Welcome, Caller, This Is Chloe (9 page)

I tried to picture Clementine and me sharing chips and salsa. Oh my gawwwwwd. No, the GM and I weren’t destined to swap friendship bracelets, especially after the latest frosty look. However, I wouldn’t mind getting to know Duncan better. Again, I wondered where he’d been all day. KDRS was a much warmer place with him around.

Just the way my home was a warmer place with people in it. My youngest brother, Zach, had left for med school in August, leaving me the sole inhabitant of the second floor. The black hole loomed before me, ready to suck me in.

I jammed my car in reverse and backed out of the driveway.

By now, Mom should be out of surgery and finishing her notes. Like me, she probably felt tired but accomplished. Today my surgeon mother mended a few hearts while I worked on creating the best talk-radio show on planet earth.

I drove to the hospital and found Mom in the CICU. She stood in front of a large window that framed a gray-haired, gray-faced man hooked to beeping and buzzing machines. Mom’s forehead rested on the window.

“Looks like you could use a red chili chimi,” I said.

Mom opened her eyes and offered me a tired smile. “Sounds good, but not tonight.” She jutted her chin toward the man. “I can’t leave Mr. Dominguez for another hour or so.”

I frowned. If I didn’t hate hospitals so much, I’d wait with her.

“Why don’t you stop by the Tuna Can?” Mom suggested. “Grams could use a pick-me-up. She spent the afternoon visiting senior assisted-living facilities.”

I lunged for Mom and frantically patted her arms and back.

Mom’s weary face wrinkled. “What are you doing?”

“Looking for bullet holes.”

My mother rumpled my hair. “A woman who specializes in helping people like your grandmother transition into assisted-living facilities took her out today.”

“And they both survived?”

“Last I heard.” Mom rested her forehead on the window. “But your grandmother isn’t happy. She was in such a state this afternoon that she lost her keys and couldn’t get in the Tuna Can, so she broke a window and tried to crawl in. Noreen next door found her stuck in the bathroom window.”

I sunk onto the chair outside Mr. Dominguez’s CICU room. I refused to look at the man whose heart my mother touched today, but not because of my fear of blood and general dislike of hospitals. In his pasty skin and bandaged chest I saw Grams, whose heart was breaking at the idea of giving up the Tuna Can, her teeny tiny corner of the universe.

This had been the root cause of World War III. Six months ago Grams’s doctors told her that because of her progressing Parkinson’s disease, she needed to think about new living arraignments, something where she wasn’t alone all the time. Grams, being Grams, had refused to consider it. But the night of the Mistletoe Ball everything changed. That evening Grams took
a walk on the beach, became disoriented, and couldn’t find her way back. When her neighbor Noreen noticed that Grams had not returned home, she called my mom, who called the police. The beach patrol found Grams after three in the morning, shivering under a lifeguard tower with a near case of hypothermia.

“She’s a danger to herself,” Grams’s doctor told my parents. “And it’s not going to get better.”

The day after the Mistletoe Ball, Mom and Dad invited Grams over for a giant spread of twice-baked potatoes. To her credit, Mom tried to put a positive spin on moving out of the Tuna Can, calling it a new and exciting episode, and she put many options on the table: a live-in aide, a roommate of Grams’s choice, an assisted-living facility.

Grams lobbed her potato in the garbage.

War ensued.

At one point during winter break, it got so bad that Grams and Mom refused to be in the same room. They sent messages to each other through me. My mom has a medical degree and Grams has eighty years of life lessons, but I swear I was back in junior high.
This
was the type of stuff that kept me snowed under during winter break.

Since that time, I’d been stewing over an idea, but I figured Mom would shoot it down. But if I could tackle a radio show, I could take on anything, right?

“Grams could live with us,” I said to my shoes. I held my breath, half expecting my mom to explode.

Instead, Mom’s shoulders bounced in a silent chuckle. “I
suggested that long before the incident at the beach. I told her with your brothers gone, we’d move you downstairs to the den, and she could have the entire second floor.”

This would restore life to the black hole. I jumped up. “Perfect.”

“She told me to shove all eight rooms up my heinie.” Mom sighed and reached for a clipboard on the door to the CICU room. “Now, why don’t you stop by and see how she’s doing? You’re the only one who can make her smile these days.”

Grams smile? After a day of looking at assisted-living facilities? I’d have better luck getting Clementine to braid my hair. Again I thought of that nasty, very Brie-like look on Clementine’s face and shivered. But Mom was right; Grams needed a dose of Chloe cheer.

As I pulled out of the hospital parking lot, plotting witty and highly entertaining ways to pull Grams out of her funk, I spotted a metallic green bike on the side of the road. A lone figure hunched over the duct tape—dotted frame, a wrench in one hand, an oily bike chain in the other.

I punched the gas and pulled up next to him. “You look like you could use a little help from a girl with a big heart.”

Duncan sat on his heels and stared at the night sky. In the moonlight I could see the circles under his eyes had darkened. Grease streaked his jeans and blood seeped from a knuckle on one of his hands. He threw the chain to the ground. “I could use a new bike.”

“Can’t help you there, but how about a ride?”

Duncan’s forehead lined, as if he didn’t understand my offer. Or didn’t want it. I recalled the KDRS staffers saying he didn’t need any help. Duncan was a person used to going it alone. Even at the radio station he held himself distant. Apart. An outsider among outsiders.

He stared at the bike, then at the hospital, rubbing his hand across the bridge of his nose and leaving a grease spot. “Yeah. I’m late.”

