Happy Endings

All afternoon this man been on my table asking me the same question without one time actually asking it.

Weather first. Then the villa. Then did I get lonely out here, which ain’t ever a question about the weather.

And he would not keep his face down. Every time I got those shoulders to let go he’d pick his whole head right back up out the cradle to tell me one more thing about his divorce, and lock the entire works up again.

C’mon now, baby. You know we’re not supposed to be doing all that.

Both my thumbs walking the left side of his spine. “Put that face back in the hole for me, love.”

“Sorry. Sorry.” He dropped. His voice came up through the vinyl like a man talking out of a pillow. “You’re very good at this.”

“I know, honey.”

Heel of my hand up under the shoulder blade. Slow.

“No, I mean it. I’ve had a lot of massages.”

“I believe you.” Knot in his right shoulder about the size of a plum, and old. You can tell. New hurt is loud and hot and it runs off when you chase it. Old hurt just sits there like it pays rent. I put my forearm in and leaned and he made a noise that was almost a word. “Mm-hm. Breathe into it now. Don’t be holding your breath on me. Holding your breath is the opposite of what we’re doing.”

“That hurts.”

Grinned at the back of his head where he couldn’t see a thing.

“It’s supposed to, handsome. Where we at, one to ten.”

“Seven.”

“Seven’s my favourite number. You tell me when it’s an eight and I’ll be nice to you.” I eased off and he melted about a centimetre and there he was.

Pretty room, though. I’ll give it that.

No wall at all on the garden side, just an opening, and the afternoon coming through it green and wet. Dry season, supposedly. Nobody tells the weather. Gecko up on the beam over his head been watching me work since I set up, with total contempt. Frangipani in a little dish because the staff put one there every morning and it’d be a crime to move it. My oil warming on a folded towel. My own sheets, because I don’t use nobody else’s. My own table, same reason, and that table done been through four airports already and it’s got a lot more coming.

Everybody looks at a woman with one bag and calls it freedom. A woman gets this light by putting things down. Some of what I put down was heavy and some of it had my name already written into it, and it all went down in the same week, and I know exactly what it cost. Down to the house and the man standing in it. There are mornings I can still feel the shape of where it used to sit.

“Can I ask you something,” he said into the hole.

And there it is.

Never at the door. Never on the phone, never while he’s still got his shirt on and his wallet out. It comes at the end, when he’s warm and loose and face down and the whole thing feels like it’s happening to somebody else already. And every last one of them thinks he invented it right there on the spot.

Girl. You knew before you oiled your hands.

Because I did. I knew when he asked where I was staying and then didn’t listen to the answer.

So my hands kept right on going down into his lower back and he got a good long nothing, which is about how long it takes a grown man to hear his own question inside his own head before it gets out his mouth.

“Mm-hm,” I hummed. “Go ahead, baby.”

Knuckles down either side the spine. Even. Like wasn’t nothing happening.

“Do you, ah.” He laughed. That laugh. “You probably get asked this.”

“Every day of my life, sweetheart.”

“Do you offer. You know.”

Eyebrow went up. He couldn’t see that one either, but it happened.

“I don’t know what, love. You gon’ have to pick a word.”

And then nothing from me. The gecko didn’t move. I didn’t move. My hands went right on working like the man had never opened his mouth.

The question is boring. The question has always been boring. I could set a watch by the question.

It’s the quiet after. That little stretch of air where a man has to say the thing out loud, in his own voice, to a woman who’s got both hands on his back. Because a man who won’t say it wants you to say it for him. And then it was your idea, and then it was never his, and Miss Pat ran a whole business on that for thirty years without once opening her mouth.

“A happy ending,” he admitted, and he had the decency to say it to the floor.

And now it’s mine. That’s the whole reason I make them say it. Not so I can act shocked. So when it lands, it lands in my hands, and I’m the one holding it.

Wife gone a good while now. Villa he can’t afford, on a card, to prove something to a woman who isn’t here to see it. Talks to the floor and not to me. And he ain’t asking because he wants me. Man has not looked at me one time since he got on this table. He’s asking to find out can he still get a yes out of anybody at all.

Baby, I am not your experiment.

“No.”

My hands never stopped. Not for one second.

“Right. No, of course. I wasn’t.”

“You were.”

“I’m not, I’m not that guy.”

