“Fine then. What did he say?”
“He said we should make an offer.”
“Well, what he should have said is, ‘You, Nicki Daniels, should make an offer, with the money you have worked your ass off to earn, starting with the paper route you had in sixth grade, and continuing until this very day when you are still working your ass off, and taking care of your kid, and dealing with my entitled ass.’ When I say entitled, I mean Jake, not me.”
She pulls one foot out of the water and offers up her toes for a helping of puke green/yellow. “Speaking of which, does he still want your money for a restaurant?”
Of course she would bring that up. About a month ago, I mentioned in passing that I was thinking of investing in Jake’s restaurant, and I’ve regretted it ever since. Peaches makes it sound like Jake is some sort of male gold digger who is only with me for my money. I don’t even have that much money. At best, a guy could dig for bronze. To me she just sounds old-fashioned. This is the twenty-first century, people. So I have the money, big whoop, why feel bad about it? I can’t deal with the idea that it’s okay to be a woman who makes money as long as you’re partnered with a man who makes more.
“It’s not like that,” I say. Conversations with Peaches can sometimes start to feel like dropping a piece of paper on a windy day where your only hope is to stomp on it the moment it lands. Otherwise you’re going to chase it all over tarnation.
“Oh really, then what’s it like?”
“I’m not the only investor. The contractor guy, Miguel, is putting in all the labor and materials—which is worth way more than my share. Jake is putting in the sweat equity. And I’m underwriting the lease. We’re all three equal partners.”
“So you’ve already committed to this?” Now Peaches is accusing me. “You didn’t tell me that.”
“I didn’t have to!” I can hear myself going on the defensive, which I hate. But Peaches is partly right. Until now, I’ve been making it seem like the restaurant thing is more of a maybe than a yes. Probably because I knew she would have such a big, fat opinion about it. Peaches has big, fat opinions about a lot of things in my life.
And I let her get away with it, probably because she’s not just the closest thing I have to a family—she’s all I have for a family. With no brothers or sisters, a mom who is God knows where (seriously, she could be dead for all I know, but I don’t know because I’m really great at practicing Don’t Look, Don’t Find), and a dad in prison I haven’t spoken to in years, I am alone in the world. Except for Cody—and if I ever decide to marry him, Jake—I am essentially an orphan. For a very long time, Peaches was The Most Important Person in my life, and just as Bill Clinton is still called Mr. President, it’s not a title Peaches is going to relinquish anytime soon. Like, ever.
Which is why Peaches hates all my boyfriends. Whenever a new guy comes along, Peaches drops down to third in my Netflix queue of people. She could handle becoming number two when Cody was born. But for her, being number three is just not acceptable. Peaches believes no man is as trustworthy as she is, and in some ways she’s right. Love has a tendency to make even good people turn shady. Or maybe I just like guys who have a little bit of shady in them.
“I don’t know, Nick.” Peaches has that skeptical tone in her voice. “Maybe you should slow your roll with Jake. It’s fine to boink him, but you don’t need to give him a job, too.”
“Peaches, I’m sorry, but I’m not taking relationship advice from you.”
“Why not?”
“Because you wouldn’t know the difference between a good boyfriend and Charlie Sheen.”
“Charlie Sheen is hot.”
“Exactly.” I practically snort, I’m so right. “Anyway, I don’t think you get it. Jake loves me. He wants to marry me—”
“Ohhhhhh! So that’s it! He said the magic words! I want to marry you. Okay, now I get it. This explains everyth—”
“Peaches, please.”
“You’re going to tell him the house is yours, though. Right? We’re not buying it, you are, and your name is going to be on the deed. The only name.”
“Peaches.”
“If he’s cool, he’ll have no problem with that. If he’s not cool with it, he’s a taker, Nicki.”
“Peaches! He’s not a taker.”
Hua looks up from my cuticles. “Peaches right. No one ever says, ‘I’m a taker.’ ” It would be just like Hua to interject once in her broken English, but totally make it count.
“Yes!” Peaches gives Hua a high five. “Hua, you kill me, woman. Thanks for the assist.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I say. I’ve learned this is the best way to get Peaches to stop talking about something. She’s like the drunk driver of BFFs—she has a way of jumping the curb and plowing right through any sobriety checkpoint you try to set up.
“Just ask him if he’s okay with his name not being on the deed. I dare you,” she says.
I can’t even look at Peaches, I’m so mad. I just stare at my OK! magazine and pretend to be absorbed in the latest Jennifer Aniston pregnancy rumor. There’s a long silence.
“Okay, now can we please talk about something else?” Peaches says impatiently. She’s pretending like she’s the one who can’t take it anymore. Nice move. Classic Peaches.
“I wish we would,” I say, still staring at the extreme close-up of Jennifer’s womb area. It’s got a red box on it to indicate where the baby would be. If there were one.
“No, I wish we would.”
“No, I wish we would, first.”
It’s hard not to laugh. Peaches and I have a way of keeping a fight going and laughing about it and playing it like a scene in a movie—all at the same time.
“Fine.”
