Claimed

by Pratt, Lulu

  The sun was beginning to, ever so slowly, descend in the air, casting long shadows of palm fronds across the concrete roads and on top of slick refurbished convertibles. L.A. afternoons in the summer are that kind of dry heat where nothing exists except the heat rising off the ground and whatever inner world you manage to contain from the heat. Cybil sweltered in my head.

  She was the ocean, she was the sun — what wasn’t she? And, more importantly, how had she become this much, this fast? I was unnerved by the whiplashing sensation of it all. Excited, too, of course, but… scared. I hadn’t known it was possible to fall this hard, this face, and I wasn’t ready to hit solid earth.

  Focus on Friday, my brain offered. Only ‘til Friday.

  Would I make it that far? I wanted to see her again, right away. Man, maybe I shouldn’t have suggested the concert. Could’ve gone with something more low-key, like a coffee date or… what else do normal people do? Are smoothies still a thing?

  But I figured the concert would be more thrilling. Plus, I was rusty with, y’know, actually making connections with others. I needed a little buffer. I worried that if we sat down for coffee or smoothies I’d accidentally tell her everything about me, thus both surprising and horrifying her. And that wouldn’t be any fun.

  “It’s a good idea,” I said aloud, trying to self-soothe. “Ya did good, champ.”

  Jesus, now I was talking to myself like some kind of ‘50s comic you’d find on a bubblegum wrapper.

  I focused on the heat ripples rising from the road, the white lines that separated traffic, the smell of exhaust fumes. The road was simple. The road didn’t draw me into spiraling thoughts of love and loss.

  Within an hour, I was back at the parlor. It should’ve taken about forty minutes, but I was weaving in and out of traffic, distracted by the mind loops. Every few blocks, someone would honk me out of my stupor, but shortly thereafter, I’d slip back into the coma of Cybil. The freeway proved thusly treacherous, but I managed to emerge with my physical form intact, having pissed off half the drivers in L.A.

  I parked in the lot behind the shop, which was uniformly littered with broken glass bottles — the informal decoration of the city. Still walking on cloud nine, I walked into the cool air conditioning of the shop.

  “Hey,” I called out. “I’m here.”

  I strode through the small hallway that was lined with flyers for upcoming concerts and comedy shows in and around the city. We let anyone and everyone advertise in the interest of growing the community. Some of the flyers had been up for years — none of us ever cared enough to check their relative expiration dates.

  “Cash? Is that you, honey?”

  “Yeah,” I replied, making my way from the hall into the parlor proper.

  My dad was behind the desk, presumably dealing with bills, his balding head bent over the tabletop because he refused to get glasses. They were, in his words, “for suckers.” My mom was similarly hunched over a client, gloves on and needle in hand. She bit her lip in concentration and ground her teeth.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, without taking her eyes off the tattoo, which appeared to be a dove with a machine gun in its mouth. Some people have no taste.

  “At a yoga class.”

  In eerie simultaneity, she lifted the needle off the client, and my dad looked up from his books. The client even turned his head.

  “What?” Dad asked, his lips curling with confusion beneath his bushy, white handlebar mustache.

  “Yoga,” I repeated. “It’s this thing where you—”

  “I know what yoga is,” he replied slowly.

  My mom finished his thought. “But why the fuck was you doing it?”

  I looked sideways at the client, an average-looking guy in his mid-thirties, definitely not one you’d associated with birds and guns.

  My eyes still on him, I said to my parents, “Uh, can we talk about this later, folks?”

  The man, clearly not reading the room, jumped in with, “Are you related?”

  “Yes,” I replied curtly. My mom, always a stickler for decorum — though her toe-to-neck tattoos might have implied differently — shot me a look. I knew, without her having to say a word, that she didn’t like my tone.

  “That’s cool,” the guy said, continuing to miss the hint. “Do you all own it together?”

  I was getting annoyed. “Yes, we do. It’s a family business.”

  My dad chimed in with, “Write us a good Yelp review!”

