The Lateral

Chapter 13

M eadow was nodding. “Yep. Yeah, yes,” she said, and Jake was moving his head right along with hers.

“Let’s go,” he agreed. They both went to the door to put on their shoes, and she helped him when the heel of his got stuck. “Thank you,” he told her.

“You’re welcome. Did you see that Tre Watkins is demanding a trade from the Drovers? I heard that he and the offensive coordinator don’t get along.”

“No, I know Tre,” Jake answered. “He gets along with everybody, but they drafted another—”

“Hold on,” I said to them. “Just a minute.”

His hand was reaching for the door handle and Meadow’s coat was halfway on, but they stopped and looked at me. Both of them seemed a little confused. “I thought you were right behind us,” she said. “Why aren’t you getting ready to leave?”

“You need to wear your coat,” Jake noted. “And a hat, and gloves.” He, of course, was wearing a t-shirt. “I still can’t believe you have goddamn pneumonia.”

“Walking pneumonia isn’t caused by actual cold temperatures,” I said. “In my case, it was bacteria.”

“Ew!” Meadow wrinkled her nose. “Did I have them?”

“No, thank goodness,” I answered. No one else did, either, not Jake and not Calandra or her family. She reported that she was feeling great, but I could tell that she was still upset about Seyram Adiang. That was something that I wanted to work on, if possible, but for right now I needed to deal with the issue at hand.

Literally, because it was my hand. Jake walked over and took it, and he studied my fingers. “It goes here, correct?” he asked, brushing above my knuckle with his thumb. He lifted it into the air to get a better look. “Are your fingers abnormally small?”

Meadow trotted over to compare hers to mine, and between them, they decided that my fingers were maybe thinner than they should have been. “You got skinnier with being so sick,” she pointed out. “But next to Jake’s, we both look like we have creepy baby hands.”

“Mine are normal,” he said, which was simply not true. “How sick were you?” he asked me. “Neither of you have given me a good answer about why I was the last person to know about the pneumonia.”

“It was only the walking kind,” she assured him, and they started back to the door. “We went to a clinic because I called Petrise when Ember fain—”

“Hold on!” I said loudly, and they stopped. Now Meadow looked annoyed.

“If we leave now, we could also go to lunch and maybe a movie,” she said. “Come on!”

“When did we decide to do all that?” Jake asked her. “People hate it when I go to movies and sit in front of them. I have to be in the back row or there are problems.”

“I’m talking about our activity before we go to the movie,” I said, but the rest of it did sound fun. It would have been a good idea for me to do some research because I had submitted an application to the theater near our house and maybe I’d get an interview, which I hoped would go better than the one at the grocery store. But then I reconsidered the plan and decided against it. “No, Jake can’t sit for so long in a little chair. We can watch something here instead, where he can spread out and change positions to keep his shoulder feeling good.”

“Ok, we’ll just go to the jewelry store,” Meadow acquiesced, but I still hesitated. “Don’t you like jewelry?” She put her hand over the silver necklace that he had given her, which she never took off.

“I don’t know if I like it,” I admitted. “I guess I do, but I need you guys to understand that we’re only looking. We’re not going there to buy something. Everyone gets that, right?”

“I got it,” Jake told me, and Meadow said that she did as well. He held open the door and a chilly wind blew into the entryway along with some dead leaves. I went onto the porch before we got the house any dirtier and the two of them followed, still talking about Tre Watkins’ potential trade and, I thought, firmly believing that I was going to end up with a ring on one of the skinny fingers of my left hand.

I was driving since Jake’s movement was still limited, and he hadn’t rented a car down here because of that. He squeezed into the passenger side and Meadow sat behind me in the back so that he could recline the seat as far as possible, which gave him a little headroom. An inch or so.

“So, what kind do you want?” he asked me.

“What kind do I want to look at and consider ?” I corrected. “I’m not sure. Like you found out earlier, there are a lot of different things to think about.” I really never wore jewelry except for some little earrings, and this idea had never crossed my mind. But when I had come downstairs that morning, Jake had already been in the kitchen and after saying hello, it was the first thing that he brought up.

