I scan the room looking for Jake and immediately trip on a pipe sticking up out of the floor—I should definitely not be wearing three-inch platform espadrille sandals in this place, but that’s just my level of commitment to fashion.
“Jake?” I look up at the two mask-wearing guys, but they shrug. “Jake?”
Miguel comes in from the kitchen area, wiping his hands down on his jeans. He manages to look stylish in a T-shirt and work boots. He gives me one of those “hugs” where our right shoulders briefly touch, so none of the dirt gets on me. “Sorry,” he says.
“It’s okay.” I’m assuming he means the dirt. “Jake around?”
Miguel looks up. “Uh . . .” He obviously feels like he needs to explain, which is weird, but whatever. “He took off a little while ago. Said he’d be back after lunch.”
It already is after lunch. That’s what I get for trying to surprise him. I shrug. “Okay.”
“Don’t worry about the plumbing thing, by the way. I think we got it.”
“What plumbing thing?”
Miguel’s head turns sharply. Then just as quickly he turns back. Like he’s suddenly worried Jake’s going to come walking through the door. “The thing in the kitchen.”
Obviously there’s something Jake didn’t tell me, and Miguel isn’t going to rat him out. Which is fine. I don’t want to have to worry about every little thing down here. I’m actually glad Jake is taking care of things without bringing me into it. I need the space on my hard drive for other things.
“Jake’s on it. I don’t think it’s going to be something we’re going to have to worry about.”
He doesn’t sound all that sure.
“That sounds like maybe I should worry,” I say with a laugh.
Miguel laughs with me, but he’s looking at me a little weird. I can tell he doesn’t want to step into the middle of anything between me and Jake. “It’s probably nothing,” he says finally.
“It looks amazing in here, by the way,” I say, changing the subject. “Or like it’s going to be amazing. Do you mind if I wait a little while? I need to make some calls.”
I have three more appraisals to do this afternoon. Good news, since I spoke to the lender this morning and my new mortgage is going to be double the old one. I can handle it, though. I can. I swear.
“Sure. Go ahead,” he says.
I perch at the edge of the counter and whip out my laptop. Twenty minutes of emails later, Miguel comes back over.
“Jake called,” he says. “He’s not going to be back for a little while. Said not to wait.”
“Oh, okay,” I say, wondering why he didn’t call me himself. I don’t want to make Miguel any more uncomfortable than he obviously already is, so I just fake being fine with it. “I’ll get out of your way.”
“Take your time,” he says. “Stay as long as you like.”
“Thanks, Miguel.”
People told me I shouldn’t go into business with my boyfriend, and I know why they said that, in theory. But right now, watching Miguel go back to tearing up linoleum, I’m starting to get it.
This could be harder than I thought.
6
* * *
RONNIE
I’m coming back from another long, meaningless day of job hunting when I run into Melissa, on her way to her car. Ever since that first day, she’s been dressing nicer, wearing perfume, putting a little bit of effort into her hair. She’s been so helpful, too. She’s done everything but write my résumé for me—she taught me how to get an email account, apply for jobs on the Internet, and use a printer. Sometimes she’s even seemed downright flirty when it’s been just the two of us in the computer room.
Or maybe I’m making that up.
“How’d the job search go today?” She stops and really looks at me, her caseload bag swinging forward from the abrupt change in momentum. She twirls a lock of her hair.
I’m not making it up.
“Not great,” I say.
“What happened?”
If I tell her what really happened she’ll feel sorry for me. How I walked into Acme Hardware to ask for an application and the kid working the cash register—probably eighteen or nineteen, definitely into heavy metal—couldn’t stop dillydallying with his phone. How I stood there, chest tight, pits stained, until he glanced up, gave me a once-over, and went back to whatever game he was playing on his phone. “You mean for a job?” he asked without looking up, thumbs flying. Yeah, I mean for a job. What do you think, asshole?
“Are you okay?” Melissa’s eyes move up, down, back, forth—examining every inch of my face, or whatever she can see of it in the fading light.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say. I’m not convincing, though. Because this is where it all falls apart for me every time. This is the level of the going-straight game that I can never get past—the part where you have to get a job and become a productive member of society. If I could do that, I would never have become a criminal in the first place. Not that there was a point before I turned into a criminal. There wasn’t. I was always a criminal. Antisocial behavior happens because you weren’t socialized properly from the get-go. I wasn’t a socialized kindergartener. I wasn’t a socialized seventh-grader. And I wasn’t a socialized adult. There was virtually no chance I was going to drive a bus for a living, or deliver the mail. The people who do that are the same people who raise their hands to erase the chalkboards and join the debate team or the football squad. I was out there shoplifting and hustling for Charleston Chews. I was never normal. Not one fucking day.
