Precious and Fragile Things (18 page)

“I
've been waiting for a girl like you…” Seth sings this loudly and off-key. He's had too much to drink. He's not charming when he's drunk. He might be charming all the rest of the time, but not when he's drunk. Or maybe it's her, maybe it's just that she doesn't like it.

A girl like you, Seth sings again, lifting his glass toward her.

Karaoke sounded like a good idea when she agreed to go along with a bunch of other people from the office and some of their friends, and some random strangers who'd ended up coming along. Gilly doesn't like to sing, not in public, anyway, and has been more than content to sit and watch.

Seth is a friend of her boss's wife. Gilly met him at a barbecue a few months ago, and he's shown up fairly often at group dates like these. He's always been nice. They have something in common, both of them Jews in a widely Christian area. He's handsome and funny, when he's not drinking and making an ass of himself singing in falsetto.

Tonight she was supposed to have a date with Joe, but he stood
her up. Well, he called to cancel. That wasn't any better. He thinks Gilly loves him, but she doesn't.

Later, though, she's glad Joe passed on the night. Gilly realizes Seth's not drunk. Sure, he's had a couple of beers, but it's not alcohol that gets him up there to sing and dance and make a fool of himself. He just doesn't care if people think he's a goofball.

She likes that about him, Gilly realizes, the third or maybe it's the fourth time they go out like that. She likes Seth. She offers him her number without thinking too much about it. Not a big deal, really. He'll call or he won't.

But Seth holds the number in his hand as though she's given him something precious. “I didn't think…”

Gilly's been laughing, having fun with friends. This didn't seem like something important until just now, but watching Seth look at her she understands it's all become very significant, indeed. “You didn't think what?”

“I didn't think a girl like you would go out with a guy like me. That's all.”

“What,” she says, laughing, “is a girl like me?”

Seth's answer is a kiss, soft and lingering.

He never does give her an answer other than that.

W
hatever had been bothering him the night before had left him. Gilly watched him carefully, trying not to let him know she was doing it. Todd might call himself dumb, but he noticed her scrutiny.

“I'm okay today,” he told her. “I'm not going to freak out on you or anything like that.”

“Whatever,” Gilly said as though she didn't really care. “Want to play some checkers?”

“Sure.” Todd got out the board and checkers from the armoire and put them on the coffee table in front of the woodstove.

They played three games, and Todd won every one. After the third victory, he lit a fresh cigarette and gave Gilly a sideways, thoughtful glance. She pretended not to notice as she set the board up again.

“How come you were letting me win?”

Gilly feigned ignorance. “I wasn't letting you win.”

He snorted. “Yeah, you were.”

Gilly forced herself to look offended, though he
had
caught her out. “Why would I do that?”

For once, Todd let the cigarette burn without smoking it. “You tell me.”

Gilly sighed. “I didn't want you to get upset again.”

“And you thought if I lost a stupid game of checkers, I'd get whacked-out again?” Todd's eyebrows disappeared behind his bangs and shook his head. “I'm a piece of work, I know, but I ain't that bad.”

Now she was on the defensive. “I just thought…”

“You do that for your kids? Let them win so they don't get upset?”

“Sometimes.” Gilly fiddled with the checkers.

“You think that helps them?”

“I don't think it hurts them,” Gilly said.

Todd rolled his neck on his shoulders, cracking it, and stretched out his impossibly long legs. “The world is shit, Gilly, and the sooner they learn that, the better off they'll be.”

Gilly thought of her sweet babies, her innocent darlings. “I don't agree.”

He fixed her with a look. “It's true.”

“If the world is such shit, like you say, then I want to protect them as long as I can. Keep them safe.” Gilly waved her hand over the checkerboard. “My kids are little, still. There's plenty of time for them to learn the world isn't always a happy place.”

He snorted. “They'll grow up thinking everything's got to go their way.”

“They will not.” She frowned at his casual dismissal of her parenting choices. “They'll grow up with self-confidence and security.”

“You going to let them win off you all the time?”

Gilly shook her head. “Of course not.”

“How old?” Todd crumpled his package of cigarettes, but didn't light another one. “Your kids, I mean.”

“Five and two.” Gilly closed her eyes briefly at the thought of them, and the sight of their faces in her mind had her smiling instead of crying.

“I was five when my mother…” He stopped himself. “When she died.”

Instant pity flooded Gilly. “I'm sorry.”

He shrugged it off, though clearly the memory wasn't dismissed. “Not your fault. What are their names?”

He was deliberately changing the topic, but Gilly let him. “Arwen and Gandy.”

Todd pulled a funny face. “Arwen and Gandy? What kind of names are those?”

