by Amy Vansant
“Her purse,” said Nicole from the porch. She walked down the stairs and dragged over a chair to join the boys. She looked at the fire.
“Good one, hon,” she said, nodding toward the blaze.
“What are you talking about?” asked Sebastian.
“She said she was mugged and the guy stole her wallet, but he didn’t take her thousand-dollar purse?”
“A thousand? It’s not that expensive.”
“Oh, I think it is,” said Nicole.
Sebastian scowled. “How the hell could she afford a thousand-dollar purse? That’s crazy.”
“I don’t know. But my guess is she had an old wallet that didn’t match the purse; one she didn’t mind ‘losing’ in a mugging. Does she have a new wallet?”
“I don’t know,” said Sebastian. “Apparently, I don’t know anything.”
“You stay over Emily’s house and suddenly Greta gets mugged and you have to come running when she calls,” said Nicole. “She faked the injury for sympathy.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“She sprinted after Croix like a cheetah on meth.”
Sebastian spat. He felt embarrassed, but he wasn’t sure why. Why should he be ashamed for giving Greta every benefit of the doubt? He hated hurting people. Hated everything his relationship with Greta had become. He would only be a curse to Emily.
“Well, what if Greta did lie?” he asked, his tone angry. “She’s just sad and confused.”
“Oh, because you left her and you’re so amazing,” said Garrett. “Shut up. I know you don’t like disappointing people but you’re just afraid to leave. You hate change.”
Sebastian placed his palm over his right eye and hung his head.
“No, you’re right,” said Sebastian. “And I know she does shit like this. Hell, I think she was cheating on me the whole time we were dating. I mean, all the signs were there, I just...I couldn’t even work up the urge to care. What am I doing?”
“She was cheating on you?” shrieked Nicole. “And you didn’t even confront her or say anything? How did you know?”
“I don’t want to get into it. It’s not like I have a video; just strong suspicions.”
“Maybe that’s what makes it so hard for you to believe she’d try and trick you into staying now,” said Nicole. “Because you find it hard to care.”
Sebastian shrugged. “Maybe.”
Nicole leaned towards him. “Just give me one little hint how you knew she was cheating.”
Sebastian shot Nicole a look. “Such a gossip.”
“So move in with Emily,” said Garrett, throwing his butt into the flames. “She seems awesome.”
“She is,” said Sebastian. “And really, she could be, like, the one, but...I don’t want to hop right from Greta’s house into Emily’s. It’s too fast. I should be alone for a while.”
“Who made that rule?” asked Garrett.
Sebastian sighed. “We haven’t known each other that long. What if it doesn’t work out and there I am in her house making the same mistake I made with Greta?”
“Then you just move, dude! I mean, seriously, what else are you going to do? Live with Greta forever until she fakes her own death or something? She’s going to firebomb your relationship with Emily every chance she gets.”
Sebastian tilted his head back and stared into the darkening sky. In his pocket, he felt a vibration and his phone chirped. He pulled it out and looked at the screen.
“What is it?” asked Nicole. “Is it Emily?”
Sebastian put the phone down in his lap and tilted his head back once more.
“Who is it?’ Nicole repeated. She leaned over and snatched the phone from beneath Sebastian’s hand. He didn’t move.
Nicole read the text message on the screen.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she said.
“What?” asked Garrett.
“Greta says her dog might be dying.”
“Duuuude,” said Garret, scanning the message as Nicole held Sebastian’s phone up for him to read.
He looked at Sebastian.
“You don’t think she’d kill her dog to get you back, do you?”
Sebastian closed his eyes.
A few hours later, Sebastian lay in his brother’s guest room staring at the glowing clock on the nightstand. Greta had sent three more texts before calling. Binker was not dead, she reported. He’d had a seizure, but recovered. Still, she pleaded for Sebastian to come home, saying the experience had been terrifying.
Sebastian said no. He remained stalwart in his decision as she begged and cajoled, until she called him a bastard and hung up.
Sebastian took a deep breath. He closed his eyes, and began to drift to sleep.
His phone chirped to life once more. He ignored the first two alerts, grabbing it on the third. He squinted at the caller ID expecting to see Greta’s name.
It was Emily.
He answered.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” said Emily.
There was an awkward silence.
“What’s up?” he asked. He could feel his heart lighten. It was good to hear Emily’s voice.
“I—” began Emily, her voice soft, as if she, too, was lying in bed. “Today—”
“I’m so sorry about today,” said Sebastian, cutting her short. “I really am. I mean, first for being late, that was a work thing. But more importantly, I’m sorry about the whole mess with Greta and the weird way I was acting.”
Again, silence fell.
“Emily?”
“I’m here,” said Emily. “I’m sorry, too, Sebastian. It’s just... I can’t do this.”
Sebastian sat up in bed. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t want to be tugging at your one leg and Greta tugging at the other. I don’t want to be part of this.”
“There’s no tug of war. Really. Greta and I are done. I’m not sure we ever started, for that matter.”
“You’re still in her house! You need time to unravel whatever this is.”
“There’s nothing to unravel!” insisted Sebastian. “And you’re helping me find an apartment. I’ll be out in no time.”
