Chapter Twelve
Jaimie
When I awoke in a strange hotel room in Vegas on Saturday morning, my first thought was: “I have so much work to get done.”
With a feeling of panic, I rolled over in bed, not wanting to get up. But I knew that the longer I put off the assignment, the more I would have to do later that night and the next day until it became an insurmountable pile. I might as well have stayed home for all the good it would do me being here. Here I was in Vegas with a view of the Bellagio Fountains from my hotel room window, and I couldn’t even enjoy it because I had so much to do. It was like a kid going to Disney World and locking herself in a room the whole weekend because she had a science fair project due.
With a cry of despair, I rose and put on a silk bathrobe. The bathroom was expensively tiled and contained a capacious porcelain sink and a gilt-framed mirror. I washed my face and was just getting ready to step into the shower when I heard a knock on the door. It was Randy.
“Hey, good to see you’re already up.” He was wearing a handsome gray blazer with a freshly ironed blue button-down underneath it. “We’re free until six, so I was wondering, what are your plans for the day?”
“I’d love to go out,” I said, “but I can’t. I absolutely can’t. I’m buried under so much work that it’s going to take me weeks to catch up. I should have spent last weekend doing, it but we were in Florida, and now I’m so far behind.”
Seeing my panic, Randy extended an arm and gave me an affectionate pat on the shoulder. “Shhh,” he said softly and gently. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”
“It’s not okay.” I was practically crying now. “If I don’t get some of this done before the fight, I’ll have to stay in, and I don’t want to do that. I probably shouldn’t even have come, and I hate it. It’s like having homework on Halloween.”
Kneading my left shoulder, he said, “I think you’re forgetting one thing.”
“What’s that?” I asked with a loud sniff.
“I’m your boss, and I decide what you have to get done this weekend. If I tell you that you can take the day off, that’s as good as an order. And what I think I would like for you to do is to put off your chores for a while and come and have breakfast with me.”
If he had caught me at a better time, I might have refused. But I was already so hungry and so desperate to get out of that room that I assented at once. “Where would you like to go?” I asked.
“I was thinking maybe the Black Bear Diner? They have the most amazing sculptures of bears all over the dining area, and their pancakes are said to be the best in Vegas.”
“Well, I don’t particularly care for bears or pancakes, but it sounds quaint and lovely. You’ll have to give me a minute so I can throw on something other than a bathrobe.”
“I’ll meet you downstairs in the lobby,” he said eagerly, and he turned and descended the stairs whistling a jaunty tune.
A few minutes later, I met him in the lobby, wearing a sleeveless red gingham blouse, a pair of dark blue jeans and lace boots. We took a cab and reached the Black Bear Diner within a few minutes. There, I ordered a plate of bacon, eggs, and strip-cut hash browns while Randy ordered a stack of sweet cream pancakes. When the waiter finally came with our order, he was so thrilled that he clapped his hands in delight. By that point, I was so hungry that I couldn’t fault him for being excited.
“Last night was really something, wasn’t it?” he asked after we had been eating for a few minutes in silence. “It’s kind of a rush, seeing all those people gathered together in one place. Reminds me of Woodstock.”
I couldn’t honestly say I had enjoyed it; I kept thinking about what would happen if a fire broke out, whether we would be able to reach the exits in time or if we would burn to death trying to get out.
“You were awfully quiet last night,” said Randy. “I guess it’s not really your thing, is it?”
I shook my head sadly. “The more people there are in a room, the more panicky I get. If I’m alone in a room and a couple friends come over to talk, then I’ll sit there and talk to them for an hour. But if a third person joins us, I’ll freeze up and go quiet, and if the group gets any bigger, I’ll start looking for an excuse to leave.”
“Amazing!” said Randy, in the tone of a proud parent. “It’s fascinating how different we all are. I can surmise you’re probably not looking forward to tonight’s fight, are you?”
I shook my head. I didn’t even want to talk about tonight’s fight, and I was relieved when he changed the subject.
“You know, I sometimes wonder how people can stand to work jobs that I would never be interested in.” He slathered a second slab of butter onto his plate. “Like, what makes someone want to be a doctor or dentist? I wouldn’t do that if you paid me a million dollars a year.”
I had never given the matter much thought. “I suppose there are economic incentives for taking on certain jobs.”
“Yeah, but if we all collectively decided we didn’t want to be dentists, or policemen, or firefighters? Society would cease to function. I guess it’s a good thing that not everyone is like me, but I can’t imagine being the kind of person who would want to take one of those jobs. That frame of mind is so foreign to me.”
“My mother was a sculptor,” I said, “and my father worked in a munitions factory. He had the dirtiest, most dangerous job and growing up, I was so afraid I would come home from school one day to find out he had died at work. But I looked up to my mother so much and always wanted to possess her talent. She could make the most extraordinary things with seemingly no effort. I’d give anything to be able to do that.”
“She probably put a lot of time and work into it,” Randy pointed out.
“I realize that now. But at the time, I couldn’t see it. All I saw was the finished product, and not the hours of sweat and pain that went into it.”
“Well, I think all children eventually come to that realization about their parents: that they broke their backs every day of their life. Honestly, if we knew ahead of time what goes into having a family and raising kids, I don’t know if anyone would do it.”
I gave him a shrewd look. “Is that why you never had kids?”
Randy shook his head, wiping his mouth with a snow-white cloth. “No, Joy and I wanted kids. We wanted them desperately. I was well-enough off that we could have brought them up in comfort. But life never seems to go the way that you planned.” In a quieter voice, he added, “Can I tell you something?”
“Yes, please.”
“Today is the third anniversary of her death. She’s been gone almost as long as we were married.”
I sat there in silence for a minute, stunned by the gravity of the disclosure. Randy, meanwhile, went on quietly eating his pancakes.
“I’m sorry,” I said finally, “I had no idea. Are you going to be okay?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine. The pain never leaves you, especially on days like today. But over time, you find ways of managing. She always wanted to come to Vegas, but between one thing and another, we never got the chance.”
“She sounds like a lovely woman.”
“She was,” said Randy. “The loveliest.”
He paid for our meal, and we took a cab back to the hotel. It was one of those scorching spring days where the temperature climbs into the nineties and waves seem to be rippling off the desert sands. Randy sat staring out the window at the Strip, his mouth creased into a frown.
If we had been drinking, I might have told him that I had also lost someone; that while I could never know the agony of losing a spouse, I knew something of the pain of losing a lover and best friend. For a moment as we sat in the car, I was tempted to lean over and reveal all. But then we pulled up to the curb, and the moment passed. We climbed out, and I thought no more about it for the rest of the day.