First, Last, and in Between

by Jamie Bennett

“Are you angry at me?” she asked.

  I held up the key and let it dangle from the pretty chain. “I wish you’d given this to me before,” I said, and she waited. “But I get it,” I continued, and I could see her tense muscles loosen and her shoulders come down. “I could have avoided a lot of problems over the weekend if I’d had this.”

  “I’m sorry,” Isobel told me, and I believed her now. “I’m sorry. You got hurt because I kept it back. I’m glad you understand it was self-pre…pres…”

  “Self-preservation,” I filled in. I shrugged. “I didn’t get hurt because of you. I got hurt because of me, what I did. I’m also not judging your actions. Isn’t that one of the things you learn in church? Not to judge?” I asked her. “I get that you had to protect yourself from me.” It was strangely disappointing that she felt that way, but totally understandable. I still didn’t think she was doing a very good job at self-preservation, either.

  Her forehead crinkled up. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. There was another long silence. “What do you have in the safety deposit box?”

  “You’ve been wondering all this time,” I said, and she nodded pretty hard. “Do you want to see?” I invited her. “Give me a ride in the tin can and I’ll show you.” I couldn’t help it—I smiled at her expression. She looked like an angry little cat when I made the remark about her car. “Don’t make that face at me, Isobel Starr.”

  She immediately smoothed out her features. “I’m not making a face. I didn’t mean anything.” She thought for a moment. “I have plans for tonight, but I could drive you now. In the tin can.”

  “I don’t even have a tin can of my own,” I said. “I’m glad for yours.” I stood slowly and she watched as I did. “I’m done for the day here, I just didn’t have anywhere else I wanted to go until now.”

  “I used to hang out at whatever school I went to until someone made me leave,” Isobel said, nodding. “Sometimes a janitor would find me really late and freak out about me being there by myself.” I thought of her as a kid, alone like that in a dark building, and I didn’t like it at all, either. “I’m just saying that I get that, about not having anywhere safe to go,” she explained. “And yes, I’ll give you a ride to the bank or wherever.”

  “Well?” I held out my hand toward the door and I wondered why she would be willing to go anywhere with me. Curiosity, or hoping to get a cut, maybe?

  “Let’s go.”

  I waved to Cal and we left the old factory. “Is that guy your boss?” Isobel asked as we walked to her car.

  I slid inside and it audibly groaned. I felt the same way, but I held it in. “Yeah, Cal hired me last week. It’s not the easiest thing to find a job when you get out but he’s an ex-con, too, so he likes to give guys breaks.”

  “What did he get sent to jail for?” she asked curiously.

  “I didn’t ask. Does it matter? He’s been living for fifteen years without any problems.” I looked over at her. “People can change.”

  “Sure,” Isobel agreed, but she didn’t sound like she meant it. “Where to?”

  I told her where to go and the piece of shit tin can strained off, wheezing under my weight. She kept looking worriedly at dials on the dashboard, so I told her about the woodshop to distract her from the fact that her car might have been falling to pieces as we drove along the Jeffries Freeway. I was learning from Cal how to turn wood on a lathe and getting better at making joints. “I never worked on a lot of the equipment that he has in this shop. They didn’t have much, and they were also pretty careful with what we could get our hands on down in Adrian,” I explained. “You might understand that there were a lot of tools they didn’t want to trust us with.”

  She nodded. “It seems like a bad idea to have a woodshop in a prison,” she pointed out, and did that thing where she flattened herself up against the door.

  “Well, they wanted us to occupy ourselves with something other than digging tunnels,” I answered, and she smiled a little, and came away from where her head was touching the glass of the window. “What have you been doing today?” I asked.

  “Me?”

  “Who else would I be talking to? Do you think anyone else could fit in this car?”

  “Not if we wanted it to keep moving,” she said sadly, and I laughed. It startled both of us. “Um, I had four houses today, so I started early. I finished with the Tollmans,” she answered.

  “What’s with the frown?”

