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I wouldn’t go to my sister because I didn’t want her embroiled in this.

  And I couldn’t go to my dad because there was no way he was up this early, and I could knock on his door until my knuckles were bloody and he wouldn’t get up.

  What he probably would do when he found out was be furious at Mick but not be much help otherwise.

  I didn’t even know what I expected from Mom and Rob.

  Maybe just not being alone in this.

  I sorta had Rob.

  But Mom was…

  Mom.

  I was halfway home when I got a call.

  It was Charlie, my other boss.

  I stripped four nights a week, Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

  Twelve additional hours a week (that sometimes stretched to more like twenty, if Charlie was in a bind), I filled in on-call, site-support work for Charlie at his company, Computer Raiders, a tech support business.

  I’d taken the job because I was a tech kind of girl, it paid okay and it could be fill-in stuff for the time I didn’t actually have on my hands to earn extra money, which anyone could use, but I always needed.

  Since I had not done what I normally did over coffee of a morning—assess my all-important day planner—what I’d forgotten was that I was on call that day for the Raiders, from seven to one thirty, with a half hour lunch break.

  “Damn,” I muttered, looked at the clock on my dash, saw I was officially open for business, grabbed my phone and took Charlie’s call. “Hey, Charlie.”

  “Hiya, Evan. Texting you an address and emailing the sitch. Printer company, their system is down. Sounds like a virus.”

  Charlie liked us to wear black jeans and his black Computer Raiders golf shirt when were on duty.

  I was thinking I forgot deodorant.

  “I’ll get on it, ASAP,” I semi-lied to him, with “ASAP” being once I went home, changed, put on deodorant, and I didn’t want to push it, but I had to, so also after I swung by a drive-through to get coffee.

  “Thanks, Evan. Later.”

  I bid adieu, made the trek home in full fret about whether to stash the Trader Joe’s bag in my apartment while I was out on a call or keep it with me, decided to keep it with me, but brought it in when I quickly changed clothes and took it back out when I left.

  If any of my neighbors saw me carrying that bag back and forth, they’d probably wonder what was going on with me.

  I couldn’t think of that.

  I had coffee to procure, a virus to clear and a system to bring back up that hopefully didn’t have too much damage done to it by whatever wunderkind out there created a virus rather than putting their mind to something positive, life affirming and world enhancing.

  I was in the midst of doing this, with a hovering printer-company manager staring anxiously over my shoulder, protesting too much that no one was allowed to get outside emails on company computers, which hinted that he was likely the culprit who opened a file with a virus, when the first call came in from my dad.

  I got three more after that while still working.

  I had to wait until lunch, which I ate at Mad Greens in an effort to deflect the pizza debauchery I’d engaged in the night before (which reminded me of Mag, which reminded me of the ugly things I said to Mag, which made me fight crying into my salad) to call my dad.

  “Evie, sunshine of my life,” he said in greeting.

  Dirk Gardiner, my father, reminded me of that Bob Seger song “Beautiful Loser.”

  He was lovable. Affable. Gracious. He was “yes, ma’am,” if a woman was six or sixty, and “no, sir,” if a man was the same. And it was charming.

  He’d wanted to hit it big in the music industry but sustained the one-two punch of not really having the talent and definitely not having the drive.

  If he went somewhere, he wanted to stay at the Four Seasons, and since he could by no means afford that, he just didn’t go at all.

  He’d wanted a wife and family, the love and laughter, but no part in taking care of it.

  And somehow, with me staying in contact, and my sister being Daddy’s Little Girl, he got a lot of the former without much of a hint of the latter.

  Though he wanted more, always wanted more.

  He wanted it all.

  And it was somehow the world’s fault he didn’t have it.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, and shoved a huge forkful of salad in my mouth, because Charlie had another job for me, and he needed me to get it done before I was off at one thirty.

  And I needed to get it done, because I’d grabbed my day planner when I was home changing, and I had Gert that afternoon too.