Gilly had been asked that question so many times it could no longer offend. “They're names from Tolkein. Gandy's real name is Gandalf.”

“What's Toll-keen?”

“J.R.R. Tolkein,” Gilly explained. “He wrote
The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings.
Seth, my husband, he's really into the Middle Earth series.”

She thought he might laugh, but he only nodded. “Oh, yeah. I seen that movie.”

“They were books first.”

“Figures someone like you would name their kids after someone from a book.”

“Someone like me?” Gilly furrowed her brow at him. “You keep saying that. What does that mean?”

“You know.” Todd began stacking the small wooden disks
with swift and efficient movements, making a tower. “Smart. High-class. Rich.”

Gilly shook her head, though his assessment of her was complimentary. “Oh, God. No, Todd.”

He looked at her from beneath the fringe of bangs and grabbed her hand. He turned it over so that her engagement ring glittered. “Looks pretty high-class to me. And you must've been smart to catch a man who could buy a rock like that.”

“This ring was my grandmother's.” Gilly took her hand away and rolled the diamond with the back of her finger. “She brought it with her when her family fled Europe to escape the Nazis.”

Todd tapped the pile he'd made, and the checkers scattered across the board. “You mean like Anne Frank? See, that's a book, too. I had to read it in school.”

“That's not just a book. It was real,” Gilly said. “And Anne Frank did not escape.”

Suddenly, uncomfortably, she was forcibly reminded of her situation. She could see in Todd's eyes that he, too, had not missed the parallel. He cleared his throat.

“That was different,” he said.

“Yeah.” She refused to look at him. On her finger, the diamond winked. “Anne Frank was hidden away to save her life. It was completely different than this.”

“Gilly…” His voice trailed off.

She shrugged, mimicking him. Gilly picked up the checkers and replaced them, snapping the small wooden pieces onto the board with firm gestures. “Let's play again.”

This time, she won.

S
he didn't try to lose any more games. Sometimes she won and sometimes she lost, but victory or defeat were fair results. At least Uncle Bill had stocked the cabin with plenty of board games and decks of cards. They wouldn't lack for that form of entertainment.

“What did you plan to do here all by yourself?” Gilly asked as they set up the board for another game, this time Monopoly.

Todd picked out the little silver shoe he claimed gave him good luck and set it on Go. “Nothing.”

“What do you mean nothing? How can you do nothing? What does that even mean?” Gilly dealt the money and laid out the property cards.

Todd gave her fierce look. “I came up here to be by myself…and do nothing.”

Gilly persisted, her curiosity piqued. “There's no TV, no DVD, no internet….”

“Didn't have any of that anyway.”

She grimaced. “How could you live without internet?”

Some days, the internet was her sole adult entertainment. The television ran constantly on the kiddie channels during the day and at night she was often too tired to watch any more than an hour of whatever reality TV show Seth had chosen before falling asleep. On the worst days she had a few minutes here and there to check her email, maybe chat online with a friend. On the best days she wasted hours surfing sites, looking at photos with funny captions, watching videos of people falling down.

“I didn't have a computer. Besides, online's for porn and shopping,” Todd said succinctly. “I can buy a skin mag cheaper, and I don't shop.”

Gilly gaped. “I don't look at porn!”

Todd rolled his eyes.

“I don't!”

“Everyone looks at porn.” He shrugged. “Anyone who says they've never looked at porn is full of shit.”

Gilly's mouth worked on a reply that came out stuttering with affront. “I don't look at porn.”

“Never once?” Todd leaned back in his chair, tipping it again. He looked her up and down, and under his scrutiny Gilly's cheeks heated, even though she was telling the truth. “Not even one time?”

“No!” She shook her head. “First of all, my kids are with me almost all the time. I can't have them looking at something like that. It's my job as their mother to make sure they don't see anything like that. My daughter uses the computer to play games. I have parental controls to block all that stuff.”

“Yeah? What about your husband? I bet he looks at porn.”

“Seth has his own laptop,” Gilly said stiffly. “I don't think he looks at porn.”

“Even if he doesn't talk about it, he's got a dick, right? Then he looks at porn. I guarantee it.” Todd closed his fist on air and jerked it. “Nothing to be scared of.”

Gilly rolled the dice and moved her piece, the top hat, five spaces to land on her own property. “I'm not scared of it. If he looks at porn, I don't know about it, okay? And that's the way I'd like to keep it.”

She couldn't keep her lip from curling with distaste at the idea of her husband masturbating to video clips of huge-breasted, spread-eagled women in trashy shoes. Todd laughed and took his turn, also landing on one of her properties. Gilly collected his money without hesitation or remorse.

“So, you shop, then.”

