Mom didn’t react when I came downstairs except to hand me a bowl of potatoes with the instruction, “Peel.”
I hadn’t bothered painting my nails, so I didn’t care. I was not going to let Mr. Rivero think I gave more than the minimum Mom-mandated f**k about him. It irked me that she’d actually made an effort at cleaning. For once, the house smelled more like Pine Sol than smoke and despair.
“So how do you know this guy?” I said, shaving potato skins into a pile.
“Work associate.”
“Does he run a cartel?”
Mom clanged a lid onto a steaming pot. “Rule number one: no business discussion unless Mr. Rivero brings it up first.”
“He’s not even here yet.”
My logic did not move her.
“If this gets sketchy, I’m out of here,” I warned, handing her the bowl. I watched her dirty up the ladles and dishes no one had touched in years. “Mom.”
She looked at me. Her makeup was understated tonight—she didn’t quite look like a corpse who’d escaped from a funeral home.
“Thank you for the clothes.”
Her eyebrows made a sad arrowhead pointing up. Jesus, please don’t say you love me.
“You look beautiful, babe,” she said, and dropped the potatoes in the pot.
I left the room, relieved and slightly queasy. I didn’t want to hear her lie. I wanted her to actually love me, but I guess “you look beautiful” was about as close as I’d get. Some girls had mothers who never called them beautiful but swore their love up and down. It’s all the same, really. All bullshit.
I answered the door when the bell rang.
Two men stood on our porch, both in dress clothes, no ties. The older one wore a suit coat. I immediately pegged him as Mr. Rivero. Salt and pepper hair, dusky Italian complexion, aquiline nose, Mediterranean green eyes. Very Robert DeNiro-ish. Handsome and slim for his age. He smiled easily and took my hand as he stepped inside, squeezing. I half-expected him to kiss it.
“You must be Maise,” he said.
“I must be.”
Mr. Rivero’s easy smile crinkled at the corners. “I’m Gary. This is my friend, Quinn.”
I wasn’t sure whether Quinn was a first or last name. He was built like a bear, more hair on his hands than his scalp. He nodded at me silently. Hired muscle.
I seated them in the dining room and poured drinks. Maker’s Mark on the rocks for Gary. Water for Quinn. Mom was still busy in the kitchen, so I poured myself some Maker’s, too. Quinn’s eyes moved around the house, lingering on the windows. Gary’s eyes lingered on me.
“So,” I said. How the hell could you talk to a middle-aged man without mentioning business or sex? “Lovely weather.”
Gary’s smile said he knew exactly what I was thinking. “Your mother’s told me a lot about you.”
“Like what?”
“You want to go into the movie business.”
“True. What else?”
“You’re the smartest girl in school.”
Had she actually said that? “Debatable. What else?”
“You’re a stunning young lady.”
I sipped my bourbon to mask the warmth in my face. I was aware of him watching every move, my hand setting the glass down, fingers poised on the rim. “Is it true?” I said.
“Very much so.”
Pots clashed in the kitchen. I leaned toward Gary. Quinn’s eyes darted to me.
“I don’t do what my mother does,” I said under my breath. “Any of it. Whatever you came for, you’re wasting your time.”
Gary didn’t blink. His eyes were shrewd, intelligent. “I’m certainly not wasting my time,” he said, and sipped.
The ribeyes were black outside, vivid pink inside. Perfect. There were three different vegetable dishes and a lemon custard pie. Quinn ate more than all of us combined and never stopped scanning the room. I stared at my mother, unsure if I was impressed or furious. She had the capacity for this and had let me grow up on microwave meals.
“What kind of movies do you make, Maise?” Gary said.
Plus one, Mr. Rivero. Thank you for not assuming beauty is my only asset.
“Experimental stuff. I’m interested in playing with the boundary between reality and fiction. True stories mixed with fantasy, in a way that makes both of them more true and more false at the same time.”
I blushed. The alcohol had gone to my head.
Gary took a drink. “That reminds me of something I saw earlier this year. The one about killing bin Laden.”
“Zero Dark Thirty,” I said.
“That’s it.” He swirled the melted amber in his glass. “There’s always controversy about things like that. You have all these people with their own version of the truth, trying to tell one story.”
“And then we all interpret it our own way,” I said, “and it becomes a million more truths.”
Gary smiled. “What about you? What truths do you tell?”
“I haven’t finished anything yet. I feel like I need more life experience before I can make something worthwhile.”
Life experience that I was racking up rapidly with Evan.
“Quite a mature attitude.” Gary tore the steak gently with his fork. He watched me as he chewed. It was like Mom and Quinn didn’t exist. Mom was unusually quiet. “You show a lot of self-awareness for someone your age.”
Backhanded compliment. “Thank you,” I said. “You show a lot of cultural awareness, for someone your age.”
