by Andrew Post
She didn’t have the time or money for any of this, but she kept this complaint to herself.
“After this, you’ll be down to four hundred and eighty-nine big ones,” Felix said. “That’s without interest, keep in mind. But the more hours you put in, the sooner you’ll be through.” Without lifting his head, his red, puffy eyes locked on to her. “Sound agreeable?”
“Yes.”
“You’re getting there,” he said, setting his phone on his knee again. He moved his hand slowly, as if aware of his tremors and not wanting them noticed or commented upon. “Little by little.”
“We done here then?” Mel started to stand.
“How’s that uncle of yours?”
“This shit again?” She’d meant to only think that.
Felix blinked up at her, a pissed-off stone.
Mel made herself sit back down. “He’s holding on for now.”
“What’s the timeline look like?”
“Couple weeks, a month.”
“Stubborn fucker, huh? The tumor, I mean. Though I suppose your uncle is too. He still able to talk, or are the eggs too scrambled by this point?”
Mel, pained, only shook her head.
“That’s too bad.” Felix put on a sad face, which Mel pictured putting a bullet through. “Asbestos is nothing to fuck around with,” he said. “How long was he remodeling bathrooms?”
“Thirty-some years,” she said. “But they don’t think asbestos caused it. Apparently it’s hereditary.”
“Something for you to look forward to then.”
Fuck you, she said with only her eyes.
“Thirty years remodeling bathrooms for us white folk. Jesus. He was doing that before you were even an itch in his brother’s britches.”
Mel said nothing.
“Your mother’s dead, correct?”
“Yes, she is dead.”
“And your old man, what did him in again, your dad?”
“Look, I know where I’m going, I know when I leave, I know what you want me to do—”
“Remind me, Melanie.”
“He shot himself. Satisfied?”
“Was he sick too, like your uncle?”
“Not in the same way, but he was unwell, yes.”
“An inoperable case of the blues, then?”
“If we have to name it.”
“Took your mother’s passing hard.”
“He struggled with depression.”
“Which is also hereditary I hear,” Felix said. “Let me ask you something. I’ve always wondered why people of your particular complexion are so resistant to the idea of psychiatry. With hundreds of years of trauma pumping through your collective veins, I’d think that’d make your brothas and sistas like the Jews and have a real hard-on for going to therapy. But you don’t. Why is that?”
“And yet every time somebody shoots up a school or a concert or a church, it’s always some ‘troubled’ white boy. Who, also, conveniently gets to be walked out unharmed. Strange.”
“That’s not the point I was getting at.”
“A lot of us can’t afford to see a psychiatrist,” she said. “My guess is it’s because of who decides how much we get paid.”
“Was that aimed at me?” Felix pointed at himself, smiling.
I don’t see any other white man in this room, Mel wanted to say but did not. But she might as well have, given his response.
“So this is my fault? You’re telling me I’m solely responsible for systemic racism and me alone?” He chuckled. “Wish somebody would’ve told me. I would’ve had that put on my business card. Down next to my email, ‘I am that proverbial Man you’ve heard so much about’, in a nice serif font, something classy.”
She let Felix soak in the sight of her, how easily he could get her goat. The pit in her stomach and the hate in her heart that had his name, and her own, written on it. Misaimed ambition – and, all right, an unwillingness to admit defeat – had led to her knowing this man, to making his association, to winding up in his pocket. He’d bought her debt and now she was to always be on call for him, day or night, do this and do that, chop-chop. Leaky radiator? Call Mel. One of Felix’s buddies popped a flat out in the middle of nowhere at three in the morning? Here’s Mel’s number, she’ll deal with it. Even if she couldn’t find an above-board place to ply her trade, fixing cars was what she’d taught her hands to do, her means of keeping the refrigerator full.
“They still got Uncle Craig parked at the hospice, out there in Erie?”
“Yes.” She hid her fists in her jacket pockets.
