Asking for Trouble (28 page)

She was coming home from yet another momentous first day,
but a completely different first day. For one thing, this was her first day
without Helene. And for another, she was coming home to Joe’s place, and he was
there. She’d texted him that she was leaving work, and he’d come home early to
meet her, and she was
glad.

She walked through the front door and straight into his
arms, stood with her face pressed against his chest, letting herself relax into
the comfort and security that was Joe. Having him hold her didn’t solve her
problems, but it sure felt that way. Maybe it just made her feel like her
problems were solvable.

“So what happened?” he asked when they were on the couch and
she had a glass of wine in front of her, because this was a Wine Night, that
was for sure.

“I didn’t hear all of it, of course,” she said. “But she
didn’t go quietly. I heard there was some yelling.” Telling him allowed her to
relish it all over again. “There may even have been some throwing things. I
wanted her to come back into the office. I wanted to see her face. But the
bookkeeper came in and packed up her desk. Too bad.”

“Yep,” Joe said. “They say living well is the best revenge,
but sometimes, revenge is the best revenge. So she’s gone. What are they going
to do about replacing her?”

“I haven’t heard much, but Dr. Marsh did say that whatever
happens, Geek Day is my project. I get to manage it. I’m sure it’s wrong to be
so pleased for myself after such a shakeup for Second Chance, but too bad, I’m
excited anyway.” She was smiling, because she couldn’t help it.
“I’ve spent all day making lists and
notes. I’m going to make this the biggest thing to ever hit the tech world, you
wait and see.”

“You don’t have to convince me.” He was smiling back at her,
his thumb rubbing over the back of her neck. “My money was on you from Day One.
You’ve got the opportunity. Everything you do with it now—that’s all on
you. I know you can do it.”

“I can,” she said. “And I’m going to. You wait and see.”

A week later, though, she wasn’t feeling nearly so warm and
fuzzy towards him. They’d gone to the gym together after work, were back at his
place again, and Joe was heating up chili.

“So do we have plans for Memorial Day weekend?” she asked
him. “Coming right up. Do I get to see what the cabin looks like in May? Do you
get to drive me crazy checking my gear if we go for a hike?”

“I need to go out of town on Saturday,” he said, not
responding to her teasing at all, which had her paying attention.

“Oh?” She stifled her disappointment. He was being cautious,
she decided, because he was afraid she’d have a fit about him not spending time
with her. She pulled greens out of the fridge and dumped them in a bowl,
reminded herself to stay casual. She’d told him that she understood his
workload. Time to prove it, because this was where the rubber met the road. She
certainly couldn’t accuse him of not caring about her, of not paying attention
to her.
 
He’d done nothing else,
lately. “Work thing?”

“No.” He gave the pot a stir. “Going to Las Vegas.”

Her hands stilled on the knife she’d been using to chop
tomatoes. “Oh?” she asked again.

“Yeah. Something your dad said I should do.” When she didn’t
answer, he went on. “That day when we went up there together. I decided, you
fought for what you wanted. Time for me to fight too.”

She’d never known what they’d talked about that day. Joe had
come out of her dad’s study more silent and closed off than ever, and she
hadn’t pressed him.

Now, though, she did. “Something about your past,” she
guessed. “About your mom, or your dad?”

“Neither. Something about me.” He kept stirring, even though
she could tell the chili didn’t need it. “When I was a kid,” he said, and she
could sense the reluctance in him, “I did some shoplifting.”

“Huh. Isn’t that pretty common?” she asked cautiously.

“I don’t know. Did you do it?”

“Well, no. You know my parents. Can you even imagine?”

“I guess not. But I did.”

“And you need to do, what? Turn yourself in to the police?
For
shoplifting?
What, twenty years
ago? You can’t tell me that even my dad would suggest that. He might be a
minister, but he lives in the real world.”

“Not quite. It’s about paying back, I guess. Facing the
past, I think that’s what your dad would say.” He went on to explain his
mission, his reluctance obvious, while he dished up the chili, and they sat
down with their dinner.

“Well, that sounds like a fairly horrible use of a holiday
weekend,” she said. “Is it going to take all of it?”

“No, just the day. I’ve got a nine o’clock flight on
Saturday morning, and I’ll be back that night. I’m not planning to stick
around. I just wanted to tell you I was going.”

“Thanks. But I’d like to come with you.”

“No.”

“Joe—”

“No. This will be bad enough,” he went on when she started
to argue, “without you there to see it. That would just make it worse.”

“I appreciate that you told me about it.” She was treading
carefully, because he had that shuttered expression, the one she didn’t see
much anymore. “But it’s like when you told my dad about us. It was hard for
you, and I wanted to be there. This is the same thing.”

“No. It’s not. This has nothing to do with you, and I don’t
want you there. I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

It felt as if he’d slapped her. She looked down at her soup,
took a bite, but her hand wasn’t entirely steady.

