Little Pretty Things Read online

  That was the scene as I led Maddy through the lobby doors into the dark, hoping to go unnoticed. An undercover mission. We got away with it for a second. A couple of the regulars turned around—there were a few Midway High faces, some hardened regulars my mom’s age or older, a couple of people I knew but ignored—but then Maddy’s presence was noticed. Felt. By the time we’d sat ourselves at a table in the corner and waved over a couple of drinks, three of the guys had dismounted from their barstools to head home. The others stayed to stare and pretend not to.

  “I don’t even know where to start,” Maddy said. “Has it really been since graduation?”

  It had been longer. Maybe she didn’t remember, or want to remember, that the last time we’d spoken had been weeks before the ceremony meant to send us on our separate ways. Precisely, it had been since the day Maddy had beaten me for the last time. And we hadn’t even been running.

  Suddenly I remembered Maddy hunched over the edge of a hotel bed, her knuckles white against a shiny, patterned bedspread. The old disgust rose in my throat.

  I swallowed around it. “Did you get your invitation to the reunion?” The reunion was why I knew where Maddy lived. Our classmate Shelly Anderson, who was planning the event, worked at the bank, where all deposits of the informational kind had to be made at her window. You always left richer than you came in.

  Our beers arrived. The bartender, Yvonne, winked at me.

  “Let me get this round, since I’m holding you hostage.” Maddy reached inside an inner pocket of the coat and pulled out a bill. “Keep the change,” she said to Yvonne.

  This round? I took a gulp of my beer, avoiding Yvonne’s look. I was sure the bill had been a fifty.

  Yvonne stalked away with a sharp glance over her shoulder.

  “The reunion,” Maddy said with an odd smile. She pivoted her beer bottle on the table but didn’t drink. “Right.”

  “It’s a Midway High reunion in here every night of the week,” I said, scanning the bar. A few sets of eyes dropped away. “Ten years.”

  “It seems longer,” Maddy said.

  To me, it seemed shorter. But maybe that was because I hadn’t gone anywhere or done anything. Maybe we all experienced life not by the hour, but by the texture and taste. I hated to think it. If that was how time measured itself, I was still a knobby-kneed kid in an oversized track team uniform. I hadn’t moved on. But neither had most of our high-school class. We saw each other at the grocery store, at Mike’s Hardware, at the movie theater. A lot of them went to church together. Some of them had kids in the same class at the elementary school.

  We didn’t need a reunion. A Saturday in some party room, going-out clothes, and Maddy down from Chicago—

  “The reunion wasn’t last night, was it? Is that why you’re here?” I’d hoped not to be working the night of the party, so that if anyone stopped by the bar on their way home, I wouldn’t have to hear about it. But now I was strangely panicked that I’d missed it.

  “Soon. This coming weekend, I think.” She frowned at the table. “I doubt I’ll stick around for it. I don’t have much to report.”

  I let my beer bottle hit the table a little too hard. Yvonne and the guys at the bar turned in our direction. “Are you kidding me?” I said.

  “What?”

  “You’re probably the only one of us who has anything to show for the last ten years,” I said. “Except the ones who are already married or divorced or have four kids or credit-card bills up to their eyeballs. Look at yourself. Look at this place.” I knew what I meant to say, even if I hadn’t said it well. She didn’t belong here, had probably never belonged here.

  I’d always thought I didn’t belong in Midway, either, that someday I’d get out and make something new of myself. But the truth was that I belonged to my hometown in a way I hadn’t been able to shake, and now it felt too late to try.

  “You always did think more of me than I did myself,” she said.

  “It was hard not to look up to you, standing on the lower-medal podium every week.” I plucked at the wrapper on my beer. I hadn’t meant to say that.

  “Maybe I should have thrown a few races.” She pushed her bottle away.

  “That’s hardly what I wanted, Maddy.” That was not the truth. Back then, I would have accepted any top placing, however it came to me.

