by Jenna Brooks
“Hey, Keith.” Her ex-husband.
He overplayed his shocked expression. “Josie! Hi! Hi!” The last “hi” was annoyingly sing-song, and Jo looked helplessly for Max and Sam. They apparently had already made it out the door; now, Jo was sandwiched between a short, heavily sweating guy in a gray suit–texting ferociously, and muttering something about “bitches”–and Keith.
Sammy was right, she thought. Dante miscounted.
Keith was glancing around the room to see if people were watching. They weren’t, but it was one of his habits. “Hey, uh, let me buy you a drink?”
“No thanks. I’m already drunk. See ya.” She moved to set her mug on the ledge, and felt a hand caress her shoulder.
“Well, Keith, who’s this?”
A pudgy, studious-looking man with a comb-over was leering at her.
Keith was still scanning the bar for whatever audience he thought may be out there. “Uh, Ken, this is Josie.”
“I’m his ex-wife. Nice to meet you. Goodnight.”
“Ex? Oh man, that’s too bad, buddy.”
She was finally able to set her mug on the bar. Shaking her head regretfully, she said, “Yeah, Ken, it’s a real tragedy.” She exaggerated a sigh. “Ruined me for other men. Goodbye.” She had managed to move away from Ken’s hand on her shoulder, and then someone bumped her in his direction again.
His hand rested on her back. “What’s your hurry, babe?”
“Ken’s the new guy at work. He’s in…” The rest of whatever Keith was trying to say got lost in the noise of the sudden crowd. It sounded to Jo like he said “ice tea.”
“What? I can’t hear you.”
“I’m in I.T.” Ken yelled. Jo heard him clearly, but his hand had moved way too low on her back, and she wasn’t having any success in moving it back up.
“Did you say ‘bite me’?” she yelled back, pretending to be deeply offended.
Bobby had come to collect her mug. He shook his head, grinning at her response, and left it where it was. Then he leaned on the bar to watch.
Jo kept her eyes on Ken’s as she grasped his hand firmly, turned it palm-up, and picked up her beer again.
“Oh no, sweetheart.” Ken was amused. “Don’t you do that …”
Still holding his hand, she poured the last half of her drink on his crotch.
Ken jumped up, swiping at his trousers; Keith was scrambling for the bar napkins. “Aw Jo, c’mon! Why do you always have to…”
“What? If I’d dumped it on his slimy hand, I would’ve gotten his wedding ring all wet.” She dropped the heavy mug on Keith’s foot. “Oh. Sorry.”
A narrow path to the front had opened up, and Bobby came from behind the bar to push the door open for her. Jo could hear Ken shouting something about assault and battery.
“You have a real good night, Jo. You okay to drive?”
“Yeah. Thanks, Bobby. You just let me know if they don’t take good care of you, okay?”
He saluted her. “I’ll do that, sweetheart.”
Max’s car was still in the lot, parked next to Jo’s truck, but she and Sam weren’t there. Jo pulled her phone from her pocket just as it starting ringing.
“Hey, where’d you guys go?”
“I’m walking Sammy home. Help me sober up so maybe I can drive.”
“I got stuck in the bar. Geez, you guys took off pretty quick.”
“Yeah, well, it looked like you were about to get lucky.” Sam was laughing in the background.
“If I’m going to live such a crappy life, I at least deserve better friends.”
“Whatever, Bimbo.”
“Hey, Maxine, you know your caller ID on my phone says ‘Bimbas’, right?”
“You got ‘Bimbat’ for Sam, too?”
“’Course.”
Sam was yelling something. “What’d she say?” Jo asked.
“She’s wondering why we have to conjugate bimbos.”
“She actually said ‘conjugate’?”
“Hey, she knows stuff, remember?”
“She’s an enigma, our little Bimbat.”
Max snorted. “Yeah, who knew? Hey, we’re almost at Sammy’s. I’ll be back to you in a bit.”
“Yup. ‘Bye.”
