I roll Callie into the dry cleaners and stop at the counter, where the clerks are helping two people in front of us. Callie points to the area behind the counter. “Push me back there.”
I frown. “Behind the counter? Ma’am, I don’t think you should go there. That’s for employees.”
“But I need to see him.”
She leans forward as if trying to get up, but I touch her shoulder. “Okay, stay in the chair, ma’am. I’ll take you.” I catch a clerk’s eye as I push her toward the gap in the counter. “Is it okay if she goes back there?”
“Sure. Hi, Mrs. Beecher. How are you today?”
Callie gushes all over the girl. She must have done this before. I push her behind the counter, past several green bags full of clothes, to the door that has the Manager sign on it.
I knock.
“Come in,” a man calls.
I open the door and lean in. “Sorry to bother you. Callie Beecher insists on talking to you. I don’t know if you shrank her best sweater or didn’t get out a stain, but she’s pretty set on seeing you face-to-face.”
He gets up and comes around his desk, smiling. “Mrs. Beecher. My favorite customer. How are you, sweetie?”
Callie beams up at me. “Isn’t he handsome?” She winks, and I’m even more embarrassed.
“Yeah, a real prince.”
“Give us a minute alone, will you?” she asks.
The man probably feels trapped, but better him than me. I step out of the room and go back around the counter. There’s a folding chair by the door, so I sit down. Another Christmas tree blocks the window. What is it with all these trees? There must be no more than thirty square feet of space in this room, and this tree fills up a huge part of it. Hasn’t anyone ever heard of decorating with tinsel or something that doesn’t impede customer movement?
I can hear laughter through the door. Callie hasn’t seemed like a cougar before now, but I wonder if this is a hundred-year-old’s idea of flirtation. After a few minutes, the door opens again, and the man wheels her out. “I really appreciate the invitation,” he says in a loud voice to accommodate her hearing. “But I’ve got plans with my family on Christmas. My mother would kill me if I didn’t show up.”
“Well, that just breaks my heart,” Callie says.
“Maybe another time?”
“It has to be on Christmas.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Beecher. You know I’d do anything for you if I could.”
She draws in a heavy breath and lets it out in a rush. “Okay, then.”
She’s quiet as I get her back into my still-idling car. When I get behind the wheel, I ask, “You okay, Miss Callie?”
“Yes, I guess I am,” she says, her voice heavy with disappointment.
I try to think of something to comfort her, but what can I say? There are other fish in the sea? Isn’t it a little absurd that I’d be comforting her for unrequited love when she’s probably fifty years older than the object of her affections?
“Were you inviting him over for Christmas dinner?”
She doesn’t answer, so I glance in the rearview mirror and see her staring out the window. Has she zoned out again?
Finally, she says, “He isn’t the right one.”
“There’ll be others,” I say.
Instead of comforting her, my words clearly upset her. Tears redden her eyes.
“You okay?” I ask.
“I’m running out of time,” she says.
I’m not sure if she’s talking about Christmas. The words sober me, but when she asks me to take her to the bank, I shake my thoughts away. When we get there, I ask, “Do you want to do the drive-through?”
“The what?” she asks.
“The drive-through, where you can do your banking through the . . . Never mind. Guess we’re going in.”
Once again I consider whether I can leave the car and meter running here, but it doesn’t seem like a great idea. It pains me to cut it off, but again I add the amount to the list I’m keeping on my phone.
I get her wheelchair out for the thousandth time today and help her back into it. Inside, I hesitate at the first desk, where a young woman looks up and offers to help us.
“No, thank you,” Callie says. “But you’re very pretty. Isn’t she pretty?” she asks me with a smile.
I can’t believe she would put me on the spot this way. “Yes, very pretty.”
The employee beams at me. “Thank you.”
“Over there, sweet boy,” Callie says, pointing to a glass office where a man is working.
I push her to the doorway of the office, and the man looks up. “Well, Mrs. Beecher. We’ve missed you! How are you?”
He hugs Callie, then reaches to shake my hand.
I take it but say, “Cab driver.”
“You can wait out there,” Callie tells me in a sweet voice. “I want to talk to this nice young man for a moment.”
“Of course.” I step back out, closing the door behind me. Good grief. Is she hitting on another man? This is reaching the absurd.
