“What’s yours?” Lexi asked now. Jules stood awkwardly, visibly uncomfortable with the whole situation and unsure what to do next.
“Just the TV,” Brooke said.
“You’re not taking that TV, you bitch,” Jake said, glaring at Brooke.
“Of course she’s not,” Lexi said. “I am.” Then she marched over to the set and started wildly ripping out wires. Jake threw the pillow aside and leapt up, grabbing Lexi by the arms to stop her. She kicked and hissed and struggled to free herself.
“Jake, stop!” Brooke screamed, rushing into the tangle of limbs. Jake let go of Lexi long enough to give Brooke a rough shove with one hand. She fell to the ground, landing on her plump butt. Jules lifted her sister to her feet, and as soon as she did, her face melted into a portrait of shock, awe and possibly even admiration as Brooke hauled back and karate-chopped Jake right in the nuts.
“No fair,” yelled Lexi as Jake fell to the ground writhing in pain, cupping his privates and muttering obscenities. “I was supposed to get to do that.”
“Sorry,” Brooke said. “I mean, sorry, Alexis. Not you, Jake.”
Lexi swiftly lifted her hand and Brooke threw up her own hands and cowered beneath them. “I’m not going to hit you, dumbass. I was going to high-five you,” Lexi said with a laugh. The sisters slapped hands.
Jake was still on the ground firing off a nonstop string of profanities and insults as the three women trudged clumsily out the front door with Brooke’s beat-up TV.
Lexi
“I have to run out for a few hours,” Jules said as she fished her keys out of her purse. “You’re welcome to use my computer . . . You know, if you want to work on your résumé or anything.”
“My résumé ?” Lexi scoffed. “That’s a good one, Jules. Let’s see: education? I went to at least half of my classes in high school, so that’s good. Work experience? Bar wench, waitress. Wait, you’re not supposed to list jobs you’ve been fired from, are you? If not, then scratch both of those. Work experience, none. Skills? I’m guessing ‘expert joint roller’ would be inappropriate, so we’re back to zero. At least I won’t waste a lot of your printer ink.”
“Okay, fine, you might not need a résumé anyway. Do you want me to drop you off downtown and you can maybe walk into some places and ask if they’re hiring? Or you could go to the library. They have all of the local papers and you could go through the Help Wanted sections if you didn’t want to do that online. It’s just a thought . . .”
Jules trailed off and Lexi could tell she was trying not to be pushy, which was next to impossible for Jules. When their dad died and Juliana disappeared—first emotionally, and then physically because she had to work to support the family—people worried needlessly about who would take care of the “orphaned Alexander girls.” Jules had jumped right in and taken over, going so far as scheduling her sisters’ annual physicals and teeth cleanings and forcing them to practice their cursive and study their math tables. Lexi and Brooke had called her “the boss of everyone” behind her back, and had resented her for acting like she was their mother. At twenty-six, Lexi found she despised it more than ever. But a free ride downtown? That she’d take.
“Sure, I’ll go,” she said now.
“Go get dressed, then,” Jules said. “I’ll pick up your bed.”
“I am dressed,” Lexi said, looking down. She was wearing ripped cut-off shorts and a hot-pink T-shirt that said FUBAR across the front. She’d cut slits in the back of the shirt in such a way that the holes formed a giant skull—through which you could plainly see that she wasn’t wearing a bra, something that was equally evident from the front view, even minus the holes.
Jules looked her up and down. “What’s FUBAR?” she finally asked.
“Just a brand,” Lexi told her. It certainly doesn’t stand for something inappropriate like Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition, if that’s what you’re getting at.
“Would you like to borrow something a little more . . . professional looking?” Jules offered. “I’m not suggesting you go out there in a business suit, but maybe a nice pair of khakis and a blouse wouldn’t kill you?”
“A blouse? Is that even a word anymore? Do you have a pocketbook I can borrow, too?”
