Love Bites

by Annabelle Costa

  “I want you to have them,” I say firmly, thrusting them toward her chest. “You never get to have new things.”

  “Well,” Mary says quietly, her green eyes meeting mine, “maybe someday you could buy me new things.”

  I swallow hard. “Yes,” I agree, my voice low enough that Mrs. Eckley can’t hear. “Someday I will.”

  My fingers brush against hers one last time as we exchange books. I’ll have to be careful not to allow my father to see the used textbooks. If he discovers what I’ve done, he’ll be fit to be tied. And if he finds out after a night at the saloon, he’ll surely get out his belt and rip up my backside. He’s done it more times than I can count. It never hurts any less, but I don’t cry anymore the way I did when I was four or five.

  Instead of continuing home after dropping Mary off, I make a detour. Ma gave me money in the morning to stop at Sullivan’s, the butcher shop, and pick up some meat. I would never have suggested Mary accompany me there, so I have to turn around and go back the way I came.

  Our local butcher shop is run by a man named Fred Sullivan. Mr. Sullivan is tall, rotund, and bald-headed, with arms as beefy as a side of cattle. In all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him without that white apron, stained with splotches of crimson.

  Sullivan’s has meat everywhere you look. Mr. Sullivan always positions himself behind the large wooden counter with its giant scale, but to either side of him hangs large, dried sides of beef, many of them as tall as I am and possibly heavier. The smaller animals hang behind him. The poultry is plucked and cured with salt, hanging by their legs, several with the heads still intact. Today he has three whole pigs hanging behind him, legs spread and tied separately.

  I inhale deeply as I walk into the store, my nostrils filling with the scent of salt and smoke and… something else.

  “Hi, Tom!” Mr. Sullivan says cheerfully. “What can I get for you today?”

  I inhale one more time. “Do you have fresh meat today?”

  Only about once a month, Mr. Sullivan has fresh meat. He buys animals at the market in the next town over to butcher, but the majority of the meat is cured for preservation. He has a small cooler that can keep meat fresh for a few days, although he can only get ice for it during the colder months. There’s no chance of fresh meat in July.

  Mr. Sullivan gives me a quick sideways glance before his face breaks into a smile. “You’re in luck, boy. We most certainly do.”

  I nod. “I’ll take five pounds of sirloin please, if you have it.”

  Ma will cook up the steak for dinner tonight on our gas stove. Pa and I like our steak the same way—bloody, barely kissed by the cast iron skillet. It is one of the few things we agree upon.

  “Coming right up,” Mr. Sullivan says.

  He goes into the back, where he keeps the cooler. I can tell when he’d thrown it open by the smell. The “something else” I’d detected has grown exponentially stronger. My stomach clenches as I wait for Mr. Sullivan to return.

  When he comes back, the five pounds of beef are on a piece of paper, dripping with fresh blood. Mr. Sullivan lays it down on the table and wraps it up for me.

  “How come you always know, Tom?” he asks me.

  I shift Mary’s schoolbooks from one arm to the other. “What do you mean?”

  “Whenever I have fresh meat, you always come in here and ask for it,” he says. “But when I don’t have it, you never ask.”

  I shrug. “Well, I smell it.”

  Mr. Sullivan raises his dark, bushy eyebrows at me. I wonder how a man with no hair on his head could have such thick eyebrows. “You can smell the fresh meat from here? All the way in the cooler in the back?”

  My mouth feels dry. The amazement is plain on the butcher’s face—he is surprised I can smell the meat from here. This is a revelation to me. I had no idea everyone isn’t able to smell a fresh carcass the way I can. I don’t think I have a particularly keen sense of smell—I barely notice the smell of the fresh flowers that Ma keeps in a vase in our living room at all times.

  I decide not to mention to Mr. Sullivan that I could smell the meat all the way out on the street.

  “I was joking,” I say. “I heard you went to the market, of course.”

  “Ah!” The smile returns to his face. “Well, you’ve gotten nearly the last of it till next month.”

