The Night Always Comes Read online

  Lynette used the toilet and washed her face but couldn’t stop crying. She took the room key and the shampoo and soap from the bathroom and put them in her purse, found his car key from behind the desk, and left. The room was on the third floor and she took the stairs down. In the lobby she saw a woman in a business suit come in the main entrance. In the Driftwood Room, there were two couples at a back table. The man was gone.

  She walked down Morrison Street and two blocks away she saw him standing in front of his car talking on the phone. Behind a pickup truck she sank down and waited. He hung up and walked back to the hotel.

  The car was a black Mercedes S-Class 450. She unlocked it and got in. She took I-405 north and left downtown and drove north along the industrial section on Highway 30. The St. Johns Bridge came and she went across it, then parked the car on a darkened street near the closed-down Tulip Pastry Shop and got out.

  7

  In front of a bar called Slim’s, Lynette called a Radio Cab and waited. The driver took her back across the river to the Hotel deLuxe, where she got her car. It started on the second try and she drove it to the West Hills where the old mansions of the city were. At the edge of a cul-de-sac she parked. In the glove box was a pint of Jägermeister; she took a heavy drink from it, fixed her makeup, and got out. She walked to a 1920s two-story brick mansion, rang the doorbell, and waited.

  The man who opened the door was small, thin, and dressed in a tight black T-shirt, black jeans, and white tennis shoes. His clothes and the shoes looked new. His hair was brown and shaved on the sides and cut short on top. On his face was the same four-day-old beard he always wore. He looked behind her to the driveway and yard and said in a voice that was effeminate and upset, “What are you doing here?”

  “I should have texted first,” said Lynette. “I’m sorry. I just needed to talk to you. I’m kind of in a bind.”

  “Well, it’s not a good time,” he said. “I have people over.”

  His driveway was empty and there were no cars on the street alongside his house. She could hear no noise coming from inside and most of the lights were off.

  “Come on, let me in. It’s freezing out here.”

  The man didn’t move.

  “Then I just need my money.”

  “What money?”

  “You didn’t pay me last time.”

  “I didn’t?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I think I did.”

  “I keep track of these things. You told me you forgot to go to the bank. You had just flown in from San Jose. You stopped and had dinner at Clyde Common.”

  He looked at her. “I’m pretty sure I paid you that night.”

  “Come on,” said Lynette. “I’m freezing my ass off and my feet are numb. You owe me, you know you do. So let me in or just pay me and I’ll leave.”

  “You have a lot of nerve.”

  “Come on, don’t be like that.”

  “Be like what?”

  “You know.”

  “I don’t like you just stopping by,” he said. “That was never the deal.”

  “You said that already. I won’t do it again. I don’t like being here either. Come on, just pay me so I can leave.”

  “What, are you a drug addict now?”

  “Jesus, no,” she said. “I just need the money. So give me what you owe me and I’ll get out of here.”

  He closed the door and locked it. She waited five minutes, and when he opened it again, he was wearing a down coat. He handed her an envelope. Inside was eight hundred dollars.

  “It’s two hundred short.”

  “That’s all I have.”

  “I’ll take a check for the last two.”

  “I don’t use checks.”

  “You can PayPal me, you have my email.”

  “Just take the eight hundred. You’re lucky to get that.”

  “Lucky? You owe me.”

  “That’s what you say, but I know I paid you for that night. You’re just trying to hustle me.”

  “Hustle you?” she said. “Why would I do that? I’ve never done that before. I just want what I’m owed.”

  “Well, I gave you what you’re owed. Now I want you to leave. I’ll call you when I want you, but don’t ever come here like this again.”

  “I’d rather kill myself than come here again,” she said in a voice that was weak and shook slightly. “I’ve never liked you, not even for a moment. You’ve always just been an entitled rich asshole to me. A pervert, too, and I want you to know that I always had to have a couple of drinks to knock on your door and I had to be half-shitfaced to take off my clothes in front of you. And there wasn’t a single time I didn’t feel horrible and creepy afterward. Not once.”

