Undeliverable (18 page)

“But of course!” She whistled and Owney trotted to her side. “In you go. I have to lock up. Oh don’t look at me like that, I’ll be back.” She herded the dog inside and locked the back door. “Off we go!”

They circled back to the front of the house and loaded into Ben’s car. As she buckled her seatbelt, Sylvia noticed the mounds of flyers on the back seat. “Yeesh, save a tree for oxygen?”

He colored slightly, but defended himself. “I’ve gone through more than that on some weekends. That’ll probably just last us the day since it’s so nice out. Lots of people should be walking around.”

They chatted amiably about old houses as they worked their way further into the center of the city. It felt odd to be heading out to canvas with another person, but Ben found he rather enjoyed having someone else along, someone whose conversation didn’t have to be entirely about what was lost. At least not his loss.

They managed to find a parking garage with a tolerable daily rate close to the theaters and parked. From there, they made their way to the corner that hosted a movie theater and two playhouses, one of which was playing
Wicked
.

“This should do us for a while. We’ll move to one of the other corners once the Wicked crowd dies down.” They split the large stack of flyers into three piles, the largest stack stored next to a lamp post under a loose brick for later.

The first movie emptied out around one o’clock, and they were kept busy until the
Wicked
audience started streaming out of the theater.

“Have you seen this boy?”

“Can you just look at this poster a moment?”

“Do you have a moment of time?”

“Please, have you seen Benny?”

For the most part they were met with polite negatives; about one in ten people actually took a flyer. A few people actually stopped to ask about it: when had it happened, was this your son? Your brother? Then their rhythm was interrupted by a Louisiana drawl:

“Lord, darlin’, ain’t that just the saddest?”

Ben turned to glance at Sylvia and see who it was that had shown an interest in the flyer. His glance skidded over the man and settled on the redhead at his side. “Jeannie?”

“Jesus. Ben.” She quickly released her escort’s arm and took a step to the side. “What are you doing here?”

Ben’s eyes flicked back and forth between his estranged wife and the man she was with, trying to figure out what their relationship was. Wondering what she was doing in Atlanta when on a Sunday like this the store should be open. There would be lots of tourists on the streets shopping. “Flyering.” The man didn’t seem like anyone Ben knew, definitely not one of their mutual friends, and she seemed overly friendly with him.

“Yeah, I can see that. Who’s she?” Jeannie seemed to fold in on herself, her arms wrapped around each other though the day was warm.

“A coworker. She offered to help.” He didn’t feel like talking with her. She hadn’t wanted any part in this before, so she had no right asking questions now. Especially not with someone who took such pity on them as the Louisiana man had.

“Uh huh.” They both paused.

Ben thought he should at least try to be civil for the sake of the third parties in all of this, if for nothing else. Sylvia was starting to look downright antsy. “So, what are you in town for?”

“Oh, I was taking Pierre to see
Wicked
. He’d never seen it before. Uh, right. Pierre, Ben. Ben, Pierre.” The lanky man at his estranged wife’s side held out a hand and slapped a lopsided grin on his face.

“Heard a lot about you, Ben.”

Ben stuck his hands in his pockets. He could already tell there was something about this overly friendly man that he didn’t like. “Really? Considering I don’t know you and my wife and I have only been apart for a little over a month, that’s a lot of talking.”

Jeannie took a step to put herself between the two men. “Ben, don’t.”

Ben was nearly as angry as the night she had thrown him out. He felt it boiling up, and he decided he didn’t want to control it this time. He was done being the one who had to watch everything he said and did, not when she made it so clear that even when he did, he wasn’t good for her. “What? Don’t I have a right to know when my wife’s found a new interest?”

Pierre leaned around Jeannie. “Hey, man, we’re just friends.”

Ben snorted. “Right. Friends. Walking arm-in-arm out of a theater. Gotcha.”

“Don’t you dare.” Jeannie stepped up into Ben’s face, tears standing out in her eyes. “It’s been seriously lonely since you left. Pierre was friendly when he came into the shop looking for a few pieces for his new house, and we’ve been spending some time together, that’s it.”

He couldn’t stop himself. “Oh? And whose fault is it that you are lonely? I seem to remember
you
telling
me
to get out.”