Gilly straightened a row of houses on the property closest to her, thinking about buying a hotel the next time around. “Hmm?”

“You don't watch porn. You must shop.”

She laughed. “You think I have so much money I can shop all day?”

“Don't you?”

To him, she realized, it must seem like it. The engagement ring. The truck, now totaled. The money from the ATM. He didn't know they ate rice and beans so often because it was worth it to her to sacrifice fancy, gourmet meals to spend a week at the beach in a house nicer than the one they lived in full-time. Todd didn't know how some months the choice between dinner and a movie lost to a pair of shoes for Arwen, or about the number of payments Gilly still had to make on her mother's medical bills that had gone uncovered by insurance. He didn't know about the money she squirreled away every
month against a time when something might unexpectedly break or get lost, how she hoarded paper towels and toilet paper and ramen noodles against the impending apocalypse.

“You know it's not money that makes a person rich, Todd.”

“Oh, fuck, here we go with the Chinese fortune cookie shit.”

“F—” she began and stopped herself.

Todd laughed. “Go ahead and say it. You know you want to. Fuck you, fuck me. Fuck everyone.”

She flipped him off, not giving him the satisfaction of saying it aloud. “I don't have enough money to spend all day shopping online. Okay?”

“So, you don't shop. You don't watch porn. What do you do? Connex?” Todd made air quotes around the term and rolled his eyes again.

“Sometimes.”

“Lame.” He snorted.

Gilly bristled. “What do you know about it, if you don't have one?”

“I don't,” Todd said off handedly, “have anyone to Connex with.”

“What about all your alleged friends?”

“They don't do lame shit like that. They're too busy committing felonies,” he said with a straight face.

She thought he might be kidding but this time couldn't really be sure. “Nice.”

He laughed. “Connex sucks.”

“How can you say it sucks if you've never done it?” Gilly had nearly five hundred “friends” on Connex and knew maybe about a third of them personally.

“I don't want to do it. Have a bunch of friends—” again
with the air quotes “—reading about when I take a dump and how many times a day I jerk off?”

“You're so crude,” she said, though truthfully that was pretty close to what a lot of the people on her list did status updates about.

He made a jerking-off motion with curled fingers. “Dear Connex, today I shot my load four times. I wanted to try for five, but I ran out of lube.”

“Todd.”

He laughed again. “Yeah, really. People don't give a shit about that stuff. What's the point?”

“To connect with people who share similar interests. It's why they called it Connex.” Gilly had no idea why she was defending a website she thought was sort of stupid, too.

“I don't have similar interests to anyone.”

“I'm not surprised.”

Todd blinked. Then grinned. “You're such a bitch.”

Gilly wasn't insulted this time; he'd sounded almost fond. “It's called social networking for a reason. To be social. I stay home with my kids all day long. If I didn't do something online, talk to people, I'd go…”

“Crazy?” he prompted after half a minute when she stalled.

“Yes. I'd go crazy.” Gilly fussed with her houses again.

She thought of the sound of muffled sobs behind a bedroom door and the cloying scent of spilled perfume. The sting of splintered glass in her feet. This, like the mysteries of her bank account, wasn't something Todd knew or would ever know.

“Who do you talk to?”

“Oh…family. People I went to school with or used to work with. I belong to a few groups for things I like.”

“Like what?”

Gilly looked at him. “Authors. Television shows. Rock bands. Whatever.”

Todd snorted and rattled the dice in his palm but didn't throw them. “Huh. That sounds like a fuckton of boring.”

“Hey,” Gilly said, annoyed. “You asked, didn't you? I'm not going to tell you things if you're going to make fun of me once you know.”

Too late, she'd admitted she'd tell him things. Todd grinned as Gilly scowled. He handed her the dice.

“Besides,” she added. “It's not just the people and the groups. There are games to play. And other things to do.”

“Like what?”

“Oh. Take surveys. Are you going to roll those dice or what?”

He rolled, took his turn. “Surveys for what?”

She didn't want to admit her shameful secret, that she whored herself for “seeds” in her favorite Connex game, Farmburg. “Anything.”

Todd nodded and helped himself to two hundred bucks for passing Go. “Yeah, right. For cash. I had a friend who got a bunch of stuff doing that. Crap, mostly. But some money.”

“I don't do it for money.” Though she had heard stories about people who'd won big.

“The fuck would you do an online survey for, if not money?” Todd looked up at her, brow furrowed.

Gilly sighed. No reason not to tell him. Stranded in a mountain cabin with a stranger who'd abducted her at knifepoint, after tossing her kids out a vehicle window, she really shouldn't be worried about telling him she had an addiction to a silly online game. “For seeds.”

