The First

There were nine people coming to my house in an hour, and I had my dress up over my hips and my forearms flat on my own dresser, because my man asked me a question at the wrong time. “You got an hour.”

“I’ve got fifty minutes.”

“So say no.” That is the whole of how my day started going sideways. “Tell me to stop.”

“I’m not telling you anything.”

“Then say it again.” He had one hand spread on my belly, holding the weight of it off me, which is the only thing I need from anybody at five months. The other hand was already gone. “Say the thing you said in the car.”

“I said I wanted your mouth.”

“Where.”

“Adrien.”

“Nah.” He kissed the back of my shoulder. “Use the words. You taught me that.” I taught him that in a parking lot nine years ago and he has made me pay for it about four hundred times since.

“I want your mouth on my pussy,” I told the mirror. “Before the Hails get here.”

“That’s all you want?” He got my other heel off and set it on the floor.

“That’s what I want first.”

“Mm.” He went down behind me like a man with nowhere to be. “Say please.”

“I will put you out of here.” He laughed into the back of my thigh.

· · ·

He has never once done this quickly. I have never once gotten him to. He got me up on the edge of that dresser, pushed my thighs wide, and then sat back on his heels and looked at me. “What.”

“Nothing.”

“Adrien.”

“You’re wet already,” he said, like a man reading a number off a page. “We been upstairs ninety seconds.”

“You want a prize?” I murmured back.

“I want you to say it.”

“Say what, that my pussy’s wet? It’s been wet since the car, Adrien, you knew that before you came up here.”

“I did know.”

“Then what are we doing,” I pressed quietly.

“Say what?”

“That you were thinking about it downstairs.” He put his thumb on my clit and left it there, not moving, which that man knows is worse than anything else he could do. “While you were counting chairs.”

“I was counting chairs.” He didn’t move his thumb.

“Cherie.”

“I was counting chairs and thinking about it,” I said, “and if you take your hand off me I will end you.” He put his mouth on me. I had my fingers in his beard and my heel knocking the drawer.

He did what he has done since the first winter. He didn’t change a thing when I got loud. Every other man I ever had took loud as instructions. “Don’t speed up.”

“I’m not going to.”

“You always say that,” I whispered back.

“And I never do,” he said into me. “Nine years.”

“Don’t you dare—”

“I’m not.”

“I mean it.”

“I know what you mean.” Two fingers, slow, and his tongue flat, and he kept both exactly where they were while I came all the way apart on my own furniture with a house about to fill up underneath me.

· · ·

He stood up and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist. “What time is it.”

“Don’t ask me that now.”

“I’m asking,” he insisted quietly.

“Twenty of,” he said, very pleased with himself.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your face did.”

He got my dress down for me, which he does without being asked, and he did the zip, and he put one hand flat on the back of my neck for two seconds the way he does. “You want me to—”

“We don’t have time.”

“I didn’t ask you what time it was,” he countered flatly.

“Nine people, Adrien.”

“Then tell me no.”

I looked at that man in the mirror for about a second and a half. “Lock the door,” I said.

· · ·

He went in slow because he has to now, with his hand under my belly the whole time and his mouth at my ear, and he talked the entire way through it, which he always has. “You feel that?”

“I feel it.”

“Say it,” he murmured back.

“I can feel your cock, Adrien, I’m five months pregnant, I’m not deaf.”

He laughed somewhere behind my ear. “This is still the best thing I ever did.”

“Marrying nobody?”

“Getting in that car.” He got a fistful of my dress. “You and your shoes in your hand.”

“Don’t talk about that right now.”

“Why not.”

“Because I’ll cry and I’ve got Lisa Hail coming.”

He laughed, and then he stopped laughing, and the last of it was him holding my hip with one hand and my whole stomach with the other and saying my name twice into my hair. Afterward I sat on the end of my own bed with one shoe on, breathing. “Your hair’s gone,” he said from the bathroom.

“I know my hair’s gone.”

“I’m just reporting it.”

“Go downstairs.”

· · ·

The house got loud around six the way it always does. “Who put this on?”

“Amaya.”

“Of course.” I had my hands in a bowl of ice water because my fingers swell now.

