The Bust

by Jamie Bennett

  Emma sneezed. The magazines and clippings and everything else may have mattered a lot to my great-aunt, but they were also very dusty. “Sorry,” I said, and pushed the box over to the door to join the others that were on their way out. It left a suspicious brown trail on the carpet behind it, signaling that there had been some additional fungus underneath. Yuck.

  When my best friend sneezed for a third time, I decided that we needed to get out. “We’ll go for a little stroll,” I told her. “It will be good for us.” She growled when she saw the leash, but there was an unfriendly boy dog down the block and also, Em was still a little prone to chasing squirrels, and I wasn’t in the mood for a chase scene through snowy woods today. It was very grey, very bleak here in the winter. It reminded me a lot of the summers in our apartment in the Outer Sunset district in San Francisco, with the cold fog that clouded out the sun so much that you never would have known that it was July. I hadn’t really understood what all our books had meant when they talked about “seasons” until I left the city and seen a real summer, and then fall, and then snow for the first time in the winter.

  But, ok, even if the weather did remind me of July in San Francisco, it was actually way colder here in northern Michigan than it had ever gotten at my former home in California. By the time we’d walked only a little way, Emma was moving slower, and after another block or two, she turned around and started to head back to the house, pulling me along with her.

  “Yeah, I think we’re done,” I agreed. We were the only people out on the road and I looked at the houses we passed, which were all dark and sometimes seemed abandoned. Some of them were only used in the summer, like the cottage with the lady who’d made me the special brownies, but a few had cars parked in front. I wondered about the people inside those houses and what they did, who they talked to. But it wasn’t that I needed anyone other than Emma, not really! We’d been a team for a long time, and we were fine with just the two of us. Still, I looked at the houses and hoped that someone would come out and say hello, but no one did.

  Em went right to bed when we got back, settling herself in the middle of the bottom bunk, and I dragged the boxes of magazines onto the front porch to take to the recycling center later. I’d been pulling them two by two in the red wagon I’d unearthed last summer in the poison-ivied back yard. Despite the sorting I’d done recently, the room didn’t look that much better. It hadn’t bothered me much before, but lately I’d been thinking that I should really finish the job and get the house totally empty of junk. It had been on my mind since…well, since Thanksgiving, I guessed. Since I’d spent the holiday with Kayden in his apartment and been a little taken aback by the differences in how we lived. I’d been considering that maybe if the house was neater, then when he visited us again, he wouldn’t be so grossed out.

  But that hadn’t been a problem, since he hadn’t come back over. I didn’t have his phone number and his apartment building had a doorman who told visitors that if Mr. Matthews wanted to see you, you’d already have that number, and no, you couldn’t even leave a message for him at the desk. Kayden hadn’t made an effort to talk to me at all, not stopping by or using the card with my info that I’d tucked into the book I’d loaned to him, The Lady Desires a Pirate. Probably it was because he was busy, busy just like I was—and I was extremely occupied, like, all my waking hours were filled. I had my job at the tavern and I had Emma. And all this! I had my house to organize and my great-aunt to learn about. Yeah, I was super busy, so it was better that Kayden wasn’t coming by and getting in my way, or texting me or whatever.

  I picked up another box and the bottom fell out, exposing a fresh crop of mushrooms among soggy, yellowed newspaper clippings about actors on a show called Dynasty. The wet clumps of paper reminded me a lot of when we’d been trying to housetrain Em when we’d first brought her home, when my mom and I hadn’t known anything about dogs and were winging it and had been horrified at puddles of puppy pee. That Christmas when I was thirteen, my mom had been feeling better and we’d gone downtown to Union Square to see the holiday lights, and there had been a little black puppy sitting in the window of a department store, so alone. She’d looked at me and I’d known that she was my dog, and I was hers, too.

