Fight for Her #2

by JJ Knight

  “I guess it’s good that the fight isn’t happening, then,” she says.

  “Yeah.” I want off the phone now. I need to think. Figure stuff out.

  “Oh!” Maddie says. “My friend Georgia just came in with Lily. Let me talk to her and then Lily can call you back.”

  “Great,” I say. “Catch you then.”

  I shut off the phone and lean against the wall. I know what I have to do, but I have no idea how to get it done.

  But Vegas is definitely out.

  Chapter 11: Maddie

  Aunt Delores is skeptical that Parker’s going to do the right thing. I can see it in the way she butters her toast.

  Even Lily notices. “Why are you being mean to your bread?” she asks.

  Delores glances down at the knife. It’s cleaved clean through the toast, and hot butter drips out the bottom. She drops it on her plate. “I’m just fine, Lily. Now go wash your face for school.”

  Lily swipes the back of her hand over her mouth, moving a smear of jelly from one spot to another.

  When she’s gone, I say, “Parker says he’s coming.”

  Delores slides into a chair. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

  “Well, I believe it,” I say. I’m getting weary of defending Parker to her. Maybe he’s right. Maybe it’s time for me to move out. I’m just afraid. Single motherhood with a job in the city takes serious coordination. Delores has made it so easy on me until now.

  I pick up my purse. Time to walk to the subway.

  Lily runs back down the hall. “Kisses!” she says.

  I bend down to press my lips against her forehead. “Have a good day, baby girl.”

  The day is blustery and colder than I expected. I pull my jacket tighter around my body. For the first time in a long time, I look forward to the holidays. Maybe we’ll go to LA since Parker is there, as well as his family.

  Christmas has always been fine with me and Lily and Delores. Once I flew my mother here from LA. But she complained the whole time about the trouble and expense, so I never did it again. We make due with a phone call.

  We’re not particularly close, not since she kicked my dad out when I was twelve for being a womanizing alcoholic. But she’s my mom.

  I haven’t known the exact whereabouts of my dad for almost a decade, although sometimes when I still lived in LA, I ran into him on street corners. As a teen this was horribly embarrassing, so I avoided him.

  If I got the chance to go back for a visit, though, I’d do my best to find him, at least to say hello. I’m not sure I could get him back on his feet. He was stubborn, prone to violent outbursts, and usually drunk. I’m not really sure Lily should be around him.

  He might not even be alive now.

  I sigh. I’m not sure how all this will work out, especially if Parker moves here for the security job.

  I pull out my phone. I’ve been stalking the profile of that fighter girl High Tide since the video of Parker came out. I’m not really jealous, but it seems like something to pay attention to. Obviously she feels some connection to him if she’s going to work so hard to help him out.

  Today she’s all excited about a fight in Vegas. She’s put in a thousand exclamation marks and smiley icons. I click through to the link.

  I stop walking.

  It’s for Parker.

  A rematch with that awful fighter who bashed his skull just last week.

  It’s huge news. A Twitter ticker to one side shows all the people mentioning #flykickrematch, which is what everyone’s calling the Vegas fight. The animated GIF of Parker doing the funny move that people think caused him to lose is all over the place.

  Why hasn’t he told me?

  Damn it, now I’m late.

  I hurry down the steps of the subway station. Last night Parker said he had good news. He’d been pretty fired up about it. I thought at the time the bit about his fight getting delayed was a little anticlimactic.

  And that’s when it hits me. He didn’t tell me about the Vegas fight because of what I told him. About the job. About moving here.

  I slide my card through the turnstile and stand beside the other commuters waiting for the Seven. Parker chose not to let me know. Did he plan to lie about it?

  Or was he going to back out?

  I can’t let him do that. He’ll resent me for the rest of his life.

  The ride into Manhattan is interminably long. I want to call Parker. To stop him if he’s going to do what I think he might. I hate that my phone doesn’t work down here.

