Memories of the Past

Glancing back into her rear-view mirror, she saw Arizona slipping away after only three days. She had anticipated that her time in Arizona would have been longer - the long deserted stretches of highway, the fast sprints in and out of the car during rest stop breaks because of the sweltering heat, the roach infested roadside motels she had pinched her pennies and begged her way into. 

But maybe it was because of these things that she had powered through the unsettling desert. Unlike the other cities she had slipped through during her 10 year journey, she hadn’t made any unplanned stops, at least not this time. Her circular road trip through the US had taken her through the supreme heat of Arizona four times and while on the other trips through she had forced herself to step out of the relative safety of her car, this time she didn’t see a point. 

She was getting bored of the monotony. The dull blue sky through the Dust Bowl, the cloudy grey sky through the Pacific Northwest, the grainy, weak sunlight of the American South, the blinding sun of the West Coast. The trains rolling beside her along long stretches of highway had excited her at first, now they were just another symptom of the road. 

Tonight she was heading into Nevada, intending on meeting an old friend in Vegas. This particular friend couldn’t really be called a friend - he had been begging for her to meet him in his den of iniquity for the past four rounds of her self imposed circular journey through the landscapes of the United States and she had been avoiding him as best as possible - but she couldn’t stay away for another round. 

When she rolled to a stop on a tiny scrap of a street in the most unsavory part of the Vegas suburbs, she was exhausted. She was getting tired of this game she had created for herself and the last place she wanted to be was visiting an old friend who was solely interested in seeing her under a false pretense of a late night exploration between the sheets of his dumpster scavenged mattress. 

To be honest, her biggest reason for agreeing to this stop along her route of torture was to beg for money. This particular friend - while living in a dump on the outskirts of one of the dirtiest cities she had stumbled upon on her ten year rolling migration - was secretly rich. He hid his wealth away in investment properties and in the well-managed vaults of Wall Street under the pretense of one day extracting it all and building a mansion on the beaches of the Bahamas. 

Jerome, or Jerry as his Vegas friends call him, was an undercover billionare - his OCD tendencies causing him to hide his wealth away until the unlikely day that he would save it all from its his security prison. But, while a miser for himself, Jerry was known to help a friend under the pretense of a loan. She was certain that he had amassed all the wealth simply for this purpose and never intended to take it as his own - it just wasn’t in his nature. 

She knocked tentatively on the door, wondering if he would even be there or would he be knocked out on the floor thanks to his insatiable cocaine addiction. While he kept his wealth in Wall Street vaults and investments, and in the pockets of friends, he had his own private stock for his illegal drug endeavors that every once and awhile he took to the extreme. 

After a few minutes of waiting, she heard a stumbling and the click of a lock on the other side of the door. Jerome, her oldfling, her childhood best friend, and her recently estranged and secluded billionaire acquaintance was staring back at her as if he had just seen a ghost. 

“Carrie?” His stormy eyes stared at her, wide and unbelieving. She gave an awkward wave and glanced down at her sneaker clad feet, fussing with the crack in the concrete of the stairs. 

“What are you doing here?” He finally asked, fidgeting with the deadbolt on the door, engaging it and disengaging it, causing the rust in the lock to squeak and complain. Carrie looked him over - he was in an unusual outfit, although she knew it was appropriate for the current character he was playing. Gone were the preppy clothes of their shared childhood days on the beaches of Cape Cod. Instead, he was wearing hole-dotted grey sweatpants with a pit-stained and yellowed white shirt. His perpetually mussy hair was replaced with a muss more like that of an unwashed beach bum, and the stench of alcohol and corn chips flooded out of every pore. 

“You asked me to come...I’ve been on a road trip for ten years, and you’ve been asking me to visit you. I thought that maybe three times would be the charm, but it turns out the fourth one is the unlikely winner.” She gave a tentative smile, trying not to breathe so as not to get the unsavory fumes of a perpetual bachelor living in the slums of Vegas imbedded in her lungs. 

“I don’t remember asking you to come. We lost touch a long time ago Carrie…” Behind him, a shadow fell across the narrow, grimy hallway. A slight, high-pitched female voice called out to him, “Jerry? What’s going on?” He turned around to confront the figure, a petite brunette wearing clean, well-fitted jeans and a cream colored v-neck. 

“It’s nothing, honey. Just an old friend stopping through Vegas and looking to say hi. She was just leaving however, she’s got a bit of a drive before she gets to where she’s staying.” Carrie knew this was a dismissal, and turned to go. She gave a small wave to the brunette and Jerry, who had wrapped his arm around her waist as he stood in the doorway watching her go. As she turned back around, she saw that she was retreating, and she dropped a small scrap of paper on the steps of the porch before continuing down to the relative safety of the only friend she’d had for the last ten years. 

Shut up in a crappy motel a few minutes outside of the suburbs Jerry had decided to call home, Carrie was feeling a little desperate. She was intending to use her relatively skimpy powers of seduction to get a couple thousand off of Jerry, for old-times sake, which would serve as a nest egg until she found a place to settle down and get a job. 

She turned on the motel’s tv, getting a grainy picture of a home improvement show. She turned up the sound and went to take a shower. As she pulled off her clothes, she heard her phone ring, a subtle chime buried beneath the layers she had shed in order to finally rinse the grime of the road off her skin. 

The number on the screen was unfamiliar, but she knew who it was as soon as she clicked the green button. A muffled voice came from the other end, hurried and frantic, “I know you need money, I could smell it on you. Raley doesn’t know I come from money - so I had to get you out of there. I plan on marrying her - she’s way too good for me, and I can’t let ghosts from my past ruin what I have now, no offense.” 

“I understand.” Carrie responded, smiling slightly into her phone. She was happy that her old friend had found someone. 

“Okay, good. Listen, you can have $5,000 bucks. I’ve heard through the grapevine about your situation and I’m sorry to hear it. I want you to settle down, get a good life. Fuck, you know what, I’ve got a couple cheap properties in SoCal, I’ll text you the address and code. Stay as long as you need, I’ll have the money wired into your account, call it 10 grand. I don’t really want to hear from you again, I hope everything works out.”

She gasped quietly to herself, muffling the receiver with her hand, “Of course, thank y…” 

“Save it. Good luck Care.” The phone clicked off. Carrie silently sunk to the floor of the crappy room, shocked by her good fortune. She knew she would be able to count on Jerry, but she had underestimated his need to purge the ghosts from his past. 

A few seconds later and her phone chimed with the address to Jerry’s place in SoCal. She was typing out a thank you message when her phone chimed again, No response. Good luck, don’t ruin this for me. 

The following morning, Carrie was on her way to SoCal. She’d been roughly four times, same as all the other places, but she’d spent her longest stint here - a period of two years in the beginning of her journey, when her accounts were still full. 

She had found a place in Santa Monica then - far too expensive and a real drain on her finances, but she hadn’t cared then. All she cared about was her mission, and who she would find on her way. It was safe to say that things hadn’t worked out the way she had hoped. 

Pulling into the address that Jerry had sent her, she realized his “cheap” property in California was a townhouse located on the beach in La Jolla. She punched in the code and brought her meager possessions - a beat up duffle bag half full of clothes and her water bottle - into the house. It was fully furnished - the kitchen stocked with pots and pans and the bedroom laid out with sheets. The whole placed smelled like cleaning fluid - a by product of the last renters to have taken advantage of Jerry’s quiet hospitality. 

For the first time since the last town she landed in for an extended period, Carrie took a shower in a full shower and dried off with soft, white, cotton towels, free from the harsh, scrubby, bleached consistency of towels in cheap roadside motels. 

She unpacked her belongings and turned on the TV.