  I started to pick up the mess on the floor of my house now, and it was extremely gross. The puppy-training part after we’d brought that little girl back to our apartment hadn’t been so fun, and neither were these newspapers today. Fortunately, it appeared that the water damage had only gone through the bottom foot or so of the box, and the stuff in the top layer was relatively dry. I removed an armful of this layer, expecting to see more old clippings, more ancient magazines, but…no. I picked out another armful and settled on the couch with the papers spread across the cushion. I looked at the envelope at the top, then drew out the folded notepaper from inside it.

  “Dear Ronnie,” I read out loud. “Oh, I miss you already!” My eyes scanned down the page, and I jumped up off the couch. Dust jumped up with me. “Em!” I called. “I think I found something!” I stopped, and sneezed. “It’s a real letter, from…” I sneezed again. “Sorry. It’s a letter from Great-aunt Maude and to a guy, like a boyfriend or—” I almost knocked myself off my feet with the force of the sneeze I let loose. “I’m going to have to open the windows. It’s the…” I took a breath but it wheezed. “Crap,” I muttered, and tugged on the sash. There had been some water damage at one point, leading to the fungus issue and making the windows very difficult to operate, so I went to the door instead. I yanked it open to sit outside on the porch and get some air while I read the letter in the fading light and the icy wind.

  “September 16, 1956,” I said aloud. “Dear Ronnie, oh, I miss you already! I went down to the beach today just to think about our walks there under the stars. Remember how you watched me as you reached for my hand, like you were afraid I wouldn’t let you take it?”

  This was so sweet—it was all about her summer romance. This was exactly what I’d been hoping to find in one of those boxes! Well, if I was being honest, I’d also been hoping to come across a stash of cash or jewelry, but this was just as good. As I blew the dust and spores out of my nose into the tissue from my pocket, I eagerly read her letter about how they’d met, about the summer when she was waitressing at a big hotel in Leland where he had come with his family to stay for a couple of weeks. It seemed like he’d gone home and back to college outside of Chicago, but she wrote in this letter how excited she was to see him again, so they hadn’t broken up!

  When I got to the “love, Maude” signature line, I made myself stop and not start reading the next letter, which I’d already seen was a response to hers, mailed with an Illinois postmark. This was a real-life romance novel and I didn’t want to speed through it all at once, as I’d done recently with a book I’d gotten from the library here. Miss Mirabelle Meets Her Match was about a lovelorn lady whose family lost their estate in a fire but whose fortunes turned around because of the man who’d saved her from the flames. He happened to be a viscount…anyway, I’d read it too fast instead of savoring it, a real problem because the closest library was small and the romance section was even smaller. So I would take my time with these letters and make them last.

  Anyway, it was time for me to get to the bus stop, because if I missed it, I was out of luck and would have to scoot my way to Roy’s. Even with the extra layers of clothing over my “I Drink at Roys” shirt, that was a terrible option. The last time I’d tried, I’d gotten to work so cold that I couldn’t even hold my tray.

  When I stepped off the bus in town, I recognized the car parked across the street, the big, red, fancy one that Kayden had. It was in front of the little law office and I made my way over there to see what he might be doing with an attorney. I knew every building, every store in this little place, because I had a lot of time to kill before I had my shifts at the tavern. I’d even been inside the law office one day to get out of the wind, but they didn’t really encourage visitors if you d
idn’t need legal help. But today, if I happened to be outside when Kayden left there, that was just pure coincidence.

  It took a while before that coincidence happened. He came out and shut the door pretty hard behind himself, and was stalking towards his car without even looking around. I had to make myself more visible to force our chance meeting.

  “Oh, Kayden!” I exclaimed. “What a surprise.”

  “Is it really?” he asked me. “You’re sitting on my bumper.”

  I stood. “I got tired. You’d be shocked by how waiting around makes you tired! At least in football, when you don’t play you can sit on the bench. Right? But when I wait for my shift to start at the bar, I have to walk around or I get too cold. I get cold anyway, even with the walking.” Presently, I was freezing. “How are you? What are you doing in the lawyer’s office?”

