What Comes After Dessert

by Ren Benton

  “Stop fidgeting. I’d fuck you, and I don’t even like big boobs.”

  She’d never heard those last six words used in a sentence before. “I’m flattered, but I have a strict policy against getting busy with married people.”

  “Does that mean you’re not doing it with Officer Beaver?”

  Other than the twice she’d done at least some of it this week with Ben, Tally had gone undone for four years. Five? She hadn’t missed it enough to commemorate the anniversary. “Contrary to popular belief, I’m not the village bicycle.”

  “I didn’t say everybody was riding. I asked if Shane was.”

  Her mother had snapped the same way when questioned, but Bonnie Castle had dirty secrets to keep buried. All of Tally’s dirt, real and manufactured, was scattered all over Main Street already. She should be able to state the truth without putting up her fists to defend it. “I wouldn’t be going on a date with Ben if there was anything going on with Shane.”

  She started the overdue chore of wiping down the counter.

  “You’ll end up with flour all over your dress. Let me do it.” Julie took the rag from her and scrubbed. “Are you fussing with your neckline because you want your boobs to say ‘friendly get-together’ or because you want them to scream ‘the ride starts here, big boy’?”

  She wanted her boobs to shut up for one night. She’d forgotten how much skin this dress showed. She should have worn a tank underneath. The cleavage would be fine if they were alone, but it was too trashy to wear anywhere respectable.

  Maybe that was why men had never taken her anywhere respectable, out of fear the hick stripper would rip off her clothes and find a pole to swing on. “I’m fussing because you won’t let me keep my hands busy and because if I take a deep breath, everybody will know what color my bra is.”

  She gave up trying to make the dress cover more than the laws of physics permitted. “I can’t wear this.”

  Julie seized her by the elbows. “Settle down. You’re covered. Don’t bend over to shine your shoes again, and nobody will see your bra.”

  Tally’s cheeks burned. Back straight. Always. Her mother had been right to terrorize her about posture.

  Julie released her. “It always amazed me how self-conscious you are about having the kind of rack other women have to pay to get. How did you ever get up on stage with that attitude?”

  Attitude on the inside didn’t matter as long as the outside met the audience’s expectations. “That’s all they’re good for. It’s their natural habitat.”

  “So what’s so bad about them, other than perverts staring?”

  Perverts weren’t the only ones who stared, and people were quick with value judgments based entirely on the way she was shaped. They looked at her breasts and thought about sex; therefore, she must be a big ol’ slut.

  But she’d had plenty of time to get used to that since puberty. “Right now, the worst thing is I don’t own a bra that isn’t held together with safety pins, but I can’t walk into Walmart and find a twelve-dollar bra in anything close to my size, and I can’t take eighty dollars out of the budget to order one from someplace that understands the concept of a narrow rib cage with a disproportionately full cup.”

  Correctly fitted, she wore a 30DD. Even if money was no object, those were hard to come by in retail stores, leaving her the options of ordering online, taking a needle and thread to rig one with an incorrect fit, or making do with the tattered collection she already had — hence the safety pins.

  “Probably hard to find clothes that don’t fit the rest of your toothpick like a tent, too.”

  “I used to get everything tailored.” Her boobs were four sizes bigger than the rest of her. If she fit her chest, everything else had to be taken in: hips, waist, shoulders, arms. She hadn’t owned a dress, blouse, or jacket with an original seam.

  She hadn’t owned many dresses, blouses, or jackets. Her roommate never understood why her everyday wardrobe consisted entirely of jeans and T-shirts, blaming it on small-town-girl lack of style. “These days, I’m getting very comfortable wearing my dad’s flannel tents.”

  “Could be worse. My fashion icon is Jake from State Farm.” Julie sashayed her polo and khakis over to the dishwasher to wipe a drip mark off the front. “You want this on?”

  “Not unsupervised. It leaks sometimes, and I’ll be behind when I come in tomorrow as it is without adding a flood to my problems.”

