Stray (9 page)

Another night alone in my apartment, another unfortunate pre-cooked meal, this time a frozen pizza. I bought this stuff for emergency quick dining, and deliberately chose stuff I didn
’t like, to force myself to cook. It wasn’t working.

Neither was trying to forget about Jon. He had me tied in so many knots that I jumped out of my skin every time he spoke to me. And why did he keep trying to get me to go to dinner with him? Wouldn’t that get him in trouble with his girlfriend? After all, this was a small town, even if you counted the resort people and all the guests.

I had done the right thing in turning him down again, but as I listlessly chewed the cardboard crust of my frozen pizza, I had to wonder if my stomach was going to survive this. After dinner, bored, I decided to call Cassidy to finalize plans for our New Year’s weekend. She had promised to coordinate with the other girls and then act as liaison with me.

“Cass, hey, it’s me,” I said, as if she would be able to determine who ‘me’ was if she didn’t already recognize my voice.

“Oh, hey, Erin.” She sounded weird.

“I called to see if you guys are all set. Do I need to get reservations for you?” I’d love to have them all at my apartment, but it was just a one-bedroom, and five of us would be a bit uncomfortable trying to share the one bathroom.

“Oh, no, I’ll take care of it. How are you, Erin?” Wait, were we starting the conversation over?

“I’m fine. So Josie, Tracy and Dani are all set, too? You’re all coming, right?”

“Um, no, Dani can’t make it.”

“Oh, darn! Why?”

“Erin, I haven’t known how to tell you…” The words were bad enough, but the sound of her voice told me to brace for something horrible. My heart froze.

“Cass, what? Please, tell me Dani’s okay!” I knew I couldn’t take one more blow, not while I was already wondering if I’d made a mistake in coming here. What if Dani needed me, and I wasn’t there?

“Erin. No, she’s fine.”

Now I was pissed. “Then what? God, you sounded like she’d died!”

“She’s getting married.”

“What!” I squealed. “That’s fantastic! When? Who?”

“Erin, sit down.”

“I am sitting. Cass, why are you being so weird?”

“It’s Greg. I’m sorry.” For a moment, I thought I’d misheard her. Greg? My Greg? How could that be? Then it all hit me. He wasn’t my Greg any more, hadn’t been for six months. But, Greg and Dani? I couldn’t process it.

“Erin, are you okay?” I stared at the phone, my mind stunned into an inability to think, or feel. “Erin! Say something. Oh, God, I knew I shouldn’t have told you on the phone. Damn that slut anyway. Erin!”

I finally found my voice, or a sort of croak that passed for one. “Greg? And Dani? How?” Fortunately, Cass understood, even though I couldn’t form a coherent sentence.

“Oh, honey, he was cheating with her even before you guys broke up. We didn’t know how to tell you, and then it didn’t seem important any more because you did break up and then you moved away. We had no idea it was serious. I’m so sorry.”

Sorry? How about fucking two-faced? Dani, one of my best friends, or so I thought, cheating with my boyfriend. And the rest of my so-called friends keeping it from me? Suddenly, white-hot rage swept through me. I didn’t know what to do with it, but I couldn’t talk to Cass any more. I hung up without saying another word.

Then I looked around wildly for something to throw that wouldn’t break or make a mess.
Always controlled
, I thought with a bitter laugh. Well, this was an out-of-control situation if there ever was one. Deliberately, I stepped over to my cupboards and opened the doors. The phone was ringing, but I ignored it. Before I threw the first plate, I screamed until my throat was raw, and then I broke every dish I owned, throwing them against the wall with all my might. I only stopped when, between one bowl and the next, I heard a timid knock at my door.

I took a deep breath and went to the door, hoping I didn’t look like an escaped lunatic. There stood Mrs. Padgett, my sweet landlady, looking frightened out of her wits.

“Mrs. P!” I said. “Is everything all right? Do you need help?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing, dear. Did I hear you screaming?”

Tears started in my eyes as I gestured for her to come in and showed her to a seat. The broken dishes were in full view, the apartment being little more than a studio. She stared at them without comment.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. P. I got some distressing news. I didn’t realize you could hear me.”

“Distressing? Would you like to talk about it, dear?” No, I really wouldn’t. I wanted to go to bed and stay there for a week, or maybe a month. I wanted to ignore that I now literally didn’t have a pot to piss in. Okay, well, not literally, but I had broken every dish in my cupboard except the bowl that was in my hand when Mrs. P knocked on the door. A sob escaped me though, and suddenly her thin old arms were around me, and she was saying, “There, there, let it out dear.”

And the floodgates opened. I slumped into her arms and cried all the tears that hadn’t come when Greg and I broke up. Then I cried the tears of anger that Megan elicited, and finally I cried the tears of betrayal that my friends couldn’t tell me my boyfriend was cheating. The low-down, miserable, son-of-a-bitch. Finally, I had no more tears and Mrs. P was soaked to the skin on the shoulder I’d literally cried on.

“Feel better, dear? Can you tell me what that was all about?”

I did feel better, strangely enough. And now that I’d accepted the truth and let out my grief, the anger flooded in to replace it. “Yeah, it was about a sorry bastard of an ex-boyfriend and a slut of an ex-girlfriend who’s about to marry him. I just found out all my friends knew they were cheating behind my back before we broke up, and no one had the balls to tell me. Sorry.”

