by Andrew Post
She had to get supplies to fill the work order, things that weren’t going to be easy to find. The client had been highly specific when detailing the special requests portion. And there was also the time constraint to worry about. Five hours until the dinner reservation. She was to do it there, at the restaurant. Nice and public.
Orlando was fine as long as you stuck close to the protective bubble surrounding the amusement parks, where the cops would do something. But drift a couple miles outside the sphere of the Magic Kingdom and goddamn was it like a different world. Orlando could very well be the greatest example of America in microcosm. All this fun stuff for the white suburbanites to enjoy, then this cement barrier surrounding the parks that prevented easy view (or access) for those drifting around just on the other side. The staggering crackheads, the scab-faced meth-heads jittering on a stoop, drunks shitting themselves while asleep on the curb, the lines of threadbare tents on the sidewalk, the mountains of trash, handwritten signs Please help and/or Wounded soldier against the buzzing neon background of checks cashed and we buy gold and pawn and lien. You could hear the rides from just about anywhere in the city. The screams of those who paid – and had the money to burn – for a good time, reaching the ears of those blocks away without a pot to piss in who screamed without having to pay for it, the only thing in their life they had for free, drenched in the thrill of not knowing if they’d be alive this time tomorrow. Better luck next time.
Brenda tried to enjoy being lost and no sooner had she let the wind carry her than she saw the sign for a chemical wholesaler.
Inside, it felt dangerous breathing without a mask. It smelled like an indoor pool; every time she blinked, the corners of her eyes burned. She explained to the clerk she was a science teacher and that’s all it took to allow him to sell her the ominous gray bottle, a half gallon of hydrochloric acid. Naturally, she paid cash, said ‘thank you’ and ‘have a nice day’ as she imagined a science teacher might, and left.
The little shopping excursion made her think about how Christmas was in three weeks and that she and Steve hadn’t even started shopping for the girls yet. They’d decided, for the benefit of their savings account, to go light this year – books, one new article of clothing each, gift cards – and she and Steve would buy nothing for each other. Both were impossible to shop for anyway. She was pretty sure she’d bought him everything that’d ever been written about mixed martial arts, and she was sick of unwrapping porcelain turtles and acting surprised.
She decided not to chance the yellow light and stopped, finding herself first in line for when the green would cycle back around. Across the intersection there was a family of four: a young man, a young woman, and two small children. The mother and the children sat in the shade of a tree. Watching them, Brenda thought of her own kids. The man, wire-thin and badly sunburned, held a handwritten sign that said, Every bit helps, god bless. The traffic coming the other way rushed past, chopping her view of the desperate family to glimpses, like a flip-book. The man was standing on the curb with the sign one moment, a pickup truck shot by, and then the man was on his hands and knees bleeding from the face, his sign pinwheeling down the street.
The intersection was crowded with other drivers and she saw the woman rush to help the man and the children start to cry, but no one got out of their cars to help. Neither did she, watching the man hold a hand to his face, red lines racing down his arm to dribble from his elbow. She had not seen what the men in the pickup truck had thrown at him, or if they leaned out and hit him with something as they passed like a baseball bat or a tire iron, but it had certainly connected, whatever the implement.
She took the wheel in her hands and felt herself making a face, forming a scowl at such a sad scene that wasn’t entirely automatic. Her chest tingled. She watched the two children’s faces twist, tears streaming. It was so undeserved, the attack. What a thing to be here, to see this. The decision to not rush the yellow light had provided this scene for her to see. The children seemed to understand that their father was in pain. Neither was old enough to stand unassisted so they sat there reaching chubby little arms toward their injured father, who was still trying to stand up, the woman helping him. Blood all over his face, spitting out broken pieces of his teeth.
The car’s radio was up too high and all the other car engines drowned out the cries of the children, or their father. Knowing the other drivers could see her, she pressed her lips together, and waited until the light changed and she had passed the bleeding man before letting herself laugh.
She knew it was not the appropriate reaction. She knew if anyone else happened to be in the car with her right now, they would never see her the same way again. But she was alone and felt, because she was alone, she did not need to pretend to feel anything but what she felt.
When her parents had found her in the backyard having crushed a hatchling sparrow with a brick at six years old, they took her to a specialist who told them that, by no fault of hers or theirs, Brenda would never feel things the same way as other people. They also cautioned her parents that, as she got older, she might engage in strange or off-putting behavior as she got to know herself better, searching for a means to feel something, to get some twinge or rise out of herself. Yes, like the bird. You should know that something like that may happen again. This is natural. Just do your best teaching her right from wrong, that even though she may be indifferent to the concepts of either, she can still live a normal, productive and happy life. Odds are she will pursue a career in the corporate world, maybe finance, possibly even government.
President Brenda. Imagine that shit.
She liked to think the person she was to her husband and their three girls was real. And, honestly, something can only be real if enough people agree to believe. So, as far as her husband and their children were concerned, she was real – and for Brenda, it made it easier to be her. She knew she liked playing her, that Brenda. It wasn’t entirely satisfying, which was why she worked for Felix – and thus why she was in Florida – but she still never wanted to stop being the other woman too, the wife and mother. Things were quiet inside her, she did not feel things the same way as others, that was true, but she liked how much value she had to them, her family. The man back home, and the three girls, they needed her. Productive. Normal. Happy.
