29. Luna
LUNA
Three weeks ago, I would not have predicted that the most productive creative partnership of my professional life would be with a Russian mob wife who color-codes her content calendars and has opinions about serif fonts. And yet here we are.
Olga sits across from me at the worktable with her laptop open and her reading glasses on—small wire-framed ones that make her look like a very elegant professor—and she’s pulling engagement metrics with the focused energy of a woman who has found something to do with herself and is not letting go of it.
The shop’s social media has doubled in reach in three weeks. There’s a local press piece coming: a lifestyle column that wants to do a feature on independent women-owned businesses. Olga handled the pitch personally and did so well. I would not have thought to pitch it at all.
I’m better at the candles. She’s better at the world, knowing about the candles. It works.
“The lavender and smoke is getting the most saves,” she says, without looking up. “We should do a behind-the-scenes on the process. People want to watch things being made. It’s very soothing for them.”
“I can do that. Hairy will probably photo-bomb it.”
She looks up. Looks at Hairy in his bowl on the shelf. Looks back at me. “The fish is an asset. He has a face.”
“He has a face,” I agree.
I look at her bent over the laptop, pushing the reading glasses up her nose with one finger, and I think about how none of this was planned—not Olga, not the press piece, not the fact that I now know she takes oat milk in her coffee and cries at nature documentaries and learned four languages because her father said she would need them to be useful to a husband.
None of it was planned and almost all of it is good, and I’m trying to hold onto the good things these days with both hands because the list of good things has a gap in it the size of a large, quiet man who has not texted me in days, and I’m not going to think about that right now.
I’m not going to think about that right now.
“I can’t pay you for this,” I say, because I have been meaning to say it and keep putting it off. “I want to. I’m working on what that looks like. But right now the shop doesn’t have the margin, and I don’t want you to think I’m?—”
“Luna.” Olga closes the laptop partway. “I told you. I’m a lady of leisure. I’m bored as fuck. Please let me do this for you.” She says it with the directness of someone who has decided to be direct and is finding it liberating. “Let me make up for some of Hugo’s bullshit.”
“That’s not your debt.”
“We’re married. His debt is my debt.” She opens the laptop again. “And more than that—I want to. I really do.” She pauses. “Please.”
I look at her for a moment. She’s looking at the screen, but her shoulders are doing the thing they do when she is hoping I will say yes.
“Okay,” I say. “But what kind of coffee do you want? I’m buying.”
I would suggest donuts, but I’ve offered three times, and she has declined three times with the polite but firm energy of a woman who has spent her whole life declining food. I’ve decided to stop pushing and wait for her to get there on her own schedule. Some things can’t be rushed.
The bell above the door saves me from having to decide on the coffee, because Cherry comes through it like a weather event.
She has two coffees in a carrier and a white paper bag swinging from her wrist, and she drops both on the worktable.
“I was in the neighborhood,” she says, which is something Cherry says when she was not, in fact, in the neighborhood, but decided to be.
She looks at Olga. “Eat, woman. You’ll feel better. ”
Olga looks at the bag. She looks at Cherry, who is looking back at her with the energy of a force of nature that has decided you are going to do something and is waiting for you to catch up.
Olga has been uncomfortable around Cherry since the first time they met, in the way people are when they’re not used to people who take up that much space without apology.
She reaches into the bag with the air of someone who has decided that resistance is more effort than it’s worth.
She takes a donut. She nibbles the edge.
Her eyes go wide, and every hinted line fades. “I have never,” she says slowly, almost orgasmically, “tasted anything this good in my entire life.”
“Why is that?” Cherry asks, pulling up a stool.
First, Olga finishes the donut. She reaches for a second. “My father had plans for me. A daughter is a negotiation. A thin daughter is a better negotiation.”
I stare at her. “What?”
“I have been very mindful of my food for a long time.” She bites into the second donut. “But perhaps a few spare pounds is not such a bad thing.”
Cherry looks at her with the expression she reserves for people she has decided are her business, whether they know it yet or not.
“Honey, you’re fine as hell and twice as hot.
Have a third. You will remain exactly as fine.
You have that metabolism the rest of us want.
” She says it with such authority that it lands as an established fact. “I can tell.”
Olga beams. It is a real beam, unguarded, the face of someone who has not been told something like that in a while and doesn’t know what to do with it except feel it. She reaches for a third donut to save for after her second.
Cherry looks at me over Olga’s head and tips her chin toward the back room with the expression of someone who has something to say and isn’t saying it here.
“I need to check some inventory,” I say. “Cherry, can you?—”
“Yep,” Cherry says, already moving.
In the back room, among the boxes of raw materials and the shelf of work-in-progress batches and the vanilla cardamom candles I still need to label, I turn to Cherry and say, “Is any of that true? The metabolism thing? How can you even tell?”
Cherry looks at me with infinite patience. “I was lying my ass off.”
