“Twenty an hour. Sixteen after subtracting your cut. So, my dear Watson, take your sweet, sweet time.”
Each of the chairs at the twelve-seater dining room table was made of the skin of an exotic, leopardlike creature. Twenty an hour seemed low. I didn’t really know how dire our money situation was, if it was Marlena, Ryder, Greg dire, room at the Mapletree dire, or what. Jimmy was paying one third of the mortgage on our crappy little house, and Mom was always in a cheerful, grocery-shopping mood when my child support checks were deposited on the first and fourteenth of the month. She’d taken out more in student loans than she owed for tuition, and had told me to thank her government “kickback” for my new snow boots. A few days before, at Glen’s, I’d put a frozen pizza in the cart. Two seconds later, Mom put it back, telling me that $5.99 for a single meal was a sin against humanity.
Mom disappeared up a curving staircase into the rooms above. Antelope or moose heads watched glassily from the walls, and a deep, yellowed rug, some other kind of skin, spanned the space between two L-shaped leather couches. The people who owned this house were murderers. I slipped off my shoes, scrabbling my toes into the fur.
On the coffee table, a diamond-cut jar full of raw almonds. I’d never actually tasted a raw, whole almond before. I unstuck the lid and grabbed a handful, popping one into my mouth. It split into halves under the pressure of my teeth, releasing a sweetness, familiar in a kind of reverse, as if I’d finally reached the source of something I’d known only in echo and gesture—the paste inside an Almond Joy, gas station coffee flavored with syrup. The almonds left a chalky silt on my tongue. I kept eating them. Now raw almonds taste like that house, like someone else’s success. They taste filched. To me, they’ll always taste like money.
Less than an hour later I was sick in the master bathroom, running the water to mask the noise even though I was on the third floor and Mom was downstairs scrubbing the stovetop with a scouring pad, singing along to country radio. The almonds came back up, a grit in my throat. Marlena’s face, the sparkles glimmering from the apples of her cheeks. Was she always wearing makeup, or was it just her skin? Ground glass, the way a snowball looks on a sunny day when you hold it to your eye. Her fingers sticky, tripping haltingly along my jaw.
I cleaned as if I were doing penance, until my arms hurt and my eyes prickled with dust, until I could taste the chemical tang of Clorox, until I’d bleached away my thoughts. Mom checked my work, but she didn’t need to—I’d learned from watching her, from ten years of weekly chores. I drew the twisted corner of a cleaning-solution-dampened rag along every counter seam; in the bathroom, I hunted down even the tiniest hairs, my kneecaps shifting uncomfortably against the tile. By the time Mom and I finished, the sun was melting into the lake, turning the whole universe an apocalyptic pink.
I stood on the front porch watching the deserted neighborhood as Mom mopped herself out the door. I could barely straighten my fingers, and a tense cord ran from the base of my head down my neck. Soon it would be dark. That’s how the sky worked at dusk in Michigan; it went pink and then, seconds later, the blue-black of ink. After locking up, Mom tucked the mop under an armpit and slipped the house keys back into the ivy planter. A house so big four or five of ours could have fit in it with room left over, and empty most of the year. I still believe that at that moment, I hadn’t yet made any decisions.
I swear.
*
Marlena showed up shortly after Mom and I got home. I was reading on the couch. Every couple of pages I stabbed a wedge of Brie with a peppery cracker, scooping the creamy middle, pungent and not exactly good, away from the rind. I’d stolen both of these exotic foods from the mansion, along with a handful of almonds that I stuffed into an inside pocket of my coat. Taking the cheese and crackers was okay, Mom said, because the expiration dates would pass before the Hodsons arrived. No knock, just the door creaking open, Marlena’s face, a question on it, like Is this okay? As soon as I put down my book—a tattered copy of David Copperfield that smelled of sour milk—she breezed fully in.
“You always look so pretty,” Marlena said to Mom, in lieu of a hello. “Until I met you I didn’t know moms could be hot still.”
“What a nice thing to say,” Mom said, standing up a little straighter, as if she’d been watered. Marlena’s manners were unpracticed, but she was what Dad would call winning. She was abrupt in a way that I always associate with rude people, but bestowed a kind of brightness on whatever caught her interest—if it happened to be you, nothing felt more sublime. Though when the beam of her attention drifted away, a searchlight scanning the next bit of horizon, it stung. She would have done well in New York, where so many people cultivate that air of intensity cut with indifference.
In my room she flopped onto my bed, kicking her feet up and crossing them at the ankles, ready to dish. The painted walls gave my room a kind of hum; we thought we were clever for calling it the think tank. Sometimes, she’d throw open my bedroom door and sing, “I live in a box of paints,” at full volume. I shut the door, praying she wouldn’t bring up the kiss. I hardly remembered it, but the blurry details were already so potent that even approaching them, warily, in memory (Ryder and Greg laughing, Marlena’s forehead clunking against my nose), sent my body into panic mode.
“You can really put it away,” she said, fiddling with her pin, turning it around and around so that her shirt twisted up. Her tone was easy, relaxed—maybe she remembered the kiss even less than I did.
“Yeah, that was news to me,” I answered, sprawling beside her.
“You’d actually never had a drink before? I have kind of a memory of you saying that.”
“Not unless you count a sip of my dad’s beer.”
“Hot-ass damn. You drained that flask like a juice box. Like a pro.” Marlena loved vulgarity. I once heard her tell our choir teacher not to “cream her pants.” I think it was her way of revolting against her loveliness, which she called more curse than blessing, which I thought was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. But now I think I understand how beauty like hers can pen you in, how it can make your life smaller and smaller, until it’s all anyone thinks you are.
“The pot made me thirsty!”
“Blah blah blah. Next time, just remember the rest of us. Also please, that level of fucked-upness is your prerogative, but not at St. Patrick’s, when somebody has to carry your ass.”
“Pre-rog-a-tive,” I said. She’d pronounced prerogative “perogaty.”
“What?”
“That’s how you say it.”
“Are you fucking serious,” she said. “Did you just correct my pronunciation? Did I use the word wrong?”
“Well, no.”
“So you just wanted to establish that you’re smarter than me?”
“No, I just—”