Ben had expected her to get mad, like she always did, to rise to the occasion and fight, but she just sighed and he could see that there wasn’t any anger there, only sadness. “I was lonely even before that. You had completely retreated from me, fallen into your obsession and drinking. God, Ben, you were drinking so much. There wasn’t room for me and your wall. Yes, I told you to leave, but that’s only because you’d forgotten about me a long while before.”

He felt as though his heart was missing beats, and he wanted to scream, shake her, but he had at least a modicum of self-respect left. “You
threw me out
! I was only trying to find our son!”

She was starting to cry now, and Pierre was looking even more uncertain about what he should do. Ben hated that she was crying, and he started to feel his anger ebb. He’d never been able to handle it when a woman cried. That was, until she added, “You weren’t doing any good, for anybody. Me, you, or our son. Probably aren’t doing any good now either.”

Ben’s anger resurged, coalescing into a cold hard knot in his chest. He shivered despite the warm day, for the first time actually hating his wife. “At least I love him enough to try.”

Jeannie’s breath left her in a gasp, and her face was drawn and colorless. “You bastard,” she murmured. “At least I know enough to know when I’m beat. And to move on.”

Ben didn’t care how much he hurt her now; everything was fair game. “Apparently. Into the arms of
Pierre
.” He gave the man’s name a French accent.

Sylvia tried to work her way between the couple. “Ah, Ben?”

Jeannie grabbed Ben’s arm and pulled him away from Sylvia. “You have the gall to insult me when your teenage slut over there has her hands on my son’s face?”

“No. You. Didn’t.” Sylvia grabbed the hand clutching Ben’s arm and in one swift twist dislodged it. She shoved the stack of flyers into Jeannie’s hand. “I am not a slut. I am not sleeping with your husband—though god knows that if he asked I would probably oblige—but he’s too wrapped up in the search for his son to even think twice about any woman. Except you. Still has a picture of you at work. With Benny.” She stepped away from the woman and threaded her arm through Ben’s. “And I am twenty-four, thank you very much.”

Sylvia started to force-march Ben from the corner while Jeannie stood with the stack of flyers in her hand. When they glanced back at the next corner she had dropped them in the middle of the sidewalk and was walking quickly in the other direction, Pierre trying vainly to keep up.

Seeing his son’s face start to drift this way and that in the wake of passersby, Ben wrenched free of Sylvia’s arm and hurried back to their original corner. He carefully picked up each one, squaring it to the stack, trying to brush off whatever city detritus clung to the pages. His face pointed firmly to the pavement, and he didn’t say anything when Sylvia came up behind him and laid a hand on his back. At least he had stopped shaking, even if he did feel like breaking something. She had no right, no right, to be criticizing his efforts to find their son. Not when she had given up so completely. Not when she was doing everything in her power to replace everything in her life that reminded her of the son she had loved and held just a year ago.

Once the pages had been collected and were once more neatly stacked, Ben cleared his throat and stood, staring after his wife. She hadn’t looked back. He rubbed his hand over his eyes, dashing away the extra moisture clinging there.

“Ben, hey now.” Sylvia turned him until he faced her. “It’s okay. I’m sure Pierre is just a phase. A coping mechanism if you will.”

“What do I care about Pierre? She hasn’t really been my wife for a year now. Sylvia, she was his mother. How can she just…give up? It’s not right. Look at her, out gallivanting at a show with a boy toy while her son, our son, he’s—” Ben smoothed over the papers again while he waited for his voice to stabilize. “My son.”

“Because she is apparently an unfeeling bitch. That’s how.” Her words didn’t hold any venom, though, and he knew they were lies simply presented to make him feel better. “Or maybe it’s just the way she copes. She can’t deal with the search, the pain, so she pretends it isn’t there.”

A little bit of the anger still sloshed about inside him. “She has to deal sometime!”

“I agree, but maybe, just maybe, no one can force her there.”

“I guess.” He looked around him at the crowds passing without even noting their presence. “I think I’d like to go home. This doesn’t feel…I just want to go home.”

“Good with me, I think I burnt my nose.” She stared at it cross-eyed. “Does it look red to you?”

