“And the woman?” I ask. “Did she go with you?”
“Yeah, eventually. I didn’t leave until about two in the morning.”
She flushes and drags herself to the sink to wash her hands.
“Go back to sleep,” I say.
“Don’t worry, I will.” She shuffles back to bed, the Bataan Death March, then drops face-first onto the pillow and moans with satisfaction.
I get dressed and put on some coffee. I take a cup for the road. I have a decent drive ahead. I walk back up to the bedroom to say goodbye. “Hey, gorgeous, Daddy’s leaving.”
She opens one eye. “Creepy.”
I watch her for a while. She looks sexy just lying there in that oversize Cubs shirt, this hard, tough woman so innocent and vulnerable in sleep.
I have to protect her. I have to make sure she comes out of this okay.
—
Before I head up to Wisconsin, I drive by Lauren’s house. I don’t stay long. By now, her husband, Conrad, is long gone, chauffeured downtown for his workout at the swanky East Bank Club before lording over his millions of dollars of investments. Is he checking out all the hard-bodied women in their spandex workout gear? Does he have one eye out for wife number four, should the mood strike him? Is that what he did with Lauren—got bored with his aging second wife and traded her in for a younger model?
Well, you better start looking again, Conrad, old boy. Three years with Lauren wasn’t a bad run. You’re not getting a fourth.
I look across the street at her place. The master bedroom takes up the entire north side of the house, with a terrace behind it where Lauren likes to sunbathe in privacy. Or so she thinks. I’d bet green money the men who live nearby have managed to find their binoculars.
Or maybe she knows that. Do you, Lauren? Do you like to tease other men, make them want you? Do you still need that validation? Have you figured out that none of that matters?
Or will you always want more?
—
“The pink one,” I say. “No, the hot pink.”
The chubby clerk with the pockmarked face in the “superstore” in Racine, Wisconsin—about eighty miles north of Chicago—lifts the phone case off the rack and runs it over the scanner.
“So this is a thousand minutes?” I confirm.
“Yeah, a thousand minutes. And with our plan, you can get monthly—”
“Nope, no plan.”
“You don’t want a plan?”
“No. Just this phone, a thousand minutes, and that hot-pink case. Don’t worry,” I add with a chuckle, “I’m not a criminal. This is for my daughter. It’s a trial run. I want to see how quickly she burns through these minutes before I decide whether a ten-year-old needs a phone.”
I wish I did have kids. Vicky said no way. She thinks the taint of her rotten childhood would somehow seep into any children she had.
The clerk glances at me briefly before nodding and taking my wadof cash and giving me another look. A no-plan, prepaid phone, paid for in cash.
—
“The green one,” I tell the elderly saleswoman in the “superstore” in Valparaiso, Indiana, which is 130 miles southwest of Racine, Wisconsin, and about 60 miles from Chicago. Green again, like my green journal, for fresh and new and blossoming and, you know, all that shit.
“And you say you want a thousand minutes?” she asks.
“Yes.” I pull out cash and drop it on the counter.
“And... would you be interested in one of our monthly plans—”