“Did you know that there are a lot of different kinds of stones?” he’d asked. “Hundreds.”

I had tried to think back to middle school science. “Like, from volcanos, or…”

“I mean gemstones,” he had explained, and showed me his phone screen. It was full of images of sparkling jewels, all different colors and shapes. “I’ve heard of diamonds and rubies, but there are also a lot of other ones. Some come in more colors than what you’d expect, too. I think emeralds are always green, but there are differences in the shade, and sapphires can be yellow, blue, clear, anything you can think of.”

“That’s funny,” I’d commented. I’d been glad to learn something new, even if I wasn’t sure why I was learning it. “Thanks for making coffee.”

“I wanted some, too.”

“Did you also want milk?” I had asked him, pointing to the little pitcher he’d put out. “I like it that way, but I thought you drank it black.”

“You have to consider the quality of the stone as well as the size,” Jake had continued, back to the former topic. “And then there are the shapes. They’re called ‘cuts.’ ‘Emerald-cut’ doesn’t just mean for emeralds,” he’d informed me. “There’s a lot to know. I’m going to talk to Demarius, our safety.”

I had known that “safety” was a football position on the offensive side—maybe. “Why do you need to talk to him?” I wondered.

Jake was already typing. “I know he just bought…ok, he answered.” They had sent a few more messages back and forth before he’d looked up at me again. “He gave me the name of the person he uses. By the way, the safety is a defensive back.”

“Oh, right. Why do you need his advice?”

“We should get you an engagement ring,” he’d casually mentioned, and I’d stared with my mouth actually gaping open like I was trying to catch flies.

Meadow had been all about it when she came down a few minutes later. “My mom never got a ring from her husband. He was my dad,” she had explained to Jake, and I hadn’t said a word about that. She wanted to believe that he was some guy that Christal had told her about, with the last name “Weiss,” but that person wasn’t on her birth certificate. She wanted to believe that he had really loved her, too, but my sister Alina, her grandmother, had never heard of him.

“It’s probably good that he didn’t give her a ring, because Mom would have pawned it like she did to the TV and the school tablet that I got in fourth grade,” she’d continued.

“I remember my mom selling a laptop that I had checked out from my middle school,” I had said, nodding.

“My great-grandma did that?” she’d asked in surprise, and Jake had looked back and forth between us before squinting and rubbing his eyes with his good hand.

“Yeah,” I had confirmed. “She didn’t get very much for it, though. About the ring—I don’t need one.”

“Don’t you want one?” Meadow had wondered.

“I…” I’d looked at both of them. She was so obviously hopeful and I thought that he was, too. “I’ll look at them,” I’d promised. And that was why we were now in the car and on our way.

Jake gave me directions to a town that was on the northwest side of Detroit, opposite from where I’d grown up south of the city. To my surprise, we didn’t go to a storefront but to an office building.

“It’s a gem dealer,” he explained. “You buy the loose stone and then you choose the setting.”

“Like, there are just vaults of jewels?” Meadow asked excitedly. I followed her line of thinking and imagined cartoon caves with sparkling gems sticking out of the walls and ceiling.

“I don’t know what it’s like,” he answered. “I’ve never done this either.”

Sadly, there wasn’t a cave dripping with precious stones in the basement of the office building. We went to a regular room on the second floor, but it did have an armed guard and several big safes. Apparently, the Woodsmen defensive back that Jake had talked to was a good client here because the jeweler had pulled out all the stops for us. It was actually overwhelming to see the array of stones, all the colors and all the sizes, all of them sparkling under the lights of the office. We sat in chairs across a desk from him as he whipped out trays with more and more beautiful jewels.

“How are you going to pick?” Meadow whispered.

“I’m just looking,” I reminded her.

“I don’t know,” Jake said, appraising me. “I don’t think a diamond is right.”

“Diamonds are always right,” the jeweler corrected him. “If not for her hand, what about earrings?”

“I don’t need earrings,” I announced. “No, thank you. Have you been doing this job for a long time? How did you get started in the business? Did you need to go to school for it?”

