The House That Modern Art Built

All the houses in the subdivision were enormous and sitting on little tiny lots, so they looked like fat people pressed up against each other in bus seats. But I was doing the kitchen, which was decent, and once you’re inside you don’t see the outside. I guess that’s what the morons buying these three-car-garage monsters thought too.

We had a list of custom specs from the particular moron who had bought this place, including crown moulding, which I thought was basically assfuckery in a mid-1990s nothing-scape like this one, but Edwin could say, Sean, the customer is always right a thousand times and still not get tired of the words. I liked working for Edwin because he gave me a ride out from town in his van, and because of the gorgeous miter saw he had. I’d been using it for the windows and now for the mouldings. I didn’t love my job, but to aim the laser line and then slide the blade arm through the pine like air—it was satisfying.

The actual house was never going to be beautiful, but that wasn’t the point—I was hired to do a job and I was going to make sure my work was amazing even if it was going to get swallowed up by the larger shittiness. Like you can see this ugly-ass woman and be revolted when you first look at her, but maybe she’s got really good teeth or gorgeous tits or something, so you can get through talking to her by just focusing on that.

That’s what I was thinking as I got out of Edwin’s van at 7:57. We were only going to get a few hours of work in before the sun was so hot the hammer would skid out of your hand. That’s the way August is here: disgusting. But the subdivision was half-built with people already living in it, and they had some rule that we couldn’t be loud before 8 a.m., so we mainly lost working in the cool in the morning. Just carrying the toolbox and some wood into the kitchen, I was sweating. I couldn’t be drinking much water when I was working indoors because we were getting to that stage in the build where if you left something messed up or wet or whatever, you might get called out by Edwin, or even by the owners if they showed up for a surprise look-see. Sometimes it was worse than being at home with Julianna because if she bitched too much about stuff on the floor, I could usually make her shut up, but at a job, I couldn’t talk back—not if I wanted to stay. I hated owners, hated worrying about spilling a bit of water like a little kid, sometimes hated goddamn Edwin, but I loved those saws.

The thing was, assfuckery or not, the work of damn crown mouldings was nice, even in a stupid room. The house had forty-seven neighbours just like it, slick white suburban boxes with no need for crown anything—but I liked cutting the simple angled lines, fitting the joins, smoothing the edges. Julianna was a poet, all staring out windows and imagining shit, but I liked real things, like the wood that framed the window. Things you could touch and feel proud of, instead of scribbles on a page. She told me someone in the city wanted to publish a bunch of her stuff as a book, which kind of blew my mind. Usually it seemed like me and her were in agreement that writing was just her way of wasting time, the way watching TV was for me. She did work at it, reading a bunch of poetry books from the library and writing the same things over and over, even though there wasn’t any point. When she heard about getting to publish her own book, Juli got so excited I didn’t say nothing to bring her down, but in my mind, I was wondering who was going to buy a bunch of pages about our stupid cat, Archie, and the time I was plastered and drove my brother’s truck over her garden. I read her poems of course, but afterwards I didn’t know anything more than I did before, didn’t feel any better or smarter, which I think is supposed to be the point of poetry. When I finished my day, all the windows in the house would be framed in—you’d think she would have seen the difference.

When Edwin came in from helping the other guys pouring concrete in the garage, he was not as happy with my work as I was expecting.

“Speed it along, please,” he said. Edwin didn’t smoke, but he always talked like he had a cigar jammed in the corner of his mouth. “This guy, he wants crown moulding so he can say he got crown moulding. It don’t need to be fit for a king. Quit with the perfectionism.”

Now that pissed me right off. “You want me to stop and let Caleb or Joey do it?”

“Those losers? Fuck no. Just make up time in the dining room, and wherever else. This ain’t fucking modern art, all right?”

I kept my mouth shut and hustled it through the dining room without barely looking at what I was doing—I couldn’t stand to look. The day got hotter.

—

“This house job is going straight to shit. The owner is coming by every day, sometimes twice. He thinks we’re too slow, lollygagging on all these fancy extras he wanted. He walks around with his hands in his pockets inspecting stuff he doesn’t understand. I’m not even sure he knew what crown moulding was when he asked for it, maybe he just thought anything with the word crown in it had to be good. He sure did stare at it for a long time, sort of squinting, like he was trying to make it out.”