  “This whole damn town is out of warranty. My washing machine doesn’t spin unless you manually get it started, so somebody has to babysit every load, and there’s no money to get it fixed.”

  “Cheaper to buy a new one than pay a guy to schlep out here from Marion to look at it, anyway.” Every service person in the phone book knew Westard was at their mercy since the hardware store closed and Jed wouldn’t even listen to the problem anymore unless there was something in it for him involving a little blue pill. By the time they were done billing for travel — twice, since the part they needed was never in the truck — repairing that ancient appliance wasn’t as thrifty as it sounded.

  “Like either is an option. We all have to live in the spaces between what’s broken.” Julie rolled her shoulders. “Most of the time, anyway. The other morning, the sole came off one of my son’s sneakers, and I had to send him to school with duct tape wrapped around his foot. I took money we can’t afford and bought him new shoes on my lunch break because my kid wasn’t wearing garbage two days in a row.”

  When you were broke, you babysat cranky appliances and wore things that didn’t fit, should have been thrown out years ago, or were handed down from someone who should have thrown them out years ago. When you were broke and had kids, you did whatever it took to keep them from feeling like trash, no matter how little you had.

  And that was just material things. What if they got sick or hurt? What if they were college bound? Where did the money come from? Just the thought of those expensive little people made Tally’s ovaries shrivel. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “I couldn’t tell you. We just make it work. It helps when you agree what the priorities are. Manny wanted to know which one of us was going to get the shoes so we didn’t come home with two pairs. Jeremy would have belted me for wasting his money.”

  The best thing Jeremy Boyd had done in his miserable life was fuck off and leave Julie a single mother. “This one’s a good guy, then?”

  “Yeah, and not just in comparison to the asshole. I dated Ben. I know what a good guy is.”

  He did have a tendency to make all other specimens look inferior, but Julie didn’t know she knew that, and the kissing incident in second grade had taught Tally the value of discretion. “Tough act to follow?”

  “Very. I finally remembered why I broke up with him.”

  “Not stinginess with fries?”

  “Ben’s not stingy. He’d give you his whole lunch if you said it looked good. But it got annoying that all we ever talked about was you.”

  Really? What did he say? What did you tell him? She shook her head to dismiss that ridiculous thrill. It was like being thirteen all over again. Or seven. Ben Fielder likes me! Sparkle explosion!

  But those bright little sparklies were doomed to be snuffed out by the recollection that he was an indiscriminate liker. At fourteen, he’d just been on the next level of making the rounds. His interest didn’t mean he thought there was anything special about her. On the contrary, she’d have to be completely overlooked to be distinguished from the masses.

  But she’d kept her silly crush a secret all this time — no point airing it now. “I can see how that would bore you to tears.”

  “When your boyfriend is more interested in a tall, skinny dancer with straight A’s and big boobs, boredom isn’t the issue. He seemed to miss you a lot when you went to New York, too.”

  Tally avoided meeting Julie’s speculative gaze. Naturally, the days between his departure and hers would have been tense after that disastrous marriage proposal. No poin
t airing how she’d been the first person to tell him he couldn’t have something bad for him, either.

  Julie sighed and threw the rag down on the counter. “Look, if it was anyone other than Ben, I’d have to say something, so I’m going to say it anyway. He’s just passing through. You deserve somebody who’s going to stick around.”

  Judging by public opinion, she deserved a Jeremy Boyd. “Who did you have in mind, Shane?”

  The crease in Julie’s nose indicated otherwise. “Know a guy long enough to compile a record of his jerk moves, and even if they’re little ones, they add up. Shane’s not a bad guy, but you could do better.”

  Julie ought to know not a bad guy was infinitely better than most other options. It was also the best a girl could do when the good guy she wanted was out of reach. “I know he had that phase in fourth grade when he thought it was funny to fart on people—”

  “Please. I saw him do that at the last Fourth of July picnic.”

  “—but he was also student council president, demonstrating good leadership qualities.”

