Fluke (6 page)

Maybe later
.

I lit a cigarette and sunk down into the couch, smoking and contemplating my next move.
 
Sara was home, and I could easily go
over there and lay around, listening to music and laughing and getting nothing done in my job hunt.
 
What can I say?
 
My mother would say that my inability to make a move towards starting a career of some sort is just a classic trait of the underachiever.

Her special boy Adam, the underachiever.

I caught the red delivery bag on my couch out of the corner of my eye and couldn’t stop looking at it once I saw it.
 
I know, I know, you keep your pizza oven fresh, for Christ’s sake. Leave me alone about it, already.

It was no use.
 
I had to take the bag and the money back to Perry’s, and today was as good as any day to get it over with.

Since Perry didn’t open his place until 10am, and I was stalling on my job hunt, I decided to do some laundry and straighten up my apartment.
 
Sara was eventually going to see where I live, barring my blowing things over the course of the next few days.
 
As I looked around the dismal little dwelling I heard my Grandpa’s words in my head, "You can’t polish a turd, son."
 
I figured I could at least try to make my turd more presentable to Sara.
 
Maybe I could even fool her into thinking I was a neat and orderly person.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s not get carried away now.

First, I decided I could go ahead and knock out the laundry.
 
It was piling up from almost two weeks of my having done nothing constructive aside from being with my wonderful new…girlfriend?
 
Yeah, I guess girlfriend is the right word.

So, I began the laundry-gathering process.
 
I imagined most people had a hamper, basket, or other container in their home where they deposited their soiled garments.
 
I didn’t.
 
I just sort of let clothes rest wherever they may fall.
 
When I thought about it and felt inspired beyond laziness, I tossed the clothes into the back corner of my bedroom closet.
 
The “Adam Fluke System” of doing laundry began with a walk-through of every room, with a thorough scan given to each, to collect all of my washables.

Even though my apartment was miniscule, without fail, I always managed to miss something.
 
Socks could work themselves under the sofa, T-shirts made their way to the vast darkness underneath my bed.
 
A pair of boxers once ended up in back of my entertainment center; I never figured that one out.

After making my way through all the rooms in my humble little abode, I found myself with a pretty large armload of laundry.
 
I made my way to the nicest piece of furniture I had, my queen size bed, and tossed it all down on top.
 
I had purchased the bed last year, second hand, when my previous bed (a remnant from grade school) had collapsed to the floor.
 
I was the only one in it at the time, as usual, and no injuries were sustained, so it ended up being a blessing.
 
A grown man can only sleep on a little twin mattress for so long.
 

I grabbed my clothes from the corner of the closet (a few things had actually made it there), threw them on the bed with the other stuff, and started jamming it all into pillowcases.
 
I was ready to make my mad dash to the little on-site launderette to clean my things.
 
Lifting my two overly stuffed “laundry baskets” I shot a glance at my bed, and went ahead and ripped off the sheets and hung them around my neck.
 
Sara deserved clean sheets.

And a lawyer, or a doctor
.
Maybe a fighter pilot.

“Shut up, Adam, shut the hell up,” I said out loud, grabbing the orange bottle of Tide, and lunging through the front door.

****

The launderette was one of my least favorite places to be, especially at such an early hour.
 
It was always hot, and there were almost always ten kids running wild, jumping on the washers, throwing things, or dropping trash everywhere.
 
Parental supervision seemed nonexistent, although, every ten minutes or so, a worn-beyond-her-years woman would poke her head in from the courtyard and tell the kids, “I’m
gonna
tear
yer
asses up if you don’t settle on down!”
 
The kids would give mom about ten seconds to disappear back to wherever she was hiding, then they were right back at their hooliganism.
 
I considered it torture, so I normally tried to do laundry late at night, when everyone else was asleep or drunk or practicing spousal abuse.
 
Of course, I had to get the place cleaned up today, so I was stuck in the launderette.

It was quiet to begin with, just a couple of women sitting in the plastic chairs, faces buried in cell phones, and only two children.
 
The kids played with Matchbox cars on the floor quietly.
 
Maybe it wouldn’t be such a horrible day.

After I loaded all my clothes into three washers (a small miracle, finding three empty this time of day), I sat back in a chair and leaned the back of my head against the wall.
 
It was quickly relaxing, with the quiet sloshing of washing machines and the hum of dryers soothing me.

My thoughts drifted to the first morning at Sara’s, after we sat down to our not-so-continental breakfast.

I hadn’t had the courage that morning to ask her about the strange, trance-like state she had been in before.
 
As I ate my eggs, though, I tried to rationalize the situation:

Maybe she was in one of those weird sleep state kind of things, like a sleepwalker.

Okay, so how did she tell me “Don’t go,” if she wasn’t really conscious?

Maybe she was just still drunk, and got a little moody, I offered myself.

Hey, Adam-boy, did she seem drunk when she snapped out of it?

No, I admitted to myself, she hadn’t seemed drunk at all.
 
