Chapter 3
Digger liked to drive and we flew through the city. Me, who rarely went above 50—I realized I was smiling, laughing as he drove. We ended up stopping at a tiny bar, a dark, hole in the wall kind of place with a few tables and most of the people there involved in shooting pool.
“How’s this?” Digger asked me. “Quiet enough for you?” He had remembered what I had said about liking things quieter. He put his hand on my back and guided me to a little table.
I nodded. The music wasn’t too loud, but the background noise of conversation and clicking cues and balls was still going to make it a little more difficult. Plus, it was too dark to really see his mouth and face very well, but I had never been the best at lip reading, anyway. I tucked the hair behind my right ear and leaned forward, tilting it towards him.
“I thought you didn’t want to go to any more clubs with your friend. That place is full of idiots, anyway.”
“Tracey likes going out, a lot. She likes to…meet people,” I explained.
Digger raised his eyebrow. “Meet people, huh. I saw her doing that—” and he said something I didn’t get.
“What?”
“Last weekend,” he said louder. “I saw her making new friends last weekend.”
I stared at him. “You were there?”
“How did you think I came to be following you down the street?”
“You were following me? Me?”
“Yeah, you. I watched you there, looking so cute but so unhappy. I watched you leave by yourself, which was a very bad idea. So I followed you, and then I saw you get into a fight with a pimp.” His hand fell heavily on my knee. “Lucky thing I did, I’d say.” He leaned forward too. “You were doing it again tonight, leaving by yourself. Don’t do that anymore.”
“I wouldn’t have, if you had been there when I said,” I responded, amazed at my sass. But Digger just grinned at me.
“Next time I’ll be on time.” He sat back, his hand sliding from my leg.
Next time? Next time!
We sat at the little table and talked and talked. He had a sister, seven years younger, just like me and Ian. But his little sister was in medical school. “She’s the smart one,” he told me proudly. “She never got below an A on her report card.”
“That’s how my brother is, too. He’s smart, and good at sports, and popular. He’s a great kid.” I smiled, thinking about Ian.
“Did you like school?”
I lost the smile. “No. Not at all.”
“Why not? The boys wouldn’t leave you alone?”
I snorted. “Please! They didn’t notice that I was there.”
Digger sat up and frowned. He said something garbled but I could understand one word clearly: “stupid.”
I flushed. “I wasn’t stupid. I’m not stupid, it was hard for me for a lot of reasons. But I went to college, and I graduated!”
“Not you, baby girl, the boys. They must have been stupid boys at your school. What did you think I said?”
I shrugged and looked at my drink. The pool players were getting louder and I was having a harder time. Once, so he could understand, I had gotten an ear plug for my brother, and then put on music and the TV and made him close his eyes. The ear plug dampened the sound coming into his one ear, and with it, he was totally thrown off. “Guess where I’m standing,” I had dared him, then talked to him from different parts of the room. He never got it right. “Now repeat what I’m saying,” I said, and talked to him in a normal tone of voice. He didn’t get that right, either, even when I stood close, and he had yanked out the ear plug, frustrated.
“I wasn’t good in school, either. I barely graduated,” Digger said.
“Why?”
“I was working all the time,” he explained.
“For your dad?”
He took a swig of beer. “My dad died when I was in tenth grade and he was sick for a while before that. I was trying to keep the business going for my mom and my sister.”
“That must have been so hard. That was nice of you.”
“Nah, not nice. A necessity. Now my mom is taken care of, my sister can go to school and graduate without thousands of dollars hanging over her head.” He nodded, satisfied. “It’s all good now.”
“That’s wonderful,” I said. I meant it.
“Is your phone ringing?”
I hadn’t heard it at all or felt the vibration through my bag. It was Tracey, of course, but I didn’t bother to answer. Then I saw the time. “My God, is it that late?” I jumped up. “I have to go, right now!”
Digger stood too. “Where’s the fire? You have to get your friend?”
“That’s Tracey calling, and I’m sure she wants me to get her, but I don’t have time.” I was trying to pull on my coat.