  “That was the year student council chose a new logo design for the school’s T-shirts and binders and yearbook cover—”

  “Don’t forget the school’s letterhead.”

  “—and the knight’s helmet looked like a penis, and his jousting rod looked like a penis, and his horse looked like a giant penis. We called it the Year of the Penis.”

  “That’s not entirely Shane’s fault. Ben designed it.”

  “No way! Why haven’t I heard this before now?”

  “Statute of limitations. He didn’t want credit because he was sure the staff would object to putting a mess of dicks all over the school. He had an artistic crisis when they didn’t notice there was a mess of dicks all over the school.” She held her hands over her head and splayed her fingers. “Even with the big white plume coming out of the dick helmet.”

  The look Julie gave her was a reminder that someone who had hated Ben since second grade wouldn’t possess that kind of inside information. She dropped her hands to her sides. “Anyway, Shane turned out all right, and I bet he has one of those... It’s been so long, I forget the word. It starts with a P, then an E, maybe an N...”

  “Does the size matter?”

  “The bigger, the better.”

  “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘pension.’”

  She snapped out a finger gun. “That’s the one.”

  “Look at you, going all Elizabeth Bennet upon taking inventory of Darcy’s mansion.”

  “Glad I’m not the only one who remembers it that way. I wanted that greedy bitch to die in a needlepoint accident. The dad and Lydia were the only ones I liked.”

  “Really? I would have thought your favorite was the goody two-shoes one. Wasn’t Lydia the troublemaker?”

  “I prefer to think of her as someone who knew what she wanted and grabbed it instead of waiting for somebody else to decide what her life was going to be.”

  “She regretted it later.”

  “Or so Mrs. Colquitt wanted us to believe.” Tally sailed through school regurgitating the answers she knew teachers wanted to hear, but she’d felt strongly enough about this one issue to tell it like she saw it. “She gave me an F on an opinion essay because I said Lydia would have had a lot more regret if she’d settled for whatever her mother wanted.”

  Tally had always done what her mother wanted. Eat this. Wear that. Do this. Be that. No one got to do what they liked all the time, but she never had five minutes of freedom to even figure out what she did like. Her childhood wasn’t just a long stretch of performing against her will; it was also a series of missed opportunities to discover who she might be outside of the act.

  Every day since had been a struggle to find a different act.

  Of course she’d cheered for the one Bennet daughter with the guts to escape the cage.

  “Colquitt never read our papers. She failed you because she had a cougar-crush on Ben and you got to tutor him after school instead of her.”

  “She shouldn’t have let me stand in her way. He spread himself pretty thin.”

  “He didn’t ask her. He asked you. Besides, they’d started putting female teachers in prison for screwing their students by then, and he’s not sneaky enough to keep a secret like that.”

  He’d been sneaky enough to keep Tally a secret. Twelve years later, they were still sneaking around in the dark.

  Discretion was a good thing. It would do her reputation no good to have the whole town know she was getting Ben Fielder off, then or now. She should be grateful he was getting her off and she wouldn’t have to hear about it via Westard Live Action News for the rest of her life after he left.

  Grateful wasn’t the word for her, though. Maybe she’d simply reached full capacity on the number of secrets she could keep.

  “You’re probably right about Lydia. She wasn’t the type to let a little scandal shame her into seclusion. Respectability off the table, she would have gone on to have fabulous adventures.” Julie pinned her with an accusing stare. “So what’s your excuse?”

  Tally’s fabulous adventure had ended in a blaze of poverty when the jobs dried up and nobody wanted to pay for her sole asset — her aging tits. “I don’t have a gold-digging sister to marry a nice rich guy who’ll bail me out of Fabulous Adventure Jail.”

  “Failure to provide gold-digging sisters should count as child abuse.” Julie turned red. “I didn’t mean—”

  Good ol’ Mom, making people uncomfortable from beyond the grave when they forgot to tiptoe around the landmines she’d left behind. The shrapnel was nothing to Tally, so she ignored it. “The scarcity of nice rich guys for them to prey upon is more of a crime.”

