Falling Down The Stairs

Chapter Six

Her life had been a mess. She had bar-hopped and job-hopped and ended up on couches. Sarah would sign a lease, and never pay rent, and just leave it all behind. For five years, she took and she took and she took and she kept running; from a failed marriage, from a disappointing childhood, and from herself. If she let herself stop, or if she thought about things for too long, she would realize the truth. And that was unacceptable.

Until she met her mentor. Until he gently lifted her head off the bar, and off the beer she was slumped over, and moved her to a booth, where he covered her with his jacket. When she awoke, warm and comfortable for the first time in months, she had assumed he was coming onto her. But, no, it was much worse -- he felt sorry for her.

"Things haven't gone my way," she said, that night, and so many nights after.

"Work the problem," he said, that night, and so, so, so many nights after.

When Sarah woke up, the night after Hannah had rejected her once again, the sun was shining, and her mentor was on her mind. She repeated his mantra -- "work the problem" over and over again, as she took a shower she didn't want to take, and got dressed in clothes when she would've rather been in pajamas, and got in her car when all she really, really wanted was to go back to bed.

She had a thin idea of where to start. The man she had chased away from the house had been wearing glasses, and she was pretty sure that he was also the man who did the paint-matching and application in the house. So, she would go to all the places around town, and look for a man who wore glasses and worked in paint.

Thin, and probably a waste of time. But, she was out of other ideas, and her head hurt, so this was going to be her course of action. She would start first at local shops; more likely, she thought, to have someone who really cared about paint and craft than big box hardware stores. If she struck out there, she would go there next.

She only had two days left, so she was going to have to break out some of her tricks, too. Sarah popped open her glove box and took out a variety of fake badges; none of them were illegal, per se (all of them said PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR on the shield, in tiny letters) and she always introduced herself as 'investigator', so she wasn't breaking the law so much as passing it in a turn lane. Which, she conceded, was breaking the law, but only in an annoying way. Sarah shook her head to clear it. She wasn't making any sense.

Sarah pulled over to the side of the road and turned her flashers on. She pulled up the internet and quickly searched for 'local boutique paint shops' and resisted the urges to add a question mark and also chuck her phone through her closed fucking car window. What the fuck else, she thought, do you call paint shops that care or whatever the fuck. Boutique. Her father used to talk about buying boutique golf clubs instead of from the big brands. What the fuck was anyone ever talking about? Her phone rang and it was Marcus and she ignored it.

Four shops, according to her quick internet search, and she punched in the address to the closest and got back on the road. She tossed her phone on the passenger side floor mat and rolled down the window. She hung her left hand loosely in the soft-and-then-sharp wind, and she imagined her phone bouncing along the pavement and crunching into a million pieces, that she could then back up and retrieve and beat to death with a gun.

Nick Paints, the closest shop, was in the town square. She had not been to the town square yet, and she loved town squares, and thinking about loving this one set her teeth on edge. She gritted those teeth and kept her head as she pulled into the main square. It was ringed by four sets of buildings -- one gigantic former courthouse, now a set of apartments, and three long, conjoined business strips. In another context, Sarah would describe them as a strip mall, but there was no anchor grocery store. Is that what made a strip mall, Sarah wondered. She would call the ones she saw in Florida strip malls, despite not having an anchor grocery store. Please shut the fuck up, she thought and then said aloud.