“Oh, my. Well, I think you have a good reason to be upset, and I’m sorry. Would you like me to make you a cup of tea?”

I laughed. “That would be great, except I seem to have broken all my cups. Thank you for coming to check on me, Mrs. P, but I think I’d like to be alone. I need to clean up this mess, and then I’m going to bed.”

“That seems like a very sensible plan, dear. Do let me know if I can do anything for you. You seem like a lovely girl. You deserve a better boy.”

Girl, boy, how odd. I was pushing thirty. But maybe to Mrs. P that was very young. She had to be seventy if she was a day. I showed her to the door, assuring her that I’d be fine. Sighing, I started the task of picking up the shards of crockery. What I needed was a hot, sweaty, one-night stand. Something to take my mind off the picture of Greg and Dani that was turning my stomach and make me feel alive again. I could have a date with Bob, but what I really wanted was six inches or more of hard dick. I wanted to be fucked hard and left wrung out. And I knew just the man to do it, if only he didn’t have a girlfriend. Jon Miles.

Maybe they had an open relationship, maybe that’s why he started hanging around me. If I could have just one night with him, would it scratch my itch? Could I forget him after I had him just once? Would he even respond to my advances? I tossed and turned for what seemed like hours when I finally went to bed, finally drifting off with the decision to at least take him up on whatever he next invited me to do.

~*~

The woman staring back at me from the mirror looked closer to forty than thirty. Every minute of my rough night showed in the bags under my eyes, the wan skin and the hair that was in knots from tossing and turning all night. I needed to pull myself together before I went to work, but it was the last thing I wanted to do. If I
’d been less conscientious, I would have called Megan to close the clinic so I could take a sick day. But then my superstitious nature kicked in. If I faked being sick, it was sure to turn into a real illness, and then I’d be short a sick day. I dragged my aching body into the shower and went about reconstructing a reasonable facsimile of myself.

Fat lot of good it did. When I got to the clinic, I was twenty minutes late and Megan was annoyed, as usual. A walk-in had been waiting impatiently for me to take a look at her son’s ball python. Snakes weren’t my least favorite type of patient, but they weren’t my most favorite, either. I motioned the woman back to the examining room reserved for everything except dogs and cats and took the small ball of reptile in both hands.

“What’s he been doing, or not doing, that has you concerned?” I asked her.

“Well, actually, I’m not sure it’s sick. But, it keeps crawling into its water bowl, and I came to find out if we should provide it with a bigger one, or maybe put it in an aquarium, you know, with water all over the bottom, and maybe some rocks?”

Heaven save me from people who don’t know how to use Google. Aloud, I said, “Didn’t the place where you bought it tell you how to care for it?”

“Well, they said it eats pinkies, and that’s about it. I don’t even know what a pinkie is. My son feeds it baby mice.”

“A pinkie is a baby mouse,” I said, with as much patience as I could muster. “How often does your son handle the snake?”

“Oh, as soon as he gets home from school, he gets it out of the cage, and carries it around until dinner. He likes to try to scare his sisters with it, or show it off to the neighborhood boys. He isn’t at all afraid of it,” she added with pride.

“Well, it’s afraid of him,” I said. Asperity colored my tone as I went on. “I’d suggest you get a book about the care of ball pythons so you won’t forget any of this. Snakes, especially ball pythons, don’t like to be handled. Your son should handle it no more than fifteen minutes at a time, no more than two or three times a week. Crawling into the water dish is its way of showing its stress. Does it have a place in its cage to hide?”

“No, should it?”

“Absolutely. It’s going to die if your son keeps handling it like that. Tell him if he wants it to live, don’t handle it for at least three weeks.”

“Well, what fun is that?” The rest of my patience made a run for it, so I counted to ten before I said something offensive.

“It isn’t about what’s fun, Mrs., er. It’s about what’s best for the animal. If your son isn’t old enough to understand the difference, I doubt he is old enough to be responsible for an exotic animal. Or any animal. There is nothing wrong with this snake that proper care won’t fix. Please hand this to Megan on your way out,” I said, giving her a slip of paper with a full office visit charge on it. Mrs. Whatever looked at the number and gasped.

“But, you didn’t do anything! $60 to tell me the damn snake is stressed?”

“Did you know he was stressed before?” I asked. My tone was dangerous, but perhaps she didn’t know that.

“Hmph. Dr. Simmons wouldn’t have charged me this much.”

“Perhaps not, but he is not here and I am.” I felt sorry for the snake, knowing there was no way the family would ever bring him back here. However, I had no doubt it wouldn’t last long anyway, because the woman didn’t seem all that interested in making her son take proper care of it. In fact, I should probably report the family to the SPCA, but it might not do any good, since the nearest local branch was located in Boulder.

My mood was not improved by that first patient visit. When I judged that the woman and Megan had had enough time to have a bitch session about me, I went out to see what we had on the schedule for today.

“You look like shit,” was the pleasant greeting my loving tech/receptionist gave me. “And I cut that bill in half. What were you thinking?”

I was thinking that the woman deserved a wake up call, but now I was thinking that I’d like to throttle the nineteen-year-old who was making my life miserable. Along with everyone else in the world.