Never Have I Ever(41)

“Okay,” I said. “I know what you want. I know the stakes. I’m going home now. I need to think about it.”

She blinked, surprised enough for it to show. “Oh, you do? You need to think about it?”

I nodded, and she stood up, abruptly, as if she physically could not stay seated. She came two steps toward me, as if drawn. I’d seen her have a lot of feelings, but most of them had been manufactured to work me over. This, though, this rising interest, this was real.

“What are you?” she asked. “I get people, Amy. I know people. I know women like you in neighborhoods like this. You don’t have anything interesting to say, so mostly you talk shit about each other. You puff and squawk, and you get nervous when anyone steps outside the safety of your little, line-filled lives.” She was so intense, eyes narrowed above bared teeth. It was as if the rhythm of the conversation had gotten away from her. I stayed cool, though I had one hand on the stroller bar, gripped so tight I was surprised the metal didn’t dent. She couldn’t see that hand. I kept the rest of my body loose and easy, turned inward, focused on my breathing, as if I were a hundred twenty feet under and every molecule of oxygen was precious. She came closer, still talking. “Why aren’t you like that? Like your friends. You have your shit on lockdown, all big eyes and tight lips. I tell you to come see me and you go diving. I have your ass in a vise six ways from Sunday and you tell me, cool as a pudding, that you need to think. There is nothing to think about. Either you liquidate your trust and transfer the money or I go to the cops and fuck your life, forever. That’s it. A or B. Your call. So make it. I’m fine either way.”

The things that she was saying weren’t all true. I looked at her, and the contrast hit me again. She glowed, so expensive and soft, in this rough and ugly house. This was not her natural habitat. She wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t have her kid in a place like this, if she had other choices. She needed my money, and she wouldn’t capriciously blow a chance to wring it out of me. If it were twenty thousand, maybe. But not almost a quarter of a million.

“What’s it worth, that Picasso sketch?” I asked.

That took her aback. “Why? You want to buy it?” When I didn’t answer, she relented. “More than your car.”

I shrugged. “It’s not that nice a car.”

She laughed again, nonplussed, while I breathed, in and out, twice, thinking.

She’d started down one path, to blackmail me. Something about sex with lawyers. She’d meant to shock me, knock me off my guard with what she’d done to get to see my file. She had a path charted that I could not imagine, but I knew it started with Boyce and led to me incriminating myself. She’d needed that tape. A child witness, twenty-five years later, was not enough for policemen or lawyers, and therefore it was not enough to scare me.

I’d stayed calm, unshocked, and then our talk about Luca had derailed her off that path. She hadn’t been able to get to me, so she had upped the stakes, pretending to be Lolly. That had been a risk. A gamble. She hadn’t done the research.

Maybe she was bad at her job, but I didn’t think so. If she were, I would have seen her before now. She’d saved me in her pocket for a rainy day, which meant that up until now she’d had a lot of success, a lot of sunshine. Now here she was, in this house that smelled musty and foul, and I knew it must be raining hard indeed.

“I don’t think you are fine either way,” I told her. “Otherwise you would have done the research. About Lolly. You were in a hurry, so you skipped steps and came at me before you were completely ready. Look at this place. Not your usual digs, I’d guess. You need me. You need my money as much as I need you to keep your mouth shut.”

Her face had gone to stone. It told me nothing. I gave her the same face back. The quiet game again, but this time I decided I would age out and die, right here on her floor, before I lost. I would not lose, and this knowledge was a wild, red pleasure. The silence stretched, and there was a clock somewhere in the room, I realized. It had been ticking this whole time, but now I was aware of the sound, each second being marked as it slipped past us. In the end she broke it.

“What the fuck are you?” she asked. She tilted her head to the side with birdlike curiosity, maybe even reptilian. My heart sped up, just a little, as if it had decided to race the ticktock sound. “I came armed for small-town-wifey-with-a-past. I know the species. Not a hard target. But you? You’re like me. You’re all folded up and secret down inside, like you’re made of fucking origami.”

The door banged open. I jumped, but she didn’t. Luca came in, toting five or six plastic bags from Publix, one-handed.

“They didn’t have cashew milk, so I got almond?” Luca said, and then he saw me. “Oh, hey.”

“Almond is fine,” Roux said, and now her smile was genuine. She loved her kid.

“Hey, Luca,” I said. My voice was shaking. Just a little, but I could hear it. I hoped she couldn’t. I bent over the stroller, fixing Oliver’s blanket, though he’d only push that exact same foot out again within a minute.

“Whatcha doing here, Ms. Whey?” he asked.

I had no answer, but Roux stepped in, smooth, her voice bright and cheery. “Working out your scuba lessons.”

That was interesting. Did Luca not know what his mom did for a living?