A steady stream of cars passed her in the highway’s other lane, all of them heading for the field as she drove toward South Street. Her Bisonette singlet pinched her tits like it always did but for once Kimbra didn’t mind. It was hard to believe that after three years on the squad (and after misplacing God knew how many uniforms) this was the last time she would ever be seen so spangly and green.
Because she suspected she wouldn’t have much cause to wear a beaded singlet in Hollywood. She ran a thumb along a seam. Maybe she would become a costume designer, she thought, a stylist, one of those people who hide halfway down the movie credits. She saw them on Instagram. They seemed to make okay money.
God knew she’d need it.
Goodbye, creepy Flats, she thought. Goodbye, vacant lot where the church used to be. Goodbye, Bentley.
Four hours before kickoff and already South Street was deserted. The parking spaces were all empty. Signs hung in the windows of the Egg House, of Mr. Jack’s Steaks: CLOSED FOR GAME. She flinched when the deputy guarding the ruined bank waved at her from the mouth of the busted vault. She prayed he didn’t try to stop her.
She parked in front of the hardware store and looked through the front windows. Crazy. No lights from the back, no movement. Her father really was gone.
And yet even without him here, even with the deputy’s back to her, why did Kimbra feel like she was being watched?
She didn’t want an explanation. She hurried down the alleyway to the back door and punched the code into the beeping alarm, left the door ajar—she wouldn’t be here long. She flipped on the lights, scanned the top shelves of the old paint corner in the stockroom. She spotted Canary Yellow #65, just a little too far back on the shelf for her father to reach it easily. Right where she’d left it.
Kimbra retrieved the squeaky little stepladder and pulled down the can that contained close to twelve thousand dollars in cash.
She popped the lid loose and took a long smell of the fragrant money inside. God almighty, did she love it. After years of growing up just this side of bankrupt—her father may have been winning the battle against Walmart but Bentley had already lost the war with globalization or global warming or whatever had taken all the jobs away—Kimbra loved her money just like this: tucked together into little folds, growing like a green sea creature she fed with her time and her care and her savvy. Loved money not to spend, not to display, but to have.
The cash had been hard earned. It represented every dollar her father had paid her to work at the store, plus KT’s eight trips to Dallas over the summer, minus the money his mother had stolen in the spring, and minus also the outlay for fresh product. Asking Dylan to hold the cash for a time had been Kimbra’s idea after KT’s mom stole the first couple thousand. When Dylan bugged out because that Darren guy saw him with the cash, this paint can too had been Kimbra’s idea. The trips to the coast, the invented half brother, Floyd Tillery, even the fake address that KT’s guy in Dallas had given to Officer Clark on Monday: they had all been Kimbra’s ideas. Because she—they—had to get out of this place.
Twelve thousand dollars. Kimbra had wanted to leave town with more, had wanted enough to walk into a car dealership and pull out a stack of bills and buy herself a vehicle that would never break down, that would get them out west with no fear of failure.
Well. She and KT would have to take their chances in her creaking Pontiac. If things got tight on the road to Los Angeles, Kimbra supposed he could do some of the work she had long suspected he’d gotten up to in Dallas.
The girl wasn’t an idiot. Every weekend when KT went on a business trip, he’d left Bentley with the same amount of product, taken it to a guy he said he’d met online—Kimbra didn’t know who, nor did she want to. Then, after hanging in the city for the weekend to keep up the front that he was at the coast, KT would return Sunday evening. The only problem? He always left with the same amount of product, but returned with different sums of cash.
He’d explained this away by saying that sometimes his guy was a little short of money, and then sometimes he was paying him back what he owed, but Kimbra had never quite bought this. When KT had first come to her with his plan he’d sworn—sworn up and down—that he wasn’t actually dealing drugs like Garrett, just carrying them to someone in the city who wanted a steady, white-skinned supplier who could carry a large amount of product unmolested up the highway. “When was the last time I got pulled over?” KT had told her with a laugh. “You know how special I am to them?”
So if this guy in Dallas was such a big shot, such a sure thing, how come he never had their pre-agreed amount?
Kimbra knew that KT left Bentley with the same amount of product on every trip because she had been the one to unpack it. Every other week a plain brown box arrived at the hardware store with a return address in Seattle. Her father never unpacked any boxes, thank God. If he did, he might have discovered a vacuum-sealed foil bag that weighed a little under two ounces and bore the cryptic words SEALED FOR MY FRESHNESS.
