Page 26 of Sublimate
In the time that I’d been recovering, I had also gotten back two clients, who seemed happy to have me cleaning after I’d disappeared from their lives. First, I’d had the problem with Kolter when he’d taken Nolan’s pocket change money. I hadn’t been able to leave the house or contact them for a while (due to injuries, but also because he’d taken my keys and broken my phone). And then I’d had this latest problem in the parking lot and been out of touch again.
Maybe they weren’t “happy,” but they accepted that I’d had an emergency and had been unable to come. It was more believable because the bruises on my face were still visible when I’d gone to their houses and basically begged for another chance. They had been willing to take me back but they were now paying me less per hour—at least I was getting something.
I was taking in laundry again, too, since I had a working washer and dryer. “I don’t care,” Nolan had said when I’d broachedthe idea using his machines for my own purposes. “Go ahead.” Then he’d left for another trip. I really hadn’t understood how much he traveled, but if you had your own plane and nothing to tie you to a place (like a job or a lack of money), you could do whatever you wanted. He had boundless choices and opportunities.
I was using his laundry room (which was huge, spotless, and perfectly fitted out) but I was also keeping track of how many loads I was doing. No matter whether he cared or not, it wasn’t very fair for me to take the water and power that he paid for, and then he didn’t get anything out of it.
I was going to pay him back. I was keeping track, like I’d said, and I was adding it to the list I had made of everything I owed him. That included the money he’d given me (that Kolter had taken), rent for letting me stay in his house, food…
It added up to a lot and he should have cared about it. I certainly did and I had been wanting to do something to make us even—but for a while, I had barely been able to pull myself out of bed. I was finally feeling like I was ready to be serious and accomplish stuff again, and that was why I was back at the Reading Room today. I wanted to see Cadence, of course, but I also had a specific goal and I trusted her a lot. I didn’t like to talk about this topic but I thought that it was something she would like.
“Can you help me figure out how to do something?” I asked, and her eyes lit up.
She tossed the tissue and got serious. “Is it complicated?” She rubbed her hands together in anticipation.
“Yeah, it’s very complicated. I need to get a bunch of paperwork and I’ve never been able to do it on my own,” I answered.
“What does that mean?”
I explained about my lack of anything important. “No birth certificate, no Social Security card. No driver’s license, no bank account, no passport…I can’t think of why I’d need one of those, but I could never apply for one, anyway. I’ve tried before to figure out how to get at least one of them, but it seems like they’re all tied together,” I said.
Cadence stared at me, shocked enough that her mouth hung open. “What?” she asked. “You don’t even have a driver’s license?” Her voice had gotten higher and louder but there weren’t any other people around to hear. “How does that work?”
“It’s hard,” I told her. “I’m always worried about traffic stops. I can’t get a regular job and I don’t pay taxes. I never had a credit card.” Her jaw just hung wider and I tried to explain myself. “I have made efforts to figure this out, but the answers I got were always different. It got more complicated because I moved around, too, so I haven’t had a good address to use on the official forms. Either I was leaving soon or somebody would have taken any mail that came for me.” It could have been a stranger or it could have been swiped by the person who was letting me stay there.
“Kolter stole your mail?” Her face pursed up like she was sucking on something sour. “You have to press charges. That’s a federal offense!”
“No, Kolter doesn’t have a mailbox. He ran over it with his car a few years ago and he never replaced it.”
“Figures,” she muttered.
“Do you think you can help me get some of that stuff? The documentation?” I asked.
“The paperwork,” she said, and I could tell that she was getting over her horror and was back into it. She was already typing, her fingers flying over the letters in the way that had always impressed me. “I need your date and place of birth.”
I told her and she stopped and stared at me. “You’re young,” she stated.
“I probably look older,” I said. “It feels that way to me, too.”
“No, you don’t look old. I just thought that with you moving across the country on your own and how you were able to have so many relationships, and when I compare that to what I’ve done—never mind. I think that we should start with obtaining your birth certificate.” She kept typing and asking questions, and there were only a few people in the library today so we had a lot of uninterrupted time.
“I’ll come in early tomorrow and finish anything left over,” she said when I asked if I was keeping her from doing the other parts of her job. “My main function here is to help patrons, like you.”
“I’m not really a patron,” I said. “I don’t have a library card.” You needed ID for that.
Cadence looked toward the window. “I’m not busy. We’ve hardly had anyone in here all week,” she said. “They’re all out enjoying the summer.”
It was true that the weather had been sunny and close to perfect. “A lot of people have to work,” I reminded her. “Most people.”
“Not Nolan, though,” she noted. “Is he home?”
“No,” I said. I had thought it was funny that he didn’t mind leaving a relative stranger in his house, but he didn’t seem to have a problem with me being there alone, with no eyes making sure that I wasn’t having parties or clearing out the furniture to sell. My sister had done both when my mom had left us together when we’d been younger. But a few days after he had brought me there from the hospital, I’d woken up and he’d been gone. There was a note on the kitchen table with a string of numbers and the words “this is the code for the door” but nothing else, like where he had headed or when he would be back. He didn’t owe me information or his presence, either, but I had sat at the kitchen table and wondered about him.
She was still staring outside, and she had started twirling. “Since you’re by yourself, maybe you’d want to do something with me,” she suggested. “We could meet somewhere besides the library. If you aren’t worried about running into anyone.”
I knew who she meant. Kolter’s mom had finally succeeded in bailing him out so he was around somewhere and I certainly didn’t want to see him. I thought that the chances were slim, though, because I couldn’t imagine that he and Cadence would frequent the same types of places.
But then she suggested something that surprised me. “We could go to a bar,” she said. Her eyes got big and she immediately went for another curl. “We could drink.”
