Love in the Present Tense (3 page)

I made up my mind I would love him forever right back. That would be my whole job in the world.

So, that was my present. After all.

I went to sleep with my head on Mama's coat.

MITCH,
age
25
:
phone calls from the top

I was in a singularly bad mood that morning. I was standing in the middle of the goddamn street trying to flag down the FedEx truck, because my faithful so-called employees had forgotten to arrange the pickup. I was standing there waving my arms like a jackass in the middle of the goddamn street. I don't know if the FedEx guy didn't see me or just pretended he didn't. But he swung around the corner and he was gone; one way or the other, I was pissed.

I was thinking, fire somebody. I have got to fire somebody. This is no way to run a fucking business. I was thinking, this is why you shouldn't hire your friends. Because you can't bring yourself to can their asses in a pinch. I was thinking, you start a business out of your home, they forget this is real. Think it's a game. Not to me it isn't.

Then I heard this voice, this funny little voice. “Hello, down there.” I looked around. It was weird. If it was one of my people playing a joke, it wasn't so goddamn funny. I was in no mood. “Up here,” it said.

“Who is that?” I said.

“It's me. Leonard.”

“Leonard who?”

“Leonard up here.”

I looked up at the second-floor window of the house next door, and there was this little kid waving to me. Like he thought I was waving my arms at him, so he was waving back. I didn't have the heart to tell him how wrong he was, and all that rage just slipped out of me even though I needed it to stay.

I walked over until I was standing in the grass under his window. “Hello up there,” I said.

“Hello down there,” he said.

He was kind of Asian looking, somewhat. Kind of melting pot multiracial I guess. He smiled, and his front teeth weren't all the way grown in. He had this dark, really jet-black hair that was noticeably unruly. It stuck up on his head like a spiky little weed patch. Shiny, like somebody had been trying to slick it down unsuccessfully. I was trying to remember what I'd just been all pissed off about because right at that moment I thought I still wanted it back.

“Leonard what?” I said.

“Leonard Leonard. Just Leonard. That's all the name there is.”

I figured he was playing a game with me, but it was an okay game, really, far superior to what waited for me back inside. “That's the whole name, huh? Just Leonard?”

“Yuh,” he said. He was wearing these really thick Coke-bottle glasses with heavy black frames, and the way he was leaning out the window, I was positive they were about to fall into the grass at my feet.

“You're going to lose those glasses,” I said.

“No way. Look.” He turned his head over so he was nearly looking at the sky, and I could see a wide black elastic band holding them in place.

“Pretty cool,” I said.

“Yuh,” Leonard said. “I know.”

When I got back inside, Cahill was holding the phone receiver for my private line. “For you, Doc,” he said. With this funny look on his face.

“Don't tell me, let me guess. It's a little kid.”

“Right you are, Doc.” He seemed to feel better, knowing all this at least made sense to me.

I took the phone. “Leonard,” I said, tucking the receiver between my shoulder and chin.

“Hi, Mitch. It worked.”

“You did good, Leonard.” I sat down at my computer and settled back to the task in front of me, sorting through a slough of HTML code on a Realtor's Web site, to see why we were getting complaints about bad links. They looked okay to Graff, which wasn't saying much for them.

“What should we talk about?” he asked.

“I don't know. What do you talk about when you call total strangers?”

“I dunno,” he said. “Stuff.”

I was feeling distinctly less like canning somebody. “Okay. Talk to me about stuff.”

Oh boy did he. For nearly an hour. All kinds of stuff. He talked about moon races on the way up from L.A. and borrowed cars with the keys left in. The race came out a tie and by the way he was five years old. And a lady named Rosalita who he thought was his grandmother but really it turned out he didn't have any, and how they visited Rosalita in jail. He told me he got “borned” too soon, and that his mom's name was Pearl and she left L.A. with him because she thought they'd be safer here, and that he didn't have a last name. And that he had to spend tons and tons of time at the clinic. He told me it was really clean over there because his mom liked it that way, and that Mrs. Morales who owned the house liked the way Pearl kept it clean, only now Pearl was out at somebody else's house, cleaning over there, too, and Mrs. Morales was supposed to look in on him every few minutes to see he was okay, but then she fell asleep in front of the TV and never did. He said when he got big he was going to get a great big dog like the one that gets walked down this street every day at six in the morning; did I ever see that dog?

“Six a.m.,” I said. “I am
always
snoring at six a.m.” And he laughed.

Then he told me a lot more stuff.

After I got off the phone I looked up and Cahill was staring at me. “What was all that about?”

“Oh, that kid next door.”

“There's a kid next door?”

“I didn't know it either until just now.”

“How'd he get your private number?”