“Eleven or twelve?” Dessie, behind me, with the plates.

“Twelve. Marcus brings somebody.”

“He said two,” Dessie offered.

“He always says two.”

“And the end of the table?” she prompted me.

“Not Amaya. Put Lisa there.”

“Mm,” Dessie said, and went. That’s not a mood. That’s a job. It’s mine, and there has never been one night in this house where somebody else did it.

· · ·

“You already decided I was coming.” Zaira with her head back over my bowl and her throat open, saying that to my ceiling. The water running warm through the back of her locs. My thumbs at her temples.

“Say that again.”

“You heard me.”

“I heard you. Say it again anyway.”

She didn’t open her eyes. That girl learned a long time ago that the chair is the only place in this house where she can hand me a thing and not have to watch my face take it. “You put me on the list,” she said. “In the order you wanted me in. Next to who you wanted me next to. Then you came up and told me what I was wearing.”

“And?”

“And I love it. I want that said. The night nobody laid anything out for me was the worst night I ever had in this house.”

“So what are we doing.”

“I’m asking you who else that happens to.” I took my hands out of her hair. That is not a thing I do. Twenty-six years, maybe four times, and every one of them was a fire.

She came up on her elbows with the water running off her. “Cherie.”

“Lie back down. You’re dripping on my floor.”

“You going to answer me?”

I turned the water down. “I’m going to think about it.”

“That’s what he says.”

“I know what he says,” I allowed quietly.

“He says it and then he takes three months.”

“Then you know where I got it.” She laughed with her throat open, which comes out more like water going down a drain. “Lie down.”

“Are you mad at me?” She had her eyes shut again.

“No.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

“I’m not mad at you, Zaira.” I got my thumbs back where they were. “I’m working out how long you’ve been sitting on that.”

“Two weeks.”

My hands kept going. “Two weeks.”

“I wanted to say it right.”

“You said it right.”

· · ·

Elise came in sideways with the tablet against her chest and did not stop walking. “There’s something at the gate.”

“There’s always something at the gate.”

“There’s a man at the gate with an envelope and he won’t leave it with Rueben.” She was past me already. “He drove up from the city. He’ll put it in your hand or he’ll take it back.”

“Pleasant about it?”

“Very. Pleasant like a man who was told what to say and practiced it in the car,” Elise reported.

“Is he carrying?”

“No. And he let me see that he wasn’t, which is its own kind of information.”

“Okay.”

“Cherie.” She stopped walking.

That is the part that got my attention. Not the envelope. Elise does not stop walking. “He asked for you by your name,” she said. “Not the house. Not Mr. Cole.”

· · ·

Sixty or so, short-sleeve shirt with a collar. Hands out where I could see them; he had the thing in a plastic sleeve, in the cold, with no rain falling.

“Mrs. Amore.” Nobody calls me that. Not one person on this earth.

“Miss.”

“Miss Amore.” He handed it over with both hands, the way you hand somebody a plate, and stepped back exactly one step. “He said to tell you it isn’t a demand. He was particular about it. He said, tell her it is not a demand, it is a page.”

“Who is he.”

“He said you’d know when you looked,” he delivered it.

“And if I don’t.”

He thought about it. I watched the man decide to tell me the truth, which I don’t often get out of somebody standing in a driveway. “Then I apologize for the trouble and drive home. He paid me for the day either way.” He shifted his feet. “Can I say something?”

“Go ahead.”

“He’s not well.” It came out fast, like it had been sitting in his mouth the whole way up the Parkway. “That’s not me pleading for him. I barely know the man.”

“Then why say it.”

“Because you’ll see in there the handwriting isn’t his”—he looked at the sleeve, then made himself look back up at me—“and I didn’t want you standing out here thinking somebody was playing at being old.”

“How long has he been sick.”

He looked at his own shoes. “I couldn’t tell you that.”

“You could guess.”

“A while.”

“What do you move for him.” A car went by down on the road.

“Parts. Props, mostly. He had three stores when I started. He’s got one now.” He almost smiled. “The one he’s got is the one his wife does the books in. That tells you which one he was never going to close.”

“Does she know you came up here?”