But I was good inside. Always. I just didn’t get enough love and I didn’t know anything and that made me ripe to try to get love in all the wrong ways, from getting money, to using women. We lived in an area on the edge of the hood in South Seattle, and there was all kinds of negative stuff happening there. I had lots of company. Sooner or later you catch a case. Then once you’re in the system, you do a bid or two in the pen, and from there on out, it’s basically over. You can never go back to the world that regular people live in, the one with choices and options.
Crazy me, I thought all the changes I made in prison this time around would help me once I got outside. I thought I’d be able to make a place for myself out here. I thought knowledge would be power. But outside is outside. It’s cold out here.
“Ohhhh, you’re not okay,” Melissa says in a voice you would use to comfort a hurt child. This is the social worker part of her, the part that rescues wounded birds and nurses them back to health. “Ronnie, I’m sorry. I really am. I know it’s hard.”
“Thank you,” I say. It feels good to have someone care about how hard it is. Usually people say that you did the crime, and so the “doing time” part, however hard it is, you have it coming. They don’t want to feel for you or hear you complain. You made your bed, you gotta lie in it. “You don’t have to say that, but it feels good that you did.”
We stand there a moment, watching the trees in silhouette. It’s a beautiful night.
“Wait, I know!” Melissa says excitedly, and skips down the steps. She clicks her key chain. Chirp-chirp! She opens the passenger door, all excited. “Get in.”
I cast a side-glance toward the car door. It is absolutely forbidden for inmates and staff to “consort” with each other. If we got caught, I could be sent back to prison immediately. Melissa could lose her job. I look all around us, checking to see if the coast is clear.
“It’s fine,” Melissa says. She waves off any suggestion of danger. She’s surprisingly cavalier. What do I know? Maybe they’re lax here at the Oregon Residential Reentry Facility. “No one cares.”
I get in.
As I click the seat belt shut, knees up around my chin, my heart is beating a million miles a second. I’m sitting in the front seat of Melissa Devolis’s car. I keep stepping on something down by my feet and whatever it is crunches
loudly, but I’m not sure what it is, since I’m so squished into the seat everything below my knees is out of view.
“It’s just old water bottles,” Melissa says. “Feel free to move your seat back.”
I’ve been wanting to ask why everyone drinks water out of bottles now, but this isn’t the right moment. Instead I say, “Is there a lever?”
I feel around, find nothing, then realize I’m looking in the 1997 place. In 2015, you move your seat back with a button, not a lever. And it’s motorized, not mechanical. And it’s on the side, not underneath. Which about sums up the world: everything’s moved and now I have to figure out where they put it.
“Found it.”
I smile sheepishly. Melissa smiles back.
“We’re going to get ice cream, by the way, because ice cream can fix anything,” Melissa says. “Do you like ice cream?”
“Sure.” I’m wondering if this is a trick question.
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic,” she says.
“No, I like it a lot. Really. I like it a bunch.” I can’t believe I just said the words a bunch. I’m nervous. Melissa is making me nervous. This whole situation is making me nervous. Sick to my stomach.
“Because it sounded like you only like it a little bit.”
“Okay, then, how’s this: I love ice cream!” I sing it out loud, like I’m Teddy Pendergrass or someone. As if I’m making love to the sentence I love ice cream.
Melissa laughs at what can only be called the top of her lungs.
“You are so effing funny, Ronnie!”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“Were you always like this?”
“Yes, I was. As a matter of fact, I still am.”
“You don’t seem like the other prisoners,” she says. “You’re different. You’re not hardened.”
“I did a lot of work in there,” I say. “I made it my job to get myself right.”
My stomach is starting to flip. I don’t feel so good. “Hold on.” I turn down the music. I’m distracted, and feeling a little sick. “Can you pull over for a second?”
“Are you going to throw up?” Melissa looks worried.
I shake my head. I don’t know how to tell her I’m worried this ice-cream cone is going to cost me my freedom.
“I shouldn’t be in your car,” I say. “And you shouldn’t have me in your car. If you want ice cream, you can surely find someone to go with you who won’t get you fired. And if I want to take a ride in some woman’s car, it probably shouldn’t be yours.”
Okay, so I did have to vomit. Words.
“I’m sorry.” Melissa drops her head. Her eyes are welling up. “You’re mad at me.”
“Not at all. I just thought . . .” Shit, I didn’t mean to make her cry. After making a woman mad, making a woman cry is the second most frightening thing I’m capable of. “I’m just trying to be responsible.”
“And I’m trying not to be!” There’s a real edge to her voice, almost a desperation. “That’s all I ever do! The right thing. I just feel like—” She stops herself. “I thought it would be okay to break the rules. Just once. Is that such a big deal?”
Melissa digs an old fast-food napkin out of the center console and uses it to wipe her eyes and blow her nose. It’s a pretty loud honk! for such a mousy person.
I reach over and put my hand on her arm. I’m only trying to comfort her, but the moment I touch her I get that electrical jolt. My stomach flips again and I get a ping. Down there. Right in the root chakra. Damn. I pull back my hand almost the moment it touches her.
