One Good Hustle

TWELVE




RAIN IS COMING down so hard it’s bouncing off the sidewalks. No umbrella. Cold drops snap my skin and stream down my face, inside the collar of my jacket, down my spine. I don’t care. Let it wash me away.

Before I left the house, Jill came downstairs to find me hiding in her bedroom. I had wiped my face but she could see my red eyes. “Who was that outside?”

“Drew. Is he gone?”

“Yeah. He went trudging down the steps like someone just drop-kicked him.” She sat beside me on her bed, almost whispering. “Did you guys break up?”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Did he say something shitty to you?”

“I want to go home.”

“Oh, Sammie.” She put a purple fuzzy bathrobe arm around my shoulders and tried to hug me close. “It’s going to be okay. Come on, Sam.”

“Don’t call me that.” I pulled away. “I’m not Sam.”

Ruby clomped down the stairs and pushed the beaded curtain aside. “What’s wrong? Who was that outside?”

“Her friend, Drew. She wants to go home.”

“Sammie honey, that’s not a good idea.” Ruby came into the room.

“I want it how it was,” I said. I got up off the bed and folded my arms. “There’s nothing now. It’s all nothing.”

Ruby put her arms around me and squeezed. I went stiff and tried to wriggle away from her round soft self. She hugged tighter.

When she finally eased her grip, she said, “You don’t like to be touched, do you, Sammie. Seems as if you didn’t grow up with much affection. Don’t you need a hug now and then?”

Why does everyone think they know what the hell I need?

I had loads of affection. Maybe not from Sam, but Marlene was a blue-ribbon mush-pot, always petting and kissing me. When I was a kid sometimes I slept in the same bed with her. Especially when we were on the road, Marlene, Sam and me—Sam didn’t want to spring for an extra bed. Late at night, Marlene used to play a game where she wrote words on my back with her finger and I had to guess what she’d just written. It felt so yummy to have my back tickled that I would slide into a stupor every time.

“I don’t know,” I’d say, “write it again. Write me a book.”

Made me want to bawl thinking of it there in Jill’s bedroom, Marlene’s fingernails grazing my skin.

“I’m going out,” I told Ruby.

Jill glanced at her mother. “Do you want company?”

“I’m not going home, okay, I just want to go for a walk.”

Ruby’s tone went low and careful. “I don’t know what all’s happened to you, Sammie, but I just want you to know that we love you.”

Jesus Christ! Love, love love.

Anyone who says I love you is just trying to hold you hostage. Drew should knock it the hell off, too, I thought. He should take it back.

And just like that, the phone rang again. Ruby, Jill and I looked at the bedside table. Ruby picked up, said hello and listened.

“Just a moment.” She held the receiver out for me.

“Sammie?” Drew’s voice was strained and huffing, as if he’d been running. He must have been at a phone booth. I could hear the traffic. “I’m sorry. I meant like a friend. You’re my best friend. Like that, okay? I love you like that.”

“I have to go,” I said, and hung up the phone.



Rainwater drips off the ends of my hair. People passing by with umbrellas look at me as if I’m a complete berserker, out in a downpour like this.

Is it turkeys that tilt their heads back in the rain and drown?

I keep hearing Drew. I love you. Marlene too. I love you. Makes me want to dig out my skull with a spoon.

Marlene claims to be selective about the love stuff. She doesn’t say that to just anyone, she says. Mind you, she also says, “Tell the truth and shame the devil,” whenever she’s trying to get something out of me. She hates all that God stuff and then she comes out with crazy shit like that.

I love you, Marlene says, and then she buggers off and doesn’t even leave a note. It was just her and me. Me and her. She used to understand that. She used to always leave notes.

One time, I heard her out back at two in the morning with some jerk. My mother has the worst taste in men.

“Come on, Jack, just for a minute,” she kept saying. Her s’s were sliding all over the place. The guy’s voice was too low to make out. Marlene got louder. “Look at me, Jack, please?” Right outside my bedroom window.

Made me sick to hear her beg like that. I pulled the pillow over my head.

Suddenly, clippy footsteps came down the little cement path beside our balcony. And then I heard the Romanian accent of Nadia, the caretaker’s wife.

“Marlene!” she said in a loud whisper. “You are waking up half the building.”

I wondered why it was Nadia and not her husband, George, coming out in the middle of the night. Seems like Nadia always had to do the dirty work.

“This is my goddamn place,” my mother said to Nadia, “and I’ll do whatever the hell I like.”

I peered through the crack between the curtains. I saw parts of Nadia—short, choppy hair, pyjama pants, and her elbow jumping around in a woolly sweater as she jabbed a finger toward Marlene.