“Why’s she calling you? She’s a grown-up woman.”
“Sometimes she gets in over her head,” I explained. “When she drinks, she does very dumb stuff.”
“Like the rest of the world.” Digger put some money on the table. “Ok, let’s go.”
I listened to the message from Tracey when we got outside. She was angry because the bartender hadn’t wanted to end the night with her, and she thought I was a bad friend because now she was going to have to get a car service back to her house. But I still had to get home for my curfew. I was leaning forward in the front seat of Digger’s car as he drove me back to where I had parked.
“What’s your rush?” he asked me. “You’re that worried about that girl?”
“No, I just have to get home for my cur—right now. Because of my parents.”
“For your what? Wait, you live with your parents still?” he asked me, sounding surprised.
I was filled with shame. “It’s a complicated situation.”
“And they watch when you come and go?”
“It’s very complicated.” I looked at Digger, but he was just nodding, slowly. “It’s hard to explain.”
“None of my business.”
I felt like I was eight years old. I sank back in the seat, disappointed with myself. I wished I hadn’t had to tell him about my stupid life, at least, not right away.
“When I said none of my business, I meant, I don’t care,” Digger announced. “Live in a hole in the ground, it’s fine by me.”
“I’d rather not.”
He laughed. “You don’t seem like a hole kind of girl. Probably a house would be better for you.”
He pulled up in front of the lot where I had parked, and insisted on waiting with me while the attendant moved the mountain of cars around to free mine. I hopped from one foot to another, until Digger stepped behind me and pulled me back to his chest. “Quit jumping. Here.”
He was warm. Leaning against him was like resting on a heated seat, and I could feel it right through my coat. When the car was ready, I didn’t want to leave. It was lovely, standing with him like that, all warm and safe. I wasn’t used to a lot of hugging.
Digger leaned over my open door. “I’m glad I got to see you tonight, Cinderella. I’ll be talking to you soon.”
“Ok,” I said, trying to remember not to care. Then I couldn’t help it, and a smile grew on my face. “I’m glad I got to see you, too.”
Digger tilted his head and looked at me. He reached out and touched my cheek. “Drive fast.” He stood up and closed the car door. He was still standing in the same place, watching me drive away, when I got to the corner and turned right and lost sight of him.
I did have to drive fast, because I was late, late, late. At red lights, I pulled on the sweater I had been wearing when I left the house and used wet wipes to remove most of my makeup. I parked at the end of the driveway and ran, hoping against hope that my father wouldn’t have heard my car, and that he’d already be asleep.
The light was on in the kitchen. He was seated at the island where I liked to roll out my dough on the cool, marble surface. He didn’t even have his laptop out in front of him, he was just silently waiting.
“Rebecca.”
I started to shake. I couldn’t help myself.
“You must have been unaware of the time.”
I nodded and took a trembling breath. “I’m sorry. I did lose track of the time. It got later than I thought and I drove home as fast as I could. I’m sorry.”
“Do you understand now why I can’t trust you?” His voice was so quiet and calm. “Do you understand the difficulty of my position, Rebecca? You, who should be an adult, are no better than a child. You can’t be depended on for even the simplest task of returning home at a given hour.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, hearing the quake in my voice.
“Sorry. I’m sure you are. I’m sure when you look at what you have become, you are very sorry. There are many, many things that I’m sorry about, as well. I’m most sorry that I wasn’t able to instill in you the importance of reliability. Of truth-telling. You’re a little liar. A worthless liar.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. But I was. I was a liar.
“Yes.” He stood and walked around the corner, grabbing my arm in an iron grip. “You’re a useless waste, of my time, of my money. Everything, everything has been given to you. How do you repay me? With lies? With your silly attempts at work, at cooking, at everything?” He shook me. “Answer!”
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry. I’ll be better.”
He shoved me then, and I hit my hip on the kitchen table and fell across it. Instinctively, I covered my ear with the hearing aid.
