Chapter 18
After meeting with a few new clients and closing down Finnegan’s, we went to the Waffle House, of course. We were engaged in one of my projects: sewing shut the flaps of several pairs of men’s underwear.
“You did wash these, right?” Salcedo asked, her mouth pursed in a look of disgust.
“Twice. In hot water,” I said. “Also, the quicker you stitch, the sooner we get this project done.”
“This is disgusting. Some other man’s underwear.” Salcedo stopped sewing long enough to gape at Havisham, whose stitches were quick and precise. She was sewing three flaps to my one. “How do you do that?”
“I had to take home ec,” Havisham said.
“What?”
“Home economics. Sew, clean, make sure you serve vegetables with meat.”
“I probably should’ve had that class,” the youngest among us said. “Mom had me taking four sciences, four maths, AP this and AP that. Now I struggle to sew on a button.”
“Probably could’ve used that class myself,” I said as I picked up the last of the underwear.
“Maybe if I’d taken more classes in math and science, I wouldn’t still be working at a bar,” Havisham said.
“Y’all using up two of my tables and now you’re sewing on men’s drawers, but you don’t have any boyfriends,” Betty said as she took the dishes from the booth behind me. “Y’all are some odd ducks.”
“Well, we couldn’t very well do this project at the table where we ate,” I said. “Might get food on these freshly laundered briefs.”
“Whatever,” she said. “Y’all are weird.”
I paused. Being called weird by a Waffle House waitress had to be a whole new level of strange. I didn’t want to imagine some of the things Betty had seen.
But Betty also reminded me of our previous late-night conversation. “Salcedo, at the risk of failing your Bechdel Test, I need to get both of your opinions on something.”
“What?” Salcedo asked at the same time Havisham said, “Shoot.”
“So, you know how I was doing a job for Trista Malone?”
“The trophy wife who drinks cougar juice?” asked Havisham.
“Eh, yeah. Pretty sure there’s a lot more to her than that, but that’s a succinct description for now.”
At this point I had to catch Salcedo up on everything that had happened, because she’d been busy with final exams and a couple of presentations. She listened intently. “So, the guy who you thought was her husband is not, in fact, her husband?”
“Yep.”
“And you’re attracted to him?”
“Almost did the deed right there in the living room with the cat watching.”
“Stark. Too much detail,” Havisham said with a snort.
“Or not enough,” Salcedo countered.
“But then he punched out Ken, and I was worried about fight bite—”
“Worried about what?” asked Salcedo.
This necessitated a discussion of how nasty the human mouth was, proximity of the nose thereto, bacteria, gross hand infections, and so on.
“So you think he’s hot?” asked Havisham, bringing the conversation to more pleasant topics.
“Understatement of the century.”
“And he’s not a cheater?”
“Doesn’t appear to be.”
She tilted her head to consider me, and her sum conclusion seemed to be that I was off my rocker. “Then where’s the problem?”
“He’s going back to California, so we’re talking friends with benefits.”
And pizza.
Heavens, just the thought of him made me smile.
Havisham snapped in front of my face to bring me back to reality. “And?”
“I think she’s afraid she’ll catch feelings,” said Salcedo.
“Catch what? How does one catch feelings?” asked Havisham.
While Salcedo translated current slang into Boomer, I looked out the Waffle House window.
Correction: I attempted to look out the window, but the air-conditioning had to have been set at sixty, while the outside was a balmy eighty-five, so condensation prevented me from actually seeing out.
“But that’s not the weirdest part,” I said to no one in particular.
“What?” asked Havisham and Salcedo in unison.
“Remember how we were joking around about the universe?”
“I wasn’t joking,” muttered Havisham. Salcedo shot her a dirty look.
“Here’s the kicker: He has one brown eye and one blue eye.”
Salcedo’s jaw dropped, and she laughed.
“And he mentioned that he’s read this self-help book that the lady upstairs gave me.”
“What book?” asked Havisham. Based on the straight line of her mouth, she wasn’t as ready to buy into signs from the universe.
“Daring Greatly by Brené Brown.”
“Oh, you should totally read that,” Salcedo enthused.
“But what are the odds, right?”
“Eh, you have several other criteria he hasn’t met, and I have yet to meet my cowboy billionaire philanthropist.”
“You’re right. It’s all ridiculous,” I said.
“Come on, what can it hurt?” Salcedo asked.
“I should just be alone.”
“No one needs to stay alone forever. It goes against Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” Salcedo tossed her last pair of underwear into the pile.
“I swear you are making some of this shit up,” Havisham said.
