Alejandro’s cell rang, he answered. “Yeah, she’s with me,” he said in Spanish. “No, you can’t stay with him. You have to come back tonight.” He hesitated. “I don’t give a crap if your lover is upset. You’re needed at home.”
He turned away from Elise. “Because I don’t want to be alone with her. No! She isn’t useless and I want you to stop saying that.” He paused. “I have to go back to work. Do you remember what that is? Or are you too busy with...with him?”
Elise kept her face turned away so he couldn’t see her expression. It looked like Carmen was with Kent, and Alejandro didn’t want to be left alone with Elise.
He hung up the phone, started the truck, and got back on the highway. Minutes later, he pulled into the cracked concrete driveway of a little house on the outskirts of the Long Island neighborhood where Elise had lived with Kent. She assumed the house was rented for the summer. It had that forlorn look of being unloved and neglected. Like me, she thought.
Inside it was nearly bare. There was a little living room with beat-up old furniture, and a kitchen to the side. An old table and chairs was by the back door.
There were two bedrooms, but she was glad to see that there were also two tiny bathrooms. It seemed that Alejandro and his brother had one room, Carmen in the other. But that was to change.
Alejandro was staring at her.
Oh, she thought. She wasn’t supposed to know that she was to take the twin bed in his room. “No, no, no,” she said. “I didn’t dump one man to get another one.”
She saw that he had to work not to laugh at something he wasn’t supposed to understand.
She pointed at his bed, which was neatly made up and had one of his shirts tossed across the foot. Alas, he was wearing another one.
He was still staring at her.
Elise pointed at the bed. “Carmen?”
He shook his head and pointed toward the other bedroom. “Carmen there.”
For the second time, Elise thought that if she hadn’t known he spoke English, his unaccented words gave him away. “I get it,” she said. “Carmen the Coward. She’s knocked up by my boyfriend so she’s afraid to go to sleep in my presence.”
Alejandro shrugged, as though he didn’t understand what she was saying, but his eyes were sparkling.
“So how do I tell you what I mean?” She pointed at his bed and said, “Carmen,” then went to the bed on the far side of the room and pointed to herself. She pantomimed sleeping, then waking and tiptoeing to the other bed—where she put her hands around Carmen’s throat and started strangling her. Then she stabbed her. Then she pulled Carmen’s body off the bed by her ankle and slammed it on the floor three times.
When she stopped, she looked up at Alejandro and gave him a sweet smile. “Is that why she doesn’t want to sleep in the same room as me?” That needed no translation. Laughing, he nodded yes.
She followed him into the kitchen and watched as he pantomimed having to return to work. But no matter what he did, she acted as though she had no idea what he meant. After the fourth time, he narrowed his eyes at her and she smiled.
With a snort of laughter, he nodded at the dirty dishes in the sink, motioning for her to leave them alone. He opened the refrigerator door to let her know that she could help herself.
She pointed to her wrist, where she usually wore a watch, to ask what time he would return. He shrugged that he didn’t know, then he showed her how to work the dead bolt on the front door. But he still didn’t leave.
“Go!” she said. “I’ll be fine. As long as Carmen doesn’t show up, I won’t murder anyone.”
As he left, his eyes were twinkling.
Elise closed the door, bolted it, then sat down on the old couch. Now what? she thought. Where did she go from here? Yes, she had escaped marriage with Kent, but what had that accomplished? How was she going to do something in just three weeks that was so fabulous that it would change her life forever? When she got back to Olivia and Kathy, she wanted to tell them that she’d... What? Had a silly little thing with Alejandro where they pretended to not speak each other’s languages?
Or was this time in the past to be all about sex? Would she be able to tell Olivia and Kathy that she’d at last had some truly great sex? But they were four years in the future. How was she going to fill four whole years? Even the Kama Sutra wouldn’t take years!
For a moment she blinked back tears of self-pity. Out of one mess and into another.
She was in a dreary little house that had a dirty kitchen with the breakfast dishes in the sink. “Too bad I had to come back as myself,” she muttered.
Something they don’t tell you in college, she thought, is that when you get married you need a degree in domestic engineering. With what her father paid Kent, they should have had a lot of household help, but they didn’t. She hadn’t known that the cause was Kent supporting Carmen and their child. All Elise knew was that she’d done most of the work herself.
She got up and went into the kitchen. There are always choices and right now she knew that she could feel sorry for herself, roll in misery, or she could—
Make myself useful, she thought, then set about cleaning up the kitchen. There was an old washing machine inside a closet, and piled on it was a tall stack of filthy, muddy clothes from the men. She started a load.
The rest of the house needed dusting and sweeping. She found a broom but no vacuum cleaner. When the first load was done, she saw that there was no dryer. In the weed-infested backyard was a broken turnstile of a clothesline. Kent’s mother had insisted that all bedsheets be hung outside so that’s what Elise had to do for her husband. That his mother’s two maids hung out her laundry didn’t matter, just so Kent’s sheets smelled like sunshine.
Those thoughts made anger go through Elise. No doubt he was with Carmen right now, whining about how Elise had humiliated him. Poor man, everyone would think. Such a saint!
She picked up a rusty can that was hidden in the scrawny weeds, then another one. Within minutes, she had a pile. When she went back inside, she got some plastic bags, put another load in the washer, then went back outside and hung up the first load.
By the time she’d done enough physical labor to calm her anger, the backyard looked a great deal better. She swept the little patio area, pulled some weeds, then did more laundry and hung it out.
“Boxers,” she said aloud as she slipped a clothespin onto the line.
Inside, she made herself a sandwich and thought that she should sit down and relax.
And think about her life? Not something she wanted to do.
On the end of the kitchen counter was a laptop and a box full of papers. They were receipts for supplies and plants. Each one was marked with the name of the job they’d been bought for. Her parents’ name was on six bills. It looked like her mother had replaced the roses in the south garden.
Elise moved the box to the table and began sorting them into piles by job. That done, she wondered what Diego’s bookkeeping system was like.
She glanced at the laptop. A computer was as private as a woman’s handbag, but still...
She put the computer on the table and opened it. Maybe it had a password and she wouldn’t be able to get into it. But it didn’t. The background was a photo of Diego’s wife and two kids—number three hadn’t been born yet—and there was a folder for his landscaping business.
Elise hesitated for just seconds before she began entering the bills in their proper places. She was tempted to double what her parents owed but it wasn’t her name on the invoice.
Once the bills were complete, she set them up to be sent via emails to the homeowners.
Smiling, feeling that she’d accomplished a few things, she began looking for groceries to see what she could cook for dinner. Alejandro would be hungry when he returned.
The cooking courses she’d taken in an attempt to please Kent were coming in handy.
She went online, found a recipe for chili and corn bread, and got busy.