  “Well, then,” she said. “You should have run faster.”

  That stung. What did she think I’d been doing all those times I came in second? “I ran as fast as I could for as long as I could,” I said.

  She looked over my shoulder for a long moment, toward the door. “That’s what I was doing, too. I was probably only faster because I was being chased.”

  By me, she meant. I saw again the blond hair beating against thin shoulders. The back of Maddy’s head had been my view of high school, and not just on the track. I was the friend who didn’t have a life of her own, the parasite, the loser. The journalism staff had even made some joke about it in our senior yearbook.

  In some ways, the ten years felt like ten minutes.

  I leaned back in my chair. My break was almost over. I thought ahead to the long night at the front desk, and then the early morning behind the cleaning cart. Maddy had one night back in Midway. I had the rest of my life. And yet, I didn’t want to spare even these few minutes on her. “What are you in town for, then?”

  “Business,” she said.

  “What do you do?”

  She shrugged. “It’s not that interesting.”

  I felt color rising on my neck. “Do you travel a lot?”

  “For work?”

  “For any reason,” I said.

  She smiled a little and leaned forward, waiting for the punch line. “A little.”

  “You’ve been to New York? Paris? Tokyo, where?”

  She understood me now. The smile slid away. “All those places.”

  “You’ve got—I don’t even know how many thousands of dollars of diamond on your hand. Is he handsome?”

  She blinked at the ring, then nodded.

  “After you leave tomorrow, I’ll be changing the sheets on your bed. Your job—your life—has to be more interesting than mine.”

  “But you could … sorry, no. I’m not going to give you any advice.” She checked her watch and seemed surprised by how late it was. An expensive watch, I was sure. “You really shouldn’t take any direction from me. Things aren’t always as they seem, you know. They weren’t then, and they aren’t now. Envy blinds you.”

  I stood up, my chair raking against the floor. I wasn’t the one handing out insultingly high tips on cheap beer tabs and pretending things between us were even. “My break is over,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean—that’s not—I meant that I’m the one who’s envious.” She looked up at me with tears in her eyes. Very dramatic. If only she’d had time for the school play back in high school, she might be clutching an Academy Award now, too. “This isn’t how I wanted it to be.”

  “So—”

  “I didn’t hope to run into you,” she said. “I knew I would. I knew you were working here, Jules, and I wanted to see you.”

  She waited to see how I would take this. “Well, you’re seeing me,” I said.

  “I just—I wanted to make sure I hadn’t imagined it all. That I hadn’t wasted all my time. So much of it was wasted. Or lost completely.” She stood and glanced uneasily at the bar. They’d be watching openly now. A low song on the jukebox kept things civilized. She lowered her voice under the music. “We were friends, weren’t we? Really friends, not just competitors? Right? Before all that?”

  All that encompassed so much, I couldn’t tell if she remembered. All that could have meant nothing or anything. Or everything. I felt the pen in my pocket digging into my hip and was thankful for its distraction. “No,” I said. “I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. I don’t think we were.”

  She went still. “Don’t say that.”

  “We were rivals, Mad
dy. Practices, tournaments—state.” She flinched. She remembered. “We just spent a lot of time together, and we were kids. It’s not the same thing as being friends.”

  “It could have been.”

  “It wasn’t. How else do you explain it? As soon as track season was over, we never spoke again. Ten years, Maddy. I’ve been in the same place. I’ve been easy to find.”

  “You don’t have to stay here,” she said.

  “That’s not what I’m saying, and you know it. Besides, you—you don’t know anything about me.”

  “I used to,” she said. Her jaw was set with the same determination she’d always engaged to stay a half meter ahead of me for an entire two-mile race. “The Juliet Townsend I used to know wanted to run from this place as fast as she could.”

  “I’m not sure what happened to the Madeleine Bell I used to know,” I said. I felt raw, and mean. “You know where they’re having it, right? The reunion?”

