Love Love (21 page)

The nurse, a skinny black man with wild hair like Buckwheat, peered at the vial in his hand. “If Connie said it was okay, that's not good news. You got bitten?”

Judy poked her right foot out from under the covers for him to see. “That's the eleventh one they gave me.”

“Six thousand dollars.”

“Jesus,” Judy said. “That's almost six hundred dollars per bottle.”

The nurse shook his head. “Each.”

Judy stared at the empty bottle in the nurse's hand. Six grand. She'd never earned more than thirty-five thousand dollars a year any time in her life, and now two years' worth of her best earnings was coursing through her bloodstream to keep her living. The concept
made sense—you take the drug to fix you—but six thousand dollars for the liquid in this tiny bottle . . . was it made from crushed diamonds?

“Don't mean to scare you or nothing,” he said.

“I think I have three hundred dollars in my savings account,” Judy said.

A little later, when Connie returned, she brought the estimated bill in an envelope. The total was $109,125.47.

“That's if you're discharged this evening,” Connie said.

What made Judy laugh out loud was seeing the last two digits of the unfathomable total, forty-seven cents.
Well, that
, she thought,
that I can pay
. It might as well have been a million dollars. Connie, whose job no doubt entailed breaking ruinous financial news to the underfunded and the overwhelmed, said nothing as she stood by with her arms crossed, shifting from foot to foot ever so slightly, like an elm swaying in the wind.

16

K
evin tried talking to the manager, then that manager's manager, but he got nowhere. The rate he'd gotten for his stay at the Stanford Court Hotel was a special deal that was no longer being offered, and if that wasn't bad enough, his credit card was denied when he tried to settle up the current bill.

“There must be a mistake,” he told the hotel associate at the desk, who handed the now-tainted Visa back to Kevin. As soon as he'd said it, he wondered how many others had relied on the same exact phrase, the same sad song of the financially blighted.

“Of course, Mr. Lee,” she said. “Would you like to use our phone to contact your bank?”

From behind, Kevin heard a wail. A couple with a young boy were waiting to check in. The mother was trying to shush her kid, but he ignored her, throwing up his arms in protest.

Kevin held up his cell phone. “Why don't you take care of these folks while I straighten this out?”

He dragged his suitcase over to the cluster of latte-colored leather chairs and dialed the number on the back of the card, where he learned that his credit limit had been reduced from ten thousand dollars to two thousand.

“Aren't you guys required by law to tell me that before you do it?”

“Yes, but not if you have a variable-rate credit card, Mr. Lee. Which is what yours is. As a courtesy, we do send out a letter to you, but it usually takes about a month after the adjustment.”

“That's useful,” Kevin said.

The rep told him it was nothing he did, that it was part of risk management that the company had enacted across the board, to all their customers. Kevin asked for an emergency extension of credit,
and after being put on hold for a good five minutes, the guy returned with more bad news.

“I think if you hadn't missed that one payment back in January, we might allow it, but the officers are vigilant nowadays. I'm sorry, Mr. Lee.”

That was the month his divorce became final, when the last thing on Kevin's mind was making sure the check got sent to the bank. He thought about mentioning this but decided against it. It didn't feel right to use one failure to fix another.

Kevin hung up and opened his wallet. He could attempt to use his debit card to pay for the hotel, but he was fairly certain he didn't have enough there, either. His final check from the tennis club wouldn't be deposited until Friday. He had some savings bonds he could cash in, but that took days.

In restaurants, when you ate without paying for the meal, it was called dine and dash. What would it be for what he was about to do—snooze and split? They had his credit card on file, so it wasn't like he was completely bagging them, but still, he felt terrible. The couple with the angry son was taking the hotel associate's full attention, making her recheck their reservation. Kevin rose from his seat, pulled on his suitcase, and crossed the length of the lobby. Hotel employees were everywhere, from the concierge behind the podium to the bellhops rolling their archway-shaped brass luggage carts, and Kevin made himself look at each and every one of them in the eye, a smile plastered on his face while the grip on his suitcase turned clammy.

“Hope you enjoyed your stay at the Stanford,” the doorman said. He was big enough to tackle Kevin to the ground if the woman behind the counter yelled out to him.

“I certainly did,” he said. “Thank you so much.”

The doorman pulled the door open, the gust of wind knocking Kevin back.

“It's nippy out there, sir,” he said. “Take care of yourself.”

Kevin turned left and walked away at a reasonable, normal pace, even though every part of his body wanted to run. Like the road leading up to the hotel, the one he was on now was also cresting up a hill, though gentler. Kevin hazarded a glance back at the hotel and saw the doorman out on the street, looking as if he was trying to find someone. Most likely he was hailing a cab for a patron, but Kevin picked up his pace anyway.

Whether it was from guilt or fright, Kevin managed to miss the gray elegance of the enormous church until he was standing at the foot of its multitiered steps. From the front, Grace Cathedral resembled Notre Dame, with its rising towers and the round rose window in between, and he recognized the tall front doors, too, ten bronzed panels called the Gates of Paradise. He'd seen both of these original structures on his honeymoon. Alice had always wanted to go to Europe, and that was reason enough for them to empty their savings accounts to spend two weeks in France and Italy. As he stood in front of this church now, seeing a bit of Paris and Florence here in San Francisco made the world smaller, more intimate, and all he had done was be physically present in both locations. Like the saying went, half of life was just showing up.