“Huh?” Todd brushed hair from his eyes and tipped his
chair back, going to his pocket for a cigarette he stuck in his mouth but didn't light. “What kind of seeds?”

“For a game,” she said, and took the dice, rolling. She landed on Boardwalk, as-yet-unowned, and crowed. “Yes! I'm buying it.”

Todd passed her the card. “So you do surveys for…seeds.”

Gilly settled her card amongst the others and looked up at him. “Yeah. You need seeds to plant, to get crops. To expand your farm and level up.”

Todd raised an eyebrow.

“It's fun,” Gilly said.

“Sooo…” Todd drew out the word, long and slow. “How many surveys do you do?”

“I don't have a lot of time, you know,” Gilly began defensively, and stopped at another of Todd's raised-eyebrow looks. “Maybe three or four.”

“A day?”

“Yes.”

Or five. Once a memorable ten while Gandy napped and Arwen had a playdate. Her wrist had begun to ache from scrolling through the choices and the seeds had been spent in fifteen minutes. She'd had to filter out junk mail for the next six weeks.

“I'll be damned.” All four legs of Todd's chair hit the floor. “Surveys are your porn.”

“Shut up!” Gilly gasped, horrified. “Gross.”

Todd grinned, unapologetic, and pointed at her. “They are.”

“You're disgusting!”

“Well, yeah, maybe,” Todd said. “But that don't make me wrong.”

Gilly lifted her chin and gave him a cool glare. “It's your turn.”

They rolled the dice, moved their pieces around the board, collected the paper cash when they passed Go. There was a suspicious absence of Go To Jail cards in this set, but Gilly didn't question it. She played for keeps, though, trying to strategize while Todd gambled his way around the board picking up properties at random without seeming to care about the cost or location.

“I'll trade you the Electric Company for Indiana and Illinois.” Gilly already owned Kentucky and was itching to get hotels on those spots.

“Nope.”

“C'mon, Todd. When I land on it, I'll have to pay you four times the number I roll on the dice.”

Todd snorted, the unlit cigarette still dangling from his lower lip. “Nope.”

“Electric Company and Water Works. Ten times the roll of the dice when you own both.”

“No fucking way, Gilly. I'm dumb but I'm not that dumb.” He made another of those jerking-off gestures. “You'll put hotels on those bitches and I'll land on them every fucking time.”

“You won't,” she scoffed, though she had to give him grudging admiration for outplaying her. He'd been merrily buying up properties, keeping her from owning more than two per set, therefore making it impossible for her to complete them. “It's statistically impossible for you to land on it every time.”

“Yeah, well, you can forget it.” His hair fell over his eye.

“Fine,” she said. “But I'm buying Park Place and putting hotels up, and you can kiss my ass.”

“Ooh, scary.”

She was angrier than she should've been about a game and understood it wasn't that at all. Her cheek hurt when she bit it and hurt worse when she rubbed the sore spot with her tongue over and over to keep from saying something she didn't mean. But to her surprise, the mantra of
Count to ten, Gilly,
didn't start. She didn't need it. She snorted a little under her breath and looked up to Todd's curious glance.

“It's just a game,” she said.

He studied her. “Well…yeah.”

She shrugged. “I mean, it's
just
a game.”

She looked around the room, then got up to go to the window. More snow. She snorted louder this time and pressed her forehead to the glass, relishing the chill.

Just a game. Slow your roll, Gilly. Chill out.

“Are we gonna finish the game, or what?”

She looked over her shoulder. “I guess so. Nothing else to do, right?”

Todd gave her a strange look and half got to his feet. “Gilly, you're not gonna freak out on me again, are you? Run out in the snow?”

She shook her head, took her seat. “No. I'm okay. Let's play.”

They did for another few rolls of the dice, before Todd said, “What's he like?”

“Who? My husband?”

“Yeah.”

She shrugged, concentrating on the board to keep emotion from overtaking her. “He's a good man. He's a good dad, fantastic with the kids. I love him very much.”

“You're lucky, then. Really fucking lucky.”

“Yes,” Gilly said. They played in silence for a minute before
the words rose to her lips, unbidden and undeniable. She'd never said this aloud before, not even to her girlfriends sitting around a coffee table, bitching about their husbands. “He doesn't listen to me.”

The dice, tipped from Todd's hand, rolled across the board and came to rest. Snake eyes. He didn't move his piece right away; she felt his eyes on her and didn't want to meet them, but did.

“I mean, I think he hears me. He just doesn't listen.”

Todd moved his racing car to an open property but didn't look to see the cost or offer to buy it. He didn't even glance toward the thin piles of paper money he'd carefully laid out in front of him. He gathered the dice again, rolling them in his palm. They clattered like bones against the board and he moved again, this time to one of his own properties.