One Real Thing (2 page)

“Rent time.” The pounding on the door was nowhere near as loud as the pounding in Holly’s head.

“I just paid,” Holly shouted back. Oh God, his head and his body were so, so heavy. He unglued one eye and peered around him. Heavy because someone was lying on him.

“You pay last week’s rent. This is this week.”

Oh, the logic. It burned. Holly dragged himself from underneath the body weighing him down. “What week is it?” His hands landed on the ancient carpet, and he slithered off the bed, picking his way between the empty bottles scattered like a labyrinth. His hips came free, and he fell forward all in a rush, bashing his cheek against the floor.

“Third week of June, Mr. Holly. You want me to come back later?”

“Uh, no.” Holly crawled toward the rickety armchair by the window. He was sure he’d stashed rent money in there.

“Stop screaming,” someone on the bed mumbled. “You’re gonna wake the squirrels.”

Squirrels.
It had been that kind of week. The room had to stink like burnt trash and tires—drug paraphernalia littered the table by the bed—but he couldn’t smell it. He hated when he snorted something he shouldn’t have. If only he could remember what it had been. Fuck it, he didn’t care. Caring was just a reflex these days, and an inconvenience at that.

Holly found a wad of money he’d shoved through a tear in the underside of the chair. He squinted at it, but his eyes wouldn’t work in the smoggy, yellow half-light.

“I got money,” he called.

His legs didn’t want to work, but Holly managed to get to the door and pull it open as far as the chain would allow.

The manager’s face was dark and soft and wrinkled and sagging; random hairs sprouted all over it, white ones, putting the lie to the harsh red curls above it.
Her face looks like a scrotum,
Holly’s drug-and-booze-addled inner narrator observed.
You’re renting from a walking testicle.

Fuck. Holly hated his brain. “Here.” He shoved the money at her. “How many weeks is that?”
I wonder if she has a twin sister. Balls come in pairs.

The manager—the patch embroidered on her blue vest read Yeleña—took the roll of money and pulled off the rubber band so she could examine it. “Three weeks.” She put the band back on and shoved the money in her pocket. “I come collect next week anyway. You need bigger deposit. I smell drugs. If cops break down the door, you pay.”

“Hey!”

But Yeleña’s back was turned and she was off down the long row of dingy doors, to hound another deadbeat into coughing up the two hundred bucks it cost to stay at the motel for a week.

“Baby.” The word was drawn out all sexy, but then a cough ruined it. A pair of fake-tanned hands tipped with pearl-pink acrylic nails slid over Holly’s belly and down to his dick.

Why didn’t you tell me I was naked?
Holly shrieked at his brain. Naked and thin. The skin on his belly drooped between his hip bones like a sheet hung up to dry.

I thought you were trying to get a break on the rent.

“What?” Holly closed the door and rested his forehead on the frame, clinging to the handle to stay upright.

“We’re outta party.” Malinda sounded bereft.

Of course we are,
said Holly’s brain.
Princess here goes through more weed and E in a night than you do in a week. Kids these days.

“Ask your father.” It was about time Holly’s ex-boss chipped in. Again.

Of course the PR firm where Holly had once held a decent job working for Malinda’s father had dumped him like a syphilitic whore as soon as the pictures of his breakup with Sierra hit the papers. Holly hadn’t expected less—Sierra wasn’t going to let her PR firm employ her ex.

Lorne, the cheap bastard, had not only fired Holly, but he’d taken the cost of the destroyed company car out of Holly’s generous severance package. What was left of the money, Holly had vowed loudly to everyone in the office, he was going to use to wipe his ass. He hadn’t done that with
all
of it, but when it came to disrespectful behavior, Holly liked to start with the basics.

Screwing his ex-boss’s daughter was a good finishing move—especially since he had it on good authority Lorne had cooked up the whole Simon debacle—but Holly was done with her. She was in the way of his downward slide—because as much as she liked to play tough, he knew she didn’t want to go the distance with him. He didn’t want that for her either. He was sick and tired of being bad for people.

Wisely, Holly got out of the way as she tried to smack him.