“Alyssa,” he sighed. He set an elbow on the table, slid a
hand over his close-cropped hair. “Now you’re feeling all left out. I thought
it would be good if I told you. Damn. I always screw this stuff up.”

“It’s not that,” she tried to explain. Her throat had closed,
and she pushed the chili bowl aside. “It’s that you open the door this little
tiny way, and that’s all. I thought if I was patient, you’d open it more, but
you won’t. How can I keep coming to you like I have been, all the times when
I’m scared and upset and tired, how can I keep asking you to help me if you’ll
never do that with me? It’s like I’m this child, and you feel like you have to
be the parent, like you have to be in charge all the time, because I can’t
handle things.”

She said it, knowing even as she did that he was going to
hate hearing it, and she was right.

“Here we go,” he said, getting up and taking his dishes to
the sink, rinsing them out and putting them in the dishwasher, and she wanted
to scream at him to leave the dishes and
talk
to her. “I won’t share my feelings. We’re back to that.”

“Yes,” she said, refusing to let herself feel belittled.
“Right now, yes.”

“Well, I can’t help it. I don’t want to talk about it,
because there’s nothing to talk about. I’ve got nothing to share. Or, OK, here
it is.” He turned back to her, and the only feelings she was getting from him
were anger and frustration. “When I think about what I’m going to do on
Saturday,” he said, “I feel like shit. And while I’m doing it, I’m sure I’ll
feel even more like shit. And afterwards, I’m hoping I’ll feel a little less
like shit, and that I can come back to you and feel like, I’ve done that, and I
can move on. There you go. That’s it. My feelings.”

“All right,” she said, because she didn’t know what else to
say. He was right. He’d shared his feelings, and she couldn’t exactly say that
those were the wrong ones, could she?

“So if you don’t mind,” he said, back under control, the
anger wiped out again as if he’d never revealed it, “I’m going to work late
Friday, get some stuff done before I take off, so I won’t see you. I’ll call
you Sunday morning, and maybe we can go out Sunday night, since Monday’s a
holiday. We’ll do the cabin another time, I promise. Just not this weekend. Sorry
for swearing,” he added belatedly.

She ignored that, because what did it matter? “All right,”
she said again. She wanted to say more, to keep talking, to batter the wall
down, but she didn’t know how.

It hadn’t been a fight. A fight, she could have handled.
He’d shut down, and she didn’t have any way to fight that. She was beaten.

Joe
watched
out the window as the barren outcrops of Red
Rocks gave way to the irrigated green of suburban lawns dotted by the turquoise
teardrops and rectangles of backyard swimming pools, followed in their turn by
the black pyramid of the Luxor, the over-the-top flag-bedecked turrets of the
Excalibur. Other landmarks had gone since he was last here, torn down without
sentiment to make way for taller, glitzier towers, every one built on gambling
dollars, every one a monument to misplaced hope or the dream of a better life,
depending on how you looked at it.

He looked down on it all, and it didn’t feel like coming
home. It felt like slipping back into a pit he’d clawed his way out of, one
painful handhold at a time. It felt bad.

The plane touched down, taxied to a stop in front of the
terminal, and he was down the jetway and into the arrivals lobby, his senses
already assaulted by the din of slot machines, the flash of lights that lured
and beckoned.

And then, somehow, incredibly, there was Alyssa. Appearing
in the doorway of the glassed-in waiting area, then making her way through the
crowd to join him. Looking serious. Looking determined. Looking like home.

He didn’t say anything, just stepped out of the stream of
arriving passengers and waited for her.

She stood in front of him, her usual smile missing. “I came
anyway.”

“I see that.”

“I thought all night.” The words tumbled out. “I thought, all
right, this is private, this is something you need to do by yourself. And then
I came anyway. I get that this is a personal thing for you. I do. But don’t you
see, if we’re going to be part of each others’ lives, I need to be able to help
you like you helped me. I need to be here for you if you’re going to do
something this hard. You were there for me. Can’t you let me be there for you?”

“I—” He wasn’t sure what to say, was still processing
all that when she went on.

“If you say that I need to wait in the car for you,” she
said, “I’ll wait. And if you really don’t want me there at all, I’m not going
to lie down in front of the car or anything. If you say no, I’ll stay here and
wait for you. But I’m going to wait here, because I need you to know that I’m
here if you need me, or at least when you’re done. You don’t have to tell me
what you’re thinking. You don’t have to share anything if you really don’t want
to, or if you can’t. But you have to at least let me be here. You have to let
me in that much. Please, Joe. Let me help you.”

When you want to close
down, open up and let her see you.

Dave’s words were there in his head, and he breathed in,
breathed out.

“Alyssa,” he said. “Wait. Can I say something?”

“Yes.” She was trembling a little, he realized, and he took
her hand.