Gary laughed. Mom pinched my knee under the table. I despised her. You don’t even know what we’re talking about, I thought. You’re just reacting to tone. Like a dog.
“Anyone for pie?” she said.
Gary excused himself to smoke, brushing my wrist as he stood. “Join me,” he said.
My pulse jumped. Whatever he’d come to ask, he was going to ask it now. I followed him to the back porch, Quinn behind us like a shadow on a leash. October had just started, a sharp, ice-toothed bite in the air, tearing the skin off the earth. Leaves rustled in the yard, a sound I’d always thought of as dying. A thousand cells shivering, delicately giving up their ghosts.
Gary offered me a cigarette. I shook my head.
“Smart,” he puffed.
You are some bigshot druglord, I thought. You have a personal bodyguard who could rip a Bible in half with his hands. What the hell do you want with me?
“It’s important to me that I understand all angles of a problem,” Gary said. “I don’t like to make uninformed decisions.”
He looked at me then, and I shivered, hard, understanding: I am an angle of the problem.
“What decision?” I said.
His gaze slid away from me, unhurried. He was not the kind of man to be rushed. “Raising a child alone is very difficult. I don’t begrudge your mother her choices. But I do require her to be accountable.”
A chill started to shimmy its way under my skin like a fine knife. Require had never sounded so ominous.
“Sweetheart,” Gary said, eyeing me again, “your mother owes someone a lot of money.”
“I’m not part of her business,” I said immediately.
“No, but you’re part of her life. And when someone owes a lot of money, the people in their life become collateral.”
I went cold all the way to my marrow. This was suddenly way too Godfather. I stared into the ghost-filled yard, seeing nothing.
“I’ve worked with her for several years. She’s never disappointed me. I knew she had a daughter, and I knew she kept her daughter in the dark about certain things.”
My eyes darted to Quinn. I wondered where the gun was on him. In his waistband? Strapped to his calf?
Gary put his hand on mine on the railing. It was warm and papery. He smelled like tobacco.
Holy shit, I thought. My life is a movie. A f**king drug thriller, happening right now, in my backyard.
“Please,” I said, “I don’t want anything to do with this.”
“I understand. But she made you part of it without asking.”
My mind filled with terrifying images. Having to sleep with this man. With Quinn. Being passed around a bunch of skeezy dealers. Snorting coke to numb myself to the horror. I was shaking.
I could call Evan. Let’s run away tonight, I’d say. Let’s start over in St. Louis. Or LA. As far as possible from this shit.
“What do you want from me?” I said, my voice like those rustling leaves.
Gary took his hand away. “As I said, you mother has never disappointed me. I’m willing to help with her debts, smooth things over with some people. But I can’t do things like that out of the goodness of my heart. That’s not how a successful businessman stays successful.”
“Okay,” I said. “So answer my damn question.”
When you realize you have nothing to lose, it’s easy to be brash.
He merely smiled. Nothing I had said or done affected this man. He was a lizard, everything pinging off his scaly surface. “I don’t want anything from you. I just wanted to meet you. Yvette’s daughter.”
He held my gaze, and I understood. I don’t want anything…for now.
“Does this make you feel good about yourself?” I said quietly. “Scaring the shit out of little girls?”
“You’re not a little girl.”
He was wrong. At that moment, I absolutely was.
“How much does she owe?” I said.
His eyes got a shuttered, closed down look. “That’s business, sweetheart. Not for you to worry about.” He stubbed out his cigarette and put an arm around my shoulder. It felt like a shackle. “Let’s go in, before your mom gets the wrong idea.”
I was too dazed to process the rest of the night. When they were gone and I was sitting in my room, my eyes full of water but not spilling, my entire body trembling, I suddenly remembered the squeaky bank teller.
I should have known what was coming. The foreshadowing was so obvious.
I logged into my bank account.
Balance: $0.00.
—6—
Rain ran down the windows in rivulets thick and silvery as mercury. The world looked like an ashtray full of soft soggy grayness, headlights fizzling in it like cigarette cherries. All I heard was a crackling sound, rain and wet tires, as if one long strip of Velcro was endlessly peeling.
Evan had seen how somber I was and let me brood in peace. I put on music for a bit, then turned it off and listened to the rain. I should have told him before we left. I shouldn’t have left with him, dragging him into my doomed orbit, toward this black hole I was slowly circling. The seat was cool and I pressed the bare backs of my legs against it. I felt like I needed to shiver from a place deep inside of me, one not connected to my nerves.
Traffic slowed as people tried not to die in the rain. Evan took a hand off the wheel and laid it atop mine. He didn’t speak.
We reached St. Louis well past noon. The Arch was a faint shadow in the downpour, almost frightening, a shape without context. It could have been the leg of an alien ship touching down. Rain washed the color out of everything. We hunted the hot blurs of traffic lights, hitting every red. Even the universe was telling me to stop.