Three steps to the bed. He could get that far.

“Fuck you.” Malinda pouted and slouched against the door. Holly sprawled on the bed and squinted against the slivers of light coming in around the curtains, so he could see her professionally sculpted face.

“You’re slumming,” he told her, tucking one arm under his head before his neck quit holding it up. “You don’t need it, Malinda.”

“Fuck you,” she said again, tossing back her straw-blonde extensions. “You don’t know what I’m feeling.” She teetered over to the table—only then did Holly realize she was wearing a pair of silver stilettos and nothing else—and pawed through the mess until she found a crumpled pack of cigarettes.

“You’re feeling like you want your own damn television show,” Holly muttered under his breath, but he hid it by rolling away from her and off the other side of the bed.

“What?” Her voice was like a dry stick snapping. She paused in the act of lighting a cigarette and struck a dramatic pose.

“Nothing, baby.” Holly found his balance just in time to keep from lurching into the bathroom and headed for the closet instead. “Just had an idea. How about you go out and get something for us?”

She grumbled, digging through some of the shopping bags he’d dropped behind the chair. Holly fished a bit of cash out of an old tennis shoe. Experience had taught him to keep the money hidden, and in more than one place—hidden from himself as much as the leeches that kept finding him. He peeled off two twenties and grabbed a pair of boxer shorts from the floor on the way out of the closet. Putting them on restored some small scrap of dignity.

“How do I look?” Malinda turned to face him.

Life with Sierra had taught Holly to bite back his first answer. It wasn’t usually productive, even on his good days. Malinda was wearing a cashmere vest that came to midthigh. At least it matched her heels, since it was pale gray. He’d bought it on his postbonfire shopping spree, not because he’d meant to wear it, but because it reminded him of Nick: reserved in form and color, but soft against his cheek. She could have it. Holly didn’t deserve Nick or anything having to do with him.

“Great. Very hot. Taking the ‘boyfriend’s closet’ look right downtown.”

The metallic alligator bag under the bed wasn’t his. He wasn’t sure it was Malinda’s either, but what the hell. He grabbed a few other things from under there that
were
hers—a half-full fifth of vodka, a black-and-pink push-up bra and matching thong, a hot-pink snakeskin wallet and a silver compact—and shoved them into the bag as well. When he surfaced, Malinda was admiring herself in the mirror over the rickety dresser. The cigarette, abandoned in an ashtray on the table, spiraled a thin thread of smoke into the sunlight.

“I’m pretty,” she said to no one in particular, running her fingers through her hair and pushing it back. She had been even before the surgeries, but Holly kept that thought to himself. Someone’s huge, glossy sunglasses were on the dresser, and she put them on, smiling at her bug-eyed reflection.

“Here, baby.” He put the bag on her arm, then steered her toward the door.

“Where am I going?” She looked over her shoulder at him as he ushered her out into the blistering sunlight.

“You’re gonna go down to the front desk here,” he said slowly and precisely, pressing the folded bills into her hand, “where you’re going to call a cab.”

“A cab? This won’t get me anywhere I need to go.”

“It’ll get you as far as your dad’s office.” Holly pushed her away carefully so she didn’t fall off her heels.

“My dad?” Holly watched her struggle to keep her balance and work out what he was saying at the same time.

“Yep. And you’re going to tell him that since he fired me from my job, I’m sure as fuck not doing his for him.” Holly blew her a kiss as he closed the door. He pressed the lock button on the knob, flipped the dead bolt and slid the chain across as the flimsy door shook with every punch and kick from outside. Lorne was a lousy parent, but Holly was a hell of a lot worse. Maybe she’d figure that out someday.

The tantrum only lasted until he heard, “Ow, my nail!” Then no more. For a moment longer, she snuffled and cursed, but it faded into nothing, and he was left in peace. As much peace as he could get, feeling this way about himself. He picked up her cigarette and took a drag.

Holly wasn’t going to think about how it felt to have divested himself of the last vestige of the life he’d watched go up in flames. He was going to think of how stupid he was to have sent her off with what might have been the last of the booze. Fortunately, under the pillows, he found a bottle of cheap rum with a good bit left.