“Get inside your goddamn place,” Nadia hissed, “or I will call the police!”

Then the jerk spoke up. “Let’s calm down.”

“Don’t tell me what to do!” That was Marlene, of course.

I listened until our apartment door opened and closed. There was scuffling and bumping, my mother saying, Oops, and giggling.

I tried to let my brain fade into sleep. After a while, my mom’s voice came high and needy again, like a baby, like a Siamese cat.

“I love you, Jack. I love you.”

That was the capper.

“I never even said I love you to your father,” Marlene had once told me. “Only you. The second you were born I loved you.”

I’d never even heard of Jack.

I opened my bedroom door and stood there, looking into the living room, where my mother was on the couch pawing the guy’s face. Jack was all leathery brown and skinny like a science project. I swear to God, he was like one of those bog-men who gets preserved in peat for a hundred years.

“Mom!”

She jerked around. “Sammie.” Her voice went all honey-pie. “Come here.” She patted the bit of empty couch beside her. “Jack, this is my little girl.”

“Hello,” the bog-man said. Long, bony fingers wiggled the air toward me.

“You want to keep it down? I’ve got school in the morning.”

Marlene often says it’s my tone that pisses her off, not the words. She’d slapped my face once last year for my tone. I’d looked at her with this hard, amused expression that I’d been working on, and she ran like hell into her bedroom and slammed the door. I could hear her dresser drawer rattle as she rooted around for something that would take the edge off.

Now, her mouth hung open for a good three seconds before she blurted, “You slept last night. You’re always sleeping.”

“Are you for real?” I said.

I went back to my room and closed the door. Leaning against it, I listened as Jack made noises about leaving. Marlene told him she loved him again. Jack left.

I refused to speak to her the next morning.

She didn’t notice; she was sleeping.

After school that day, Nadia was outside our open door as I came down the hallway. Her voice was sharp and she was jabbing a finger at Marlene.

My mother kept her arms crossed.

Nadia’s expression changed into a smile for me. I tried to make nice as I slipped past her to my mother’s side of the door.

As soon as I was by her, Nadia went back to that harsh sneer. “You think you can wake up half the building and nothing is going to happen? Not so!”

“Where’s George? When I signed the rental agreement for this godforsaken hole, I signed it with George.” No matter her history, Marlene figures a guy will always treat you better. She’ll go to the longest line in the supermarket just to deal with a guy.

“George! George has had it with you. He’d have kicked you out a long time ago except he likes Samantha. He thinks she’s cute. Lucky for you.”

Marlene’s mouth hardened. “That is lucky,” she said. If she’d been a cat, her tail would have been switching, hard.

My lungs clenched.

“If I have to speak to you again, no more chances!” Nadia gave me another gruesome smile before she hurried away, her tough little legs zipping down the hallway.

I made a beeline for my room.

Marlene followed me. “George thinks Sammie’s cute! Isn’t she cute with those trashy tight jeans painted on her teenaged ass? Cutest thing you ever saw.” Then she stormed into the kitchen and slammed things around in the sink.

“What do you figure that little bitch meant by that? You and George spending time together these days or what?”

I came out and stood in the kitchen entrance. “No. I told you—he’s a drama coach. He gave me his business card because he thinks I should be an actress. He thinks I’m interesting.”

“I’ll bet,” she said. “I’ll just f*cking bet. Maybe cute Sammie could haul her interesting ass in here and clean up the kitchen!”



I’m standing in the phone booth now. I have to call one of them and I don’t know which one first.

I stick in a quarter.

Seems to ring and ring forever.

Finally, “Hello?” Her tone sounds urgent, as if she’s been interrupted in the middle of performing brain surgery.

“Mom? It’s me.”

She breathes out a bitchy kind of disgust. I can almost hear her lip curl.

“What’s going on? Is everything okay?”

“You tell me,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“Excuse me?” she mimics.

“What are you doing? What’s wrong with you?”

“You think you’re going to run off with him and just leave me here in the muck? You and Freddy. What a laugh.”

“Freddy?”

“The index card!” she says. “I found it, smartass. In the living room. Think you’re so damn smart. There’s code scratched all over it—I can read it.”

I stand in the phone booth, rain dribbling down the outside of the glass as I try to put it all together. The thought of Freddy’s face up-close makes me want to puke. Then the index card flutters through my brain onto the couch: me in the living room, calling all over town. I forgot to put the card back. It probably slipped down between the couch cushions.

“I called him because I was looking for you.”

“See how far you get!” She hangs up.

Leaning in the phone booth, I watch little rivers run down Kingsway. Brown puddle-waves splash the sidewalks as cars rush by.