  When I finally emerge in the Garment District, a heavy rain is falling. I duck under the nearest awning.

  I hit dial on Parker’s number, then realize that with the time difference, it’s five in the morning there. I kill the call. Dang it, I’ll have to wait.

  * * *

  Apparently our break from the work madness is already over. Minutes after I shove my bag into the drawer of my desk, rumors circulate that Anton himself is coming down to the rack room, where the fabrics are kept clipped to dozens of metal rolling stands. It’s where I work, along with two interns and a textile specialist.

  The room is arranged in a system it took me months to understand, a combination of price, weight, fabric type, and how exclusive a print or texture is to Anton’s line.

  I glance down at my outfit, hoping it will pass.

  Anton is very exacting with his own appearance, and expects the rest of us to follow his example. Even as an intern, I was expected to wear current fashion and never to come to the office in discount-store mass-production outfits.

  Those of us on tight budgets would share the news of sample sales and cram into basements to snatch anything we could get our hands on. It stressed me to no end when I first worked for Anton, but now I live for the thrill of the hunt. Finding a perfectly fitting rare item at a good price is my nirvana.

  Those of us who lasted more than a few months — and many didn’t — got enough seniority to gain access to the discard room, designs that were intended to be ready-to-wear productions but for whatever reason didn’t survive the approval process to become an active line.

  But the discards were risky. Employees were sometimes sent home after Anton spotted them wearing an outfit that it “pained” him to see after its failure to launch. Max, a friend of mine from technical design, ended up using his $1500 discard three-piece suit as a zombie costume for Halloween. He said he cried as he shredded the cuffs and pant legs, but he couldn’t wear it for anything else after Anton told him the suit was “a bigger disappointment than RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

  For those of us who didn’t have trust funds or family ties that kept us fed and housed, shortcuts like this made the day-to-day difficulty of working for a major designer with high standards a little easier.

  No one warned us that Anton would be in the office today, but luckily I am wearing a discard that was only adjusted slightly before becoming part of a successful line. The champagne-colored suit has pants with a wide flare to the bottom, a feature that was toned down in the final product. As long as I stand behind something, Anton will never notice I’m not wearing the current version.

  The interns rush around, shoving spools of thread into drawers and hanging fabric samples back on their racks. Even Flora, a textile designer with ten years of experience, frantically pushes a fuzzy broom around to pick up loose bits of thread that have fallen beneath the tables.

  “How can I help?” I ask. I have only had personal contact with Anton twice. One was my first day as an intern, when he delivered a rambling pep talk to the nervous college students taking positions during their last year of fashion design school.

  The second was when he called me in to commend me on my choices of fabric for a couture collection that was overdue for a runway show in Milan. He asked me about my plans after graduation, and after I admitted I had none, he offered me my current position in the rack room assessing fabrics.

  I am barely above the interns in rank. I still have to run aroun
d town, looking at new arrivals in the various millworks and coaxing buyers to let me in on where some of the most promising fabrics are manufactured.

  The elevator dings, and we know this has to be Anton, as the rest of us always take the stairs. It isn’t that we want the exercise. Standing over a cutting table for hours at a time, or racing across the city trying to track down some elusive color of silk, is work enough.

  But this is our way of knowing we are being invaded from the outside. The rack room is subfloor one. Only the sewing room is below us. So anyone coming via elevator has to be upper management or a guest. We can at least move around the room or straighten the project in front of us before the doors reveal the wide open space of our worktables and desks.

  Anton steps out, tall and lean in a coal-black suit with Jacquard stitching.

  Flora moves super close to me and whispers, “Is that Super 220 wool?”

  I peer at the suit, but the dark color doesn’t allow me to see it clearly enough to definitively tell me that it is a fabric that could run $1000 a yard. I’d have to touch it to know for sure, and I am not going to do that.

  “My people!” Anton says, holding out his arms as though he will hug the whole lot of us. “How are you today?”

