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He threw the booster onto the floor and buckled her into her car seat.
“Where are we going?” Dalia asked as he started the vehicle.
“To the supermarket and the pharmacy.”
An idea popped into his head. To fully break with the past, he needed to move out of his place, a fairly easy task considering he’d been renting a furnished apartment and had already given his notice to the landlord, explaining the place would be available by the end of December. Now, it would be even sooner.
All he had to do was go home and pack. He would arrange for a cleaning service to go in, empty the fridge and cupboards, and clean the place. He grinned. This might be a good time to do that. Beverly had spent the night, left in the morning, and then returned in the afternoon. According to her latest text, she’d just left again, and since she might come back tonight...
“But first, we’ll visit my apartment.”
Dalia frowned. “Do you have cookies?”
“I do. You can have them.”
“Yay!”
He drove straight to the neighborhood where he’d lived for the past three years. The low rent had suited his salary as a Pediatric Cardiology fellow. Last year, he’d started his first job as an attending physician. After he’d met Beverly, he hadn’t found the time to search for a better place.
As he veered into his street, he noticed Beverly’s car leaving his building. The last thing he needed was a screaming match in front of a three-year-old. He pulled up his hood, hoping she wouldn’t pay attention to the old, black Chevy with a little girl sticking her nose against the window.
Beverly passed him and turned right at the intersection, her usual route home. It was now or never. He pulled into the lot and parked his car at the back of the building. Carrying Dalia, he entered through the side door and climbed the two floors to his apartment. He unlocked the door, entered the apartment, and locked up behind him.
She hadn’t cleaned the kitchen. Leftover pizza lay on the counter next to a half a pot of cold coffee. Tyler tossed the pizza in the garbage can, took two boxes of cookies out of the cupboard, one butter cream, the other chocolate, and put them on the table.
“Here you go, pumpkin.” The pet name her mother had given her suited her. “Don’t make yourself sick. We’ll take these with us when we leave.”
“Okay.” She sat on a chair and drew the cookies closer to herself.
Swiftly, Tyler flung his suit bag on the bed and filled it with his three suits and buttoned-down shirts, then zippered it shut and set it on the floor. Since Dalia was busy with her cookies, he changed into jeans and a long-sleeved polo. Tossing his dirty scrubs into a plastic bag, his shoes and sneakers into another, and adding a zip-lock bag full of the rest of his toiletries, he filled the rest of his oversized carryon with his remaining clothes. Grabbing another plastic bag, he wrapped his bottle of scotch, another of Bailey’s Irish Cream, and a bottle of white wine before adding them to the bag. Since his laptop and shaving gear were already in his car trunk, he was good to go.
More comfortable in his casual clothes than in the scrubs he’d been wearing since last night, he called to Dalia.
“We’re done here, sweetie. Let’s go.”
He put the cookie boxes in a plastic bag and hung it on her arm.
After securing his garment bag to his suitcase, he checked the kitchen and grabbed the bag of garbage from the pail. Dragging his luggage with one hand and the bag of trash in the other, he ushered Dalia out of the apartment, locking the door behind them. After dropping the garbage down the chute, he reached for Dalia’s hand, and with his suitcase bouncing behind him, went down the stairs and out the side door once more. He packed his luggage into the trunk and opened the back door.
Dalia climbed onto her car seat, and he buckled her in.
Eager to leave the neighborhood before Beverly came back to check on him, he slid behind the wheel. They’d spent less than half an hour in the apartment, but on a cloudy December afternoon, the wintry sunset shrouded the street in an early darkness.
Starting the engine, he drove out of the parking lot and around to the front of the building in time to see Beverly pulling her car up to the curb. Damn, he’d expected he would have more time before she discovered he’d been and gone.
He kept driving, grateful for the gloomy sky that obscured his face and sighed with relief. She didn’t notice the old Chevy.
In the back, Dalia nibbled on her cookies and sang. Suddenly in a good mood, Tyler joined her. Beverly and his canceled wedding faded into the past, an unsavory past he was more than ready to forget.
