Chapter 12
CURDLING
When I get home, I’m gazing out of the kitchen window over the iron stairwell at the back of the building when I see a flash of blonde hair.
My apartment is the only one on the top floor, so people are never here unless they’re heading for my front door.
The knocker rattles. I carefully place the plate I’m washing on the dish rack and step over to the door.
When I open it, a woman in tight jeans, a lace shirt, and one of those bomber jackets that I could never afford is standing outside with her eyes narrowed.
I’d guess she’s about my age, but the similarities end there as I take in her perfectly made-up face and long blonde hair.
“Is Rig here?” she says.
I shake my head.
As I eye her up, the feeling that something has changed starts to seep away.
I knew she was something to do with Rig before she even opened her mouth, and really, I’m not that surprised.
My stomach churns. If Marni was here, she would tell me off.
Her mantra of never hoping that relationships with men will amount to anything and never being disappointed loops through my head.
Those comments always amuse the hell out of me because she says these negative things about men, but out of the two of us, she’s the eternal optimist.
When I focus back in on the woman, her foot is tapping against my doormat, and she’s scanning me from head to toe, eyes running over my holey leggings and the oversized sweater I stretched by hanging it up when it was wet.
“He told me he’d be here.”
He did? Rig said only his buddy Jake knew. Part of his lying low strategy, he said. It just now occurs to me that I’ve only got his word for it that people were after him after that fight. Nobody knows I’m here, babe. Can I stay for a few days?
“When did he tell you that?”
She scowls. “Yesterday.”
He was talking to her yesterday? Ugh. Of course, Jake might not exist at all.
One truth I do know, though, is that he’s probably got as many women chasing around town after him as he’s got guys who are after him for losing the fight.
I open the door farther and wave at her to come in. “Come in and have a look if you like.”
Her nose wrinkles as she looks over her shoulder and down the stairwell she’s just come up.
I sigh. “Can I pass on a message?”
Her eyes go wide. “You know where he is?”
I eye her glossy hair. Maybe all the stuff he said about email and video calls was just a nicer way of letting me down than the first time he took off. I shrug.
“I’m Sadie, Rig’s girlfriend.” She sniffs. Girlfriend? My stomach cramps painfully. “I’ve been trying to track him down, but no one seemed to know where he was, and Jake kept telling me he was off on a contract. Then he said he’d be here.”
And now he’s conveniently disappeared. So maybe Jake was the only one who knew where he was originally. I study her again. So this is the infamous Sadie. Maybe I’ve got a few questions for her. She pushes a hand through her long blonde hair.
“We’ve been together for five years.” She gives me a glittering smile. “He’s already spoken for.”
He said his relationship with Sadie finished a long time ago. I lean against the doorjamb. This is the third version of the Sadie story I’ve heard. He said it was over. Marge said it was on and off. And now, according to Sadie, they’re still together.
“I heard your relationship was over,” I say.
Her laugh is brittle. “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? Women throw themselves at him.” She wrinkles her nose.
Acid rises up my throat, hot and sharp. I didn’t throw myself at him. “He’s not an unwilling participant,” I say.
She scowls. “All the girls in this town are sluts, and all the guys here fuck around. Rig and I have an agreement.”
Do they indeed?
“He’s going to get me out of here,” she adds.
Why does she need him? She could just get in her car and go. And I don’t appreciate being called a slut. Almost as bad as someone telling you you’re fucked up. Is she his type? I am nothing like her.
You’re not how I thought you’d be.
When her eyes come back to mine, they’re narrowed on me. “Did he clean and cook? Fix things up for you?” She nods at the apartment behind me, and her chin has a bitter jut to it as my heart sinks. “Talk about buying a house by the sea with you?” she adds.
And my heart slumps down into my feet. He did most of the cooking and cleaning over the last six days. He told me about the beach house, though I wasn’t invited to buy it with him.
“He told me he was saving for a house.”
She laughs. “Saving? He makes a ton of money on the rigs that he’s been stashing away for years. He doesn’t need to save for anything.”
Then another thought occurs to me, maybe he’s ducking and diving with all the different women he’s been sleeping with.
