Chapter 13: Moving In

The morning after his dinner with Adelaide, Kirby had a leisurely breakfast alone. He enjoyed an extra slice of her excellent ham with his over-easy eggs. Don’t know when I’ll get any of that again, he mused as he savored the final bite.

Returning to the underground safe room he had called home for the past week, he found the clothing, shoes, and other items Adelaide had provided for him packed neatly into matching blue nylon gym bags. Garment bags with his suits lay on the bed beside them. A monogrammed notecard sat atop one of the bags. “Jeffrey, you’ve been a wonderful guest. I’m sorry I can’t see you off, but duty calls. I’ll see you this afternoon, when Amy brings you by the club. Just tell the staff which car you’re going to borrow, and they’ll pull it around front.” The penmanship was exquisite.

Upstairs, he told the ruddy-faced maid that he would be driving the Land Rover.

Waiting by the front door, he hoped to see Amy or Adelaide, but neither made an appearance. He felt a little bummed about that. Aside from his students and his fellow teachers, he had spent more time with the two sorceresses and the household staff over the past week than he had with anyone else in his five years in Oklahoma City. Upon further reflection, that was what had him bummed out. He had been so used to “saving up” his sociability and his human affection for the time he spent in Houston, that not returning to visit this summer left him feeling lonely and alienated—even before his adventure into the world of the unnatural. He had noticed it before. He had come so close last year to moving back to Houston that he had even begun applying for jobs before he decided against it. Thank goodness he had changed his mind. It was, perhaps, only the distance from his hometown that allowed him to cope even as well as he had with the open wound that was his divorce. There’s no magic spell to fix it. This is the wound that will kill me. The knife’s still in it and who knows when Tina will reach out to twist it again?

No! You are not allowed to go there, thoughts. Nuh uh! Despite these commands to his psyche, despite the desperate need he felt to wrench his thoughts to anything else, he could feel the ache welling up from within, from a place deeper than the wound in his chest. No, the wound that hurt him now went all the way through him and out the other side. I am so fucking broken.

He found distraction thinking about Amy. He pictured her moving across the room. Gangly was a word he’d usually reserved for tall people, but the way she moved, the way she carried her slender frame made it apply to her, even though she was only five feet four. She had the same awkward energy as a baby gazelle, slender and spastic. Her humor could be infectious—when one was not recovering from life-threatening injuries. Sure, she could be annoying at times, but over the past week he had come to appreciate her company and the energetic intensity she could bring to almost anything she did. This combination of qualities helped her give off an aura that screamed, “This woman is dynamite in the sack!” Unfortunately, she had hinted that she was already in a relationship and she had flatly stated that he was not her type. That was okay, however, because after only a week she already felt like a friend. Kirby needed a friend.

The front door opened and the maid approached. He stood and she handed him the keys to the Land Cruiser. “Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome, sir,” came the reflexive response that could have been scripted by a BBC screenwriter, down to the slight Cockney accent.

“Yes, but I really do appreciate it. We haven’t been introduced. I’m Kirby, by the way.” He held out his hand.

“Yes, sir.” She shook his hand. “I’m Eve. Nice to make your acquaintance.”

“Yes, and...um...thanks, again.”

“Do you need any help with your things?”

He shook his head. “I’ve got it.”

“Very good, sir.” She looked at him expectantly. He was perplexed at the attention until he realized that she was waiting for him to leave. He approached the big front door, two gym bags in one hand and the garment bag in the other, and she opened it for him. “Good luck, sir,” she said, before closing the door behind him.

He stowed his bags on the back seat of the Land Cruiser and climbed behind the steering wheel of the still-running vehicle. He looked at the key in the ignition, then at the key ring in his hand. The latter, he noticed, was labeled “Land Cruiser Spare Key” and he slipped it into his pocket. Buckling up, he adjusted the seat and the mirrors, took a few breaths, and put it into gear.

The drive to his new place, although it crossed numerous socio-economic, ethnic, and cultural divisions within Oklahoma City, only took fifteen minutes. He passed in front of the row of bungalows, made the block, then turned onto the alley behind the row of houses. The detached two-car garage behind his place had been left open and he turned into it, taking up both spaces. He shut the garage door using the button on the wall, grabbed the gym bags from the back seat, and walked to the back door where he let himself in, after fishing the “Burly, Bald, Beard-O” keychain from his pocket.

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Other than the remote control on the kitchen counter, labeled with a yellow sticky-note “CLICKER FOR GARAGE”, the bungalow appeared just as it had the previous afternoon. He walked through the house, throwing the bags on his bed as he passed, taking in the feel of the place. It was quiet. Empty. Lonely.

Unopened packages still dominated the room that had been set up as an office. He fished out his keys and used one of them to cut the packing tape on a carton containing a premium-brand all-in-one stereo system. Music. I need some music. He began uncrating it and looking for the instructions.

Once he got the music going, the morning gave way to a one-man orgy of uncrating and assembling. Styrofoam bits, padded wrappings, torn cardboard, and assorted other pieces of packing material filled the small office almost to his knees and the overflow had begun to spread into the hall. On the way back from his bedroom, where he had installed what its box had proclaimed was the “WORLD’S LOUDEST ALARM CLOCK!!!”, he nearly tripped on the detritus. It was time to tidy up.

