Shimmy Bang Sparkle(79)

He pointed toward the bathroom. Very softly, he confirmed the plan. “Sheikh is way down there.” Then he pointed to the ceiling, which was standing in for the balcony, “And I’m up there. Ready?”

I nodded and crinkled the bag for Priscilla. Nick began walking toward me. Just about one foot before he crossed my path, I tossed a tiny piece of jerky across the room. Priscilla bolted after it at full speed. The leash unwound, filling the air with a sound like an unspooling fishing line, and pulled tight in front of Nick.

He stopped before he got himself tangled, with the nylon rope just pressing into his shin. “We’re in business.”

Yes, indeed. We definitely were.



It was almost showtime. I was so nervous I could barely think straight. I felt like I was four double espressos in, and yet the strongest thing I’d had to drink that day was a glass of iced tea with our room service lunch. In the shower, I found my hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t even unscrew the lid on the little bottle of complimentary shower gel. It always happened to me before a job—the nerves. But this was different. Everything about this felt different. It was the end of my time as a thief. And it was the beginning of my time with Nick.

In my head, I heard him saying it again and again. I’d been hearing it all day. I love you, Stella. And I always will. The sound of the toilet seat being raised broke my daydream, and I cleared a gap in the steam on the shower door.

He paused with his pants halfway undone. “You OK?”

“Sort of,” I said. I slid open the door an inch and handed over the shower gel. “I can’t get that open.”

It was hardly a jar of pickles, but he didn’t give me a hard time about it. It took him half a second to get it undone. As he handed it back to me, his expression softened, that secret unspoken language that I think maybe we’d been speaking all along. “Don’t worry.”

The water splashed at my feet, but I didn’t step back into the stream. “I know.”

“I’ll look after you like I’m Ruth and Roxie all wrapped up in one.”

As if it would anchor me, I ran my finger along the seal between the shower frame and the glass panel. “Nick. We haven’t talked about what happens if . . .”

His focus got laser sharp, and he shook his head. “Don’t you dare. You say those words, and you give them power. We will be fine. We’ve got this. You know we do.”

I swallowed hard and drizzled the flowery smelling gel into my palm. “OK. Promise?”

“Let’s get one thing straight,” he said, reaching into the shower, touching my wet cheek. “Whatever I say to you, whatever it is, it’s a promise. We clear?”

As if he’d thrown a warm blanket over me, I stopped shivering. All the uncertainty, for one blissful instant, disappeared. And all I knew, all I had to know, was him. And his confidence. It was contagious and wildly addictive. Working with him was different than with Roxie and Ruth; not better, just different. Because with him, I didn’t feel like the only one with a plan. I felt like a partner, an equal. Not the point of a triangle, but one half of a whole. “OK,” I said, and I shut the door and found myself alone in a little world of swirling steam.

But as I lathered up with shower gel and shampooed my hair, my shower thoughts unwound in their usual chaotic directions. The best-case scenario wasn’t hard to imagine. We get in. We get out. We drive east all night and all day and are back in Albuquerque in time for breakfast burritos. I cleave the diamond down the middle and rough out as many decent-size stones as possible. We move the raw stones. We divide the proceeds four ways and hide the cash. Within a few months, I’m out on the Big Wide Open with Nick. Mr. Bozeman is living it up at a retirement community outside Flagstaff. Back in the 505, Roxie is making macaroni and cheese for her son three times a week in a little adobe house with a carport. Ruth is in a sparsely and elegantly decorated yoga studio, saying “Ohmmmmmmmmm . . .” with a roomful of pregnant ladies and their dogs as they all get into triangle pose and look at the ceiling.

That was the goal.

But, I thought, as I put half a dozen very generous squirts of my conditioner into my palm . . .

There was also a worst-case scenario to consider. He didn’t want to talk that over, but I had to think it through. And it looked like this: We get caught. Nick and I spend the night in a county lockup, awaiting charges, as Priscilla is, hopefully, returned to Mr. Bozeman. Ruth and Roxie cannot pay this month’s rent and have to move to a less-safe apartment across town. The Big Wide Open goes to someone else. Mr. Bozeman is still in debt, and I can’t be there to help. The magnificent love story of the last little while explodes in a tragic spray of dull embers, and all the happiness we were all so close to having vanishes forever.

All is lost. Game over. Nobody gets their happy ending. Nobody comes out better in the end.

Toweling myself off, I tried to center my thoughts by focusing on a line in the bathroom wallpaper where two flowers were slightly mismatched, but it didn’t help. The worst-case scenario felt like it was right there in that line—the split between what was and what would never be. But I pushed those thoughts out of my head and cleared a place in the mirror to look at myself in the steam. You can do this, Stella. You can do this. You can.

As I stepped out of the bathroom in my robe, I found Nick zipping up both my suitcase and his own, getting them set to go by the door. We’d paid our bill already and arranged for a late checkout. Taking the pile of clothes I’d left on the bed, I shimmied very slowly into my panties and my leggings. We went about our routines in a nervous silence, interrupted only by the ding of my phone. It was a notification from Instagram.