She climbed out of bed, but she still held the sheets around her. She looked back at Thomas for a moment, perhaps on the verge of asking him to turn his head. Then, likely realizing how foolish that would be, she let the sheets drop to the floor, and quickly pulled on panties, jeans, bra, and t-shirt. Thomas had never seen someone dress so rapidly; it was obviously practiced. He’d barely caught a glimpse of a large posterior riddled with cellulite, a side profile of a drooping breast, and a lower-back tattoo of some unknown design. Her body type was remarkably like Kara’s — well, the Kara of their sexual romps, not the chunky Kara who’d hissed at him at Oxendine’s — and both women even had a tattoo in the same spot. In the drunken groping of early morning, he hadn’t really noticed the similarity, but now he looked at Allison as if she was Kara’s evil twin sister.
“It’s déjà vu all over again,” he murmured.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just thinking about what I’ve got to do at work today.”
“Yeah, working at a grocery store must require a lot of thought.”
Ouch. He stirred on the bed, planning out a razor-sharp rebuttal, but then he slowly relaxed. He’d let her have that one. She deserved to score at least one point, the way he was treating her.
Allison knew her comment should provoke a response, but Thomas remained silent, and they simply stared at each other. Confused, she put on her hoop earrings, picked up her purse (in their passion, it had been slung into the closet), and opened the bedroom door. She looked back, still expecting Thomas to lash her with a comeback, but the gray figure on the bed said nothing.
“See you around,” she said softly.
“Yup.”
And she was gone. Thomas expected her to slam his apartment door shut, but she closed it as softly as she’d uttered her last words.
Smiling at his masterful manipulation, he picked up the tangled sheets from the floor, along with the blanket, and nestled down into bed. That had been easy — almost too easy. He thought back to Kara’s venomous threat. Maybe Allison was already scheming some revenge herself, since she was, after all, Kara’s evil twin sister…
Ah well — let the chips fall where they may. He’d deal with it if and when he had to. Right now, he needed to get at least a few more hours of sleep before work.
Chapter Fourteen
“You look like you’ve been rode hard and put up wet,” Vernon said as Thomas stepped through the back door. He was sipping coffee and glaring at those damnable green beans that refused to sell. He supposed he’d have to discount them even more, or they’d sit back here until the End Times.
“Yeah, it was a wild night,” Thomas admitted, putting his jacket on the eternal coat rack.
“Get yourself any strange?”
“Vernon, it’s uncouth to ask that.”
“I ain’t had any couth since third grade. That was the year lil Lizzie Locklear stabbed me with a pencil, and I whacked her upside the head in return. She didn’t get in any trouble, cuz she was a sweet lil girl, but I did.”
“I guess you also learned that justice can be elusive, huh?”
“Damn right I did. So, did you get any strange or not?”
“Vernon…”
“Alright, fine, don’t tell me nothing. But do me a favor: try to hide your face when a customer’s near. If they see how haggard you look, they’ll run right out the door.”
“Ha ha.”
“Yeah, I thought that was funny myself,” Vernon said, chuckling. “So, what’re you starting with today? The usual?”
“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about Orianna.”
Vernon rubbed his potbelly and sipped his coffee. He looked very much like a Zen Buddhist contemplating an exceptionally difficult koan.
“That’s interesting,” he finally said. “You’ve been dodging that topic since she gave her notice. In fact, you walked right away from me a few times soon as I started talking about it. Was right rude.”
“Yeah, I know,” Thomas said. “Sorry about that. Me and her had a disagreement, or whatever you want to call it, at the Christmas Party.”
“Huh. You mean when ya’ll walked out into the night? I thought ya’ll were going to do some kissy-kissy stuff.”
“I guess I did, too. But she dragged me all the way down to the docks just to tell me she was leaving. Pissed me off.”
“Huh. She didn’t mention any of this.”
“She didn’t? I figured she would’ve ripped me apart.”
“Well, she didn’t mention you at all when she gave notice. What’d you say to her?”
“I just told her she was like all these other restless youths who’ve quit over the years. And I was pissed off cause she ruined the Christmas Party for me. She just wanted to be dramatic and have someone ooh and aah at her performance.”
“Or maybe she wanted someone to talk her out of her decision.”
Thomas had considered this, but only briefly. If Vernon was right, then his response had been completely wrong, and had actually cemented Orianna’s decision. But even as he reexamined this potentiality now, he reaffirmed his innocence. Orianna should never have put him on the spot like that, should never have created such a scene and then expected him to act perfectly.
But, on the other hand, he’d acted in a similar way decades ago, and Vernon had handled it perfectly. He sighed and looked away at the cinderblock walls, thinking of Orianna sitting steely-eyed on that dock box in the night.
“Yeah, I know it’s tough,” Vernon said kindly. “Seems she threw you for a loop. You did the best you could, I guess.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Well, she came into my office and gave notice, and I gave her The Talk, but it didn’t have any effect that I saw. She wanted to be gone pretty quickly, so I said OK. And we shook hands, and that was the end of it.”
“The Talk, huh?” Thomas said, frowning.
“Yeah. I seem to remember giving it to you about — oh, man, I don’t even want to do the math…”
“Twenty-three years, roughly.”
“Wow-ee. Hell, that’s as old as Orianna is. She’s twenty-three, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” Thomas said, feeling foolish. He remembered Reggie’s words: And what are you doing mooning over a twenty-three old? Even I know not to mess around with those young’uns.
“Well, she’s gone now, Thomas,” Vernon said, putting his hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “I know you had a little crush on her, if you don’t mind my saying. Maybe I had a crush on her too. Now don’t laugh! A geezer like me can still enjoy the company of a slim young thing. But I try not to let it get to me. Sometimes it’s hard. You know how many people have come and gone over the years. I try to make ’em understand that they’re family, but some people don’t want this family — maybe they don’t want any family.”
“What did you say back then? Some people think they’re better?”
“It was true then, it’s true now, and it’ll always be true.”
The two men made strong efforts not to look at each other. There was too much emotion in the air. Past and present swirled together, faces nearly-forgotten and faces just-seen formed and reformed, until a shifting mosaic of Oxendine’s current and former employees seemed to hover in the air. At the center of the mosaic, Orianna’s calm, thin visage glowed softly. Thomas tried to subsume it into the mass of humanity, and succeeded — for a few seconds.
“It’s déjà vu all over again,” Thomas muttered. “And it’ll be déjà vu all over again in the future, too.”
“Yup, that’s right,” Vernon said. “Oh, by the way, can you clean the bathroom today?”
Thomas laughed, glad for the tension to be cut. “Sure thing, boss.”