Unprotected

by Kristin Lee Johnson

  Amanda smiled hearing Trix’s name.

  “She still asks about you, by the way. Asks if I have tried to reach you. I haven’t told her that you work here yet.”

  “I can’t believe she still remembers me.” She tried to sound casual to disguise the lump rising in her throat.

  “Amanda, you were a big deal in our house for a long time, especially after you took off.”

  Amanda chewed on her glass, biting on the bitter salt. The margaritas were dulling her defenses. Her belly swelled, making her think she was going to vomit. There was no way she could speak, even though Jake was waiting for a response.

  She finally swallowed hard. “I thought we were going to let all this stuff go.”

  “Yeah, well, I lie sometimes.” Jake was feeling it too, the tequila and their past.

  “Just like a lawyer,” she said with a weak smile.

  They were quiet for a minute. Then Jake said, “Let’s order some food and talk about sports.”

  * * *

  They ended up staying at the restaurant until after 9:00 p.m. talking about the Minnesota Vikings, Gophers, Timberwolves, Wild, and Twins. Jake had ordered fajitas and used his vegetables to diagram what he thought the Vikings needed to do to bolster their defense. They were having a great time until Amanda suddenly realized that she hadn’t done anything about her car.

  “We gotta go,” she said, jumping up and grabbing the check.

  “Hey, that’s mine,” Jake said, grabbing the bill out of her hands. “I made you come, so it’s my bill.”

  Amanda wanted to argue, but she was too panicked about her car. “It’s way too late to get someone to fix it tonight. What am I supposed to do now? I need my car.”

  They went to the front of the restaurant where Jake paid. “Let’s go back and survey the damage,” he said. “I’d like to think I could change a tire if I had to.”

  Jake drove them quickly back to Amanda’s car. Amanda started to get out, but Jacob grabbed her arm to stop her. “Wait a minute,” he said. “You have two flat tires. Did you notice anything wrong with your car before?”

  “I think I would have noticed if I was driving on a rim,” Amanda told him. “What are you talking about?”

  “We better call the police, Amanda. I think someone slashed your tires.”

  * * *

  After dealing with the police for over an hour, Amanda was exhausted, still a little tipsy, and just wanted to go home. Officer Baer of the Terrence City PD took pictures of her car and confirmed that two tires had been slashed with a small blade. She couldn’t muster any feelings other than fatigue.

  Jake drove her home without saying a word. She pointed out her apartment, and he parked the car in front of her house. He suddenly turned the car off and looked at Amanda.

  “This isn’t good,” he said.

  “I’m not thrilled either, Jacob. It’s going to be at least another day before I’ll have my car back. It means I’m going to have to rely on people like you to get around.” She was hoping he would offer to pick her up for work the next day so she wouldn’t have to ask.

  “It’s not your car I’m worried about, Amanda,” he said, looking down at the steering wheel. “What if this wasn’t random?”

  The idea that someone had intentionally slashed her tires hadn’t occurred to Amanda, but when he mentioned it her stomach dropped. “Come on,” she said weakly. “That’s stupid. No one around here possibly cares about me enough to do anything to my beat-up hatchback. Are you trying to scare me or what?” She regretted admitting she was scared, especially to Jacob. She didn’t know if she had any reason to be afraid, but at times like these her aloneness was glaring. During college her purse was stolen in downtown Minneapolis by a guy who ran up behind her, yanked the purse off her shoulder and ran. The incident left Amanda sleepless for weeks, and was actually one of the reasons she began to let herself lean on Lucy for more support.

  “I really don’t want to scare you, Amanda. But I don’t think people go around randomly slashing tires.”

  “Nobody knows me or my car. You’re almost flattering me to say someone knows me well enough to bother slashing my tires.” She couldn’t let this even be possible. He tilted his head in acknowledgement that she had a point. “Plus, the cop said I might have driven over something.”

  “He said it was unlikely, Amanda.”

  “He didn’t say it was impossible, Jacob.”