Kimbra had never opened a single pouch. She didn’t want to know what was inside. When KT had come to her in the spring with a half-formed plan he had hatched with Garrett Mason, that had been her one stipulation: she never wanted to see whatever it was they were moving.
So if KT had driven to Dallas with the same amount of product on Fridays and returned with different sums of money on Sundays, Kimbra knew that in between KT hadn’t just been “waiting for his guy to sell our shit,” as he’d told her. No. KT was earning extra on top. The sight of the escorting ad that Whiskey Brazos sent her yesterday had solved a number of suspicions. Kimbra would recognize that dick anywhere. Ah well.
She wasn’t certain how she felt, knowing her man had been turning tricks. She told herself she should be bothered by it, should be worried about STDs and the cops, should be consumed with fear at the knowledge that her man might not be as straight as she’d always assumed, but in all honesty she felt nothing but gratitude. He’d made her more money; it might be the most selfless thing (perhaps the only selfless thing) he’d ever done for her. Escorting, to Kimbra’s mind, was crafty, dangerous, stupid and useful: did any four words better summarize the love of her life?
She wondered how it had started, wondered how her man had first discovered he could stomach whatever it was he had done for this money. Even if he was some kind of queer (difficult as that was for her to imagine), wouldn’t it take a special sort of damage for a boy like KT to perform the things promised in that ad she’d sent to Joel Whitley? She couldn’t imagine it was easy on the body or the brain. Had he gotten practice, she wondered, somewhere close to home?
Which led her to another question: if the escorting ad she’d seen was KT’s (again, she would know that dick anywhere), why had KT put Dylan’s face on his own listing? It smacked of some sort of revenge, but what could Dylan have done to deserve it? She wondered if that vengeance had anything to do with the fact KT had been snorting up half of his product all summer. Because thieving mothers or not, there should have been much more money in this can than twelve grand.
All week long, Kimbra had thought she wanted to know what secrets were eating her poor beautiful boyfriend so badly he’d started using (again). She’d been certain that if she knew, she might be able to help him, like always. She’d thought she could find a solution to it the way she had found the paint can and the half brother and every other answer she’d come up with when KT had come running to her, crying because the world was so hard.
It was confounding, the loathsome gravity at work in her heart. Kimbra knew that she was clever, reasonable, cautious, and yet against this one footballer with the little freckle on his upper lip, his careful hands, the glimpses she sometimes caught of the better, gentler boy who lived inside him, none of Kimbra’s caution did her a bit of good. Look at them, the girl with the bankrupt family and the eighteen-year-old footballer with the drug habit and a sideline servicing men for money. The town’s tabloid sweethearts, Dylan Whitley and Bethany Tanner, seen through a busted filter. With some mixture of relief and resignation, Kimbra had lately begun to tell herself that she and KT were made for each other. A part of her—a grotesque, powerful part—would always be the plain girl who had been stunned two years ago when that handsome, funny, dangerous boy had first privileged her with his attention.
Kimbra sealed the paint can shut, readied herself to go. A thought finally occurred to her: maybe she had other options. Look at all she’d uncovered by herself this week. Think of all she could accomplish without a man dragging her down. Of how much further a single person could stretch twelve thousand dollars in sunny California.
Maybe—maybe—when she reached the turnoff for KT’s house Kimbra would carry straight on.
But at that moment she noticed something glinting behind an old can of spray paint deep in the back of the shelf.
Because she noticed the glinting thing, Kimbra didn’t hear the faint sound of the door opening wider behind her.
The top shelf was very deep. She balanced carefully on the tips of her sneakers, braced one hand on the lip of the shelf and was just able to grab the little glimmer of green that rested against the far wall.
It was a Bisonette’s singlet, just like the one she was wearing now. Just like the ones she was always misplacing.
Kimbra turned the singlet over. Sure enough, the name LOTT was printed on the back.
How on earth had it wound up here, covered in dust? The singlet had been in a pile near the wall, like it had been tossed atop the shelf and forgotten. But who would have stolen one of her singlets and misplaced it way up here?
Who else had access to this room?
B-B-Benny Garcia stuttered in her head: “I h-heard it was your d-d-dad runs that p-party.”
Kimbra didn’t want to know what this was about. There were some rumors she didn’t want confirmed.
She turned.
She saw the man waiting behind her.