  “Fine,” he answered me briefly. He moved toward the car like he was leaving. “See you.”

  “Want to hang out for a while?” I suggested. “I don’t have anything to do, do you?”

  He blew a hard breath of steam into the cold air. “No. No, I don’t have shit to do.”

  “Great! Let’s go to Holliday Booksellers.” Their romance selection was limited and too expensive for me, but they did have a tiny café that had just opened, where they didn’t mind if you hung around for a while to get out of the cold wind and snow. “I’ll buy you a coffee. I need some to wake up. I think the cold makes me sluggish and yesterday I dropped two glasses. Roy was really ticked.”

  “No, I…” He seemed to reconsider. “Yeah, ok,” he sighed.

  “Great!” I repeated, and put my arm through his to walk us across the street. I felt him stiffen, but he didn’t pull away from me.

  “I see you’re still wearing the garbage bag,” Kayden noted. The crinkly plastic brushed against his thick black coat as we walked.

  “It’s not the most fashionable but it does keep the wind out.”

  “You look like…” He tilted his chin up and down to give me a look. “Yeah, you just look like trash with legs.”

  “Not the most fashionable,” I said, nodding.

  “Aren’t you embarrassed to be walking around like that?”

  “No. I’m more worried about staying warm.” I looked at his outfit and also remembered the purple fur coat I’d seen him wear when he’d come into the bar where I’d worked in Oklahoma. “Are you embarrassed to be with me? I guess clothes are pretty important to you.”

  “Not looking like I live outside and need social services is important to me,” he agreed.

  “Well, I don’t really care. What put you into such a mood?”

  Kayden held the door of the bookstore for me. “I’m not in a mood.”

  But clearly, he was, and he stayed frowning and sour as we ordered coffee from the red-haired lady behind the counter, and as we watched her struggle to make drinks for us. She spilled most of a carton of milk and there was a lot of angry muttering.

  “What were you doing with the lawyer?” I asked Kayden.

  He played with a sugar packet before answering. “I’m trying to get someone to represent me. I want to sue my agents. Former agents.”

  “Why?”

  “They stole from me!” he bit out furiously. “They robbed me blind.”

  “Oh, lordy! Are you serious? That’s terrible!”

  Kayden nodded. “I talked to my accountant and I’m…” He didn’t finish, but I looked at his face and saw the desparitiness there.

  “How bad is it?” I asked him gently. “Are you poor?”

  “No!” he answered, even more furiously.

  “How much did you lose?” I questioned, but he only shook his head. “What did the lawyer have to say about it today?”

  “He just told me the same thing as the other ones I spoke to. I don’t have a case. My signature was on everything.” He sighed. “I went along with everything, because I trusted them.”

  “You mean, you let them steal from you,” I concluded, and Kayden glared.

  “I didn’t know what they were doing, obviously. I wasn’t thinking clearly a lot of the time.”

  I thought for a second myself, wondering how much they’d taken with his permission. “So, what are you going to do about it?”

  “Nothing. Nothing, there’s nothing I can do.” The red-haired lady signaled that our coffee was finally ready and he got up to fetch it for us. I took a sip and gasped. It tasted absolutely terrible.

  “I can pay you back for my drink since you don’t have any money,” I suggested, and I thought for a second that he was going to snarl something angry back at me.

  But he just nodded. “Thanks, but I can still afford to buy you a coffee.”

  “What about your apartment? Can you afford it, too?”

  He looked surprised. “My apartment? I haven’t thought about that.”

  Well, this was very bad news for him. “You know, at least it doesn’t seem like you have a lot of people to buy Christmas presents for,” I suggested. “That’s a positive.”

  Kayden stared at me and I opened my mouth to apologize for reminding him that he was alone, but then to my utter shock, he burst out laughing. He tried to wipe his eyes with the napkin from under his coffee cup, which was already totally brown and dripping because the lady had been very sloppy. She wouldn’t have lasted two minutes with Roy breathing down her neck.

