“Do we want our children exposed to the temptation of legal marijuana?” Debbie Landry asked. “Knowing they can buy it just as easily as they can buy a beer?”
Caitlin laughed, a light, silvery chuckle. “Well, hon, I'd have liked my child to have lived long enough to've been tempted.”
Silence.
“Oh, hon, I'm so sorry,” Debbie said.
Caitlin waved her hand again, this time with a shake of her head, her eyes closed. “No,
I
am. That was
. . .
I'm just a little tired today.”
“We can finish up without you,” Porter said. “There's not much left on today's agenda.”
“Why don't you do that?” Caitlin said. She rose slowly. She looked frail.
Michelle rose as well. “Wonderful meeting all of you,” she said, gathering up her iPad and notebook.
She followed Caitlin out of the meeting room.
Caitlin walked down the
hall and through the reception area without stopping. Michelle wasn't sure what to do. Caitlin seemed like a woman who didn't want to be interrupted, who just wanted to get somewhere private and hole up, sink into her deep, warm well of unending grief. It could be a comfortable place, Michelle knew.
It's my job to look after her, she thought.
“Caitlin?”
Caitlin stopped. Her hand gripped the corner of a file cabinet. She turned to Michelle, her eyes a little red, her smile back in place. “Oh, I'm sorry, Michelle. Didn't mean to run off and leave you.”
“That's okay. I just wanted to know if there was anything I could do for you, anything you wanted to work on this afternoon, or
. . .
”
Caitlin snorted. “Hell, let's just go get a drink.”
Don't let Caitlin talk you into cocktails.
There was a tapas
place close by that Caitlin liked.
“Just for a glass of wine,” she'd said. “And they have small plates, if you're hungry.”
It was just after 5
p.m.
, and though Michelle wasn't hungry, she figured she'd better have something to sop up her glass of rioja.
She wasn't going to have any at all, but Caitlin ordered a bottle, and Michelle had a feeling Caitlin wouldn't be leaving any of it on the table. And she barely seemed to eat. Just a few olives. One bite of the tortilla
.
Small as Caitlin was, Michelle wondered how she'd manage even the short drive home.
Not that Michelle was eating a lot either. Her stomach, her chest, everything felt tight. She'd be getting a call from Gary at some point, and he'd tell her where to pick up her money. Only with Gary, you could never trust that it would be anything simple. He'd find some way to twist it, to fuck with her, just because he could, and because he enjoyed it.
The restaurant was dark, a lot of stained wood, wrought iron and dark red booths. “It feels a little private, don't you think?” Caitlin said, taking a tiny nibble of octopus.
Michelle nodded. Of course, nothing was really private. Gary could have someone spying on her, right now. He could have already hacked her new iPhone for all she knew. If he knew the number, he could ping it, find out what cell tower it was in contact with, approximately where she was. She didn't know if he could get into the GPS without having physical contact with her phone, without infecting it with spyware, but she'd never assume that he couldn't.
That he wouldn't have some way to turn on the microphone without her knowing.
“It's very nice,” she said.
“I don't get out enough,” Caitlin said. “I mean, it's funny to sayâI do all this travel, these fundraisers, parties
. . .
but I don't just go
out
very much. It's always business.” She chuckled. “I suppose this is, too.”
What do I say to her? Michelle thought.
What does she want to hear?
“I know what you mean,” Michelle said. “You get wrapped up in your business, it gets to be your social circle too. I've made some great friends that way. But it's good to have a life outside of work.”
Another weary chuckle. “I don't know if I have a life
inside
of work.”
Michelle hesitated. It was tempting to push. To dig. But they barely knew each other. If she started asking too many questions about Safer America
. . .
“You've done some great things,” she said.
“Here's hoping,” Caitlin said, raising her wine glass.
x
x
x
The wine bottle hovered
over Michelle's half-empty glass. “No, thank you,” she said to the waiter. Maybe James Bond could belt back a couple of martinis and go do spy stuff, but she wasn't going to risk it.
Caitlin, meanwhile, kept drinking, as Michelle had guessed she would.
“I don't know,” she was saying. “I'm really not sure about this whole pot thing.”
“Oh?”
“Just if it's worth pouring all kinds of money into opposing something that's eventually going to pass.” She tilted her glass to her lips. The swallows were getting bigger now, sips turning into mouthfuls. “It's like trying to hold back the tide.”
Michelle nodded.
Caitlin suddenly leaned forward. “I mean, what do
you
think? You've lived in California. Y'all have had medical marijuana for how long now?”
“Close to twenty years,” Michelle said. Her heart was beating a little faster. This was getting too close, too close to her real life. Or Emily's real life.
“And you haven't fallen into the ocean yet, in spite of what some of my friends here think.” She laughed. “Of course I can't use California in any kind of an argument with them. They'd look at y'all to prove their point it's the devil's weed.”
Michelle glanced down at her iPhone. 5:52
p.m.
She still had plenty of time.
“I guess there's plusses and minuses,” she said. “I'm sure there's some abuse of the medical-marijuana system. It's easy to get a card if you want one. But pot really seems to help some people.”
“Well, then, maybe we ought to be treating it more like real medicine. Make it a little harder for any ole' kid with a hangnail to walk into a clinic and get a Baggie full of weed.”