“Get out of here. I can’t stand the sight of you. You make me ashamed every time I lay eyes on you. Worthless, pitiful, stupid liar.” He slapped me across the face. “Don’t lie to me again!”
I was sobbing as I ran up the stairs, both hands over my mouth so that Ian wouldn’t hear me. The most important thing was to keep him out of it. I opened the window and scooped some snow off the roof to put in a washcloth for the incipient bruise on my hip and for the stinging ache on my cheek. It hadn’t been that bad tonight.
There had definitely been worse.
∞
I got up early on Sunday morning to bake for Ian’s game. While the blondies were in the oven, I sliced up oranges and apples to put in big containers and mixed up the homemade granola with extra almonds, sunflower and pumpkin and flax seeds, wheat germ, maple syrup, organic oats, and every other healthy, carb-loading ingredient I had been able to think of to fuel them. I put all that in the ovens too, and by the time Ian came down into the kitchen, I had eggs going for him on the stove, and the food bag was all packed and ready.
“Thanks, Wreck,” he said tiredly.
“Late night?”
“I went out with Maryam.” Ian could come and go as he chose because my parents trusted him to be responsible. “Then I came home and studied for my history test tomorrow,” he continued, proving that he was totally reliable and conscientious. “I’m dead this morning. How about you?”
Good, he hadn’t heard anything of the skirmish in the kitchen. “I went out with Tracey.”
“Again?” Ian hated her. She treated him like a child, practically patting him on the head and talking in a baby voice whenever she saw him. “Wreck, why don’t you make some new friends?”
“Like Melina at work? We could talk about our hemorrhoids and bloating together. Doesn’t that sound fun?” I put his whole-grain toast on a plate and smeared it with peanut butter, then added the sliced banana. From the time he was little, he’d liked the same thing every day for breakfast when I was there to cook it for him. On game days I tried to give him more.
“Like more friends your own age. Tracey is a real bitch to you and—”
“Excuse me, Ian?” Our father walked into the room, and it felt like all the light got sucked out of it. My hands immediately started to shake. Ian bent over his plate, mumbling an apology for cursing. I spooned up the eggs for him and put the pan in the sink. Then, as I went to put the rest of the eggs away, I hit my bruised hip on the counter. The abrupt pain made me gasp, and I dropped the carton. It fell with a decided splat on the tile floor.
“Oh, Rebecca,” my father said, sighing. “I’m going to have to start charging you every time you break or ruin something else. Maybe then you’ll learn to be less clumsy and take more care. Thank goodness you were always so terrible at sports, or you would have ended up breaking your neck somehow.”
Ian got up to help me but I shook my head at him and knelt on the floor, wiping up the yellow yoke and sticky white that had seeped through the cardboard package. I was an idiot. Stupid, stupid. Ian’s face looked frozen in anger, and I knew our father was going to be furious if he saw his perfect son with that expression. I didn’t want Ian to defend me, and it looked like he was gearing up to do that.
He turned on our father. “She’s not clumsy. You make her nervous,” he said.
Oh, no. “Ian. Stop,” I said, standing up and shaking my head at him. “I was very dumb to drop the eggs. I wasted them. It was a dumb thing to do and he was right. Please just eat your breakfast.”
“You have problems of your own, Ian,” my father said, turning on him. “I was just looking at your grades online. What’s happening in math? You have a B? And your average in physics dropped two percentage points? How do you expect to get into college with those grades?”
“I’m doing the best I can!” Ian’s voice rose. My father stood up, facing him. I looked from one to the other. What would he do to Ian? When he took a step forward, I swept my hand across the counter, knocking a glass onto the tile floor. It shattered into a million pieces.
“Rebecca,” my father said. “You ridiculous cow.”
Ian knelt down to help me. “Get out of here,” I hissed at him. He stood slowly, picked up his plate, and walked out of the room. I jabbed my hand on a piece of glass and put my bleeding finger into my mouth.