  “Here,” I offered, and took a tissue from my inner pocket. Besides the dust and fungus in my house, my nose also ran a lot when I waited outside for the bar to open so I carried a stash. “I guess you’ll have to get a job, beyond volunteering.”

  “I guess so,” he said thoughtfully. Had this really not occurred to him?

  “What have you done before? What’s your work experience?”

  “I played football,” he told me.

  “I mean, besides football,” I said, but he didn’t answer. “Did you graduate from college?”

  “No. I redshirted for a year but I never got enough credits to finish.” He sighed and wiped his eyes again, but now he wasn’t laughing. “I don’t have any skills besides football. And look how that went for me.”

  I thought it had been ok, since he’d been a star and all, but I just nodded. “Ok, so what’s next?”

  “I have no idea.”

  And he clearly didn’t. He looked completely confuddled. “You could sell your car. You’d get money for that,” I suggested. “But I guess you can see from my life how much it sucks not to have transportation, so you’d have to buy—”

  “No, I’m not selling that car.”

  “Ok, well, I’ll go back to my earlier idea. You’ll have to get a job. Let’s look! They have good wi-fi here,” I said. I reached across the table for his phone and tapped some codes until I found the one that worked to open it. “Hm. There’s a lot fewer ads now that it’s winter, but maybe…here’s one! Do you have any experience with carburetors? You have a car, so you must have seen one, right?”

  “I have no idea what that is or what it does. I just told you, the only thing I know how to do is football. That’s it.”

  “Well, it’s not like you can give up,” I counseled. “You’re going to have to eat. Hey, I have an idea! I worked briefly for a repo company down in Louisiana and I learned a few tricks. If you want, I’ll go with you to LA or New York or wherever your former agents live and we can try to shake them down for the money.”

  “I think getting arrested once was enough for me.” But he did look somewhat interested. “You shook people down?”

  “Not personally,” I said, sorry to disappoint him and destroy my rep. “I watched, though. You could be scary like that, if you wanted. You’re really tall.” And he was sturdy. No, not sturdy, but strong, lean but strong, like you could put both your hands around his bicep and the tips of your fingers wouldn’t meet. But it also seemed like you could put your arms around him and hug him and fit together very nicely. If you wanted to.

  “I’m not going to th
reaten them for my money,” Kayden told me.

  “If you’re concerned about things getting physical, we could get you a weapon—”

  “No, I’m not going to do that.”

  Fine, fine. I went back to flicking around his screen. “Have you ever heard of the Junior Woodsmen? That’s a football team, right?”

  “Sure. They’re the development league team here.” He took a sip of the coffee and made a face. “Shit, that’s awful.” He pushed the cup away from himself. “I think the Junior Woodsmen play on a field over by the practice facility we used to use. It’s total crap, and they’re supposed to be a joke. Like a peewee team.”

  “They’re having tryouts.” I held out his phone to show him. “It says they’ll consider everyone who comes. Maybe they need a quarterback.”

  He didn’t even look. “No. They don’t need a quarterback and I wouldn’t try out there even if they did. Playing in the devo league? No. I was a starter on the biggest stage in the world. I wouldn’t go backwards.”

  “Snob.”

  “Whatever.” Kayden shook in head. “I’m not doing that. I’m done with football.”

  “Ok, fine.” I slid the phone back over to him. “Then you better look for something else. Because if you can’t pay rent…”

  “I’ll figure something out. I know how to work.”

  I had my doubts. I bet he’d never had to work that hard for anything, ever in his life. “I hope so. Oh, what about selling your sperm? You’re super good-looking and you could make some cash off something you’ve been giving away for free. I’m sure we could also find a willing woman to give you an assist. A hand, so to speak.”

  Although I’d been totally serious, Kayden laughed again. I liked that sound. “What time are you done tonight?” he asked me, ignoring my sperm suggestion.