Salvation (7 page)

“Yeah, let’s get out of here. The sun’s
comin’ up soon and I for one need my beauty sleep,” a young woman with messy
bleached blonde hair grumbled.

“We can see that, Dorie,” someone said,
and there was more laughter.

Carla linked her arm with mine. “I’ll
drive you home, sugar. Vinnie, your cousin Guido is waiting at the house for
you. He wants a full report on what went down tonight, ASAP.” She pronounced it
‘ay-sap.’

“Cousin Guido? Seriously?” I asked.

“No, not seriously,” Vincent said. “His
name’s Jerry, but Carla thinks it’s hilarious to call him Guido.”

“He’s my brother, I can call him what I
want,” she said, then began to lead me to one of the parked cars.

“Wait,
I’m
taking Trevor home,”
Vincent told her.

“No you’re not. Guido wants to talk to
you
now
. You got some ‘splaining to do, Lucy,” Carla countered.

“I’ll go see him right after I drop
Trevor off.”

“No way, Vinnie. You need to get your
ass over there.”

He pressed his eyes shut, then opened
them and said, “Fine, but give us a minute.” He took my arm and pulled me
aside, turning his back to the cousins.

“I thought you said no one calls you
Vinnie.” I grinned at him.

“I lied so you wouldn’t start calling me
that, too.”

As he slipped a business card in the
pocket of my cardigan, he whispered, “That’s my cell number. Please call me.”

“I’d have to be nuts to call you after
tonight. Don’t you agree?” Despite myself, I picked up his hand and laced my
fingers with his as I said that.

“Yes. Completely certifiable.” He leaned
in and brushed his lips to mine, then rolled his eyes at the resulting chorus
of whistles and whoops from his relatives.

“I really have to think about this,
Vincent,” I said quietly.

He kissed my forehead, and I looked up
at him as he reached out and gently caressed my cheek. There was so much
longing in his dark eyes. I really wanted to take him in my arms, but I stopped
myself.

“A minute’s up,” Carla announced, coming
up behind me and taking hold of my shoulders, then steering me away from her
cousin. I glanced back at Vincent, who gave me an apologetic little half-smile
before turning and heading in the opposite direction.

Chapter
Four

I had to work the lunch shift just a few
hours after my wild night with Vincent. As soon as I arrived at Nolan’s, Cole
said, “Can I talk to you a minute, Trevor?” That surprised me. He was one of
the waiters at the restaurant, and we’d had a very awkward first (and last)
date a few weeks ago, during which he’d caused a big scene by accusing his
ex-boyfriend Hunter of hitting on me. He’d apologized for it later, but since
then, he and I pretty much avoided each other.

What he needed to tell me had nothing to
do with the two of us, though. We sat down on the bench in the employee
dressing room and he said, “I answered a call on the restaurant’s main line a
few minutes ago. It was a girl, she said she was your cousin Melody. She
sounded really upset.”

“Oh no. Did she tell you where she was?”

“No, she didn’t say much. She just asked
for you, and I told her you’d be here in a few minutes. Then it sounded like
she started crying. I asked for a number so you could call her back, but she
said she was at a payphone and hung up.”

“Damn it,” I murmured.

“What’s going on? Is she in some kind of
trouble?”

“Melody’s seventeen and pregnant. I came
to San Francisco with her to get away from her abusive father and thug of an
ex-boyfriend. But soon after we got here, she met some guy and took off with
him. That call was the first time she’s contacted me since then.”

Jamie, my employer, happened to come
into the dressing room just then with a stack of clean aprons. He sat down
beside me and said, “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but that sounds serious. How
far along is she in her pregnancy?”

“Seven months. You don’t think she’d be
going into labor this early, do you? I was sure she’d come back to San Francisco
to deliver the baby, because I promised I’d be there for her. She was so scared
to go through childbirth alone.”

“What do you know about the guy she took
off with?” Jamie asked.

“Nothing, I never met him,” I said. “One
day, I came home and found a note saying she was in love with this guy and that
they were going to be traveling together. She only knew him a week. Melody has
the worst taste in men. She always picks these total scumbags, so I can’t
imagine this one would be any different.”

“Did she tell you his name?”

I sighed and said, “Only his nickname,
Slayer. Doesn’t that sound awesome? I don’t even think she knew his real name.”

“Did she say anything else, maybe
mention where he worked?” Jamie asked, setting the aprons on the bench beside
him.

“She claimed he was a talented tattoo
artist, but also said he was unemployed.”

“That might be enough to go on,” Jamie
said. “If you ask around at the local tatt shops, someone might know him and
have some idea where they went.”