  The interns murmur, awestruck by the arrival of their superstar boss.

  An assistant consults a list and whispers something to Anton. He smiles at us, probably refreshed on our names. “Flora, Madelyn, so good to see you both.” He keeps his arms outstretched, and Flora steps forward to be kissed on both cheeks.

  Drat. I will have to come around the table and reveal the wide taper of the pants. I don’t really want to be sent home today or to wreck Anton’s happy mood. But I fake a smile and move forward for my turn.

  Anton does not glance down. His air-kisses don’t even graze my skin. He’s preoccupied.

  He glances around the room, tapping a finger against his cheek. “I am looking for some inspiration,” he says. “And I know my Madelyn here is talented with fabrics.”

  Anton heads toward one of the racks, but it’s the inexpensive mass-produced set, things that might be sent to the lower-end buyers.

  I hurry up to him. “If you’re considering options for the upcoming couture line, you’ll probably find something more suitable to consider over here.” I gesture to the racks on the far side, near the windows, where we can assess fiber strength, luster, and weft of the custom sample lengths that have been especially commissioned for the high-end designs.

  Anton follows me over to them and brushes his hand through the folded samples. The metal hangers bump together with a tinkling sound. “Is there anything here, Madelyn, that you would find particularly compelling if you were, hypothetically of course, creating a mother-of-the-bride dress for a reigning sovereign? In oh, I don’t know, less than a week?”

  Holy shit.

  I walk past him to a second rack. “You would want something we have a lot of on hand, but that isn’t common. Something handmade. Not too pale, to keep it set apart from the bride. But not too dark.”

  While I talk, I strain to think who the client might be. Is there some big upcoming wedding? Usually you have months, if not years, to prepare for something like that.

  I pull a plum hand-dyed silk from the rack, then an indigo charmeuse, and to cover my bases, a deep rose tricot.

  “She hates pink,” Anton says.

  I toss the rose tricot, a custom fabric that cost thousands of dollars in design and production, to the other side of the table. Anton nods, as if approving of my carelessness for the sake of art.

  His fingers slide down the plum silk. “Lovely,” he says. “But possibly too clingy for her frame.”

  So a stout sovereign. “Understood,” I say. The charmeuse will have the same problem. I turn back to the rack and pull three heavier samples to spread out on the table.

  Anton touches them, closes his eyes, and breathes in and out slowly. I have no idea what goes on inside his head as he considers his options. I can only imagine drawings being sketched in the blackness of his mind. Or perhaps he sees the woman turning on a platform, wearing the creation that morphs into different shapes as he sees the color, fabric, and drape on her form. That’s how it works for me.

  Minutes pass. We all wait as if Anton is going to deliver some great proclamation.

  “I’ll take all of these,” he says. The assistant scoops them into his arms. The two of them say nothing else but head straight for the elevator.

  When the door closes, Flora sags against the table. “When he said, ‘She hates pink,’ I thought you were a goner,” she says.

  I laugh. “There was no way for me to know. Anton is reasonable.”

  Flora grunts. “I’m not so sure about that. You haven’t seen him under pressure.”

  “One week to design a mother-of-the-bride dress for royalty isn’t pressure?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “He might have been being dramatic.”

  “I guess we’ll know in a couple weeks,” one of the interns says. Her cheeks are flushed, bright against her pale skin and black fringe bangs. “I’ll watch the gossip sites to see if those fabrics show up on anybody important.”

  I glance at the clock. Shoot. With all the excitement, I hadn’t thought to call Parker about the fight. I’ll have to wait until I can get away from the others.

  I can’t let him blow this big moment in his career any more than he’d ask me to leave Anton while he’s making a dress for a queen.

  Chapter 12: Parker

  Brazen looks like he’s had one too many cans of Red Bull when I hit the gym the next day. He’s wired, banging on a weight bench and yelling instructions to someone I can’t see from the door.