  The guy dopily replied, “Sounds cool.” He looked down at the ink on his arm. I could tell from experience that it was about three strokes away from being finished. My mom, following my sight line, said “one moment” and did a few quick, elegant final touches on the man’s arm. He grimaced like a wimp, but said nothing.

  “All done,” she chirped. Well, maybe not ‘chirped.’ Bellowed, perhaps. Between the size 2X leather jacket, bleach blonde buzz cut and deep voice, nothing about my mom could be described by the breezy word ‘chirped.’

  The guy, finally sensing that he was in the middle of some family drama, let himself be quickly ushered through the final clean-up and payment process. He was out the door, a hundred and fifty dollars lighter, within five minutes. My dad folded up the credit card receipt as my mom took her customary place on the nearby couch. The furniture had even molded to the shape of her body, a slight dent in the middle of the red couch.

  “Why,” she began slowly, “were you at yoga?” I wondered if she’d ever thought about yoga before in her life. Seemed doubtful.

  I shrugged. “Wellness.”

  My dad raised an eyebrow. “Since when did you care about wellness?”

  The questions were beginning to jangle, but I hung in. I supposed a partial truth couldn’t hurt. “I dunno,” I replied. “I’ve just realized I haven’t been taking the best care of myself since… you know, since getting back. And it seemed like maybe it was time to change that. And yoga seems dumb, sure, and just for rich people, but I had a pretty good time. I felt great afterwards.” I was careful to leave off that the feeling was probably a halo effect from being in Cybil’s presence.

  The room was silent as I watched my parents try to process this information. They were two long-time bikers, serious no-frills people who liked their meat tough, their music loud, and their beer crappy. They would’ve been less surprised to hear that I’d skipped out on bail, or gotten into a fist fight outside a strip club, both things that they’d probably done in their time. But this? Nothing had prepared them for their son doing yoga.

  My dad was the first to speak. “Well,” he said slowly, unsure of his words even as he spoke them. “If it makes you feel better, then… then that’s good.”

  This was about as close as he could get to displays of emotion, and I was pretty impressed that he’d mustered one up for this.

  My mom was the more effusive one of the pair. She vacillated for a few moments, then at last beamed and replied, “I’m very proud of you, Cash. For taking things into your own hands. Even if your methods are, um, untraditional. It’s important that you watch out for yourself. You gotta have your own back.”

  I laughed, “Only you could manage to make self-care sound like some kind of mental motorcycle gang.”

  Her lips spread wider, revealing teeth damaged by years of bar brawls and poor dental care. “Gotta remind you where you come from.”

  “What’s the whole thing about yoga that makes you feel good?” my dad asked, clumping up the words in all the wrong ways. He seemed, more than anything, genuinely baffled by the concept.

  Careful once more to omit Cybil, I replied, “I think the atmosphere, mostly. You set aside this hour where you just say, I’m not gonna let my mind run wild, or have bad thoughts. And everything’s really quiet. No loud noises.”

  They nodded. Both knew that, since I’d come back, I’d had a… thing with loud noises. Even someone slamming a door could make me jump. I usually tried to play it off, and the panic attacks were rarer, but
still — quiet was nice.

  “I’m proud of you, boy,” my mom said. “Real proud. Maybe you could take me to this yoga thing sometime.”

  I tried to hide the shock and amusement from my face. “I’m not sure it’d be, um, your thing.”

  “What, us fat chicks can’t do yoga?” she asked derisively.

  “No, you biker chicks can’t — or don’t, widely speaking — do yoga.” If Dandelion had nearly turned me away for my jeans and T-shirt, I could only imagine what they’d do to my mother, who I’d never seen without at least one piece of leather clothing. She had, in no particular order, leather vests, pants, shirts, jackets, shorts, bras, collars and chaps. She would be out of her element, to put it very, very mildly.

  She seemed unfazed by my words. “Whatever, kid. Do what you like, so long as it makes you feel good.”