“Ugh, no. It was in my psychology class.”
“I do remember that one,” I said.
Havisham said nothing. Silence hung among us long enough that I could hear Betty and Jasper squabbling about whose turn it was to clean the bathrooms. We all knew Betty was going to win the argument and leave the task to Jasper, but I couldn’t grudge him his part in their evening entertainment.
“Havisham?”
She took a deep, ragged breath. “Listen, Stark. A month ago, maybe even a week ago, I would’ve agreed with you, but living alone isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Fine. I’ll keep the cat.”
“Oh, I definitely think you need to keep the cat, but maybe be open to something more?”
“First of all, it hasn’t been a year. Second, he told me he’s leaving. If he were open to something more, don’t you think he would’ve mentioned that? Third, I’m not entirely sure who he is beyond having the first name Tiberius and not being Blake.”
“At least he hasn’t promised you more than he’s going to deliver?” Salcedo said in a small voice.
“Y’all aren’t all that helpful,” I said.
“Au contraire. We are helpful indeed. Where’s the tally on the car fund?”
I checked the Notes app on my phone. “Well, I’m not getting the other fifteen hundred from Trista, but I have almost four thousand down with another three thousand to go. In . . . eleven days. And that’s the other reason I can’t sleep with him. I can’t afford to pay Havisham fifty dollars.”
She and Salcedo laughed. Salcedo looked up, the very devil in her eyes. “I’ll spot you the fifty dollars if you’ll spill the tea after you do the deed.”
“It’s the principle of the thing, Salcedo.”
“Three thousand dollars is doable, Stark,” Havisham said. “If I have to beat the bushes to find more patrons for you, I will, but let’s see if we can avoid any other underwear-related jobs.”
Once back at the Bel Air Apartments, I looked at Malone’s windows. Dark. I considered knocking on his door. Didn’t. Instead, I picked up Mrs. Q’s book and had a seat on the couch. My kitten soon followed.
Mrs. Q had had the audacity to circle a chapter heading about how people can’t go it alone.
All her notes and highlights were for herself, but I felt reproached nonetheless.
I rolled my eyes and kept reading. Eventually, I came across the chapter in which a man tells Brown that men suffer from shame, too.
Even worse, according to this man, women couldn’t handle it if a man expressed raw emotion despite saying that’s what they wanted.
A lump formed in my throat as I thought about . . . my father. Did shame explain why he’d done the things he had? Or hadn’t done the things he didn’t do, as the case might be.
Nope. Putting those memories right back in the vault where they belonged.
Shame didn’t excuse some of the things he’d said to me.
Unfortunately, being a child didn’t absolve me from my part in the drama, either.
My kitten jumped into my lap and settled in the middle of my book like the world’s cutest, fluffiest, most misshapen bookmark.
“It’s very difficult to read through you,” I said.
She purred.
“I suppose you want to be petted?”
If there had been a subtitle for our situation, it would’ve said “purring intensifies.”
“How am I supposed to learn about embracing vulnerability and shame if there’s a cat in the middle of my book?”
She rolled over on her back, baring her belly and blinking slowly at me.
That little, fuzzy belly called to me. I wanted desperately to feel her fur, but would she close her claws over my hand and bite me to form the world’s cutest bear trap?
She arched her back and exposed more belly.
“Oh, so you’re going to show me how to be vulnerable, huh?”
My only answer was more purring and tiny air biscuits. Tentatively, gently, I reached down to rub her belly, and it was as soft as I’d imagined. She did close her paws around me, but no claws.
“Look at you, my little queen of vulnerability. I’m gonna call you Brené Brown.”
Wait. My queen? I was not going to keep this cat, much less elevate her to royal status.
I couldn’t even finish the thought still believing it was true.
It was too late.
I’d named her. We were bound together for the duration, so there was no need to call the cat shelter.
At the mere thought of taking my sweet Brené Brown to a shelter, my heart hurt. I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t.
Unaware of my inner turmoil, she yawned before sliding out of my book and curling up to sleep on my lap. Trapped, I had no choice but to continue reading her namesake’s book.
While I was brushing my teeth before bed, I got the phone call from Trista that I’d been half expecting. She didn’t even bother with hello. “Did you mean it when you said you could find my husband?”
“Yes. Finding people who don’t want to be found is one of the things I do,” I said cautiously.
“Money’s back on the table if you can find him in the next month and serve him with divorce papers.”
“You’re on,” I said.
“I just want this all to be over,” she said.
“Then I’ll do my best to make it sooner rather than later.”
We made arrangements for me to meet her the next morning.