He was carrying three garbage bags full of cardboard, packing foam, and plastic to the garage when a voice called loudly from next door. “Hey, Kirby! How’s it going?”

He looked over to see Patty’s head, encased in a cycling helmet, sticking up over the privacy fence that separated their backyards. “Hey, Patty! Good to see you. Things are going alright so far. Hey, what’s the recycling situation in this neighborhood?”

“Well, the cycling situation is pretty good,” she said. Through the gaps in the fence he could make out that she was on a bicycle, standing up on the pedals to see over the fence. “You ride?”

“No,” he admitted. “I haven’t ridden a bicycle much since I learned how to drive a car.”

“Too bad. It’s hella good for keeping fit. Gotta stay competitive!”

Ignoring the fact that a woman almost old enough to be his grandmother had just used the expression “hella good,” he asked, “Competitive? Do you race, or something?”

“Or something. I’m a sucker for triathlons. If they have one, I’m gonna show up.”

“Cool.” This morsel of information about his new neighbor was, indeed, pretty cool. I’ll probably be using a walker when I get to her age. “So...about the recycling?”

“I’ve got no idea. Marci’s…,” she broke off before trying again. “Marci is… Wait. You know about the mumbo-jumbo, right? Adelaide said you were in-the-know regarding the witchy stuff.”

“You mean the…,” and he paused, looking to the left and to the right before continuing in a more subdued tone. “Sorcery?”

“What? Speak up, Kirby! No, wait! Hold it!” Her head disappeared, then reappeared as he saw her climbing the back steps into her bungalow, carrying what looked like a serious bicycle for serious cyclists. “We don’t need to shout. Meet me across the street at the bistro in ten minutes. We can talk like civilized folks. Lunch is on me!” Not only did she not wait for him to answer, but the slamming of the screen door was the exclamation point at the end of her sentence.

Ten minutes later, he crossed the street to find her already seated at one of the bistro’s two sidewalk tables. She stood and shook his hand and they both sat down. A waiter appeared and, following the master programming of waitstaff everywhere, filled their water glasses, handed them menus, and recited the daily specials, before disappearing back inside to escape the heat.

Patty sat across from him, her white hair still wet from what must have been a lightning-quick shower, in cargo shorts and a polo shirt, one collar up, the other down. He wondered if he ought to mention that to her, but it was one of those tiny, awkward social things that he felt slightly too uncomfortable to undertake. Adelaide would have mentioned it in a way that made it sound like a compliment to Patty’s sense of personal style. Amy would have called her a doofus, probably, and reached out and fixed the collar. Kirby did neither. Instead, he opened the menu. “What’s good here?”

“Anything but the vegan crap,” she snorted. “Marci always gets that stuff. I don’t know how she can stomach it.”

Having already completely ignored the area of the menu featuring vegan fare, he had no problem heeding her admonition. When the waiter reappeared, they both ordered the lunch special and a beer. After the waiter withdrew, Kirby asked, “So, what were you going to say about the recycling?”

“Oh, yeah. I was gonna say that we don’t actually throw anything away.”

Scared even to ask, as visions of his neighbors living in filth and amid roomfuls of their own garbage crept into his thoughts, he pressed on. “By which you mean...?”

“It’s Marci and the mumbo-jumbo. It’s a thing.”

“You mean the—” and, again, he could not help but look from side to side to see if anyone might overhear him. They were the only people visible on the entire block. “The sorcery?”

“Yeah, the sorcery. Marci’s Art. Whatever you wanna call it,” she said in tones so ordinary that she might have been talking about her roommate’s penchant for basket weaving. “She says it’s unsafe—that’s her word ‘unsafe’—to let anyone have access to our garbage. So, she just makes it go away, gets rid of it in some mumbo-jumbo way.”

“I’m going to go out on a limb here, Patty, and guess that you, yourself, are not one of the mumbo-jumboers, not a, um, sorceress.”

“Nah.” She shook her head with an air of ‘aww, shucks’. “Not me. I’ve tried my hand at it. How could I not, living with Marci? But I just don’t have the knack. But I’ve seen some shit, Kirby. I. Have. Seen. Some. Shit. Let me tell you—” She broke off in the middle of her sentence and looked toward the gloved right hand he had kept in his pocket since he had shaken hers. “But Adelaide says you’ve already seen more than your share of shit too.”

“Yeah, a little more than I would have wanted.” He decided to change the subject. “So, how long have you and Marci been together?”

“Hell, we were friends when we were just kids and we fooled around a little—well, maybe more than just a little—in high school. We didn’t really get serious until she graduated from college, after I got back from Israel. It’s been the two of us ever since.”

“Y’all married?”

“For all intents and purposes.”

“But not legally?”

“I’ve got nothing against it—and I’m damned glad this country finally pulled its head out of its ass in that regard—but Marci is my reality,and I don’t need a government license to tell me that. Marci feels the same or, at least, she’s never said otherwise.”

The waiter returned with their meals and the beers they had ordered. Kirby raised his beer in a toast, “To finding your reality!”

“Hear, hear!” Patty agreed heartily and clinked the rim of her bottle to his.