  I walked over to her and planted a kiss on her shiny forehead. She wrapped one arm around my back, and I thought how lucky I was to have such a wonderful family, even for all their quirks. In the same breath, I felt guilty for not telling them about Cybil. Here they were, being so supportive and understanding, and I couldn’t even open up about the real reason I was at yoga, the actual motivation behind my new self-discovery. It felt like I’d given them more lie than truth.

  But it’s not a malicious lie, my inner voice suggested. And it was true — I just didn’t want them to worry that I was getting in over my head, or that some of my other mental health issues were rising back to the surface. That is, I wanted them to believe that I was fully okay. They had spent enough of their lives worrying about me. I couldn’t add to that burden. Not just for Cybil. She had already gained significant value in my existence, but my parents came first, always. And I had to protect them from this new part of my life.

  “Cash,” my mom said, breaking me out of my thoughts. “We’d like to discuss something with you.”

  My ears caught her concerned tone. So much for keeping them free of worry. “What is it?” I asked, already scared of the answer.

  My father sighed and took up some black ledgers in his burly arms. “Kid, the shop’s in the red.”

  The tension in my chest released. This was old news. “Yeah, I know. We’ve been in the red since the move.”

  He shook his head. “We were in the red, but kind of a faint red. More of a pink. Now we’re in deep, crimson, bloody red.”

  My eyebrows raised in an unconscious parrot of my dad’s longtime facial expression. “What are you trying to say?”

  That’s when my mom cut in. She said, “There’s been less foot traffic in the past few months. Who knows why. And we haven’t been doing more than small pieces for quite some time. Things would be different if we got the occasional sleeve commission, or a chest piece, but lately it’s just been dumb commemorative shit that business boys can hide under their shirt sleeves, and delicate little flowers for girls who wanna feel hip.”

  She grunted with exasperation. She hated, above many other things in the world, people who got tattoos as part of a trend. For one, it meant that they probably weren’t going to be repeat customers, and for another, they had terrible taste in ink — see man with dove with gun. Also, tattoos were so integral to her lifestyle, her background, that when other people got them on a whim, it made her feel like her ink was somehow less valuable, less defining. In other words, she took this shit personally.

  “Anyways,” she continued, “business has been slowing down. But I guess you already knew that.”

  I nodded. I had, subconsciously, noticed that. The bell on the door rang less often, and the sound of needles whirring seemed more and more infrequent. I only kept loose tabs on the books, as my dad took great pride in single-handedly managing that position, but even I knew there was trouble with the bottom line.

  “What’s the long and short of it?” I asked, knowing my parents would respect my desire to just bite the bullet.

  My dad cleared his throat, then said, “I’d guess we could only stand a few more months like this before we had to…”

  “To close up shop,” my mom finished.

  “We’re sorry, son. We know this was your dream.” My dad looked away, his expression unreadable.

  Indeed, it was my dream. I’d never wanted college, so instead of putting my army money to tuition like most of my fellow recruits, I funneled it into the shop. While I was deployed, my parents found the shop, which is small but well-positioned for foot traffic or so we thought. Sure, they’d been passionate about it too — my mom has been tattooing people since she was about sixteen, and my dad had, at the time, just gotten his finance degree from an online university. But ultimately, we all knew that the shop was my baby, my pride and joy.

  They had worked so hard to keep it afloat. I think they saw it as a way of channeling their fear and love for me into a tangible thing. It was definitely easier, during the deployment, for my dad to manage the books with methodical precision than to say he cared for me and stayed up at night worrying that my truck would roll over an IED.

  They’d staked their whole life in the shop. Literally.

  I asked, “But what about your retirement money?”

  My parents looked grimly at one another, and I knew what that meant — there was no money.

  See, my army pay had helped open the shop, but it wasn’t enough. Not for land in this area, not for all the materials we’d need. My parents had cashed in their savings without a second thought. Though my dad had his finance degree, neither of them were particularly precious about money. They shared the motorcycle mindset that money would come when it was needed. But now that they’d left that life behind, they didn’t have a gang, a crew, to catch them when they fell. They were, at this moment, without a safety net.