“Well,” said Emily. “Let me know when you’re free and clear, your life and your head.”
“Emily...”
“I really liked your mom, by the way. And your brother and Nicole. Your whole family is really nice.”
“Thank you,” said Sebastian, “but Emily—”
“I’ll talk to you later.”
“Emily,” said Sebastian. “Emily!”
The phone went dead.
Sebastian raised his thumb to call Emily back and then stopped. He put the phone on the table.
He thunked his head back against the wall.
What am I doing?
Was he so scared of looking like a loser that he was willing to lose her?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Devastation.
Emily was so sad, she didn’t even try and cry symmetrically. When the right eye spilled to her cheek, she didn’t roll over to encourage the left. She didn’t stare forlornly out her window. She didn’t play melancholy music. Heartache without art; the bleakest of all heartaches.
Things had been going so well, and then, thanks to an orange purse, she and Sebastian were over. When she made the phone call, she’d felt strong about her decision to pull from the race until Sebastian was free from Greta. She felt less strong the next day when she didn’t hear from him. Weaker still, the day after that. Now it had been four days. Sebastian had made his choice. His choice was Greta. Or starting over, but not with her.
Emily heard a knock on the door and knew it was Kady. They’d been talking on the phone about how much men sucked when Kady told her Joe was leaving for a baseball game with his friend, and that he wouldn’t be home until late. She suggested the two of them make homemade sausage. Emily had no idea why. All she knew was at one point Kady said, “I have sausage casing in my
car. And four pounds of meat. I’m on my way to your house.”
Emily didn’t want to socialize, but she knew Kady felt low herself, and Kady would do it for her. If Emily wanted an authentic prison tattoo using food dye and a sewing needle, Kady would be the first person at her doorstep with a bottle of McCormick’s Blue Number 3 and fourteen different-sized needles. She was that sort of friend.
If Kady thought it would make them feel better to make sausages, Emily was ready.
Kady had meat; Emily had a Kitchen Aid mixer. Emily never used it; once a year she cleaned it and dumped a dead housefly from its shiny silver bowl. Now she could finally use it for something more than modern kitchen art.
Emily answered the door to find Kady holding two plastic bags.
“I have meat!” she announced.
“I can see that,” said Emily, letting her in.
They threw the bags on the kitchen counter, poured a couple of glasses of wine and opened all the packages. Kady chopped the meat into cubes and Emily set up the mixer. Kady shoved the meat into the top bin, tentatively at first but with increasing agitation.
“It’s probably good Joe wasn’t home tonight,” Emily said, watching the fervor with which her friend shoved cubes of meat through the blades.
Kady grunted.
Emily had never ground meat before, but she had a visceral reaction to watching the threads of fat and muscle squish through the metal screen of the mixer attachment. The vision settled somewhere between the opening cartoon of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and the Saw movie franchise.
“How have you not kicked him out of the house yet?” asked Emily.
Kady shoved another piece of meat in the top bin.
“I plan to, every day, but then I start thinking about telling him we saw him in a car behind a Mexican restaurant, and the fight to which that would lead... I just get so tired, y’know?”
Emily nodded. She’d been there before.
Emily handed Kady the cubes of meat while standing in front of the mixer attachment. Every time the mixer suffered a sputtery air bubble, flecks of meat spattered across Emily’s face and chest. By the time they finished the meat, she looked like the only girl left alive in a horror movie, the remains of her sorority sisters painted across her tee.
“What if Girl Scouts showed up right now selling cookies?” asked Emily. “And I answer the door covered in meat.”
Kady laughed. “Sure, I’d love some cookies, girls!” she said. “Just let me finish killing this guy...”
“I have some money here in the basement somewhere, girls! Just follow me down...” said Emily, bursting into giggles.
“At least if Joe is cheating, I know how to dispose of the body now,” said Kady.
“You think I could fit Greta in there?”
“Maybe one boob. Not two. I don’t have enough casing.”
Laughter died when the grinder clogged so badly Emily had to turn it off and dismantle the unit. She peered into the mechanism, her face an inch away from the exposed blade-disc.
Kady flipped on the switch.
Emily barely missed having her face sheared off, which spun them into more peals of nervous giggling.
“I’m so sorry!” said Kady. “I thought turning the machine back on might help dislodge the blockage!”
“We probably should have waited until after the dangerous part to open the first bottle of wine,” said Emily.
They ground the last of the meat, and Emily read the recipe for the next step, eager to get to the part where they ate.
“Let the meat season for twenty-four hours.”
Kady’s jaw fell slack.
“Whoops,” she said.
They skipped that part.
They stuffed the sausages into the casings Kady had purchased from a butcher earlier that day. Kady fed the meat into the sausage stuffer and eased it into the casing, twisting off links at varying intervals, until they had a phallic string of mixed shapes and sizes.
“I remember him,” said Kady, as Emily twisted one off. “I remember him. Ooh, I really remember him...”
Emily couldn’t stop laughing. Making sausages was better than moping around.
After making the links, Emily read more of the recipe.
“Put sausages into the smoker.”
Emily looked at Kady. “I don’t suppose you brought a smoker.”
