Sorry, We Didn’t Make Enough For Company
“Youth Gone Wild” Skid Row
The office, back in the room where Gretchen and I lived, had a mini kitchen. The oven worked but the stovetop didn’t. So I stood at a hot plate stirring the SpaghettiOs with meatballs in the one pot that we owned, with one of the two spoons we owned. As soon as the pot’s contents were hot enough I was going to pore it equally (more or less) into the two bowls we owned. We also owned one pan, a pizza pan for oven stuff, two plates, two forks, and a butter knife we’d pass back and forth to one another. The only glasses we owned were tumblers for booze.
Behind me, I heard the simulated gunfire. “I thought you were going to play Gears of War III.”
“I was,” she replied distractedly.
“That sounds like a Covenant plasma rifle.”
“Yeah.” You could hear the focus in her voice.
I watched the SpaghettiOs start to bubble again so I stirred it. “Why the plasma rifle?”
“I’m saving my energy sword.”
“So you’re playing the Arbiter?”
“Yep.”
“So why are you playing Halo 2 as opposed to Gears of War III?” I asked as I reached up into the cabinet and pulled down both of our bowls. One was a cobalt blue fiesta ware, the other was plain Coronet white. I set them down and went back to give the pot another stir.
“I don’t think I can emotionally handle Gears right now.” There was a wavering in her voice that made me want to walk over and hug her. But I also didn’t want the SpaghettiOs to get stuck to the side of the pot, so I kept stirring. “How’s dinner?”
“Just about done.”
I smiled as I heard her call frag out then heard the sound of a plasma grenade exploding from the game. As capable as Gretchen was and how handy she could be in a scrap, it was easy to forget that she wasn’t a trained soldier. There were things in a fight she was extremely lacking at training and experience.
Two months ago we’d ended up on the unsafe end of a scrap with a couple of dock workers. So I ended up making entry into a room unbeknownst of the fact that Gretchen had tossed in our last flash-bang seconds before. I was practically standing on it when it went off and I got knocked the fuck out. So since then, we’d been working together to get her trained in calling frag out if you were tossing a grenade or flash out if you were lobbing a banger. In movies, people would just holler grenade, but that was reserved for when grenades were coming at you.
I didn’t hold a grudge about her rattling my noggin with the flash-bang because I knew she felt bad about enough on her own so there was really no reason for me to hold a grudge.
“So, why don’t you think you can handle Gears right now?” I asked as I gave the pot one last scraping stir.
“I’m not ready for the Dom scene.” I could hear the pain in her voice. The problem with rereading a book, rewatching a movie, replaying a video game is you know what’s coming and you can’t change it, no matter how much you want it to change. It leaves you with a degree of mental impotence without any kind of mental Viagra that can cure it. So instead of dealing with the emotion of the truly Epic Dom scene in Gears III, Gretchen had tossed in Halo 2. It made sense, and I respected it.
I turned the hotplate off and poured and spooned SpaghettiOs with meatballs into the two bowls. It poured more or less evenly between the two. I might have had one or two more meatballs than her, but I also had six or seven inches and sixteen years on her, too. I picked up the bowls and started walking to the bed where it was pushed against the windowed wall. I half-hopped half-plopped next to her and we used it as a place to sit since we’d ditched the old pull-out couch. I handed her the fiesta ware bowl and a sleeve of saltine crackers. The problem with saltines was you couldn’t seem to buy the single sleeve anymore, you had to buy the whole box of four. The bad news was we tended to be wasteful or they’d go stale before they could all be eaten. The good news was we each got our own sleeve and didn’t have to share.
Gretchen and I shared our thoughts, our bed, our bodies, our care, and cheesy enough, our love; but sharing food was beyond a goddamned line that we refused to freaking cross. She’d have her plate, I’d have mine, and never the two did meet.
“Did you get me a spoon?” she asked as she paused the game and sat the controller down.
“Shit.”
She smiled. “I got it.” She hopped up and sauntered across the room and came back with the other spoon. I was using the one out of the pot. “Thanks for cooking.” She took a spoonful as she walked back to the bed.
Using a hand-powered can opener to open two cans of SpaghettiOs with meatballs, dumping and scraping them in the pot, heating it up, and putting in bowls was our equivalent of “home cooking.” The secret was when you turned the can upside down to use the can opener to pop a hole in the bottom of the can so air could equalize and most of the SpaghettiOs and meatballs simply slide out into the pot. That trick saved me literal seconds of spoon-scraping time. Life is short.
I used my spoon to push a meatball and some SpaghettiOs onto half a cracker. Then I just popped the whole cracker in my mouth as Gretchen sat back next to me. I proceeded to use crackers as an edible utensil whereas Gretchen pushed crackers into the SpaghettiOs along the edge of the bowl letting the cracker get mostly soggy in the sauce before alternating between two spoonfuls then one cracker.
