Aspen, Colorado
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” ROBERT ASKED HER. SHE QUICKLY jammed the phone between the arm of the overstuffed chair and outside of her leg so he couldn’t see it if he looked closely. She hoped her face wouldn’t reveal anything, but he’d startled her and she hadn’t seen him coming up behind her in the hotel lobby.
“Nothing,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound guilty.
“I thought I saw you doing something with your hands.”
She’d been texting. She was fast, a blur of thumbs. But because Robert was in back of her when he asked, she was fairly certain he couldn’t have seen the phone. All he could have seen, she thought, was her leaning forward in the chair, head bent forward, intent on something. Any kid would have known what she was doing, but despite what he seemed to think of himself, Robert was no kid. She doubted he’d ever sent a text message. Robert thought cell phones were for calls. That’s how old he was.
She held up her right hand. “My nails,” she said. “I hate my nails. I chew on them too much.”
She thought it was a pretty good lie. She did hate her nails.
Robert looked at her suspiciously, narrowing his eyes, darting them all over her and around her like a mental frisking. But he skimmed right over her legs and the arm of the chair where the cell phone was.
She’d had the phone for three days, and neither Robert nor Stenko knew she had it. It had been fairly simple to get. She’d asked them to stop at a Wal-Mart as they were passing through Cheyenne on the way to Colorado. She’d said she needed to buy some things. When Robert asked what she needed, she’d said, “Feminine things, if you gotta know,” and that shut him up. She knew they wouldn’t want to go inside with her to buy Kotex, or whatever else the two of them assumed were “feminine things.” She borrowed $50 cash from Stenko and he peeled it off the roll he had taken from the motor home.
The TracFones were located in the electronics section. While standing in line at the cashier’s, she bought a 120-minute Airtime card from a display.
She’d activated the phone in a restroom stall by calling an 800 number with the ten free minutes that came with the phone. Following the prompts, she loaded two hours of talk time onto the phone from the code on the Airtime card. Once it was loaded, she muted the ring and placed the call to the number she remembered from so many years ago to the house on Bighorn Road. She didn’t recognize the voice of the boy who answered, but he did give her Sheridan’s number, which she punched into the memory of the phone before powering it off. Then she threw away the packaging and the charger and slipped the phone down the front of her jeans. She knew that when the battery ran out she could buy another phone at any Wal-Mart or convenience store.
On the way out of the store, she gathered up a large package of Tampax, some nail polish and lotion, and her favorite shampoo. She’d learned years before from one of her many foster brothers that the best time to steal from Wal-Mart was early in the morning, when the employees were lethargic. So she bagged them all up at a self-service checkout and walked out past the staffer near the door who never looked twice.
Outside, she’d offered to give Stenko the change but he smiled and said, “Keep it.”
THEY WERE IN THE LOBBY of the nicest hotel she had ever been in. Such luxury! It was warm and comfortable with crowded couches and chairs, bowls of fresh fruit on tables, dark red wallpaper, hanging chandeliers turned low, exposed ceilings with thick wooden beams, deer heads on the walls. It was late, but she couldn’t sleep since she’d dozed so much in the car all day getting here. The key card to their suite was on a table in front of her. The sleeve for the card read: HOTEL JEROME. Outside, it smelled of pine trees.
Robert sat down in a chair across from her. He had a large tumbler of amber liquid on ice. He was dressed casually, but in a studied way, as if trying to fit in with the surroundings. Open-collar shirt, sports jacket, chinos, leather shoes without socks. And of course he carried his laptop case.
“Dad’s in the bar,” he said. “He’s likely to be in there a while.”
“I’d like to go to bed,” she said. “I’m really tired. It’s one in the morning.”
“I know what time it is. What, do you have an important meeting tomorrow or something? Besides, all you did all day was sleep in the car.” And he laughed.
She really didn’t like him at all, she thought. If it weren’t for Stenko and what he’d done for her, she would have thought of a way to get away already. In fact, the thought had crossed her mind in the Cheyenne Wal-Mart when she was alone from the both of them for the first time since they’d left Chicago.
“What’s he doing in the bar?” she asked, trying to divert the subject away from what she’d been doing previously.
Robert smirked. “Toasting the groom.”
“What groom?” she asked, although she knew.
“The groom. There’s going to be a big wedding in the hotel in a few days. But you don’t need to know anything more about it.”
“Why don’t you trust me?” she asked.
“Because,” he said, taking a sip from his drink, “I think you’re a devious little tramp.”
“I’m not a tramp.”
“Yeah, I forgot,” Robert said. “That was a nunnery Dad found you in, not a brothel.”
“He saved me,” she said. She was so angry she nearly forgot that if she stood up to slap his face he’d see the phone.
“Yeah, I know,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“Why are you doing this to him? Making him do these things?”
Robert sat back, steepled his fingers, and stared at her as if weighing how much to tell. “I’m actually helping him.”
“How does doing these things help him?”
“You wouldn’t understand, girlie.”
Oh, how she disliked him.
SHE’D OVERHEARD some of the conversation in the car earlier that day as they drove south from Wyoming into Colorado. Stenko and his son, Robert, spoke in hushed tones, but she sensed it when Robert would shoot looks at her in the back seat. She pretended to sleep so she could listen and they’d feel like they could talk freely.
Stenko had said, “So the name of the groom is what again?”
“Alexander Stumpf,” Robert said, reading off the screen of his laptop. “Son of Cornelius and Binkie Stumpf of La Jolla, California. Heir to the Stumpf shipping fortune. Reading this, he sounds like a snooty little bastard. The bride is named Patty Johnston. You know, Johnston Cosmetics?”
“I guess I’ve heard of it.”
“Everybody’s heard of Johnston Cosmetics, Dad. Sometimes you astound me. They’re one of the biggest of the multinationals. They make billions on the backs of Third World workers they exploit so rich women can smell good.”