The Assistants(59)

I grabbed at him again. “But it’s true. It isn’t any less true just because I waited till now to tell you. Please, Kevin.”

He steered me toward the door.

“Please don’t,” I said. “I need you.”

“Tina, it’s over.” He opened the door and shuffled me out. “I’m done.”





25




OF COURSE on my way back home from Kevin’s, I got caught in a heavy, melodramatic rain that left me drenched by the time I dropped like a felled tree onto my bed. I closed my eyes and listened to the storm pounding at my windows, thinking about how my life was over. Which was something I’d thought a number of times before, to an embarrassing degree, but this time it had to be true. Because what else did I have to lose?

What else could possibly go wrong?

It was a masochist’s favorite question, and intuitively one knows the asking is a dare. It’s: Go on, nothing can bring me any lower; I have nothing left to care about.

And so the impossible and inevitable happened while I was just lying there feeling sorry for myself. I never even saw it coming.

It was a break, a cascade. Not the clean trickle of baptism, more the membrane-addled gush of the womb. Plaster. Paint chips. Crumbly gray cement. When the ceiling rain bubble finally burst, it erupted ninety years’ worth of spackle matter all over my head.

My sheets were muddled to charcoal black and brown, soaked through to the mattress. My hair, stuck wet to my face, smelled inexplicably of ashes.

I looked up and was surprised to find an opening no bigger than the circumference of a quarter—surrounded by a flailing popped balloon.

Amazing, I thought. Drop by drop, how much it grew, how much matter it collected over time.

I plugged the anticlimactic hole with a plastic I-heart-NY bag and some masking tape. I tossed my sheets into the trash. I didn’t have any clean sheets to replace them with, but I hadn’t thought that part through.

I took a shower.

Only then did I begin to cry, because, in truth, there is nothing more self-satisfying than sobbing in a steaming shower.

That’s how Emily found me, sodden and pruned, curled up on the shower floor. We didn’t have a bathtub, mind you, so it was a stand-up shower I was lying down in, no easy feat for a full-grown adult. Luckily I only ever got to be half-grown. Still, my thigh or elbow must have been blocking the drain because I’d managed to flood the room.

Emily was standing ankle-deep in water. “What happened?” she asked.

“The rain bubble popped,” I said.

“And it made this big of a mess?”

I shook my head. “Kevin broke up with me.”

Emily’s perfectly symmetrical Anglo-Saxon features did a thing I’d never seen them do before. They warped hideously with grief. She knelt down and lifted me up from my puddle. “Why?”

“Because I’m me,” I said. “He finally figured it out.”

To Emily’s credit she didn’t kick me while I was down, literally or metaphorically. She also didn’t try to say anything to make me feel better. She barely spoke at all. But she got me dried off, and dressed, and into bed.

As previously stated, I didn’t own a second set of sheets, so Emily made up the bed with a checkered tablecloth and a few bath towels. She fed me Girl Scout cookies from the freezer and glass after glass of Jameson. When she opened up my laptop, the Assistance site appeared.

“Let’s not worry about this now.” She clicked off the page and opened up Netflix instead. “How about something with Channing Tatum . . . ,” she said. “Or Ryan Gosling.”

“No.” I curled into the fetal position beside her. “I only want to watch ugly people tonight.”

“All right, well, that shouldn’t be too hard.” She scrolled through the new releases. “In what category would you place Jeff Goldblum? He’s sort of got an ugly-sexy thing going, don’t you think?”

“Emily?” I slurred into my pillow. “There’s something else.”

I wasn’t looking at her, but I could tell she’d stopped scrolling. “What?” she asked.

I took a deep breath to calm myself—a profound, bottomless inhale of fresh air, followed by a stanky, whiskeyed exhale.

“Before Kevin kicked me to the curb,” I said. “He told me something . . .”

I could feel Emily bracing for the worst, tightening her jaw and sphincter muscles as if that would help to make what I was about to say less awful.

“What did he tell you?” She tried and failed to sound composed.

I couldn’t utter the words out loud, because then it would all be too real, how bad this was, how serious it was, the trouble we were in.

“Fontana!” Emily was yelling now. “What did Kevin tell you?”

“He told me that he got called into a meeting at work,” I said. “And they were talking about our website.”

Emily was quiet for a moment. The plastic I-heart-NY bag that I’d masking-taped to the ceiling crackled from the wind outside.

“The Titan legal department,” I clarified, because I wasn’t sure if the words drooling from the side of my mouth were puddling onto my dishcloth-covered pillow in coherent sentences. “Glen Wiles and the rest, they’re looking into our funding.”