With the quality and cost of the stuff you could get in the clinics, your kid with a hangnail probably wouldn't be coming out with a Baggie-full, Michelle wanted to say. More like a tiny plastic bag with a couple of nice buds.
Instead she nodded and said, “I'm sure there are ways things could be improved.”
“Hell, I don't know.” Caitlin tilted back her glass and swallowed. “Sometimes I think we ought to go in a different direction altogether.”
“With medical marijuana?”
“With Safer America. I don't know, like promote after-school programs. Job training. Maybe community gardens.” She laughed, as if the whole idea was absurd.
“Why don't you?”
“Well, it isn't up to me. We have a charter. We have the board.”
“But you're the founder.”
“I'm the figurehead.” Caitlin shrugged and tossed back the rest of her wine. “Sometimes you start something, and it takes on a life of its own.”
“Why don't I drive
you home?”
“Oh, don't be silly. It's just a few blocks.”
Michelle hesitated. Another situation where she wasn't sure how hard to push. But she could just see it: her first day on the job, and Caitlin gets pulled over for a DUI, crashes her car into a fire hydrant, or worse.
“Well, it's part of my job,” Michelle said lightly. “So you can relax and not have to worry about driving.”
It wasn't just that Caitlin had drunk almost the entire bottle of wine. Michelle wondered if she'd had anything else, meds, maybe, whatever it was she took to manage anxiety, to sleep. She had to be taking something, Michelle was willing to bet. She wasn't weaving, exactly, but it took her an extra effort to plant her foot each time she stepped, and her eyes seemed unfocused.
“Maybe I should take you up on that.” Caitlin stretched a little. “I'm pretty tired. I can send Rodrigo for the car tomorrow.”
Leaving the car was
fine with the restaurant manager. They knew Caitlin here. “I left them an extra-nice tip,” Caitlin said, sliding into the passenger seat of Michelle's rented Prius.
“This your car?” she asked.
“A rental. But
. . .
”
It's like the one I have at home,
Michelle almost said.
“I've always liked them.”
“Well, no need for you to be renting a car. There's an extra one in the garage you can use.”
“That's very generous, butâ”
“Now, no arguing.” Caitlin wagged a finger. “It's supposed to be used for Safer America business, and it's just sitting there rusting away as it is.”
They'd just turned down the broad avenue that led to Caitlin's house when Michelle's iPhone rang. Emily's, rather. The ringtone, “Get Smart.”
Fucking Gary. And it was only 6:29
p.m.
“Sorry,” Michelle said. “I have to take this.” She pulled over. No hands-free setup on the rental, and even if she had one, she wasn't about to put Gary on speakerphone.
She fumbled around in her new tote for her phone. Her Emily phone.
“Well, hey there.”
Just the sound of his voice, that phony flirtatiousness, made her shudder.
“Hi, listen, I'm going to have to call you backâI'm
. . .
driving someone home.”
A chuckle. “Now, what did I tell you about cocktails with Caitlin?”
God, Michelle hoped Caitlin hadn't heard that. She pressed the phone closer to her ear.
“Five minutes,” she said. “I'm just about there.”
She disconnected.
“What was that,
Get Smart
? How funny!” Caitlin gave Michelle a friendly pat on the arm, giggling a little. “And here I thought you seemed so serious.”
Michelle supposed that she
was
serious. It was Emily who'd learned to lighten up a bit, to laugh at Danny's jokes.
What was he doing right now? How was he?
She pushed the thought aside. She couldn't take the time to worry about him. Not now.
“You're early,” she said.
“Change in plans.”
Of course.
“Gonna need you to make a stop first, pick something up. Got a pen?”
“What am I picking up?”
“Never mind that. You're just the delivery gal. You'll hand it off, and then you'll get your money.”
Not good. But so predictable.
It was close to
sunset.
At first the neighborhood she'd driven through seemed okay. Nice, even. Well-kept older houses, big oak trees, trimmed lawns. Restaurants and clubs that looked funky and hip. Then the main business street turned into peeling beige stucco fast-food chains and auto-part shops: radiators, mufflers, tires. A strip club called Purple Passion that looked like one of the auto-part stores, with faded tin siding. No sidewalks in places, just dirt.
It hadn't cooled off much, and Michelle was glad she'd kept the air on, the windows rolled up. She was drenched in sweat as it was, her heart racing like she'd been running. But of course she hadn't been.
Danny was right. She should have turned Gary down. Should've run. Should've done
. . .
something.
Anything
other than taking this job and driving down a sketchy-looking street in god knows where, Houston, so she could “pick something up” for that fucker Gary.
She'd packed a change of clothes this morning: jeans, Nikes, black T-shirt, a light-weight women's cut hoodie she wore on nicer days in Arcata. But she hadn't had time to change, so here she was in her black silk Eileen Fisher T and her black Stella McCartney slacks.
She did take the time to put on the Nikes. In case she had to run.
The address Gary gave her was for a trailer park called “Shady Acres.”
Shady Acres. She had to roll her eyes at that. Fucking Gary. She'd bet good money this was his idea of a joke.
Probably you'd call this a mobile-home park as opposed to a trailer park, she thought. The homes here were single-wides, long rectangles that looked like flimsy shipping containers made out of plastic siding, plywood and corrugated tin, the skirts around the bottoms warped and buckling, satellite dishes clamped or bolted onto the structures like the remnants of some advanced alien technology.