“Room eight, about twenty steps from the front desk, last door on the right?”
She looked at him. He looked at her.
“You understand what it means when I ask you that, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Happy to hear it.” He jerked a thumb at the door. “Get lost.”
She managed to hold it together until she’d returned downstairs and got in her car and got back on the slushy frontage road, puttering along in her death trap Geo, and she’d only let it out with a sharp sound that hurt her own ears, a scream of pure self-loathing, frustration, and fear. Saying screw it to whether she got stuck in the snow, she pulled off to the side of the road. At that moment, had to. The steering wheel was already misshapen, but she dented it again pounding it with the bottom of her fist, only stopping when she heard a muffled crack – and received a pain so bright she gasped every molecule of the car’s air into her lungs.
Chapter Three
When the Daubers finally arrived at Dock 17, three minutes shy of their reservation, Brenda hung back in her rental at the curb and watched the groom and blushing bride walk up to the front doors, holding hands. Apparently, Mr. Dauber said something positively hysterical because Mrs. Dauber made a sound like a goose being kicked to death.
Once the door had closed behind them, Brenda pulled into the lot and parked far from the restaurant, near the lot’s exit. She removed the suede case from her purse, took the gun out and, keeping her hands low to prevent anyone walking past to see what she was doing, loaded it, returning it to her purse without the case, a round chambered.
She sighed. “And now for you.”
Still treating it like it was a ticking bomb, she reached over to the passenger-side floorboard and lifted the ominous bottle covered with warning stickers from the shopping bag, and slipped it into her purse next to the gun.
She approached the restaurant, hiked the purse strap high on her shoulder and walked pressing one hand against it, now heavy with its new contents, close to her side. She did not care for hearing the liquid inside the bottle move around with each step. She imagined tripping and falling on the goddamn thing, subjecting herself to watching the layers of her abdomen melt away and her hands dissolve to skeletal claws as she tried slapping the acid off her. Steady does it. Though the whole thing with the acid is foreign territory, this is nothing new to you. Get in, do what you’re there to do, and get out.
The jitters always hit her minutes before a work order was to be filled. She questioned things, of course. What had brought her to this place both geographically and in the overall why-is-my-life-like-this sense. How, in reality, she was a total stranger to her husband, to the girls. Stop. She’d told herself that they knew the real her, that filling work orders was just what kept a roof over their heads and meant nothing, that it was just work, but a much different kind than fucking Linda Cassel, for example, did. They know me. They know the real me. This is just Mama doing a job.
Dock 17’s doorman wore a sailor’s uniform that made him look like Donald Duck, albeit one with pants (it wasn’t that kind of place). He smiled and pulled open the door for her by its spyglass-shaped handle, saying, “Welcome aboard,” like it wasn’t at all a stupid way to greet someone.
Brenda smiled politely, holdin
g her chin low like her neck hurt. Angling the head like this shifts the features and will cause someone – especially a tall individual like the doorman – to remember her nose and mouth being set lower on her face than they were. She’d seen the police sketches and how grossly inaccurately they always portrayed her. She had to give props to her nightly skincare routine because her age had been guessed as young as twenty. At nearly double that, it was almost as bolstering as getting carded.
Though it was clearly trying to pass itself off as a high-end joint, the smell of seafood in varying degrees of preparation was as thick here as it would be at any food court Long John Silver’s. Low tide and beer batter and fryer grease. She could feel her pores clogging.
The floor glistened with sand people had tracked in from the beach, crackling under her flip-flops like spilled sugar.
She got stopped at the sign that said, Please wait to be seated. The girl behind the podium, another Donald Duck, stepped in her way. “Do we have a reservation?”
She had one of those faces, the architecture of which seemed determined to inform everyone who beholds it that she was not very smart. The product of amorous cousins, possibly. This was Florida after all.
“We, as in you and I?” Brenda said, glanced at the girl’s name tag. “That’s very sweet of you, Valerie, but we just met.”