She returned to the Palm Cove Motel and entered the office, asking if any mail had arrived for her. A package was placed on the counter, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string. Just like the Julie Andrews song, she thought, and figured Felix probably thought the same thing when getting the parcel ready.
The clerk commented on how deceptively heavy the package was given its size, making a joke about someone sending her gold bars. Brenda wedged out a laugh, tipped an invisible ten-gallon, and exited the office and returned to her car to retrieve the things she’d bought while out today. Two bags. One from a chemical wholesaler and the second bag from the big box store: refridgerator magnets with each of the girls’ names and a pair of new sunglasses. She didn’t want to risk leaving the chemical bottle in a hot car.
Inside the room, she locked the door, closed the curtains, and without a knife handy, picked at the knotted string around the package with a fingernail. Cradled by wadded fistfuls of newspaper was a triangular suede case. She unzipped it and looked at the semi-automatic pistol and the loaded magazine. Hollow points, as requested. She checked the sights, dry-firing at the bland landscape painting bolted to the wall. She loaded the magazine and tugged on the slide until the gun had spat out the last cartridge onto the floor. Confident it would not fail her, in a blur of hands she ejected the magazine, picked up the cartridges from the grungy carpet, thumbed each back into the magazine, slapped that back into the gun, and racked the slide once more.
Both the remote for the TV and the clock radio had been superglued to the nightstand. Burning red digits. Ten after five. The room’s stink of damp carpet and toilet bowl cleaner was star
ting to give her a headache.
She lay on the bed, hoping her back would loosen up, and listened to the drone of the interstate. Rush hour swelled, ebbed. A stretched square of yellow on the ceiling, the shape of the failing sun cut by the window. The square slowly slid along the wall and soon was gone altogether. Then the stretched square was replaced by flickering orange streetlight that did not move with the time. She did not move either. Over the years, the job had gifted her with a bottomless store of patience. Maybe having three kids all under the age of thirteen had something to do with that too. She wanted to join the traffic, to return to the airport, and go back home. She wanted to pile onto the couch in a warm tangle of limbs, feel the weight of her family on her as they nodded off one by one and nobody had any reason to be keeping an eye on the time. Being alone would be fine too. She just didn’t want to be in fucking Florida anymore. That was the real point.
She turned her head to look at the bedside clock. 6:22.
From her pocket, she took out the sheet of paper that had photocopied driver’s licenses printed on it. She stared until she knew the faces of the man and the woman better than her own. Stacy Ann Roberts, twenty-one, white, blue, brown. Buckley Thomas Dauber, twenty-eight, white, brown, brown.
6:39. Brenda reviewed the work order in her email. She scrolled down to the bottom, double-checking the special requests, who got what and in what order.
The work order on her phone screen fell away, replacing itself with the picture of her husband she’d taken on their last vacation – before his accident. Unlike how she answered work calls, letting it ring a few times to imply they were interrupting her, with the hubby she always picked up at once. She didn’t want him to worry.
“Hey, you,” he said. “How’s Florida?”
“Hot,” she said.
“Weird.”
She laughed. “Smart-ass. Still snowing there?”
“It is, yeah,” he said, sounding glad to switch back to small talk now that he’d had his daily dose of reasons to worry about his wife traveling. “Getting upward of seven inches tonight, I hear.”
“Wish I could be getting upward of seven inches tonight.”
Steve laughed. They were bad at dirty talk. Always had been.
“I miss you,” he said.
“I miss you too. How’s it been today?”
“Eh, I’d put it at about a C-minus.”
Even though he wasn’t here to see it, she frowned. “I’m so sorry, hon.”
“It’s all right. Better than yesterday. That was a rough one.”
“You’re keeping a count on your meds, right?”
“I am,” Steve said, in a moderately pissy tone. He was selective about when he wanted to be babied. “I’ve got enough to hold me over until next Thursday. Wednesday, if I have another day like yesterday.”
She could hear it in his voice; he was hurting now. He thought he could hide it.
“The girls around?” she said.
“You just missed them, actually. Linda came by a minute ago to take them to the movies.”
Fucking Linda. Linda Cassel was the mother of Kara Cassel, the obnoxious best friend to Judy, Steve and Brenda’s youngest. While Brenda didn’t particularly care for Linda or her equally bratty little shit, at least her own girls were getting out of the house. Most days Steve was a serious homebody but especially so when Brenda left town. He felt that his pain, which he could only hide so much given that he now walked with a cane, made him an easy target for mugging.
She heard a door being drawn open on his end. She knew the rubbery moan of the insulated hinge. The kitchen door that let out into the garage made that sound, especially when it was cold.
Steve said, “You still okay taking a cab home tomorrow night?”
“Yeah.”
“I really don’t mind picking you up.”
“It’s okay. I don’t want you staying up half the night waiting to drive all the way out there just to get me. A cab’s fine.”
“You okay, hon?” he said.
“Yeah. Just bored.”
“Jeez, excuse me all to hell.”
