“You’re late on your half of the rent.”
I look up from my spot on the couch. I’ve only been home for ten minutes and had hoped I might miss John this afternoon. He’s an office assistant at a local church, plus he works with the Youth Music Ministry, whatever that actually means—I’ve never been a big churchgoer—and his hours are never as set as I’d like. This is hardly the first time I’ve come home to find him standing in the kitchen, his hip propped against the counter, one of my yogurts in his hand.
He always eats my food, no matter how many times I put my name on it, or where I try to hide it in our admittedly tiny kitchen. It’s like nothing in this apartment belongs to me since it was John’s place first, and he’s letting me live here. He opens my bedroom door without knocking, he uses my shampoo, he eats my food, he “borrows” my laptop. He’s skinny and short, a wisp of a guy, really, but sometimes it feels like he sucks up all the space in our shared 700 square feet.
Another reason I want to get out.
Living with John was only ever supposed to be a temporary thing. It was risky, going back to someone who knew my past, but I’d figured it would just be a place to land for a month, maybe six weeks, while I figured out what to do next.
But that was six months ago, and I’m still here.
Lifting my feet off the coffee table, I stand, digging into my pocket for the wad of twenties I shoved in there after my visit to the pawnshop this afternoon.
I don’t always get rid of the stuff I take. The money has never been the point, after all. It’s the having I’ve always enjoyed, plus knowing they’ll never notice anything is missing. It makes me feel like I’ve won something.
But dog-walking isn’t bringing in enough to cover everything yet, so today, I’d plucked Mrs. Reed’s lone diamond earring from the pile of treasures on my dresser, and while I didn’t get nearly what it was worth, it’s enough to cover my half of this shitty concrete box.
I shove it into John’s free hand, pretending I don’t notice the way his fingers try to slide against mine, searching for even a few seconds of extra contact. I’m another thing in this apartment that John would consume if he could, but we both pretend we don’t know that.
“How’s the whole dog-walking thing going?” John asks as I cross back over to our sad couch. He’s got a bit of yogurt stuck to the corner of his mouth, but I don’t bother pointing it out. It’ll probably stay there all day, too, forming a crust that’ll creep out some girl down at the Student Baptist Center where John volunteers a few nights a week.
I already feel solidarity with her, this unknown girl, my sister in Vague Disgust for John Rivers.
Maybe that’s what makes me smile as I sit back down, yanking the ancient afghan blanket out from under me. “Great, actually. Have a few new clients now, so it keeps me pretty busy.”
John’s spoon scrapes against the plastic tub of yogurt—my yogurt—and he watches me, his dark hair hanging limply over one eye.
“Clients,” he snorts. “Makes you sound like a hooker.”
Only John could try to shame a girl for something as wholesome as dog-walking, but I brush it off. If things keep going as well as they’re going, soon I won’t have to live here with him anymore. Soon I can get my own place with my own stuff and my own fucking yogurt that I’ll actually get to eat.
“Maybe I am a hooker,” I reply, picking up the remote off the coffee table. “Maybe that’s what I’m actually doing, and I’m just telling you I walk dogs.”
I twist on the couch to look at him.
He’s still standing by the fridge, but his head is ducked even lower now, his eyes wary as he watches me.
It makes me want to go even further, so I do.
“That could be blowjob money in your pocket now, John. What would the Baptists think about that?”
John flinches from my words, his hand going to his pocket, either to touch the money or to try to hide the boner he probably popped at hearing me say blowjob.
Eddie wouldn’t cringe at a joke like that, I suddenly think.
Eddie would laugh. His eyes would do that thing where they seem brighter, bluer, all because you’ve surprised him.
Like he did when you noticed the books.
“You ought to come to church with me,” he says. “You could come this afternoon.”
“You work in the office,” I say, “not the actual church. Not sure what good it would do me watching you file old newsletters.”
I’m not normally this openly rude to him, aware that he could kick me out since this place is technically all his, but I can’t seem to help myself. It’s something about that day in Eddie’s kitchen. I’ve known enough new beginnings to recognize when something is clicking into place, and I think—know—that my time in this shitty box with this shitty human is ticking down.
“You’re a bitch, Jane,” John mutters sullenly, but he throws away the empty yogurt and gathers his things, slinking out the door without another word.
Once he’s gone, I hunt through the cabinets for any food he hasn’t taken. Luckily, I still have two things of Easy Mac left, and I heat them both up, dumping them into one bowl before hunkering down with my laptop and pulling up my search on Bea Rochester.
I don’t spend much time on the articles about her death. I’ve heard the gossip, and honestly, it seems pretty basic to me—two ladies got too drunk at their fancy beach house, got on their fancy boat, and then succumbed to a very fancy death. Sad, but not exactly a tragedy.
No, what I want to know about is Bea Rochester’s life. What it was that made a man like Eddie want her. Who she was, what their relationship might have looked like.
