Imaginary Girls(12)

She walked out and stood before me and my stepmom near the jaundice-colored couch. She didn’t sit. It wasn’t the kind of couch she’d ever sit on.

From the cloudy expression on her face, I knew it hadn’t gone well. She seemed . . . there was no other word to call it but surprised. He must have said no, which didn’t happen to her often. She probably had no clue what to make of it.

One time, I remember, a boy she was sort of seeing tried to say no when she told him she was craving a slice of cheesecake and he needed to go get her some, like right this minute. “Where’s the best cheesecake in the whole state?” she’d asked him, and when he’d said down in the city, she’d said, well, that’s where he needed to go. She was testing him, I knew, doing it only because she could. But he had to work early the next morning, he said. It was late, he said, too late to drive two-and-a-half hours to the city just for cheesecake and two-and-a-half hours back so he could make it to work on time, especially if she wasn’t going to ride with him.

She gave him the eyes first: green in the way nothing else in the world is green, green to stun you, venom green.

She moved closer to him on the couch, lowered the volume on the TV. Then she took a single finger, just the one, and traced the line of his chin—accomplishing two things at once: a reminder that he really should do something about that stubble, but also of who he was dealing with, who she was.

“Don’t you like cheesecake?” she asked him innocently, and I’m trying to remember if his name was Raf or Ralph or Ray, because then Raf or Ralph or Ray said, “You know I do,” and she said, “Do I really?”

She leaned on his shoulder and mumbled something into his ear that I couldn’t make out from across the room.

She’d had him at the chin, I could tell, but she’d also made him late to work a few times already and I knew he had that on his mind, too. Being fired was apparently something that normal people concerned themselves with. Ruby herself was always late for work at Cumby’s. She ate M&M’s free off the vine in the candy aisle and popped the cap on her gas tank to keep her car full up on unleaded, but she wasn’t fired, not even close. Then again, no one else in town lived a life like Ruby’s.

Raf or Ralph or Ray was trying to make a decision. Then he saw me looking.

I was thirteen then, maybe twelve. He saw me across the room and smiled. That’s how I knew he’d risk getting fired for Ruby; lots of boys in town would.

“You up for some cheesecake, Chloe?” he asked me then, because if a guy wanted a solid shot at Ruby, he had to make an effort with her little sister. And I said yeah sure I wanted some cheesecake, and with cherries, and before you knew it he was heading south for the Mid-Hudson Bridge, trying to beat the 1:00 a.m. weekend closing at Veniero’s, some bakery in Manhattan that he assured us made the best cheesecake in the whole state. We didn’t even give him gas money, though Ruby donated a nickel for the tolls.

And I honestly don’t know—didn’t care—if he got fired the next day or not.

How easy it had been to convince him. He could have said no; he’d made a valiant effort. But in the end he didn’t. He physically couldn’t. And I don’t think he even liked cheesecake.

My dad, though, he seemed to have a strength that boy couldn’t muster. Or else Ruby had lost a touch of her magic in the years we’d been apart. My dad came out of his office all beard and big head, like he held all the power, like no one could tell him what to do, and I hated him a little bit then, hated him a lot, for thinking he could deny Ruby what she wanted.

“So it’s all settled,” my dad said. “I assume Ruby’s staying for dinner?”

“Oh no,” Ruby said. “I’m staying, but not for dinner. I’m on a liquid diet, you know, a cleanse. Shakes only, the fruit kind or the milk, and I don’t want you to go to any trouble with the blender.”

She nodded politely at the man who was my father, though he’d skipped out on me before I could walk, and then she nodded politely at the woman who was married to the man who was my father, and pulled me by the sleeve up out of the basement to get the hell away from them both.

I should have known she’d come for me at some point. I should have been waiting. Ruby was impetuous. She did things like head down the driveway to check the mailbox, wearing only rain boots, a hoodie, and a summer slip with a jam stain on the lace hem, and end up across state lines, hours from home, telling my dad she’d come for custody.