Page 46 of The Vacancy In Room 10

“Your toolbox is in my van,” Crystal says. “I’m taking Amber and Tiffany and their friends to Waterworld later, so you probably wanna get it.”

“Sure,” I say, and all I really want to do is brush my teeth, take a shower, and cry for a couple of hours, but instead I follow Crystal to her van in the parking lot. For some reason Rosa and Jackie follow, too. When she opens the back doors of the van, I’m taken aback at what I see.

“Oh, my God,” I say, my hand over my heart. “You guys did this?”

And Jackie giggles, and Rosa nods.

All of my herb plants are sitting in a neat row on a couple of towels with the roots intact and the Popsicle stick labels still connected to each carefully placed plant.

“The cops already nabbed you,” Crystal says. “So we figured we had time to get them before any of the uptight neighbors reported us... Ah, Jesus, don’t cry.”

But I’m so incredibly moved and undeserving of this kindness that I can’t help the tears forming. I dab at my eyes with the hem of my filthy dress.

“I’m not!” I say. “Thank you. Really.”

The girls help me carry the little plants to a patch of dirt on the side of the office where I will replant them, and then Crystal is off readying her girls for Waterworld, and Rosa and Jackie escape the midday heat inside their apartments.

I avoid the front office as if that will keep the smell of the stringent bleach and feel of the frigid AC from being real—that Eddie won’t be real, and it will all just be a nightmare I had, and I’ll laugh at how real it felt. But of course, it is real. I see the AC unit dripping water onto the dirt below the window, and I can only assume Callum didn’t think to turn it back down to a normal temperature after he did what he agreed he’d do and moved Eddie to my car. The fact that I’m even thinking about this like it’s a normal thing on a to-do list for the day makes my stomach lurch.

I go into my apartment and take a scalding hot shower and throw on cotton shorts and a tank top and sit on the edge of my bed, and it hits me for the first time that I am meant to be starting my new job tonight at the Egg Platter. A bark of humorless laughter escapes me when I realize that is, of course, not what I’ll be doing tonight, and I surely lost the job. I don’t let myself sit and think about it. I take a long deep breath and then push my feet into a pair of flip-flops and head out the door because I have something very important to do before anything else.

When I ring the doorbell to 109, I can hear Mary’s labored breathing and heavy footsteps coming to answer it, which makes me think Sinatra is probably not there. But then I hear the sound of quick spritely footsteps, and when the door opens, Frank appears instead of Mary, who makes her way back down the hall to her good chair.

“Hi,” he says with a smile like all is forgotten, but I know he won’t forget being lied to and left hanging, and it’s almost funny that in the midst of all the absolute insanity my life has become, this makes me want to cry, and I care more about making it right than anything else right now.

“Hi there,” I say back.

“Grandma Mary is home, you can come in.”

“Actually, I came to see you,” I say.

“You did?” he asks, fidgeting with the rim of his ball cap and shifting his weight from one bare foot to the other.

“I wanted to apologize for the other day.”

“It’s okay,” he says eagerly. “I can still help you with stuff if you want.”

“It’s not okay. I didn’t forget about you, I promise. Just, some stuff came up that kept me from being there, but I wanted to give you this to make up for it,” I say, and he stares, wide-eyed, at the oversize toolbox at my feet that’s nearly as big as he is.

“What is it?” he asks.

“You can open it if you want,” I say, and he kneels down and clicks the latch open.

His mouth drops open when he sees piles and rows of all the tools a person could ever want. Wrenches and pliers and vice grips. Hammers, screwdrivers, nails, and bolts. He looks up at me with a look I recognize, because I’ve given it myself many times. He thinks he’s being tricked, so he stays quiet and doesn’t let himself get excited. It makes me want to cry even more.

The tools are old, and I have everything I really need in the utility closet. So even though I cared about these tools a lot and have an emotional attachment, this is the best home for them to go to.

He stands up and shoves his hands in his pocket, not knowing what the punchline is. “I don’t get it,” he says.

“They’re for you,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“You like to make things and fix things, just like me. And you’re gonna need tools for that. I mean especially if you plan to assist me with stuff, right? I can’t have an assistant without his own tools,” I say, and he just stares at me for a minute.

“These are...for me? To keep?”

“Yes.” I smile.

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