  “I don’t like the woman very much,” Isobel said. “She acts like I’m some kind of, I don’t know, crap beneath her high-heel, that I’m barely good enough to take her money.” She frowned more, ferociously. “She doesn’t know me! But I know about her.” She lost the angry, hurt expression as she told me more about Mrs. Tollman, her two kids, and her cheating husband. It sounded like she was telling the plot of a good movie or a book, that was how into it she was.

  She explained that today she had found a hotel key card in the garbage can next to Mr. Tollman’s desk. It was from a local place, which meant that he was probably using it during the day for some fun with the girlfriend. “It would be interesting to get a look at his credit card bills to find out what else he’s up to, but he doesn’t get paper copies,” she lamented. “At least Mrs. Tollman still does, and it’s enlightening. What she spent on makeup and gym fees alone last month would support my mom for about a year. She—” Isobel stopped, and her eyes ran over to me. “Whatever,” she said quickly. “Mrs. Tollman wastes a lot of money, that’s all I meant. Other people would appreciate it.”

  Her mother. I thought about what Rella Ross had asked me so angrily, if I had known “that woman.” “Is your mom doing ok?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Isobel affirmed, and slowed for a light. “My mom is great.”

  Yeah, sure she was. That was why Isobel’s forehead was all crinkled up and her pink lips were turned down again. “That’s good,” I said. “Good that she’s doing so well and she doesn’t need all the money that you said those people waste.” She nodded and I looked out the window at the dirty freeway.

  “When I go to clean these houses, sometimes it makes me mad,” Isobel said suddenly. “Like, these people have so much, and they don’t even care. They don’t even seem to realize it! At the first house I went to today, I saw that they were getting rid of a perfectly good TV because they wanted a bigger one. There was nothing wrong with what they had, they just wanted to upgrade and show off. But they should pay less attention to the TV and more to the fact that their son is practically failing fifth grade. The stuff his teacher is saying, he’s going to flunk in elementary school.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked her. “How do you know this information about these people, what’s on their credit card bills and what the kid’s teacher is saying? Are you poking around?”

  “I can’t help but see things,” she defended herself. “Like, I’m in their houses, picking up, straightening up. I’m not blind.”

  Sure, that was all it was. “You’re just observant,” I agreed. “Just noticing things in plain sight.”

  “Yes,” she answered. “That’s right.” She squirmed in the seat a little, uncomfortable with the lies she was currently telling me. “I also notice that you’re not moving great today.”

  Well, she actually was observant. “Yeah,” I sighed. “Yeah, I’m getting old.”

  She didn’t fall for my lie, either. “Is that bandage holding?”

  My hand went to cover it. “It’s fine. You did a good job wrapping me up.”

  “I have practice. My mom was, um, accident prone. I don’t mind taking care of people like that.”

  “You should be a nurse,” I suggested, and she burst out laughing.

  “Sure, right.”

  “Why is that so funny?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I’ll be a nurse. Or maybe I’ll be the President. You have to go to school for that.”

  “Yeah? You could do that,” I said. “Why not?”

  “No.” She shook her
head. “I’m not a school person. I didn’t graduate from high school and I sucked at it the whole time.” She glanced at me again, but I just nodded. “My boyfriend laughed the first time he heard me say that I was a tenth-grade dropout,” she admitted. “He thought it was so stupid. I mean, I guess smart people wouldn’t drop out when they were fifteen.”

  “Not everybody likes school,” I said evenly, but I clenched my fist next to my hip where she couldn’t see. The guy was an asshole for laughing at her. Didn’t he notice how he’d hurt her feelings? It was painted all over her face.

  “Did you finish and graduate? You said your brother went to college.”

  “You remember that? Sure, Jory went to college to play football, and he always did pretty well at the school stuff. I finished high school, that’s all,” I told her.

  “I liked school,” she admitted. “I wanted to learn. But I wasn’t good at it and everything was always hard for me. I went to so many different places because we moved around a lot. And I couldn’t go every day like other kids did because I had to deal with things at home.” She sighed.