The first thing I pull up is her company’s website.
Southern Manors.
“Nothing says Fortune 500 company like a bad pun,” I mutter, stabbing another bite of macaroni with my fork.
There’s a letter on the first page of the site, and my eyes immediately scan down to see if Eddie wrote it.
He didn’t. There’s another name there, Susan, apparently Bea’s second-in-command. It’s full of the usual stuff you’d expect when the founder of a company dies suddenly. How sad they are, what a loss, how the company will continue on, burnishing her legacy, etc., etc.
I wonder what kind of a legacy it is, really, selling overpriced cutesy shit.
Clicking from page to page, I take in expensive Mason jars, five-hundred-dollar sweaters with HEY, Y’ALL! stitched discreetly in the left corner, silver salad tongs whose handles are shaped like bees.
There’s so much gingham it’s like Dorothy Gale exploded on this website, but I can’t stop looking, can’t keep from clicking one item, then another.
The monogrammed dog leashes.
The hammered-tin watering cans.
A giant glass bowl in the shape of an apple someone has just taken a bite out of.
It’s all expensive but useless crap, the kind of stuff lining the gift tables at every high-society wedding in Birmingham, and I finally click away from the orgy of pricey/cutesy, going back to the main page to look at Bea Rochester’s picture again.
She’s standing in front of a dining room table made of warm, worn-looking wood. Even though I haven’t been in the dining room at the Rochester mansion, I know immediately that this is theirs, that if I looked a little deeper into the house, I would find this room. It has the same vibe as the living room—nothing matches exactly, but it somehow goes together, from the floral velvet seat covers on the eight chairs to the orange-and-teal centerpiece that pops against the eggplant-colored drapes.
Bea pops, too, her dark hair swinging just above her shoulders in a glossy long bob. She has her arms crossed, her head slightly tilted to one side as she smiles at the camera, her lipstick the prettiest shade of red I think I’ve ever seen.
She’s wearing a navy sweater, a thin gold belt around her waist, and a navy-and-white gingham pencil skirt that manages to be cute and sexy at the same time, and I almost immediately hate her.
And also want to know everything about her.
More googling, the Easy Mac congealing in its bowl on John’s scratched and water-ringed coffee table, my fingers moving quickly, my eyes and my mind filling up with Bea Rochester.
There’s not as much as I’d want, though. She wasn’t famous, really. It’s the company people seem to care about, the stuff they can buy, while Bea seemed to keep herself out of the spotlight.
There’s only one interview I can find—with Southern Living, of course, big surprise. In the accompanying photo, Bea sits at another dining room table—seriously, did this woman exist in any other rooms of a house?—wearing yellow this time, a crystal bowl of lemons on her elbow, an enamel coffee cup printed with daisies casually held in one hand.
The profile is a total puff piece. Bea grew up in Alabama, one of her ancestors was a senator in the 1800s, and they’d had a gorgeous home in some place called Calera that had burned down a few years ago. Her mother had sadly passed away not long after Bea started Southern Manors, and she “did everything in memory of her.”
My eyes keep scanning past the details I already know—the Randolph-Macon degree, the move back to Birmingham, the growth of her business—until I finally snag on Eddie’s name.
Three years ago, Bea Mason met Edward Rochester on vacation in Hawaii. “I was definitely not looking for a relationship,” she laughs. “I just wanted some downtime to read a few books and drink ridiculous frozen drinks. But when Eddie showed up…”
She trails off and shakes her head slightly with a becoming blush. “The whole thing was such a whirlwind, but I always say marrying Eddie was the only impulsive decision I’ve ever made. Luckily, it ended up being the best decision I ever made, too.”
Sighing, I sit back from my laptop, my back protesting, my legs slightly numb from how long I’ve had them folded up under me. The throw over my thighs smells like cheap detergent, and I push it away, wrinkling my nose.
Hawaii.
Why does that make it worse for some reason? Why did I want them to have met at church or the country club or one of the other five thousand boring and safe locations around here?
Because I wanted it not to be special, I think. I wanted her not to be special.
But she is. Beautiful and smart and a millionaire. A woman who built something all her own, even if she did come from money and the kind of background that made achieving shit a hell of a lot easier than it did for someone like me.
I stare at that picture some more, wondering what her voice sounded like, how tall she was, what she and Eddie looked like together.
Gorgeous, obviously. Hot. But did they smile at each other? Did they touch each other easily, his arm around her waist, her hand on his shoulder? Were there furtive caresses, brushings of hands under tables, secret signals only they knew?
There must’ve been. Marriage was like that, even though most of the ones I’d seen hadn’t seemed worth the effort.
So, Bea Rochester had been perfect. The perfect mogul, the perfect woman, the perfect wife. Probably had never even heard of Easy Mac or seen the inside of a pawnshop.
But I had one thing over her. I was still alive.