One Good Hustle

TWENTY-SIX




IT’S A LITTLE before nine when I come into the house. Almost dark outside. Ruby and Lou are on the couch in front of the television. There’s a giant bowl of popcorn between them.

“Aha! The mystery woman returns,” Lou says.

“Jill left for a party about twenty minutes ago,” Ruby tells me. “She wanted you to come along but she didn’t know how to get hold of you.”

“That’s okay. I’m tired anyway.”

“Did you go horseback riding?” Lou asks.

“Na, we just walked around and looked at cows.”

Ruby laughs hard at that one. I don’t know why. She does that sometimes.

They seem so cozy together, Ruby and Lou, that I’m not sure where to look.

“Pull up a chair and stay a while,” Ruby says.

I sit down on the second couch.

“You’re just in time to watch The Way We Were,” Lou says. “Want some popcorn? Here, let me get you a bowl.”

Ruby steadies the big bowl beside her as Lou gets up.

“You look like you got a little colour today,” she says.

“Probably.” I rub my eyes. They feel as if they’re full of sand after all that time in the sun.

“I talked to your mother a little while ago.”

I blink at her and keep my mouth shut. The television splashes blue light on Ruby’s face.

“I didn’t call her. She called me,” Ruby says as if she can read my mind.

Marlene called Ruby? I wonder if she saw me sneaking around out back.

Lou returns from the kitchen with a smaller version of the bowl on the couch. He shoves a bunch of popcorn into it and then hands it to me before he sits and licks butter and salt off his fingers.

“She really misses you, Sammie,” Ruby says. “She quit drinking, she told me, and she’s in AA. She sounds pretty damn good, considering. Except that she hasn’t talked to you in a while.”

I don’t know what to say to that.

“She’d like to see you.”

I glance out the window into the blue dusk.

“Don’t you think you should go and see her soon?”

Lou keeps his eyes on the television.

I nod.

“What are your plans, Sammie? What do you think about September?” Ruby asks.

I look at her.

“Your mom’s doing a lot better. If she keeps it up, you’ll be going home soon.”

I turn my face to the TV. Robert Redford is jogging through the park right past Barbara Streisand.

“It’s started!” Ruby yelps as the piano starts to plink out the theme and Streisand hums along. “Turn it up, Lou.”

She braces the bowl once more as Lou jumps up and turns the volume knob on the television.

“Memories …” Streisand sings. They light the corners of her mind.

Another wrist-slasher of a song. Right up there with “Theme from Mahogany.” I stuff popcorn into my mouth.

My eyes drift to Ruby and Lou cuddled together on the couch. Lou’s got his arm around her, and she’s got her head nestled into his shoulder. What must it feel like to be Ruby, to have Lou watching out for you all the time? A person wouldn’t have to be so careful, wouldn’t have to keep their antennae so pricked. I imagine myself snuggled against Lou’s arm. You wouldn’t have to be big around Lou; you could afford to just let yourself be small.



It’s about two in the morning now and I still can’t sleep. Jill’s not back. Maybe she called home after I went to bed. Probably staying over at Crystal’s house.

I barely heard a word of that sappy movie tonight. Ruby snivelled all over the place and went through half a box of Kleenex. Not me. I was too busy thinking about Drew assuming he could just touch me like that. I can’t figure out if I’m being childish. I don’t even have someone I can talk to about it. Definitely not Ruby.

Ruby is not my mother. These people are not my family.

Drew is not my family either.

Lying in bed, I stare at the ceiling. Outside, headlights come down the road and light up the camper curtain for a second or two. Brakes squeak. There is a pause and then I hear a car door open and slam shut.

The camper door creaks and Jill climbs in, shaking the whole frame. I squint at my watch, trying to make out the actual time.

“Hi,” I whisper.

She sniffles.

“Jill?”

No response. I watch her silhouette as she takes off her leather jacket.

“What’s the matter?”

“Go to sleep.” Her voice is warbly. She unzips her jeans and wriggles out of them, shaking the trailer some more as she sits on her bed. She pulls back the covers and crawls under them. “Where the hell were you all goddamn day?”

The booze smell coming off her is sour, as if she’s been drinking all night and it’s making its way out of her pores now.

“I told you. I went out to Langley with Drew.”

Silence.

“Where were you tonight?”

“Making a f*cking ass of myself,” she says.

“Oh yeah? Right on.” I’m trying to be light, make fun of what likely isn’t a very big deal. “Where?”

“Byrne Road.”

Another bush party. She tells me she got a call about it from Mark, one of the guys from her regular crowd at school. When she couldn’t get hold of Crystal, she called Mark back and caught a lift with him. Once she got down to the Byrne Road bush, the first thing she saw was Crystal Norris on a log by the fire making out with Roman.

Jill’s voice rises as she goes into detail about the screaming and yelling that followed. Two-faced slut! Lying bitch!

Roman separated them. Jill punched him in the stomach. More screaming.

Mark invited Jill to take off with him, go to another party he’d heard about. But Roman suggested that Jill come back to Crystal’s place with the two of them to talk it through. Crystal’s parents were out of town. And that’s what she actually did. The three of them hiked back along the trail to the road in silence and got into Roman’s ugly black Firebird with the shitty gold bird emblazoned on the hood.

“Why didn’t you take off with Mark?” I whisper.

“Because! I had to know what happened.”

“What happened is: Roman’s an a*shole and Crystal’s a twat. That’s what happened.”

“You don’t know jack-shit, Sammie. You’ve never had a boyfriend and you’ve never been in love. You have zero life experience. I had to get closure.” She states this as if it were a life-or-death fact similar to I had to get a blood transfusion.

I keep my mouth shut.

