Outside the Lines (24 page)

“He’s a goner,” Rita commented after he’d left.

“What do you mean?” I asked as I reached to tie an apron around my waist.

“All week long it’s been ‘Eden says this’ or ‘I want to take Eden there.’” She grinned. “He’s toast.”

I blushed and she laughed. “Oh, boy,” she said. “You’re toast, too. He’s an Aquarius, so it’s a good match for you. I don’t even have to do your chart. I knew it the minute I saw you two together that night in the office.”

“You did, huh?”

“Oh, yeah. Sparks flew. I was lucky to escape when I did.”

Rita and I spent the next few hours getting the meal ready. I put together a homemade barbecue sauce while she chopped up about fifty heads of green and purple cabbage for the slaw. We pulled the massive amounts of pork apart and heated it up slowly on the stove, stirring in the sauce to help keep it moist. A local bakery had donated about ten racks of hamburger buns and I made five cookie sheets full of espresso-laced brownies. When it was all ready, Rita buzzed Jack to come help us set up, and we opened the doors for dinner.

“The line’s down the block,” Jack remarked before he let the first rush in. “I hope we have enough.”

I helped Rita serve for the first hour, putting together sandwiches and scooping up good-sized portions of coleslaw onto paper plates. One of Jack’s other employees, who introduced herself as Starr, showed up, so when the line calmed down to a dull roar, I was able to go back to the kitchen to fetch the first tray of brownies and take it around the dining room, serving each individual. Every tall, skinny man with long, dark hair sent my heart skipping a beat, but none so far was my father. Jack came over to assist me in serving the brownies, introducing me to his regular clients.

“This is Jade and Cheyenne,” he said, gesturing toward two older-looking women sitting together at a table. They were painfully thin—skeletal, really—and wore heavy makeup and skintight, peacock-hued T-shirts. “Ladies, I’d like you to meet Eden.”

“Hi,” I said with a smile. “Would you like a brownie?”

“Only if you sit down and eat one with us,” one of the women said. She had black stringy hair pulled up into a ponytail on the top of her head. “I’m Jade.”

I looked at Jack and handed him the tray of brownies, snagging three in the process. He obliged with a smile and walked away to finish handing out dessert on his own. I sat down at the table across from Jade and Cheyenne and gave them each a brownie. “Thanks,” I said. “I’m wiped out.”

“You work today?” asked the other woman, whom Jack had introduced as Cheyenne. She was blond with thin, greasy braids and no teeth. Like Jade’s, her face was pitted with angry acne scars that her elaborate makeup did nothing to hide.

“Sort of. I helped my brother cook a meal to impress a girl and then I came here to cook all afternoon. I think I need to find a career that doesn’t have me on my feet so much.”

“You should give sex work a try,” Jade said. “You’re definitely on your back more than your feet!”

Cheyenne cackled and popped a bite of brownie in her mouth. “Oh yeah, I’m sure this pretty girl wants to come be a hooker.”

“Sex worker,” Jade said, correcting her. “And why not? We make a living.”

“And we shoot it right up our arms,” Cheyenne said. She reached over and patted me on the arm. “Don’t worry, honey. We’re just jokin’.”

“I figured.” I smiled. “How long have you been coming to Hope House?”

Jade looked at Cheyenne and tilted her head. “What, since it opened?” she said. Cheyenne nodded. Jade went on. “We heard Jack was a good guy and he brought the nurse in for free HIV and hepatitis tests. Then he started doing dinner and we was hooked.” She moved her gaze back to me. “The food’s been hella better since you got here, though.”

“Well, thanks.” I felt oddly privileged to have been asked to sit down with these women. I knew from both Rita and Jack that their clientele didn’t open up very easily to strangers. I imagined what it must be like to be them, to live in their world, and I shuddered a bit internally. What did it feel like, I wondered, to have people on the street avert their eyes from you to avoid interaction? Was this how my father lived now? Alone and unacknowledged?

“What time’s your next job, Jade?” Cheyenne asked with her mouth full of brownie. Her question jolted me out of my thoughts about my dad.

“Seven o’clock,” Jade answered. “I got a regular for a half-’n-half in the alley behind his office. Get this. Dude wears
pink lace panties
.” She snorted. “How ’bout you?”

“I got nothing. It’s the corner for me tonight, see what I can dig up.”

