Vignettes: Part Two
3. I'm checking a guest in. It's 10:30 pm, two days ago. In the low light, I extend a packet of keys toward a middle-aged woman who has just finished telling me a story about watching O.J. Simpson pull over in our parking lot during the infamous freeway run with A.C. Cowlings in '94. She is laughing about it. Mid-laugh, a buxome woman with collagen lips hurls her purse down on the counter, the loose arm of her fur coat comically upsetting the other woman's hair. "Make me another key, Corey," she says, pouting. The other woman looks astonished. "Just a moment," I say, using a facial aside to share the briefest moment of sympathy. I remember names the same way I do numbers, which comes in handy at swank hotels; this is Ms. Russo. When I finish with the other guest, I ask, rhetorically, "New key, Ms. Russo?" She pouts more, winks at me. I code her another room key, scheduling a morning taxi as I do, appearing too busy to foment conversation. As I'm speaking with the dispatcher, she pulls a heart-shaped plastic bottle from her handbag and sets it in front of me. I nod. She points at the label. I read it, unable to avoid her attention any more. It says "Liquid Love Warming Massage Lotion: Cherry". She winks at me again, twice more walking away.
4. I'm thirteen, and it's raining outside, where I stand like a kitten before a freckled girl named Daphne. I haven't slept in three days. I have distrust for everyone, insomnia being only one of its many symptoms. "Are you okay?" she asks me. "Yeah, I'm fine," I say. She starts to cry, her eyes reddening with salt, her face bloating. I don't want to hold her. I say nothing, and she takes it as a sort of sensitivity, a thing which defines me. The rain drizzles into my fine hair, runs off when I turn to look away, rolls periodically down my forehead, but I'm not crying. "I miss him, you know," she sobs. I am reticent. I hate her. The sky suddenly clears, leaving a sunlit mist that hovers a few feet up from the ground; there are minute beads of water on everything, on my shoes, the pavement, the brickwork building, in my eyelashes, on her necklace, her freckled nose. "Why the fuck are all those people at my house, Daphne?" I ask, meaning to include her. "None of them even knew Matt." She shrugs and says, "Ashley Rhone's mom made her come because she's never experienced the death of someone her age." I snort, furrow my brow. I turn and walk slowly back toward my home, muttering some cryptic literary phrase. When I get there, Ross bounces a basketball off my chest and does a finger roll. “I’m playing twenty-one,” he says. “That’s two.”
4. I'm thirteen, and it's raining outside, where I stand like a kitten before a freckled girl named Daphne. I haven't slept in three days. I have distrust for everyone, insomnia being only one of its many symptoms. "Are you okay?" she asks me. "Yeah, I'm fine," I say. She starts to cry, her eyes reddening with salt, her face bloating. I don't want to hold her. I say nothing, and she takes it as a sort of sensitivity, a thing which defines me. The rain drizzles into my fine hair, runs off when I turn to look away, rolls periodically down my forehead, but I'm not crying. "I miss him, you know," she sobs. I am reticent. I hate her. The sky suddenly clears, leaving a sunlit mist that hovers a few feet up from the ground; there are minute beads of water on everything, on my shoes, the pavement, the brickwork building, in my eyelashes, on her necklace, her freckled nose. "Why the fuck are all those people at my house, Daphne?" I ask, meaning to include her. "None of them even knew Matt." She shrugs and says, "Ashley Rhone's mom made her come because she's never experienced the death of someone her age." I snort, furrow my brow. I turn and walk slowly back toward my home, muttering some cryptic literary phrase. When I get there, Ross bounces a basketball off my chest and does a finger roll. “I’m playing twenty-one,” he says. “That’s two.”