Bethel's Meadow (20 page)

I returned her smile, but I didn’t say anything in response to her compliment. I was all business. I held up the work order Vernon had given me and handed it to her. Rachel Draper frowned at me for not responding, but her look of mild irritation quickly transformed into an impish grin.

Game on.

“Yes,” she said, quickly scanning the sheet. “This looks right.” She glanced back up at me and winked. She really was a charmer. I almost wished we were in a bar instead. “Follow me to the rear of the store, sweetheart. That’s where we keep our four computers.”

I must say, trailing behind Rachel Draper accounted for some of the most thrilling fifteen seconds of my entire life. Her perfume and body spray overwhelmed my senses, making me feel like a tomcat on the prowl for his carnal prey. She filled out her tight pantsuit like a grand champion, and the way she seductively jiggled and bounced along made me want to jump for joy. As tired and as beat-up as I felt, I envisioned doing Rachel Draper right there on the spot. And the thing is, she knew I was enjoying her show. She was exactly like Samantha in that regard.

I suddenly felt alive again.

In the back was quite an impressive operation. The mostly open area was a combination of warehouse and office space, with three desktop computers neatly lined up on a counter against the front wall. There was a twelve-by-twelve cubicle at the far end of that wall, where Rachel Draper’s name tag was affixed to the fabric-lining of one of the partition dividers. The PCs were attended to by diligent workers feverishly clacking away at their keyboards. They were sitting on special ergonomic chairs that looked like miniature versions of the massage chairs in the salon. There was an open door in the back where customers pulled up to accept delivery of one-gallon jugs of alkaline water. The line of cars must have been quite long because the delivery action never ceased. All a customer had to do was drive up, pop open the trunk, and in went the water jugs.

I performed standard diagnostics on each of the PCs to ensure they were in good working order. This was a new location for the store, and Vernon had called upon them just as they were seeking assistance in setting up a high-speed Internet connection. The computers were set up solely for logging and fulfilling orders, making use of a database Vernon had designed himself. Vernon was one of the best database programmers in Florida; naturally there were no problems and only a few suggestions for improvements, all of which he would quickly address.

I spent an hour working with the three employees, and when I was done Rachel summoned me to her cubicle. This is where the fourth computer was. But what immediately caught my attention were the books on the overhead shelves:
The Purpose Driven Life
by Rick Warren,
The Way of the Master
by Ray Comfort,
How to Hear from God
by Joyce Meyer, two leather-bound volumes of the Bible,
Think and Grow Rich
by Napoleon Hill,
How to Win Friends and Influence People
by Dale Carnegie, and many other self-help volumes and books on religion.

“Are you a born-again Christian?” she asked. She noticed I was scanning her literary collection.

“What makes you think I need to be?” I asked. “Perhaps I was sold on Christ the first time, and I never left Him, thus never needing to be born again.”

That sent her eyebrows arching.

“Well, I never heard it put that way before,” she said. She sat in her chair and looked up at me earnestly. I knew what was coming next: “Have you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as your savior?”

I didn’t want to treat her to another smartass rejoinder. After all, I was here as an employee and representative of Vernon’s company. I couldn’t afford to fuck this up.

So I shrugged my shoulders and said, “Ms. Draper, I’m just here to address your IT needs. I respect your faith. I really do. But perhaps we could take up this discussion at another time. But for now—”

“Yes, at another time,” she said. Rachel Draper wasn’t being playful—she was dead serious. She looked like a woman on a mission. “I would like that.” She reached across her desk for a business card and handed it to me. “I could be your life coach. Call me whenever you need to.”

“Excuse me?” I was a bit taken aback by the notion that I would require the services of a life coach of any kind. “What does that mean, exactly? What is your definition of a life coach?”

“I want to gift you with some of my
sweet
holy water,” she said, ignoring my request for clarification. She stood and brushed past me. She leaned out into the warehouse and ordered one of her employees to remove four gallons of alkaline water from inventory, and to have them ready for Mr. Smith when he drove around to the delivery bay.

She turned back to me and launched into a rather lengthy sales pitch outlining the benefits of alkaline-ionized water. It could do everything. It could cleanse my colon, slow down the aging process, maintain the proper pH balance in my body (thus reducing the possibility of disease), give me increased energy, clear my mind, reduce plaque in my teeth, sooth my throat when it became sore, and much more!

I thought:
Yes, folks, it’s the new age snake oil
.

But I restrained myself from commenting.

I sat in her chair and turned on her monitor, saying, “Well, that all sounds fantastic. I will gladly accept the gift of your . . . What did you call it? Your sweet
holy water
?”

She smiled. “Yes, it is indeed holy water. It cleanses the body, the mind, and the soul.” From my side she leaned over to type in her computer’s password, providing me an eye-popping view of her beautiful breasts, summoning childhood memories of the divine décolletage of many a dental assistant.

“This should only take ten minutes or so,” I said. “Then we’ll return when the phone company comes out to install your data lines, which I think will be in two days. Either Vernon or I will call you.”

“Sweetie, I would prefer it be
you
who called,” she said, smiling big and pretty.

“As you wish, Ms. Draper.”

“I’m
Miss
Draper, not Ms. But you can just call me Rachel, honey.” I could have melted—the way she said it really made me feel like a
honey
.

I nodded and smiled. “If that will be all, allow me to finish up here and I shall soon be on my way.”

“I’m going to meet some friends of mine tonight for happy hour over at Barton’s Grill,” Rachel said, referring to the most expensive steak establishment on Dusty Pond. “You should join us, Mr. Smith. We could discuss my role as your life coach.” She was clearly counting on an affirmative response.

I didn’t even think about it when I said, “Okay, Miss Rachel. Sounds like a plan.”

