First, Last, and in Between

by Jamie Bennett

  It sounded pretty good to me. I was already feeling the week dragging down on me, enough that I wanted to lie on their beautiful bed after I changed the sheets and fluffed all the pillows that Ameyo decorated it with. There were a lot of pillows, a practice I didn’t really understand but thought I would like to imitate someday, if I ever had a full-time bed and not a part-time, pull-out sofa. I tried to think of how my future house would look, but as usual, I didn’t get past some small details. Lots of pretty pillows I would arrange; a fern, because one of my other clients had one and it looked so lacy and green on her bookshelf. A canister on the kitchen counter for spoons, that would be nice.

  I could get myself a fern, I thought. Maybe I would decorate my current apartment with it, and why not? I been making back the money that I’d spent on my car, and there was more where that came from. It wasn’t very likely that I’d ever live in a house like Ameyo’s, with two stories and the pillows and a marble jar for her spoons. But I could have a plant, I told myself. I wasn’t going to turn into my mom, filling my house with useless junk, if I only had one little plant.

  I picked up a pair of Patrick’s pants from where they’d fallen out of the laundry basket, and his phone dropped out of the pocket onto the carpet of their big, shared closet. I took out mine and texted Ameyo to let her know that I’d found it, and then I hit the button on his phone to power it up. I knew he used the same code for this that he used for the burglar alarm and the garage door opener, which Ameyo had told me so I could get into the house if I didn’t have my key. And it had turned out that he also used the same code for their safe, where they stored their marriage certificate and wills, a necklace with diamonds, and some cash.

  The phone opened up and notifications came in, missed calls and texts he hadn’t read. I scrolled down to see what he was up to. It looked like he was calling himself from the hospital, probably trying to locate the phone, and there were messages from his wife, too. But then I saw something different. “Call me, babe,” the text read.

  What? I stared at the notification on the screen. That message wasn’t from Ameyo. Who the hell was writing that to him if not his wife? I did as much snooping around on the phone as I could without doing anything that would clue him into the fact that I’d opened it, but that meant that I couldn’t see any of the other texts from “Charlie.” What else had that woman been saying, and what had he said back? I stared at the screen, frustrated.

  And there were other suspicious things. He had ordered a gold bracelet that was arriving next week but Ameyo’s birthday had just happened. And worse, Patrick had booked a hotel room in Detroit, at a super-fancy place, and had a restaurant reservation there, too. But when I checked the calendar that he shared with her to see if he’d added these events, I saw he’d written in that he was going on a “golf trip” that weekend with “the boys.”

  That son of a bitch. That cheating son of a bitch. He was doing this with his wife pregnant with his baby! He was cheating and then also pretending that he cared so much about Ameyo that he wouldn’t even let her paint a few walls of a bedroom. I remembered what my mom had said to me, the words coming true again: “We all have something to hide.” She had also told me that men were all the same. I put the phone on their dresser and went to clean the bathroom.

  “What’s the matter with you, Iz?” Kash asked me later. I hated when he called me that. “You burned dinner and you’re acting weird. Bitchy.”

  “Sorry,” I told him. They’re all the same, my mind told me.

  “And what’s with that?” he asked, pointing to the tiny plant I’d bought after I’d left Ameyo’s house. I’d been so sad, so unsettled. When I’d seen the plant nursery, I’d pulled in without even thinking and I’d gotten myself a present.

  “It’s a fern,” I said to Kash. “You know, a houseplant?”

  His eyes narrowed. “Don’t talk down to me, Izzie,” he warned, and I dropped my gaze and nodded.

  I wasn’t sure what had gotten into me, but Kash had come by in quite a mood, too. Something had happened over the weekend, last Saturday when he wouldn’t—I meant, when he couldn’t come and help me with my car. By the time we’d spoken again on Sunday, he was ranting about me bothering him while he was working, how my phone call had messed something or other up. How whatever had gone wrong was my fault. He still seemed angry.