He told us about his history, certifications, and credentials as we continued to study the gems. “Look at these,” Meadow said, poking me and indicating another tray. “Don’t they remind you of something?”

“Those are from Sri Lanka,” the jeweler noted. “Sapphires.”

They were blue sapphires, and it was the color that had caught our attention. “They’re like Jake,” I said, and Meadow nodded. They were almost exactly the same shade as his eyes.

“You like that kind?” he asked me, and I nodded, too. Who wouldn’t?

“They’re beautiful,” I said, and then we had a big discussion about the cut of the stone, which one I liked best and what would look best on me. Jake held my hand, examining it as he listened and at the end…

“Good,” he said. “Now you’ll have a ring.”

“I don’t need one,” I reminded him. “Why is this so important to you?”

“It’s important for you,” he answered. “With that on your finger, you know it’s serious.”

“Then why didn’t you tell your girlfriend about me?” I asked, and he seemed a little stunned.

“Araceli and I were talking about her new job and her life in Chicago,” he explained. “She used to work for the Woodsmen on the operations side and she’s a big fan, so we discussed the season and my surgery. We talked about the Boones and their daughter, since she’s friends with Audrey. We remembered things we used to do together, too.”

That, more than anything else, was hard to hear. The two of them had a past, something that he and I didn’t share. I nodded, understanding that they’d been happy to spend time together and that he wouldn’t have thought of me while she was around. It was normal, nothing unusual, although I had to admit that it hurt my feelings. I shouldn’t have allowed that but I couldn’t seem to help it.

“It just didn’t come up,” I filled in. “I didn’t come up.”

“That’s a bad answer,” the jeweler announced. I looked over to see that both he and Meadow were listening to our conversation and frowning at Jake. “I’ve been married for twenty-two years, and your wife doesn’t want to hear that she wasn’t important enough to talk about.”

“And he was talking with a person who used to be his girlfriend,” Meadow added. “She was, right? Because she was all, ‘Oh, Jake and I are old friends and I know him so well, and I’m so cute,’ and it was disgusting. Ember is so much prettier.”

“Araceli wasn’t being disgusting,” Jake told her angrily.

“Also, you don’t want to defend the former girlfriend,” the other guy advised. “This is what’s known as digging the hole deeper. I advise an apology.”

“There’s no hole here,” Jake told him, his voice booming out. “There’s nothing to apologize for.” Maybe the jeweler agreed or maybe he just wanted to lock down the sale, because he said sure, do you want a matching necklace?

The ride back to Ann Arbor was very quiet. Meadow sat in the back with earbuds firmly in place (unlike Jake, they didn’t bother her). None of us had much to say, except when I tried to thank him.

“You don’t need to tell me that,” he said.

“I do, because you’re buying me a really expensive piece of jewelry,” I reminded him. He hadn’t let me know how much it cost, but I knew it was more than what I’d paid for my car.

“You don’t thank someone for an engagement ring.”

“Ok, but I do feel a lot of gratitude,” I explained. “So, thank you.”

“You don’t have to say that to me anymore, about anything.” He paused and then added, “We need to talk about Araceli.”

But I was a little tired of hearing her name. “You don’t have to say anything about that, either.”

“I wasn’t trying to not tell—I wasn’t not telling her,” he said, and then shook his head. “Mother of all fucks. I’m trying to say that I wasn’t avoiding the issue of you. That’s wrong, too.” He shook his head again. “You’re not an issue, you’re a person. I mean that I wasn’t trying to keep you a secret from her, although that was what the damn jeweler was implying.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” Jake asked.

“Sure,” I told him. I got it, just like he always said. He had been with the woman he loved but couldn’t have any longer because she wasn’t interested. If she’d still wanted him, she wouldn’t have left him with me. She wouldn’t have gone out to her car and taken off. So maybe she wasn’t so smart after all, because it was like Meadow had asked me: did she really think she would find someone better? Better than Jake? It was absurd.

