by Lukens, Mark
They got in the car and Matt stabbed the key into the ignition. He twisted the key and the engine struggled to turn over.
“Not now,” Gina said and put a hand to the side of her head like a massive headache was coming on.
Matt flashed a winning smile. “Give her a minute.”
Their car suddenly roared to life. It was a four cylinder Honda that had one tire in the automobile grave, and it sputtered loudly because there was a hole in the muffler.
Matt stroked the cracked dashboard. “Told ya she’d start.”
Gina didn’t respond.
Matt pulled out of the supermarket parking lot and drove down the narrow roads through the city that led back to their apartment building. A few snow flurries danced around in the gray light in front of their windshield. He glanced at Gina as he drove.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her.
“I hate that place,” she said without looking at him.
“So look for something else.”
“There’s nothing else out there,” she said and then stared at Matt. “Is there?”
Matt caught her look. “Hey, I’m trying my best. Jack said he would hire me back on the lawn crew in the spring …”
“But we don’t have that kind of time to wait.”
“I’ve been looking.”
Matt reached inside his coat pocket and grinned.
“What’s wrong with you?” Gina asked him, noticing his smile.
He pulled out the bright blue notecard from his coat pocket and held it between two fingers. The card was thick and the color unusually bright. “I think I may have found something.”
He handed her the card.
She read it and looked back at Matt. “This says they’re looking for a couple.”
She handed the card back to Matt who stuffed it back into his coat pocket as he turned his car onto their street. “It also says great money for easy work. I think the exact words are—substantial pay.”
Gina sighed and gazed out the passenger window at the rows of buildings and dilapidated houses squeezed in close together.
“It won’t hurt to call the number,” Matt said as he pulled into the gravelly driveway that led to a small parking area in the back of the three story apartment building they called home.
• • •
Matt and Gina’s apartment was very small, but it was neat and tidy, decorated with thrift store furniture. As soon as they got home, Gina told him she was going to take a hot bath.
Matt waited for a moment, making sure that the bathroom door was locked. She would be in there for at least half an hour. He ran over to the phone on the kitchen wall and grabbed the receiver. He held the blue notecard in his fingers and he dialed the phone number at the bottom.
He glanced down the short hall that led to the only bathroom and bedroom in their apartment.
The phone rang in his ear. It was pretty late in the afternoon. The office, or wherever he was calling, was probably closed by now. He could still leave a message. He wasn’t sure how many of these blue cards were floating around out there in the city and he wanted to be the first applicant.
Matt’s breath caught in his throat when a man answered in a low voice. “Hello?”
For a moment Matt couldn’t speak. Then he cleared his throat. “I … uh … I’m calling about a job opportunity that I saw on a blue notecard …”
“Yes, sir.”
Again Matt was at a loss for words—which was an unusual occurrence for him—but then he found his voice.
“I’m interested in finding out more about the job.”
“Yes, sir,” the man said and gave Matt directions to an office on the outskirts of Boston. Matt turned the blue notecard over and stretched for a pen on the counter; he scribbled the directions down.
“Thank you so much,” Matt told the man on the phone. For some reason he pictured the tall man in the dark coat on the other end of the phone, even though that man was probably still busy leaving cards around town. “We’ll be there tomorrow at twelve.”
Matt hung up the phone and pumped his fist in the air. He wanted to shout with excitement, but he stayed quiet. He eyed the hall and closed bathroom door.
It was time to celebrate.
• • •
In the bathroom, Gina took off her cashier’s uniform and dumped it on the floor. She had steaming hot water running in the bathtub, and the water was already foaming up from the bubble bath and body oil she had added to it. She had a few candles lit around the small bathroom. She stood in front of the mirror in only her bra and panties, and she studied her body in the candlelight. She rested a hand on her slightly protruding belly and stared at it for a while as the bathtub filled up.
She wasn’t really showing yet, but she would be soon. At some point she was going to have to tell Matt that they were having a baby.
But she was hesitating. She was scared. He had lost his job with the lawn crew a few months ago when winter came. They worked him as long as they could; raking leaves, cutting down dying trees, but after a while they couldn’t keep him on the crew. Jack promised to put him back to work in the spring. But what if he didn’t? What if Matt couldn’t find a job? They could barely take care of themselves, what were they going to do when a baby came along?
Gina turned off the water and stripped off her bra and panties. She slid down into the bubbly water and tried to relax, she tried to let her problems float away. But she couldn’t help worrying. God knew Matt wasn’t worrying. He never worried; he always believed everything would work out—an eternal optimist which complimented her constant pessimism.
Her pessimism was a gift from her mother. She thought of her mother, and she thought about telling her mother about the soon-to-be-gift from the stork, but then she pushed that thought away. Her mom was a drunk and an on-again-off-again drug addict. She had kicked Gina out on the street when Gina was only a teenager so she could stagger off with her life of abusive, drug-dealing boyfriends, and parties.
And Matt’s parents weren’t much more help. His mother was dead and his dad never wanted to help Matt; he wanted Matt to pull himself up by his bootstraps and make it on his own like he had. Yeah, some kind of lifestyle Matt’s dad had carved out for himself, freezing to death up in some rusty trailer in New Hampshire.