  The twenty-eight-year-old IT executive couldn’t look at her, but he didn’t move from the doorway as she walked toward her car.

  It was almost three years since three separate loan officers had limited her mother to a two-hundred-thousand-dollar home loan. In desperation Lynette promised she would get the rest, eighty thousand dollars. “Don’t worry. I have almost three years to figure out how, and I will,” she told her mother. Within a week of that promise she had the second job at the Dutchman and took every extra shift she could get both there and at the bakery. She quit eating out and never bought herself anything that wasn’t needed. She had two years and nine months until their landlord said he would sell their house, so she worked and worked and worked. But after ten months she realized there was no way she would come up with that kind of money.

  When she confessed her situation to a coworker at the Dutchman, Gloria, Gloria told her she knew how she could make that money and more. Gloria was a part-time escort and told her about it one night after work. Lynette went home from their meeting half-drunk and spent the rest of the night in bed, sobbing. A week later Gloria introduced her to the bald, pudgy man.

  She met the IT man at the RingSide Steakhouse. Lynette, him, his coworker, and Gloria. After dinner Lynette and the IT man moved to the bar, sat by themselves, and awkwardly came up with an agreement that Gloria had planned out for her. He drove her back to his house and it began.

  He was timid the first three times they were together, but after that he began sending her text messages telling her what he wanted to do and how he wanted her to look. In person they seldom spoke and never discussed his texts or what he wanted. During sex if he came too quickly, he’d sulk and oftentimes become cruel. If he felt like he had done a good job then he would be nicer to her. He would lounge around longer before dressing. He’d make jokes and flirt.

  As time passed his texts became more demanding and aggressive, but she never once complained. She only thought about the money and complied with how he wanted her to look and what he wanted her to do. On Gloria’s advice, with each new thing he asked, she charged more. But it began to drag on her and she dreaded the nights with him. After a while she had to be drunk just to walk up his drive, and always, no matter what, as she drove home after a night with him she broke down crying.

  A personal trainer came to the man’s house four days a week. He hired a woman to pick out and buy his clothes. He bleached his teeth and had pedicures and manicures. He waxed his back and his pubic and leg hair. To be with him she had to do the same. His personal bathroom was covered completely in mirrors, even the ceiling, and there were times they had sex in it just so he could watch himself.

  He paid for the house in the West Hills with cash and had it completely remodeled before he moved in. An interior designer oversaw the project and decorated it. She picked the furniture, the photos, the dishes, the appliances, even the bath towels and sheets. The house had five bedrooms, an oak-paneled study, a gym and recreation room in the basement, and four full bathrooms. The floors were high-gloss oak. The walls were flat white and each held a single abstract black-and-white photo. All the furniture was black and uncomfortable except in the basement, where he had a soft leather couch and an entertainment center with the largest TV she had ev
er seen. The kitchen had a professional-grade range even though he didn’t cook, a stainless-steel refrigerator-freezer filled with juices, beer, condiments, sparkling water, and premade meals a woman cooked for him each week. Another woman did his laundry, his grocery shopping, and cleaned the house.

  Lynette came every two weeks and he paid her a thousand dollars each time and she had seen him twenty-six times. Eight of those nights, when he’d asked something more of her, he had given her a tip, sometimes an extra thousand dollars. The only problem that arose was that he wouldn’t pay her until the end of the night. By then he didn’t want her anymore. He would say he didn’t have the money or that it was too much or that she wasn’t worth it. By their eleventh time together and all times after, Lynette had to demand to get paid. It became a struggle between them and eventually, nearly always, by the end of the night she was left to beg.

  8

  The car started on the third try. She left the West Hills and went across the Ross Island Bridge and headed south on Milwaukie. It was ten thirty and the only Dairy Queen open until eleven finally appeared and she parked and went inside. The place was empty but for a teenage girl with glasses and brown hair standing behind the register.