“Oh, yeah? That’s crappy.” Julianna was getting dressed to go to work when I came in, which was sort of the problem with her job. She was a waitress at a fake-Italian restaurant because she never got paid anything much for her poems—not so far, anyway. Waitressing meant she was always out in the evening without me. She kept saying that she wasn’t “out” if she was at work. But the fact remained, she was at the restaurant with all these douchey pasta-eating guys, who would pat her ass if they got the chance, of course, because she had a sweet little curve back there, and she wore these fucking shorts that I could not believe were part of a uniform at a family restaurant—a saintly white blouse and these tiny black shorts like a Hooters whore. One time she’d been leaving for work when Edwin dropped me off, and he was practically hanging out the driver’s window watching her walk down the sidewalk. I’m sure it was the same with whatever guys were passing her all the way to the restaurant.

“Today, hottest day of the summer, the owner just stood at the other end of the living room, fiddling with a tape measure like a little kid—pulling it out to watch it snap back. So fucking annoying. I was sanding up the ends before I started the window frames. I didn’t like to work when he was there, but you gotta get something done sometime, especially when he’s pushing for faster work. Of course he came over and looked at what I was doing and asked what I was sanding the end bits for. ‘It need that?’ He asked me that!”

“Oh, jeez, I’m sorry, Sean.” She was doing up her shorts; she had to tug a bit to get the button done. I always told her to just scrape off the sauce and eat that, not the noodles, because carbs were bad for her ass. I don’t know if she listened to me—I bet she didn’t—but she still looked damn good, and had the tips to prove it. It was a blessing and a curse, that ass. “What did you say?”

“Well, I’d’ve loved to not answer. But it was pretty clear I heard. So I just explained to him how yeah, you need to sand if you want a tight join. And he just fucked off—left, and took the tape measure too. What a loser!”

I chucked my shirt into the corner—Edwin don’t allow the guys to be shirtless on site because he says it’s unprofessional, but in the van we all strip off fast—and was heading to the can when Julianna said, “Hey?” She was twisting her blouse over her stomach. “Sean?” Then she just stood there blocking the bathroom door while I was just sweating and dying to take a leak, like she didn’t know she had said anything.

“What, Julianna? What?”

“I think Archie’s feeling sick today. Could you keep an eye on him?”

“Archie?” She was watching me with her big dumb eyes, making me feel like I was the dumb one. “The cat? Oh, he’s fine. Cats are rodents; they take care of themselves.”

“He’s not a rodent.” I only got a step forward before she grabbed my arm. Her hands were like ice, and I remembered why I liked her again. “I’ve just been so busy, with the extra shifts at work and trying to get the book ready and all. And then today I realized he might be sick—”

I shook her hand off and took another step away. “Well, that is your own damn fault, Julianna. You have responsibilities here, you have a job that you need to keep, but instead you’re wasting time, writing shit no one wants to read—”

“They’re going to publish it, Sean, I told you! A real publishing house sent me a contract.”

“Yeah, yeah, for how much again?”

“I told you, $500. That’s not nothing—and I put a lot of myself into that book. It’s important to me to get things right.”

“And for $500 you’re going to kill the cat you supposedly love and lose the only job you can get.”

“I won’t—I just wanted—”

“Go to work, Juli, or it’ll be you and that cat both feeling sick.”

—

“They want to eat gravy but pay dry,” said Edwin—some fucking metaphor. After he kept talking a minute more, I realized Edwin was actually going on about the owner refusing to pay proper labour costs. It would’ve been nice to understand that earlier in the conversation.

This was the next night: he ranted all the way to my place and then he wanted to come in. I knew he was hoping Julianna would be there. But what can you say when your boss drives you home and goes, “Got any beer?”

At least she wasn’t there, though actually that pissed me off too—she should’ve scheduled her shifts so we were both home at the same time occasionally. And the cat was there, running ape-shit circles around our ankles. Edwin was eyeing the bottle of 50 I handed him as if I’d fished it out of the sea. He was reading the label for a full minute, even though there were about four words on there. I oughta’ve shown him one of Julianna’s endless poems—it would’ve taken him out of commission for a week.

Finally he took a swig, swallowed, and looked down at the orange mess swirling around his feet. “Your cat?”

“It’s Julianna’s.”

“Seriously?” He bent down and gave it a testing pat, as if you could tell by the fur who it belonged to.

“Seriously. You know a guy with a cat?”

Edwin sat his fat ass in a chair. “I’ve known just about every thing in my time.”

“I bet.” We drank in silence.