Melissa looks at me like I’ve seen a million women look at me.
“Don’t,” she says. She takes my hand. Puts it back on her arm. “I want it there.”
Shit.
I search her eyes, looking for some little bit of hesitation, some little bit of doubt. Some sign that I shouldn’t do what I’m about to do. What Melissa wants me to do.
“Please?” she says.
So I do it. I just lean over and kiss her. Her lips are so soft, my whole body is immediately flooded with sex and I’m drunk with being inside another person’s mouth for the first time since Bill Clinton was president. You’d think I would want to devour her whole body on the spot, but it’s the opposite. I want to go slow and savor it, because it feels so deep and thick and tastes so good I think I might die of pleasure. And I want that. I want to die of pleasure. After a long, long minute, Melissa pulls back and looks at me. She silently starts the car, checks her mirror, rips a U-turn right in the middle of the boulevard, and begins driving away from the halfway house. I don’t even have to ask where we’re going.
We are going to her house, where we are going to have the best sex I’ve ever had.
* * *
An hour later, we’re back in the car, crawling along surface streets, making our way back to the halfway house. We’re not saying much, maybe because we know what we just did can’t be undone—and also because we know we’re going to do it again.
There’s no way we’re not going to do that again.
Melissa is taking a left on Southeast Hawthorne when I suddenly realize where we are.
“Wait. Can you take a right at the next corner?” I point toward a big tree up ahead. Even though it’s dark, I can see the fall colors from the light of the streetlamp, and it takes my breath away. There are no fall colors in prison. There are no colors, period. “I just want to check something out.”
“Sure,” she says. “Up here?”
We turn down Southeast Thirty-Seventh. This is it. This is her street. I didn’t imagine it would be this cute, lined with little bungalows. I scan the doors for addresses. I know Nicki’s by heart, of course. I’ve written it on a dozen birthday cards and letters over the past seventeen years. She may not have wanted to talk to me, but that didn’t mean I was just going to go away. I remembered every Halloween, every Thanksgiving, every Easter with a Hallmark card. I never wanted her to think I forgot about her.
I’m filled with something—hope? Joy? Pride? Dread? Fear? Relief? All of those. But mostly I can’t wait. Because this is my chance.
“A friend of mine lives right here,” I say. I point at Nicki’s house. “You mind if we stop for a quick second? The lights are on and it would be fun to say a surprise hi.”
“It’s not really in the rules,” Melissa says. She’s got sort of a bashful smile on her face, still in the oxytocin and dopamine haze. “But why not, I guess.”
“It’ll just take a second, I swear.” I get out of the car. My heart is like a fist squeezing over and over in my chest, but since I know Melissa’s watching, I have to make like everything’s fine, everything’s normal, I’m just here to say hi to an old buddy. It’s too late to turn around, there’s no way to explain my way out of it, and besides, I don’t want to turn around. For all these years I have wanted to see my daughter, to talk to her, and she wouldn’t let me.
Well, now she can’t stop me.
I know I’m taking a chance, just showing up like this. But I also know the power of surprise—it disarms a person. It’s been easy for Nicki to ignore me over the phone. She could be logical, a left-brained, rational person who doesn’t want to see me for this reason, that reason, and the other reason—reasons she’s been rehearsing over and over until she got to the point where she believes that she doesn’t even need her own father in her life.
But she’s wrong. She does need me.
All she has to do is see me.
7
* * *
NICKI
The moment I see him it’s as if someone pushed the whole house off a very tall building and I’m falling and it’s the panic part, before I realize death is inevitable and just relax and let my life flash before my eyes.
My dad is standing there.
Ronnie pushes the doorbell again, he pro
bably shouldn’t do that, it’s just scaring me more, this whole thing is really intense and—
“Go away!” I can hear myself yelling at him, but it doesn’t sound like it’s coming from me. Now I know why people say that in a crisis time stops and you leave your body. Because it’s true. “Go. Away.”
“Baby! It’s your dad! It’s me, open up,” he says. “Please open up.” He tries the door, but it’s locked.
I am frozen in place.
“I’m out! I’m just here to say hello.” He’s attempting to sound light and happy like he’s dropping by for coffee. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you, I thought it would be fine—”
“Jake! Jaaaaaaake! Come here quick!” I flip on my heels and lunge toward the back of the house, in the process slipping on a piece of pork loin. My ankle twists and I almost go down, before catching myself in a large comic gesture. As I get back on my feet, I pass Cody, who has heard my yelling and has come out of his room to investigate.
“Mom!”
Cody’s already to the door and looking through the window and I can see that he knows who it is. My dad. I don’t know how he knows—I guess I’ve shown him pictures—but the recognition is moving across his face like one of those skywriting planes pulling a banner: you know this guy, you know this guy, who is this, who is this, it’s your mom’s dad, it’s your mom’s dad, it’s your mom’s dad, Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie . . .
Multiple Listings Page 7
