Use Me!
alyssa
I don’t know why I said it out loud. Most of the time I keep things like this buried, because the second you put a dream in the air somebody wants to swat it down. Maybe it was the wine. Or maybe it was just the comfort of Julian.
“So, I’ve been thinking,” I said, tracing the rim of my glass.
“I’m grateful for the job at Harrison & Mills, Harrison is great, but he’s near retirement, barely in the office.
His son’s the heir, and that man is a piece of work.
Every single thing I say, he second-guesses on principle.
I say left, he says right. And the part that makes me want to throw something is he’s not even good.
A mediocre white man who’s failed up his whole life, who strolls in with no prep, fumbles a hearing, and gets nods like he’s the second coming of Thurgood Marshall. ”
Julian set his drink down, dark eyes steady on mine.
“I out-work him, I out-read him, I’m right, and I still sit there getting talked down to. He gets the benefit of the doubt and I have to earn mine back every morning before nine. He looks the part. I have to keep proving I am the part. With a smile.”
He nodded. “So you’ve been thinking…what? Find another firm?”
“No. I’m thinking about opening my own practice. Here.”
His eyes widened and a smile spread across his face.
“Nothing big,” I said quickly, already defending against an objection he hadn’t made. “Just me. A paralegal, maybe. A receptionist eventually. I’d keep my services affordable. Sliding scale, payment plans. People around here deserve somebody who sees more than billable hours.”
I braced for it. Have you ever run a business? What’s your five-year projection? That’s not sustainable.
“Good,” Julian said.
I blinked. “Good?”
“This town needs it. Needs you.” He smiled at me. “You’d be a force.”
A nervous laugh got out of me. “That’s it? No market analysis? No devil’s advocate on overhead?”
“Why would I argue you out of something you already know?” His brow went up. “You’ve practiced law for years. You know your worth. Why keep letting other firms take a cut?”
I hadn’t realized how braced I’d been for doubt dressed up as concern.
The be realistic advice that I was used to hearing from the people in my life.
Because that was the rhythm I knew. Float a dream, watch a man pick it apart for my own good until I learned to stop floating them.
Malik never said good. Malik said be realistic, and meant be smaller.
Julian had said good like it was obvious, and now he was already three steps ahead of me.
“There’s space in the old Perryman building,” he said, already past whether and onto how. “Been empty two years, but the bones are good. Walk to the courthouse, visible from Main, ground floor for clients who can’t do stairs.”
I stared at him. “How do you know all that about a building?”
“I’m an investor, Alyssa. I know most of the viable commercial real estate in this town.” He said it like it was nothing.
Nobody had ever gotten ahead of one of the things I wanted before. They only ever got in front of it to block the light, and now he was talking square footage and sightlines to the courthouse, already building the thing bigger than I’d let myself build it.
Which meant I had to slow him down, because he was thinking like Julian, and I’d been thinking like a woman counting what was actually in her savings account.
“Okay, but you’re going way bigger than me,” I said, half a laugh in it.
“I’m not trying to buy a building, Julian.
I’ve been saving enough to lease a space.
I just need one office, a room for me, a second for a paralegal, conference room, reception area.
Then I can grow from there.” I held his eyes. “Does that make sense?”
To his credit, instead of arguing me up into something bigger, he offered: “I understand. Then let me connect you back with Cheryl. She’s got eyes on every listing in the county before it hits the market. Let her pull what’s out there that fits your requirements.”
“Thank you, Julian,” I said slowly, “I really appreciate that.”
julian
I’d thought the car was the war to be won. We fought, and she kept the car. That should’ve settled it.
What I hadn’t understood yet was that the real battle with Alyssa didn’t just get fought over big things.
It got fought over groceries she didn’t call for me to carry.
It was fought over the bandage around her finger, from slicing it trying to put together furniture herself, instead of calling me down to do it.
It was fought over a mixing bowl.
I was at her kitchen table one night working long division with Micah when I heard wood drag across the floor behind me. I turned around and she was up on a dining chair, on her toes, one arm stretched for a bowl on the top shelf.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ve got it.”
“I’m six-three. You’re five-eight flat-footed, standing on furniture three feet from me.” I was already up. “You couldn’t say, Julian, hand me the bowl?”
“You’re already helping Micah with his homework,” she replied like it closed the matter. “I wasn’t going to bother you.”