  “Your mom called,” he shared.

  Great.

  I swallowed my salad and began, “Listen, Dad—”

  “Bring it here, I’ll unload it.”

  I stared at my greens.

  “No problems,” he continued.

  “Are you…being serious?” I asked slowly to confirm.

  “Sure. I got you covered, kid,” he replied nonchalantly. “Give you a split, eighty-twenty. Me bein’ the eighty, ’cause I’ll be shifting it.”

  For once in this situation, I made a quick decision.

  “Dad, that’s not gonna happen.”

  “Serve him right. Stick in his craw, his old man did what he couldn’t do.”

  So Dad assumed these were Mick’s drugs, he was dealing, and this was not only Dad finding a way to profit off this current situation, which was unsurprising, it was a way to best Mick, which also wasn’t surprising.

  Dad’s version of a win-win.

  What wasn’t, I noted, in any of that, was any thought to me.

  Okay, I needed to check my planner and see when my period came last, because I thought I just got done with it, but I felt like I was going to start sobbing again.

  Instead of doing that, I declared, “I’m not having this conversation.”

  “It’ll get it off your hands and you won’t have to worry about it,” he pointed out.

  “Yes, and not only will Mick have issues if I do that, and from what I can tell, they’d be very serious issues, I might have issues since this guy knows I have it and then I won’t have it and he’ll suspect I did what you’re thinking of doing with it.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that,” he muttered.

  Of course he hadn’t.

  “’Bye, Dad,” I snapped.

  “Evie! Wait!” he called.

  I wanted to hang up.

  I wanted to hang up.

  I wanted to hang up.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Let this be done, girl. Let this be the last shit Mick unloads on you. Listen to your old man for once, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I muttered.

  “Look after yourself. I’m in a new band, we got a gig, come see me play. I’ll shoot you the info in a text.”

  Another band.

  I hoped it lasted, for his sake. Even if it was just local gigs.

  But I knew it had no hope of lasting, because nothing my father had a hand in lasted.

  “Right. Great. Looking forward to it,” I said by rote.

  “It’ll be all right, Evie. You always land on top, doncha?”

  At another time, in perhaps thirty years, when I had the time, I would have to ponder this.

  Ponder how anyone could think that their daughter working two jobs, one of them stripping, to pay for her tuition, her rent, her food, to get various family members out of jams, who it was taking years to get her systems engineering degree because she was out of school more than she was in it because, if she had the money to pay for it, she didn’t have the time to go to class, was landing on top.

  I had a good car, because I worked hard to buy it.

  I had a nice apartment, because I worked hard to have it.

  This work, by the way, was mostly taking off my clothes and dancing on a stage with my body slicked with oil and strange men shoving money into the only remaining garment I wore.

  I wanted a degree i
n something that fascinated me, a job making good pay, a husband (someday), a family (someday a little later), love, laughter, vacations, birthday parties, graduations, weddings and a decent retirement in a condo by a beach.

  Oh, and to take off my clothes only in privacy for the rest of my life.

  That’s what I wanted.

  I had thought that wasn’t asking too much.

  But maybe I thought wrong.

  Maybe I should start taking selfies.

  Of course, I’d have to have an Instagram account, something I did not have (and wasn’t actually on social media at all, mostly because I didn’t have the time for it).

  But I could take apart and put together a radio by the age of six, I was changing the oil in my father’s car by the age of eight, and I’d figured out how to do that myself.

  I could start an Instagram account.

  “Evie?” Dad called.

  “Yeah, Dad. I always land on top,” I said.

  “That’s my girl. See you soon, my darlin’. Later.”

  I put the phone down realizing he did not tell me to call the cops.

  He also did not say, no matter when, day or night, he’d be at my side if I went to the cops or something else cropped up with this situation.

  So, two votes for cops from two men in my life who weren’t blood.

  One vote for no cops from my mother.