He thought about that one longer than any of the others. “She knows he sent somebody,” he said. “I don’t believe she knows where.” Then he got in a Camry and went back down my hill.

· · ·

Rueben put his floodlight on for me and I opened it on the hood of his car. “You want me to run it inside?”

“No.”

“It’s cold.”

“Rueben.”

“I know.” He stepped back off the hood and put his hands in his coat. “I’m not reading it. I’m standing here.”

“That’s all I asked.”

A photocopy. One page out of a spiral notebook. The wire marks ran down the left edge, little black commas, the way they come out when a man lays a notebook face down on the glass and leans on it. The hand was big and slanted. It put a line through its sevens. I knew that hand. I knew it before I read a word of it. The way you know a man’s cough through a wall. “Miss Amore.”

“I’m fine.”

“I didn’t ask you.”

“Then don’t stand there with your face doing that.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He used to write my grocery list in that hand. Then he’d put the pen behind his ear and lose the pen, every time, and tell me somebody took it. A Tuesday in a spring nine years gone. A list of what got settled that day, written the way a man writes down what he is owed.

“That’s a slip number,” Rueben said from the car.

“I thought you weren’t reading it.”

“I’m not. I can see the shape of it from here.”

“What else can you see from there.”

“That whoever wrote it kept books on paper, and that he wasn’t hiding them from himself.” A name I didn’t know. The word HULL in capitals with a figure beside it, and the figure was more money than I had ever touched. A second figure under it, smaller, with the word CLEAN after. Three lines up from the bottom, same hand, same ink, in the same list as the boat:

C / FRI / LA GORCE / SETTLED.

And under it, the other one.

R.B. WIFE / FRI / SAME.

I read my own initial four times. I read it the way you check a bill you already know is right. Behind me somebody opened the terrace door. Four seconds of my own house came out. Glasses. Amaya laughing. A man’s voice I couldn’t place saying something that got the whole room. Then the door shut and it was quiet. And I was afraid. I am not often afraid. “Miss Amore.”

“Don’t.”

“You want to sit in the car a minute?”

“No.”

“I’ll leave the heat on.”

“Rueben.”

“It’s on,” he said, and went and sat in it, and left the door open for me, and did not look at me one time. I wasn’t ashamed. I had nine years to be ashamed and I used them up.

I knew my own line. I always knew my own line, down to the coffee in that booth and the knock in a radiator on Palisade Avenue. I had never once thought about the second one. R.B. WIFE. She had a bowl in her hands; she was being nice to me. I put my hand on her arm; I did not ask that woman her name.

· · ·

I came back in through the mud room so I wouldn’t have to cross my own kitchen. Stood in the dark of it with my coat on and my hand flat on the dryer. And I did the arithmetic I’ve done every day since I was twenty-six. What am I holding. What does it want. Who does it reach.

It reaches Zaira, upstairs, with wet hair and a point she has already won. It reaches Elise, who has nine years of lists. It reaches a sick man in a yard in Florida. And it reaches a woman I never asked.

Amaya came through with two empty bottles and stopped. “Why are you standing in here in the dark.”

“It’s cold out there. It’s warm in here. I’m old.”

“Mm.” She didn’t move. She held the look about a second and a half past where anybody else would let it go. That is the most annoying thing about that girl and the reason I’d give her a kidney. “You want me to get him?”

“No.”

“Okay.” Two steps. Then she turned around. “Cherie. You want me to get him?”

I put the sleeve inside my coat, against my side, where the baby is. I noticed I’d done it about a half second after it was done. “Yeah. Tell him the office.”

“Should I be scared?”

“No, baby.”

“Because you got your hand on your stomach.”

“I always have my hand on my stomach.”

“Not like that you don’t.” She shifted the bottles to one arm. “Cherie. Is it the shops?”

“It’s not the shops.”

“Is it him?” She put the bottles on the dryer.

“It’s not him either.”

“Then it’s old,” she said, “because that’s the only other thing that makes a person stand in a dark room with their coat on.” That girl has never had one day of training in her life.

“Go get him.”

“You just lied to me.”

“I know,” I said. “Go get him anyway.”