I wondered what he’d said to her when he’d walked her to her car, but the more important thing was that he had let her go and then come back inside. To me. He’d hugged me, too, for a long time as we stood in the living room of that house, and then we’d sat on the couch together until we’d both fallen asleep with me resting against his shoulder, the one that hadn’t been surgically repaired. The ring that he’d bought this morning (for what I thought was a giant load of money) represented his acceptance that he and Araceli wouldn’t be together and that he was settling for me. That was ok.

“I’m not mad, like the jeweler thought I was,” I said, “and I’m not trying to argue. I don’t want to do that.”

“Good,” he said, and seemed relieved. He didn’t bring it up again which also relieved me. Yeah, it was a win to be second place, because at least it meant that you were still in the race and not stuck watching from the sidelines. I thought about Araceli. Maybe it wasn’t exactly a win.

The rest of Saturday and Sunday passed way too quickly for my liking. We were mostly with Meadow, of course, since we were in the same house—except it was a little unusual. She had spent a lot of her time in her bedroom in our rental, away from me. In Jake’s house, she was in the barn or the pen with the sheep and goats as much as possible. She even enjoyed hanging out with the chickens and the goose.

But for those two days, she stayed practically attached to my hip. I might have even used the word “clingy,” but it wasn’t like I minded it. I was actually overjoyed that she wanted to be with me, and I thought that maybe it was because she’d gotten scared by my illness. So I kept telling her that I was feeling good, until she said, “Yeah, I know. It’s honestly a little creepy how you keep repeating it, and you’re making me think that you need to get heart-removal surgery or something like that.”

“No, my heart is totally fine. All of me is,” I said, but she seemed less than reassured. I stopped saying the words and just tried to act normally, but despite how much I was enjoying myself with her and Jake, I found that hard. What was normal anymore? Going and buying loose gemstones that had to be kept in a huge safe? Him talking about me needing a new car, that we’d deal with it when he got home—and by “home,” he meant the place where we would all live together, although we hadn’t yet discussed the actual sleeping arrangements? And sure, I knew that he was scared of squid (they were really creepy, he’d written in his long document), but that didn’t mean we’d have a successful marriage. It didn’t mean he’d be happy with me and I wanted him to be happy.

Regarding the sleeping arrangements: those had been separate in the house in Ann Arbor, just as they were when we were up north. Not that you needed to be in a bed with someone for sex to happen, but it hadn’t. Of course, he’d just had surgery and it was possible that he felt too sore and tired…although from my experience at clubs, it didn’t seem like there was much that prevented men from wanting sex. At the place I’d danced in Des Moines, we’d had one guy wheeled in by his friends to get a lap dance right after he’d woken up out of a coma. I hadn’t considered it therapeutic or particularly hygienic, either.

Jake hadn’t directly written about sex in his “Important Life Issues” doc and neither of us brought up the topic this weekend, either. Maybe it wasn’t very important to him—in fact, when Meadow and I were leaving on Sunday afternoon, he didn’t kiss me goodbye, not even on the cheek. He took my hand, though, and he did share some important information.

“I’ll be home by next weekend,” he stated.

“Really? I thought you had to stay here longer.”

“No, I’m coming back. If I need to fly down again, I will.”

That was great news and I told him so, but it also gave me very little time to figure everything out. There was a lot to figure, too, about my job, our marriage, our future. It was so much that it made my head hurt slightly, but I couldn’t rub my temples in front of these guys because they would think that there was something else wrong. Actually, I was fine, absolutely fine. It was lucky for me that I had these amazing problems to worry about, instead of the other issues that had sometimes plagued me in my life. It was a fortunate thing to think, “I wonder if I’ll have sex with this wonderful man?” rather than, “I wonder if I’ll have a bed to sleep in or if more family is staying here again?” or “I wonder where I can hide from my pimp so that he can’t find me and beat me up? Again?”

On our long drive home, Meadow chattered about Jake, my ring, the marriage ceremony, and how she’d tell all the people at school about everything. “They’ll die,” she said happily. I nodded along, but I did warn her that they probably wouldn’t believe her.