“PLEASE TELL ME THAT’S NOT A DECOMPOSING RAT.” I HELD
Duncan’s scarf over my nose and mouth and tried not to breathe the air in the executive break room of Schnepf and Stromberg Accounting. It stunk so bad Duncan’s ruddy, wind-kissed cheeks were tinged green.

“It’s not a rat.” Duncan spoke without taking a breath. “I’m pretty sure it’s a sub sandwich. At least it
was
a sub sandwich.” With a dust pan, he scooped a six-inch oozing brown mass from a bin marked Cans Only and dropped it into a small plastic bag he plucked from his trash cart. He wrapped the decomposing blob in two more bags and shoved it deep into a bin on his cart. With a spray bottle marked Pine Fresh, he cleaned the bin and doused the air. “Got it.”

“And the crowd goes wild.” I threw my hands in the air and made mass cheering noises. “Another garbage crisis deftly dealt with by . . . Trash Man!”

Duncan winced as he pushed his cart into the hallway, the wheels squeaking softly. “Trash Man?”

I fell in step beside him, our way lit only by the after-hour security lights glowing a soft orange. “Do you prefer Garbage Guy? Rubbish Rescuer?”

He groaned.

I fingered the edges of his scarf, which still hung around my neck, noting that this one, too, had a lopsided red heart stitched onto one end. “How about Junk Hunk? Debris Dude?”

“You’re a warped soul, Chloe.” He didn’t laugh, but that half smile curved his mouth. Mission accomplished.

Duncan ducked into the next office in search of more garbage, which he sorted into the two circular bins on his cart. He worked quickly, efficiently. Duncan Moore was a guy who knew his garbage. He also seemed more at ease here than at school. On the ride from the hospital parking lot, he’d been stone still, but here in the office building, his face no longer looked carved in granite.

“You’ve been doing this a while?” I asked. When I rescued Duncan and his broken-down bike on the side of the road, I’d expected to take him home. Instead, he directed me to a commercial office complex north of the hospital.

“A few years. I have six office buildings where I handle trash.”

“Must take a while.”

He poured the contents of another trash can into his bins. “I’m home a little after eleven.”

“Which explains why you sleep through econ.”

“Doesn’t everyone sleep through econ?” He tilted his head, his gray eyes sparking with silvery bits.

“I kind of like econ.” I took a small waste basket of paper and emptied it in the bin marked Recyclables. “All those business models, market analyses, supply-and-demand charts. It’s fun.”

Duncan grabbed another trash can. “Like I said, Chloe, you’re a warped soul.” Yes, he was definitely different with his garbage. Almost relaxed.

In a communal office area, he emptied a trash can and something clanked. He dug around and hauled out a dinged box with a frayed cord and said, “Yesssss!”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A treasure.”

“Uh, Dunc, it’s a pencil sharpener.”

“Same thing.”

“Exactly what are you going to do with it?”

“Fix it.”

“Why?”

He stared at the scuffed, dented box, then me, clearly not understanding the latter. “Because it needs fixing.”

I pictured Duncan working on the transmitter, the lights, and the clock. “You like to fix things, don’t you?”

The trash cart’s wheels jangled and squeaked as he pushed them out of the office area. “Yeah, I guess so. After school I work in a thrift store fixing broken appliances.”

“You have two jobs? No wonder you have no time for fun.”

“It’s not bad.” He didn’t seem upset, more resigned, as if working two jobs was a fact of life.

“So what kinds of things do you fix at the thrift store?” I asked.

“Everything. Radios, dishwashers, old movie projectors, snow skis. And toasters. Bet you never met a guy who’s fixed a hundred toasters.”

“I’m impressed. I bet you can fix anything.”

The squeak of wheels softened as he slowed. “Some things can’t be fixed.”

Like friendships broken by lies and frosty pink slurs. The thought slammed me. Could I fix the growing gulf between Brie and me? Did I want to? I slid my pin curls behind my ears. Of course I did. Despite the horrible words and flying tamale, Brie wasn’t a villainess. I believed that with all my heart because I knew I could never be friends with someone who had an evil heart. We were still connected.

Long ago I figured out the BF connection, the invisible thread that linked friends. This thread was responsible for the times you finished each other’s sentences or showed up to school wearing the same color shirts or your hair in matching messy ponytails. Sometimes this invisible connection woke you in the middle of the night and demanded you text your BF. That was when your BF texted back:
Mom gon. I’m @ d hsptl. I nd u. Merce
. I’d been connected to Merce and Brie for years, and some part of me still hadn’t let go.

While I thought about the BF thread, Duncan, too, had traveled in his head to a deep, thoughtful place. His garbage cart was still,
his gaze pinned on something across the darkened corridor. Was he thinking about the things he couldn’t fix? Without the scarf around his neck, I could see his pulse slamming below his jaw.

I grabbed the trash cart and sent it rolling down the hall. “Okay, time for a little fun.”

Wide-eyed, Duncan stared from me to his runaway trash cart and back to me. “Fun? Here?”

“As someone very wise and with wonderful taste in old shoes once said, fun is everywhere. We just have to make it.”

Duncan headed for his trash cart. “Hate to burst your bubble, but garbage is not fun.”

With his trash cart once again in hand, he squeaked down the hall, leaving me looking at his broad shoulders and the curve of his faded jeans. The pocket was torn, but someone had attempted to patch it with lopsided stitches, and I pictured Duncan’s own hands fixing that tear. Always fixing things. Always working.

I whipped off the scarf, tossed it through the air, and looped it around his neck, drawing him back to me. That wonderful sea-swept smell mingled with pine cleaner.