  She started to say something, then thought better of it. She pulled her coat tighter around her. “Let’s just say there’s a lot about me you don’t know, too,” she said.

  Fair enough. I turned to leave.

  “Juliet, wait.”

  She caught up with me at the door to the lobby and laid a soft hand on my arm. I could see Lu at the desk, leaning her chin on her fist and watching the dark parking lot. For a moment, my life split in two and I was the me I could have been and also the me I’d become.

  “It could still be,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It could still be the same as being friends. We could—it could be real this time. We could get things right. Chicago’s not that far away, and there’s the reunion. Maybe I will come back for it, even if they’re holding it at the same place—” Her face darkened. “God, what are the odds? But there are some things—I’d like to have a chance to talk to you sometime, really talk. Just think about it, OK?”

  Clearly she had no idea how little happened around Midway in a given week. I wouldn’t be able to think about anything else. I slipped out from under her hand and opened the door.

  I led Maddy through the lobby, Lu watching, and pointed in the direction of her room. Outside, a lean silver car had parked nose to nose with the vending and ice machines. It could only be hers. As soon as Maddy had swept through the lobby, Lu turned on me.

  “What the—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

  “All this time I thought I was your fanciest friend.”

  Lu lived in a ranch house overstuffed with her husband, three kids, and mother-in-law. She might have the same terrible job I did, but she’d figured out a few things I hadn’t. “You’re pretty fancy,” I said.

  Lu’s smile was close-mouthed to hide her crooked teeth. “So why is she here?”

  “Business, she said.”

  “No, I mean here. At the Mid-Night. Did you see her? She could stay anywhere. She could have stayed at—hotels I don’t even know downtown, the Luxe even.”

  I glanced uneasily at Lu. Maddy knew all about the Luxe. But she’d gotten a room here to talk to me. Hadn’t she admitted it? But she could have stopped by with her olive branch and still stayed somewhere else. And what had she actually said, in the end?

  A pair of headlights grazed over the lobby. The silver car was leaving. Maybe staying somewhere else was the plan she’d had in mind all along.

  Why had she come? The car, the diamond, the soft raincoat. The forty-two-dollar tip on an eight-buck bar tab. The room paid for but not used. Maddy Bell certainly wasn’t a Bargain.

  Which could only mean she was desperate.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Lu pushed the cart into its closet. I locked the lobby doors behind us and dropped the keys into the slot for Billy.

  As we walked out to my car, I scanned the parking lot. Maddy hadn’t come back.

  “She got a room, didn’t she?” Lu said. “Weird.”

  I wondered why she’d bothered. What had she accomplished? Was putting me in my place worth the price of a room at the Mid-Night? But the Mid-Night was a cheap place to stay, and Maddy could clearly afford to throw money around. “One less room to clean tomorrow,” I said, grabbing a brochure that had been tucked under my windshield wiper and throwing it in the backseat.

  “At least she didn’t bring a guy back,” Lu said as we got in. “And then you’d have to clean up? After your friend had freaky sex all over one of the rooms?”

  “Lu,” I said.

  “You don’t think she has freaky sex with somebody? Did you see that ring?”

  “Lu, please.”

  We drove the rest of the way to Lu’s place in silence. The Mendoza house was small and plain, on a clean, pleasant street where people invested heavily in flower boxes and kept the paint on their shutters touched up. The house was dark, but Lu’s husband had left the porch light on for her.

  “Goodnight,” I said. “See you bright and early.”

  She hesitated with her hand on the door. I could already feel how Maddy’s visit had changed how Lu thought of me. Lu and I had worked together for a few years now, and we were friends. Really friends—what Maddy had wanted from me. Lu was older than I was by about ten years, and she had a husband who remembered to leave on the porch light. We didn’t have a lot in common, but we could talk for hours about what we watched on TV or how we were so glad we didn’t live at the Mid-Night the way Billy did. About her three rowdy kids and how coming to work was like a vacation from all their noise. About her parents, back in Mexico, who she missed, or her mother-in-law, who she wished would get her own place. About how she might get her real-estate license someday. About the life she was working toward.