  We’ve officially switched over to Buster’s Gym for training now that the Vegas gig is going down. Or so we’d assumed. I need to find out if Brazen has already signed a contract. He isn’t going to be happy when I tell him I’m out.

  “What’s got you looking like somebody pissed in your breakfast cereal?” Brazen asks. “We’re going to Vegas!” He pumps his fist.

  I’m not even changed yet, still in jeans. I sit on a weight bench and look down. The fighter on the mat is Hudson, Jo’s little brother. He’s doing sit-ups with a forty-pound kettlebell on his chest. The poor boy is straining like he might bust a gut muscle.

  “Reach for it, Mighty Mouse,” Brazen says to him.

  Jo walks through and glances down at her brother. His face has gone completely red and his shaggy brown hair is falling over his eyes.

  “You’re too easy on him,” she says.

  Hudson falls back on the mat, trying to work up the gumption to attempt another sit-up. He knows better than to say anything while Brazen is in charge. That’ll just get him more of the same torture.

  “He needs some French fries or something,” Brazen says. “Didn’t your mama feed this boy anything?”

  Jo shrugs and passes on by. Brazen has zero memory for personal details. I know Jo only met her mother for the first time a few months ago. She didn’t even know she had a brother until then. She probably doesn’t have a clue what Hudson has been fed.

  He is a skinny thing, though. I was way more filled out by the time I was seventeen. He’ll be a flyweight for a long time if he can’t bulk up.

  “Take your mind off the pain,” I tell Hudson. “Your brain is the one saying you can’t do it, not your body. Your mind gives out way before your body does.”

  “Can’t…take my mind off…this.” Hudson sits up in a struggle that is difficult to watch. He falls back.

  “Think about girls. Or a fight you had with your mom once. Something dramatic.”

  Hudson goes for another one. “I saw…my dog…get run over once.”

  “Good,” I nod. “It has to be something hard-core to make you forget what you’re doing.” I used to use Maddie during tough workouts, imagining what I’d say to her if I saw her again, how she left me without even saying she was going.

  But it’
s time to do what I came here to do.

  I turn to Brazen and say it all in one big gush. “I’m going to back out of Vegas to move to New York and be a security guard.”

  Hudson falls backward after only half a sit-up.

  Brazen roars with laughter. “You are a card, Power Play. A total card.” He smacks me on the shoulder. “Now go suit up.”

  I don’t move. “I’m serious. I have a daughter in New York. I’m going to live near her and work.”

  Brazen stops laughing. “You mean this.”

  “I do.”

  The next things out of Brazen’s mouth are a stream of words that are half-cussing, half-made-up, but loud enough that the stacks of iron weight discs actually rattle.

  Jo bolts back into the room. “What is going on?”

  Brazen’s face is redder than Hudson’s. He points at me. “That little son of a bitch thinks he can just walk away after all the work I’ve put into him.” He leans in close to my face, his finger inches from my nose. “You’re under contract. You can’t just walk out of a match.”

  Jo runs back out. Hudson watches us with alarm.

  I’m feeling shaken up. Can he sue me? Could my wages get garnished for the rest of my life if I back out? Hell, I don’t know what I’m signing. Half of us don’t. That’s why we have managers.

  But now I’m going against my manager.

  Jo is back, followed by Colt. Like me, he’s in street clothes.

  “What’s the problem?” he asks calmly.

  Brazen whips around. “Power Play here thinks he can just take off and ditch the matches we have set up.” He glares at Colt. “Including Vegas!”

  Colt’s eyebrows hit his hairline. “Has something happened?” he asks me.

  “Maddie got me a job.” I glance at Brazen. “My daughter’s mother.” I can feel my face burning. When I say it like this, it doesn’t sound as important as it feels. “I’m moving there.”

  “This is over a piece of ass?” Brazen bellows.

  That makes me snap. I leap forward to smash his face, but Colt is fast and blocks it.