  I wondered what those things were. “I hated it. I never did any work, I skipped and acted like a real asshole to my teachers. They didn’t deserve a kid like me,” I said. “It wasn’t their fault that I liked other things better.” I sighed now, too. “I liked making money, I liked drugs. I should have tried harder, worked at it like my brother did.” There were a lot of things I should have done.

  “Don’t you have to be pretty good to play football in college?” she asked me.

  “You do. You have to be even better to be a professional football player, which Jory is. He’s the best in the league in his position.” I couldn’t keep the pride out of my voice. My big brother was a star.

  “Your brother is really a professional football player?” Isobel asked, aghast. “Then he must have money! What are you doing riding around in my crappy car and letting yourself get beat up? Just get it from him and pay off what you owe!” She stopped talking and looked over at me, horrified, and scrunched herself away. We nearly swerved into another lane.

  “Will you not do that?” I asked, because it was starting to really piss me off.

  “No, I won’t ever again,” she promised. “I’m sorry. I won’t ask any more questions, because it’s none of my business. I’m so sorry.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I mean, will you stop acting like I’m going to do something to you? Right now, you’re so far across the seat, you’re practically out the window. Don’t you think that if I was going to hurt you, I would have done it already?” She had given me enough opportunities. But I hadn’t even liked to see the rain fall on her. I felt like I’d rather have the shit kicked out of me again rather than hurt Isobel in any way.

  She leaned away from the door where she had plastered herself. “Ok. Sure, I just thought I had been pretty rude with what I said,” she told me. She flicked her eyes toward me again as she spoke. “It’s none of my business about your brother or money or anything. I shouldn’t have mentioned any of that or questioned you.”

  “You can say whatever you want to me.”

  “Ok. I will,” Isobel lied.

  She drove for a while before I spoke again, and I only did because I thought that she had a right to know more. She was, after all, the person who had dragged my bloody body across the city. “You really can talk to me, ask me stuff. It makes sense that I’d get money from my rich brother, right? But I can’t get Jory involved in any of this because I could ruin his career. They could kick him out of the league for associating with a felon, and if he gave me money to pay them, he’d be an accessory, too. Let alone me screwing up the rest of his life outside of football. He has a girlfriend he loves now, a fiancée. I’m not going to mess with any of that.” I held up the key, letting it dangle from Isobel’s delicate silver chain. “I have this. I’m going to be fine.” And Jesus, I hoped that was true.

  She only nodded.

  “Do you want to know what’s in the box before we get to the bank? What if it was something illegal?” I asked. “Would you be ok with that?”

  She bit her lip. “Is it? Is it more drugs?”

  “It’s cash,” I said with satisfaction. “Money. It’s the proceeds of a big deal that went down two days before I got arrested. I put my cut of it in the box. I’ll pay what I owe, and then I’m done. I’m out of it all.”

  “Then what will you do? Go home? You could do all the things you told me about, like the beach, and sledding, and seeing your family. You can see your brother.”

  “I have a ways to go first,” I said briefly. “I’ll probably be in Detroit for a while.” She nodded her head, like this was a good idea.

  ∞

  Isobel

  I wondered the whole way in the car what Rory was thinking. I could tell that he was in pain, just by some of the little movements he made, the tiny muscles that jerked in his face. But other than that, he was mostly a mystery to me.

  The car moaned and groaned as Rory slowly levered himself out of it in the bank’s parking lot. I looked around, checking every detail, because the whole place made me nervous. I didn’t care for any building that looked too official, because I’d spent time in a lot of places like that, and nothing good ever happened when you left them. It was how I’d ended up in foster care twice and way too many court-ordered appointments for various issues in our lives. Rory and I had to sit for a long time in the bank lobby, waiting for the one person who was apparently in charge of the safety deposit boxes, and who was helping an old lady with a hugely long problem. As I was someone without a bank account, it was all totally foreign, and very uncomfortable.

