Never Have I Ever(42)

Luca brightened, and he looked back and forth between us, “For real?” Then a faint shadow of worry crossed his face. He turned to me, “Is it expensive?”

So he knew about the money trouble. He was a bright kid, and I doubted this house looked like their real home, wherever that was. I wondered if he knew how his mother planned to recoup their losses. I didn’t think so. He’d have to be a better player than his mother, to eat my blondies and chat about my pictures, all the while knowing I was one of her hapless victims.

“You let me worry about that,” Roux told him. “Go put the groceries away and let us work out a schedule for your lessons.”

“Cool,” he said. “That’s so freakin’ awesome.” He disappeared into the kitchen. We could both hear him in there, banging around in her carb-free fridge.

I went to the stroller. “I need to think,” I told her, soft, insistent.

“No you don’t,” she said.

“I do,” I said. Exactly how broke were they? She had the Picasso sketch, and she could sell the car. That would get her, what? Maybe fifty, sixty thousand? That was a lot of cash, but maybe not to her. And not next to a quarter mil. I thought I had some wiggle room. A little. So I pushed it. “I’m not impulsive, Roux. You give me time or you go to the cops and you get nothing.”

It wasn’t true. I’d bend if she pushed me now. I’d have to. But I shoved that truth way down, into my most secret spaces, deeper than the worst parts of my past. Down to where the worsts that I was doing every day lived, the things inside me that I could never, never look at. My real worsts, that this woman, who owned my past, must never know. I met her gaze head-on, and I saw my bluff land. I saw the very moment she believed me.

“I’ll give you until tomorrow,” she said, and I felt a small but fierce exulting. She raised her voice, loud enough for Luca to hear. “Thanks, Amy. I’ll come by tomorrow about nine a.m. and do the paperwork so he can get started.”

Luca appeared in the doorway, grinning at his mother under a nut-milk mustache. “Like you’ll be up at nine.”

“I walk right then anyway,” I said, staring her down, pushing it even further. “Let’s make it ten. I can’t miss my workout.”

“Sure,” she said, but with an edge. Luca wiped at his mouth and then rolled off the doorjamb. He went galloping up the stairs. A moment later we heard a door slam, and then music turned on, loud and bass-heavy.

“I have to go. Maddy will be home any minute,” I said.

She didn’t answer. She stayed silent, and I took it as permission.

I put my other hand on the stroller bar, began turning Oliver around. He was still out, dreaming. Something good, by the look of it. His mouth worked faintly, as if he were nursing. I pushed him to the door.

Roux’s voice stopped me. She was right behind me. She’d come to me, silent, barefoot, and so fast.

“Are you playing, Amy? Are you in my game?” I could feel her breath on my neck. I made myself be still. I didn’t answer. “Don’t. It’s just money, and you aren’t even using it. Fifteen years is a long time. That baby will be as tall as Luca by the time you’re out.” She was almost whispering, but every word she said landed like gospel. “Be here, tomorrow, ten a.m. If you bounce off to the goddamn beach again, I will pack it in. I’ll move down to the next bitch on my list. Yeah, I need the money, but there is always a next bitch. So do not test me. If you play me, if you make all the setup I did on this into wasted time, I will fuck your life so hard on my way out. Believe it.”

I said nothing. I didn’t even look at her, but I believed. I pushed forward, out the door, fleeing with my boy into the sunshine.





7




All afternoon, as I took care of Oliver and scrubbed my kitchen and bathrooms to keep my hands busy, the choice was churning in my head. Roux was pushing me down toward memories and guilts that were sunk too far for anyone to see them. Not even me. I’d thought they were deep and distant, but Roux had said I was like origami; maybe she was right. What if they were only folded away? She’d brought my worst things close and made the barriers that kept me from them feel as thin and frail as pleated paper.

Scrubbing the grout as if it had personally offended me, I knew that if prison was my only fear, even my main fear, then I did have a choice. When I was fifteen, I’d learned that justice bent to money. I could afford to hire a lawyer. Assuming I did not pay Roux, I could afford the best damn lawyer in the state. Well-spoken white people from prominent families came out on top in our broken court system. It wasn’t fair, but it was true. If I went to an attorney right now, the two of us could go straight to the D.A., get in ahead of Roux. Make a deal.

The max was fifteen years. I couldn’t bear to think of Oliver navigating all those rocky years to adolescence with no mother. Perhaps I deserved it, but he didn’t. In fifteen years he would likely be taller than me yet still vulnerable and innocent, like Maddy. But Roux had told me fifteen years to scare me. Given my youth at the time and my current life, I would not get the max.

I was a tax-paying wife and mother, valued in my community. Tig, a kid from the wrong side of town with a bag of pot in his pocket, had gotten only three years. It was likely, though by no means guaranteed, I would fare better than he had. I might even get probation and community service.