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  “I’m going to go up to my apartment. When I get inside I’ll wave to you and let you know I’m in and you can go home. And if you really want to help, you can pick me up tomorrow on your way to work. Goodnight.” She opened the door to get out, paused, and forced herself to sit back down. “Thank you for helping me tonight, Jake. It’s nice to have a friend in town.”

  “You’re welcome.” Jake watched as Amanda climbed the stairs to her upstairs apartment until he saw a light switch come on. In another minute, Amanda waved from the window facing the street before she closed the blind.

  In less than five minutes the lights were off and Amanda went to bed, so she didn’t see Jake sitting in his car, staring at her apartment for a long time before he finally drove home.

  Chapter Nine

  What on earth had she gotten herself into ?The realization that the assignment to do outdoor education for teenagers was actually a curse did not come all at once. Amanda first began to see what a nightmare the program would be when she met her co-facilitator, Blanche Larson. Blanche could not have been even five feet tall. She was built like a tree trunk—almost a perfect cylinder—with round, hard muscles on her arms and legs, and a round hard torso. Blanche had short, dark hair that was tipped with blonde in the worst home coloring job Amanda had ever seen. She wore polo shirts with the collar turned up so it encased her head, and wind pants that had to be sized for a ten-year-old boy. She had seven gold studs in one ear, nine in the other. Blanche was ageless to Amanda, but from the way she talked about herself she had to be almost forty.

  They met over lunch in Blanche’s empty classroom. Blanche was the new teacher for kids with emotional and behavioral disorders. The kids were at lunch, followed by various electives, so she wasn’t expecting any students back for nearly an hour. Amanda did not bring a lunch with her, but Blanche had to use their meeting time to eat.

  “Go ahead and eat, please,” Amanda told her.

  “Sorry, it’s the only free hour I have.”

  Blanche was orderly in everything she did, and it occurred to Amanda that she must have been in the military at some point. Blanche sat behind her desk in the small classroom while Amanda took the chair next to the desk. From a cooler behind her desk, Blanche took out a large carrot with the greens still attached, something that looked like a rust colored rock that Amanda presumed was a raw sweet potato, a bag of leafy greens tipped in red, and a refillable plastic bottle containing a gray, milky liquid. She set everything in front of her, shook the thermos, and proceeded to chug the gray liquid. Amanda forced herself to turn away because she knew she was staring. She saw charts all over the wall with students’ names and symbols next to each name.

  “It looks like you have a pretty elaborate system here,” Amanda said, getting up to examine the charts more closely. When Blanche didn’t answer, she turned to see Blanche eating the raw sweet potato like an apple. Amanda could see her jaws working to chew up the potato, which had to be hard as a rock.

  “I’m a vegan,” Blanche said in response to Amanda’s stare.

  “Uh huh,” Amanda said. She couldn’t remember exactly what it meant, but she was pretty sure it had something to do with the food she was eating.

  “I switched when I went into recovery six and a-half years ago,” Blanche told her, bits of potato flying out of her mouth as she spoke. “I realized that being clean and sober was about everything I put into my body. Percoset and THC weren’t my only drugs of choice.”

  Amanda just kept nodding because, as usual,
she had no idea what to say.

  “I lost one-hundred ten pounds when I got clean. I found a whole new person waiting to come out.”

  So the cylindrical-shaped veggie-eating army brat used to be a spherical, weed-smoking drug addict. “That must have felt great,” Amanda said.

  “Yes it did.” Blanche had polished off the entire sweet potato and tore into her lettuce. She took out several leaves, shook out the water, rolled them exactly like someone would roll a joint, and bit into the end. From a raw potato to plain lettuce leaves. She couldn’t imagine what that kind of roughage must do to her digestive tract.

  “So what’s your story?” Blanche asked, holding the lettuce doobie to her lips like she was going to smoke it, her piercing gaze focused on Amanda.

  Amanda shrugged and looked at the floor. “Not much of a story,” she said. “I’ve been at Social Services about a month. Just graduated from the U with a degree in social work.” When Blanche looked like she wanted to ask more questions, so Amanda cut her off. “I’m pretty excited about this program. Can you tell me more about it?”