I take a seat and watch through the door as she talks to the man. They’re both smiling. Callie looks through her purse, but she clearly can’t find what she’s looking for.
This doesn’t add up. Callie isn’t the kind of woman to be flirting with younger men, is she? Maybe in her dementia she thinks she’s twenty-two.
She couldn’t remember where her keys were, but she remembered where these men worked? Yes, there are notations on her list that probably prompted her memory, but why would this be important enough to have written down while she forgets the location of her keys?
Frustration waxes through me. I check my watch.
After a few minutes, the man gets up and hugs her again, then turns her wheelchair around. I go to the door. As it opens, I hear the man saying, “I’m sure she’s lovely. But my girlfriend wouldn’t like it.”
“You can’t make an exception for an old lady?” Callie cajoles.
“Sorry, Mrs. Beecher. But I do appreciate it.”
When I have her back in the car, I have to ask again. “So who were you talking about to him? The person he said was probably lovely?”
“My Sydney,” she says. “I’m starting to think I have as bad taste in men as she does.”
“Sydney has bad taste in men?”
“That’s right. Such a sweet girl. She deserves so much.”
I seize the opportunity. “So . . . what’s Sydney’s last name?” I glance back hopefully and see that Callie is faltering. She still can’t think of it.
“What about a picture?” I ask. “Do you have a picture of her?” Maybe that will prompt a clue about how to reach her.
When she doesn’t answer, I say, “What does Sydney do?”
“She’s one of those . . . you know . . . Oh, I can’t think of it.”
Not helpful. Irritation floods through me again. What am I going to do with Callie?
I look in the rearview mirror and see that she has drifted off to sleep again, this time with her head at a weird angle. She’s probably going to hurt when she wakes up. I pull over and get out, lean into the back seat, straighten her head, and lay it back on the seat.
She never stirs.
Though it’s against my better judgment, I take her purse. I’m going in. I have to find her keys or something about Sydney . . . anything that will help me get Callie into her house. I pull out her big wallet, unzip it, and look inside for a key. Nothing. No cash, no key. I move her checkbook, her glasses case . . . then I look in the pocket on the outside of her purse.
Not a key . . . but a cell phone.
“Are you kidding me?” I whisper as I take it out. All along she’s had a cell phone in here, probably with her granddaughter’s contact info on it, and she hasn’t told me? How many times has she dug through that purse today?
I try to turn on the phone. Perfect. The battery is dead. I have to get it juiced up so I can see what’s on there.
The phone is different from mine, but I know what kind of connector it needs. I drive to a drugstore and leave her in the car with the engine idling while I go in. I grab the connector off the carousel that holds the cellular accessories and glance out the window at my car. Did I lock it? What if Callie wakes up and climbs over the seat and drives away?
I chuckle at the thought. And if someone steals it, they’ll have to deal with Callie, and I’ll be off the hook.
But no one steals it, and Callie doesn’t go into car-jack mode. She’s still there, sleeping deeply, as I get back in. I plug the car charger into my lighter slot and the lightning end into her phone. Then I start driving to nowhere, waiting for it to gain enough power to turn on.
I’ve driven a few miles when the phone starts up. I pull over into a Jiffy Lube parking lot. There’s no passcode on her phone, so I thumb through to her contacts list. On the search bar, I punch in the name Sydney. Up comes the name Sydney Batson, with a phone number.
Finally! I click the little phone icon next to the number and listen as Sydney’s phone rings. I’ll tell her to get to her grandmother’s house and open the door immediately or I’ll dump Grandma on the curb. I would never do that, of course, but she won’t know that.
But the phone rings through to voice mail. I want to scream. I leave a message that I have her grandmother and need for her to call me. I realize as I hang up that it sounds like a ransom call. But maybe it’ll light a fire.
I go back to her contacts and find her address. Maybe the girl works at home. I turn the car around and head that way. Callie is still sleeping when I get to the little patio home with a double garage and a tiny courtyard out front, home to wilted flowers that desperately need water. Of course. She takes care of her plants like she takes care of her grandmother.
Well, I’ll just sit here with the car and meter running all day if I have to, until the notorious Sydney gets home.
Minutes crawl by. I’m tapping my heel and shaking my knee, and finally I slam my fist on the steering wheel. I can’t do this. I can’t just sit in someone’s driveway for hours.