“Sure,” Jules said. “And some panty hose, if you’d like. Come on.” Lexi made a face but she followed her sister into her tiny, tidy bedroom. Jules opened the closet she shared with Shawn. It was jam-packed but remarkably neat and organized.
“Are all of your clothes actually arranged by color?” Lexi asked, surveying the contents.
“Well, yeah, and also by type and season,” Jules admitted. “Winter stuff here, from dark to light, and summer stuff here, same order, long sleeves then short sleeves and then tanks. Shoes go by heel height.”
“That’s totally fucking psycho, you know that, right?”
“I like knowing where to find my things,” Jules told her. “It just makes things easier.”
“Whatever you say,” Lexi said. “Just show me the blouse section. This ought to be fun.”
Jules pulled out a handful of shirts and Lexi tried not to cringe. Who dressed like that, in bright, flowy tops that looked like a flower shop threw up all over them? She made a puking, gagging sound at each one Jules held up for her.
“Look, I’m trying to help you,” Jules said. “If you want to walk around and be laughed at, go right ahead. You’re not a kid anymore, and you have to find a job. If you think you’re going to be offered some amazing position—or land any job at all for that matter—looking like a homeless meth addict, good luck with that.” Jules jammed the tops back into her closet and stormed out of her room, leaving Lexi standing there. “I’m leaving in ten minutes, with or without you,” she called from the kitchen.
Lexi sighed. If she didn’t put on one of these awful outfits she’d be stuck in this godforsaken house all day. She flipped through the tops and found a black one that wasn’t too hideous. It was pretty sheer, and she knew Jules would have a conniption if she didn’t wear something underneath it, so she rifled through the tank top section until she found a black one with skinny straps. Then she slid a pair of white jeans off their hanger and pulled them on. They were baggy and too high-waisted—Lexi guessed Jules had probably had them for a decade or more—but she supposed they’d do. She grabbed a pair of black gladiator sandals from the floor, since all she had were ratty flip-flops and one pair of what she was pretty sure people called hooker boots.
“You clean up pretty well,” Jules said when Lexi came out of the bedroom. She’d pulled her hair back into a messy bun, which on Lexi—at least in a presentable outfit—looked more chic than sloppy.
“I feel like a jackass,” Lexi said.
“Well, you don’t look like one,” Jules told her.
They sat in silence in the car, and Lexi was grateful for it. What would they talk about? Jules’s boring marriage or her stupid book? Lexi’s job hunt? What they’d both been up to for the past ten years? Lexi was pretty sure Jules wouldn’t want to hear about her creative rent-financing practices or all of the drugs she’d done or about the time she’d downed a bottle of hand sanitizer she’d stolen from a port-a-potty and her friends had been kind enough to drop her unconscious ass off on the curb outside of the ER.
“Here’s ten bucks in case you need to make some copies or anything. Pick you up here at three?” Jules said. They were idling outside the West Valley Library.
“Sure,” Lexi said, taking the money and hopping out of the car. “See ya.” She pretended to be searching for something in her bag while she waited for Jules to pull away. When the Honda was out of sight, she crossed the street and turned left, where she made her way to the dollar movie theater, the one that showed last season’s movies and served five-dollar pitchers of beer. She saved just enough money to buy a pack of gum afterward so Jules wouldn’t smell the beer on her breath. Lexi sat
in the cold, dark theater, thinking it was too bad that sneaking around wasn’t an actual job.
Jules
“It won’t be forever,” Jules told Shawn, stroking his chest.
“No, it won’t,” Shawn said. “It will just feel like it.”
“What else was I supposed to do? Let them both live on the street? I didn’t have a choice; you know I didn’t.”
“I lived with my sister for a while before we got married, remember? I get it. They’re family. They’re screwed-up crazy people, but they’re family. It’s what you do.”