  Julie backed away from her gaffe. “I suppose a big, fat pension will have to suffice. And just think, if you marry Shane, you’ll be a Crystal Beaver.”

  “Perfect if I go back to stripping.”

  “Is that an option?”

  “I’m too old to make decent money, but if Stella fires me for bankrupting her, lousy money is better than none.”

  “If you’re not keen to go back to it, I could get you in at the warehouse. The hours are shit and it’s not much better than minimum wage, but you could keep your clothes on if you wanted to.”

  “What kind of warehouse is it that clothes are optional?”

  Julie stuck out her tongue. “You know what I mean.”

  “That would be better.” If the person doing the hiring was as forgiving as Jules. “Thanks.”

  They avoided eye contact until the feelings billowing through the kitchen like smoke dissipated.

  Julie beat her to changing the subject. “Do you think it’s bad luck to talk about marrying one man while waiting for another to pick you up for a date?”

  A date was usually full of possibilities, and this one wasn’t. Ben was leaving. He wasn’t coming back. Her future didn’t include anything related to this date, other than the disappointment that it would be the last. “One’s not available and the other’s temporary. There’s not a lot of luck involved with either of them. But as far as flings go, you can’t get better than one you don’t have to see every day after it’s over, right?”

  “You’re not the fling type, Tal.”

  She wasn’t the type to do a lot of things she’d done out of fear or necessity. This one, at least, she’d gone into willingly because it was as close as she could get to the only dream she’d ever had.

  “So, what does an eighty-dollar bra look like?”

  Tally slapped the encroaching hand away from her chest. “Perv. It looks very punk rock when it’s held together with safety pins.”

  “Might as well show me. I’ll just ask Ben about it tomorrow.”

  “If he gets me out of this dress and that’s what he notices, I’m going to kick him in the balls with my unsightly naked toes.”

  Julie’s grin morphed into a fierce scowl. “Dammit, I’m so pissed at you for not talking to me for twel
ve fucking years.”

  Tally shrugged off another emotion before it chafed her raw. “You have a husband to talk to.”

  “I need somebody to talk to about him. And say unkind things about my children to without worrying about a visit from DCS. And I’m sure as hell not discussing Ben’s hot ass with my husband. Ooh, let’s discuss that.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.” He was sitting on it last time I got him most of the way out of his pants.

  Julie grabbed her hand and pressed two fingers to her wrist. “You do have a pulse. Oh my god, are you Westard’s first lesbian?”

  Tally wiggled free of her touch. She hadn’t flinched, but she was approaching her maximum threshold for human contact before Ben even arrived. “You’re the one who said you’d do me and tried to get my top off.”

  “Obviously the homophobes are right and you’ve converted me through gay osmosis.”

  “Maybe if that rumor got around, women would stop guarding their husband’s junk around me.” She wondered if Julie’s attitude toward her would change if her husband was in the room.

  “I bet it would make it worse because then the men would be thinking about you with other women, and they seem to be wired to dig that. Face it, you’re stuck being the imaginary threat until something younger and prettier comes along.”

  “How old is your daughter?”

  “Oh, now the stripper thinks she has jokes.”

  It was nice to have somebody comfortable enough with her faults to joke about them. Jules could say the S-word now and everything. They should definitely talk more. “I have some nail polish left over from a past life. If you want to come over sometime and get a pedi.”

  “In all our spare time.”

  Tally had found time for Ben. She would have to fill that time with something when he was gone.

  Julie would still have a husband and two kids to keep her busy, though.

  Maybe all of her relationships were doomed to take place in fleeting increments.

  She’d been keeping an eye on the clock on the oven. Precisely when it displayed 6:57, Ben came through the door and reached up to give the buzzer a preemptive swat. He froze with his arm overhead and stared at Tally when she emerged from the kitchen.