  The thought that there will be no more fresh meat for another month fills me with… well, it’s hard to describe. A sense of disappointment going down to my very core. Funny how such an insignificant thing should make me feel that way.

  Mr. Sullivan wraps the meat up in paper for me. I watch his thick fingers, always stained with cow’s blood. Surely there is animal blood permanently etched into the creases of his hands. Before I can stop myself, I blurt out, “Do you need any help here, Mr. Sullivan?”

  The butcher looks up at me in surprise. “Help?”

  Now that the words are out, I don’t regret them. I’ve been thinking about working here ever since my mother took me here as a small boy. “You don’t have anyone else who works here,” I point out. “I could come help you. After school. And during the summer.”

  He looks me up and down, appraising me. He has no wife and no children of his own—nobody to become his apprentice. I have been coming here since I was a child and he knows my family well. I’m young and healthy, with a strong back. And I’ll take whatever he can pay me.

  “What about your father?” he finally says. “Doesn’t he want your help at the shop?”

  I cringe. Pa works as a blacksmith, as did his father before him. He’s good at what he does, which is why we can afford fresh meat and have an indoor water pump, unlike many other families in our town. There’s always been a general expectation that as his only son, I would take over for him someday, but the truth of it is that neither of us seems eager for that day to arrive. He seems to want me with him at the shop even less than I want to go there.

  “He won’t mind,” I say.

  Mr. Sullivan gives me a skeptical look.

  “I’ll talk to him about it,” I promise.

  “If George Blake says it’s okay,” he says thoughtfully, “well, you seem like a good boy, Tom. I would take you on if that’s what you want.” He adds with a grin, “As long as you’re willing to work hard for not much pay.”

  “Whatever you want to pay me is fine,” I tell him. And it is true. After all, any money I earn will have to be turned over to my father.

  I tell Mr. Sullivan I’ll return within the next few days to let him know what my father has decided. I leave the butcher shop clutching five pounds of fresh steak and feeling even better than I did when Mary let me hold her hand.

  But then the second I leave the store, it happens again. That feeling.

  Someone is watching me.

  _____

  It takes me two days to work up the nerve, but today I finally speak to Pa about my job at the butcher shop.

  I wait until his stomach is full from dinner and he isn’t too drunk—a combination that does not occur as frequently as I wish it would. Pa works late at the shop most nights. He is the only blacksmith for miles and he brags that he makes most of the tools used in the town. He used to take me with him to the shop some days when I was a young boy. He showed me how he holds the piece of iron under the fire until it changes color from blackened silver to red-orange. When iron is very hot, it becomes pliable, but only for seconds. He has to make the most of those seconds to quickly hammer the metal into the shape he wants, whether it be bending it to give it a curve, drawing it to make it longer and thinner, or upsetting it to make it shorter and fatter.

  “I need to speak to you, sir,” I say to my father as he stuffs the last chunk of potato into his mouth.

  Pa frowns at me, as if already displeased by what I have to say. When my father is home, he is nearly always frowning. He’s a large man with sparse light brown hair and blurry features on his face—thick lips, a bulbous nose, and beady brown eyes that
are always squinting. When my father is not around, my mother will sometimes joke, “You are lucky you get your looks from me, Tom.”

  My mother is one of the most beautiful women in town, even now that she is getting on in years. But I don’t look like her. She has hair the color of corn silk and pale blue eyes. I may share her fair complexion, but my eyes are so dark that you can barely discern my pupils and I have a shock of black hair. Ma swears she has an uncle with dark hair like mine, but I never met this uncle or saw photographs of him. She was vague when I asked her his name.

  “What do you want, boy?” Pa barks at me.

  Ma is clearing the table and her eyes are beseeching me to keep my mouth shut. Most days, I would have obliged. The last thing I want is to anger my father and put my mother in danger. But today I persist.

  “Sir,” I say, “Mr. Sullivan has offered me an after school job.”

  My father’s eyes widen. “The butcher?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I glance over at my mother and see that her already pale skin has gone white. She turns away from us and crosses herself.

  “What do you want to do that kind of dirty work for?” Pa barks at me. “If you want to work, you can come to the shop with me!”

