Authors: Jessa Hawke
The man kept on mopping like he couldn't hear her. All she could really see from his back was his broad shoulders. As Jen moved around the puddle of milk to try and get his attention again she saw more and more of his face as she walked. Suddenly she realized it was Rick.
Jen wasn't a superstitious person, but whenever she had bad dreams they always meant something. She wasn't sure what it could mean that she had seen Rick mopping up a bunch of spilled milk in a supermarket of her dreams, but she knew it meant something. Jen went to a psychic and told her what was going on. The psychic listened carefully, then bent over Jen's palm to read the lines.
“There is something about this man's job, you said it was waste management? In the dream he is cleaning up waste, but something is wrong. He is trapped in a job he wishes to leave, and you are there as well. And you are pregnant.”
Jen almost fainted. She couldn't be pregnant. She texted Rick on the way to her doctor's office. When she got there she saw she missed a few phone calls from Rick. She called him back and got his voice mail a few times. Then he called her back.
“Baby,” he said. “I have no idea why you think your pregnant when there is no way you can tell. First of all, you said you were on birth control. Second of all, it's the day after so there is no way to tell for sure. But if you want to keep it you can, but we have to keep it a secret.”
Jen hung up without saying anything else. There was something for sure wrong, and she knew it now. There was no way that Rick would call her and say something strange like that if the dream hadn't meant something real, it was just all around too strange. What if Rick was into something much more sinister than he'd let on. Jen's mind raced and she thought of all the gangster movies where the guys were all part of “waste management,” but really they were out there extorting people and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. Some of the stuff they did was scary even—violent. She didn't want anything to do with someone like that. But surely that wasn't the case for what was going on with Rick. It just couldn't be. He was too great of a guy, and he was also too good looking, and too good in bed. Suddenly Jen's mind went a new direction with everything: What if Rick was so full of shit he was married?
But of course you would think all of these terrible things, Jen though to herself, and you would go to the doctor's office the day after.
Rick was right, there was no way for her to tell if she was pregnant the day after sex. It just wasn't possible. So she headed home instead of wasting anyone's time. She was just glad that she hadn't made an appointment. As she climbed back into her car she felt her phone vibrate against her side in her purse. She ignored it, knowing it was Rick trying to get a hold of her. She didn't want to put him off but she just didn't want to talk about it right that very second. It was one thing to know, but it was a whole different thing to know and not know at the same time. She didn't want it to be this way. She knew that she was pregnant. The whole ride home she knew. When she walked into her apartment she knew. When she realized that it was Rick on the couch she knew. When they embraced and she threw her arms around his neck she knew. When when he asked how she knew and he didn't have an answer all she could tell him was that she knew.
So they waited a few days and bought a test from the store. It was positive. After that things changed between them, but not drastically at first. It wasn't until the talk they had a few days after the test came back positive.
“Jen, there are a few things I've kept from you,” Rick said as he sat on her couch with her, holding her hand. “First of all, I don't know how else to say this so I'm just going to go for it. I'm in the mafia. That means the whole waste management thing is more or less a cover for all of the other stuff that I have to do for the mob. It's a pretty good paying gig, but there is a bunch of unsavory practices that I didn't mind so much when I was younger, but as time goes on I hate it more and more.”
Jen wanted to recoil but didn't. She didn't want to offend Rick. It was shitty that he'd lied to her, and it sucked that he was in the mob, but maybe they could get over it. Maybe there was a way for them to reconcile what was going on between them with what the world wanted them to do.
“There is something else,” Rick said. “Besides that, I'm married.”
Jen recoiled this time, and the wail of a banshee left her lips before she could even think of suppressing it. She got up and ran out the front door of the apartment, then down the hall, then down the steps, then out the door. She just kept running and running. She figured she'd know when she was supposed to stop, but she couldn't. Something about moving away from the entire situation made her feel like she was getting some kind of resolution to what was happening. Like if she put enough distance between her and Rick maybe she wouldn't have to face it. Maybe, just maybe, if she ran forever everything would go back to normal for a change instead of being so shitty. So she ran, without looking back. All the way to the end of town. Then she collapsed.
Luckily Rick was just behind Jen when she went down, and he scooped her up and carried her back to her place. After that their relationship changed, but it didn't cool off. They were still hot for each other, but now they had to be careful, almost as if playing some kind of game. They couldn't go out in public together, and Rick couldn't get caught coming over to her place. This wasn't just because Rick was married, but because if the mob found out that she was pregnant something would have to happen. Either she would be drawn into the mob herself as an axillary person, or she would be killed. Of course neither of them wanted the former, but even the latter seemed to be a bad option in Rick's mind. He told her that even though it could appear to be glamorous at times it really wasn't. In the movies they never showed the hours of boredom, waiting for someone to show up at a money drop, or all the paranoia that eventually tore people apart.
The more Jen listened the more she realized that being in the mob was nothing like the movies depicted. There was just so much more going on under the surface that she hadn't known about. People killed each other all the time with little or no reprisal. The only people that a mobster would get into trouble for touching was someone who was “made.” Rick was a made guy, like the rest of the made guys he hung out with. But some of the others were starting to bring around hanger-ons, as they were called. People that didn't really have any skin in the game but wanted badly to be a part of it. The way they did this was by doing things for made men in the hopes that at some point they would be rewarded by being vouched for when they were made themselves. It was all a pretty shadowy underworld of rules and regulations that were only adhered to when it was convenient, and completely disregarded at a moments notice.
