Page 23 of The Progressions

Those comments hadn’t helped, either. “We can’t do anything about it, so there’s no use in worrying. Do you want to see what I did in your condo today?”

“You really don’t care?” Tyler asked me. “You really don’t mind that she was slandering you for no reason?”

“I said that I don’t like it and I’ll tell your girlfriend the same thing when I see her.” I thought of how she’d ignored me when I’d asked her to get the moving trucks out of the parking lot. “It probably won’t make any difference if I get mad and yell, and I doubt she’ll apologize.” I wanted to take her fur hat and smack her with it, but what was the point? “You know, I’m sorry, and I don’t have a problem saying it.”

“What are you sorry for? Posing with me?”

“No, that was very a normal thing to do. I like that picture,” I said. “It just seems to suck that you have to deal with this when you’re starting a new season with a new team, although it also seems like you enjoy being a pot-stirrer yourself. You know, how you caused problems with the rest of the Woodsmen,” I reminded him, and he started to glower again. “Never mind. Let’s get out of here and go to your condo. It’s too hot in this office.”

We left together and I locked the door. Despite saying that I wasn’t worried about Shay Galton’s angry followers, I did glance around quickly to make sure that the parking lot was empty.“You don’t actually think they’d come after me in person, right?” I asked.

His answer wasn’t negative at all and it wasn’t reassuring. “They’re looking for her approval,” he told me. “They’re pretty into her. She has one guy who thinks they’re married.”

“Oh, that’s scary,” I said.

“Yeah, she went and got a restraining order. But then she…” he said, and then stopped.

“What?”

“I agreed that she needed to take out the order against him. What did you do in the condo?” he asked me, and I fiddled with the lock.

“Ta-da!” I said as I flung open the door.

Tyler didn’t say anything. He walked inside and looked all around, though, turning his head and then turning his body in a circle to take it in. There were no more boxes, not even one. I’d cleaned from top to bottom today and then I’d rolled out rugs, hung some art on removable hooks and, with a dolly and a whole lot of difficulty, I’d put the furniture in place. There was now an appropriate number of tables, chairs, and couches.

He walked upstairs and I followed, and just as silently, he examined the three guest bedrooms that were fully furnished and the guest bathrooms that were also complete down to toilet paper on the rollers, hand soap, and towels hung up on the bars. We trooped the two flights to the basement where I’d done theleast, but I had managed to get his lighter-weight kettlebells down here, one at a time and by dragging instead of lifting them.

The main bedroom was the last place we visited. I’d had an actual mattress delivered this morning and they’d put it on one of the beds that Shay Galton had stolen from Tyler’s former home in California. I had an itemized list, along with pictures, of every piece of furniture from there and all the accessories, too. He could decide if he wanted to keep things, and then he could buy the stuff (I’d already bargained down the prices, but they still felt horrendously high). Whatever he didn’t want, I would ship back. That was also going to be horrendously expensive but I kept in mind his new sponsorship forSauf!, the energy drink from Germany. He could afford it, just like he could afford to pay me for all the work I’d completed in this condo. I’d put in a lot of hours and it had added up to a lovely sum.

But maybe what I’d done wasn’t right, because he still hadn’t spoken. The casket was still in here, and maybe that was the problem…just as I’d told Iva about her blow job situation, it was better to ask.

“Remember that I’m working for you, so if you don’t like it, let me know and I’ll fix it,” I said. If I hired more movers on his dime, I could even get the casket out. “You have to say something.”

He finally did. “Every night when I came here, I saw a difference,” he told me. “I could see how much you were getting done. Now, it’s pretty unbelievable. All that shit was overwhelming but you made it look like a real home.”

“Good,” I said, nodding. “I’m glad you feel that way. And just like in other real homes, there are a lot of bills to deal with. I have them all on the laptop—”

“I’ll look later,” he said. He went to the kitchen and checked the refrigerator, which I had restocked. I had been watching what he ate and keeping track of what he’d asked for, too, and now he was on a weekly grocery delivery with those items. They would bring it to my office so I could put it all away for him in here—if he wanted to keep me on the payroll, I would do that.

Now he took out a bottle of sparkling water, and he cut a lime and squeezed it with one of the kitchen tools he had. “Want some of this?” he asked me. I nodded, so he poured out two glasses. He’d already had a set of very nice ones, in three sizes and they all matched.

“Thank you,” I said as I took it. “I had to look up what that thing was.”

“A citrus reamer?”

I nodded. “In my house, we don’t ream enough to need a specific implement for it. You know, the stuff in your boxes was kind of strange.”

“Like kitchen tools you don’t use?”

“Yes, and also how it was packed,” I answered. “I could tell what had been boxed up by the movers because they used way too much paper and bubble wrap. I can’t even imagine what they charged you for all the materials, but I saved most of it in case we send things back to California, and I’ll pack it all myself. They did the accessories and furniture. And Shay Galton’s stuffwas jumbled, kind of thrown together.” Like the giant tangle of underwear. I had carefully washed all of it, just in case, and now it was put away in the ample closet I’d shown her on the first tour of this place.

“Her assistant probably did it for her, and that girl is lazy,” he explained.

“It wasn’t all like that, though. Everything for the kitchen was very orderly, very neat.”

“Yeah?”

“So was your personal stuff,” I continued, “all your clothes and gear. You said you didn’t have an assistant.”

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