  “Your TV is terrible,” he commented as he sat down on my couch, then grimaced and moved around. Maybe he’d found the bad spring. “Your whole apartment is one big shithole.”

  “We could go somewhere else. Why don’t we go to your place? It’s a lot nicer.”

  He shrugged and gulped some beer.

  “Seriously,” I pressed. “Why don’t we go there? Unless…”

  “Unless what?” Kash asked.

  I had been thinking about Ameyo’s husband, and his girlfriend. “Everybody’s got something,” my mom had said. “We all have something to hide.” Kash had never let me near his phone, and of course, without going through that and looking in his apartment, how was I supposed to know what he was really doing? “I just don’t get why we can’t go there,” I answered. “I don’t understand why we always have to come here.”

  “Because I said no,” he told me. “Because I don’t want to.”

  “But—”

  He slammed the beer onto my crate coffee table and liquid sloshed out onto the floor. “What the fuck has gotten into you tonight?”

  “Nothing.” My heart had started to pound as I recognized the clear warning signs. I went back to the sink and tried to scrub out the chicken that had burned to the side of the pan when I’d almost ruined our dinner.

  But it was too late. He was suddenly right behind me, very close, and it felt like the anger was pouring from his body. “You know, I don’t like your attitude. I came over here when I didn’t have to, after working all damn day. You ruin my dinner and then you act like a bitch. It’s like you’re trying to provoke me. Are you trying to provoke me, Izzie?”

  I slowly turned off the water. “No, I’m not. I’m sorry. I’m tired from today, too.”

  “From doing your dusting.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “I’m sorry.”

  He grabbed my arm and yanked me over to the couch. “Stop talking. I’m tired of your fucking mouth,” he said. He put his hand over it, over my mouth and my nose, so that I couldn’t breathe. I made myself stay still and calm for as long as I could but then I couldn’t help trying to pull away, trying to push and claw at his hand and wrist to get some air.

  That was all it took. He wanted me to fight back, to give him more of a reason. He moved his hand off my mouth but it curled into a fist.

  After Kash left, I lay on the couch for a while, looking out the window. It was too cloudy tonight to look at the stars and anyway, it was always going to be difficult to see them from my window. I’d been reading Rory’s book about the constellations, slowly, page by page, and I’d found out about light pollution in cities. I thought about going somewhere with wide-open spaces and real darkness so that I could lay like this but look up at the sky and see everything I had read about so far.

  It was getting late. I forced myself to get up to get more bags of frozen peas out of the freezer to drape in various places on my body. I pressed one bag against my face and the cut on my mouth. He had gotten me there with the back of his hand, his knuckle and his ring. It was going to be a terrible bruise that Rella would see for sure—there wasn’t going to be any hiding this from her, and she would be so upset. I was sorry that I had pushed him, sorry I had been rude, but…but I hurt, and I went into the bathroom to find something to take to make myself feel better.

  Before I lay down again, I picked up the little plastic pot from the floor. Dirt was everywhere, but I’d clean that up in the morning. I felt dizzy as I stood back up with the crushed plant in my hands and then I threw it away, putting a paper towel on top of it so that I wouldn’t have to see it in the garbage. I pressed the cold peas to my cheek a
gain, hoping that in the morning, things would look better than they did right now.

  I took my phone from my purse and held it, thinking. I hadn’t saved Rory’s information in it, just in case the phone rang when Kash was around and he saw the screen. Once or twice he had gone through my contacts, too. But I had memorized the number and now I slowly moved my finger over the screen to dial it.

  “Hi,” I said when Rory answered. “It’s Isobel.”

  “I know that,” he told me. “What’s the matter? Are you ok?”

  “Just a second,” I said. I put the phone down on the cushion and tried to get a hold of myself, because tears had started to pour down my face when I heard him speak, making the bag of frozen vegetables wet and slippery. It took a little while before I could even speak, but when I’d stopped with the outburst, I picked the phone back up. “Sorry,” I said, wondering how many times I had repeated that word tonight. At least a hundred times to Kash as I begged him to stop. “I’m ok. I’m just calling…to call. I haven’t talked to you in a while.”