They had no help. They were on their own.
She loved Matt so much. She just wished they could catch a break somewhere.
• • •
Matt heard the water turn off in the bathroom. He knew Gina would be soaking in there for maybe twenty minutes or so. He didn’t have a lot of time.
He darted around the kitchen and threw a romantic dinner together which consisted of two individual frozen lasagna dinners that he heated up in the microwave. He set the dinners on plates and placed them on their small kitchen table. He lit two candles and he found two wine glasses in the cabinets.
But they didn’t have any wine.
Pepsi would have to do. He poured the soda into the wine glasses and added an ice cube to each one.
Gina came out from the bathroom wrapped in her thick white robe. It was cold in the apartment because they tried to use their heat as little as possible. She came down the short hall and saw the arrangement on the kitchen table.
“What’s all this?” she asked and couldn’t help smiling. A thought entered her mind suddenly that nearly stopped her heart. Maybe somehow Matt knew that she was pregnant; maybe this was his way of celebrating the news.
“We didn’t have any wine, so I had to use Pepsi,” Matt said with that lopsided grin of his that had made her fall in love with him.
“What’s the celebration?” she asked as she took a sip of the Pepsi from her Champaign glass that they had used a few nights ago on New Year’s Eve.
Matt seemed to be nearly busting with excitement—and then the dam broke. “I called the number on that card.”
Gina’s heart dropped. She sighed and brushed by Matt and sat down in front of one of the lasa
gna dinners.
Matt sat down opposite from her, but he didn’t touch his food. He stared at her with that constant smile on his face and that stupid hope dancing in his eyes, reflected by the candlelight.
“Just hear me out,” he said.
Gina picked at her food with her fork just for something to do. She hated to burst his bubble, but somebody had to. “Baby, it’s probably just a scam.”
“They’re talking about a lot of money.”
“How much?”
“Well, he didn’t say. He just said that we could come in for an interview tomorrow.”
“We?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not going. I have a job already.”
Her words stung momentarily, but Matt skipped right past them. “Yeah, a job you hate.”
Gina took a bite of her food. It wasn’t too bad for a frozen dinner.
Matt took a bite of his food, beaming, like he couldn’t control his smile anymore. “I scheduled us for an interview.”
Gina dropped her fork back down into her lasagna. “What?”
“Twelve o’clock. That’s when they want us there.”
“Tomorrow’s my day off. I don’t want to spend it in some room with twenty other foolishly hopeful people who are led along until the big scam is revealed.”
That wiped Matt’s smile away. “It’s worth a try,” he said and pouted like a kid. “As you can see, I’m not having much luck anywhere else.”
Gina didn’t reply. She looked down at her food, picking at it with her fork. Her blond hair hung down in her face a little.
“Gina?”
She still didn’t look at him.
“Please, Gina. Just go with me. They want a couple. We both need to be there.”
She sighed and finally looked at Matt. He looked like some kind of puppy dog begging for a treat. How could she resist him?
“When do we need to be there?”
Matt popped up from his chair and rushed over to her, kneeling down beside her like he might be proposing (yeah right, she wished). He grabbed on to her and pulled her to him. He kissed her.
“I love you,” he told her in a low voice.
• • •
Matt and Gina were twenty minutes early for the interview and they sat in a waiting room that was furnished with cheap furniture and out-of-date magazines. The whole place looked hastily put together, Gina thought. It looked temporary.
“We’re the only ones here,” Gina said as she glanced around the small room. There was only one other door in the small room besides the one they had entered. A beautiful woman dressed in an expensive business suit sat at a cheap desk with a laptop opened in front of her. They had introduced themselves to her when they came in and she had them sign a sheet on a clipboard. Gina noticed that there were no other names on the sign-in sheet.
“That’s good,” Matt whispered, and he still couldn’t help smiling. He was having himself a grand old adventure, Gina thought.
“They probably just schedule one couple at a time,” Matt added as he leaned towards her; the spearmint gum he had chomped on the way to the interview radiated from his breath.
Gina looked back at the secretary who sat at her desk, studying her laptop. She had dark hair and skin, and she had an exotic beauty. Gina wasn’t an expert, but she was pretty sure the woman’s high heels were some kind of designer brand.
A phone buzzed beside the laptop and the secretary picked it up. She didn’t say anything into the phone; she just nodded and listened, and then hung the phone up. She opened a drawer and pulled out two clipboards with papers attached. She grabbed two pens and brought them to Matt and Gina with a fake smile.
“Could you please fill these out while you’re waiting?”
They took the clipboards from her and thanked her.
“Make sure you answer every question,” the secretary said in her slightly husky voice that had just the hint of an accent in it that Gina couldn’t place.
Gina snuck a glance at Matt to see how intently he was watching the woman.
But Matt’s face was already aimed down at the papers on the clipboard.
Gina watched the secretary walk back to her desk, her perfect ass swishing back and forth underneath her skin-tight gray business skirt.