I was about halfway through my bowl when I heard a knock on the outer office door. I looked to Gretchen, she held her fist up. I sighed and did the same, we pumped them three times then she threw paper and I threw rock. She laughed and wrapped her hand around my fist and gave it a squeeze. I hopped up taking my bowl and a couple of crackers with me and headed out into the outer office and then opened the door into the hall.
He stood there in the dark blue three-piece suit with the light blue shirt, dark tie that was either a dark blue or a black—I couldn’t tell—and the tan trench coat George Smiley had worn in several scenes in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. His smile was genuine and infectious. He glanced at the bowl in my hand. “Catch you at a bad time?”
I finished chewing and swallowed. “I could think of worse ones.”
His smile broadened. “I was hoping you’d have trousers on. May I come in?”
I stood to the side and called out. “Hey, Gretchen, Lucifer is here!”
I heard her feet hit the floor and come running into the outer office. “Lucifer. God, I’ve missed you.” She set her bowl on my desk and ran over, giving him a hug then blushing. “Sorry about the God thing.”
He gave her a squeeze. “It’s all right, I’m used to that kind of thing. I think if either one of us got offended easily we wouldn’t associate with Nick.”
Gretchen laughed, and even though it was at my expense it wasn’t mean.
Uncle Lew looked at the bowl, then me. “I really didn’t mean to bother you during dinner.
I shrugged. “We had a decent day and thought we’d celebrate.”
He laughed. “This is why I like you, Nick.”
I shot him a confused look.
“That bowl, this evening, is why Heaven is afraid of you and those under me don’t understand you.” Lucifer took his coat off and hung it on the coat stand by the door. “You’re incorruptible because deep down you’re content.”
Gretchen seemed to chew on that a minute while I finished my bowl and set it on the desk next to Gretchen’s. “Nick wants things,” Gretchen offered in my defense.
Lucifer smiled that ever-charming smile that seemed to light up whole rooms. “Such as?”
Gretchen started holding up a finger with each point on the list she was pulling from thin air. “Mel Gibson to get his older-guy-action-movie comeback. George Miller to finish his wasteland trilogy before he dies. Donald Glover to reboot Beverly Hills Cop. After that, for Hollywood to stop rebooting crap. A true-to-the-novel Starship Troopers movie.” She held up her other hand to keep counting. “Libertarians to get their shit together, even though he knows they won’t because they’re Libertarians. First-class airfare for a two-week butler package vacation at Sandals Montego Bay, Jamaica—”
“Wait…how do you know about that?” I interrupted.
She giggled and shrugged. “I’ve been working as a private investigator for the past six months?” That got a laugh out of Lucifer.
She shook her head a bit, causing her hair to wave. “No, seriously. Since you don’t look at a lot of internet porn—well, embarrassing porn anyway—you never clear your browser history.”
Lucifer chuckled knowingly then looked at me. “Point is, neither side really has anything you want they can give. Meaning they can’t get leverage on you, Nick. You seem to be a man with nothing to gain and nothing to lose, and that’s a man who can’t be controlled.”
I chewed on the way he phrased that, like he knew Gabrielle had been by and I’d asked for Jammer back. Jammer wasn’t coming back, neither side could, or would, do that. Jokers to the left of me, poets to the right, I guess.
“You are the distillation,” Lucifer continued slowly, making sure I could keep up, “of nothing to gain, and nothing to lose. Thus, you’re the big variable in everyone’s equation.”
“That a good or bad thing?”
His smile dimmed slightly. I might not have noticed had I not known him my entire life. “It’s neither good nor bad. It simply is what it is.”
There was a tonal shift in the room and we all felt it.
“So what can we do for you, Lucifer?” Gretchen asked cautiously as she walked around and sat at her desk the way she did at client meetings.
Lucifer knowingly looked to me. “So, I hear you’ve had a conversation with Baalberieth?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t want to nod, but I think I did a little. “Do we have an easier name to call him?”
Lucifer held his hands out placatingly. “He told you to call him Uncle Bear, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, I’m not doing that.”
Lucifer laughed. “Understandable, and I don’t blame you on that account.”
“So,” I said cautiously. It’s like we were all dancing around a hat with no idea what was under it. “Sorry we didn’t make enough SpaghettiOs.”
For an instant Lucifer laughed and I couldn’t help but think of him as Uncle Lew, my dead mom’s big brother. He put his hands on his knees and stood from the chair. His gaze bounced between Gretchen and myself. “I think we both know I didn’t come here for dinner. But me coming here was easier than asking you out to Sheol House.”
“Easier for us, anyway.” Gretchen nodded in agreement. “But one is definitely nicer than the other.”
“I humbly accept the compliment.” Lucifer’s smile was anything but humble.
“So what do you need, Lucifer? Why did you come on out this way in the first place?”
Lucifer smiled. It was sad and longing, but it was a smile. “We need to talk.”