Jo opened the tailgate of her aging SUV and sat down, lighting a cigarette. It was warm that night, unusually so for early May. She noticed Keith’s silver sedan, parked two rows over.
He drove his car for what was a five-minute walk?
She pulled her cash out of her trouser pocket. She knew it wasn’t the safest thing to do, counting what was left of her tips in the middle of a center-city Manchester parking lot at night. Or at any time, actually: Manchester was no longer the small-city haven it had been a decade ago. There was a “good” side now, and Barley’s was pretty close to the “bad” side of the city.
She had thirty eight dollars left. That would pay the electric bill. She fanned her face for a few moments with the cash, then rolled it up and put it back in her pocket.
A few minutes later, a blue hatchback pulled in next to Keith’s car. The dome light came on, and Jo watched as a plump, fortyish redhead arranged her bangs, and then practiced several seductive glances in the rearview mirror. As the woman stepped out of her car, her purse strap caught on the gearshift, jerking her backwards. Jo was amused–and gratified–to realize it was Keith’s girlfriend, Shelly. It wasn’t often that Jo felt like she had the upper hand on anyone, let alone a younger woman with a six-figure income, so she relished the feeling for a while.
Max suddenly hopped up on the tailgate. “What’s up?”
“I just watched Shelly do her mating ritual.”
“Oh. Whatever that means.”
“Never mind. It’s boring.”
“You looked pretty entertained for something so boring.”
Jo grinned. “Let’s go. I need some sleep.”
“Wanna go for pancakes? I’m not ready to drive.”
“Nope. I didn’t make much tonight.”
“You go on, then. I’ll see you for coffee in the morning.”
Jo yawned as she slid slowly off the tailgate. “Not before nine. I don’t have to be back at work until noon.”
“You getting your mail on the way in?”
“Want me to grab yours?”
“Thanks. Slide it under my door.”
“Geez. Anything else?”
“Whatever. It’s on your way up anyway.”
She pulled Max to her feet. “Goodnight.”
“’Nite, hon.”
Jo had just pulled out of the parking lot when her phone rang. A minute later, she made a quick U-turn.
She swung back into Barley’s lot, and up to Max’s car. Max was sitting in the driver’s seat, head back, her eyes closed. Jo tapped her horn, and Max startled, looking at her and mouthing, “What?”
She lowered her window. “Get in. We have to go get Sammy.”
“Jo, you’re gonna get pulled over.”
She sped through the yellow light at Elm Street. “Yeah.”
“Fine. Get a DUI.” She massaged the sides of her neck. “She needs to call the cops on him. He’s escalating.”
“Like that’ll help.”
“At least it’s something.”
Jo didn’t answer.
“Wait…Jo, you just passed her house.”
“We’re going around the corner. You go to the front, cause a distraction. Ring the doorbell. Then get outta there.” She pulled to the curb. “I told her to come out through the back porch, so we’ll be back here in a couple minutes, tops.”
“It’s that bad?”
“It could get there, and he’s not going to let her out tonight. I’m not leaving her there.”
Max moaned. “Why aren’t we calling the cops?”
“Sammy said no.”
“Great. What are we going to do after?”
“Try to get her to go to the cops.” She left the truck running as she opened her door. “C’mon. Count
to twenty, then ring the doorbell.”
As she approached the house, Max could hear Jack from the driveway. “Get up! No one’s buying it! Get off your ass!” She took the steps to the front porch two at a time, taking in a fleeting impression of the perfect symmetry of the hanging baskets lining the railing. Something thudded hard in the house as she pressed the doorbell, and the sudden silence inside was like someone had flipped a switch.
A minute or so went by. She could still hear Jack’s voice, but not his words. The kitchen light, off to the left side of the house, went out.
A few seconds later, she saw Jo and Sam to her right, running for the truck. Sam appeared to have a slight limp. Max sprinted back down the steps, across the driveway, and got to the truck just as Jo dove into the driver’s seat.