“You need to lower your rates,” Jade advised.

“Fuck that. I don’t got any teeth, so I can charge more!” She opened her mouth wide to reveal slightly frightening pink and empty gums.

Jade reached in her mouth and pulled out a set of dentures. “No,
I
can charge more. I provide options!”

Though a little horrified at the content of their conversation, I burst out laughing. They looked at me, confounded by my amusement. “I’m sorry,” I gasped. “I can’t help it. ‘I provide options!’” They still stared at me like I was out of my mind so I explained further, trying to catch my breath. “As a chef I provide options for soup or salad and you provide teeth or no teeth. Different profession, similar business model.” I cracked up again.

Both ladies smiled and started to laugh, too. It struck me how surreal this conversation was. Like any other talk I might have with Georgia—a simple exchange of information about our respective lives. The subject matter might be entirely different, but the sense of connection was the same.

Jack came back over when he saw us laughing. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

“Options,” Jade said, and all three of us giggled while Jack appeared baffled.

He sat down next to me, pressing his leg against mine. “Did Eden tell you about her father?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.” It hadn’t crossed my mind to bring it up. Did my dad utilize a sex worker’s services? I cringed to consider it.

“What about your dad, honey?” Cheyenne asked.

Jack looked at me expectantly, so I took a deep breath and explained to the ladies what had brought me to Hope House in the first place. They listened intently to my description and took a long, hard look at the snapshot of him I kept in my purse.

Jade ran her finger along the edge of the photo and smiled softly. “It’s nice,” she said, “that you’re looking for him. My family wrote me off a long time ago. They think I’m a piece of shit. Which I am.”

“No,” I said, standing up to hug her. “You’re not.” She clung to me for a moment and I pressed as much feeling as I could muster into my embrace before she pulled away. I hugged Cheyenne, too.

“We’ll keep our eyes open for your dad, sweetie,” Jade said. “If we see him, we’ll let him know where to find you.”

“Thanks,” I said sincerely. “That means a lot.”

“Oooh! I got a date,” Jade said, noticing the time. “See you next week, Eden?”

I nodded. “I’ll be here.”

“Bring some more of those brownies, too,” Cheyenne said. “They were
bangin’
.”

After they left, Jack took my hand under the table and traced the outline of my fingers with the tip of one of his. My breath shuddered. He glanced at me sidelong with a wicked half smile. “Problems?” he asked in a mock-innocent tone.

“No,” I breathed. “No problems.” Holy crap, this man knew what he was doing. I tried not to think about where he might have learned it.

“That was great of you, you know,” he said, pulling my hand up to kiss the inside of my palm.

I smiled at this gesture. “What was great?”

“Hugging them like that. They don’t get a lot of physical affection. Some from each other, maybe, but not nearly enough. Outside of the men who pay them for sex, they’re basically touch-starved.”

I shrugged. “I’m an affectionate girl.”

“Lucky me.” He traced the sensitive nerves of my hand again and then continued up the underside of my forearm.

“What are you doing after your shift tonight?” I asked. Excitement skittered along my skin.

He locked his eyes on mine. “I don’t know. Did you have any wild ideas?”

“Well, I was thinking you might come over to my place,” I said, attempting to keep my breathing pattern normal.

“Won’t Jasper be jealous?” he asked.

“He’ll live.”

He leaned over and brushed his lips against mine. “I’d love to,” he whispered.

What the hell,
I thought. Rules were made to be broken.
Georgia will be so proud.

My daddy tried.

He tried like he had always tried after he did something horrible. Except this time he tried harder, because taking me with him in the middle of the night and ending up in jail was, according to my mother, the most horrible thing he’d ever done. He cleaned the house and grocery-shopped and made my mother and me delicious dinners out of simple ingredients. He brought his easel into the house and painted every room, reasoning that if we ever had to move, we could rebuild our memories from his canvases. He went to the doctor with my mom without arguing and came home with a bag full of pill bottles that sounded like a baby’s rattle when he walked by. As far as we knew, he took them.

I wanted to believe he was doing better. I wanted to believe the smiles he showed me were real. But his hands shook and his eyes were dark. The flickering joy I usually saw in them was nowhere to be found, no matter how hard I tried to make him laugh. The mask he wore was so thin—as transparent and fragile as tissue paper. I was certain it would crumple and blow away in the next stiff wind.