  My mom said what I’d already surmised. “Cash, we don’t have any money left.”

  I could feel my heart migrating into my throat. “So what are we going to do?” I felt, suddenly, like a little kid — helpless, and with no answers.

  My dad, ever the pragmatist, spoke up. “If things don’t start moving in a different direction, we close up. It’ll be hard, but we do it. Then your mother and I will get jobs and—”

  “No,” I replied, shaking my head. “You shouldn’t have to work anymore. Not now.” They were both in their early sixties and had lived hard lives. Both chain-smoked, too. It was only recently that I’d convinced them to each cut down to a pack a day. Not to be blunt, but I wasn’t sure how much time they had left, and I wanted them to spend it doing something they loved, and as a family. Neither minded work if it was at the tattoo shop, but I knew they’d chafe under the rule of a boss at a restaurant or factory. It injured my pride to think that I couldn’t provide for them at this stage in their life.

  “We’re not closing up,” I declared. “We’re just not.”

  My dad said, “It’s not that simple.”

  “Sure it is. We’ll figure out a way to bring in the customers. We’ll do promotions, maybe change the décor. We could—” I gulped, hating the thought, “We could even advertise on social media.” This last one killed me, but I’d make an exception to my principles for the sake of my family.

  My parents, like me, both detested social media and the culture it had birthed. My mom nixed this first. “We ain’t never going on that,” she said, disgust coloring her tone. “We don’t need the internet. We’ve got something better — honest-to-God talent.”

  I smiled at her pluck, but inside, failed to quell my own doubts. We were both excellent artists, that much I knew, but it wasn’t going to be enough to distinguish us from the pack, not in this crowded market.

  I rubbed my forehead and said, “Okay, I’ll think on it. There’s gotta be a solution. I just know it.”

  My dad smiled, a gesture tinged with sadness. “I like your faith, kid.” And I knew that what he meant was, “You’re so young, and you don’t know better.”

  I would prove them wrong.

  Chapter 10

  Cybil
r />   THERE WERE about twenty dresses and skirts piled around me, like an ominous crop circle summoning up something even worse than the devil himself — wrenching self-doubt.

  “Blaire,” I whined, “everything looks horrible.”

  Her voice came back tinny through FaceTime. “That’s not true.”

  I had perched my phone up on a nearby dresser, resting against a potted succulent, so she could give feedback on my various outfit choices, and while she’d played along for some time, I knew she was beginning to tire. Her chin had slumped into her hand, and her eyes were looking listlessly around my room, perhaps mentally redecorating or thinking that I had far too many posters with kitschy slogans in bubblegum pink and white lettering.

  She sighed, “Girl, you’ve been trying stuff on for an hour. I love and support you, but enough.”

  Clutching a red satin sheath in my hands, I turned to the camera, my bra and underwear fully on show. “I still don’t know what to wear!” I moaned in her direction.

  She rolled her eyes. “Any of it. You look hot in all your stuff. Your body is, like, dynamite. You could wear sweats and he’d be impressed. Besides, didn’t you say he asked you out in yoga class, when you were probably wearing your usual harem pants?”

  Blaire got me there. I did almost always wear those damn pants. And I supposed, by extension, that meant he’d seen me looking less than perfect. I never wore much make-up, if any, to class, since I taught Bikram later in the day.

  “Okay, I’m only giving you a few more minutes of advice,” she announced. “I’ve got a set at the Comedy Store to prep for. Here we go. It’s a rock concert, so don’t wear anything that’s dry clean only, or really anything that you care about damaging, because someone is definitely gonna spill shit on it. Wear comfortable shoes. Probably go with black, because y’know, it’s cool and whatever. That’s it.”

  I was reluctant to admit it, but Blaire had probably done all she could for me. “All right, all right, thank you, that’s very wise.”