Scruffy Buttons

by Chris Castle

     "Stan? Oh Stan. Something awful's happened. I’m at Shelly’s. Can you come over?"
     This was something new. Something that was unsettling and exciting at the same time. Maybe something had happened to Shelly. Or that asshole Richard. Maybe they would be interviewed in the papers by morning.
     "I’ll be right over," he said.
     They’d agreed to look in on Shelly’s flat while she went away for two weeks to the beach. He didn’t want to but Jen insisted. She and Shelly had been friends since Jenny broke up with the guy before, which goes back through a stack of calendars. He and Jen had met in a dance club, one of those swing places where everyone learns how to dance like in the old black and white movies. Stan loved those places; he really dug it. In his heart he’d always wanted to be like the classics from the fifties, who could face down the rats and seduce the girls at the end of a hard night’s drinking. It reminded him of watching all the oldies at the foot of his dad’s bed, eating sweets as his old man smoked through a carton of unfiltered cigarettes and never stopped smiling. That’s what being happy is, he thought.
     So anyway, this house-sitting affair. They had to check in every day, once at lunch and once in the evening. They rotated the days. Sometimes she would cut out of the hospital on her break and miss eating altogether. Sometimes he would climb inside their place to check to see if the microwave was still gathering dust in the corner. He had wanted to stay the night there every couple of days but she’d refused. Up until the phone call he’d completely forgotten about even checking in tonight, seeing as how they were coming back in the morning.
     One night he had a dream that the place had been torched. Not in the way it happens in real life, where the fire builds and smoke gathers and heat slowly crawls to each inch of the place. This was a disaster movie. Burning beams tumbled to the floor; flames roared and licked the ceilings, the real deal. The flames were red dragon tongues and the tips were a hundred wasps gathered at the tip. But the strange thing was that when he walked through the place he didn’t panic. In the dream he walked past the burning walls as if they were part of an amusement arcade that could not hurt him. Jenny was there too and she walked by his side, holding his hand. The two of them somehow made their way through the hallways as if they had all the time in the world.
     By the time he’d reached the stairs he could see Jen’s outline in the window behind the thin lace curtains. In silhouette she moved like an older woman would, stopping and starting. Then she seemed much younger, biting her nails and throwing her hands back and forward the way she did when she was trying to pull the answer to a problem out of thin air. He waited on the steps to watch to see what she would do next. He wondered how anxiety could make people age and then act like a child within seconds. It was then she saw him looking at her, and waved her hands at him to hurry up. He couldn’t help but laugh as he made his way up. She looked like a kid who’ d just shook her fingers out the cookie jar and smashed the whole damn thing into a million pieces. He loved her most when she was in that mode, frantic and excited, like when they packed for a holiday at a few hours notice.
     Stan took the stairs two at a time. When he hit the last steps he waited for a few seconds. Before he knocked on the door, he breathed in, once, twice. He wondered why he felt on edge all over again. He thought how strange it felt that he had to knock on the door of a place when his girlfriend was inside.
     He looked at the door. The grain of the wood was thick and deep and he could see the lines that made up the beams. He thought he saw scratch marks along one beam. Had Shelly and Rich come to blows on this doorway? Had they slapped and scratched and tore each other half to pieces in secret? Suddenly he wanted to know all that went on between them. How they slept at night, had sex; how they sat when they settled down for dinner. All of it. He was so lost in the scratch marks that when the door swung open, he actually found himself jumping back.
     They stood facing each other. Jen—petite, with black hair, dark eyes, dark lipstick—whose skin was as pale as any he’d ever seen. Jen who had bitten his lip and drawn blood the first night they had stayed together. Who now stood looking up and into his eyes, the tears dried and marking her cheek in long thin shards all the way to her jawbone.
     They didn’t say anything. Instead, she stood in the doorway and looked at him. She waited for him to say something, ask questions. He waited until he could bare it no more and just reached forward and gave her a hug. When he came away from it, surprised by the force and the need he felt as they held each other, she whispered to him to come inside. He took her hand and followed her in.
     The first thing he noticed was nothing at all. Exactly that. He walked through the door and into a bare room. He had been here the day before last. He had sat in the big fat leather chair that had been positioned in the middle of the room. He had put his face against the cool glass of the dining table. He had poured drinks from the decanter and rested the ashtray against his stomach in the hours that he’d spent there on and off for the last two weeks. And now he walked into a long flat expanse of white walls and nothing else. For a second it hurt his eyes, being faced with the glare of the framework with nothing to distract his eyes. He swayed from one foot to the other as he tried to refocus "They’ve taken everything. Even the carpet. Look." She pointed to the far corner. There were a few nails pointing straight up at funny angles. "They even rolled the carpet out and took that as well. They took us to the cleaners."
     Stan pulled his glasses from his face and rubbed his eyes. We, he thought, have not been taken to the cleaners. He tried to say the right words but they were all jumbled up and started to slide. He looked to sit down and realised he couldn’t. Instead he folded his arms tightly to his chest and tried to make sense of what was laid out before of him. It felt as if he was walking into a waiting room. For a long moment he waited to be led someplace else, or be told what he was there for.
     "Kitchen’s been emptied out. The bedroom’s still got the bed and that’s it. Everything else is gone. What are we going to do, Stan? "