Jen thought long and hard about leaving Rick for awhile but it always seemed like the coward's way out. Not that Jen didn't realize that it was an actual, viable option. It was just that she was actually in love with Rick and didn't want to leave him. She wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. Jen didn't think about what was going to happen with his wife and kids, or what was going to happen if, or when, people found out. And when it dawned on her she had retreated into her own head a good deal, in order to justify staying with Rick and to minimize the very real danger to her and her unborn child, she knew that was why so many of the people that Rick hung out with had that weird, detached look on their faces. The kind that soldiers get after being deployed to long. The look that man adopts when the pressure is just too great and they have to be absent in order to be present.
Jen thought about calling her mother and fleeing the state but that seemed like a terrible idea to her the more she considered it. She even thought about contacting the police and offering up her cooperation in exchange for some kind of protection, but then she heard Rick talking about how a made man had rolled on the mob years ago. The mob had been patient, dropping the entire matter for about a decade. Then they had carefully started to seek the person out. First it was just the internet and searches. Then it was weird phone calls in the middle of the night to people they thought might be the guy. Eventually they tracked him to a small town in the middle of nowhere. It didn't take long for the guy to disappear. The real kicker, Rick had told her, is that since the former made man had been in the witness protection program no one noticed when he wasn't around anymore. As far as anyone knew he'd died shortly after rolling over on the mob. So his family didn't raise a stink that would have forced people to do their jobs and track down the killers, or at least try. Instead the whole thing was swept under the rug, so to speak, because the witness protection program wasn't about to air their dirty laundry to their own bosses and tell them how badly they'd fucked everything up.
So Jen felt trapped, but at the same time it was the kind of trapped that a dog feels while it wears an electric collar and stares longingly across the property line at the street. Jen knew that it was all on her, that her destiny was in her hands. Sure the mob would try to flex and make people think that they ran everything, but really, from the little she'd been able to see of Rick's friends—which wasn't very much since they couldn't know they were together as a couple—it had seemed that most of them were literally playing some kind of weird game where organized crime was the focal point. Sure they were dangerous, but mostly to each other. The mob even had loosely followed rules about only killing people that were soldiers in the mob as to avoid civilian death. Jen also noticed that when they did kill someone out side of the mob syndicate it was usually someone weak and alone, someone that wouldn't lose their minds and kill everyone in sight. The mob didn't pick on retired cops or soldiers, they didn't fuck with people they knew would go from zero to shooting up their houses at night in less time then it took to pee their pants. The mob always had an eye out for an easy mark, and sometimes they didn't want anything from a mark but their life.
Things went on this way for some time. Then Jen really started to show and both of their attitudes changed. Rick started talking about how it might be possible to buy his way out of the mob. He could leave his wife in good financial standing so that she'd never have to work and he didn't even think she'd really mind anyway, if that were the case. Jen asked how much money he was talking about having to spend to buy his way out, but Rick wouldn't say. He just kept talking about how it was worth it, how he had to live a normal life at some point and all of the mob stuff was going to get him killed eventually anyway. It just wasn't enough that they were in love. The way things were at that time pretty much insured that Jen would end up raising the kids alone, and neither of them wanted that.
When Jen first started considering taking off with Rick she knew that it would have to be quick, and that she wouldn't have time to commiserate with any of her friends about what was going on. She knew that Rick was giving up a lot for her, but at the same time she didn't feel at all badly about it because she knew as well as he did that what he was doing wasn't something that could be done forever. People got out of the mob for reasons that were usually pretty good. Rick's reasoning was sound, as far as Jen was concerned, but she also wondered if he was being completely honest with her. What if there was no way for him to buy out and he was just saying that so that she didn't worry all the time. She knew that she wasn't cut out for constantly looking over her shoulder.
“Listen,” Rick said one day as they walked in the park. “I'm going to buy my way out and we're going to head west, all the way out to Colorado. The west side of the Rockies out there is sparsely populated. There are towns where people go to disappear. One place I've read about on the internet even has a sign up at the post office telling people that if they take pictures of the residents that they will be arrested and the film scrapped.”
Jen's eyes grew wide.
“What do you think is going on out there?” she asked.
“I'm not sure, really. It could be that witness protection just loves the place. Or it could be the rich eccentric people move out there to be left alone. You'd be surprised how hard it is to be left alone in this country. But Colorado's Front Range does a good job of providing that place. You can go there and get lost in the mountains. And weed is legal. I've never smoked the stuff because the mob looks down on that sort of thing, and drugs in general. But maybe we could move out there and live like a couple of New Age hippies in the mountains. Of course we'd have running water and all of that jazz. You know what I mean. I'm not talking about living under a bridge or anything.”
Jen had agreed and they'd set a date. As the date approached Jen wondered more and more whether or not she'd made the right decision. It was easy to just tell herself yes, but she knew that deep down there were other ways she could go about raising the child. She knew that she could pull off being a single mother, and that it didn't have to turn into something out of a thriller movie where she moved far away from her life in order to stay alive. The closer the day got the more antsy she felt about the entire thing. But she couldn't let Rick know. He wasn't joking around about buying out, and the amount of cash that he'd stored at her house for the drop off was huge. She'd never seen so much money in one place in her life. She wondered what it must feel like to be able to produce that amount of money on demand. Or maybe the feeling was more like the trapped feeling she'd had clinging to her for the past few months. Maybe Rick felt like his whole life had been kind of a waste since he'd only ended up making enough money to buy his was out of the mob.