Maybe he’s not on a rig at all, and this is his convenient way of moving on.
He tells whatever woman he’s with that he’s got a contract on a rig and moves on to the next one.
Maybe he moved on from Sadie, and she’s chasing him around town.
Now he’s probably moved on from me. Well, I’m not turning up on doorsteps and asking where the hell he is.
Anger burns up, hot and fast. All his questions about hopes and dreams. Buttering me up.
If any of this is true, then he’s a great actor. Fuck.
“He’s gone off on a job; he went yesterday,” I tell her, and her face screws up as she looks away.
“If you do hear from him, tell him I have to talk to him about our apartment,” she says.
What? I stare at her, but all that comes out of my mouth is “Our apartment?”
“Yeah, our apartment,” she repeats, narrowing her eyes at me again. “I need to talk to him about some repairs.”
Repairs? He has an apartment? With her? And he’s fixing it up …
so … so … they bought this place? He told me about the trailer and his mom’s farm, but he never mentioned this.
Maybe the trailer is the place he takes women to fuck them, Carly.
Holy shit. I mean, she could be lying about all this stuff, but it’s hard to lie about an apartment.
Names are on deeds, and you can look up that kind of thing.
Maybe I will. He said he had nowhere to live …
Well, no, actually, he didn’t say that. He said he needed somewhere to hide.
And he did have other places to stay. Clearly.
He could have gone to his mom’s. Or, it appears, an apartment he has with Sadie.
Fuck, I’m an idiot. Am I so desperate to find a good guy that I’m an easy mark?
“Whatever he’s told you, don’t believe it,” she says.
“Yeah, I’m getting that,” I say as I stare at my socks.
“Honest to God, he’s always got some tall story, some line to feed you.” She shrugs. “But …” She looks down at her hands. “… he’s decent in other ways.” Her chin juts out again.
If she’s lying, she’s a stellar actress.
And I understand only too well all the other ways in which he’s decent.
How come I wasn’t aware of his relationship with Sadie when I picked him up?
All I’d heard was that he was a womanizer.
And you’d do well to remember that about him, Carl.
None of this sunshine-and-flowers bullshit.
You’d think with Marge and her posse, I’d be on the hotline to the best inside information there is.
Those old gals talk to everyone and know everything.
Now I’m thinking it’s a very fine line between him being blunt with a twist and someone who’s an out-and-out asshole.
I’m on my own for a lot of reasons, and I thought he was on his own for good reasons, too.
I guess I didn’t push hard enough into what those things were.
I’m willing to bet there are a lot of women in this town who think like Sadie does about him.
How many are given the story about the house on the beach?
“Okay,” I say, because, at this point, I have no idea what to say.
She tosses her hair over her shoulder, turns around, and clomps down the stairs in her fancy shoes, and I watch her tiny ass sway in her designer jeans and turn and shut the door, then lean against it.
Why are men never the something special you think they are?
Maybe I shouldn’t believe everything she’s told me, but I think it’s also clear I shouldn’t be believing everything he’s told me, either.
I eye up the vodka on the countertop. Five minutes, Carly.
Five minutes of death around the block, then you can have a drink.
When I arrive back sucking in breaths like I’m about to die, my mind is still buzzing, and I don’t feel like drinking, like, at all.
Goddammit, I could do with someone to talk to.
I don’t want to talk to Marni; she’ll just tell me to move on.
I could maybe talk to Brit, but she clearly worships the ground Rig walks on.
But there is one person I know I can talk to, so I get in my car and head out to the church graveyard.
I pick some flowers by the side of the road on my way, and when I get there, I take my trowel out of the trunk, my grass shears, a plastic bottle filled with water, and soap and a small dish so I can wash the vase I have on the grave.
I spend an hour tidying it all up and adding the flowers and another hour lying on the grass next to Charlie under the tree, rambling on about Rig and how much I was hoping it would be different.
I don’t know where my hoping for something better came from or how it started, but it feels like it’s been a noose around my neck all my life.
Then I tell Charlie how much I miss him and how I wish he was still here, and I start to cry.