five VINCENT part 3

< part two

That morning at the airport was the first time I’d drank since the day I was fired. I’d gone almost one week without a drop living at Carl’s house, helping care for his mom until the morning Margaret tracked me down.

I was deep in a dream. A single frame of it remained when I awoke, the last flash of a coin flipped into a dark wishing well: a tall building, long and sandy gray. Green grass meeting stacked blocks of stone.

I rolled to one side in a saggy hammock of giggling springs to find Margaret standing over me.

Vincent. I need your passport.

Her face was empty of anything that could be interpreted as expression, positive or negative. I scooted back and made sure I could see both of Margaret’s hands.

She dumped my backpack, found my passport and photographed it with her phone, snapped it into her purse. Flatly rejected giving me a moment to get cleaned up, wouldn’t consider going someplace to talk over coffee and refused to wait while I got dressed.

This won’t take long, she said.

Margaret dragged a steel folding chair to my bedside, wiped it down with one of my socks. A fluffy surfline of lint and dust tumbled over the edge of the seat and fell to the carpet in slow motion. She sat in a whirling plume of dust motes lit by boxy blocks of sunlight from the basement windows. Held her purse on her lap with both hands like someone waiting for a bus in a bad neighborhood.

My brain’s buoyancy changed and it tipped, lifted free of the muddy bottom and rose slowly to the surface. Bobbed and rolled over and I heard her say:

I need you to listen. Can you do that? Shut your mouth and really listen to me?

I sat up and nodded, wrapped in my blanket, a wide-eyed survivor on the bumper of an ambulance at the scene of a disaster. Got my back burner lit, started warming up an apology and focused my remaining attention on the space between Margaret’s eyes. Put my listening face on and braced for the new demands, her latest terms. If I could get through this speech without interrupting, if I didn’t further fuck things up, then there was a good chance I was going home today.

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