“Daddy?” I said one afternoon when I got home from school. It was a warm spring day and we were sitting in the sun on the front porch, sipping from cans of root beer and eating celery smeared with peanut butter. He was staring off into space and didn’t respond, so I nudged him. “Daddy?”

He rolled his head slowly around to look at me. “What, Bug? Everything all right?” He wasn’t drunk, but his words were labored. They sounded the way I felt when I had to drag myself out of bed to go to school.

I nodded. “Yes. Everything’s fine. I was just wondering . . .” I didn’t know how to ask all I wanted to know.
Is your brain okay? Is the medicine working? Are you drinking and I just don’t know it? Do you still want to leave me? Are you ever going to get well?

“Wondering what?” he asked.

I started again, trying to compress my inquiries into one. “Well, how are you feeling?”

“How am I feeling?” he repeated. He dropped his eyes to the can he held, running his index finger along the rim of its mouth. Mom always yelled at me when I did that; she said I’d slice myself on the can’s sharp edge.

“Yes. You seem kind of sad.”

He sighed. “How could I be sad when I’m sitting next to the prettiest, smartest girl in all the world?”

I smiled. “Daddy. Seriously.”

“I am being serious. That’s an honest question. How is it possible for me to be sad when I have you?” He reached over and swung his arm around my shoulders, hugging me to him. He was so skinny. He cooked, but he barely ate. I was worried. When he took his meds, he usually ate more, not less.

“Look at your garden, Eden,” he said. “It’s still so beautiful.”

I glanced down on the side of the stairs at the Garden of Eden. The tulips and daffodils had faded away, only to be replaced by clusters of vibrant bluebells and towering shocks of orange tiger lilies.

“Should we take Mrs. Worthington a bouquet?” he asked, releasing me from his embrace. “She’s watching us. Maybe she’d like one.”

I looked across the street just in time to see Mrs. Worthington’s curtains swing closed. “No,” I said. “She’s not very nice.”

He bumped me gently with his knee. “Maybe she’s not nice because no one brings her flowers.”

“You told me before she’s not nice because she has a stick up her wrinkly old butt,” I reminded him.

He laughed, but it was a forced sound. “I hope you didn’t tell your mother I said that. She’d have my hide.”

“No,” I said quietly. “I didn’t tell her.” All my father’s secrets felt like stones in my belly. I was sure if I fell over the side of a ship, I’d sink.

“Good.” He patted my leg and stared off into space again. “I’m going to try and sell a painting,” he said after a few minutes. “Maybe two.”

“You are? That’s great, Daddy! Which ones?”

“The ones of you sleeping on the couch.”

“Who are you going to sell them to?”

“The Wild Orchid Gallery.”

“Do you think they’ll want to do a show?” I asked excitedly. A show meant my dad would be working. A show meant he’d be making money.

“No.” His voice was flat.

“Why not?”

“The gallery owner wants something I don’t want to give her.”

“Oh,” I said, and crunched on another celery stick. “Daddy?”

“What, Bug?”

“Are you happy?” I thought this maybe was a better question than asking if he was sad. I thought maybe he’d answer me with something other than another question. I wished he’d just tell me the truth.

My father turned suddenly and took me in his arms, hugging me with such strength I thought I might break. “I don’t know,” he whispered in my ear. “Are
you
?”

I buried my face into his neck. He smelled of sweat and Old Spice. “I think so,” I said. “I think I might be happy.”

“Okay then,” he answered. “Then I’ll be happy, too.”

The demons were winning. No matter what he did or how hard he tried, David felt them writhing around inside his head, gnawing at his resolve to stay well like a dog on a bone. He went through the motions of being normal but could not combat the feeling that at any moment he might crack wide open and be revealed as the imposter he was. Still, he forced himself to do what he knew was expected of him. The impulses were there, of course. They throbbed in his body like a second heartbeat. They snipped and snapped at his heels, trying to get him to trip up. He knew it was only a matter of time before he stumbled. So he kept quiet. He kept his movements small and measured so they wouldn’t spin him out of control. He helped around the house and spent time with his daughter. He kept the angst he felt a secret from his family, just like the pills he pretended to take. He was smarter about that this time, making sure to flush them instead of stockpiling them away as he had done before.