Kady shook her head.
They skipped that part.
Emily took the links to her back patio and lit her charred, ancient grill. She put the sausages on the grill with old wood chips left over from two summers previous, thinking that might compensate for the missing smoker.
They sat in the metal patio chairs while the sausages cooked. Emily tried not to look at the hammock, swinging empty beside her.
“I don’t think I can wait any longer,” said Kady. “I have to kick Joe out. You’re right.”
“I mean, I understand you still don’t know if he’s been cheating for sure. It doesn’t look good, but...”
“No,” Kady said, after a moment of consideration. “We’ve been growing farther and farther apart for a long time. I thought we had so much in common but...”
Kady trailed off and took a sip of wine.
“What about you?” asked Kady.
“What about me?”
Emily stared at the huge cloud of smoke billowing from the grill, wondering what would happen if one of the neighbors called the fire department.
“You and Sebastian.”
Emily shrugged.
“I guess it’s over.”
“Hey, that’s a lot of smoke,” Kady said, standing.
She opened the grill, enveloping the patio in a giant cloud. Kady poked a sausage with a fork and then removed them all from the grill. They took them inside to taste them.
“Oh my god,” said Emily, putting the first forkful into her mouth. “That is disgusting.”
They had over-smoked the sausages and turned greasy, wonderful pork products into sawdust tubes.
Kady tasted a tiny piece and then spat it out, face twisted with disgust.
“I thought maybe I could eat it,” she said. “It kills me to waste them, but that is awful.”
“The only thing these are good for is hamster cage lining.”
“We are sausage failures.”
Emily snickered. “That’s what we’ve been talking about all night.”
Emily turned on the television for background noise while they cleaned bits of meat from every surface in the kitchen. The baseball game appeared.
“Oh that’s perfect,” said Kady.
“I’ll put something else on.”
“No, leave it. I don’t care. Maybe we’ll see Max and Joe in the crowd. Whoo.”
Emily groaned. “Don’t even say Max,” she said. “Apparently, that’s Greta’s middle name. And she works at the stadium so maybe we’ll get to see her, too. Whoo.”
“Greta’s name is Max? What are you talking about?”
“Short for Maxine. Sebastian said Greta tries to get people to call her Max, but it never works except with one little group of hipster girlfriends.”
“She has hipster girlfriends?” asked Kady, picking a piece of fat from the toaster. “She seems more preppy.”
Emily shrugged. “I dunno. Apparently, they roll their own cigarettes and stuff.”
“Like poser Joe.”
“Maybe they should get together. Joe and Greta. That could...” Emily trailed off. “Holy hell.”
Kady stopped wiping sinew from the coffee maker.
“What?”
Emily pulled open a drawer and retrieved a pen and paper.
“What car symbol is this?” she said, quickly drawing what looked like a squiggly “H” in a square. “I’m terrible at car types.”
Kady looked at it. “Honda? Or no; if it is wider and more stylized, Hyundai.”
“This can’t be,” said Emily, dropping the pen to the counter.
“What? What? You’re
killing me!”
Emily locked eyes with Kady.
“Joe has a friend named Max he meets at the baseball stadium. Joe, who doesn’t smoke, suddenly wants to roll cigarettes. Mark said Joe was with a girl in a black Hyundai...”
Kady’s mouth gaped. “Greta calls herself Max. She rolls her own cigarettes, works at the stadium... Don’t tell me she has a Hyundai.”
“The car spying on Sebastian and me the other day was black, but I didn’t get a good look at it. The car Greta got into at the party was a black sedan with this emblem.” Emily held aloft her doodle. “I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but if this emblem is what you say it is...”
“A Hyundai...”
“Sebastian said he thought Greta had been having an affair. Could it be...?”
Kady turned and looked at the baseball game playing on the television.
“Son of a bitch,” she said.
Chapter Thirty
“We have to go to the stadium,” said Kady, grabbing Emily’s hands. “We’ll catch them both.”
Emily pulled her right hand from Kady’s grasp and put it to her head. She was at a loss for words.
“My brain is screaming that this is a bad idea,” she said.
“How can we not?” said Kady, tugging on Emily’s left hand like a child begging for candy money. “I mean, we have to at least go see who Max is, right? That’s all we need to do to end speculation on this crazy coincidence. Please? Please?”
“Fine. But this is for you, not me. I don’t care what Greta is up to except in relation to how it affects you.”
“Yea!” squealed Kady. “Quick costume change and then we’ll take your car. I’m not sure mine will even make it.”
“Quick costume...what?” said Emily, but before she could finish her thought, Kady ran out the front door.
Emily saw Kady from her kitchen’s bay window. Her friend opened her car and slipped in. A whirlwind of motion erupted in the back seat, a swinging arm, a hand, a foot; all appearing from behind the front seats and then sinking back into the depths. Kady looked like she was wrestling an anaconda in her back seat.
Emily ran into her bedroom, changed her meat-splattered shirt, freshened her makeup, redid her ponytail, found her shoes and gathered her phone and keys. As she slipped those items into her purse, Kady burst through the front door, now dressed in black jeans and a black, long sleeve blouse with an oversized collar.