  And one essential abstention from my father.

  Last, the person I really needed to talk to about all of this, my brother, I couldn’t talk to because whatever he said could incriminate him.

  I didn’t know what to do with all of that.

  I didn’t know what to do at all.

  What I knew was, I had to finish my salad, hit my call, and go get Gert.

  It was grocery day.

  “Evan, what’s up? You aren’t right.”

  I looked down to Gert, who was in one of those motorized, grocery-store chair-carts.

  This was because she couldn’t walk very far.

  Into a restaurant when I took her to Chili’s or Applebee’s, yes.

  Around a King Soopers, no.

  “I had a bad date last night,” I evaded, telling the truth, but not all of it.

  She shook her head and scooted along the aisle toward the fruit juices.

  Gert was all about fruit juices.

  Being “regular” was a big thing for her.

  “Boys these days, they don’t know which end is up,” she decreed.

  Mag knew precisely where the ceiling was.

  This thought made my heart feel heavy.

  “Was he one of them metrosexuals?” she asked, reaching for the prune juice.

  I took it from her and put it in her basket, thinking that Mag kind of was, being fit and well turned out.

  Though, my guess, all that messy, sexy hair flew in the face of metrosexuality.

  “There’s a new one, you know,” she said, not waiting for me to answer her question, as was her way.

  Gert was alone a lot.

  As in, almost all the time.

  So, when she had company, she talked.

  “Spornosexual,” she continued. “Not so much about the grooming, all about the body. I wanna see me one of them. Was he one of them?”

  Okay.

  That sounded more like Mag.

  “I’m afraid I’m not keeping track of all the terms for dudes these days, Gert,” I admitted in an effort not to label Mag with the ridiculous word of “spornosexual.”

  “Well, I got lots of time on my hands and I know it all,” she replied. “You have questions, ask me. I got answers. These days, everything is confusing. You gotta do your research. I know what heteronormative is, and you don’t wanna be that. I know cisnormative, and you don’t wanna be that either. And binary and nonbinary, and not that stuff you do when you’re in class with your bits and bytes.”

  She then laughed and took the endcap probably a little faster than the King Soopers management wished their scooters to go.

  But the next aisle was cookies, so she had reason.

  “How’d the date go bad?” she asked.

  Not because my brother is a jerk, surprisingly, but because I was a bitch, I did not answer.

  “He just wasn’t my type,” I said.

  To that, she stopped on a scooter squeal and looked up to me.

  Gert had curly gray hair, two missing teeth, three sons and a daughter who lived in different states and did their best from far away to take care of their mother, who flatly refused to move closer to her children.

  And she fell in love with computers the minute she saw her first one in 1981 (she knew the exact year, and by the by, it was August).

  In other words, we were kindred spirits two generations apart.

  She budgeted everything from groceries to gas to electricity.

  But she paid Charlie for tech support, because now, she lived on her computer with her email friends and her Facebook groups and her online forums, and if her system was down, her entire life was interrupted, and she was even more alone than her normal alone.

  This being how we met.

  And when I went to fix her computer and saw the state of her, and her house, bimonthly grocery shops and more than occasional trips to the likes of Cracker Barrel and Olive Garden, not to mention, me talking her into letting me clean her pad every once in a while, became part of my schedule.

  I also talked her into giving up her yearly support payment to Computer Raiders, which felt disloyal to Charlie, but if something came up, she had my number. I didn’t charge, but that didn’t mean she could afford a trip around the world.

  But for Gert and her fixed income, one thing loosening up for her meant a lot.

  Another reason for my presence at the grocery store and our eventual trip to some family restaurant chain.

  We’d have our usual discussion about it, but I’d be the one paying for both, and Gert would be all about the gratitude in order to hide her relief that she could pay her winter gas bill and maybe afford a haircut.

  “That’s it. You’re in the doldrums because he wasn’t your type?” she asked.