“I remember watching you as a little girl,” my father recounted. “All the other children were able to climb on the bars and go across. To swing themselves, to go down the slide. You just stood alone, looking at them. You were always slow and stupid. Always embarrassing yourself. Making a nuisance of yourself.” He continued while I swept up the glass. Finally he left the room to get dressed and I sat on the floor for a while, closing my eyes. Ian came back in and helped me finish cleaning.
After the game, which I secretly believed Ian’s school won due to proper nutrition, I called Tracey back.
“Sorry,” I said, first thing. “I’m sorry I didn’t drive you. I had to get home.”
“Going out with you is like going out with a child,” she spat out. “It’s ridiculous!”
“I know,” I agreed. I was pretty sure that what she was really angry about was that the bartender had denied her the night before.
“Where did you go, anyway?” Tracey demanded.
“Last night? I told you, I went home.”
“No, because I called you and you weren’t home. I talked to your dad.”
“Tracey, no. Did you? Why?”
“You weren’t answering your phone!” she snapped back at me. “I called you to come get me and you didn’t answer and then I had to take a car share and I threw up in it. I’m so angry at you!”
“So you tattled on me to my father?” I asked, my voice rising.
“I didn’t tattle! I just asked him if you were home yet. From the bar.”
“Oh, Tracey! How could you do that to me?” I asked desperately. No wonder he had been so angry. He probably still was.
“Shut up, Wreck! It’s your own stupid fault! If you had come to get me, you wouldn’t be in trouble now.” Her voice had risen until she was almost screaming.
Tracey knew some of what went on in my house. We had been friends since we were in elementary school, and it had been impossible to hide everything from her. I knew she was feeling guilty for telling on me to my father. There was a big pause. “Sorry,” she muttered.
“Just forget it,” I told her. “There’s nothing we can do to fix it.”
“I can say that I was lying when I talked to him before,” she said softly, wheedling. “I could say that I got mad at you because…because you’re more successful at work than I am! And that I made it up that you went to a club and home with some guy.”
“Tracey! You said all that?” It was too close to the truth of what I had been doing for me to get really angry at her, though.
“I’m really good at getting my dad to think what I want him to think.”
She was. Her parents were both wrapped around her little finger, which was absolutely not working well for any of them. “No, thanks. I just have to let this die down. He’s supposed to go away this week, and maybe he’ll be over it by the time he gets back.” I could live in hope.
“Probably,” Tracey agreed, already over her guilt and my problems. “Listen, Wreck, that bartender was such an asshole! We can never go back there.”
“Ok,” I agreed. She gave me a litany of complaints about the guy she had been ready to go home with. The biggest, and most important one, was that he told her not to wait for him at the end of his shift. He had seen her the weekend before with someone else, and after they made out for a while, he thought that he just wasn’t that interested.
“Can you believe that?” she seethed. “He turned me down. Me!”
It was hard to believe. Tracey was so cute and little, with wavy red hair and big eyes. She looked like a pixie. A pixie with big breasts, a great butt, and an up-for-anything attitude. I couldn’t remember the last time she had gotten denied. “Maybe he was upset that you left with the other guy before,” I said soothingly.
“You know, you’re probably right,” she said, considering. “I’ll bet was! He was just trying to hurt me. What a terrible person, to treat an innocent woman like that.”
I held in a sigh. No matter what, Tracey liked to turn it around so that she was the victim. “Yep, he’s a monster. Hey, I have to go.”
“Wait, one more thing.” She kept me on the phone for a while longer, and then when we hung up, she sent me about 30 messages on various subjects.
I was only interested in one message, and finally it came.
“You there?” Digger wrote.
I thought hard about how to respond. I went for clever and pithy: “Yes.”
“Can you come down to the garage next week?”
I considered. Odds were good that Melina might not be at work for at least a few days, given her approaching due date and the fact that my dad was going to be out of the office too. She was a lot less diligent when he wasn’t around.
Think, Wreck. Be cute and charming, flirty yet aloof. “Yes! I guess, sure.” It didn’t quite strike the tone I had wanted.