  “Why are you jumping around like that?” Rory asked me, leaning over toward my chair with his lips quirked like he was about to smile. Despite his beat-up face and his careful movements, he seemed a lot happier than I’d ever seen him. His problems were almost solved. “Are you nervous about something?”

  “No,” I lied. “I’m not jumping, either.”

  “You’re like a little cricket, always hopping around.”

  “Did you just call me a bug?” I asked incredulously. “Is that the ugly green one? You think I’m like a nasty insect?”

  He laughed. It was a deep, rolling, beautiful sound that made me forget to be nervous. He didn’t laugh too often. Rory slid the key off the chain that Rella had given me. “Turn around for a second,” he said, and twirled his finger to demonstrate. When my back was to him, he gently moved aside my hair, and put the necklace around my neck. I felt the tips of his fingers sweep against my skin, softly brushing me, and I shivered.

  The bank lady clicked on her heels across the floor then, and said hello to us. I saw her eying Rory, his size and his beat-up face, but she smiled anyway, because it was her job to be nice and also, you could still see how handsome he was. The bruises made him look scarier, sure, but the good looks were still there underneath. I frowned at her but she didn’t pay attention.

  The teller brought us back to a little room that was like walking into a giant safe, with a wall of numbered doors. The big vault made me even more nervous, and Rory lost some of his happy mood, too. He gave her his key and she stepped up on a stool to open a metal cubby. Then she pulled out a case from its spot and stepped back down, smiling at him again.

  “I’ll give you this room to use while you open it,” she said, and put it down on a table in an even smaller space. Both of us together barely fit inside after she vacated it.

  “Too close,” Rory said, and I tried to scoot away.

  “I’ll leave,” I said quickly.

  “No.” He cleared his throat. “No, it’s not you. I just don’t like small rooms very much.” His eyes went from side to side, like he was measuring the distance.

  “Then let’s hurry. Let’s get it and go.” I reached for the lid of the box that the teller had brought in for him. I had wondered about this for eight years, carrying that key with me and thinki
ng about what he might have hidden. I flipped back the lid and Rory and I stared inside.

  Nothing. There was nothing inside there.

  “It’s empty,” I said, totally unhelpfully. Then just as stupidly, I turned to look up at him. “Rory? It’s empty.”

  “I can see that,” he growled out. His voice was what I remembered from when I was a kid, when he’d barked into the phone just before he’d shoved the bag into my arms and went down the stairs to get arrested. I started to back out of the little room, brushing against him even when I turned sideways. He didn’t like it when I tried to get away from him, but the two of us in this tiny room was too much for me, even in the best of circumstances.

  Rory put his hand in the box. Then he picked it up and stared inside, and turned it upside down and shook it. There was nothing. “It’s gone. It’s all gone.”

  I had managed to get myself to the door and I opened it into the hallway. The teller came walking briskly toward me, smiling at me, now. “All done with your box for today?” she asked.

  Rory came out behind me, looming above us both and holding the empty box by its handle, letting it dangle from his clenched fist. The teller lost her smile. “Who else could get into this?” he asked her.

  “The people on the signature card. They’re the only ones,” she said. Her eyes were huge as she looked up at him. “Is there a problem?”

  “No. No problem.” He seemed to realize that he was frightening her. “No problem at all,” he said, and smiled at her in a way that made her step back. “We’re done, thanks.”

  He handed her the empty box and motored out to the parking lot, moving faster than I did even with his injuries. Rory was already lighting a cigarette and on his phone by the time I caught up to him. “We have to talk, you and I,” he was saying to someone in the same low, scary growl he’d used when we opened the empty safety deposit box. “Don’t worry, Memphis, I know where to find you.” He put the phone back into his pocket and I saw his shoulders quickly move up and down, like he was breathing hard.

  I kept my mouth shut, and when Rory swung around to look at me, I didn’t shrink back, because that made him mad. Funny, it made Kash angry when I stood up to him. I pushed everyone’s buttons in different ways, apparently.