“So, I go over there … and we’re sitting in Crystal’s basement.” Jill’s voice is slushy with tears. “Roman thought we should have a drink and calm down so he made us all screwdrivers. I was sitting on the couch with Crystal, and I’m like, How could you do this, Crystal? You even tried to make me jealous of Sammie and it was you the whole motherf*cking time! She starts crying and saying how sorry she is. Then Roman starts telling me that he loves me but it just didn’t work out. I’m like, Because I wouldn’t f*ck you, that’s why! And she would! I started getting pretty pissed off again, you know, like I was about to start busting some heads. So Roman made us some more drinks.”

Judging by the smell of her he must have made them strong.

Then they talked and talked some more and then they all cried. Roman too. The whole thing turned into a big gory love-fest. Crystal said that she loved Jill and Jill said that she loved Crystal. Roman said that he loved them both. Then he made more drinks and there was laughing and tears and hugging. Roman kissed one of them and then the other. Crystal kissed Jill and Jill kissed Crystal and the next thing you know, Crystal and Jill are necking with each other and then each of them with Roman.

“Puke!” I say. “How could you kiss Crystal Norris?”

“Crystal’s my girlfriend,” Jill says.

“Since when do you make out with your girlfriends?”

She pauses and then begins to cry. “Oh God, I can’t believe I was necking with Crystal.” Jill is really bawling now—heaving and sobbing mixed with these high little squeals.

“Shh.” I glance out the back window at the house. The windows are still dark.

A long whimper comes out of Jill. “I’m not a virgin any more.”

“You don’t mean tonight? Holy shit. See! This is why I do not drink. Shit like this. You don’t even like Roman any more.”

“He gave me ten bucks and put me in a cab. Like I was a hooker.”

“I don’t think people pay for a hooker’s cab rides.”

“And the two of them stayed there together.” Jill is silent for a long second and then she lets loose. “I lost my virginity!”

A close-up of Roman comes into my head, his moustache, and his tight jeans and his gruesome hard-on, and the thought makes me gag. “I don’t get this. Did Roman force you or something?”

“He said he loved me.”

I wince. Suddenly it is clearer in my mind than ever that sex and booze are the downfall of humanity. Drew’s I Love You echoes in my head. The sensation of his hand on my breast comes back and I scratch the sheet roughly over my chest to make it go away.

“I wonder if my mother did it with Fat Freddy,” I say, my mouth twisting up. “She must have.”

“What are you talking about?” Jill wails. “Are you listening to me?”

I want to kick the crap out of them all: out of Drew and out of Jill and Roman, Freddy and Marlene, Sam and Peggy! All of them f*cking while Rome burns. That’s the phrase right there. That’s what they’re doing: F*cking while Rome burns.

Sam pushing Marlene toward the bedroom, Roman telling Jill he loved her—and then the way Marlene and Jill act about it! Both of them in a snit as if they just had something swiped when in both cases they handed it over on a silver platter. I’m supposed to feel sympathy?

I can’t stand any of them. All of this bullshit probably has a lot to do with why Sam doesn’t call. Except with him it’s not booze and sex, it’s money and sex. How am I supposed to compete with that?



It’s light outside but not bright. My watch says 8:10. The sound of birdsong seems really inappropriate right now. I’d be surprised if I slept three hours.

In the cold light of morning, my rage feels a bit broke-down and limp. When a picture of Drew slips into my head again, though, when he takes my hand along the back road in Langley, I pull it away. I fold my arms and keep to myself. I don’t want any of it. From anyone.

Jill told me once that there was a rumour going around at school about me. “People notice that you’re a bit tripped out about being touched,” she said. “A lot of people think you must have been raped.”

Apparently the rape rumour started because one of the guys in Jill and Crystal’s crowd—probably that idiot, Mark—came up behind me in the courtyard at school and put his hand on my butt. My elbow flew back and nailed him in the gut. He doubled over and bellowed as if I’d just shot him. Tough titty, don’t touch my ass!

Another time, the same idiot reached for the locket on the chain around my neck and I smacked his hand away before he could touch it. It was a locket that Sam had given me when I was little. And it was right in the vicinity of my boobs, for God’s sake.

I had the impression that Jill enjoyed telling me what they were saying about me. As if, not only did she have the inside dope, but she now had more evidence that I acted like a child as well as looked like one. I wonder if she told Ruby all that crap. Jill’s big mouth is probably why Ruby keeps on hugging the hell out of me.

I look across the trailer at Jill now. She’s still conked out, lying on her side. Only one eye is showing. Her makeup is smeared around it like a bruise. There’s a vague stain of purple lipstick on her puffy lips. She stinks worse now than she did when she came home.

She looks like a giant baby, lying there. Except she’s not one. Can’t even call her a technical virgin now. That seemed to be the worst of it last night: the fact that she wouldn’t be able to tell people that she’s a virgin any more. She kept repeating it over and over. As if her hymen was the best and most crucial part of her.

You’d think that someone had murdered her family and stolen everything she valued in the entire world the way she carried on. Meanwhile, nobody we know ever believed she was a virgin anyway, not the way she’s always strutting around like she knows more about sex and drugs than we’d know in a lifetime.

I hope to hell she had the brains to make Roman use a rubber, that’s all I can say.

Sitting up, I grab my jeans from the end of the bed, haul them on and step into my sandals. Jill wakes. A groan. She rolls onto her back and then back onto her side. She pushes herself up on one elbow.

“Oh f*ck. I think I’m going to boke.”

“Better do it out the window,” I tell her.

She squints up at me, eye shadow and mascara smudges all over her face. “Sammie,” she says.

I just look at her.

Her eyes are red and puffy and it seems as if she’s about to start bawling all over again. “Swear. Please. Swear to god you won’t tell anyone what I told you.”

I shrug and shake my head. “Who am I going to tell?”