“Lachlan.” And here I did the thing I almost never do, which is take my hands off a man in the middle of a session. I pulled the sheet up over his back and tucked it under his far shoulder the way I would for anybody, because he was still my client and he was still cold and that fan was still going. “You’re not in trouble. You asked, I said no, that’s the whole thing. We’ve got twenty minutes left and your hip flexors are a disaster. You want the twenty minutes?”

He lifted his head. Thirty-eight or so, sunburned in the shape of a singlet, and his eyes were wet in a way that had nothing to do with me.

“Yeah,” he conceded. “Sorry.”

“Face in the hole, baby.”

He put his face in the hole. And he got the rest of his session, every minute of it, because that was the deal. Hip flexors. Calves. And then the last few minutes on his hands, which is my own little secret, because nobody on God’s earth ever works a man’s hands and it takes them apart every single time. Every time.

He fell asleep on me and woke himself up with that soft embarrassed jolt they all do. Drink water, I told him. That plum is coming back inside two weeks, so quit sleeping on that side. He thanked me twice. He got his shirt on while I was still packing, which is what people do when they want to keep talking and have no idea how to start.

“You’re not what I expected,” he offered.

“Oh, nobody expects me.”

A little shrug, one strap sliding off my shoulder, which I put back with my chin.

“I meant it as a compliment.”

“I took it as one, sugar.” The table legs snapped in and made that click, and that click is the best sound in my whole life. Work’s done. Money’s somewhere. I get to leave. “Water. Not beer. Water first, then beer, handsome.”

He paid through the app on my way out past the plunge pool, which is the only way I take money, and the number landed on my screen while I had the table under one arm and my bag cutting into the other shoulder and sweat running straight down the middle of my back.

Now. Rupiah is a beautiful currency for your self-esteem. Everything comes with so many zeros on the end of it that for about four seconds you are a wealthy woman.

Then it converts. Then the scooter takes a bite. Then the oil takes a bite, and the laundry takes a bite, and the sheets take the biggest bite of anybody, because oil eats cotton and I go through a set every six weeks like clockwork. And then the room takes its bite, and the room has a fan and a rooster, and the rooster has opinions.

So. One massage. One man asking me for a hand job in a villa he is renting for more than I will see all month. One gecko, judging.

That’s the job. And I love it. I love it so much it’s almost embarrassing.

* * *

Temi called while I was on the scooter, which she knows I am always on, and which she does anyway.

I pulled over by the rice field where the signal is good and sat sideways on the seat with my helmet still on and my table strapped behind me like a very large flat child.

“Si.”

“Ma’am.”

“Where are you.”

“Rice field.”

“Which one.”

“Girl, they don’t name them.”

“They absolutely name them.” I could hear her charting. Temi has never once called me without doing something else at the same time. She’s at a nurses’ station, she’s on the bus, she’s eating something with a lot of crunch directly into the microphone. “Okay, so. I have four minutes and I need the whole thing. How was today.”

“Today a man asked me for a happy ending while I had his spine in my hands.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“In the villa?”

“In the villa.”

“With the pool?”

“With the pool.”

“And what did you say,” she prompted, in the voice she uses when she already knows, because she has been asking me that exact question since we were both twenty and broke in the same classroom in Atlanta learning what a piriformis was.

“I said no.”

I was picking dried oil off my thumbnail with my teeth.

“And then what happened?”

“And then I did his hip flexors.”

Temi screamed. Properly screamed, the way she does, so that I had to hold the phone away from my face and the man cutting grass in the field looked up at me.

“You did his hip flexors.”

“He paid for ninety minutes, he got ninety minutes.”

“Sienna Yvonne Brooks.”

“Don’t full-name me on a scooter.”

“I need you to hear yourself right now,” she insisted, crunching. “You baby these men. You sugar them, you honey them, you’re out there calling grown strangers handsome, and then you act shocked when one of them gets a notion.”

“Who’s shocked. I have never once in my life been shocked.”

“Sienna.”

“I’m from Atlanta, Temi. That is not flirting, that is manners.”

“It is both and you have always known it is both.”

“It’s a little bit both,” I conceded, and I was smiling in a rice field by myself like a crazy person.

“A grown man propositioned you and you gave him more care.”

“He got the care he paid for. Those are two different things and you know they’re two different things.” A truck went past full of very calm chickens. “Also his shoulder was properly bad. Like, somebody hit him with a car ten years ago bad. You would have loved it. It was like pressing on a wall.”

“Do not try to distract me with a wall.”

“It was a really good wall.”