Edwin leaned over the cat again and tugged at the silver tag on his collar. “ ‘Remember us with no familiar name’? What the fuck is that?”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s a poem. Julianna had some fucking idea about…I don’t know. The cat’s name is Archie, and the guy who wrote that poem is Archibald something, so it’s like—she loves that poet guy. I tried to read his book, but I guess I’m not a fucking poetry genius because it was all just trees and sadness to me.”

Edwin nodded and shrugged and took another sip of beer. Really, he wasn’t a bad boss. He got the job done, and he didn’t put up with shit unless it was his own. I could’ve almost liked the guy if he didn’t have a hard-on for my girlfriend.

“What’s she up to these days, Julianna?”

“She’s workin’. Italian place by the arena.”

He leaned back and narrowed his eyes like he was going to say something filthy and I clenched up. “Oh man, I love them garlic sticks. You eat free there?”

“Naw, I gotta pay unless she brings leftovers home.”

“How long till the end of her shift?”

“Long. Hours.” I did not check the clock on the VCR.

“Yeah. I bet if you go in there, though, she’ll set you up, right? Extra sauce, the good wine instead of the shitty house stuff?”

God, he was so hot for her, even the food she served was sexy to him. “Dunno. I never tried that.”

“You never know till you try.” He set the bottle on the table and stood, hitching his belt. “You tell Juli I might be stopping in some suppertime.”

I thought about clocking him one but I needed the job. I was so hot and tired, and I’d drunk that beer so fast, I didn’t know if I’d heard what I thought I’d heard. So I just walked up the stairs with him, even though I didn’t want to climb those steep basement steps behind his swaggering ass, but I knew the door stuck and if you weren’t used to it you couldn’t get it open. It felt good to watch him fumble for a moment, though. When I closed the door behind him, the goddamn spooky-eyed cat was staring at me. I can’t take that shit. I knocked him with my foot just a bit and he flipped down a couple stairs—just to remind him to show a little respect. Cats land on their feet, my ass.

—

When I got home Friday night, I was pissed off because Edwin kept us waiting in the hot van for ten minutes while he shot the shit with the guy who installed the window glass. Then he kept a tenner off my pay because he said I’d busted a blade off the jigsaw and what he thought I would’ve been doing with a jigsaw out there I just don’t fucking know.

There was nothing to eat. The only thing in the kitchen was a bunch of old notebooks on the counter, for some reason. I opened one at random and read a poem about ice on an ice-cream cone. It wasn’t bad, and I would’ve told Julianna so if she’d been there to hear it. I went out and picked up shrimp pad thai, came back, ate it while watching a movie where a dog plays basketball. Then I went back and read the poem again. I wondered if the ice cream she was writing about was from the shop down by the lake we used to go to back home—she thought it was romantic to walk and eat ice cream and look out at the water. Or maybe it was about the time we tried to make our own and it was a mess.

The cat went up on the table while I was in the can and he stole a shrimp. I locked him in the pantry, tossed the cat-contaminated food, opened a beer, watched the rest of the movie, then Letterman. Nearly midnight and Julianna still wasn’t home. I shotgunned another beer in the kitchen. In bed I felt like I’d stay awake, but then it was morning and Julianna was curled beside me in a white linen ball, so I must’ve fallen asleep.

Work continued to be bullshit all the next week—still hot, still dull, still the fucking owner begging us to make it fancy but then cut corners and Edwin agreeing. After all the time I spent on them cupboards, they put on ugly plastic door pulls. Like zits on a perfect round ass.

“You can’t be telling the client what he needs. It’s the client who tells us.” Edwin was unloading boards from the truck—I didn’t even know what they were for. There was something else now?

I tried to stay on topic. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but generally, doesn’t the client tell us at the beginning what he wants, and then leave things be? Correct me if I’m wrong, but the client is not usually in the house while we’re doing the work.”

“It is what it fucking is, Sean. I pay you the same per hour whether the work makes sense or it don’t. This ain’t modern art, I told you. So earn your money and quit bugging me, okay?” He shoved the ends of some of the twelve-foot two-by-fours at me.

I grabbed the wood and breathed deep. I needed all the oxygen I could get. “Fine.”

We plonked the boards on the lawn. As I started to go, he said, “I was right—your Juli does help a guy out with a few extra breadsticks and the good wine.”

I stopped with my back to him; I needed to work out what he was saying, if it was another of his fucking metaphors: Did he just go eat in Julianna’s restaurant, or did he actually lay her?