“You can come,” he said.

“You haven’t been back here ever, have you?” she asked him
when they were in the rental car and on the freeway toward North Las Vegas.

“No. Never.”

“I haven’t either.”

“Not a gambler, huh?”

“Not with money,” she said, and he had a while to ponder
what that meant, because she didn’t say anything else, just looked around her
with that curiosity, that attention that was all Alyssa.

He did his best not to think, otherwise. He’d planned the
day’s itinerary starting with the North Las Vegas Target, because that had been
his biggest—well, target. He’d start there, and then he’d go on, one step
at a time. Do what he had to do, then leave. It was just one day. He’d had
worse.

He pulled in off Nellis Boulevard at the familiar red sign,
walked with Alyssa across the wide expanse of parking lot to the entrance. The
remembered heat of Vegas beat down on them from the cloudless desert sky,
reflected up from the black asphalt, a ghost of what it would be in July, when
it would be like being in an oven set on rotisserie. Stepping through the
automatic glass entry doors was like entering an oasis of cool, and the skin of
his arms pebbled into goosebumps at the contrast.

He looked around, headed to the right, to the curved expanse
of the service desk. He ignored the line, walked straight past it and told a
young woman scanning a big bag of returned items, “I need the manager.”

“Sir, you’ll need to wait your turn,” she said.

“No, I won’t. I don’t need any of your time. I just need you
to call the manager.” This was going to be hard enough. He didn’t need to wait
in line for it, or to explain himself to a bored teenage clerk.

She cast him a dirty look and said pointedly, “Excuse me,
ma’am,” to the woman she was helping. But she picked up the phone all the same
and made the call, and Joe stood to one side, forced his body to relax, and
waited.

It only took a minute for a middle-aged man with a neat
haircut and a tie over a white short-sleeved shirt to appear out of the door
leading into the back of the store, trailed by a security guard bigger and
broader than Joe. Cameras, Joe guessed. He’d looked like potential trouble, and
they’d decided on backup.

“Can I help you, sir?” the manager asked warily.

“Yeah.” Joe thought about asking for a private spot, but he
just wanted to get this done. “I’m here to pay a debt.”

“I can give you the number for our credit department,” the
man said. “That would be what you’re looking for.”

“Not that kind of debt.” The manager looked even more
nervous, and the security guard took a step forward. Joe wasn’t there to
torture anybody, so he went on quickly. “I need the name of the charity the
store donates to, because I need to write you a check.” He reached into his
back pocket for the checkbook and pen he’d shoved in there, keeping one eye on
the guard, because the guard sure had his eye on him.

“Sir . . .” the manager said. “What is this all about?”

“I stole some merchandise from your store.”

“Uh . . . recently?”

That made Joe smile despite his
tension. “No. Quite a while ago. Too late to balance your books. So, charity?”

“Well, I suppose,” the man said, looking
bemused now, but at least he didn’t look terrified anymore, “the North Las
Vegas Educational Foundation, for the schools.”

“All right.” Joe stepped to the
end of the counter, filled in the blanks, and ripped the strip of paper out of
the checkbook, handed it to the manager. “Thanks.”

The man looked at the amount.
“Holy sh—” He sounded a little breathless. “What exactly did you steal?”

“Enough.”

“Well, that wasn’t so bad,” Alyssa said cautiously when they
were back in the car, turning out of the parking lot, the A/C doing its best to
dispel the accumulated heat.

“You think?” He kept driving, and she was quiet again, and
he was grateful. The GPS was telling him to turn into another parking lot, so
he did. He walked, Alyssa beside him, into a grocery store, a chain drugstore,
an office supply store, made his little speech, wrote his checks, and got out
of there fast. It wasn’t fun, but it did get easier with practice, just like
everything.

Until the stop at the mom-and-pop shoe store, that is. Then
it got a whole lot harder.

This time, when Joe explained his purpose, the man’s face hardened.
“So you think all you have to do is write a check, and that’s it?” he asked.
“Do you have any idea how much I lose to shoplifters every year? Shoplifters,
hell. Call them what they are. Thieves. You tell me you were a thief, and I’m
supposed to, what, congratulate you for admitting it? You walk in here, pay for
a couple pairs of shoes, and suddenly it’s all fine? Or, what, you’re a hero? What
about all the kids who’ve never stolen anything? Where’s their parade? I am so
sick of that attitude. You tell me you were a thief, I see a thief, I don’t
care how many checks you write.”

Joe was opening his mouth to answer, but Alyssa was there
first. “Have you owned this store that long, then?” she asked. “What, twenty
years? Did Joe steal from you?”

Joe winced at the question, but she was right. That was why
he was here.

