Never Have I Ever Page 26

“It would on Kanga. And Lisa Fenton,” Roux said, unaware that what I had just done, mimicking, had worked on her. She sounded ever so slightly defensive. “I’ve seen your husband, and he looks wound up, with the little spectacles and those knife-sharp creases in his khakis. It would work on him.”

She was right, but I didn’t acknowledge it. I had her off balance. I could feel it, and now I knew one more thing about Roux: She took pride in her work. She’d gone to Boston to screw exact amounts out of my lawyer, cased my neighborhood, interviewed my friends; it was no accident that Char had met her first. She’d manufactured a game to use on me like a tenderizer, softening me up so she could tear me open, cause words that I should never say to come spilling out. She was good at this, and proud of it, so I didn’t acknowledge it.

“You don’t really know them,” I said instead, dismissively.

Her smile got tight. “Fine. I’ll stop talking about rolling Boyce. I won’t even show you the pictures. Instead let’s discuss the statute of limitations for felonies connected to a death here in the lovely state of Florida. Oh, wait. There isn’t one.”

When I tapped, she hit back hard. The muscles in my abdomen tightened. I swallowed, swamped with sudden fear, as she’d intended. I pushed it down, away.

“Okay,” I said. “I know what you want. I know the stakes. I’m going home now. I need to think about it.”

She blinked, surprised enough for it to show. “Oh, you do? You need to think about it?”

I nodded, and she stood up, abruptly, as if she physically could not stay seated. She came two steps toward me, as if drawn. I’d seen her have a lot of feelings, but most of them had been manufactured to work me over. This, though, this rising interest, this was real.

“What are you?” she asked. “I get people, Amy. I know people. I know women like you in neighborhoods like this. You don’t have anything interesting to say, so mostly you talk shit about each other. You puff and squawk, and you get nervous when anyone steps outside the safety of your little, line-filled lives.” She was so intense, eyes narrowed above bared teeth. It was as if the rhythm of the conversation had gotten away from her. I stayed cool, though I had one hand on the stroller bar, gripped so tight I was surprised the metal didn’t dent. She couldn’t see that hand. I kept the rest of my body loose and easy, turned inward, focused on my breathing, as if I were a hundred twenty feet under and every molecule of oxygen was precious. She came closer, still talking. “Why aren’t you like that? Like your friends. You have your shit on lockdown, all big eyes and tight lips. I tell you to come see me and you go diving. I have your ass in a vise six ways from Sunday and you tell me, cool as a pudding, that you need to think. There is nothing to think about. Either you liquidate your trust and transfer the money or I go to the cops and fuck your life, forever. That’s it. A or B. Your call. So make it. I’m fine either way.”

The things that she was saying weren’t all true. I looked at her, and the contrast hit me again. She glowed, so expensive and soft, in this rough and ugly house. This was not her natural habitat. She wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t have her kid in a place like this, if she had other choices. She needed my money, and she wouldn’t capriciously blow a chance to wring it out of me. If it were twenty thousand, maybe. But not almost a quarter of a million.

“What’s it worth, that Picasso sketch?” I asked.

That took her aback. “Why? You want to buy it?” When I didn’t answer, she relented. “More than your car.”

I shrugged. “It’s not that nice a car.”

She laughed again, nonplussed, while I breathed, in and out, twice, thinking.

She’d started down one path, to blackmail me. Something about sex with lawyers. She’d meant to shock me, knock me off my guard with what she’d done to get to see my file. She had a path charted that I could not imagine, but I knew it started with Boyce and led to me incriminating myself. She’d needed that tape. A child witness, twenty-five years later, was not enough for policemen or lawyers, and therefore it was not enough to scare me.

I’d stayed calm, unshocked, and then our talk about Luca had derailed her off that path. She hadn’t been able to get to me, so she had upped the stakes, pretending to be Lolly. That had been a risk. A gamble. She hadn’t done the research.

Maybe she was bad at her job, but I didn’t think so. If she were, I would have seen her before now. She’d saved me in her pocket for a rainy day, which meant that up until now she’d had a lot of success, a lot of sunshine. Now here she was, in this house that smelled musty and foul, and I knew it must be raining hard indeed.