“What’d you eat?” I said it like it was a code, which is all metaphor is. “If you’d told me you were going, I would’ve said get the chicken parm. That’s the best.” I finally faced him; he was just smiling like an idiot, squinting into the sun.

“Them lasagna rolls, man—those are the bomb.”

“What time did you go? To the restaurant?”

“Late…lateish. I figured if it was the dinner rush they wouldn’t like her chatting with a friend—” Edwin was not Julianna’s friend “—so I went just before close, like.”

“Like.”

“You’re a lucky man, Sean, and don’t forget it. She let me stay while they was closing up and we had a little chat. Sweetheart, that one. A real sweetheart.”

“Chat?”

“Well, I just asked her what was new. Imagine my surprise when she told me she has her own book of poetry coming out in a few months. How come you never told me that?”

I just stared at him. The answer was, Why would I tell him anything? But I figured I couldn’t say that without starting a fight. “I didn’t know you were interested in poetry.”

“Oh sure, oh sure, huge fan. So this is exciting, getting her very own book published. We ought to celebrate.”

“Well, I’m glad you and Julianna had such a good talk.” He didn’t seem to be getting my tone, but that was an act. To get that tone out of me was the whole point of the conversation.

Edwin kicked at the pile of boards. He still hadn’t told me what they were fucking for. “You two ever step out on the town? I know a place, a couple young sweethearts of my acquaintance introduced me. Dancing, good beers on tap, good-looking people, great place to raise a glass to Juli’s success.”

I opened my mouth and he just about thrust a hand in. “Not a pickup joint—classy. You could take your lady for a night of celebration.”

“Well—”

“You oughta think about it. These girls that I’m taking out tonight, they’re all right, but they’ll go with whoever pays for drinks, y’know. Would be nice to have you and Juli there too, for real conversation.”

I shook my head, nudged the narrow boards with my foot.

“You just think about it. We won’t be waitin’ on you, like.” That wink again, my god, I ought to have punched his face in when he did that. “I’ll give you the address.”

—

At home, the place was just piles of dishes and books and crap, and Julianna on the floor like a child, with a bunch of papers out in front of her and that fucking cat in her lap.

“What’re you doing?”

“Oh, hey. Just working on the order for my book.” She didn’t even get straight up when she saw me come in—had to carefully set the cat down and stack up her pages so they wouldn’t get kicked. Shows her priorities. Finally, she scrambled up to big-girl level. “How was your day?”

“Bar none disaster. The owner is totally dicking us.”

She patted my arm but didn’t really meet my eye. “That’s too bad, Sean. I’m sure Edwin will sort it out. I got some veal for dinner, if you want.”

Of course she would bring up that bastard right away. I stared at her to see if she looked dirty, like a liar. When I met her, way back in Iria when we were both practically kids, she was a virgin, or that’s what she said. Actually she wrote a poem about it, how I was the only one, ever. I wasn’t sure. She was hot, Julianna—I knew that even though when you’ve fucked someone a lot of times, it’s hard to see their hotness. But with her I could always see it. I guess it got pointed out to me a lot by how other guys stared at her. They wouldn’t let me forget for a second.

“It was on sale. Frozen stuff.” I guess she thought me going all grim was because she bought expensive fucking veal. Her giant blue cow eyes didn’t tell me anything—after all these years, I still didn’t even know if I trusted her not to lie. How fucking crazy is that?

“What’s modern art?” I said it because I suddenly knew she’d know. She’d gone to university, though she dropped out when I got the job out here.

The cat had gone into the kitchen and was yowling for its dinner. Julianna was walking after him as she answered. “What do you mean?”

“You know, modern art. The expression, the thing people say.”

“Like Clement Greenberg? Or like Ezra Pound?”

“No, not like history. I mean Edwin’s always going, ‘It’s not modern art,’ when I want something I’m working on to be better and he doesn’t. Like he doesn’t want me to do too good a job.”

“Oh, that’s an expression. Like, it’s not that important.”

It was like a punch in the gut. It was good to know that’s what she thought of my work. Good to know she was so knowledgeable about Edwin’s expressions. Just fucking great. She went into the kitchen to feed that cat she loved so much, not even looking back to see how I felt. As soon as the door shut I slammed my fist into the wall beside the window. Plaster dust waterfalled onto the floor.