I call her back and leave another message. “This is Finn Parrish. I’m a cab driver your grandmother hired, and I can’t take her home because she locked herself out and can’t find the key. I don’t know what to do with her. I got your address from her phone and I’m sitting in your driveway, and my meter is still running. I have to make a living. Call me back.” I give the number again in case she’s too dense to look at her caller ID.
I’ll mention dropping Callie off at the curb in my next message if she doesn’t call me back. I glance in the rearview mirror and see that Callie’s head has dropped to that painful angle again. I get out and prop her better, then get back in front.
Another whole day pretty much wasted, and she doesn’t even have cash to pay me again. She could write me another check, but for all I know it won’t clear the bank. I haven’t had a chance to try to cash the one from yesterday.
Maybe God is punishing me. Maybe this is some cosmic what-goes-around-comes-around sting. I probably deserve it after the way I treated my mother. He’s been waiting for the right moment, and this is apparently it.
Now God’s stuck me with an elderly woman who’s sick. And there really isn’t anything I can do about it.
I look back at Callie again. Does she look cold? I turn up the heater, then shrug off my jacket and put it over her.
Whether from cold or not, there’s a pallor to her skin as she sleeps that saddens me beyond words. Callie doesn’t look well at all. What if she dies right here? What will I do then?
As irritating as she is, she’s a sweet woman. She doesn’t deserve to die in a cab in her granddaughter’s driveway. Anger shoots through me. I add Sydney’s number to my phone, then get out and call her again while I pace up and down the drive-way, and this time I light into her voice mail. “I just want to know what kind of person refuses to call back when I’ve told you that your sick, confused, Methuselah-contemporary grandmother is sitting in my cab, locked out of her house. This isn’t good for her. She needs to be at home, not running all over town, and now she’s so deeply asleep that I’m afraid she might not wake up. So why don’t you call me back before I put her out on the curb or drop her off at the police station? Or—here’s a thought—go unlock her door so she can go home!”
I almost throw the phone after cutting it off, but instead I kick my tire. I get back into the car, wondering why I chose this profession when my other one failed. I’ve gone from the scent of coq au vin to gas fumes and body odor.
But truth be told, cab driving has been less of an emotional and physical drain. My restaurant clientele let me down—when the economy tanked, they quit coming. But it didn’t really matter. By the time I had to sell the restaurant, I was burned out anyway. I was ready to go.
But there were a million other things I could have done. Why did it have to be this? Why do I have to be stranded here with her?
When Callie’s phone rings, I jump. I swipe it on. “Hello?”
“Uh . . . hi, this is Sydney Batson.” Her voice is clipped, a little angry. “I didn’t get your messages until just now because I’ve been trying a case in court.”
A lawyer. I hate lawyers. But yeah, that’s a good excuse.
“Let me speak to my grandmother.”
“Can’t, she’s asleep in my car. So are you going to come get her, or unlock her house? This is tying up my whole day.”
“You said you had the meter running. You’ll get paid.”
“It’s not about that. She’s not well. She needs to be home.”
A car pulls into the driveway behind me as I’m talking, and behind the wheel is a woman with a phone to her ear. Is this Sydney?
She waves. “Yes, it’s me,” she says. ‘“Bye.”
I get out of the car and wait with my hands on my hips.
Sydney is cuter than I expected. She’s not tall like a model, as Callie implied. She’s a petite blonde with big brown eyes. She heads toward me. “I didn’t know she was going to call you. I got her dressed this morning and made sure she had food. I don’t even know how she had your number.”
“I gave her a card yesterday after I took her to the doctor. And that’s another thing. Why would you send her to the doctor with a cab driver? She didn’t hear her name yesterday when they called it. I finally had to force them to take her back.”
She opens the back door of the cab and leans in. When she sees how deeply her grandmother is sleeping, she gets back out. “She’s sleeping so soundly. I hate to wake her.”
“I know the feeling,” I say. “So . . . what? You’re just going to leave her there?”
“No, of course not.” She glances back at Callie. “You’ve taken care of her. I appreciate it.” She closes the door quietly, trying not to disturb Callie. “Look, I’m a first-year associate at my law firm, and yesterday they fired a bunch of us. I’m still there, but it’s the worst possible time for me to miss work. I started a case in court today, and as you probably know, you can’t just ask the judge for a personal day. Besides, my job is hanging by a thread if I don’t win this case . . .”