Gina looked down at the first page on the clipboard, and she read the first few questions.
“What the hell kind of questions are these?” she whispered to Matt.
Matt was already scribbling down his answers.
“Have you ever hunted animals?” Gina whispered harshly to Matt, reading one of the first questions.
He looked at her and shrugged. “Just write down no. Unless you have hunted animals.”
Gina gave him a dirty look and then she looked back down at the questionnaire. She looked at the next question: What kind of physical condition would you say you’re in? Excellent. Good. Fair. Poor.
Next question: Do you have any scars on your body? If so, please describe in detail.
Next question: Do you have any tattoos? If so, please describe in detail.
She lifted the page and studied some of the other questions. How close do your closest relatives live? Are you close with your relatives?
She watched Matt again as he scribbled his answers down, his brow furrowed in concentration like he was taking a mid-term exam.
Gina sighed and began her questionnaire, filling out her name—Gina Simon, and her age—twenty-two.
Thirty minutes later the secretary slinked on over to retrieve their clipboards and to flash her fake smile at them again. “All done?” she asked.
They nodded and handed the clipboards to her. She took them to the door and knocked lightly. She waited a moment and then opened the door. She entered the small office and closed the door behind her, but Gina couldn’t see anything inside the room when the woman had slipped inside. She was gone only a few minutes, and then she came back out without the clipboards. She sashayed back to her desk and waited.
Ten minutes later her phone buzzed again. She picked it up, listened for a moment and then hung the phone back up.
“Mr. Yates will see you now,” she told them as she stood up behind her desk and gestured at the only other door in the room like a game show model.
Matt and Gina got up from the plastic chairs and walked across the dull carpeting to the door. Matt paused at the door and then knocked lightly.
“Come on in,” a gruff voice called out from the other side of the door.
They entered and saw a large man in his early forties seated behind the desk. He stood up and smiled at them. He wore a dark suit and tie, but his powerful muscles bulged underneath the fabric, stretching it. He gestured at the two chairs in front of his desk.
“Please sit down.”
Matt and Gina sat down.
Gina glanced around at the office; other than the desk, chairs, and a fake plant, there was nothing else in the room. No artwork or framed certificates on the walls.
“Thanks so much for seeing us this soon,” Matt said.
“My pleasure,” Mr. Yates said and glanced down at their clipboards which were the only things on his desk besides the phone. “Matt Perrone and Gina Simon.”
They nodded and smiled.
“Not married,” Mr. Yates said with a slight frown.
“No, but we’re going to be soon,” Matt spit out.
Gina glanced at Matt like this was news to her, and then she gave Mr. Yates a tight smile and nodded.
“Is that okay that we’re not married?” Matt asked, and he seemed nervous, like this might be the first strike against them.
“You’ve been together for a while?” Mr. Yates asked.
“Three years now,” Matt said.
Mr. Yates nodded. “It should be okay.”
Gina looked back at Mr. Yates. Something about him seemed a little off to her. And there was something a little off about the secretary out in the waiting room. And this nearly bare, temporary office. She waite
d and braced herself for the scam that she knew would be coming. Maybe it would be selling vacuum cleaners, or timeshares, or nutritional supplements.
“I appreciate you filling out these forms,” Mr. Yates said. “I know they’re a pain, but they are important.”
“No problem,” Matt said and grinned.
Mr. Yates folded his big hands together on the desk in front of them and leaned forward slightly, the suit’s fabric straining around his shoulders and upper arms. He smiled at them, but the smile never seemed to touch his ice-blue eyes.
“Now I bet you two want a few more details about this job,” he said.
“Yeah,” Matt answered. “But it sounds great so far.”
What sounds great so far? Gina wanted to ask him. They didn’t even know what they would be doing yet. She glanced at Matt like he was a lamb awaiting the slaughter.
“I’m going to explain everything about the job in a few moments, but first I need to ask a few more quick questions.”
Mr. Yates opened a drawer from his desk and pulled out a few more pieces of paper. He laid the papers down on the desk in front of him and scanned them quickly.
Gina rolled her eyes slightly. Great, more questions.
“I assure you,” Mr. Yates said as he looked right at Gina like he could read her mind, “that these are important questions even though they may seem mundane.”
Matt gave Gina a quick, pleading glance.
And she gave Matt a tight smile, but she hoped he could read the expression in her eyes: I’m only going along with this so far.
Mr. Yates read a question from his paper. “Would you describe yourselves as extroverts or introverts?”
Matt and Gina exchanged glances.
“Uh …” Matt said, not sure which one was the right answer. “I’m not really sure.”
“Well, this job would be more for the introverted,” Mr. Yates said.
“Oh, that’s us, then. We’re introverts. Homebodies. We never go anywhere. We love to hang around the house.”
Matt gave Gina a look, trying to get her to go along with him.
Gina looked back at Mr. Yates and nodded quickly. “Matt’s right. We’re as introverted as they come.”
Mr. Yates studied them for a moment with his cold blue eyes and that humorless smile still pasted on his face. He gave them a quick nod and continued with another question.