  “Do you want the marshmallow Milanos?” I asked back to deflect.

  “Evan, talk to me.”

  I focused on her to see she was very focused on me.

  She was also worried.

  “He was a great guy,” I said softly. “And I messed it up.”

  “How’d a sweet, pretty girl like you mess it up?” she returned softly.

  “It’s a long story,” I told her.

  “Well, I got all day. But I know you don’t,” she said. “Still, I got all day, every day, and everything else on my body is goin’ south, some of it literally, but my ears work just fine. So, you wanna talk, I’m an old lady, my husband’s dead, but I remember the way it was and that it was hard work, finding a man.”

  “I’m actually not in the market for a man, Gert. It was a blind date. I just…liked him.”

  She tipped her head to the side. “And you can’t fix what you messed up?”

  Mag had exited the premises with a slam of the door.

  I doubted it.

  But for his sake, I wouldn’t even try.

  I shook my head.

  Gert motored toward the Milanos, mumbling, “Shame.”

  She had that right.

  “Think about you,” she said, grabbing a pack of the toasted marshmallow Milanos. “I think about you all the time. Minute I met you, I was surprised you hadn’t gotten yourself claimed. But that happens a lot.”

  She kept motoring.

  And talking.

  But I grabbed another pack of toasted marshmallow Milanos, and a double dark chocolate, both her favorites, because she’d be through the pack she nabbed in a day, but she also wouldn’t take three because she knew I’d eventually be buying them.

  I tossed them in the cart, and she talked through it.

  “Good ones, they fester, and I know why. And it’s a fool reason, me
n not wanting a woman who’s got a head on her shoulders and herself sorted. They gotta play the hero. They gotta be the fixer. They can’t be the one with the problems ’cause it’s all a competition for them and they can’t have their woman bestin’ them at somethin’. So the smart ones, the adjusted ones, they go to waste. And the men pick the crackpots, then moan that their woman is a hot mess when they looked right past that one who’d give them harmony.”

  This sounded startlingly like my mother and Rob.

  She shot me a semi-toothless grin and finished.

  “I was a hot mess. My Stan sorted me out. Maybe you need to get yourself some trouble. Boys’ll swoop in like vultures.”

  One could say I didn’t have to search far for that.

  I gave her an uncommitted grin.

  She reached out and touched my hand.

  “You’ll find somebody, Evie. Someone perfect. I gotta believe that,” she said. “This world, lettin’ a girl like you be alone for too long, it’d be a world I don’t understand.”

  I took hold of her hand and gave it a squeeze. “Thanks, Gert.”

  She clicked her teeth, I let her go, and she rounded the next endcap on two wheels.

  Because that was the chip aisle.

  And she did this saying, “Up for Applebee’s?”

  The thought of sitting in Applebee’s attempting to enjoy a brisket quesadilla with that grocery bag in my trunk gave me the shivers.

  Even so, I had a one-word reply.

  “Always.”

  By the time we’d unpacked groceries, enjoyed our dinner, I got Gert back to her house, and I was on my way home, I had an hour to figure out where to stash the stash, get to Smithie’s, gunk up my face and hair and get onstage.

  I was going to have to be quick with the mascara.

  The entire drive home, I did not come up with a good place to stash the stash.

  I didn’t feel safe leaving it at home. A shady guy knew my phone number. Who knew what else Mick told him, who that guy was talking to, and regardless, he knew my name and the Internet made all sorts of information people shouldn’t have available in minutes.

  I didn’t feel safe leaving it in my car in Smithie’s parking lot.

  He had a secure parking lot, with lights and cameras.

  Nevertheless.

  Since I wasn’t going to pop it by my dad’s because he’d sell it, my sister’s, and get her tied up in this, and definitely I wasn’t going back to Mom’s because I didn’t want a scene, but also I didn’t want to face Rob’s disappointment that I wasn’t making his version of the right choice, I decided to leave it in my car.