  It’s not like I hadn’t ever told her anything about me. I’d told her plenty.

  But now we’d both had a look at Maddy Bell and at the world outside our reach. Her real-estate license must have seemed so small, so far away.

  “Yeah,” she said, finally opening the door. “See you.”

  I stopped for gas, counting out the few bills I had on me beforehand. The numbers on the pump turned fast. Inside, I leaned against the counter and chatted with Dickie Buggit, the attendant. We’d gone to Midway High together. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I’d gone out with Dickie Buggit once—oh my God, why? But then there were a lot of guys in town like Dickie and not a lot of guys not like Dickie. Out of all the guys I’d gone out with, gone home with—hardly any—Dickie was the only one I could still be friends with. And by friends, I meant buy gas from. I counted out my change, considered a lottery ticket.

  The door chimed.

  “Aw, hell,” Dickie said under his breath. He reached for the phone, running his finger down a list of numbers taped to the wall.

  A woman bundled in two sweaters, a scarf, and house slippers stood blinking in the bright light of the station. Teeny, as everyone called her, walked the streets of Midway as the town ghost—alive, but barely there. For a short, slight wisp of a woman, tiny indeed, she had a large presence, showing up in unlikely places, uninvited and unwanted, mumbling some phrase or another to herself on repeat. She came out to the Mid-Night a lot, but there wasn’t much to steal there.

  Dickie talked in low tones into the phone. I went to an end-cap to take a look at the audio-book selection: westerns and thrillers marked down, and a few get-rich schemes at full price. I watched Teeny shopping the aisles. She liked color. A handful of gumballs went into her cardigan pocket. She considered and put back a pack of gummy bears.

  By the time she made the round trip through the store, her sweater pocket bulged with a stash of bright, round candies.

  Dickie hung up and leaned over the counter. “Come on, Teeny,” he said. “If you’re going to steal, at least be sneaky about it.”

  She didn’t seem to hear him.

  “How much are those?” I said. “The candies.”

  “Five cents apiece, for crying out loud,” Dickie said. “Cheapest thing
in the store.”

  The cheapest thing could still be too much. “You called the cops on her?”

  “Nah, that place she lives,” he said. “She gets loose, they come pick her up. She’s going to get hit on the street one of these days.”

  He made her sound like someone’s loose mongrel dog. I glared at him. “Let me pay for some of those.” I turned out my pockets, letting whatever change I had fall on the counter.

  Dickie shrugged, rang me up.

  Teeny was making for the door. I followed her out into the parking lot, looking around for the car or van coming for her. “Hey, Teeny,” I said. “Let’s wait for your ride, OK?”

  She ignored me, shuffling past my car, the pumps, and toward the street.

  “Teeny, stop—stay here a second.” I came alongside her and reached for her arm. It was thin in the bulky sweater, but she was strong. She ripped her arm away from me. The overfilled pocket swung around, and the candies arced out, pinging against the asphalt around us and rolling in a million directions.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I said, running to grab a few before she darted for them and Dickie’s prediction came true. When I came back, Teeny was kneeling in the lot, gathering the candies to her. She mumbled something under her breath. “I said I was sorry.”

  I walked the lot, collecting the candies, and brought them back to her, getting mad. What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she snap out of—whatever this was? Why wasn’t anyone caring for her, keeping her safe?

  The last handful of gumballs returned to the pile, I stood up and watched the street, fuming at myself for getting involved. “I’m going,” I said. “It’s late.”

  “The girls,” Teeny said.

  “What?”

  “The girls.”

  She looked up at me, her eyes wide and concerned. She could have been a hundred years old, or twenty-five, I couldn’t tell. She was younger, though, than I’d ever guessed, if I’d ever given any thought to her at all.