“Do you have a reservation? Better?”
Brenda smiled at the girl’s resolve. “It’s okay, Valerie. I’m meeting someone.”
The girl didn’t move. “May I ask whom?”
“I’m here to see the Daubers.”
Maybe it was because Brenda was still wearing her sunglasses, or the brusque way she was addressing the girl in her ridiculous uniform, but something rose in the hostess’s young face. Maybe she saw Brenda as some sidelined ex-wife. A jilted lover. A mother-in-law whose disapproval of the union would not be ignored. Either way, the girl’s imminent drama alarm had been tripped.
Turning to face the girl straight-on, daring to risk a few more details of herself that could only make for a more accurate police sketch, Brenda took off her sunglasses and employed her best disarming smile, though it rarely worked on hetero women. “I swear they know I’m coming.”
Probably in some background way Buckley Dauber knew to expect them to send someone, the people he’d cheated. So it wasn’t entirely a lie, but still, it was too late. The girl, Valerie, had taken in Brenda’s previous body language and asperity and had formed her opinion of her and not much now would alter it. But Brenda could see the high school dropout’s gears turning. She was the slightest bit afraid. She hid it well, but the girl must’ve been, at one time or another, on the receiving end from an abusive father or ex-boyfriend. It stays in the eyes, never truly gone. Brenda could work with that.
She pictured Valerie dead. First, gut-shot and lying pale in the woods. Then strung up and dismantled like a stolen car, the pieces neatly arranged, hanging flayed and emptied, a hollow red husk, steaming guts thrown to the dogs.
Like someone will always turn around if you stare at the back of their head long enough, the silent calculations of others can be felt as tangibly as a cold hand clamping onto the shoulder. And though the girl might not have been able to parse the details of the pictures Brenda was creating for her, the girl the central subject for each one, she must’ve felt the ire radiating from the black holes in Brenda’s eyes all the same.
The girl’s posture abruptly corrected, a small gasp she tried passing off as just clearing her throat. If they happened to be having this exchange in a time before language and law had muddied things, she would be rolling over right now, offering Brenda her soft belly, rip away as thou wish. When chimpanzees smile, it’s a sign of submission. Some people unconsciously produce a pained grin when afraid – just look at the snapshots taken by hidden cameras inside haunted house rides, just like the ones they have here in Orlando. We like to pretend we’re not still animals.
Even though it was on her head straight, Valerie adjusted her ridiculous sailor’s cap and leaned to check her podium’s monitor, her face underlit unflatteringly by its glow. “Again, I’m very sorry, ma’am, but the Daubers’ reservation is only for two. Are you sure they’re expecting you?”
You could’ve knocked Brenda over with a feather. This one must really care about her job.
Without looking away from the girl, though the latter was trying her best to avoid a second concentrated dose of eye contact, Brenda curled one hand into her purse and brought out two twenties. She held them out, letting the girl make up the middle distance and reach for them. Brenda folded them into her hand and closed the girl’s fingers around the bills, making her crush them, forcing her to really feel the texture of that green paper and remember what sway it had.
“Good?”
The girl nodded furtively. She caught her sailor’s cap before it fell off her head. “Have a nice night.”
Only then releasing the girl’s hand, Brenda moved into the dining area.
Since this was Florida, it came as no surprise that most of the diners were over-sunned blue-hairs. None of them looked real. All that tight, leathery skin and clacking false teeth made Brenda think a drunk taxidermist had taken up ventriloquism. It was Saturday night and the diners had all been out on their yachts baking under the sun since dawn, replacing what water they’d lost now with overpriced booze and butter-drowned sea life. Judging by the loudness of some of their laughs, a lot of them should probably plan to take a taxi back to the hotel tonight. The laughter only the disgustingly affluent are allowed. With every crack in their lives packed tight with money, they could laugh with abandon, no swarming paranoia that suggests it might be dangerous enjoying yourself too much because doing it could be self-jinxing.