“Get in. Hurry up.” She swung the truck into a U-turn, heading back downtown.
“We need to get you to the emergency room,” Jo said. She was stopped at a red light, studying Sam in the rearview mirror.
“I’m okay.”
“No, you’re not.”
Max lit a cigarette, handing it to Jo. “Sammy, you need to get checked out.”
Jo took a long drag as she opened her window. “And you need your injuries documented.”
Sam turned to look out the window. “Just take me to my mom’s house.”
“Where’s Tyler? Still in Boston?”
“Yeah. He’s with his dad this weekend.”
Max turned to face her. “Sammy…”
“I’m not going to the hospital. Please.” She pulled her cigarettes from her purse. “Just drop me off at Mom’s.”
Jo put her hand on Max’s leg and gave her a quick look. “Okay, Sammy.”
Max started to say something, then lit a cigarette for herself instead.
They sat in her mother’s driveway for a minute after Sam bolted from the truck, rushing unsteadily to the house.
“She’s not limping as much.”
“She’ll be okay for tonight.”
Max was staring straight ahead. “We’re this close to the diner anyway. Neither one of us will sleep much after this.”
“Yeah. Pancakes.” Jo started her SUV, grimacing as the engine thumped ominously. “Next up, truck repair,” she mumbled.
“I don’t understand what went on there.”
“I know.”
“Why’d you shut me up?”
Jo rolled her eyes, pulling her hand in from where it dangled out the window, laying her head against it. She puffed her cheeks out as she exhaled, wanting to show her annoyance. She hated the whole topic.
“I mean it, Jo. I want to know why. She needs to blow the whistle on that bastard.”
“You can’t make them tell.”
“Them?”
“Battered women. You can’t force them to tell.”
“Sure you can. We could, anyway.”
Jo rubbed her forehead. “Okay, fine. We take her, against her will, to the E.R. And after, we tell her that if she won’t file a police report, then…What? She’s on her own? Chances are, that’d be it for her, and she’d go home to him, and the only thing we’d accomplish would be to isolate her more than she already is.”
Max was annoyed that it made sense. “I suppose.”
“Or she actually goes and gets medical help, files a report, gets an OP, and then Jack turns up the heat and she caves. Happens that way a lot, even with the toughest women, and we both know Sam’s not all that strong to begin with. And then Jack shuts us out, and we’ve isolated her more.”
“And then,” Max grumbled, looking away, “he’d get even with her.”
“Yeah. The point is, she has to do it for herself. Besides, if we’re controlling her life, then we’re just doing the same thing Jack does.” She pulled into the parking lot. “C’mon, let’s get breakfast.” She glanced over at her. Max was watching a scrawny gray cat amble across the parking lot. “What?”
“Thinking.”
“About what?”
Max opened her door. “That you’ve done this stuff before.”
chapter 2
JO MUMBLED “HELLO” into her cell three times before she realized that it was the alarm going off.
“Oh, no…Not yet.” She pressed the snooze button, and stuffed the phone under her pillow. Her dog–an eleven year old, forty-pound mutt that she had rescued when Johnny was thirteen–sighed deeply and curled up hard against her.
“Mornin’, Daisy.”
Jo turned onto her side and put her arm over the dog. She remembered that she had an eight hour day at The Crate, and felt the grip of her adrenaline again. She looked out the window of her second-floor apartment, knowing it was a bad idea to be waking up after only four hours of sleep.
“I can’t do it anymore, Daisy.” The dog opened one eye, thumped her tail a few times, and dozed off again.
She drew her legs up as she thought about Barb, and the expectant sneer the woman wore when she was about to pick apart one of her workers, as though she was defying someone only she could see. Like she was saying, “Go ahead, I dare you. Talk back.” The ugliness of the work: the filthy dishes, the flies swarming the kitchen, the purportedly clean silverware that was always coated with the dried egg that the servers scraped off with their hands. The way everyone seemed to shrink away from each other when Barb appeared–and the assistant manager, Amy, a stammering sycophant, too afraid of losing her mortgage money to risk challenging Barb. The nastiness of the customers
…guests, Jo! Call them “customers” again and I’ll write you up…
Her stomach gripped again. “I can’t,” she moaned.