“But then what? If Mel wants to be with
this guy, I can’t exactly drag her back here.”

“Well no, but you could go check on her
and make sure she’s alright,” Jamie said.

“She’ll probably call back,” Cole chimed
in. “If she needs help or if she went into labor, she’ll call again.”

“Did she call here, at the restaurant?”
Jamie asked.

“Yeah. I’m sorry about that,” I told
him. “I don’t have a phone, so this is the only way she can reach me.”

“That’s totally fine. I just asked so I
can tell everyone who might answer the phone to come and get you immediately if
she calls back,” Jamie said. “In fact, I should do that right now, in case she
calls soon.” He got up and left the dressing room.

“He’s a really nice guy,” I murmured.

“Jamie’s the best. The bar’s gone
through a few owners in the two years I’ve worked here, but ever since Jamie
and his husband Dmitri took over, this place has really felt like a family.”
Cole grinned and added, “Not in the dysfunctional and driving-you-insane sense
of the word.”

I grinned too. “I didn’t realize there
was any other kind.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”

I sighed and said, “I don’t know why I
thought I could help Melody. We had this crazy idea to come to San Francisco
and find my father, who took off when I was three. I don’t even remember him.
Of course we couldn’t find him, and even if we had, it was such a long shot
that he’d be willing to help us. We just really had no one else to turn to,
though.”

“You know, Jamie used to be a cop and
most of his family is still in law enforcement. I’ll bet he could track down
your dad.”

“I don’t even know if I want to find him
now. Like I said, it was a stupid idea to think he’d help us.”

“Aside from needing his help, wouldn’t
you like to see him? I mean, my dad and I had a really strained relationship,
but then he died in a car accident when I was twelve. I’d give anything for one
last conversation with him,” Cole said, his brown eyes pained behind his thick
glasses.

“But my dad didn’t want me, Cole. He
took off and never looked back. Even worse, he left me with my mother, who was
a hot mess. If he cared about me at all, he wouldn’t have left me with her.”

“Where is she now?”

“In jail. That should tell you a little
something about the woman he left me with.” I tried to change the subject away
from my family drama by saying, “What about your mom, where is she?”

“In a shitty little hell hole called
Gomsburg, Idaho. She moved in with her mother about ten years ago, soon after
my dad died.”

“So you grew up there?”

“Yeah, for the latter half of my
childhood. As soon as we could afford it though, my then-boyfriend Hunter and I
made a break for it. We moved here and never looked back.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Let’s just put it this way: Gomsburg is
a town of less than 900 people, most of them potato farmers.
Redneck
potato farmers. I’m half-black, half-Jewish, and gay. What do you suppose
growing up there was like for me?”

“Oh man.”

“My mom was crazy to move us there.
Didn’t it even occur to her that I was going to get beat up every single day of
my life in a place like that?” Cole shook his head, then stood up and grabbed
an apron from the stack on the bench. “But whatever, I survived. And what
doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, like the cliché says, so I must be the Man
of Steel after all that shit.” He said that as he tucked in his green Nolan’s
t-shirt, tied the black apron around his narrow hips, and stuck an order pad in
his pocket. “Anyway, see you out there, Trevor.”

He left the dressing room and I pulled
my buttoned-up cardigan off over my head, then checked the pocket. The business
card was still there from last night. Or technically, this morning. I had no
idea what I was going to do about Vincent, but right now I was too worried
about Melody to give my love life much thought. I put the sweater in my locker
and took a quick look at myself in the full-length mirror. My blue-green eyes
were a bit bloodshot after my late night and my dark brown hair was a mess, I
was way overdue for a haircut. I finger-combed it as best I could, picked a
thread off my plain white t-shirt, and went to work.

Every time the phone rang at the hostess
station, I rushed over. But after a couple hours, I realized Melody wasn’t
going to call back. A knot of worry settled permanently in the pit of my
stomach.

Toward the end of my shift, River and
Skye came for a visit. “Hey dude. I have a present for you,” River said. He
took my hand, flipped it palm up and placed a little silver cellphone in it.
“Don’t get too excited,” he said. “It’s just a pay-as-you go dealie, nothin’
fancy. And you only have sixty minutes on it right now, try to make ‘em last.”

“Thanks. You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know, but you and I have that big
wedding gig coming up and need to be able to call each other. Oh, here,” he
said, and dug in the pocket of his denim jacket. He pulled out a wall plug and
a wad of paperwork, which he handed to me. “Your number’s on one of those
pieces of paper. I already programmed it into my phone, and put my number and
Skye’s in yours. But don’t call Skye unless it’s an emergency, because he’ll
talk your ear off and burn all your air time.”

