“Remember how we used to decorate for holidays?” I asked him. My mouth was beneath the blankets and the words were muffled.
He didn’t answer. I listened to him breathing, listened to the rhythm become steadier and eventually turn to quiet snoring.
I lay there listening to him for the longest time, and at some point I fell back asleep. When I awoke it was almost noon and he was gone, down in his studio, as usual.
Chapter 59
After the night of Krystle’s party, Adrian and I found more and more excuses to be together. It began with us taking our breaks at the same time.
“I’m going to grab a sub. You hungry? Want to come with?” he would ask me.
Of course I did.
For months it was like this. Flirtatious yet out of reach. Inappropriate, but without any real lines being crossed. I was still living with Sam, but we had deteriorated to being just roommates. I mean, mainly. Okay, to Sam, we were still together. But to me we mostly weren’t.
Then one night after work it finally happened. It was November of 2000 and the store had been terribly busy with nasty, stressed out holiday shoppers. It was late and Adrian and I were out together, brazenly having a drink. We’d had lunch together, but never a drink. Belinda thought he was working late but he had taken off when I did, telling one of the managers that he was coming down with a cold.
We started talking about a woman we had seen who was shopping with her children. Her little boy, who looked like he was about four, had pulled down his pants and started peeing right into the stroller on his little sister. It was hilarious. Half the store saw it happen. His mother, who had been ignoring her kids and reading one of her unpaid-for books, looked up to see her baby covered in pee, and flipped out. Her target was Wilfred, an old man who had just started working at Border’s and had unfortunately been standing nearby.
“What’s the matter with you?” she said to Wilfred. “How am I supposed to take them back outside? She’s soaking wet! She’ll freeze to death! Get me the manager!”
“I didn’t do it,” said Wilfred.
“I didn’t do it either,” said her little boy.
“I know you didn’t do it,” the woman said back to Wilfred in a shrill, mocking voice, “but you could have said something when it was happening.”
Wilfred didn’t know what to do. He was holding some books so he set them down on a table and went to find a manager. All around customers and workers had stopped what they were doing and were focused on this woman and her children. The attention made her even angrier, so she decided to leave. However, she had an armful of books she hadn’t purchased, which started off the alarm. By the time Wilfred came back with a manager, the woman was hysterical and both her kids were screaming.
“What’s the matter?” asked the manager.
In what I could only assume was one of those irrational, heat of the moment decisions, the woman pointed at Wilfred and yelled, “That old man peed on my baby! You need to fire him right now! He’s not right.”
We’d all seen what really happened, but she had to blame someone, had to divert the attention away from herself and her children.
Adrian and I had left in the midst of all the commotion. It had provided plenty of fuel for flirty, silly scandalmongering all the way from Border’s to the pub where we sat drinking pints of Smithwick’s.
“That woman’s going to win a lawsuit over this, and Wilfred’s going to end up in jail,” said Adrian.
“She’ll visit him there, out of guilt, and they’ll fall in love,” I said.
“They’ll have a conjugal visit, and conceive a baby who pees on everything,” said Adrian.
Were we talking about love, sex, and babies? I would take such a conversation in whatever form it presented itself. Ridiculousness with Adrian made my heart race more than the most serious talk I could have with Sam.
“Did you see that little boy’s reindeer sweater? No wonder he peed on his sister! He needed to rebel!” I said.
“Do you have brothers or sisters?” asked Adrian.
“No. Do you?” I took another drink. I had recently found myself learning to thoroughly love beer.
“I have a younger sister. She’s twenty-seven. Or twenty-eight. I’m not sure. I should know this. Um, she must be twenty-seven. So you’re an only child?”
“Yep. Just one sister?” I asked, passing it back to him.
“Yeah. Her name is Alexa.”
“That’s a pretty name.”