That Sexy Librarian and Me

48th

                 forty eight hours

to save a life

As it happens, there was a blizzard going that very day. An unexpected one, especially for the month of July, but the rain was pelting hard and the winds were fast and unpredictable. Of all the damned days, Remy had to pick this one to be out on the streets. Of all the damned—

“Hey buddy!”

Remy pretended it wasn’t an old man wearing a suede suit calling him.

“You, with the pretentious Armani suit!”

Remy had to turn at him at that. Whether or not he was standing outside a broken down homeless shelter, he was most definitely not wearing an Armani suit. He could barely afford Armani, in any case. “Yeah?” he called out angrily. “What’s it to you?”

“I’m short on hands tonight,” the man yelled. “Come in and help a man out.”

Remy wanted to fuss about this and that. This was going to be about how his mother had been on his ass about finding a job, and that about how this was the only interview he’d thought about and worried over. The weather hadn’t helped one bit, and John, McCain and Lawrence was the one firm he’d thought he’d fit right in with. He tried his phone but he had no reception. Blasted rain, blasted day. Blasted decade, Remy thought darkly.

“Sure,” he responded as he walked to the dimly lit door. “What’ll I lose?”

People were everywhere. Remy couldn’t believe how many people were cramped into this small wagon sized shelter.

“Help me lay these out, will ya?”

Remy said nothing. Instead, he dropped his blazer and file on the ground and got to work. After what felt like a million mattresses and some thousand servings of bland tasting soup, Remy settled down next to the old man.

“You look young,” he told Remy. “Of a reasonable age. What’re you doing out here?”

Remy didn’t want to admit he’d lost his way, had himself a flat and decided to walk through whichever street his phone decided to tell him to go. “I was in the neighbourhood.”

“I see.”

“I’m Remy,”

“Glad to meet you,” he told him with a smile. “The name’s Grizzly.”

“Like the bears?”

“Like Grizzwald Johnson.”

“The pianist. I’ve seen you by the club,” Remy observed his old face and beard, then spoke. “What’re you doing here?”

He looked around the shelter and pulled out what turned out to be a pack of cigarettes. “What is any of us doing here, Remy?”

They didn’t speak for the next hour or so. Occasionally, a child would pass by to observe Remy closely. When the rain sounded like it wasn’t angry and out for blood, Remy started looking for his coat.

“Over here,” a woman’s voice came. “Chelsea, we have to give the man his coat back.”

Chelsea, as it turned out, was an ordinary girl, except for the missing limb and eye. She has an adorable smile on her face as she told him, “It’s very clean.”

Remy took a deep breath before crouching over the family of two and covering them up. “You look nice in it, nice and clean.”

Chelsea didn’t fuss over thanking him or anything, but her mother nodded at him.

“You live here, then?” Remy asked silently as the little girl fell asleep.

“Here and there.”

“Where’s there?”

“It was an old apartment by the ocean,” she looked distraught as the dim light fell on her ice blue eyes, lighting them up with something more than anger. “We were evicted.”

“Didn’t have enough to pay the rent?”

“Don’t think rent had anything to do with it, boy.”

So in a corner Remy sat, angry and upset with the world, wondering why he thought of his small studio apartment and got the feeling that he was luckier than every single person here. He would call his mother, he decided, just as midnight came and went. Hell, he’d even call his ungrateful bastard of a father. A new day had come, dark and dredgy. A new day, and already he was one blazer lesser. To think that was his only good suit.

“Street law doesn’t work like them preppy law schoolers up there, Remy,” Grizzly told him over a cup of coffee over at campus, right near home. Funny how home didn’t feel as comfortable now, not with what he’d witnessed the previous night. Something told him that this wasn’t the first night he’d lose sleep.

“Do you know someone or not?”

“I might know a woman,” the old beard finally offered. “But don’t think it’ll be any help. She likes to throw her weight around.”

Remy would have told him about all the women he knew that liked to throw their weight around, starting with his psycho analyzing mother.

Something close to one in the night, after two days of wearing the same clothes and eating the same soup, Remy walked into his studio and found the need to hear Athenia’s voice. Of course, when it mattered, she’d decide to ignore his calls. Angrily, he made his way to the couch and slept there for half of the night. Then, when his back revolted against his brazen decisions, he made his way to the bed and slept there.

To think thousands of people slept on hardwood floors made his mind think back to the work he had waiting for him over by the couch. Switching on the light, thinking of Athenia as he brushed his teeth, and thinking of how proud she’d be to see that he’d given up precious sleep to do something made him happier than he could ever admit.

Athenia and him wouldn’t speak exactly for a week, and by then Maddie returned from honeymoon and his mother would be more than proud of the man he wanted to become. He’d chosen his path, his career, his dream. It wasn’t something his father understood, not while he tried to explain it over the phone, but what did his father know?

What did anyone know when it came to dreams?