  “Not since you got mad about me leaving the medicine.”

  “Since I got mad about you breaking in,” I corrected. “Please don’t do that. I didn’t like it.” It had terrified me to know that someone had been able to get in, even if that someone was Rory.

  “Yeah, I’m sorry. I won’t, not anymore. I’m glad you called me.”

  I nodded back at the phone, also glad I had called him. And the pills I’d taken were starting to work, making me feel more relaxed, the pain gradually reducing from raging to bearable.

  “What did you do today?” he asked me.

  “I started at Ameyo’s house,” I said. “And I was right, she’s pregnant. She told me.”

  “You don’t sound happy about that,” he commented, so I had to explain that Patrick was having an affair. I didn’t tell him exactly how I knew, that I had gotten into Patrick’s phone, but I tried to make it clear that I was sure about this, giving him a few damning details like that I knew Patrick was going to a hotel, buying gifts for another woman.

  There was a big silence. “You figured all this out, just from the stuff he left lying around,” Rory stated.

  “Yeah, I see things, when I’m at their houses. Ameyo is going to be so crushed.” I wondered what would be worse, being betrayed like that by someone you really loved or what Kash had just done to me with his fists. I didn’t kid myself that he loved me, but if he even liked me a little bit, why did he do this? I blinked slowly. The pills were really working, and I didn’t care so much about Kash or anything else, either. Everything had turned down to a simmer.

  “That’s too bad for that woman,” Rory said slowly. “That’s a shame. I don’t get why you’re so upset about it, though. You sound strange.”

  “I sound strange because this is terrible! It’s so terrible the way women get treated. Even someone like Ameyo, someone so perfect, practically. It just shows that,” I started to say, but stopped.

  “What?”

  It just showed that they were all the same. They hurt their wives, their girlfriends, and they didn’t care at all, but I couldn’t say that to Rory. “Nothing,” I mumbled instead. My mouth was swollen and I had been talking too much with it, that was really why I sounded strange. I had the urge to laugh, suddenly. Men were all the same, but my mouth was the wrong shape and I was sure different now. I snorted a little laugh. I was different? No, I was exactly as I’d always been, but it seemed to strike me as funny.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Rory asked me.

  “I’m a little tired. I think I’m going to bed. To sofa bed.” I giggled a little at that comment, too.

  “It’s eight o’clock,” he pointed out.

  “Yeah, well, I’m lame, right? I’m almost twenty-two and I go to bed at eight. Or maybe I’m like a vampire, but reverse.” I laughed. “A reverse vampire.” I felt dizzy and closed my eyes. “It looks weird.”

  “What does?”

  “Everything!” I laughed harder, but it made my mouth hurt so much, even over the pills.

  “What the hell is going on, Isobel?” He paused. “Are you high?” he suddenly asked. “Are you?” he repeated disbelievingly.

  “No! I had to take something,” I tried to explain. “I had to take a pill or two.” I’d had to take some of my stash. I had removed this particular medication from the bathroom cabinet at the Weller house, where Mrs. Weller made me wear special socks over my own socks to protect their floors from my germs. I laughed at that, too, but tried to stop because Rory was talking. His voice was low and furious.

  “I can’t be around that. I can’t be around you if you’re using.”

  “What? I don’t take drugs,” I told him, offended. “I’m not like that!”

  “Well, I am,” he said. “I’m exactly like that. I’m an addict, Isobel. If you want to get high, it’s your business, but I can’t be a part of it. Goodbye.”

  And he hung up, clearly angry, clearly disappointed, and mostly sad, and I had made him feel that way. Even with my mind not fully connecting all the dots, I understood what I had done. Nothing seemed funny now. I threw aside the bags of peas and stumbled barefoot down to Rella’s apartment, where I cried on her couch until she came back from her meeting, and then I cried with my head on her lap.

