Chelsea feels as if the breath has been knocked out of her. She’s ready, and yet she wasn’t quite ready? She wanted five more minutes to process things. She’s not surprised at Joy and TJ, though; much like his first day with that Instagram girl, TJ always seems to get a rise out of people by simply being far too calm and reasonable for a buff guy. This is not a time for calm and reasonable, because frantic, irrational people hate something about that odd combination of strength, vulnerability, and lack of ego. Chelsea hasn’t seen him much since that first day, but she hopes Joy won’t get him kicked out. Everyone knows Joy is the closest thing they have to a loose cannon, which is one reason why she works here.
“M’lady.” Steve gives a bow that’s meant to be both courtly and joking, and Chelsea gives him her Florida Woman face, and snarls, “M’bourgeoisie,” as that’s the contrast they’re going for in this match. Steve is urbane and smooth and looks quite rich, while Chelsea looks like a cheap goddamn train wreck. Her hair is sprayed into a big rat’s nest, her neon-pink lipstick is smeared, her tank top is ripped and reads FLORIDA WOMAN in red glitter, her shorts are short, and she’s splattered all over with fake blood. The first time she saw it in the mirror, she flinched.
“It didn’t look like this,” she’d murmured to Sienna. “When I—”
“I know it didn’t. I did that on purpose,” Sienna responded, squeezing Chelsea’s hand.
And that’s why the VFR works, at least from the inside: because everyone here understands. Sienna’s costumes are caricatures that lead them away from their lived reality. Arlene’s work has been untangling their trauma, and Chris has worked their bodies to exhaustion, making them strong and ready to sleep and let their minds and bodies heal. These are people who need something to do, something to focus on besides the snakes in their heads and the horrors they’ve lived through, and the VFR gives them that.
“Ready, Chel?”
Steve and Chris wait for her inside the door. The lights are dark, and she can hear murmuring, but it’s confounded by the bone-thumping beat of whatever music Harlan has blasting in the arena.
She nods and walks through the door.
The lights go on, the music starts playing, and…holy shit.
36.
Everything’s been going so well, aside from the constant dread. Every day, Patricia expects to be thrown out of her own house or descended upon by thieves or—worse—the authorities, but the days pass as they always have, or perhaps a bit more slowly. Over the past few weeks, she and Brooklyn have developed an understanding. Brooklyn doesn’t wake Patricia up until it’s light outside, and she goes to bed when bidden. The child no longer asks when Mommy and Ella will return, which is a relief for them both.
They have a schedule now, with designated times for cleaning, swimming, reading, watching shows, and taking meals. Patricia has taught Brooklyn how to sweep, how to make pasta, how to cut an apple with the big knife, although the apples ran out weeks ago. The judge, for all his promised cruelty and secondhand thievery, has not yet turned off the utilities or phone or internet, and the O’Malley food has kept them alive. But it’s running out, and Brooklyn is becoming more and more difficult as she finishes off her favorite snacks. Patricia had forgotten how children, like armies, march on their stomachs.
When there’s nothing snacky left but rye crackers and rice cakes, she knows they’re in trouble. The O’Malley house is tapped out, but there must be other families in the neighborhood who’ve flown the coop, leaving full pantries and freezers behind. There’s something gauche about going through the HOA directory, though, and many of her neighbors don’t know about the auction, so she won’t have that convenient excuse. She needs some way to gather information without seeming interested.
It comes to her one long afternoon, when Brooklyn gets fussy about the puzzle they’re working on together and tosses a piece across the room. “I want to play a game!” she pouts. “A real game. Like Chutes and Ladders or Sorry! Puzzles are stupid.”
“Puzzles are not stupid,” Patricia chides her, “You just…”
She trails off.
Games.
Dice.
Bunco.
And tomorrow is Thursday night. Perfect! Those bawds will have all the neighborhood gossip—who’s here, who’s not, whose yard is well below the HOA standard. She sends Marion a text message, asking who’s hosting and if they prefer white or red, and she’s in.
The next day, she goes out of her way to make sure Brooklyn is exhausted. They swim together for three hours instead of one, and by six, her granddaughter is fussy and rubbing her eyes. Patricia makes their last frozen pizza and lets Brooklyn eat as much as she wants. Soon she’s scooping up a heavily sleeping child off the couch and tucking her into her cozy closet nest. After making sure the closet doors are secure, Patricia gets dressed, puts on a full face of makeup, and walks to Robin Steele’s house, a bottle of Pinot from the judge’s wine fridge under her arm.
It’s annoying, actually, how much she enjoys Bunco with the girls. There are six of them and six bottles of wine and deviled eggs and charcuterie and a fresh fruit and cheese tray that Patricia would like to devour with both hands. They drink and laugh and toss dice, and even if she has nothing to contribute to the scuttlebutt, she takes it all in and says the right things and makes a mental note of possible targets. The Herberts next door are in Sweden, and Dr. Brown in the cul-de-sac was killed by a patient at the hospital and has no children. Both of their houses are empty, and she knows the Herberts’ security code. She leaves with the rest of the fruit tray and a promise to come next week. She’s actually looking forward to it. Without the judge around, without a reputation to uphold, she was almost…herself.
Whoever that is now.
Back home, she tiptoes into the kitchen and slides the fruit tray into the nearly empty fridge, smiling at how happy Brooklyn will be when she wakes up and sees the big chunks of melon and pineapple and the last remaining strawberry. Patricia will have to cut up the melon, of course—they’ve already had one minor choking scare, and she doesn’t care to repeat it.
Barefoot, tipsy, happy, she arms the security system and does a little dance down the hallway on the way to her room. Marion insisted on playing some old Dolly Parton, and Patricia had forgotten how much she used to enjoy music, how they used to play it in the diner at night as they cleaned up, taking turns picking the songs on the jukebox. She doesn’t sing, though—she doesn’t want to risk waking Brooklyn. Aside from the occasional nightmare, the child sleeps like a log.
She opens the door to her room, and something is wrong, some slight disturbance in the air, some breath of a sound, some animal signal that makes her freeze. She fumbles for the light switch, and a shape lunges at her.
Patricia throws her hands in front of her face as if she’s being attacked by a leaping pit bull, but she’s made a mistake.
The shape is Brooklyn, and Brooklyn is five and can’t jump that high.