And there it was, the whole machine laid out in one sentence. She was keeping a ledger. I was already doing one thing for her kid, so the window for asking me anything else had shut. She’d rather stand on furniture on her tiptoes than spend a “favor” she’d decided she’d already used up.
I lifted her off the chair, set her down, slid it out of the way with my foot, took the bowl off the shelf without rising up on anything, and handed it to her.
“Thank you,” she said, sheepishly.
“You’re welcome.” I sat back down. Micah was watching the whole thing, delighted.
It took me a while to stop taking it as an insult.
Because that’s what it felt like to me a lot of the time.
Like she was telling me, eight bags and one bowl at a time, that she didn’t trust me to hold a single thing.
It took me a while to see I wasn’t even in it.
She wasn’t refusing me. She just didn’t have the reflex that lets you set a thing down in somebody else’s hands.
That had been worn out of her long before me.
I was learning how to manage around it. Like knowing she’d gone to the store and simply being there when she pulled in, bags out of the car before she’d unclipped her seatbelt. I was just there, hands already full. Nothing to ask me for, nothing to fight.
Maybe two weeks after that, my phone buzzed.
ALYSSA
Went to the store. Pulling in ten. You around?
I’d started to think we were turning a corner on it. But it was one thing to refuse my hands. It was something else to make sure I never saw the load.
“There’s a tenants’ meeting tomorrow night in Franklin Terrace,” she said over dinner, like it was nothing. “Over in Ironwood. Black mold, no heat, the usual slumlord special. I’m going to hear them out and walk them through their rights.”
My fork paused midway to my mouth. “Ironwood.”
“Seven o’clock. Runs maybe till nine, nine-thirty, if a lot of people want to speak.”
“You’re not driving out there yourself.”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s not a good area that time of night. I can have Gerald take you and bring you back.”
She laughed. “It’s a community meeting, Julian, not a back-alley deal. I’ve been doing meetings like this for years. In Jersey, no less. I think I can handle the country.”
“Small-town South doesn’t make the risk smaller. Sometimes it makes it worse. It’s Franklin Terrace, in Ironwood, after dark. You don’t know that area like I do. You’ll take Gerald.”
“I don’t need a babysitter.”
“A driver isn’t a babysitter. It’s basic safety and convenience. And it’s not whether you have survival skills. It’s that I’d spend the whole night worried about it.”
She stabbed her food. “Fine. But he doesn’t hover.”
The next night, Gerald’s text hit at 9:30pm:
GERALD
Ms. Carter dismissed me for the night. Said her meeting is running long. Tried to stay but she insisted she’d call a ride share later. Sorry, sir.
My heart dropped and my vision went red at the edges.
I knew Ironwood. Knew exactly which corners turn a woman alone into a story people tell later.
And she’d sent her coverage home. We had talked about it.
She’d sat at that table and agreed, and then the second a man might have to wait in his own car an extra hour, she’d undone the one thing I asked, and told herself she was being considerate while she did it.
Half the lot lights were dead and the rest were flickering. Men hung out along the front of the building, more between the cars. I parked close, engine running, eyes on the door.
Alyssa came out at 11:14 with her phone up and her head down and didn’t see the two men off to the side turn and clock her. I dialed her.
“Hello?”
“Look left.”
Her head whipped around. When she saw my Range Rover her shoulders dropped, the guilt flooding her expression. She ended the call and crossed the lot fast.
I got out without a word and opened her door. She slid in and buckled like nothing was wrong, like she hadn’t just sent away the coverage I’d arranged for her. I got back in, locked the doors, and put both hands on the wheel.
I didn’t pull off. Didn’t look at her because if I did, I didn’t trust what would come out.
“You sent Gerald home.”
“He’d been sitting out here for hours, Julian. I didn’t want to—”
“To be an inconvenience? To accept help?” My hands tightened on the wheel. “That’s his job, Alyssa. You sent away my coverage for you and stood out here alone so a man wouldn’t have to do the job I pay him to do?”
“It was fine, Julian. I didn’t need—”
“I don’t want to hear that.” It came out sharp enough to cut. “Every single time I reach for something, you’ve already got it, you don’t need it, you’re fine. Tonight I’m fine meant a dark parking lot and two men doing math on you while you looked at your phone.”
She looked around the lot, at the men she hadn’t noticed, then dropped her head.