The din of activity beyond her door, of people spending money, served as temporary comfort. News of Danvar’s discovery had the divers in a mood. Even the Lords seemed interested. They were already scrambling for who might have title based on mineral claims, arguing and spilling beer on ancient maps. Rose had seen this play out before. There would be a frenzy of spending all the spoils one hoped to make. This would be followed by the lean times of those same gamblers asking for loans and handouts. People hardly took a breath between these extremes. It was the stagger home of a drunk who could hit every dune on either side as he lurched a thousand paces in what he might’ve crossed in ten.
But Rose knew a slow rise could lead to just as precipitous a fall. She had married a man who’d decried such fits of gluttonous frenzy. Her husband had made his gradual fortune, had climbed a slope of infamy up that peaceful dune to the heights of the great wall, and had stepped right off just as neatly. All he might have left her was snapped up by villainous thugs who gave themselves title and who thought a bath and a clean robe made them natural born princes. She had been left with nothing but the Honey Hole, which her husband had won in a game of dice.
It had only been a place to stay the night she was tossed out with her children. But then it had been a business to manage, her only source of income. She took care of the girls and tended the bar, grew some vegetables on the roof, whatever it took to keep the water flowing. But each passing week drew the noose tighter and tighter around her neck. She looked for a buyer, but who would buy a place that barely broke even? Everyone else got their pay, she made sure of that. The drunks who swept up in the mornings for a pint made more profit than she. There was nothing left for Rose after the school fees for the kids, after the dive gear Palmer and Vic needed in order to not lose their spots. There was nothing left to help them start a life of their own, help them open a business, rent a stall in the market, anything. Nothing but mounting costs. Piles of coin transmuted into piles of resentment. Resentment that left her bitter toward her husband for bolting in the night, for leaving her a tent and a whorehouse to choose between.
For a long while, she’d only tended to the men at the bar, only slaked that thirst. But there were long hours of thinking how tight the money was, and the joking offers came fast and loose. They were made with a laugh, but there was always the dangle and jangle of coin. “Hey Rose, I give you fifty to go upstairs right now.” “Hey Rose, one hundred. Just scored big-time down in Low-Pub.” “Hey Rose.” “Hey Rose.” “Hey Rose.”
There was one night where a hundred and twenty coin was enough. This was the cost. Enough to pierce some membrane within her, some barrier she would’ve sworn could not be crossed; but it had been worn down over months and months of lean times. Worn so thin the right words could make it through.
The offer came from a customer she knew well enough, might have dated if they’d been sitting on the same side of the bar, if they’d been around any other bar, in any other place, at any other time. She would’ve had sex with him for nothing, the way a respectable woman does. Instead, she let him pay. And it wasn’t bad. He cared. Asked her if that felt okay. Did all the work. Didn’t hit her or spank her or ask if he could choke her a little. Pulled out and even cleaned her up with his shirt. She would’ve done it for free. Nearly told him so as he left stacks of coin on her dresser. Fragile, wobbly things, all that coin. Like the tall scrapers to the east.
And then he went back to the bar, and Rose sat and stared at the towers of coin on that dresser her husband had left her, and it was a different woman who walked out that door. She would survive, she realized. But it would be a different her. It would be someone else who did the surviving, who would drag memories of a former self along, a tiny echo of a woman somewhere deep in her skull, a small voice of who she used to be.
When Palmer had come asking for a little help the next day, it had felt different. He was fourteen back then, and Rose thought he could see. She thought he knew. She sure as hell did, and the same ten coin that he asked for and always got suddenly weighed the same as ten thousand. Palmer pocketed it too easily. Like it was the same coin. But it’d been too hard won for that. Not to slide away so easy. Not to just disappear. And here was when the gulf with her children opened. It opened not the day her legs had, but the day her palms did. It was the only way, she told herself. There was no other. She would earn her keep the only way she could. And the cost of dispensing that keep could only grow.
It was inevitable that her children would find out. Men don’t just talk, they brag. They brag about rented love, even. And children hear everything. They are echo chambers. And they take what they learn from their parents off to school more readily than they haul anything of merit home. A father’s boast becomes a way to torment a peer. And so the boys heard about her new line of work from the worst source possible.