What I Remember Most

by Cathy Lamb

  “Moose, I’m flattered that a man like you would ask me out, but I am not dating right now.” Or ever again.

  “Oh.” His face fell. He blushed. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “My life is too complicated.” Let me count the ways.

  “Maybe I can help you uncomplicate it?”

  “Men never uncomplicate a woman’s life, Moose. Exactly the opposite.” I could count the ways there, too.

  “I’m uncomplicated.” He smiled.

  He was sweet. Like a milkshake or a plum. “No, thank you, Moose. I’m sorry.”

  He sighed. “You are the prettiest lady who has ever been to this town and you are so easy to talk to and you turn me down.” He slapped a hand dramatically to his forehead. “My hope has been squashed.”

  I laughed, handed him another beer. He still left me a twenty-five-dollar tip.

  He asked me out three nights later. “It’s not a date, Grenady. But there’s a movie I want to see, and I’d like to take you and buy you the biggest tub of popcorn in Oregon. We can sit at opposite ends of the theatre and I promise I won’t look at you, not even one time, though I confess I will be tempted.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Hope squashed again,” he said, fist to heart. “How will I recover from these blows?”

  I smiled. “Ask someone else out.”

  “No one rivals your beauty, Grenady.” He smiled back. “Your wit. Your humor. And I like the red hair, too.”

  When Moose came in a week later, he said, “Grenady, this is not a request for a date, but how about if you come with me to a family barbeque this weekend?”

  I laughed. “And that would be a no again, Moose. When your date meets your mother, you know where that’s headed.”

  “I think you’d like her.”

  “I’m sure I would. Ask someone else. She’d be more polite than I would, for sure.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because of what I’m going to say to that mongo lumberjack over there.” The mongo lumberjack walked in and swore at Randi, a sweet waitress working her way through community college. Randi was bringing a heavy tray of food out to the dining area. He thought Randi was in his way and said, “Shit. Watch where you’re going, missy! You blind?”

  His voice boomed in that restaurant.

  “Get out,” I told him when he sat his floppy haunches on a barstool.

  His hairy brows furrowed. “No. Who the hell are you to tell me to get out? I came here for a burger and I’m gonna have my burger and my fries. Get me a beer and none of your sass.”

  “Get out,” I said again. I stood my ground. He wasn’t even in my top-twenty most scary people.

  He shifted his hefty, farty self on a stool. “When I tell you to get me a beer, you get me a beer.” He pointed a finger at me and yelled. “Move your butt, woman.”

  Move your butt, woman? No one talks to me like that anymore. No one.

  “Don’t talk to her like that,” Moose said from the other end, then stalked over to confront the fool.

  I grabbed an empty beer pitcher and slammed it on the bar. I grabbed Tildy’s bat and shoved it into the pitcher, my temper triggered high and wide. “Here’s your beer.”

  “That ain’t no beer, so what ya gonna do now, tight ass?” He gave me the once-over with those slitty eyes. “How about you spread those pretty legs and—”

  I took the bat out, the pitcher went flying across the bar, and I took a swing at his head.

  He pulled away in the nick of time. The men on either side of him had already moved, knowing what was up when the bat first made its appearance.

  “Let me show you what a tight ass can do, you fat, drunken, dirty son of a bitch.” I came around the bar, wielding the bat around my head like a samurai warrior. I could feel myself losing control, diving into my latent fury.

  “Shit!” He stumbled off the stool. Ignorant and drunk. He fell to the ground. Splat. Like a wallowing pig.

  It was almost as if the room shifted. All I could see was him, a bully and a loser, picking on people he thought were defenseless, like all bullies. I wanted to smash him. I advanced, bat above my head. “Apologize to Randi! Apologize!”

  “Whoa, okay!” He put two hands up. “Sorry, Randi! Sorry!”

  I felt Moose right beside me. He grabbed for the bat, to protect me from getting arrested, I later realized. “Don’t come in again. Ever,” Moose said. I was surprised at how deep and threatening his voice sounded.