“I don’t think you are fine either way,” I told her. “Otherwise you would have done the research. About Lolly. You were in a hurry, so you skipped steps and came at me before you were completely ready. Look at this place. Not your usual digs, I’d guess. You need me. You need my money as much as I need you to keep your mouth shut.”

Her face had gone to stone. It told me nothing. I gave her the same face back. The quiet game again, but this time I decided I would age out and die, right here on her floor, before I lost. I would not lose, and this knowledge was a wild, red pleasure. The silence stretched, and there was a clock somewhere in the room, I realized. It had been ticking this whole time, but now I was aware of the sound, each second being marked as it slipped past us. In the end she broke it.

“What the fuck are you?” she asked. She tilted her head to the side with birdlike curiosity, maybe even reptilian. My heart sped up, just a little, as if it had decided to race the ticktock sound. “I came armed for small-town-wifey-with-a-past. I know the species. Not a hard target. But you? You’re like me. You’re all folded up and secret down inside, like you’re made of fucking origami.”

The door banged open. I jumped, but she didn’t. Luca came in, toting five or six plastic bags from Publix, one-handed.

“They didn’t have cashew milk, so I got almond?” Luca said, and then he saw me. “Oh, hey.”

“Almond is fine,” Roux said, and now her smile was genuine. She loved her kid.

“Hey, Luca,” I said. My voice was shaking. Just a little, but I could hear it. I hoped she couldn’t. I bent over the stroller, fixing Oliver’s blanket, though he’d only push that exact same foot out again within a minute.

“Whatcha doing here, Ms. Whey?” he asked.

I had no answer, but Roux stepped in, smooth, her voice bright and cheery. “Working out your scuba lessons.”

That was interesting. Did Luca not know what his mom did for a living?

Luca brightened, and he looked back and forth between us, “For real?” Then a faint shadow of worry crossed his face. He turned to me, “Is it expensive?”

So he knew about the money trouble. He was a bright kid, and I doubted this house looked like their real home, wherever that was. I wondered if he knew how his mother planned to recoup their losses. I didn’t think so. He’d have to be a better player than his mother, to eat my blondies and chat about my pictures, all the while knowing I was one of her hapless victims.

“You let me worry about that,” Roux told him. “Go put the groceries away and let us work out a schedule for your lessons.”

“Cool,” he said. “That’s so freakin’ awesome.” He disappeared into the kitchen. We could both hear him in there, banging around in her carb-free fridge.

I went to the stroller. “I need to think,” I told her, soft, insistent.

“No you don’t,” she said.

“I do,” I said. Exactly how broke were they? She had the Picasso sketch, and she could sell the car. That would get her, what? Maybe fifty, sixty thousand? That was a lot of cash, but maybe not to her. And not next to a quarter mil. I thought I had some wiggle room. A little. So I pushed it. “I’m not impulsive, Roux. You give me time or you go to the cops and you get nothing.”

It wasn’t true. I’d bend if she pushed me now. I’d have to. But I shoved that truth way down, into my most secret spaces, deeper than the worst parts of my past. Down to where the worsts that I was doing every day lived, the things inside me that I could never, never look at. My real worsts, that this woman, who owned my past, must never know. I met her gaze head-on, and I saw my bluff land. I saw the very moment she believed me.

“I’ll give you until tomorrow,” she said, and I felt a small but fierce exulting. She raised her voice, loud enough for Luca to hear. “Thanks, Amy. I’ll come by tomorrow about nine a.m. and do the paperwork so he can get started.”

Luca appeared in the doorway, grinning at his mother under a nut-milk mustache. “Like you’ll be up at nine.”

“I walk right then anyway,” I said, staring her down, pushing it even further. “Let’s make it ten. I can’t miss my workout.”

“Sure,” she said, but with an edge. Luca wiped at his mouth and then rolled off the doorjamb. He went galloping up the stairs. A moment later we heard a door slam, and then music turned on, loud and bass-heavy.

“I have to go. Maddy will be home any minute,” I said.

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