They'd both shown up, as a newly minted couple, watching the throng of people gathered in front of Notre Dame, snapping photos, buying trinkets, offering prayers. He remembered Alice's hand in his hand, their fingers interlocked, her cheeks apple red from the spring chill, and her face, childlike in its display of joy, how back then her happiness had been his happiness. And so, when he felt a buzz from his cell phone amid the swirls of good memories, Kevin was certain it was Alice calling him, their hearts fused together through time and space, but it wasn't a phone call but a graphic of a yellow envelope in flight, shooting into a gray mailbox.

READ TXT NOW?

backhand sux 2day. help! wish u were here.

He clicked on the Reply button and leaned against the railing as he struggled to type on his microscopic keypad. He persevered to compose a response, except instead of sending the message, he somehow turned it into a draft and couldn't figure out how to edit it.

He dialed Alexa's number, and she picked up on the second ring.

“I bet you gave up trying to text me back,” she said.

Listening to her familiar voice, he felt homesick. He thought of his house, Snaps nestled in her corner of the kitchen, her nose tucked under her bushy tail. Which reminded him, he hadn't heard from Judy, but then again, he hadn't expected to.

“You're turning your shoulder early,” he said. “Your backhand. Just slow down your stroke and you'll see what you're doing wrong.”

“Bill's schedule doesn't coincide with mine, so Artie's my hitting partner now.”

Artie wasn't the best, but he wasn't the worst, either. “He's a good guy. He played Boris Becker once, did he tell you?”

She laughed. “Twice today, which makes it something like a hundred times altogether.”

A gust of wind came out of nowhere, and his suitcase teetered. From above, church bells rang to signal the start of a new hour, their resonance felt as much as heard.

“Those bells,” Alexa said.

“It's a beautiful city.”

“So my mother says.”

“Listen,” Kevin said, and he told her of his hotel escape. If aliens came down from their spaceships and wanted to know what human happiness was, Alexa's laugh would be an apt example.

“Snooze and split, I love it,” she said. “So maybe you'll take up that offer to stay with Mommy dearest?”

Was he really going to do this? Go to the house of a complete stranger and crash on her couch like some kid on break from college? His bank account would appreciate the sacrifice, but it felt like yet another failure in what was quickly becoming a string of failures on this trip out West. But desperate times . . . desperate measures.

“Are you sure it's okay?”

“I already told her you might be coming, so this will make her day. There's no such thing as a free lunch, though. You
will
pay with your sanity.”

“The funeral's later this afternoon, so it'll just be for a couple of days.”

“Don't say I didn't warn you.”

From Grace Cathedral, it was almost two miles to Alexa's mother's place, nineteen streets away, information easily retrieved by Alexa's phone, which was able to provide Kevin with step-by-step instructions via Google.

“Walk over to Sacramento. That way, you'll pass by Lafayette Park, which looks pretty cool. And after that, go up another street to Clay, and four intersections later you'll see Alta Plaza to your right. I can see the Street View, but only the steps leading to the park. Looks like you'll have some pretty good views. I wish I was there.”

He was never great with directions, but he thanked her and promised to send her phone photos. By the time he reached Lafayette Park, he received another text message, this time with a snippet of a map, complete with a translucent blue line that led him to Alexa's mother's house, marked with a green lollipop. For the first time this trip, he relaxed. Now that he could see where he would have to go, he could enjoy the scenery.

By the time he climbed the multitiered steps of Alta Plaza, the afternoon sun hid behind a flock of fluffy clouds, like a flashlight shining through a bedsheet. The view here was as spectacular as Alexa had promised, the busy expanse of the city's buildings scattered in front of the low hills beyond. It felt very Californian, and Kevin took out his phone and took a picture for Alexa. When he passed by a group of pug owners with their squishy-faced companions off their leashes and frolicking in the grass, he took two more and sent them, too. The dogs of his youth—Samson and Delilah were the ones his family had way back when, and Kevin could almost see his father chucking tennis balls for them, two at a time to keep them both happy. His old man wasn't so old then. Kevin hoped he was having one of his good days today, that he wasn't in too much discomfort.

He received a reply when he was two streets away from the house.

qt pics! luv the dogs. 3022 washington st. 4got2tellu her name is claudia. dont let her scare you.

Kevin hung a right on Divisadero and gawked at a row of houses, all of them typical San Francisco Victorians, somehow managing to be both capricious and grand as they stood stacked next to one another. One house was decorated with golden fleur-de-lis buckled atop each window frame, while another displayed its family shield above the porch, the copper face shiny like a mirror, while carved wooden sunflowers adorned the molding of its enormous bay window. Every house was flawless, neither a beam crooked nor a window askew, the paint so perfect that it looked plastic.

The house at 3022 Washington Street was something else entirely. There was an oddness to this tall two-story Victorian that could very easily have been three stories. There were four doors in front, the two giant ones in the middle large enough to fit a delivery truck
through, and jutting out to the sky in one corner of the roof was a steeple-shaped bell tower. When Kevin reached the front steps, he saw the four letters embossed above the doors,
SFFD
, and two brass plates to the left of the knob, each with its own door bell, announcing firehouse and cookhouse. San Francisco Fire Department—that's what those letters stood for. Alexa's mother was living in what once must've been a fire station.

He didn't know which doorbell to ring. Most likely, they both triggered the same alert, but to be on the safe side, he pressed the cookhouse button; food seemed like a safer bet. From inside, he heard the most beautiful throwback ding-dong, a sound right out of
Leave It to Beaver
, and waited. Considering the depth of the house, if Claudia were on the second floor in the back, it might take her a couple of minutes to open the door.

Across the street stood a more normal home, cedar shingles and white trim, nothing gold. In the window above the garage door, a black cat parted the curtain and made itself comfortable on the sill to soak up the temperamental flits of sunlight.