I roll my eyes. “A key? Do you have a key?”
“I’m just saying that I couldn’t take her to the doctor yesterday because of an important staff meeting, but she was sick and I wanted her to go. How has she been today?”
“I’m not her nurse,” I say. “Do you have the key or not?”
“She keeps an extra one under her mat.”
My mouth drops open. “Are you kidding me?”
“No. Did you check there?”
“No! I didn’t think anyone was stupid enough to leave a key under their mat. That’s the first place anybody would look.”
“Clearly not you!”
“You’re blaming me? You need to take better care of her!”
Tears spring to Sydney’s eyes, but she makes a valiant effort to hold them back. “I get up at five a.m. every day to get over there because that’s when she tries to get up. I get her bathed and dressed, feed her, and make sure she’s okay until I can check on her at lunch. Then I come home and feed her again and get her into bed. It’s not easy!”
I feel bad now. Maybe she isn’t a no-account. I lower my voice. “Maybe you need to hire somebody to stay with her.”
“I can’t afford it, and neither can she. Until recently she was fine in her own home, but she has just gotten worse and worse . . .” She dabs at her eyes. “Wait. You said she called you today. Did she seem more coherent?”
“A little. She had me running all over the place doing errands. The dry cleaners, the bank. She even went shopping.”
“For what? I do all her grocery shopping.”
“For Christmas.”
Her eyes brighten. “Really? She remembered that it’s almost Christmas? That’s a good sign, right? The medicine must have already helped her.”
“I guess. How old is she, anyway?”
“Eighty.”
“Only eighty? I would have thought . . .” My voice thins out.
“She’s been so out of it for the last few days. I’m so relieved that she’s doing better. I was thinking maybe she had a brain tumor or Alzheimer’s . . . but it wouldn’t come on that suddenly, would it? If only the doctor would call me back with the results of her tests.”
I can’t believe I’m still standing here with her. “Okay, well, I can take her home if you want. Or you could take her.”
“Look, I know the whole key-under-the-mat thing is disturbing, but I obviously can’t control her, and I knew if she ever got locked out, it would be the first and probably only place she would look for it.”
“Uh-huh. Well, she didn’t.”
“She’s a strong-willed woman, and having this . . . dementia, or whatever it is . . . it’s only making her more strong-willed.”
“Ya think?”
She breathes out a huff and shakes her head. “You don’t have to be sarcastic.”
It’s true, I don’t. I get back into the cab and grab my phone. I navigate to the Notes section and find the amounts I’ve logged. “She owes me seventy-seven dollars for today.”
She swallows. “Okay. Let me get my purse.”
I feel a little sorry for her as she goes back to her car. It sounds like she’s strapped and stressed. I know what that feels like.
By the time she returns, I’ve made up my mind. “Look, don’t worry about it. I have a check she wrote me this morning for yesterday. Does she even have enough in her account for that? Just forget it. You don’t have to pay.”
“No, I insist. You have to make a living.” She opens her wallet and pulls out a twenty. “This is all I have right now.”
“I take debit cards, but—”
“Okay, the truth is, I only have forty-two dollars in my account. I’m supposed to get paid tomorrow. Can you wait?”
“Sure, don’t worry about it.”
“Can you help me get her into my car?”
“Of course.” I’m elated to get her off my hands.
I get her chair out of the trunk as Sydney crawls in to wake her grandmother up. “Grammy?”
I wheel the chair to the door, and Sydney hands me back my jacket. “Yours?”
“Yeah. She looked cold.”
She smiles up at me, like she sees something that I don’t want her to see. “Thank you.”
I look away as I shrug it back on.
She shakes her grandmother again and, louder, says, “Grammy, wake up!”
Callie stirs and opens her eyes. “Hello, pretty girl. I must have dozed off.”
I watch as Sydney gently gets her out of the car and into the wheelchair, then I help get her into the front seat of Sydney’s car.
When I’ve collapsed the chair again and put it into the back, Sydney rolls her window down. “Thank you for taking care of her.”
“Sure, no problem.”
I go to my car and watch as the girl backs her car out. Relief floods over me like a drug as I head to the airport to make some actual cash.