He locked the front door, grinning as he walked over to answer my question.
Well, all right then.
3
BIANCA
M
om is going to be mad.
I repeat it to myself over and over. Rocking and swaying in the chair where my feet can’t touch the floor. It’s another rainy day in Seattle. The sun’s taking a nap and I want to as well. The diner is crowded, loud. Smells of strong coffee and sweet, sweet maple syrup jar my senses, repulsing and attracting me. A paper turkey on the wall reminds me of the Thanksgiving picture I drew for Mom, but have yet to give to her.
I want to go home.
Mom is going to be mad.
My dad doesn’t hear me, although he smiles and nods as if reading my thoughts.
Soon. We’ll go home soon,
his face reads.
His eyes are on me, but his ear is somewhere else— captive to the lips of someone not my mom.
Mom is going to be mad.
Rather than sitting in one of the bar chairs like me, he stands. He likes it here. The people like him too. My
mom says they like his hair, black and curly because he has Sicilian in him. I don’t know what that means. I just know it’s fluffy and shiny. I wish mine would shine, but that’s only when Mom puts grease in it.
My dad delivers bread in a big truck. I guess to this place too. The pretty lady behind the counter, the one with yellow hair and dirty plates in her hand, smiles as he speaks. She’s amazing. I don’t know how she holds all those plates.
Then she looks at me as she puts the plates down. My dad says something to her. She moves her hair, so different from mine, off her shoulders. She cracks a smile first; then I mimic her.
I think she’s nice.
“Honey, wake up! Look at me.”
“Huh? Why are you so loud?” I groaned. Tanner hovered over our bed, staring at me in an unusual show of concern. My head hurt and my body ached. Probably coming down with something, I thought. My PJ top wasn’t even buttoned correctly, one button off at every hole. My tall husband crouched as if to scoop me up in his arms. “What’s wrong?” I asked, sliding toward the center of the pillow-top mattress before he could attempt it.
“The dealership called me last night. They found your car by the river and had it towed in. I fell asleep at my desk, so I didn’t get the message until now. Lorenda said you were here, so I came right home.”
“Oh. That,” I calmly answered. I’d begun correcting my buttons. Habit. “I’m fine. You know I never drive well in bad weather.”
“Are you sure you don’t need a doctor? I could have one over within the hour.” He loved demonstrating his control of things. I’d seen that the day I first met him. The day he took control of my life.
“I’m fine, Tanner. Really.” As his intensity subsided, I grasped his hand. He sat down beside me. “Now . . . how bad is my car?”
“The shop said it’s totaled. At least it was at the end of its lease,” he lamely joked. He owned the dealership—actually, several of them.
“Wait.” His side of the bed was undisturbed. “You didn’t come home?”
“I’m sorry. I know I promised not to do that. We’ve had some recent employee issues that have me pulling out my hair.” His curly mane was intact, well-groomed, with just a hint of gray beginning to appear. “Besides, you were supposed to come by last night and get me.”
“You’re right. Well, you know how that turned out.”
“You’re joking. Definitely okay.”
“Told you.”
“Are you going by the shop today?”
My head was pounding. “No, I think the ladies around here will have to do without their shoes for one day.”
“Good for you,” he said, pretending to chuck me on the chin. “I don’t like you working anyway. So, how did you get home?”
“I flagged somebody down. A nice family,” I answered, not really knowing what had happened.
Tanner’s fears allayed, he excused himself to shower. He would take a quick power nap, then go back to his office to crack the whip. Honestly, the man never slowed.
Tanner Coleman was a self-made millionaire. The story had appeared in so many newspapers and magazines that I could recite it from memory. After completing college at North Carolina A&T, he lucked out and inherited his grandparents’ small-town fried-chicken business. In less time than he’d spent in school, he’d turned the single restaurant around, developed a blueprint, and sold franchises throughout North America. Of course, he’d diversified his holdings, investing in car dealerships and real estate to round it out. To say he was driven was an understatement. He was a man of many passions, as I’d come to learn in the five years since we’d married. Either please him or get categorized along with that which displeased him. Not somewhere you wanted to be. Me? I just wanted to be loved. I think that’s all I ever wanted since getting off that Greyhound from Seattle.
Fatigued, I longed to return to bed. It was time to get up, though. And somebody had some explaining to do.
As Tanner showered, I decided to use one of the spare baths. If I hadn’t, he would probably coax me to join him in spite of what he imagined to have been my ordeal. I grabbed a towel to wash my face. As I ran my hands under the running water, I waited for it to cool, imagining what Lorenda had cooked for breakfast downstairs. A big glass of orange juice and some wheat toast would do me fine right about now.
I was startled from my thoughts by a figure in the mirror—about my same height and build, but with much longer hair and those wild, fiery eyes.
“Oh!” I shrieked. “Don’t you know how to knock?”
“Did you tell him?” she blurted out before I could recover from jumping out of my skin.
“Damn it, Pumpkin! You scared the hell out of me!”
“Sorry,” she meagerly offered. “Did you tell him?”
“No. And I’m not. He thinks I was driving. He doesn’t know you’re here, and I’m not bringing you up. Not yet, at least.” I brought the cool, damp towel to my face, wishing my houseguest weren’t here. “That’s a touchy subject to begin with,” I continued.