“I read it off to him while we were talking just now. We were talking out his window. I had him dial it right then while I was reading it off to him. Then I taught him how to hit redial.”

Cahill just stared at me for a minute. He was even younger than me, and I was only twenty-five at the time. He had one of those haircuts shaved on the sides but long on top. That morning he had this mean cowlick near the back. He was definitely having a bad hair day.
“Why?”
he said.

“Shit, I don't know, Cahill. Why not? He's over there all by himself. Dialing up total strangers. If he's going to talk to a total stranger, I figured it should be me.”

Cahill had a big mental filing cabinet of my eccentricity and unreasonableness. I watched him silently file this new evidence away.

Ten o'clock that night the phone rattled me out of sleep. I don't usually go to bed nearly so early but I'd gotten only two hours the night before. It's a long story.

My first thought and my fondest wish was Barb, but I halfway expected it to be Leonard. If it had been, it would have been call number five for that first day. It was a girl. A young girl. Not Leonard young, but young. Teenage.

“Who is this?” she said.

“No,” I said. “No, that won't cut it. You called
me.
You tell me who
you
are.” I hate it when people do that. Doesn't anybody know phone etiquette anymore?

“Why's my son been calling this number? I hit the redial, see who he's been calling. Who the hell are you?”

“I live right next door,” I said. My voice softened a little. I couldn't help it. It was kind of touching. It was what I wanted. Some proof this kid had a real momma lion on patrol for him. I told her, “If you were in the back room and my blinds were open we'd be watching each other make this call.” I was in my loft, upstairs. The whole downstairs had pretty much become the business.

“Why's he been calling you?”

“Because I gave him this number. He was calling total strangers.”

“He still is,” she said. “You're a total stranger. To me.” Her voice hadn't softened yet.

“My name is Mitch,” I said. “Sometimes people call me Doc, though.”

“Why? You a doctor?”

“No. It's just a joke. My initials are M.D.” No response. “It's a joke.”

“I don't get that joke.”

I sat up in bed. Reached over to pull up the blinds, but I reached over so far I almost fell off the bed. But I got the blinds up. I wanted to see her. She sounded so young. Maybe fifteen or sixteen. Maybe she was a lot older but just had a little-girl voice. I wanted to see who I was talking to. But all I saw was a glow behind white curtains. “You know,” I said. “That woman you rent from…I know you think she looks in on him while you're gone. But she doesn't.”

I waited a long time, but the line just went quiet. Then I heard a little sound. Might have been a sigh, or she might have been crying. I couldn't tell.

“I don't know what I'm supposed to do,” she said. “I gotta work.”

“What's your name?” Leonard had told me but I couldn't remember.

Barb always said I'm born to pick up strays. But Barb was not there. Then again, when was Barb ever there? If she had been available I might have told her that she should come around more often. Maybe I wouldn't need the strays. She wasn't around to hear that pointed complaint, though, which was the point.

“Pearl.”

“Pearl what?”

“Pearl none of your business. Pearl's all you need to know.”

“Why don't you try dropping him here while you're gone?”

“Oh, sure. With you. Great. How do I know you don't molest little boys?”

“Because…I don't.”

“Good answer,” she said. “You should run for politics.”

“Look, I'm not the only one here,” I said. “There are four of us, minimum. All day. We're working here. Doing software and Web design and stuff like that. He's not going to be alone with anybody. He's safer here, believe me. He's going to fall right out that window one of these days.”

I waited a long time for her to answer. I thought she was just taking her time. I never heard her hang up the phone. Until I heard that dial tone I didn't realize she had.

Twenty minutes after nine the following morning, I got a knock on the door. All of us were hard at work. Well, not all of us. Hannah and Cahill and me. Graff hadn't found his way in yet. When did Graff ever fall in before ten a.m.? He's the one I should've canned. Only he's not the one who blew the FedEx pickup; that was Hannah. And I couldn't fire her because she thought the sun rose and set on me. She'd have never been the same.

“Come in,” I said without getting up. But nobody did. “Come in.” I said it louder this time. All of our customers—that is, the very few who care to drop by in person—know enough to just barge through the door. I was thinking, goddamn Jehovah's Witnesses. I was thinking one of these days I'd have to tie those suckers up or hold a gun to their heads and make them listen to my views for a change. See how they liked it.

I blasted out of my chair and over to the door. Threw it open. I was pissed.

On my doorstep was this little girl. Maybe sixteen years old. Or maybe as young as fifteen or as old as seventeen or eighteen. Maybe part black but definitely Asian, with the sweetest, deepest dark eyes. She was one seriously beautiful little girl. Hanging off one of her hands was the irrepressible Leonard.

I thought, this could not be Leonard's mother. No way. Unless she had him when she was like, twelve. That's not possible. Is it?