  “Leave before I bash your head in,” I said. I hate men. “Don’t you ever get too big for your britches or someone’s gonna bust your britches wide open and then they’ll find out you got a butt like everybody else. Nothing special about it. Now you get your fat butt on out.”

  He stumbled out, shocked that someone stood up to him.

  I ignored the other customers’ clapping and Randi’s grateful expression. I took a deep breath, tried to control myself. I rolled my shoulders. I tried to think of something pleasant. Like pie.

  “See what I mean, Moose? I don’t think I’m polite enough for your mother.”

  “You’re wrong there. My momma used to compete in rodeos, and she would love you.” He grinned. “Are you sure about the family barbeque?”

  It was raining after my shift at The Spirited Owl. I drove past the steel statue of a cowboy on a bucking horse, through the faux Wild West town, parked in another neighborhood, and tried to breathe in the dark, icy solitude of my car. It had been a busy night, even without the samurai sword attack.

  I ate a bowl of tortilla soup, cheese bread, and a stuffed baked potato with butter and sour cream. Then I had a piece of apple pie. I had not stopped to eat during my shift and had only two bananas and half a can of chili before work, so I was as hungry as a bull on charge.

  When I was done, I peed in a pop cup, dumped the pee out the back passenger side door so I wouldn’t step in my own waste, and washed my hands with bottled water and soap. I brushed my teeth, then changed into my sweats, two sweatshirts, my jacket, a hat, and two pairs of wool socks. Before I went to bed I opened the pink ceramic rose box and put my lily bracelet back on. I did not want to wear it to work. I was worried I would lose it.

  I wrapped myself in both blankets, but not tight in case I had to move quick, and wriggled into my sleeping bag, my gun only a foot away.

  The rain turned to hail, and it pounded my roof and clattered on the black plastic. I hoped the black plastic would hold through the night, but I wasn’t counting on it. Soon it felt like the inside of a refrigerator in that car.

  Being broke never gets easier.

  The poor girl mentality has never left me. Even when I was living in that obnoxious semimansion with Covey, driving a $50,000 car that he gave me, and wearing designer clothes and heels and a bag that cost five hundred dollars that, again, Covey bought and insisted I use over my twenty-dollar black purse, I was poor in my head.

  Covey used to laugh at me with such derision. “Dina, you can buy anything you want, with your money or mine. I gave you a credit card. You could buy a slew of thousand-dollar purses. You can buy designer anything, but here you are, cutting out coupons before you go to the grocery store.”

  He was utterly baffled. My coupon cutting offended his manliness, his ego. I found it sensible. Why pay full price when you can cut out a coupon and pay less? I would go to the store for paper towels and seriously debate which package to buy based on a savings of fifty-nine cents.

  I never wanted piles of money so I could buy a yacht or a sports car or a huge house. I never wanted it so I could show off. I never wanted it so that I could feel better than anyone else. I wanted the money so I could feel independent, not scared and vulnerable, open to anything the world could throw at me.

  Having money, to me, meant protection. Safety. Another day. And to me, now, with my accounts frozen, with little savings in the new bank account I’d set up in town, I felt like I was waiting to be shot.

  Waiting for the bulle
t.

  I dreamed that night of a red crocheted shawl. It wrapped around me as I slept, snug and warm, over my head, down to my toes. I felt her hand on my cheek, his arms hugging me, keeping me safe.

  Sleep, Grenadine . . . sleep, love.

  Was it them? Was it my imagination?

  Did it matter?

  I slept.

  My federal public defender, Millie Sanchez, called me the next morning at eight o’clock. I was already awake because the plastic on my car window had come off at six-thirty, after also coming off at three. I’d had to find the duct tape, hit the ice off the plastic, and retape it, all in the dark.

  Millie was born in Mexico and moved to the United States when she was fifteen. Both neighborhoods were rough. She’d told me she learned how to box from her brothers. One brother was currently in jail for boxing someone’s face in.