  “I’m sorry, but we’re closing in twenty minutes,” the girl said. “The grill’s just been shut off.”

  “That’s okay,” said Lynette. “I just want a Peanut Buster Parfait for here and one to go. And do you have coffee?”

  “Yeah, but it’s been sitting forever. You can have it for free if you want.”

  Lynette nodded and handed her ten dollars, and the girl rang her up.

  In the corner of the empty Dairy Queen she sat in a booth. A heat vent on the ceiling blew down warm air and she took off her coat and scarf and drank the burned coffee. Tears welled in her eyes and she couldn’t stop them. In one day, years of her planning and struggle and sacrifice came to mean nothing. There would be no house; she wouldn’t be able to bring that to Kenny or her mother. She had failed.

  She was going to hire her father’s crew for a day. If she did the prep work they could have painted the entire main floor in that amount of time. There was also a baker at 9th Street who was an artist and Lynette was going to hire him to paint the Trail Blazers and Winterhawks logos on the walls in Kenny’s room. A licensed electrician named Roy Oldham, a regular at the Dutchman, said he would give her a full day of work for a month of free drinks. She had plans for the bathroom, the kitchen, and the basement, all written in a notebook she’d look at when she couldn’t sleep or was on break at work.

  She began eating the Peanut Buster Parfait and looked at the clock on the wall. Seventeen more minutes until they closed. A couple in their twenties entered and went to the counter. The man whispered in the woman’s ear and she ordered for both of them and the same girl rang them up. The couple stepped back and the woman took off the man’s baseball cap and shook the rain from it. She ran her hands through his hair and put it back on. They each had a dipped chocolate cone and sat at a table across from each other.

  Three more people came in after that, two tall, high-school-aged girls and a man wearing a canvas coat and a hat that read GIFFORD CONSTRUCTION. The girls looked like sisters and the man their father. They sat in the booth across from Lynette. The girls wore matching sweats that had a large yellow M and a mustang on it. Milwaukie High School. They had come from a swim meet in Eugene and both the girls complained that they didn’t make the finals. Their father listened, and when they were finished, he told them how great he’d thought they’d done.

  “But you always say that,” one of the girls said while eating a Blizzard. “And tonight we both sucked.”

  “Not making the finals doesn’t really mean you’re bad,” the father said, and at that the two girls began laughing.

  Lynette finished the Peanut Buster Parfait, closed her eyes, and thought about swimming. When she was a freshman in high school, she made friends with a girl who had just moved to Portland from Seattle. The girl said her parents had a cabin on Hood Canal in Washington. “All we do all summer is swim and lie on a raft and eat. You should come up.”

  The girl had told her this only in passing, just one day while they ate lunch together. That night Lynette couldn’t sleep because she wanted to go with the girl to Hood Canal, she wanted to swim all day and lie on a raft, but she didn’t know how to swim. She had never learned how. For nearly a month she worried about it and then one Saturday she took Kenny to the Northeast Community Center and told a woman there that she and Kenny both couldn’t swim and wondered if they could take lessons together. The woman signed them up for the adults/teens class every Wednesday at seven p.m. and charged her for only one person, sixty dollars.

  Lynette had only twenty dollars, but that evening, when they got home, she put the nine CDs she owned in a pile to sell, and when her mother and Randy went to sleep, she went through her mother’s purse and took thirty dollars. Her mother never mentioned the missing money and every Wednesday after that Lynette took Kenny to swim class. Her mother must have known that Lynette couldn’t swim either but said nothing about it and let them go.

  From the beginning, however, Lynette was terrified of the water and so embarrassed and scared that she could barely walk out to the pool. She and Kenny would put on their swimsuits in the handicapped bathroom, but always just before they left she’d say to Kenny, “I can’t do it.” She would sit on the toilet seat and sob, and Kenny, who was excited to get in the water, would try to pull her outside. “Please don’t make me,” she’d say. “Please don’t.” But her brother wouldn’t stop pulling on her arm until she opened the bathroom door and they went outside to the showers to rinse off before class. They had learned to swim together and she had learned to like it, and when the classes ended they even kept going for a while.