  There is no good answer to that question. I can’t remind my father of the last time I was at the shop with him, how he took a piece of metal still glowing from heat and poked the tip against my bare palm. I screamed with pain that took days to disappear and the molten iron left behind a scar that remains to this day.

  I only wanted to show him what would happen if he wasn’t careful, he explained to my mother as she rubbed salve over my injured flesh. I just touched him with the tip. I don’t know why he won’t stop crying.

  I was six years old.

  Instead, I say, “He’ll pay me wages. You can have them.”

  I don’t want to turn over my wages to my father—I want to save them for when I might ask Mary for her hand. But it is clear this is the only way to get him to agree.

  “That’s really the sort of work you want to do?” Pa sneers at me.

  “Yes, sir.”

  If he’d had a drink in him, he might have hit me. My hand balls into a fist around the scar on my palm that still aches sometimes. The last time he hit me, I took the blow—he has several inches and quite a bit of weight on me, and my chances of getting even one punch in are minimal. But one of these days, I’ll be able to punch him hard enough that he’ll know he’s got a real fight on his hands.

  That will be my last day living in this house.

  But it’s not today. Today Pa throws down his fork and shrugs his big shoulders. “You want to go work for the butcher like a fool, go do it. But every cent you make is mine.”

  I nod. “Yes, sir.”

  It is fair—the best I could have hoped for. My father acts like he is doing me a great favor, but I know the truth—he doesn’t want me working in his shop any more than I want to be there.

  Chapter 3: Brooke

  I sleep like shit. Not that it’s any surprise.

  Jamie came upstairs with me and sat with me for a long time. He even went back to his own apartment to get some hot chocolate to make for me. He limped over to the kitchen, heated up some milk in the microwave, and brought me out a steaming mug of chocolate. It even had little marshmallows in it. I felt a bit childish drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows, yet it did make me feel a little bit better. But when he looked like he was going to pass out on my sofa, I told him to go home.

  “Are you sure?” he asked me. “I could sleep on the sofa if you don’t want to be alone.”

  I desperately wanted him to sleep on the sofa, but I know he has back problems and I’ve got the most uncomfortable sofa there ever was. (It’s from Ikea—‘nuff said.) So I sent him home for his own good. And then of course missed him desperately.

  As I lay awake in bed last night, I kept replaying the last time I ever saw Sydney. We met up for drinks after work, and I remember when Sydney breezed into the bar, she was the most gorgeous I’ve ever seen her. She was glowing. I thought she’d gotten engaged.

  “This mystery guy must really be good in bed,” I said to her.

  “Oh, he is,” she assured me, crossing her legs in a way that made at least two guys turn to stare at her. “Among other things.”

  “So when do we get to meet him?”

  Sydney flashed me a coy smile. “In due time.”

  “Can you at least tell me his name so that I don’t have to keep calling him ‘mystery guy’?”

  She shook her head.

  I let out an angry huff. “Can you at least tell me what letter his name starts with?”

  She shook her head again. “Come on, Brooke. Don’t pitch a dying duck.”

  “C?” I guessed. “Does it start with C? B? L? Please just throw me a bone here!”

  Sydney laughed. “I promise you, you’ll meet him soon enough.” She twirled a lock of blond hair around her finger. “It’s getting serious.”

  “How serious could it be if you won’t even tell your friends the guy’s name?”

  “Okay…” Sydney took an onion ring off the plate in front of us. I’d have been jealous that she ate so much yet never seemed to gain a pound, but I’d seen Syd’s fridge at home and knew that she starved herself when she was alone. “His name starts with H.”

  “H,” I repeated. “So… is it Henry? Harry? Hank?”

  Sydney just smiled at me and patted her hair, surreptitiously adjusting one of her bobby pins. Syd was really into bobby pins. I thought it was funny how this girl who was otherwise the height of fashion always had a ton of bobby pins stuck all over her gorgeous blond hair. She was addicted to them.