  She is the one who will keep my butt out of the slammer, if she can, which is unlikely, due to a ginormous mistake on my part. She explained to me, when I was in the slammer, about the FBI, IRS, postal service, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office investigations that had gone on for months against Covey and me.

  There were judges involved, search warrants, a secret grand jury, and an indictment; our bank had handed over our statements without telling us. Covey apparently had secret accounts and shell companies, and had lost millions in investor money. There were a hundred other things my blown mind could hardly handle.

  The bottom line: I had been charged with theft, fraud, embezzlement, and money laundering, though I had zero clue how to do any of those things even if I wanted to, which I didn’t.

  We dispensed with the pleasantries quickly.

  “Hey, Dina. Bad and badder news. The assistant U.S. attorney has already built a solid case against you, although the case is infinitely stronger, more egregious, against Covey. It’s those five different documents that you signed that are making you look guilty as sin.”

  I put a hand to my forehead. “Millie, I told you that Covey had me sign papers that were part of his business.”

  “That’s why you’re screwed to Mexico and back right now. Why didn’t you read them?”

  Why didn’t I read them? I didn’t even want to go there. That would have me diving headfirst into shame. I was stuck in a beer bottle. “I told you. Covey pushed, said they had to be signed right away, since I was an officer in his company, there were tax reasons, banking reasons, government rules and regulations, investment protocol . . . it was for our clients. I didn’t know. He sounded official and confident, and when I asked for time to read them, he started throwing fits, saying I didn’t trust him.

  “When we married he said he wanted me to be a part of his business life so we could share it together. I didn’t want to be a part of his company, I wanted to do my art, but he pushed and I gave in.”

  “Isn’t that romantic?” Millie is not a romantic in her public life. In her personal life, she has been married for twenty-five years to a man who used to be a race car driver in Europe but now has an organic garden and sells fruits and vegetables to grocery stores.

  “Come and join my lucrative company, new and innocent wife, Dina,” Millie mocked, “and sign these papers. Double cheater. Your signature is on documents that transfer money into different accounts, then that money went through complicated channels and was shifted out of the business to shell businesses on the devil’s evil tail.”

  “I didn’t know. I’m stupid. I get it.” Stupid. I’d heard that so many times in my life, “Stupido Grenado . . . she’s stupid . . . she’s retarded . . . she can’t read . . . what’s wrong with that stupid head?”

  “You’re not stupid, Dina, are you kidding? Married couples sign papers between each other all the time and they don’t know what they’re signing. When most of America signs their tax returns, which were prepared by their accountants, they don’t even look at the numbers. It’s too confusing, anyhow. The tax accountants could have their clients signing away their rights to their uteruses and grandmas and no one would know.” She sighed.

  “I should have known, Millie. I shouldn’t have let him push me into this. I trusted him.”

  “I remember when I was younger, my mother handled all the finances, and she would go over to my dad, who would be sitting in his lounge chair drinking a beer and watching a football game, and she’d say, ‘Sign this, Pablo,’ and without looking up from the game he’d sign the paper, then pat my mom on the butt and say, ‘Come sit with me and watch this football game. I’m lonely for you.’ She’d put the papers away, drink a beer, watch the game with my dad while they ate quesadillas, and he would never even ask what he signed.”

  “Looks like I’m your dad.” Sheesh. It was so cold in my car, my fingers were numb. I noticed the scars on my hands from the fire. Hardly noticeable to anyone, but they were noticeable to me.

  “You’re not the first wife to get wrapped up in something like this, and that’s what I’m harping on with the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, blah blah and blah. Problem is that your maggot-brained husband isn’t clearing you.”

  “Not at all? Still?” I wanted to castrate him. Two quick whacks. I’d recently blocked Covey’s home, cell, and office phone numbers—and blocked him from my e-mail. Unfortunately, he called me from different numbers, and I had to block those, too. I’d already shut down Facebook and my website. I didn’t want to talk to him, and Millie told me not to under threat of “mean punishment.”