“Cherry.”
“She’ll look good with some weight on her, the poor thing. Did you see her face?” She starts pulling boxes. “Where are the vanilla cardamom ones? She likes those. We should send her home with one.”
“Second shelf, left side.” I find the box. “You just told her?—”
“I told her what she needed to hear. She’ll be fine. Her bone structure could survive a hundred donuts.” Cherry takes the candle and inspects it. “This one smells incredible.”
“Thank you, I’ve been working on that pour temperature.”
We stand in the back room among the wax and the wicks and the lingering sweetness of vanilla and cardamom, and I think about Olga out front eating her third donut with the focus of a woman discovering something late that she should have had all along.
And I laugh. It’s been a while. Cherry grins at me, and it is the best I have felt in days.
The day is productive, to say the least. It’s nice to know I can be productive when my insides are ripped out. Seems like good preparation for motherhood.
I close the shop at seven. Olga has gone home with the candle and a list of content ideas she typed out before she left, and another donut.
Hairy has done his evening laps, circling with his usual conviction that the bowl is larger than it is.
The day has that pleasant wrung-out feeling that comes from having done something real in it—the good tired, the kind that means the hours were worth something.
I turn off the back lights and lock the register and say goodbye to Hairy through the glass, the way I always do, then I head toward the train. Another day marked off the calendar, another day without Ivan.
So, it’s been good and bad.
The alley between the shop and the laundromat next door is one I cut through because it saves me three minutes, and I’ve cut through it a every day for years.
I know the smells, where to walk to avoid slipping, all of it.
Can’t take it in winter—the muck gets frozen over, and it’s way too slippery everywhere.
The vanilla wax has been a little rosy on the top end, and I’m not sure if that’s due to my pregnancy or if it’s real. I’ll have to check in with Mike tomorrow. His hormones never betray his nose. I hope Olga will want to come to the press interview. I have no idea how to do one of those.
I’m so thoroughly inside my own head that I don’t really notice the two men in the alley until I’m already deep in it and they’re there. No big deal. I pass people here sometimes. Just meet their eyes, and they know you’re watching them as much as they’re watching you.
There’s a third man leaning against the wall ahead. He is in bad shape. That is the first thing I register even in the shadows. Not the size of the men near me, not the dark, but him.
His face is a geography of damage, nose clearly broken, one eye swollen most of the way shut, the posture of a man who is hurting and furious about it. He looks like he lost a fight very badly, and the fury in his one good eye is the kind that is looking for somewhere to put itself.
Everything in me stops. Goes cold. I don’t run. There is nowhere to run to. I passed those other two men, and now, I feel them behind me. See their shadows, long and lean on the ground by my feet.
“Luna Ambrose,” the Walking Bruise says. “We’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
“I don’t?—”
They put something over my head. I don’t fight it because there are three of them and one of me.
I’m pregnant, and the math does not work in my favor.
I go limp instead, trying to calm the panic in my chest. But they get me to my feet, and then something sharp pokes my lower back.
One of the two men behind me says, “You can cooperate. Or don’t. I kind of hope that you don’t.”
I swallow that down. “I’ll go with you.”
“Damn.”
I count our steps, turns, time—left, then right, then up and into a vehicle. Fuck.
The drive isn’t long. But when we get out, I hear almost nothing. No city sounds. No traffic.
We go downstairs, and the air turns stale and wet and chilled. A basement? Concrete floor. When they pull the head bag off of me, my eyes have to adjust to the one bulb’s light.
No windows. The kind of room that was built to be exactly this.
The Walking Bruise stands in front of me. Up close, the damage to his face is even more thorough than I clocked in the dark. Someone did that to him recently. Someone who’s very good at it.
“We’ll see what you’re really worth to Ivan,” he says, and smiles with the half of his face that still moves properly.
I breathe. I breathe once, carefully. “I’m not worth anything to him,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I expected it to. “We aren’t together anymore.”
He tilts his head. Then he reaches into his jacket, and the switchblade comes out, sparkling as he flicks it out. He leans close and smells like cigarettes and something medicinal, and I might retch if I weren’t terrified. I might anyway.
“If he won’t pay for you,” he says, quietly, conversationally, “I guess we can end this now.”
My mouth opens. “I’m pregnant. With Ivan’s child.” I have no idea if that makes a difference, but it’s all I’ve got.
The silence in the room is total.
He straightens. He looks at me for a long moment, and the smile that comes onto his face is the worst thing I have seen tonight, which is a night that has had several candidates. He folds the knife and puts it away. “He’ll pay plenty for you, then.”
He turns and goes up the stairs. The light stays on. The door at the top locks with a sound I feel in my back teeth.
I stand in the middle of the concrete floor, and I breathe. I breathe again, I look at the room, and start counting what I have.
One door. One bulb. No windows. No phone—they took it in the alley.
And somewhere above me, a city that doesn’t know I’m here.