Coming down in the world by leaps and bounds,
his brain moaned. Holly took a drink to shut it up.

There wasn’t enough alcohol in the world, though, to drink away everything he didn’t want to think about. Like how the only thing keeping him together was knowing it would kill his mother if he screwed up for real and got locked up or knocked off.
Dad too,
his brain murmured.

Holly wasn’t sure about that. He jammed the cigarette out on the bedside table without regard for the lack of ashtray. His father had two other sons who were perfectly functional. Holly had no idea how his father lived with the embarrassment. He knew damn well that people always said:
He took after his mother. It wasn’t you. Look at your other children.
Holly had to agree.

But his mother…Holly usually tried not to think about her, wherever she was. Mentally. Physically she was in Minnesota, he was pretty sure, at some pleasant “resort” where they locked her in at night and doped her up in the morning. When he couldn’t avoid thinking about her, he worried about her. About who was there to tell her it would be all right when she forgot who she was.

That was the worst. Holly had always been able to handle it when she forgot him, but he couldn’t take the lost look on her face when she forgot herself. And that was why he wanted to keep something of himself around—because he wanted to think he might be able to bring her back someday.

“It’s okay, Mom.”
When he was a little boy, he would take her hand and lead her to the rose-printed chair in her room.
“You’re fine. Look.”
He would point at her dresser and the photograph of her wedding to his father. She’d take the picture and look at it, then at the woman in the mirror, back and forth, until recognition dawned in her hazy blue eyes.

“My hair.”
She would touch the soft fall with one trembling hand.
“It’s such a mess.”

“I’ll fix it for you.”
Even when he had to stand on her sewing box to brush it, he always did his best.

“I don’t want him to see me like this.”
She would wear her bathrobe for days, until the blue velvet was stained with spilled tea and flecked with dried blood from where she’d dug at her skin with broken nails.

“You look beautiful, Mom.”
She had been luminous, like her pain had burned away anything imperfect and left behind only beauty.

Holly missed her so much, but he couldn’t take her phone calls these days. The doctors, he’d talk to, but not her. He took a searing swallow of rum and rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. They’d always had each other, and then he’d left her. He always meant to return her calls, but he couldn’t deal with the way they ripped him up inside.

Not talking to her is worse.
When he got drunk enough, his brain could convince him it was worse.

By the time his vision cleared, he was fumbling with his phone.

That went as well as everything else in his life had recently, but now he had only himself to blame.

“Yes, Mr. Welles, you were on the access list for Mrs. Welles, but Mrs. Welles was discharged on February nineteenth of this year. I’m afraid we have no transfer documents. She came to us from Brownbriar—have you considered trying there? Sometimes we do have patients return there for further care.”

“We’re sorry, Mr. Welles, but Mrs. Welles is no longer with us here at Brownbriar.”

“Mrs. Welles hasn’t been here at Summerlee for some years, Mr. Welles. Have you tried Brownbriar?”

Holly ran out of rum about the same time he ran out of phone numbers and nerve. Wherever she was, he’d lost her. No one had called him to let him know. Or if anyone had, he didn’t remember.

He didn’t deserve to know.

He had a bit more money. Enough to turn into more than enough if he played his cards right. He’d pull himself together and find a poker game somewhere. If it was something he shouldn’t be doing, Holly was damn good at doing it. As soon as he found his clothes, he could get back to the business of getting everything he deserved.

***

to:[email protected]

from:[email protected]

You know, sometimes things stop being funny. Do you think he knows what he’s doing?

http://www.outoutout.com/entertainment/sierras-ex-downward-spiral

http://www.gossipfly.com/entertainment/sierra-i-left-him-because

http://www.stargazer.com/gossip/sierra-worried-about-ex

Rich

The photos in these links were harder to look at. Holly had obviously taken his breakup as a sign he hadn’t been partying hard enough before, because he’d redoubled his efforts. He was looking worse for wear too, pale and gaunt, like a ghost of the vibrant person he used to be.