Brenda laughed. “Not with you, dum-dum.”
He laughed his good, warm Steve laugh. She remembered the first time she’d heard it on their first date and how she wondered if now was too early to start telling herself she’d fallen in love and how different that was from the real thing, a decision. This also she did not voice.
“I know,” he said. “Just getting your goat. What’s up?”
“They rescheduled this completely pointless meeting for later on tonight, so I’m here sitting on my hands until eight o’clock.”
“I’m so sorry, babe. That sucks.”
“It’s all right. Wouldn’t mind it so much if it wasn’t going to be all these hungover guys sitting in a stuffy room talking about third-quarter projections.”
Another silence. “Will you be counting yourself among the hungover?”
“I’m being good.”
Because of his medication, Steve couldn’t drink, and over the past few years he’d become something of a finger-wagging teetotaler. But he usually saved the bulk of his lectures about perforated livers for his brother, Eric – who, really, after the third DUI, could probably use them. Steve had changed, sure, but that’s being married to somebody. Neither of you are going to be the same people at twenty-three that you are at thirty-eight. It’d be worrying if you were.
“I miss you,” Steve said again. Differently this time. Not just some empty crap you say to a loved one who’s traveling, but really meaning it. There was something else there too. Maybe it was the pain throttling his voice. He only sounded like that when he was about to apologize for something.
“I miss you too.” She meant it. She did miss him, and the girls. A great deal. But she had to be here. After the titanium pins had been drilled into Steve’s spine when a negligently overloaded shelf collapsed on him at the warehouse, the settlement would only carry them so far. Before that, they’d bought a big house when they’d trusted the money would hold, when they still had that naïve confidence that they weren’t the kind of family that tragedy visits.
They’d learned there was no such thing as good luck, just bad luck that builds up like plaque in a vein. Felix provided the bad luck triple bypass. Brenda was working for him back then, before Steve’s accident, but not nearly as often. She could barely remember what the cubicle farm of her old nine-to-five looked like, even after rotting away in it for nine years. Far as Steve knew, she still worked at that gray hell. She’d quit a perfectly good job (the implosion had not sunk the marketing firm, surprisingly) to do what, she felt, she was more naturally inclined to do – tasks that did not require her to blunt her edges to fit into that machine that only asked one question: how can we make people feel they need to buy things that they don’t really want and/or need?
Doing what she did now, in her mind, it wasn’t really that different – I pinpoint an underserved demographic (track the mark) who someone (the client) wishes to capitalize on (have murdered) and I provide persuasive material (usually bullets) that convinces them to make a purchase (die).
The important thing was ensuring, every single day, that the Stocktons would not become one of those sad post-implosion families.
You know the sob story. The internet was flooded with articles about them, and not only did the word implosion become fixed to what happened, but it was really being looked at as a true tragedy. It might as well be illegal to use ‘tragedy’ describing a situation until upper-middle-class folks are affected. But you’ve seen them, or you know someone it’s happened to: the women who’ve gone from spending their Sunday mornings in the Target parking lot wearing their yoga pants and namaste, bitches bumper stickers on their high-end SUVs, humble-bragging about their fabulous lives, to now spending their Sunday mornings waiting in line outsi
de the food shelf while their kids cry in that luxury SUV, which all of them are now living in.
That’s not going to happen to us. The Stocktons hold on to what they buy. We don’t temporarily borrow them, put our feet up on things we like to say are ours and just wait for repossession day. Fuck that. We select, we own, we get what’s ours – for keeps.
Not that a happy life is contingent on accumulating nice material things, but let’s be real. That sounds an awful lot like something a poor person would say. And the Stocktons may’ve had their fair share of rough patches, but they have never been and never will be anything resembling poor. Just saying the word poor sent a chill down her spine, like it was some cursed phrase, the financial status version of playing Bloody Mary, willfully inviting misfortune into your life. There are worse things than being dead. Being the P-word, number one with a bullet.
To make good on that family mission statement of holding on to things for keeps, that meant bringing home the bacon and to do so meant being away from home a lot. It meant missing birthdays sometimes. It meant sacrifice. And sometimes that’s hard. Nothing is free. Not even happiness, regardless of whatever any self-help blog tries to tell you. Because even they want something – like your clicks so you can be exposed to ads. Happiness is free, they’ll say, as they make money off you reading their little white lies. Everyone’s a cheat. Everyone’s a salesperson, a hustler, a schemer. Every interaction is a transaction, a give and take, and there’s never not a winner and a loser. Brenda was glad she learned this early in life. It’d made things so much easier. Hell, maybe I should start a blog. The Trials and Tribulations of a Suburban Hit-Mom. How to remove bloodstains from silk. A timesaving lifehack that will see your Heckler & Koch USP Compact 9mm shining like new in minutes using only vinegar and lemon juice. The top ten ways to garrote a man twice your size and not throw your back out. Other murderers-for-hire hate her, click here to learn her one CRAZY trick.
The shit you think about when you and your husband are on the phone and have run out of stuff to say and are listening to each other breathe. But like always, Steve would wait for her to pull the trigger. Small punishments for being away so often. Perhaps unconscious, but most likely not.