“Good.” I waited for a while, looking at the phone, but that was it.
Melina was at work the next day, cranky and nasty and, unfortunately, gassy, too. She stopped excusing herself after a while, and it got so bad I almost threw up into the garbage can. When she took her mid-morning break, I ran outside into the extremely brisk air and was glad to breathe it, even if it was freezing me. By the end of the day, I thought for sure that she wouldn’t be back again the next morning, she was so crabby and tired and apparently sick to her stomach. But on Tuesday morning my father came down himself, in person, to Warehouse Services, so Melina was very lucky that she had turned up that day.
I was even luckier. I was on my bi-weekly call with the warehouse, running through a list of shipments and having them physically check the location of each item. We could have completed the task a million times faster and more efficiently over email, but phone calls were the way Melina insisted it had to be done. It made me look very important when I had to ask Kelvin at the warehouse to hold for one moment.
“Hi, Dad. Can I help you with something?” I asked, holding my hand over the receiver as if Kelvin would hear some privileged information.
“Finish your call,” he told me, so I did, while he and Melina were deep in discussion. He was done with her and left before I hung up, so I never had to talk to my father at all. And then, one more wonderful thing, Melina, white as a sheet, said she wasn’t feeling well and had to go too, taking off before she even remembered to leave me a list of silly, pointless jobs to perform. Hallelujah! I was free from Lindhart Auctions for the day.
What to do, what to, what to do. I tapped my pen against the edge of my desk. The thought of Brody’s Automotive drifted through my mind. “Can you come down to the garage next week?” That was what Digger had written. “Can you come down—”
“Rebecca?”
I jumped at least a foot in the air. “Oh! Arthur. Did Melina forget to send you her report again?”
“No.” Arthur looked past me, right and left. He was a nice guy who worked down the hall in Accounts. Nice, but a little different.
“Can I help you with something? Melina isn’t here,” I told him.
He studied the paper in his hand. “Yes. I wanted to talk to you.”
“Oh, sure.” I waited, but he just stood there, looking at the paper more. “Did you want to talk about something in particular?”
“Rebecca, I’ve always thought of us as work acquaintances.”
“Um, yes, we sure are.”
“I have to ask you a personal question.” Pause. “Do you like working here?”
My eyebrows shot up. “Here, in this office?”
“Here, at Lindhart Auctions.” Arthur finally looked me in the eye. “Do you enjoy Warehouse Services?”
“I don’t…why?”
“We can talk about it later. I notice that my allotted break is already up.” He scooted out of the room before he finished saying it.
I stared at his retreating back. “Work acquaintances.” What a weird guy.
I resumed tapping my pen, thinking. It was only Tuesday. I should play this whole Digger situation very cool, for sure. I definitely shouldn’t drive down to the garage as fast as my car could carry me, no way. I didn’t want to seem desperate. Or grasping at straws, for that matter, because what did that mean, “Can you come down to the garage next week?” It wasn’t an invitation to go out. It wasn’t even an invitation to hang out, maybe. There was way too much room for interpretation and doubt. So, no, I wasn’t going to go to Brody’s Automotive. No, sir!
My logic and arguments were excellent. The only issue was that I hadn’t listened to myself at all, I sighed, as I pulled up in front of the garage. It was bright and sunny and getting even colder so I only spent a little time putting on lip gloss and brushing my hair before I hurried inside.
“Rebecca!” Lorelei jumped up from behind the desk and ran to open the door to the office. She came out into the waiting area and gave me a huge hug. “Thank you so much for coming in person! Dig said you were definitely the woman to ask and I really appreciate it.”
“Oh, sure,” I said, totally mystified. Was I not here to see Digger? What was she talking about?
“Come sit down and I’ll show you what I’ve done.” She took my hand and tugged me into the office behind her and gestured at a chair.
“Do you mind if I sit on this side?” I asked, and pointed at the chair to her left.