  Blanche nodded while she finished chewing her roughage, holding up one finger while she gulped down the last of her gray liquid. “Okay, let’s get to it.” Blanche systematically put her uneaten carrot and her scraps back in her insulated bag and got out a thick binder labeled Experiential Education. “I’m all about learning by doing,” Blanche said. “These kids need to get their bodies active, efficient, and productive and their minds will follow. I spend most of the week in the classroom with them working on behavior modification. One day a week I want to get out, quit talking and start doing.”

  “That sounds great,” Amanda said. “What kind of stuff would you have them do?”

  Blanche rubbed her palms together excitedly. “Oh, man, what won’t we do? I can’t wait! I want them doing ropes courses, rafting, climbing, tracking, camping, skiing, swimming, hiking, running … Anything that gets their blood pumping and their muscles working. Anything intense! I want it to be all-day stuff. I want to get away from the school and get out into the world.”

  They put together a rough schedule for the next several weeks. Blanche said she would like to start with a group of ten, five social service clients and five kids Blanche chose from her classes. They would start activities in two weeks.

  Amanda left the school with a large binder labeled, Learn by Doing. There were sketches of kids on high ropes courses, which were essentially telephone poles suspending obstacle courses made of ropes and wires fifty feet in the air. It looked like the kind of thing she might have tried when she was drunk in college.

  Amanda approached her car with visions of herself trapped on top of a telephone pole with angry teenagers refusing to let her down. The Honda was fresh out of the service station after having the two tires patched, and she suddenly noticed a dozen deep scratches on the passenger door. She wondered if they were new, or if they could have happened when the mechanic repaired her tires. Then she noticed dents and more scratches around the keyhole on the passenger door, as if someone had tried to pry the lock open.

  Amanda looked around the parking lot, trying to figure out if a high schooler had tried to get in her car to steal her cell phone or go joyriding. There were three girls standing around one of the doorways, and a few scattered students in the area entering and leaving the school. The fall wind was starting to feel bitter, and she thought she felt a few drops of rain. Amanda looked in the car and thought everything seemed normal inside. Not wanting to stand in the cold any longer, she got in her car and drove back to work, trying to ignore the nagging feeling in her gut.

  * * *

  Back at work, Amanda stopped at Max’s desk to fill him in about the project.

  “It has potential, don’t you think?” Max asked after hearing her description of what she and Blanche would be doing. Max was between bites of an enormous cheeseburger dripping mayo and ketchup into a pinkish blob on his desk blotter. Quite a contrast from Vegan Girl.

  “I hope so,” she said, looking away. As someone who ate most of her food condiment free, the mayo-ketchup mixture was revolting.

  “Let’s talk at staff on Monday about some good referrals.” Max tore into his mountainous burger again just as the phone rang, so she used that excuse to bolt.

  Amanda spent the rest of the afternoon reading from the Learn by Doing material. The extent of her experiential education before this project was doing the “human knot” exercise at nearly every college “getting to know you” event. She couldn’t imagine herself motivating a group of teenagers to build a canoe together, but she was also excited at the prospect of trying.

  Shortly before the building closed, Amanda heard several people cooing and laughing outside of Max’s office. Max’s wife, Christine, had just arrived with their one-year-old daughter, Jade. Max’s wife was surprisingly pretty, a contrast to Max’s bookishness. Leah said once that Max had found a wife way out of his league, and he should give that gorgeous woman whatever she wants.

  Amanda stepped out of her cube in time for Jade to wobble straight into her legs and tumble to the floor. After a second of shock, Jade let out a wail.

  “I’m sorry,” Amanda said, crouching to pick up the sobbing toddler when suddenly a lump rose in Amanda’s throat and her stomach dropped. A picture flashed in her head of a pink-and-blue crocheted blanket and a hard, smooth rocking chair. A console TV, greenish-gray shag carpeting, wood paneling, a smell she couldn’t identify … The image was homey, safe, and sad, and it swam in front of her eyes as if she were there. The feeling slid away as suddenly as it came.