  “Is it Hayden?” I asked. “Like the planetarium? Syd, are you dating a planetarium? You can tell me if you are.”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” is all she said.

  Well, now I’ll never find out. Because Sydney is dead. And Hayden the Planetarium is probably the one who killed her.

  I drag myself out of bed, pushing away that dizzy, nauseous feeling I always get when I haven’t slept enough. I’m tempted to call in sick, but at the same time, I feel like work might be a good distraction. The last thing I want to do is sit home all day, thinking about how it could have just as easily been me lying in a body bag right now. I’ve certainly gone out with enough sketchy guys over the years.

  Maybe it’s time to rethink the dating scene. Maybe it’s time to get more serious about settling down with a decent guy.

  I manage to shove my body into some clothing and apply the necessary creams and concealer to hide the fact that I spent the whole night awake. I’ve got my clogs on and I’m ready to leave my apartment when I hear three loud thumps on my door.

  Yes, it’s eight in the morning. Yes, it’s broad daylight outside. But that doesn’t mean those thumps don’t scare the crap out of me.

  The entire time I was at Gramercy Park, I couldn’t shake that feeling of being watched. But then when I went home to try to escape that unpleasant sensation, something occurred to me:

  If someone was watching me at the park, they now knew where I lived.

  The whole thing put me in a panic. I couldn’t even tell Jamie why I was so upset because he would have thought I was out of my mind. Normal people don’t think they’re being followed. There’s a word for people who suddenly decide they’re being followed and that word is not “perceptive.”

  I tiptoe over to the door and let out a breath when I see that it’s only Mr. Teitelman behind the peephole. I unlock the door and find my downstairs neighbor standing at my door, his eyebrows bunched together in a frown. Mr. Teitelman is in his seventies and one of those men who has more hair in his eyebrows than he has on top of his head, and has never worn anything but checkered shirts in all the time I’ve known him (well, occasionally bathrobes). He moved in two years ago, after his wife of forty years died, and he’s really the sweetest guy ever. Well, aside from when I
so much as breathe too loudly in my apartment.

  “Too loud!” Mr. Teitelman greets me. “Why so much stomping around, Brooky? You woke me up! Your shoes are so loud!”

  “But I only just put my shoes on like one minute ago,” I point out.

  “Eh?” Mr. Teitelman says.

  That’s the kicker. Mr. Teitelman can’t hear worth a damn. I always have to repeat everything I say a hundred times and yell at the top of my lungs so he can understand me. But then I have to tiptoe around to keep the noise from bothering him. It’s like he has some sort of hearing disorder where he can only hear stuff directly above him.

  “I’M SORRY,” I say. “I’LL BE MORE QUIET.”

  “That’s my girl, Brooky.” Mr. Teitelman’s face creases into a smile. “By the way, my grandson is having his bar mitzvah this Saturday and I’m having a party over here in the afternoon when it’s over. You’ll come?”

  “Um…” I’m trying to think of a nice way to tell my neighbor that I don’t want to spend my Saturday afternoon at a thirteen-year-old’s birthday party.

  “We’ll have catered food from Katz’s deli,” he says. “It’s going to be the good stuff!”

  “Um,” I say again.

  Mr. Teitelman winks at me. “James said he’d stop by.”

  I cringe. Much like Gabby, Mr. Teitelman is convinced that Jamie and I are meant to be together. We are literally unable to have a conversation about Jamie without him winking meaningfully at me. Still, he’s right—if Jamie is coming, that makes the party more appealing. The truth is, the thought of seeing Jamie there is enough to convince me to go.

  Hmm. Maybe we’re not as much in the Friends Zone as I had thought.

  “Okay,” I agree. “I guess I can come by for a bit.”

  He cups his hand over his ear. “Eh? What’d you say, Brooky?”

  “I’LL COME TO THE PARTY.”

  Mr. Teitelman claps his hands together. “Wonderful! I’ll order extra chopped liver.”

  Before I can tell my neighbor that I would never consider eating chopped liver in a million years, he’s heading down the hall, whistling a little tune to himself. He’s really a very nice man—maybe I should get carpeting.