  “You should tell him,” she said to me the next day. She looked at my face and her eyes got very watery. “You should tell Rory what happened and why you took those pills.”

  She hadn’t bothered to ask where I’d gotten them, and I knew she thought they were from my mom. I let her keep that illusion. “I can’t tell him,” I mumbled, my mouth aching. “He doesn’t want to talk to me or see me.”

  “I don’t want him to believe that about you, Izzie. I think he should know the truth about Kash.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Do you think Rory is going to rescue me or something? I don’t need rescuing. I’m fine.”

  “Your face tells me different!” she snapped, but then a tear trickled down in the deep creases of her cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her, and then I cried too. I was messing things up for everyone, making everyone upset. “I have to go,” I finally said. “I’m going to be late.”

  “Be a little late one morning,” Rella argued, although I was sure she had never once been late to work herself.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I can’t.”

  So Rella kissed my uninjured cheek and told me to call her, and I drove off on nothing stronger than ibuprofen, which wasn’t anything close to enough. By the time I got to the Tollman house, I wasn’t doing very well.

  “Oh!” Mrs. Tollman said when she saw my bruises. She reared back, and her own frozen face showed as much revulsion as the sculpted and injected features would allow. “What happened to you?”

  “I had a car accident,” I told her.

  “And you ended up like that? How odd. How…unfortunate.” She looked me up and down. “Are you going to be able to work today?”

  “I’m fine to work today,” I told her. “I’m great.”

  “You look absolutely horrifying.” Her hands went to cover her own cheeks. “I can’t imagine going out in public like that.”

  “I have to work,” I said, trying to keep my voice pleasant, “so I had to go out in public. Is there anything you want me to focus on today?”

  Of course, she did have a typed list to give me, but she hesitated as she held it out, then seemed to come to a decision. “I’m going to be home and working in my office. Start there so I can go in,” she told me, so I picked up my bag and walked to the other end of the house where she had her all-white office, with a shiny desk, a white leather chair, and some white artwork in sleek, silver frames on the walls. I cleaned it as quickly as I could, but she was already at the door and tapping her foot when I finished vacuuming the smooth, white rug.

  “Are you done in here yet?”

  I straightened slowly from unplugging the vacuum, various part
s of my body screaming with protest at the movement. “I’m finished,” I answered, trying to keep my tone very polite. I stopped as I left the room and put my hand on the wall to lean against it briefly, needing the support. When I looked over my shoulder, I saw Mrs. Tollman back in the doorway, watching me. Damn.

  In spite of working as fast as I absolutely could, it did take me longer than usual, and I was sure that I hadn’t done as thorough a job without being able to move as well as I usually did. Mrs. Tollman was in the kitchen when I got there to pick up the rest of my supplies. She looked at me and then at her phone, which she held up for me to see as well. Her other hand held a stack of money.

  “I expect you to be gone by four-thirty,” she informed me. “It’s four forty-two. I have engagements and I can’t sit here forever waiting for you to finish.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to sound as humble as I could. “It was because of the car accident.”

  “In the real world, we have to overcome our issues to perform at our jobs,” Mrs. Tollman informed me. I looked down at my canvas bucket so that she couldn’t see my face, and I bit my cut lip to stop the words from coming out of my mouth. Real world? What did she know about that? And what was her job, exactly, besides volunteering for her son’s team and her daughter’s ballet company?

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, staring at my can of cleanser. “Next week I’ll be done on time.”

  “On time,” she repeated, and shook her head slightly. Then, very deliberately, she removed one of the bills from the money she held. “I’m going to have to take this out of your pay for today. The work wasn’t done to my satisfaction.”

  I realized that my hand was clenched into a fist. What was I going to do, hit her? I wanted to, so much. I wanted to bruise up her pretty, cold, empty face, to make it just like mine was.

  Instead, I reached for the money, minus what she’s taken out. Mrs. Tollman put it on the counter so our fingers wouldn’t mistakenly touch. “Next time I come, you’ll owe me the full amount or I won’t clean for you again,” I stated.