The girl came to the car and held out her hand. When Olivia counted ten dollars into it—two dollars’ worth of change she had to scrounge around the floor and in her pockets for—the girl smiled and pointed at the restaurant.
“What?” Olivia said, thinking that this kid better not fuck with her.
The girl just pointed again.
Then she set off in a full run back to the far corner of the parking lot.
Olivia got out of the car, shielding her eyes from the bright restaurant light reflecting off the wide glass window. Inside, there were skinny men in baggy clothes sitting at the counter. And there, in one of the bright orange booths, pregnant and laughing, sat Ruby. Olivia pressed her face to the plate-glass window, looked right in Ruby’s face. Ruby stopped laughing and looked her right in the eye.
Olivia moved forward, opened the door, and stepped inside. She was hit in the face with the overwhelming smell of grease and a blast of cold air-conditioned air; she had not realized until that moment that the humidity that was forecasted for that night had actually arrived. She had not realized how sticky she was until the cold air sent goose bumps up her arms.
Moving toward Ruby, Olivia remembered something the girl had told her on their ride to the clinic: “Karma is a boomerang,” she said. “You do something bad, it comes right back at you.”
Here I am, Olivia thought, coming right back at you.
Ruby was waving at her, happily.
“What a surprise,” she said, practically chirping.
The girl had nerve. “Brass balls,” David would have said. She sat there, smiling and waving and chirping at the person she’d robbed less than twenty-four hours earlier.
“I know why you’re here,” Ruby said.
Olivia was right in her face now, no plate glass between them. She could smell her, she was so close, a smell of smoke and sweat and—Olivia flinched—sex. The boy she was sitting with—Ben, maybe?—had the flat stoned look of those kids in the parking lot. Between them on the bright orange table were onion rings, french fries, empty packets of catsup, and grease-splattered wrappers.
Despite the cold air in there, heat rose in Olivia; she felt her face flush, felt the hot grip of anger tear through her.
“You little shit,” she hissed.
She had Ruby’s fleshy freckled arm in her hand and she gripped her so hard that she knew there would be bruises when she let go. Olivia tugged Ruby right out of the tight booth. When Ruby was on her feet, Olivia recognized the Japanese baseball shirt she wore, and the khaki drawstring shorts: They were David’s.
“Those are his clothes, you stealing little shit,” Olivia said, and then she was tearing at the clothes, at the girl. She felt the sweaty tangle of Ruby’s hair in her fingers, the familiar way those clothes felt under her hands. How she had struggled to untie those shorts, to pull them off David and release his penis to her waiting body. “You fucking shit,” she said, and started to drag Ruby out of there, and the girl, too pregnant to slip from her grasp, let herself be pulled away, into the hot night air.
Outside, Ruby managed to free herself. She didn’t run. She just stood under the fluorescent lights and tried to pull herself together—straighten the shirt, smooth her hair, wipe her face. Olivia heard her own ragged breath. She could kill this kid. She really could.
Ruby held her hands up in front of her face.
“Look,” she said. “Okay. Jesus. Calm down.”
It was those words—“Calm down”—that sent Olivia at Ruby like a football player tackling an opponent. She slammed into her, and the two of them tumbled to the ground, awkwardly nailing at each other, rolling around on the hot asphalt. Ruby hit back, but her blows were so ineffective, they seemed almost comical. Thinking this, how silly Ruby’s soft punches were, Olivia was struck by how comical all of it was—the eerie lights, the shabby A&W, the pregnant girl wearing Olivia’s dead husband’s clothes, and Olivia herself, rolling around like this, scraping her knuckles against the gravel and tasting the iron tang of blood in her mouth—and so Olivia stopped hitting and rolling and settled instead into an awkward hug, lying spoon-fashion with this girl, this thief, this JD. At last, their breathing slowed to a normal intake of air. That was when Olivia realized that she was still holding on to Ruby, holding on tight, not about to let go.
chapter five
Who Could Hang a Name on You?
OLIVIA SAT ON the rocks above the ocean, the rocks where college kids came to watch storms, where every year at least one got swept away by a wave. Beside her sat Ruby. Olivia did not want to take Ruby back into her home. Not yet. She knew that she should have taken her to the police. She should have pressed charges. But she could not do it. She wanted something from the girl, something big, and important: that baby Ruby had inside her. Olivia could not let it go. Instead, she let good judgment and common sense go. Instead, she had brought Ruby here.