“No, I’m fine!”
“Fine. Be fine, then. I’m not stopping you.”
“I will.”
“Go ahead,” Peaches says, letting her head bob just a little. “I’m waiting for you.”
“I’m doing it,” I say. “Right now. This is me being fine.” I exaggeratedly do my best impression of “fine”—supercalm face, Mona Lisa smile, eyes forward, head just slightly tilted to the left. “You like it?”
“I love it.” Peaches laughs and holds up her hand for a high five. “You’re effing hilarious.”
I slap her hand. “No, you are.”
And as both of us dissolve into giggles, Hua tries not to ruin my cuticles.
2
* * *
RONNIE
After church, I always clean. Every Sunday I pick up each of my thirty-two possessions and carefully wipe off every speck of dust. Every last morsel. Done right, this kills a good two hours.
Which is great, because Sundays are long. I don’t have to go to my job, and normally that would be a good thing, but not here. Because the kitchen where I work is probably the most happening spot in the whole place: giant vats of boiling water for the mashed potatoes, huge ovens filled with industrial-sized trays of “meat” loaf, and massive sheets of gooey paste that pass for apple cobbler. The kitchen also has the one thing that’s always in short supply on Sundays: regular people to talk to. Employees, who just work here, not live here. They come and go as they please.
I love to talk to regular people. I like to hear about their lives: their kids, their cars, their struggles, their TV shows. I want to know them and feel them and live vicariously through them. It makes me feel alive. It wasn’t always like this. One time, doing reps in the gym, I realized that all of the relationships I had before I got here were either with people who a) I was using or b) were using me. To the 1998 Ronnie Daniels, human beings worked in one of two directions—you could put something in, or you could take something out. These days, I see myself more as someone sitting next to the mailbox observing everyone who comes up and saying hi and good-bye and trying to make their day a little brig
hter.
It’s a lot better this way.
My books take the longest to clean. They are my prized possessions and I do them one at a time, all fourteen of them. I have spiritual stuff like The Holy Bible (King James Version), The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and the Tao Te Ching; some general interest, like the copy of Tuesdays with Morrie someone gave me, and a thick and unreadable hardcover about investing in stocks—which I’ve always planned to do someday. But the majority of my books are about psychology. Over the years, I’ve read it all: child development, evolutionary psychology, marriage and family therapy, self-help. My favorite book is this one on attachment theory—because how people bond to their moms is the way they do life. Seriously. You think you have free will, you’re making choices about how to be, whom to love, and how to love them. Not really. It was all set by your first birthday. You didn’t choose shit. Your mom came to you when you cried, or she didn’t, and she read the signals you were sending, or she didn’t, and the rest is an episode of Divorce Court.
When I’m done with the books, I give a once-over to my two legal pads and my pen—I have one of those blue Paper Mates, not the Bic Cristals I really like. Even after all this time, I can still remember how much easier the ball rolls on those Bics, and I like the darker color of the ink, too. I got an eye for stuff like that. I’m stylish. Even in here. I used to shy away from saying so, but now I’m old enough to just be real. That’s how it is and why lie? Sure, maybe I’m not as cut as I used to be, but for fifty-seven, I’m still good-looking in an Alec Baldwin sort of way. I got a full head of hair, piercing eyes, and a voice made for phones (or pillow talk).
I definitely still have it, or I would if there were anyone to give it to.
I’m just about to start on my two photographs—they’re my prized possessions, so I always save them for last—when I hear the sharp clatter of jingling metal against metal stop right outside my door.
“Hey. Ronnie.”
It’s Dacker, one of the younger guards. There’s a sharp, listen-up–type of urgency in his voice.
“Dacker?” I can see Dacker’s right eye through the square window. “What’s goin’ on?”
This is unusual. It’s fifteen thirty on a Sunday and nothing else is supposed to happen around here until dinner. I hear a key slide into the lock—my lock—and the next thing I know the heavy metal door is swinging wide open. I can see Dacker, all of him, not just the part of his face visible through the cell door. He’s a good-lookin’ kid, Dacker. Maybe all of twenty-nine.
“Warden wants to see you.”
“On a Sunday?” This could be alarming. You never really want to see the warden in the flesh, much less on a weekend. Last time that happened, that snitch Eyelash went and lied his way out of trouble by throwing four innocent guys under the bus. All four ended up in The Hole for a month. I was one of them. “What’s he want to see me for?”
“Don’t ask me, man. I just do what they tell me.” Dacker says this like he and I are basically in the same boat. I guess in most of the major ways, we are. We spend all our time behind bars, don’t we?
“And they told you to come here and get me and take me down to see Warden Moline?”
Dacker shakes his head. “Naw, man. It’s the other one. The assistant warden.”
“Reeves.”
“Yeah, man. That’s him.”
“The red-faced guy. Who can’t dress.”