In fact, she had seemed more lucid than I felt at the time.

I had finished my breakfast by wiping up the yellow puddles of yolk on my plate with my toast, and decided to just give up thinking about it and not worry so much.
 
She had smiled at me and said, “Those were the best eggs I’ve had in years.”

The buzz of a dryer startled me and caused me to lift my head from its resting position.
 
A lady stood up and headed for the dryer, pink clothesbasket in hand.
 
She opened up the round glass door on one of the mustard yellow dryers and began pulling out towels.
 
I resumed my comfortable state, head back against the wall, and drifted back to thoughts of Sara.

When Sara had finished her eggs and toast, I cleared the dishes off of the table and put them in the sink.
 
I brought out the coffee pot and topped our cups off, and returned to get some milk and sugar for hers.
 
I was becoming quite the domesticated man.

“I don’t need any more cream or sugar, Adam,” she called as I turned to head to the dining room.
 
I did a one-
eighty
and set the milk and sugar back down on the counter and went to the table.

“You do take cream and sugar, though, right?”

“Sometimes,” she said.
 
“Depends on how I feel.
 
If I’m hung over, I’ll drink it black. Something about the bitterness of it makes me feel better.
 
Plus, cigarettes taste better with black coffee.”
 
She stated this matter-of-factly, not even realizing that she just explained the exact reason that I like my coffee black.

We smoked and sipped our black coffee, and I took a long, slow look around her apartment.
 
The dining room wasn’t so much a room as it was a square section between the living room and the kitchen.
 
I could picture the brochure for the townhouse advertising a “dining nook,” or a “dining area,” as opposed to a room.
 
The walls were decorated with three Georgia O’Keefe flower-as-symbolic-vagina prints in black frames, two hanging on the wall behind her entertainment center in the living room, and one behind the table in the dining nook.
 
A large, spotless wood-framed mirror hung on the wall by the entrance to the kitchen, and an ornate looking scroll, with a family crest and some calligraphy-type writing hung to the right of the mirror, a thin rope holding it on a nail.

I had seen the scrolls before; a guy sold them at the mall.
 
He set up in the center of the mall, with a couple of long wooden tables and a big, thick book, brimming with nearly any last name you could think of.
 
Along with each last name, there was a family crest, history, and meaning of the name.
 
I stopped once to look for Fluke, unsuccessfully.
 
I gave the salesman, a thin, bearded guy with thick glasses, a good-natured hard time about the exclusion of Fluke as a last name, and he said that he’d “get right on the Flukes.”
 
I didn’t really care so much, as I doubted the validity of these things.
 
It seemed like so many names with so many different meanings that it just didn’t seem that important to me.

I stubbed out my smoke and walked to look at Sara’s scroll.
 
Hers was interesting to me, no matter how sketchy or thinly stretched the premise might be, because, well, it was Sara.

DuBeau
,
the scroll said in fancy, medieval strokes.
 
“A person from beauty,” it said for the meaning.
 
In smaller, though no less grandiose pen strokes, the scroll went on to explain that it was a name of French origin (as though I didn’t guess that already), and it originated back in the eleventh century.

I sipped my coffee and tried to contemplate the eleventh century when I heard Sara ask jokingly, “What are you doing? Admiring your handsome self in the mirror?”

“No, I did that for about two hours yesterday,” I responded.
 
“I try not to go over two hours of admiring myself in the mirror a day.
 
Such a thing can be overwhelming to mere mortals.”

She laughed heartily at this, and I felt my confidence, which had sagged significantly earlier, re-fortifying itself.
 
I was doing fine, and this was going to be a good morning.

“Actually,” I told her, “I was checking out your name here on the scroll.”

She walked over and stood behind me and rested her chin on my shoulder, looking at the scroll.
 
She asked, “What do you think?”

I went in for a shot of flattery, which was no exaggeration, and said, “I think it hit the nail right on the head. ‘A person from beauty’ is the perfect description for you.”

As soon as I said it, I realized that it sounded a little too sugary sweet, and could have been interpreted as condescension.
 
Or
ass-kissing.
 
Or a lie.
 
I felt Sara’s chin on my shoulder, and hoped she had caught the sincerity in my voice.
 
She had.

“Well, thank you,” she said.
 
“Thank you very much.”
 
She shifted her head and kissed the side of my neck.
 
Then her hands moved to my sides and guided my body about two steps to the right, centering us in front of the big mirror.

“What’re you doing?” I laughed, still feeling her warm lips on my neck.

“Look,” she said.
 
“Look at us.”

In the mirror, our reflection stared back at us, my shirtless top half, her head resting on my shoulder, her fingers laced together over my midsection.
 
My hair was shifted around crazily,
warped
would have been the best word to describe it. My pale chest had about a dozen little hairs scattered across the center.
 
My eyes had large, puffy black bags beneath them, and I saw a developing pimple on my left shoulder.
 
Sara’s face looked as beautiful as it had when we stood beside my car, making small talk, which seemed like forever ago.