“Sure! Wherever you want.” Lorelei had twisted her long hair into a big knot on the top of her head, allowing me to see that it was shaved underneath halfway up and tattooed also with a geometric design in blue. She woke up her screen. “See? I just don’t know what to write. It needs to be fancier.”
I stared, trying to read quickly, never one of my strongest attributes. “This is the application to the lower school at Lamb’s Academy,” I said, as if she didn’t know. That was the private school where I had gone from kindergarten through twelfth grade and where Ian currently attended.
Lorelei was nodding. “For my son, Joaquim. I’m hoping he can start in fifth grade there.” She told me about him. He was so smart, she said, and she knew he’d do great at Lamb’s. There were so many more opportunities there for him. They were going to need financial aid, and she needed his application to be perfect.
“How did you know to ask me? How did you know that I went there?” I asked slowly.
Her eyes opened wide. “Oh, did you go to Lamb’s? Shit, that’s awesome! Dig just thought you seemed like a private school babe, and you really do, you know. That’s a compliment! We thought you’d know how to fill this out. If you couldn’t help, I was going to ask Ilsa.”
“Who is that?”
“Digger’s little sister. She’s such a fucking smarty pants, like you.”
No, not like me. “That’s why he wanted me to come down here.”
Lorelei froze. “Crap on a skillet, didn’t Digger explain?”
I forced myself to nod and smile. “Yeah, totally.”
“No, he didn’t. I’m going to kill him!”
“It’s all right, seriously.” It didn’t matter that I had thought something totally different, that he had wanted to see me.
She smiled at me. “Well, thank you! I’m so lucky that you’re helping me!” It was funny, Lorelei looking to me for advice, like I was some kind of expert. Or like she said, like I was some kind of smarty pants.
I started to look at the first line and immediately felt my pulse kick up. There was too much for me to read and I didn’t want to sit there and struggle with Lorelei watching me. “You know, maybe you could send it to me so I can take my time.” Because otherwise we were going to be stuck in this office for the rest of the night. I was a sloooow reader.
“Sure, no problem.”
I had a sudden thought. “Lorelei, who have you been dealing with in the admissions office?” She named someone I didn’t recognize. I slid the keyboard over in front of myself and typed in the Lamb’s Academy website. We both browsed through the pictures of the Lamb’s admissions staff. “There. Sylvie Bowen Everhart. I know her.”
“You’re kidding!” Lorelei shrieked, and I clapped my hand over my ears instinctively. “Sorry, sorry! You actually know one of these people? Do you think it could help Joaquim?”
I held up my hands. “Maybe? It wouldn’t hurt to ask. My mom knows her mom and my sister—my sister knew Sylvie Bowen, too. Anyway, yeah, I’ll call her. Tell me more about your son so I can talk about him to Sylvie.”
Lorelei was just about crying. “That would mean so much to me. Look, I don’t even know you, and you’re helping me. Just like you did with that hooker.”
“Well, you’re not like the hooker…”
“You’re a generous girl! Just admit it.”
I was shaking my head, saying, “No, no. You did the same for me. You tried to help me, too. You tried to make Digger like me.”
“Tried to make Digger do what?” he asked. I hadn’t heard him come in.
I stiffened. I had come here thinking…thinking something. I was happy to help Lorelei, but I wasn’t feeling so happy about Digger.
“Dig, you’re a real rat bastard. Did you not explain to Rebecca that I wanted her to read the application for me?” Lorelei put her hands on her hips and tapped her foot. “Did you ask her if she would mind? No. No, because you’re a rat bastard.”
Digger opened his mouth, and judging by the expression on his face, I could tell that nothing good was going to come out of it. I stood up quickly. “Lorelei, send me the application and I’ll look at it, and I’ll call Sylvie for sure. Talk to you soon.” I headed for the door.
“Hey!” I looked back over my shoulder. “Why are you leaving?” he asked me.
“I’ll help Lorelei like you guys wanted. I’m going to go home now.”
Digger walked over to me and tilted my chin up with his hand. “Don’t run off looking like that, like somebody stole your last cookie. Come on, Cinderella.”