  Still crouching on the ground, Max bent down next to her and held her shoulder. “You okay, Amanda?”

  Not wanting to make a scene, Amanda stood up quickly. Christine was holding Jade, who had already recovered and was wiggling to get down again. Amanda mumbled something dumb and backed out of the office before they could ask her what was wrong.

  When she was in her car, she sat for a moment before putting the key in the ignition. Closing her eyes, she tried to bring back the image. It stayed away, just beyond where her mind could grab hold. Breathing deeply, she tried to smell what she had smelled before. Eyes closed tightly, she tried to see it again.

  As the feeling slipped further away, the immediate surroundings returned. It was dusky outside, and a freezing cold rain began to fall in huge droplets on her windshield. She started the car and blasted the heater.

  Chapter Ten

  Amanda woke the next day still in a fog. She lay in bed for nearly an hour before she remembered that it was Thanksgiving.

  Amanda was looking forward to the day with Lucy’s family. Thanksgiving was always Amanda’s favorite holiday with the Ramirezes because there were no church services, no pressure to try to fit into yet another setting where she didn’t belong.

  Religion was a thread tightly woven into the Ramirez family tapestry, and it served to highlight once again Amanda’s barren family heritage. She and her mother never attended church, never prayed, and never acknowledged the spirituality of any holiday. Its glaring absence grew when she attended mass with Lucy’s family. They prayed together as comfortably as they laughed together. When the family joined hands during the Our Father at mass, or when they prayed together at the dinner table, Amanda always felt as though her cold hands were the weak link.

  The phone rang, and Amanda grabbed the phone she kept by her bed in case someone broke in.

  “Good morning, chiquita,” Lucy sang.

  “You always sound more Latino when you’re about to see your family,” Amanda told her, settling back down on her pillows.

  “I need all the points I can get,” Lucy said. “This is the first time I’ll be seeing my aunts and uncles since I broke the news.”

  “Everyone is coming?” Amanda said, sitting up and holding the covers around her, suddenly feeling less excited about the holiday.

  “Don’t freak out on me, Amanda. I need you today.” Lucy sounded
small and afraid, and she sniffled like she was going to cry.

  “Listen to who is freaking out,” Amanda said, unconsciously reaching for a tissue and wanting to pass it to her friend. “You must be a weepy waterfall with those extra baby hormones. It’s going to be fine.”

  “Mama called this morning already,” Lucy said. “She’s having the whole family, which she loves. But we’re all invited to William’s house tonight, and she’s all nervous about what she’s supposed to bring. William told her not to bring anything, and now Mama’s insulted and embarrassed. She’s all, ‘My future son-in-law wants me to look like a dog in front of his parents showing up at his house with nothing.’”

  Amanda laughed.

  “It’s not funny. William’s family has money. His father has run his own business for years. His parents are big at St. Thomas’s church, and they know a lot of people,” Lucy sighed. “It sounds terrible to say, Amanda, but they are very white Latinos.”

  “Now I know you’re freaking out because you never talk like this,” Amanda said. “I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, white Latinos?”

  “I’m not being critical. I totally understand. It’s just that Mama won’t. William’s father was born in Minnesota. He lived in Minnesota when there weren’t a lot of Mexican families here. William’s mother is the same, she makes hot dishes! Mama makes tamales.” Lucy was crying again. “My whole life we have driven to St. Paul to mass because it’s in Spanish. Mama finally joined St. Thomas when it became impossible to get all of us girls out of the house on time to drive an hour. They rarely even speak Spanish at his house.”

  Amanda was quiet for a minute, running her hand along the smooth edge of her quilt. She could hear Lucy sniffling, blowing her nose, and trying to pull herself together. “All I know is that your mom treats me like a member of your family,” Amanda said, “and I know I can’t speak Spanish. You’re not giving your mom enough credit.”