Of course Julianna came running when she heard the crunch. I couldn’t even tell if she was pretending to care when she touched my busted-up, bleeding knuckles. Or was she cooing over me even though she was wet for fucking Edwin? I shoved her and she skittered back, tripped on goddamn Archie, and fell onto the couch. The cat sank his teeth into her calf like it was a mouse. She squawked, her ponytail disintegrating around her face.

There was no choice. I had to see for myself. “C’mon, brush your hair; we’re going out.”

—

I watched her very, very carefully. When we first saw Edwin by the pool tables, she nodded and grinned and let him kiss her cheek. He insisted on buying the first round and when I tried to say no thanks went on about Julianna’s brilliant poetic book—that’s what he called it—and how he was going to say he knew her before she got famous. I was dying to ask what his favourite poem of hers was because I was betting he hadn’t read any nor even knew what they were about. But what if he had? What if he said one of my own favourites, the one about the ice cream, or the one about a tomato plant growing in a gravel yard? So I didn’t ask.

We sat at the bar with these two awful females of the sort you’d expect in a place playing Shania Twain followed by Aerosmith. Super-young, not pretty but with thick dark eyeliner and boobs that seemed to be resting on shelves inside their bras. It was an awful night, because everybody had some sort of plan or agenda, in addition to the usual one of just getting pissed drunk. Julianna was trying to get me to not be mad but in that idiot way she had of pretending not to know why I was mad in the first place, so she wouldn’t have to stop what she was doing or apologize at all. She just rubbed up against me the whole night, all bug-eyed. Those sad girls Edwin brought just wanted to get their drinks bought and their bums patted every once in a while, so they could bicker with each other about who Edwin really liked. Edwin was happy to buy their rum and diet Cokes and pat whatever was available, but he was obviously after Julianna. He wasn’t subtle about reaching around her to flag the waitress, clapping his hand down on her thigh every time he laughed. She didn’t blink, and she even blushed when he talked about how she was creating true literature, as if those other sluts cared. He was so familiar with her, calling her Juli as if he’d known her forever, grabbing a sip of her drink when she looked away and then, when she caught him, just giving a little wink and licking his lips—it was obvious they’d slept together.

The thing was, I felt like Edwin was mainly doing it to get at me; sure, she was hot, but the two chicks sitting on the other side of him weren’t that bad, didn’t have boyfriends they fucking lived with, and weren’t playing hard to get like she was. Not that hard, though—Julianna laughed when she saw him licking her beer foam off his lip, a wet chirp that sounded way too into it for me to believe all the surprised looks she gave to his wandering hands. I was a rock, though, just staring at the baseball game on the screen over the bar, minding my business, peeling labels off my empties, waiting out the night.

Finally, finally, it was last fucking call and we could let the evening die. Edwin knew we’d taken the bus to the bar, so when he got outside he offered us a drive home in his lousy car, but then Julianna went, “No way, you’re plastered,” like she was his wife or something. And he just hands her the keys, super-sweet, like they were the couple and I was just some asshole getting a free ride home.

She lit out across the parking lot—just like that, her long blond hair glowing a kind of silver in the streetlamps’ glare as it swung just a few inches above her round little rump. Edwin jogged up to her with the two girls trailing behind. They didn’t even glance back to see if I was following—I could’ve gone back in to call a cab or collapsed in the parking lot, for all they fucking cared. Eventually I went after them, just to see the nightmare through.

Really, I knew it wasn’t Edwin’s fault, although he was a fucker. It was natural for a man to want a beautiful woman, and anyway, Edwin never promised me he wouldn’t. It was Julianna who had made me promises, written me little bathroom-mirror poems on sticky notes about staying true forever, all that shit—and it was her I held responsible.

When I got to the car, Julianna was already behind the wheel and the two girls—I never got their names—were fussing around getting into the back. Edwin goes, “Well, Sean, your woman has secured the front seat for you. Guess I’ll make myself at home on the hump.” He and the girls laughed like idiots. I guess they were drunker than I’d thought. He climbed in between them and slammed the door. When I went over and opened the passenger door, Julianna smiled up at me and without thinking I smiled back—a pure instinct smile. I felt stupid, but what could I say? I was just a loser who couldn’t even buy a car or keep his girlfriend off other guys’ dicks. Juli waited for me to buckle up before she pulled out.

I was ignoring Julianna, and in the back seat Edwin had somehow sweet-talked both of the girls onto his lap. Juli was being all prissy, asking, “Is that really safe?” The girls just laughed like hyenas and started yammering on about who liked Edwin more. “No, me!” “No, me!” Barely even words, but they sure could go on. Then one of them shifted sideways over his knee so that I, glancing back from the front seat, could see right till Sunday in the headlight from oncoming cars as we pulled onto the highway back to town. I kinda got hypnotized.