Jules wondered how she ever got so lucky. She hated thinking about it, because it made her feel guilty. She’d had twelve years to watch and absorb what a loving, healthy marriage looked like, and she knew that had given her a distinct advantage over Brooke and Lexi. At eight and six, they’d still been in that la-la land of innocent, immature narcissism that most kids—the lucky ones, at least—are supposed to exist in. What did their parents’ marriage have to do with them? They were happy, big deal. They were supposed to be. It was right there in all of the fairy tales: You met a boy, you fell in love, you got married and you lived happily ever after. But as a much more mature almost-teenager who had been navigating the landscape of boys and betrayal herself already, Jules knew better. She’d watched how her parents interacted, how her dad doted on her mom, how he told her she was beautiful and that the dinner was delicious and even kissed her and grabbed her butt in front of them. Jules knew that was special, and she wanted it someday, too. And somehow, miraculously, she’d gotten it. Poor Brooke and Lexi never had the same road map, at least not when they needed it most. It was no wonder they were so messed up; Jules couldn’t even blame them.
“I just wish we had more space,” she told Shawn now. She realized that if they lived anywhere but Southern California, they could have four times more house than what they had now for the same amount of money. Even though their two-bedroom 1930s Spanish-style house was small even by L.A. standards, she and Shawn owned it and she was proud of that fact. Still, her sisters were taking turns sleeping on the twin air mattress in the tiny bedroom they called the “cloffice”—for closet-office—and on the couch in the living room, both of which were pretty miserable options. If one had been unmistakably superior, they all knew Lexi would have claimed it as “hers.” As it was, the couch was too soft and the air mattress was too hard, so flip-flopping back and forth offered both girls a rotating measure of relief.
“It’ll be good practice for when we have a baby,” Shawn said.
“When we have a baby,” Jules reminded him, “we’ll also have millions of dollars, so unfortunately all of this practice sharing sardine-can quarters will have been for nothing.”
Shawn laughed. “Good point. I keep forgetting about that. I mean, I never really forget about it completely, but it still just doesn’t seem real. Which reminds me—”
“It’s coming along really well,” Jules interrupted, anticipating his how’s-the-writing-going question.
“Sorry. I mean it. I’m just so damned excited for you. I know you won’t believe this, but I think I’m more excited for you to finish that book than I am about the whole inheritance. The money will be great, don’t get me wrong, but being able to say, ‘This is my wife, Jules. She’s a novelist’ is going to be epic. Not to make it all about me or anything.” Shawn smiled sheepishly.
Jules had fantasized about that very scenario countless times, and it was always some version of the same setup. “And what do you do?” the snooty stranger would ask. “Me? Oh, I write,” Jules would say vaguely, knowing this would prompt further probing. “What do you write?” the stranger would invariably want to know, clearly waiting for her to say something like “bank brochures” or “appliance manuals.” “I’m a novelist,” Jules would reply, a cat playing with her freshly caught mouse, batting it this way and that, not ready for the fun to end. “Would I have heard of anything you’ve written?” the now-impressed stranger would say next. And then Jules would rattle off a string of bestselling blockbusters and bask in the stranger’s satisfyingly nervous fawning.
“Yeah, that will be great,” Jules said now. She wanted to tell Shawn she was stuck, that she was suffering from the biggest and most crippling case of writer’s block the world had ever known. She wanted to beg him for an idea, a plotline, a character sketch or two; hell, even a single decent sentence to get her going would be more than she had now. But for some reason, she couldn’t. Shawn was her biggest fan, her greatest supporter. Nobody had ever believed in her the way he did, except maybe her dad. She wanted Shawn to be proud of her, and how could he be if she couldn’t even come up with a stupid idea? This was her deal, her challenge, and she’d just have to buckle down. No pain, no gain. And the payoff of being able to say she did it all alone? She could practically taste the satisfaction.
“What are we going to do about Alexis?” Shawn asked after a long pause.
“What do you mean?” Jules asked.
“She has to get—and yes, I’m using air quotes here—an actual job, remember?”