“Si.” Her voice came down about half a step, which is the only warning I ever get. “How much is in the account.”

And see, this is the thing about a best friend who knew you before you had any money at all. She doesn’t ask how you are. She asks the question underneath the question, and she asks it flat, so you can’t make a joke out of it without both of you hearing you do it.

I took the helmet off. The field was doing that thing it does in the late light where the green goes gold at the tips and you can watch the wind come across it from a long way off, one row at a time. God, I love it here.

My thumb found the sore spot in my own forearm and pressed on it, hard, which is a thing I do.

“Eleven hundred,” I conceded.

“Dollars.”

“Dollars.”

“And what’s the room through to the end of the month.”

“About four hundred.”

“And the flight you keep not booking.”

“Temi.”

“I’m asking.”

“Three-ish. Depends.”

She let that sit. Somebody on her end asked her about a patient and she told them two seconds with her hand over the phone and came back.

“So you turned down money today,” she noted, not unkindly, which was worse.

“I turned down him. There is a difference and you know there’s a difference.”

“Mm.”

“Don’t mm me.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said mm, and mm has a whole paragraph in it, and I’m not doing this with you in a rice field.”

Temi laughed, and then she went quiet for a second, and I could hear her put something down.

“Okay. Can I say the thing.”

“You’re going to say the thing whether I let you or not.”

“You could come home for a month,” she offered, fast, the way you say a thing you rehearsed in the car. “Not forever. A month. My couch is a real couch now, it’s not the futon, I have an actual adult couch. You could pick up shifts at the place on Ponce, Danielle still asks about you, you’d clear what you’re clearing out there in like nine days and you wouldn’t be washing sheets with your feet.”

“I like washing sheets with my feet.”

“Nobody likes washing sheets with their feet.”

“It’s meditative.”

“It’s poverty, Si.”

“Okay, rude.”

“I’m a nurse, I’m allowed to be clinical.” Crunch. “Just book a round trip for once in your life. One. See how it feels.”

“No.”

“Why not.”

“Because I don’t do round trips.”

“Right, but why.” And she wasn’t even being clever about it, that’s the thing. She asked it the way she asks a patient where exactly does it hurt. Like she had all day and no opinion.

“Because a return ticket has a date on it.”

“So?”

“So a date is a thing somebody can hold you to.”

A beat of nothing on her end. Then, delighted, because she is evil:

“You know who else had a date.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m just saying there was a man in this city with a calendar.”

“Temi.”

“A laminated calendar.”

“I will drive this scooter directly into the water.”

She laughed at me for a while. Then she stopped, and when she came back she had gone soft in a way that I hate and I need.

“Who’s holding you to anything, baby.”

“Nobody. That’s the point. Keep it that way.”

“Mm.”

“There it is.”

“I said mm.”

“You said a paragraph.”

“I said mm and only mm,” she repeated, “and you heard a paragraph, and that is not a me problem.” She laughed first, so I was allowed to. Then she changed lanes entirely, which she does, which is why I keep her. “Okay. Real question.”

“Go.”

“Everybody out there wants to know if you give happy endings,” she mused. “Does anybody ever ask if you’re getting one?”

I sat on a scooter in the middle of a rice field with my helmet in my lap and my table strapped behind me and I laughed so hard the man with the grass looked up again.

“That is disgusting,” I told her. “That is a disgusting thing to say to me.”

“I’m a healthcare professional.”

“You’re a menace.”

“Answer the question.”

“I have to go, the light’s going and I don’t have a headlight.”

“You absolutely have a headlight.”

“It’s more of a suggestion,” I countered, and put my helmet back on, and she was still talking when I hung up, which is how all our calls end.

* * *

Buford Highway. Nineteen years old.

The place was called Jade Garden Wellness and there was no garden and nothing jade about it. Strip mall, between a nail salon and a phone store with a gold sign. Miss Pat ran it. About sixty, the warmest face you ever saw on a human being, and the coldest arithmetic going on back behind it.

“Rooms one and two are yours.” First day. She had a clipboard she never once wrote on. “Three and four are Dominique’s.”

“What’s different about three and four?”

And Miss Pat looked at me.

That’s all she did. Warm face, kind eyes, looked right at me for about four seconds and did not say one word, and I was nineteen years old in a polo shirt with somebody else’s name on it and I understood the entire business.

“Rooms three and four,” I repeated.

“Mm-hm.”

“Cool.”