That’s why it took a moment for me to realize the car was heading onto the soft shoulder and jerkily slowing down. I looked over at Julianna and her face was wet. “Christ, what now?”

She just kept on crying and braking and didn’t take her eyes off the road.

“No, what’s this? I say something to you? I didn’t say no goddamn thing to you.”

“A cat. There was—a cat!”

We’d come to a stop by that point. Them in the back were wasted, but they still could recognize we weren’t moving. “What the fuck?” squawked one of the idiot twins.

“Just calm down, Juli, honey.” Edwin actually leaned forward between his two blitzed beauties and put his hand on Juli’s shaking shoulder. She didn’t even notice, as if he’d done it a thousand times before.

“No, no. I gotta get the cat.”

If I’d been sober I would’ve worked out that she’d meant in the road there was a cat, but I wasn’t and now we were at the side of the highway in the goddamn dark and Julianna was both sobbing like a maniac and trying to get out of the fucking door with cars whipping by at a hundred miles per hour. So I grabbed her by her skinny arm and yanked her back in the car. “The cat is at home, you dumb bitch.”

“The cat, I hit it. There’s a cat on the road that’s hit and I’ve got to help it.”

Finally I got what she was saying through the beer fog. I brought my voice down so the others wouldn’t hear—not that they gave a fuck. Edwin had lost interest and was necking with the blonder one; the one more like Julianna. “Yeah, well, don’t add yourself to the graveyard.”

“I can see it.” She pulled herself toward the door again, but I got my fingers dug into her arm. “Sean, I’ve got to help that cat.” She twisted and managed to get free of my hand, I don’t know how. That girl was an eel. She opened the door and was out before I realized I’d lost her.

She was plastered to the driver’s side door when I got to her—a semi had just gone by and the car was wobbling. “Get in the car, Julianna. I fucking mean it.”

“I couldn’t stop.” She was talking like her teeth were chattering. “Jessie and Jennifer don’t have seatbelts on and they would’ve gone through the windshield.”

“Well, good you didn’t kill no one over a fucking rodent.”

“Cats aren’t rodents!” she screamed, her mouth wide and spit flying. She started to lunge at some white streak a hundred metres back in the right-hand lane. Even I could see there were headlights coming. She must have had something more to drink when I hadn’t been paying attention.

I grabbed her arm again and the other one too, flipped her round and slammed her against the car. “You can’t fucking run down the highway, Julianna. You need to take responsibility for murdering that cat and just get the fuck on with it.”

She was crying so much she looked ugly. “I-I-I-I—”

I smacked her a good one across the mouth and came away with a hand coated in snot and tears and spit. “Get it together. Now you gonna drive or am I? Maybe me driving wasted is better than you sober, what do you think?”

“What the fuck?” Edwin had rolled down the back window, which Julianna was half leaning across. “What’s going on? Leave the girl alone.”

“Fuck off, Edwin. Get back to your sluts. This is none of your business.”

She was trying to drop down out of my hands now and curl up on the ground. Thank god she didn’t weigh very much.

“Jesus, Sean, this is fucked up.” Edwin was trying to get the door open but Julianna was pressed against it and I put my hand on the top of the frame too. Fucking Edwin. He always had to get involved in every goddamn thing. The girls in the car were squawking but I couldn’t see their faces.

The next passing semi flattened me against her. When it was gone I shoved my hand behind her back, opened the door, and crammed her in with the other two bitches.

“Edwin, take shotgun. I’m driving now.”

I got us home just fine, though I did see the back door of Edwin’s car was a bit dented where Juli had slammed against it. Served him right, specially since right after that he told me he didn’t think there’d be all that much carpentry work for me the rest of summer. Fucking liar. But I made him settle things like a man, and that was satisfying.

When I got home from dealing with Edwin, Julianna showed me the bruises on her arms, her swollen lip. I told her what the fuck else was I supposed to do? She could’ve gotten herself killed. She didn’t have an answer to that. And she was mad about me losing the job—even a crazy whore needs someone to keep her in veal and notebooks. We had a fight, and she wound up having to stay home from work for a long time after that. But it was good—me and her, just the two of us hanging out all the time, no outside interference. I think we both felt lucky, being together like that.