“When I was in school, I told a story about my dad that no one believed, and people remembered for years,” I explained. “If I saw some of my old classmates right now, someone would probably say, ‘How’s your dad, the firefighter?’ and they’d all laugh.”

“Was that true that your dad was a firefighter, though?” she asked doubtfully. “My grandma said that guy didn’t stick around.”

“Yeah, Alina was right. I never knew him,” I admitted. “So in my case, it was a lie, but your case sounds so crazy that I don’t think they’ll believe it, either.”

“They’ll see,” she said confidently, but then looked over at me. “You’re not still considering backing out, right?”

“No!” I said, frustrated. “Jake just bought that expensive sapphire for me! I wouldn’t make him waste all that money.”

“I thought so,” she said smugly. “You’re always worried about money.”

Yeah, I was. That was why I contacted the movie theater about my application on Monday, but they didn’t get back to me. It was also why I stopped by B-Dzld, after getting my hair trimmed and fixing my makeup until it was perfect. I also wore the shirt that I’d put on for my original meeting there, the first time Travis had hired me, and I paired it with a skirt that was even shorter.

“Back again,” he said as I walked in, but he did a double take and ogled me more carefully. “You look good, but you’re not perfect.”

“You let Tiffany dance when she had stitches in her cheek and you didn’t say anything when I had a split lip,” I reminded him.

“I keep telling you girls to leave those guys.”

“Come on, Travis,” I said, and he told me he’d think about it. “Come on,” I repeated. “I need this job. Please?”

He’d been walking away but paused. “Come tomorrow night and be ready to go,” he said over his shoulder, and I breathed out and nodded. It seemed like I had my job again at B-Dzld, and I headed to my car full of relief. Jake had tried to give me more money before we’d left Ann Arbor but I’d said that I didn’t need it. That morning, we’d gone shopping and he’d bought Meadow practically an entire new wardrobe and that was way more than enough—I wasn’t with him for financial reasons.

Well…I did need his money for Meadow. And also, I wasn’t really with him, not fully. So I was a liar and a user, but I wasn’t stopping. No, I wasn’t, even though it made me feel like crud.

My phone rang as I drove, startling me, but thankfully it wasn’t the school. “What the hell are you doing?” Calandra demanded when I answered. “I just heard from Ginnifer that you’re back at B-Dzld.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Isn’t that a relief?”

“Hell, no!” she yelled into the phone. “Why the hell are you doing that?”

“Um, I guess because I need a job,” I told her. “I’m not going to live off Jake.”

“And why the hell not?” she demanded, and then asked herself, “How many times have I said that word? I may have set a record.”

“You know that it’s a dangerous thing to put your financial trust in someone,” I said, and I heard her snort. Then she did it again, slowly and with purpose. “I don’t want to listen to that,” I told her, and she said the same thing.

“I don’t want to listen to that, either! It’s you saying something that sounds all mature and respectable, but I know the truth.”

“You do not!”

“I do, because Meadow texted me! She told me that his ex-girlfriend was at that house when you two showed up—”

“I’m not upset about that,” I interjected.

“If you’re not, you’re nutso. If I came upon my man having drinks in private with his ex, and he hadn’t cleared it with me first?” She detailed several consequences that would ensue in those circumstances. “But you’re right,” she concluded.

“Huh?”

“You’re right that you don’t need to be upset,” Calandra told me. “He knew you were on your way to that house. Unless Jake is literally the stupidest person in the world—”

“He isn’t!”

She kept going. “Or unless he thought he’d make her invisible somehow, then I agree that there wasn’t anything going on between him and his ex. The fact that he didn’t try to hustle her out makes me pretty sure that it was all innocent. Thoughtless, but innocent.”

It didn’t explain anything about his feelings for her, though, and I thought again about second place. It was still on the podium, a silver medal which was certainly better than spit in your eye. “I agree that they weren’t having sex at that moment,” I said, because she was waiting for my response.

“Meadow was so pissed. She wanted to kick that girl’s ass.”