  “I’ve called his attorneys—those two are slick mothers, aren’t they—and Covey is refusing to tell the assistant U.S. attorney and the rest of the governmental gang that you had nothing to do with his flaky, shaky business at all.”

  “I think he made sure I signed enough papers so he could have something to hang over my head like a guillotine if I ever dared leave him.”

  “I think you’re right. That gutter dweller wanted your name on something incriminating.”

  “Control issue. Then he could always threaten me with jail if I left.” That knowledge floored me. He was so devious, I could hardly grasp it in my frozen brain.

  “Yep and yep. He should be the only one taking the fall here. I would like to fry him in hot sauce.”

  We talked more. I was depressed when I hung up. Depressed. I could feel it moving in like black clouds. The black clouds had been with me for years, long ago. I had gotten rid of them by fighting them off. But now they were back—heavy, tight, relentless.

  I did not see an end to them on the horizon.

  I went to a Laundromat. I didn’t want to spend the money, but I didn’t have a choice. When I was there I sketched a collage. I drew lilies, their long, green stems inside a circular glass vase with a twisty neck. Inside the vase was an entire country village. Cobblestone streets. A church steeple. White picket fences. A city park and gazebo. People on bikes. Idyllic. Warm.

  I drew a jagged crack in the vase.

  During my shift, two nights later, I felt myself getting sick, as if my body was breaking down a piece at a time. I remembered a woman from years ago who told me moonshine could cure anything, and gave me a shot of whiskey to get better. I was thirteen. It helped me sleep.

  In my car, a light snow falling, I felt the flu taking over, starting with my throat, which burned as if it were on fire. I ached like a poked rat, my head throbbed, and I was soon coughing and sniffling. It grew worse and worse throughout the night. I soon was chilled to the bone and knew I had a fever. I put it at about 100 degrees. As I usually run about 97.6, this was not good. I tried to picture my fever burning up all the germs. Didn’t work.

  I had to get better. I had to be efficient and not temperamental at The Spirited Owl and I had to pester Hendricks’ Furniture to give me a job. Until then, I would fake being healthy, chug medicine to get me through, and spring for orange juice.

  I put on two sweatshirts, a sweater, a jacket, both sweatpants, three socks, a hat, gloves, and a scarf. I snuggled into my sleeping bag and both blankets in the back of
my car. I nearly froze to death that night. I shook and shivered. The freezing air, and a few snowflakes, blew through the black plastic bag over my window like it was nothing, which it was, nothing. I felt my feet go numb and my fingers tingled.

  I cursed those black-masked criminals who busted my window and wished for their testicles to wither and drop from their bodies and for a large snake to invade their rectal cavities.

  About an hour later I could feel my fever rising and along with it a spreading, bone-jangling chill. I struggled into the front seat, turned on the heat in the car, and drove around. I parked and went back to shivering. When I was drifting in and out of a nightmare-filled sleep, I thought to myself: I understand how people die from the flu. I get it.

  Then the plastic dropped off the window.

  I groaned. Snow flew in on a wind gust. I heaved myself out of my sleeping bag, took off my gloves, and used the duct tape to get the plastic back up.

  I was shaking harder when I crawled back into my sleeping bag like a dying rat.

  My insurance would pay for the window to be replaced. I would tell them that someone smashed it when it was parked in a parking lot. That was true. If I told the full truth, it would trigger an investigation. My problem was that I needed to put up a $1,000 deductible and I could not do that yet. The $1,000 would put off my being able to get in an apartment.

  Should I suck it up and be cold and get into the apartment sooner? Or get the window fixed and not freeze outside at night? Would an intact window help that much in the depths of winter? Doubtful. I did a Personal Financial Calculation in my head. I was in poor shape, but not as poor as when I first flew out of Portland. I would get my next paycheck soon, and I had tip money. I needed first and last month’s rent, a security deposit, and Cherie’s monthly payment for the divorce. That was a lot, but I was getting there.