“Call me anyway,” Skye said with a grin.
“We can always buy more minutes.”

“Um, no you can’t,” River told him. “You
spent all your money on the nightmare face.”

“Nightmare face?” I echoed.

“That’s what River calls my gorgeous Man
in the Moon clock,” Skye told me. “I was trying to get it working today, by the
way. I think I might have succeeded, if it hadn’t crashed into that tree. That
really didn’t do it any favors.”

“I thought you were going to take it
apart and use its gears in your sculptures.”

“I am, but I wanted to see if I could
get it to work first, just for the hell of it,” Skye said. “Oh, I should warn
you, River is totally insane with that saving minutes thing. He doesn’t
understand that they round it up to a whole minute, no matter if you talk for
two seconds or fifty-nine. So I get calls from him like:
Skye! Buy cheddar!
Then he hangs up on me. He also yells his two-second messages, like maybe that
saves a fraction of a second.”

“I don’t do that,” River insisted.

“You
totally
do that. That was
exactly what you did yesterday. You called, screamed about cheese and hung up,
like a crazy person.”

“Well, air time is expensive.” To me,
River said, “We gotta go dude, we have a bunch more errands to run. Plus, you’re
working and all, but I just wanted to give you that.”

“Thank you, I appreciate it,” I said.
“I’ll pay you back, too.”

“No need. I can write it off as a
business expense, now that I’m a real caterer and all. See you tomorrow at Mrs.
Dombruso’s, right?”

“I’ll be there.”

River headed for the door, but Skye
grabbed my arm and whispered, “Please tell me you’ve been considering
moonlighting as a dancer with me. And don’t tell River, he doesn’t approve.”

“There’s no way, Skye.”

“Don’t say no yet, not until you come
and check it out.” He pressed a business card into my hand. “Here’s the club’s
address, I’m working tonight from eight to midnight. Come visit me. Please?”

“I’m never going to agree to working
there.”

“Come and see me anyway. Tell them at
the door that you’re there to see Skye Blue, they’ll let you in.”

“Skye Blue?”

“That’s my stage name, but I’m actually
thinking about changing it for real. It suits me a lot better than Skye
Fleischmann.”

I grinned at that. “You’re right, it
does.”

He turned and jogged after his brother,
who was already outside. But as he crossed the dining room, he called over his
shoulder, “Come and see me tonight, T! Do it! Don’t break my heart!” He flashed
me a huge smile before he disappeared out the front door.

I took a look at the business card in my
hand, and an instant frown line appeared between my eyebrows. There was a color
photo of a shirtless blond boy on the card, who barely looked eighteen, and the
name of the club was Daddy’s Boiz. Ew. Okay, there was no freaking way on earth
I’d work at that place, even if the thought of me being paid to dance wasn’t
completely laughable.

But now I was concerned about my new
friend. Even just from the business card, I could tell that the sleaze factor
was through the roof at this club. I didn’t know much about Skye, but he struck
me as really innocent and trusting. I decided to go and check it out this
evening, because I wanted to make sure no one was taking advantage of him. More
worry added to the knot already in my gut.

*****

When my shift ended I took the bus home,
making my weekly stop at the Goodwill on the corner before continuing on to my
building. My apartment was a fifth floor walk-up in a marginal neighborhood
near Market Street, a studio measuring maybe ten feet by twelve. It didn’t
currently have electricity because I couldn’t afford it, but it did have its
own tiny bathroom with a toilet, sink, and stall shower. That made the place a
real find as far as I was concerned.

The room was divided in half by a sheet
suspended from the ceiling with thumb tacks, and I pushed it aside and put my
thrift shop finds on the foot of my cousin Melody’s twin bed. I’d done well
today, finding half a dozen baby clothes for fifty cents apiece. I’d been
buying stuff for her baby ever since we moved to San Francisco about two months
ago, and had built up a decent collection.

And yeah, I kept doing it even after
Melody took off. I really believed she was coming back, especially after I’d
promised to be by her side holding her hand when she went into labor. She and I
had grown up together after her dad took me in when I was six, so she was more
like a sister than a cousin. All we had was each other.

I dropped the curtain and headed to my
own bed beside the front door. It was a foam bedroll topped by a puffy sleeping
bag, which I really liked because it was warm and cozy. Since I’d gotten so
little sleep last night, I decided a nap was in order before heading out to
visit Skye. I kicked my shoes off and tucked myself in. Then I remembered something
and pulled my new phone from my pocket, setting it on the floor beside me. I’d
put slips of paper with my new number beside every phone at the restaurant. If
Melody called back, all my coworkers knew to give her that information.