“I know, and I’ve been looking on Craigslist and I even walked the dogs over to the community college the other day and checked out the jobs board. She has a high school equivalency degree, no college credit at all and, from what I can see, absolutely zero skills or experience. There aren’t a lot of Fortune 500 companies looking for a Lexi.”
“At least she’s got a GED,” Shawn said. “It’s better than no high school degree at all.”
“I guess,” Jules said.
“Hey, remember how my brother Randy got his job in Germany?”
“Wasn’t he waiting tables or something?” Jules asked.
“Yeah, he was working at that little German pub that used to be over by all the car dealerships. The Festhaus, I think it was called? Anyway, he waited on this guy one night who happened to own a bunch of pubs in Germany. And the guy was so impressed he hired Randy to oversee the whole operation. Randy never waited on another table again.”
“What do you suppose are the rough odds,” Jules asked, “of Alexis landing a waitressing job at somewhere decent enough to have rich, important customers, and then keeping it long enough for the opportunity to wait on one of those rich, important customers to present itself, and then bowling this rich, important customer over with her winning personality and bottomless charm and professionalism and being hired immediately into an overseas middle-management position?”
“Somewhere between slim and none?” Shawn asked.
“I’d say more like somewhere between none and none,” Jules said.
“What about vo-tech? She could take some quickie course in, like, cutting hair or fixing computers or something.”
“I have a list of courses in my desk but I’m afraid to give them to her. She’s so damned touchy. I was trying to give her some time to figure it out on her own. She doesn’t want my help, Shawn, you see that every day.”
“Well, want and need are two entirely different things,” Shawn reminded her needlessly.
“Let’s give her a few more weeks,” Jules said.
“I wouldn’t wait too long. The clock is ticking. I’m just saying.”
Nobody knew that better than Jules.
Brooke
“Yeah, I’d say you’re just about marathon ready,” Lexi jeered.
“Alexis, leave her alone,” Jules said, pausing for a moment. “But honestly, Brooke, I thought you said you’ve been training after work?”
“I’ll have you both know I’m the only one who’s made any progress at all toward getting our inheritance, so maybe you could both get off my back,” Brooke said. She stopped to catch her breath, and when she did, a pocket Pomeranian named Precious darted between her legs and got tangled there. Her sisters kept walking. Brooke untangled Precious and struggled to catch up. All of the houses looked the same in Reseda—cement blo
ck squares with tidy lawns and identical squat driveways. If she got separated from her sisters, she might never find her way home.
“How do you know how much progress I’ve made on my book?” Jules demanded, her one free arm pumping.
“If you had written anything at all, you’d be begging us to read it,” Brooke said. She was gasping for air, which she supposed was the point. When Jules had begged for help walking her dogs, Brooke knew it was her sister’s not-so-subtle way of getting her to exercise—and getting Lexi to do anything at all. And since Brooke needed any nudge she could get, she had feigned ignorance and agreed to pitch in.
“When you wrote those short stories when we were little, I remember you making us read them eight thousand times each,” Brooke reminded Jules now. “We had to reread them every time you changed a word or put in a comma.”
“Well, this time I want it to be a surprise,” Jules said.
“Yeah, sure.” Brooke smirked.
“Well, what did you do? You left your loser dickhead boyfriend, big whoop,” Lexi chimed in. “It’s not like he tried to stop you or anything. So like I was saying, how far are you running these days? Three miles? Five?”
Brooke cringed. The truth was, she had tried to run a few times, but it had been unseasonably hot lately and every step had been brutal—she’d barely been able to jog a few hundred yards—so she was waiting for the fog to roll in to start training in earnest. They called it “June Gloom” and you could set your clock by it. It was nearly April, and that would still leave her plenty of time to get in shape. She was sure muscle memory would kick in once she got going. It was going to have to.
“I’m not sure,” she admitted. “I don’t have a pedometer or anything yet, and I’m not very good with judging distances.”
“Maybe we should get you a ruler,” Lexi said. “I’m guessing we could measure your distance in inches.”
Everything's Relative Page 8