23

T
HE NEXT STOP WAS the library. Things didn’t start off so well.

I walked in and took a seat at the table where Glory and I had last convened. The library was busy this afternoon. All the schools had let out by now, and kids were filing in to do research and to meet up with their study groups. I sat for ten minutes watching Glory work at the front counter before she finally looked up and acknowledged my presence. Her smile was beautiful as always, but its radiance was muted by her obvious displeasure with me. I knew I deserved the lukewarm reception.

As Glory approached she kept her head down, as if pondering what she was going to say to me. When she reached the table, she finally looked at me.

“Hello,” Glory said. “You look like you haven’t slept in forever. How are you?”

“I’m very sorry,” I said. “I was a real jerk on the phone with that voicemail message.”

She frowned. “You were blocking my calls.”

“No, I didn’t block you,” I said, trying not to sound too defensive. “Glory, I had this terrible, terrible headache. I turned my phone off and kept it off for the entire weekend.”

“I hope you’re okay now,” she said, still somewhat frigid. I felt like a total shit. I realized then that the last thing in the world I ever wanted to do was to hurt this woman. The look of disappointment on her face was really killing me. I’d never felt so guilty in my entire life about anything. Well, almost anything. . . .

“I’m feeling much better,” I said. “Listen, it wasn’t you, okay? Things in my life right now are really nutty. I have a lot on my mind. I’ve been unemployed forever and—”

She held up her hands. “Stop, okay? I’m really busy and I have to get back to the desk. It’s rush hour in here.” She placed her hands on her hips and shook her head. “Blocking the channels of communication isn’t a good way to start a relationship. If anything is going to develop between us, you have to know right off the bat that I’m not interested in anyone who would hide things from me. We have to be on the level with each other. There has to be honesty and forthrightness.”

I knew she wanted me to tell her why I didn’t go by my first name. She didn’t care for mysteries or whodunits. She just wanted me to come out with it.

I said, “I understand what you’re saying.” I stood and looked at her with what I hoped were caring and apologetic eyes. “I won’t hold anything back from you. How about starting with a clean slate? I could take you out for dinner.”

“No,” she said sternly. Then she dropped her shoulders a bit and sighed. “I mean, no to going out to a restaurant.” Her countenance wasn’t so uninviting anymore. She was warming up a tad. “I made something for us the other night. I never got around to putting it into the oven. So come on over tonight, and we’ll eat and catch up with each other.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s almost four now. I get off in two hours. How does seven sound? It’ll give me time to get home and clean the place up a little bit.”

It took all I had to keep from heaving a huge sigh of relief. Forgiveness was being offered. I hadn’t had much of that in my life.

“I’ll be there,” I said. “Do you want me to bring anything?”

She smiled and shook her head. “No, just no frowning and getting lost in space like you tend to do. Just bring your smiling face over, okay? I have plenty of wine and beer. Just come over and we’ll relax and get to know each other better.”

I nodded. “It’s a deal.”

…

Before reaching my car in the library’s parking lot, Sidebottom chimed in on my cell phone. I hadn’t called him since my disappearing act had ended. The weather was a perfect seventy-five degrees. As I pressed the answer button, I decided I would stroll around the lot while I talked to him. The cool breeze was quite refreshing.

“What the bloody fuck?” he said. A lovely way to kick off a conversation. “I knocked on your door a million times. I knew you were in there. I could hear music blaring—some blues and country bullshit going.”

What he’d heard was me playing the guitar in sync with accompaniment tracks from my computer. The sound had been cranked so high that I couldn’t have heard anything at all outside of my living room. Even if I could have heard someone at the door, I wouldn’t have answered.

“I’m super sorry,” I said. I wasn’t going to get emotional about it. Men just briefly apologize to each other and move on, like nothing happened. After all, he wasn’t my girlfriend.

“Your door was locked,” he said. “You never lock your door. Dammit, I needed to talk to you.”

I quickly explained to him what I’d been through over the weekend: about being unable to sleep and generally feeling down about the state of the human race. He knew I occasionally turned off like that.

“Your old disappearing routine,” he remarked. “Earth to Smith, Earth to Smith. Jesus Christ, you’re a space cadet sometimes.”

After I calmed him down and told him everything was cool with me, he said, “I hear you’re working for Buckwheat. A lot of chicks saw some glamor shots of you on a printed ad he put out. I couldn’t believe you consented to something like that. Anyway, do you think he has room to take me on for a little side work?”

“Don’t call him that,” I said. “His name is Vernon.”

“Whatever,” he said. “Look, I’m not as close to him as you are. I know he never particularly cared for me. I was hoping you could put in the good word for me.” He was right: Vernon didn’t care much for Sidebottom as a person, but he still treated him with respect. Vernon really wanted to like Sidebottom, though, and was determined to not give up on him. He prayed that Sidebottom would wake up one day and not be a prick anymore.

“I’ll get you on board,” I said to him. “But only if you promise not to call him Buckwheat again.”

“Smith, you do know you’re the only person who doesn’t call him that, right? I remember all those Buckwheat pencil trolls he had.”

“I don’t care, Sidebottom. You call him Vernon, or I’ll knock your block off.”

“Okay, whatever. Look, I think he’s a really good guy to have for a boss. He’s one of the only IT managers I ever had that didn’t walk around trying to impress everyone with the bilge he’d just read in
Information Week
. I never once heard Buck—um, I mean, Vernon repeat phrases like ‘mission critical’ or ‘think outside the box.’ You know how much I hate suits, right?”

“Wally, I gotta get ready for a date. Anything else on your mind?”

“Oh, I heard about that. You’re meeting up with Water Girl tonight. Man, I have to admit, you aced me out on that one.”