Cowboy Baby Daddy

* * *

It’s 6 in the morning when my phone rings.

I let it go to voicemail and have a brief, magnificent fantasy of falling back to sleep and not waking up again until I’m no longer tired, but that dream is cut short as the phone rings again.

“What?” I answer.

“Rise and shine,” Mike says. “It’s time to find you an apartment. I’m downstairs and ready to go.”

“It’s too early,” I tell him, but I know it’s not going to make any difference.

“I brought coffee and donuts,” he says. “If you’re really nice to me, I might even let you have some, now get your ass outta bed and let’s get going.”

I go on to make a very compelling argument about how nobody’s going to show us apartments this early in the morning, but he’s already hung up.

Grumbling, I get out of bed.

Mike didn’t leave me time to take a shower, so I put on some deodorant and hope I don’t feel too disgusting by the time the day’s out. I don’t really like my chances.

When Mike said he was here, he meant parked in the garage down the block. It’s a bit early, but there are already people on the sidewalks, nearly all of them talking on phones. I can’t help but wonder how many of them are actually talking to someone and how many are just talking into the air, trying to appear like they’re a lot more important than they actually are.

I might be a little cranky.

I’m not even to the parking garage when I hear Mike’s voice echoing through the structure. He’s arguing with someone about whether parking on the line is “in” or not, and from the sound of it, it doesn’t seem like he’s winning.

I follow the ruckus and eventually find Mike standing at the back of his car, up in the face of the parking attendant, and the problem is easy enough to spot.

Mike didn’t pull into a space and take a little more than his share of the spot; he’s parked behind two cars, blocking them in. He’s trying to advance the argument that because one of his tires is on one of the yellow lines, he’s technically not parked illegally.

“Lei, you’re here,” he calls over the attendant’s shoulder. “Let’s get the fuck out!”

I hurry to the car and get in. The parking attendant is still shouting profanity at Mike through the window, but as soon as Mike starts the car, the man backs off.

“Yeah, I didn’t know how long I was going to hold him there with that bullshit,” Mike laughs. “Your coffee’s in the cup holder on the right. You drink it black, don’t you?”

“I don’t even care right now,” I tell him, and pull the lid off the cup.

I pour about half the cup of coffee down my throat. It’s a good thing the coffee is cold.

“So, I stayed up until 4 in the morning looking at places, and we’ve got some options. There are a few in town and a few out of town. Which would you like to check first?”

“You didn’t make any appointments?”

“Who’s going to take an appointment in the middle of the night?” Mike asks. “It’s Jersey. People there don’t have plans. They’ll be so thrilled that a New Yorker is in town they’ll roll out the red carpet.”

Mike’s one of those New Yorkers. He’s of a special breed that thinks no one outside of the five boroughs has anything important to do. That, mixed with the already sizeable God complex, and they just might kick us out of the state.

We’re on the road for a long time, longer than I would have thought.

I made sure to look at the clock as we were leaving, and it’s already been almost three hours. There’s no way I can make this kind of commute.

“What kind of brokerage houses do they even have in Jersey?”

“They have brokerage houses everywhere,” I tell him. “The only difference is that in New York, if someone on the floor pisses you off, you can hunt them down before they’ve had a chance to leave the state.”

“So, what’s the deal with you and Dane? I kind of got a vibe from you last night.”

Mike and his stupid vibes.