“I hear ya, sis. He would flip if he knew I was visiting.”
“It’s a big house and he’s always at work, so I might get away with it.”
“Always at work? That’s not good.” She
tsk
ed. “You must not be fucking him right.”
“Pumpkin!”
“What? I’m just saying. I know how men are. Really.”
“Uh-huh,” I offered with a long roll of my eyes. She made me uncomfortable when she talked like this. It was that as well as her prior dealings with Tanner that left me with an ill feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Just shut up.”
“I’m only looking out for you, Bianca. If you’d like, I could teach you a few . . . tricks. Blow the tall fella’s mind.”
“Already causing problems.”
“That’s not me, sis. I’m here to solve problems.”
“Like my car, Pumpkin?”
She chuckled. “Oops. But you gotta admit some blame in that too. You should’ve never had me out there in your car in the first place. You know I don’t drive worth a shit.”
Pumpkin came beside me, flipping her hair and admiring herself in the mirror as I tried to finish wiping my face. She was so vain. I looked miserable and yet she looked ready for the club—her clothing way too revealing, as was her nature. “How much longer will you be here?”
“Not too long. Just long enough to take care of some things. You don’t mind, do ya?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Pumpkin smirked. “No. Not really.”
4
HENRY
T
he Scotch was releasing its hold, the corrupting genie retreating back into the bottle at the side of my bed. My broken finger ached almost as much as my throbbing head.
I awoke with questions I wasn’t prepared to truthfully answer. Was I going to rob a man at gun-point? Would I have killed him if he didn’t get with the program? And did I really pull a woman from a car? A woman like
that
? Those legs, that body. The things she stirred up in me. So wild and reckless. Crack dreams. Straight-up crack dreams. One certainty was that I was out of control.
I always was a risk taker. That’s why I succeeded, going beyond what was expected—my SATs in high school, summer school in college while holding down two part-times, one of which brought me to the attention of Tanner Coleman—the man. Out there on a wire was where I lived. Sometimes you fall off the wire . . . if you’re lucky. Other times, the wire can be used to hang you. To the average-average on the street, things looked steady, but the eyes were slowly rolling back, a faint breath escaping my lips.
The gambling was small at first, those random long shots seeming like pure, undiluted genius. One big hit and I was caught up, ignoring the losses that piled up one after another. If only the ball would’ve fallen this way or that. If only that player weren’t knocked out of the game with a concussion. Before I knew it, I was deep in debt, too arrogant to change my ways or lifestyle in spite of it. I kept after the elusive prize—that big payday that would right everything—but it never came. It was as if the world were conspiring to fuck me. Tanner Coleman’s firing was the last hard one with no Vaseline.
Sure, I was borrowing company funds to cover a bet, but I was going to put it back. I wasn’t a thief. The worrisome part was that perhaps I’d become something worse.
Thanks to somebody in the company, that was one wager that didn’t get covered. And I was left without the payment I’d promised. Broken promises, just like my finger and whatever else was coming up if I didn’t honor my obligations.
Worries spurred me to action. Ignoring the pain, I sat up.
Ten a.m. and
The Price Is Right
playing on my TV. The crowd was booing an old man who didn’t spin the wheel all the way around. So this was what morning felt like to the unemployed. At least I could grab a bowl of cereal before planning my next move. Maybe I’d scout out Tanner again at his office—one more go-round. The clock was ticking. Someone would be calling on me later. And not Pumpkin, whom I probably would never hear from again.
I sniffed my finger for confirmation. In the dried residue, I detected faint traces of her treasured offerings. Thoughts of her were a danger akin to being out on that wire again. I should’ve never let her get out of my car.
A noise from my kitchen broke me from my yawn. It was a cabinet closing. This place didn’t have roaches, and none of my acquaintances had a key. As poor of thought as I’d been, I knew I’d locked my door when I came in. Not sure where I’d dropped my gun or what I would do, I crept toward the sound, ready for a confrontation.
Feet resting atop my dining table as if it were a piece of furniture from the Layaway Depot, he slurped milk from my bowl. “You’re out of cereal,” Kash joked, as if I were still his friend from high school. He dropped the empty box onto the kitchen floor. I felt my stomach tighten, a familiar mechanism, considering the pain I equated with him. I turned and darted.
Run
, was all my instincts commanded me to do.
Those instincts led me right into the fist of Lupe, his muscle, who had been silently standing behind me the whole time.
My body thumped onto the hardwood floor, where his big-ass foot came to rest on my chest. I struggled to catch my breath.
“I know, I know. I’m early. But when I didn’t hear from you, I got
concerned
,” Kash offered as he joined Lupe in the view from above. Both of them equally large, they were matching mounds of chocolate and vanilla. I’d known Kash since puberty, back when neither one of us was getting any action. Back then his nickname came from someone teasing about his taste for black attire, asking him one day, “Who do you think you are? Johnny Cash?” He still hung with a shady crowd, but by a simple change in the first letter and by virtue of the money now flowing through his hands courtesy of those who shared my addiction, he’d claimed the joke as his own. Kash— the man with the answer for all your vices.