She rolled onto her back, returning to a semi-sleep and letting the thoughts come. It was time.
The customers. They were simply an extension of Barb, who was simply a female counterpart to–an extension of–every controlling, punitive male that Jo had ever known. People came to The Berry Crate to sneer at their servants: the waitresses who–like Amy–were themselves stammering sycophants, stabbing each other in the back, vying for the best stations and the most profitable shifts.
She wondered where the customers did their sucking-up. She thought that it all was simply a continuum, like some kind of universal human condition: people spent their lives crawling all over each other, like the flies on the filthy kitchen counters, trying to get to the top of the heap. Those who were suffocating on the bottom begged for only one thing: please don’t hurt me.
Don’t hurt my children.
She gasped, jerking awake again: her cell alarm was ringing. She reached under her pillow and hit the snooze, allowing herself a few more moments of drifting. It was safer to let the thoughts come that way, in a place just half-awake, not in control of the thoughts that would come.
Barb’s sneering face melded into the smug mask of “Pit Bull,” the father’s rights attorney who had represented Keith in her first try at divorcing him, eleven years before. It was the same sneer as Barb’s, and Amy’s. The same as the guests. “You will produce those children every Wednesday, and every other weekend, and they will be affectionate, and loving towards their father, or we will be hauling you into court every few weeks.”
Jo had been panicked by the silence of her own lawyer, who seemed completely blindsided by Pit Bull’s vitriol.
Jo finally responded. “They’re afraid of him.”
Pit Bull snorted. “Really?” And then, the sneer again.
“He’s been violent for their entire lives…”
“Self-defense is not violence.”
“Unless you’re a woman, you mean.”
It was the only moment that Pit Bull seemed to be off of his game. He recovered quickly, though, lecturing her on the fact that they would break her financially. Put her in jail. They would take the children. Anything to make her “comply.”
“What you’re doing is called Parental Alienation,” he said.
His was the exact same expression that she had seen so often on Keith’s face, espec
ially in the early years of their marriage, when he would punch her, or throw her against a wall, or pick her up and body-slam her. Then, there was one pivotal day - years earlier, when the boys were still small - that he shoved her to the floor. She had missed landing on Johnny’s little brother, Matt, by only a few inches.
Jo got up, shoving Keith down the hallway of their townhouse until he reached the end of the line: the bathtub at the end of the hall. He tore the shower curtain off of its hooks, grabbing for something to break his fall.
She gazed down at him, and in a soft, menacing voice, said, “No more. That’s it. If you ever touch me again, you bastardized moron, one of us is going to die.”
It had felt good to be where she was at that moment; even better to see him there, looking so small and so stunned. She had never told anyone about that, about how much she had enjoyed the feeling.
It would be years before he beat her again. He never touched her until that time, not in any way at all, and it was a lonely, sad life for her. He’d had an arsenal of other ways to abuse her, though, and countless methods of getting even; but Jo had taken him back and lived with him for another four years after The Day of the Pit Bull. She couldn’t let Johnny and Matt be alone with him. She needed them to get older, old enough that custody wasn’t a noose dangling above them.
“If you let Keith come back now,” her attorney had warned, “you lose your grounds for a Fault Divorce.”
Jo stared at her, thinking about the coward the woman really was. “I have grounds now. Big deal.”
“You’ll be in danger.”
“My kids are in more danger than I am.”
“Okay. I just have to advise you, you’ll have no basis later. The courts don’t really care that much about his temper, or his mind-games, or his affairs.” She was writing out a receipt for final payment on Jo’s account. She slid it across the desk. “No grounds.”
Jo considered it for a moment. “Unless he hurts me bad again, right?”