“The very same.” Dacker cracks an almost imperceptible smile as he swipes a pair of handcuffs off his right hip in one clean, practiced motion. He’s not supposed to enjoy spending time with the inmates—fraternize is the official word for it—but sometimes he can’t help it. Some of us, like me, are cool people. Probably makes his job less depressing. In fact, if Dacker wasn’t so nice, he’d probably be working the Monday-through-Friday nine-to-five by now. But he still has some humanity, and around here that means the JV squad—nights, weekends, holidays. “Turn around.”
“Oh, you wanna boogie?” I do a little dance move as I turn around. Seventeen years in this place hasn’t taken the boogie out of me. I’m proud of that. Besides, I know these guards so well—the way they move, how they handle me—I could go on Dancing with the Stars with any one of them and win the mirror ball trophy. (Dudes in the joint love that show. It’s as much skin as they’re going to see this side of the barbed wire.) “Does anyone say the word boogie anymore?”
“No one ever did,” Dacker deadpans.
He gives me a little nudge and we start moving toward the door of the cell block.
“How’s your girlfriend, Dacker? She still giving it to you good?”
“She is,” Dacker says evenly.
I’m the go-to guy around here for advice on relationships. Sort of like a jailhouse lawyer, except a jailhouse therapist. I know women so well, and I’ve done so much reading, dudes just started coming to me and talking to me about their problems, especially with the ladies, and pretty soon I was up to my ears in cigarettes and candy bars that I was taking in trade. Along with the spiritual stuff—meditation, Buddhism, and this Egyptian theology you’ve probably never heard of—I got turned into sort of a guru in here.
This time, though, Dacker’s all business. “Let’s see what the warden wants, huh?”
I wince at the reminder of where we’re going. “Yeah. Let’s see what old Assistant Warden Bob Reeves wants with me on this fine Sunday afternoon.”
As we walk, I’m reminded of the hook on an old disco song and I break into an a cappella version—“ ’Cause boogie nights are always the best in town . . .”
And inside one of the cells, someone claps, because I can really sing.
* * *
Reeves lurches in wearing his weekend clothes: a pair of oversized jeans and a size XXXL T-shirt from a local fun run he obviously didn’t do. At his weight—he must top 250, at least—Reeves couldn’t do a five foot, much less a 5K. He perches on the edge of his desk, his massive left buttock holding him down, while his right one hangs free.
I shift in my chair, poised for anything. Encounters with a warden are tense. My first tour of duty in the joint, I used to spend hours playing chess, and it’s a lot like that. You never know what’s going on in the other guy’s mind. This could very easily end with a trip to solitary, or a punch in the face.
“Now, now, you can relax,” Reeves says. He’s looking straight at me, which in prison means he’s waiting for a response. “Take a load off.”
Pawn to d5.
I’m flipping through my mental Experiences in Prison file, looking for a match. Nothing’s coming up. I have no idea what’s going on here. I decide to play it safe by keeping it very neutral.
“Thanks,” I say. “Don’t mind if I do.”
Okay, pawn to d6. Just match him, nothing more.
Reeves clasps his hands together, winding up for his next move. It’s disturbing to see how much he enjoys this. There’s a thing in the psychology world called sublimation, where, for instance, people who want to inflict pain become dentists. Wardens are people who in another era would have become overseers on plantations, but since slavery is outlawed, they become wardens instead. It’s a real ugly profession. Anyway, I watch as Reeves arranges his face into “thoughtful,” then says offhand, “I’m going on vacation tomorrow for two weeks and I’m in here trying to clear off my desk before I leave. Heading to Bend; I got a place out there.”
Boom!
Cxd4, bitches!
Reeves just upended the board. A warden referring to his personal life? Telling me something about himself and his world outside the armed guards and the electronic gates? That just does not happen.
“And since I’m going to be gone for two weeks,” he continues, “I realized I needed to let you know what’s happening so you could make some plans.”
Plans?
“Uh, Warden. Excuse me,” I say
. I just realized candid is the way to go here. “Can I ask you a straight question?”
“Sure, Ron. Go ahead.”
“What is happening here?”
“You’re getting out of here, Ron. That’s what’s happening.” Reeves grins so wide it almost erases the contempt that permanently roosts on the left side of his upper lip.
You’re getting out of here. That’s what’s happening.
My large intestine almost drops through my lap and out the bottom of the chair. Those are the most life-changing words to crash into my psyche since the jury foreman stood up seventeen years ago and said, We find the defendant guilty . . . Reeves keeps chattering, as if he doesn’t understand that my ears have gone deaf.
“The way it happened was, I found out Friday that you became eligible for that new early release program back on September 29,” he says. “I was feeling generous, because that’s the kinda guy I am, so I decided to do you a solid and take care of it before I left on vacation.”
You’re getting out of here. That’s what’s happening.
Suddenly, I’m time traveling back to that federal courtroom in 1998. To the moment I heard the word guilty. It was as if I died on the spot. And dying was just like people said it would be: there was a long tunnel with a white light at the end and in a flash, I saw my whole life—random scenes of it anyway—peppering my eyes like machine-gun fire.
The alley behind my childhood home in Seattle.
The first time I scooped the money off the table, hustling pool.
Multiple Listings Page 2