Eleven months I worked there. Never did work three or four. And not because I was better than Dominique, let’s put that down right now. Dominique drove a Lexus and had her boy in private school and she went into that room with her eyes open and her price set, and she could read a man coming across the parking lot before he got his keys out. She taught me more in eleven months than school taught me in two years.

“Make them say it,” she told me once, in the break room, eating wings. “Don’t you ever say it first. Not the word, not the price, not nothing. You let it come out his mouth in his voice.”

“Then what.”

“Then you decide,” Dominique said, and she pointed a wing at me. “That’s the whole job, baby. Not the hands. Everybody got hands.”

So I don’t have a rule. Never had one. Rules are for people who don’t want to do the thinking.

I have a read. And sometimes the read is yes, and when it’s yes it is because I wanted it, on a day I picked, with a man who asked like a human being, and I have never once in my life been talked into anything.

That afternoon, in that villa, with the gecko and the frangipani and a man talking to the floor about a wife who left him.

That read was no.

* * *

And then there was Keenan, who there was nothing wrong with.

He opened doors. He was good to my mother when she got sick, better than her own sister was. He had a laugh you could hear from the parking lot. Everybody loved him. I loved him.

He just had me scheduled.

I found out we were engaged at a cookout. His mother came at me by the drinks table with both arms out saying welcome to the family, baby, and I said thank you, because what do you say with a plate in your hand.

The house in Smyrna was already moving. Money down and everything. There was a room in it he called the nursery, out loud, to his cousin, standing right in front of me, and everybody laughed, and I laughed too. And once my licence came through I’d be working at that same cousin’s spa off Roswell Road. Decided. Somewhere I was not.

And here’s what still gets me, because I read strangers for a living. Four seconds, face down, and I can tell you what a man does for work and who hurt him and whether he’s going to be a problem. Sat in that man’s mama’s backyard for a solid year and never saw it coming once.

Then my mother died.

Dr. Naomi Brooks. Fifty-one years old, and in every one of them she never left the country she was born in. She taught me what hands are for. She used to do my scalp at the kitchen table when I was small and she had a strong opinion about everybody’s posture, including strangers, including people on the television.

She left me eighteen thousand dollars and eleven words in her own handwriting.

Go somewhere you’ve never been. Then go somewhere else.

That’s it. That’s the whole note. Nothing about the house. Nothing about her sister. Nothing about Keenan.

I stood in her kitchen and read it maybe nine times, and the part that got me, the part that still gets me, is that she never did it. Not once. Lived her whole life inside one state and then wrote me eleven words telling me not to.

So I took her literally, because that is the only way I know how to take anything.

Bought a one-way out of Atlanta with her money.

Never bought the other kind since.

People meet me now and get it wrong in about a second. They think free spirit. They think she’s out here being profound at a sunset.

Girl, no. I am out here because a man bought a house with a room in it for a baby nobody had asked me about, and there is a version of this where I’m in that house tonight with my licence on the wall and a good man asleep beside me. And I’d have been grateful. And I’d have been furious. And I never would have known which was which.

* * *

I got back to the room before full dark, barely, on the suggestion of a headlight, with both hands aching in the web between thumb and finger the way they do after a deep-tissue day. Stood the table against the wall. Rinsed my sheets in the shower with my feet, which is a skill, thank you, and hung them over the balcony rail where they would be dry by morning and smelling faintly of the neighbour’s cooking.

Then I sat on the end of the bed with the fan pointed directly at my face and opened my phone to put the session in the books.

There was a message from the villa manager.

Hi Sienna, hope you are well. Can you call me tomorrow. We’ve had some feedback from a guest and I just want to have a chat about how we handle in-villa bookings going forward.

I read it twice.

Eleven weeks I’d been working out of that villa and the two others the same company runs along that stretch. That was the whole thing. That was the spine of my month. That was the reason the eleven hundred dollars in my account was eleven hundred and not two.

And I sat there with the fan going across my face and my hands throbbing and my wet sheets dripping on the balcony, and the answer showed up about four seconds later, and it was so simple it was almost funny.

He had not complained about the massage.

He had complained because I said no.

There it is again. Somebody somewhere deciding what I’m going to be, and sending a very polite message about it afterwards.

Miss Pat never said it either.

I opened a new tab and typed in the name of an airline, and I didn’t even know yet where I was going. I just wanted to look at somewhere that wasn’t here. The search field sat there blinking at me with one box filled in and the other one empty.

One way. Like always.

I just had to pick the other end.