“I know,” I sighed. “I’m sorry that’s her first instinct, but it makes sense with who we are. I’m glad she didn’t act on it, because Araceli was nice. And also, you’re not supposed to attack people and all that.”

“Yeah, I’m also happy that she kept it locked down. Now let’s get back to the issue of you and your princess movie going off the rails,” Calandra stated.

“What are you talking about?”

“You, Ember, I’m talking about you being delusional. ‘It’s a dangerous thing to put your financial trust in someone,’” she quoted me, making her voice higher and preachy. I didn’t talk like that. “We both know that you’re not dancing at B-Dzld because you’re afraid of putting your ‘financial trust’ in Jake. Although, I agree, it’s important to have your own resources.”

“What exactly do you think I’m doing?” I asked, but she asked me a question in return.

“Weren’t you going to spend time figuring out a career? Weren’t you thinking about working on your education?”

“Well…yeah,” I confessed.

“And? Did you tell Jake you want to do that? Didn’t he ask you about the future? Didn’t he send you a whole plan about what he wants to do?”

“I think I’m getting another call.”

“Don’t play like that.”

“No, I really am,” I told her. “Oh, fiddlesticks. It’s from the jail.”

“Local?” she asked, and when I quickly said yes, she said, “Christal. Text if you need me.”

But I had a history with this kind of situation. Before I’d left home, I’d tagged along to bond out plenty of different people and although it had been a while, the memories came back. I parked and sat in front of the county correctional facility, just like I had with my mother when I was a kid.

“Why are we paying this bail stuff again?” I’d asked her back then, when I got old enough to question our motivations.

“Because he didn’t really do it.” That had been a common rationale that she’d given me. Her offspring/niece/nephew/stepkid/husband/boyfriend/et cetera had been led astray—it hadn’t been their fault and we needed to help the innocent victim. Another common refrain was that the police were to blame. They had manufactured evidence or were inventing crimes that had never happened. It also could have been the fault of the stupid city of Taylor/River Rouge/Inkster/Detroit/ et cetera, or even the legislators in the far-off state capital of Lansing who made such confusing laws and in such a ridiculous quantity that no person could ever follow them.

But sometimes there hadn’t been an excuse. My mom had just taken a final draw off her cigarette and shrugged as she stubbed it out. “This is how it is, Ember,” she’d said on those occasions. “This is what you do for family.” I sat in my car and thought about it now. I thought about my mom, Christal, and especially Meadow, and I wasn’t sure what I should do. I picked up my phone again.

“Hi,” Jake answered.

“Hi.”

After a short silence, he asked, “Did you need something?”

“Christal got arrested and arraigned and I’m sitting at the jail wondering if I should bail her out.”

“No,” he answered immediately, and then sighed. “Meadow.”

“Yeah, she’ll be heartbroken if I leave her mom here. Although, it’s probably the best place for Christal.”

“Can you explain that?”

“Not in a way I think she’d understand. Would you get it if your only real parent was locked up and I didn’t step in?” I asked.

“I don’t have a parent like that. Thank God,” he added. “Before you do anything, you should think about it for a while. Talk to Meadow and try to get her to see that jail is actually the safest place for Christal.”

“Maybe she’ll listen,” I said, hopeful.

“Maybe.” He didn’t sound that way himself.

“You know, I’d have to use your money. You gave me all that cash before you left, and I don’t have enough myself to do it. I don’t have anything that’s worth anything that I could put up for collateral. But I will soon enough, right? I’ll have a beautiful ring from you.”

There was silence.

“I wouldn’t really do that,” I told him. “I wouldn’t put something so special at risk, but I’m just saying—”

“You’re trying to talk me out of marriage. Again. Can you, for a moment, believe that I know my own mind? It’s pretty fucking insulting that you feel like you have to hold my hand and walk me through my choices.”

“Ok.” I swallowed. “Ok, I’m sorry. I won’t do that anymore.”

“Ember—”

“I have to go figure out this thing with Christal,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.” He’d been calling regularly, at least before the disagreement that had just happened between us.

“Ember,” he repeated, and sighed again.

“Bye,” I said. I hung up.