“You never told me about when you were little.”
“Ah, maybe one day,” she hedged. “Maybe one day you’ll give me another dose of your magic tonic, and I’ll spill more of my secrets, eh? What the hell did I tell you? Well, I hope you make right use of it.” She smiled, just a flash was all, a lopsided grin that made her look goofy.
But the goofy smile dried to nothing—I saw it hover for a beat, then run. She said, “Things are changing, Vera. I hope you’re ready.” She tapped the coverlet with a sharp finger. “On that score, let me save you a bit of heartache.”
“Heartache?”
“That’s right. First rule: you can’t be both the boss and their friend. That strikes you as lonely, I know. But you get over it.”
Gold
I expect she thought she was preparing me, much as a farmer tells a day laborer which rows to hoe and how much, at day’s end, she would be expected to reap.
Eleven mouths to feed, eleven mouths. I went to bed thinking of the money we didn’t have, and woke thinking of it. Everything was expensive. With the city being built again from scratch, prices from fish to lumber to apples to morphine were triple what they had been.
In the evenings, Tan and I settled accounts. I finished whatever task in the house needed doing—washing, cleaning, counting, sorting, worrying—and took a seat at the counter of his outdoor kitchen. He stopped scrubbing his stove and set a place for me.
One night, he poured a cup of tea and cut a slice of the corn bread he’d made that morning. The pan was nearly full.
“How many customers today, Tan?”
He held up three fingers.
“All day?”
All day.
While I’d been at Rose’s bedside, Tan had suffered diminishing sales. Across the next weeks, folks in the camps settled into a grim acceptance of destitution, the long haul upon us. In the houses that were still standing, the gas lines were slowly being repaired. Tan hadn’t wanted to add to my worries, but the demand for his stew, his fried rice and bean bowls, had ended.
“She wants you to dig out the safe from the rubble at The Rose and bring it here,” I said.
Tan paused, and I knew he was figuring how to cart such a heavy thing. That is, if they could find it under a building’s worth of burned wood and brick.
“Bobby can borrow the wagon from the Ladies’ Protection,” I said. “And we have Monster. But you’ll need more men.”
Tan nodded. He’d get more men. To pay them, we agreed to spend four dollars from the kitty—four dollars in dimes and pennies. Tan looked eager; he thought as I did that the money in the safe would save us.
I bid him good night. As I was coming into the house through the kitchen door, Bobby called to me. He was in the garden having a smoke.
“Hey, Anyway,” he called, “you all right?” The concern in his voice was so real—intimate—it shocked me. I didn’t know I wasn’t all right till Bobby Del Monte asked me.
Knowing he was close ruined any hope of sleeping. My heart skipped ahead of me—fast and unthinking—to Bobby, as the one good thing.
That next night, after everyone in the house had gone to sleep, I was lying in my cot, thinking of Bobby, when Rogue picked up his head and growled.
My first thought was, Oh no, another quake. But Rogue was wagging his tail and happy-whimpering, his snout pointed toward the door.
“Pie?”
“Shh.”
“Bobby? What are you doing?”
He dropped to his knees beside the cot and, reaching over me, patted Rogue, talking to him in that gentle voice he used with Monster. “There, boy. Shh. That’s right. Settle.”
Minding Bobby, Rogue stopped beating the cot with his tail.
I waited to see what would happen next.
“Hey,” he whispered. “I could hear your brain ticking all the way down the stairs, through the kitchen door, across the alley, inside the stable. I thought I’d better visit and tell you, for Rogue’s sake here, shh. The dog needs his sleep.”
“Bobby, how’d you get up here without—?”
“Stairs,” he whispered, kissing me, first on my cheek, then across my forehead and down the other cheek to my lips. “Stairs, Anyway.”
“Bobby?”
“Shh—”
He had bathed and his hair was damp. He brought with him the coolness of the night air too.
“Bobby, if Pie hears us—”
“She’d be appalled!” We stifled our laughter by pressing our lips into each other’s necks.
I reached for the lamp, but he took my hand and held it to his heart. “Nicer,” he said. “Look, the moon.” It was coming through the ox-eye window, from across the park, and across the sea; it was a moon from Japan and beyond, and it lit the curves of the window casing and put a shine on the Singer and a shine on us.
I snorted to tell him I agreed.
“You know sometimes you sound like a horse,” he whispered.
I thought, I am a horse. I’m a horse and I have nothing on but this thin muslin nightgown.
He said, “You are the farthest thing from a horse. See,” he whispered. “I’ve kissed a few horses and that was no horse kiss. But I may have to kiss you again to know exactly what it was.”
“I’m a girl,” I whispered.
“That you are,” he agreed. “My girl.”
In the dark, I nodded.
“Say, would you mind if I stretched out on the rug, just for a bit?”
“Bobby, come up here next to me.”
“Do you think Rogue would mind?”
“He won’t be pleased, but he won’t mind.” I snapped my fingers to prove it. Rogue groaned like an old man, which made us both laugh. I snapped my fingers again, and Rogue slunk to the floor.
Bobby pulled off his boots and lay on top of the covers next to me, on his side, with his arm around me. “Go to sleep, Anyway,” he whispered, and kissed me