  “I’m sorry, but we’re closing now,” a voice said. “I let you stay an extra ten minutes.”

  Lynette opened her eyes to see that the family and the young couple had left. The Dairy Queen was again empty and the counter girl stood by Lynette smiling. “Here’s the extra Peanut Buster Parfait you ordered. I kept it in the freezer for you.” She set down the ice cream in a white paper bag. Lynette looked at her and tried to speak but couldn’t.

  9

  The car started on the first try and she headed north to Belmont Street and parked. There was a hard rain falling. She ran past a half-built condominium complex and stopped at the entrance of a new five-story apartment building. She entered a code, the main door opened, and she took an elevator to the fifth floor and knocked on apartment 51. A minute passed and a woman in a black silk bathrobe answered.

  “What are you doing here?” the woman exclaimed. “I’m in a hurry. I gotta leave in a few minutes.”

  “I’ll only be a minute,” said Lynette. The woman shook her head but stepped back and Lynette walked into a large open room that overlooked Belmont Street.

  A white shag rug covered most of the floor and on it sat a brown leather couch, a long glass coffee table, and two matching brown leather chairs. A sixty-inch TV hung on the wall.

  “I know I should have called, but at least I brought you ice cream,” said Lynette and followed the woman into the kitchen.

  “What kind?”

  “A Peanut Buster Parfait.” Lynette took off her scarf and coat and set them on a stool.

  “Is that Dairy Queen?”

  “Yeah.”

  The woman went to the fridge, took an open bottle of champagne from it, poured a glass, and headed for the bathroom. Lynette followed her.

  “I can’t eat shit like that anymore and not gain weight. It all goes to my stomach and nowhere else. Sorry if I was a bitch. I’m just stressed and I didn’t know you were coming over. You have to call first. Anyway, I have to get out of here in fifteen minutes. Terry got mad at me last week for being late. Old people hate it when you’re late and it was the first time he ever got mad at me. He looks like my grandmother when he gets upset.”
/>   Lynette sat on the edge of the bathtub. “Jesus, you keep this place warm. It’s like heaven.”

  The woman looked at Lynette in the reflection of the mirror. “What happened to you? You look like shit.”

  Lynette shrugged and just watched as she put on her makeup.

  Gloria Milligan was the most beautiful woman Lynette had ever met. Thin and tall with black hair and light blue eyes. She had a seemingly natural elegance to her, but Lynette knew she had worked hard at it. Gloria was neither elegant nor educated. When drinking or in a bad mood, she could slip up and show her true self: a mean, often crude, drunk who looked out only for herself, who could be vindictive and cruel. The old man she was with had witnessed none of it. He thought she’d grown up in Portland and had gone to college at UC Berkeley. That she was an only child whose parents died in a car wreck when she was in high school. A girl born to money but who now had none of it.

  Lynette knew the truth. Gloria had grown up in the logging town of Clatskanie. When drunk, Gloria could disappear into tirades about her past life in a single-wide trailer with her mother and father, a brother, and two sisters. Her father, a onetime truck driver, was partially paralyzed from a stroke. The family was forced to live on her mother’s waitressing job, food stamps, a disability check, and a two-hundred-dollar monthly stipend from her mother’s parents.

  It was Gloria’s looks that had both saved and ruined her. By the age of fifteen she was constantly sought after. Her brother’s friends came by unannounced, her two sisters’ boyfriends flirted with her, her dad’s friends hit on her, her coworkers at the pizza parlor would punch her in before she showed up, and two of her high school teachers gave her passing grades when she didn’t deserve them.

  It had been seven years since she’d had contact with her family and now, at twenty-eight, she had a cocaine habit and failing vision. She couldn’t drive at night and had difficulty reading signs even in daylight. She told nobody but drunkenly confessed to Lynette one night. “I’ll be blind in five years,” she cried. “Completely blind.”