Brenda pictured herself sealing the doors and setting fire to the place. All that papery skin going up like so many dead leaves. She wanted to tip her head back and breathe deep its black, money-scented smoke.
She scanned the room until she spotted the two youngest people in the place – the Daubers, at their table for two, a tealight flickering between them. They were like a commercial for boner pills, these two. The dopey grins. The hand-holding that was so constant you’d think they’d not only exchanged rings but got their palms stitched together.
Brenda considered where they were seated in relation to the exit and the path she’d take from their table once it was over so she could get back to her rental car.
Before the Daubers felt her looking at them, Brenda moved off toward the bathrooms. One wall of the restaurant was a long, curved aquarium. It always felt cruel to her, places like this where what was on the menu was forced to be in the room while alive, watching the less lucky get devoured by us hairless apes. Through the colorful fish and the miniature sunken ships and thick glass, she could see Buckley Dauber and his new wife on the other side, rendered abstract and stretching as if boneless, becoming more deformed with every step Brenda took.
After passing through the steam and noise erupting out of the door to the kitchen, she stopped at a cart piled with dirty dishes. She picked out a cloth napkin that was translucent with melted butter and then, locating a water glass deep among the greasy plates and crab forks, she draped the napkin over it to avoid pressing any more fingerprints onto it and lifted it free.
She took the glass with her into the ladies’ room. She got some side-eye in the mirror from the old biddies with their arthritic backs turned at the line of sinks, who evidently thought mirrors only worked one way. They probably took Brenda for one of those middle-aged women trawling for husbands, looking to slip their digits into the old men’s pockets before their wives were even planted.
In the last stall, she locked the door and used the toilet tank as a workspace to take the gun from her purse and tuck it into the back of her skirt. Then she set the water glass on the toilet paper dispenser and – carefully, using both hands – lifted the b
ottle of acid from her purse and patiently unscrewed its safety cap. Setting that aside, she tried to ignore how conscious she was that her legs were currently bare from the knee down, and tipped the bottle slowly until the innocuously clear liquid began to trickle out into the glass.
Maybe it was the lingering reek of whoever had recently used the stall masking it, but she didn’t detect any smell coming from the acid. Nonetheless, she only breathed through her nose. The image of sizzling lips pulling back from crumbling acid-eaten teeth flashed in her mind.
She filled the glass halfway. And with every movement precise and deliberate now, fearing she’d accidentally knock the glass over with an elbow and melt her own feet off, she recapped the bottle, returned that to her purse, and lifted the purse’s strap back onto her shoulder – all done slowly, carefully.
Shuffling steps. The creak of a hinge. Brenda could see the sagging stockings of her new restroom neighbor under the partition. They closed their stall’s door with unnecessary force, shaking their shared wall.
Like the shooting numbness that attacks the face and hands before a tumble down a long flight of stairs, Brenda stared helplessly at the contents of the glass standing on the toilet paper dispenser as it sloshed, climbing to a mere millimeter from cresting the glass’s rim before falling back and coming to rest.
Holy shit.
She was of a mind to draw her gun and fire through the wall, blast the old bag sitting right there on the can, give her the Elvis exit. But she resisted and waited for her heart to slow, listening to an old woman void her watery bowels less than two feet away from her.
Using the cloth napkin, she picked up the glass high on its rim and turned to face the closed door of the stall.
From here, there could be no pretending. No characters, no roles.
Mama’s just doing a job.
Leaving the stall, she watched the glass as she walked, rolling her steps, the contents swinging side to side. One thin layer of glass was keeping her from having a boiling stump of a left hand. She quickened her pace passing the kitchen door, afraid of someone barreling out and colliding with her. She turned and entered the dining area, feeling a few eyes find her and hold. The confusion and fear spread among the diners, a silent wave.