A small smile broke through Ben’s misery. He couldn’t help but be a bit amused at the image of his pigtailed coworker staring intently at her own nose. “No. I don’t think it’s sunburned.”

“Well that’s a relief. I peel like nothing else when I burn. It’s embarrassing.” She started walking, then stopped. “I don’t look like a teenager, do I?”

He shouldn’t have gotten as angry as he did with Jeannie, but she had surprised him. It was fading fairly quickly now anyway, with her gone again. “You shouldn’t listen to a woman in rage. You should know that.”

She stamped her foot at the non-reply. “But do I look like a teenager?”

Ben paused and turned to give her a once over. “No. No, you certainly do not.”

She blushed. “Good.”

He hesitated before asking her, “Did you mean what you said?”

She linked arms with him again and started walking towards the car. “Dunno what I said. She pissed me off. I stop thinking and just start talking when I’m pissed off.”

“Never mind then.” If she didn’t remember having said she’d happily sleep with him, then he certainly wasn’t going to bring it up. Sylvia probably just said it to piss off Jeannie anyway.

The ride home was fairly quiet, Ben brooding over the day’s encounter and lost efforts. When they reached Sylvia’s house, he walked her up to the door and greeted Owney as the dog came rushing out. He ignored the two humans and headed straight to the herbaceous border of the walkway to relieve himself.

“We weren’t gone that long, silly.” Sylvia shook her head and turned to Ben. “Well, at least today was educational.”

“I’m really sorry about my—about Jeannie. That was uncalled for. And thank you for helping. I think people react better to a young and attractive woman rather than a middle-aged guy looking for a young boy.”

“That’s not it at all!” Ben raised an eyebrow and she continued. “I don’t look like I’m trying to pass a stone when I hand them a flyer. Owney!” The terrier skittered into the house and Sylvia closed the door, laughing.

Ben scowled then muttered, “I do
not
look like that.” Muffled snickering answered him and he threw up his hands in surrender and returned to his car. He spent the evening sitting at his desk, staring at the map, telling himself he was picking the location to paper next weekend, but all he accomplished was draining the last of the whiskey bottle at his side. He stumbled into bed, wondering if the next day would bring anything new.

T
he center was fairly subdued when he got there, typical for a Monday morning; most of the staff was bleary-eyed and relying solely on the pungent coffee to keep going. As he made his way to the warehouse, Ben noticed the lights were already on and there were voices inside. Voices that he did not recognize. Images of empty safes and stripped shelves danced through his head and he wondered if it was only Mrs. Biun who had stripped them of their valuables, or if there were more thieves among the staff. Well, besides Sylvia, but letters doomed to be shredded hardly counted. He hurried to get inside and confront whoever was in his domain.

There were two people in the bay reserved for prepping auction items. A short, rotund woman was checking things off on a clipboard while an older gentleman was calling out numbers and shelving items.

Ben cleared his throat. “Um, excuse me?”

“Just a tick, dearie, just a tick. Next?” The woman hadn’t even looked up and flipped the page on her clipboard.

The old man shelved a Nazi motorcycle helmet. “That would be 06-08-14-72”

“Check.”

Ben tried again. “I’m sorry, but I have to interrupt. Who are you and what are you doing in my warehouse?”

The woman rounded on him with a simpering megawatt smile. “Oh, terribly sorry, Tanya’s my name. This is Jeffrey. We’re from the Minnesota Center. Just brought down the stuff for the auction, didn’t you know? And who are you? Where’s ol’ Pammy?”

“Pammy?” Ben tried to remember if there was anyone in the center by that name, but he drew a blank.

Tanya waved the hand holding her pen. “Shriveled old prune who runs this circus.”

“You must mean Mrs. Biun. She retired. I’m her replacement, Ben. Ben Grant.” He held out his hand and she grasped it briefly before returning to her clipboard.

“Nice to make your acquaintance, I’m sure. But we have got to finish this up now, boy. Go do what you have to do. We’ll talk later.” She turned back to Jeffrey, effectively dismissing Ben, and continued her inventory as they unpacked their boxes. Ben shrugged and went to his desk to find Sylvia peeking around the divider.