“Doesn’t matter,” the owner said. “I know the type. I ought
to, they’re in here every day. Working in pairs, most of the time. They’re
practically pros. I have to hire extra staff just to keep them from stealing me
blind. Bunch of felons brought up to think they have a right to take anything
they want, never mind getting a job and earning it, oh, no, that’s too much
work, and they don’t want to work. They want it easy. I know the type.”

“No, you don’t,” Alyssa said. She’d taken a step forward,
was all but pushing Joe out of the way. “You just think you do.”

“Alyssa.” Joe said. He didn’t want to discuss it, he just
wanted to leave. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

“It
does
matter,”
she insisted. “It matters a lot.” She was on a roll now, Joe could tell. She
looked like her dad just before he let loose, and he braced himself for it.

“You have absolutely no idea who Joe is,” she told the owner,
her voice shaking only a little bit. “You have absolutely no idea who
anybody
is. People change. They make
mistakes, and they have regrets, and if they’re strong enough inside, they
might even go back and try to fix what they did wrong. Not everybody does.
Most
people don’t. Do you? Did you do
everything right when you were a teenager? Do you now? Do you pay every penny
of your taxes? How do you treat those employees of yours? How about your wife,
and your kids? Are you telling me you do everything right? Because I don’t
believe it.”

“That is absolutely none of your business,” the owner said,
his face flushed with anger. “What right do you have to come into my store and
accuse me?”

“What right do
you
have,”
she fired back, “to accuse Joe? Do you have any idea how much courage it took
him to come here today? What’s forcing him to pay you back for something that
happened twenty years ago, something he didn’t even do to you? Nothing but his
conscience. Nothing but wanting to do the right thing, and
doing
it, no matter how hard it is, no matter how hard you make it
for him. What kind of a man do you call that? Because I call that a good man. I
call that the best kind of man.”

The man’s face was reddening, and this looked like it could
get ugly, so Joe signed the check, added another zero for the hell of it, left
the payee line blank, and set it on the counter. “Give this to charity,” he
told the owner. “Or, I don’t care, give your employees a bonus for all that work
they do chasing down shoplifters. Give yourself one. Makes no difference to me.
I’m not doing this for you, and I don’t really give a damn what you think of
me.”

Alyssa looked at the check. “He doesn’t deserve it,” she
told Joe. Her eyes were flaring ten kinds of mad, her chest was heaving, and
she looked like she was ready to march into battle for him. She looked like
Joan of Arc.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Let’s go.”

 
Back in the car,
he rolled the windows down, blasted the air, and did his best to exhale the
tension.

“Jerk,” Alyssa said. She still looked stirred up. She still
looked great. “I’ll bet he steals from the IRS six ways from Sunday. I’ll bet
his employees hate him. I’ll bet his
wife
hates him.”

“If you’re going to get that mad for me,” he said, almost
feeling like laughing for a moment, “I won’t even have to. You sure are doing
your best to let me off the hook.”

“That’s because you don’t need to be
on
the hook. What part of what I said didn’t make sense to you?”

“It was pretty good,” he admitted. It had sounded good,
anyway.

“It ought to be. It came right out of a sermon on what
forgiveness means. ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass
against us,’ remember that one? It’s about having regrets, and owning up and
making amends. Once you’ve done all three, you don’t have to hang on anymore.
At least,” and she was laughing at herself a bit now, “that’s what the man
says.”

“I wish it was that simple.” He put the car in gear and
started out again. He was almost done. If he was supposed to feel better, why
wasn’t it happening yet? Why was everything still roiling around inside?

“You’re still feeling ashamed,” she guessed.

“Yeah. Being back here—it’s not fun, remembering all
this, or thinking about what my dad would have said about all the things I
did.” The words didn’t come easily, but they came.

She didn’t answer him right away. “I didn’t know your dad,”
she said at last. “But I’m guessing he was a lot like you. So I’ll just ask
you, pretend this isn’t you. Pretend you’re talking to somebody else, somebody
who’s doing what you’re doing today. What would you think of that guy? What
would you say to him?”

He had to think about that one for a couple minutes, and
while he did, she went ahead. “Why do you give to Second Chance? Why do you
care?”

He gestured his inadequacy to answer that, just a
straightening of his hands on the wheel, but he knew one reason, at least.
“Because those kids deserve a break.”

“Then,” she asked gently, “don’t you think you do, too?”

He didn’t answer, because he couldn’t. He just kept driving.
He’d do what he’d come for, and hope that was enough. The feelings would have
to sort themselves out.

The two stops after that were easier, to his relief. He made
his speech, felt Alyssa there beside him, waiting to leap to his defense again,
but it wasn’t necessary. He was able to write his check and move on.

“One more,” he told her after the second place.

“I thought you said seven stops.”

He started the engine one more time. “Boys and Girls Club.
Not because I stole anything from there,” he added quickly. “But I’d have done
a lot worse if it hadn’t been for them. I played a lot of basketball at that
place. If this is about paying back, that’s somewhere I need to pay.”