WIFE FOR A PRICE

by Kathryn Thomas

  Laughing grimly, I drop them into my pocket and return to the tin bucket.

  When I get to The Shack, Sarah meets me out front with an expression on her face I can hardly begin to pick apart. These past months she’s been going in on me pretty hard with this “joking” stuff, telling me whenever I protest that, “Oh, you should be able to take a joke, since you are one.” But now she’s forced to tell me what hospital they’ve taken Dad to, she just mumbles and looks at the ground, before turning away as quickly as she can. Maybe she’s guilty, or maybe she’s just annoyed because she thought of another hilarious joke and can’t use it today.

  I drive to the hospital, which is only a couple of miles away, but the place is so busy I have to wait in line for five minutes. Some guy at the front of the line is trying to convince a nurse that he hasn’t been given his medication, even though he’s twitching like crazy and dribbling. “Come on, Patsy, you know I wouldn’t lie to you, doll. You know I wouldn’t!”

  Finally a smiling black lady asks me, “What can I do for you, dear?”

  I tell her, and she replies that my father is being seen to by the doctor and nurses at the moment and I won’t be able to see him for a few hours. When I slump into the waiting room chair, a machine-made hot chocolate cupped in my hand, I let my head fall back and close my eyes, trying not to think about if dad could be dying a floor above me, and trying not to think about my baby, whose grandfather might be dead before it’s born.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Hound

  I drive back to the city in a state of numbness for the first ten or so minutes, trying to disentangle all this shit in my head. I relive the moment where Daisy told me she was pregnant, wishing that Dean had showed up bloody half an hour later so we had a chance to talk about that, at least. Pregnant, with my kid, pregnant, which means I’m going to have a son or a daughter if she doesn’t decide to get rid of it. Pregnant, goddamn. I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to have a kid, no way, not when you really get down to the sort of person I am. But if she decides to keep it, I won’t have a choice. Part of me is terrified of being forced into that; the other part welcomes it, thinking maybe I’d rise to the challenge. A few hazy fantasies come into my head of me and some tall lad sitting at a table and reading a book together, me teaching him to read, or me and this girl in the library and her turning to me and saying, “Daddy, look what book I found!” I choke them back. Daisy hates me. She might run. She might tell me I’m never allowed to see the kid. She might do anything.

  Only slowly, the pregnancy revelation is pushed back to make room for Dean, bloody Dean, tooled-up Dean, who I really had no clue was back in town. Like Denton, I thought he was dead, long-dead, maybe dead before Daisy and I become fake-husband and fake-wife.

  “Hey, man,” Denton says, when I pick up my cell. “What’s good?”

  “Are you going to tell me about Dean? Because if you are, you’re too late.”

  “ Shit , my man, shit .”

  “How is it that women working at a The Lady Shack know before you?”

  “He’s been hidin’ out in Austin for a minute. Hidin’ right under my nose, but the motherfucker’s got some James-Bond-type hideout or somethin’. Don’t know, man, but I’m sorry. You wanna refund or what?”

  I hang up the phone without replying, and wonder where I’m driving. I want to go to the hospital to talk to Dean—it won’t be too hard to figure out which one he was taken to, I’ll just call Denton back—but I know that Daisy will be there, and I’m worried about how she’ll react if she sees me. Maybe she’ll make a scene right there in the hospital lobby, screaming and pointing at me and telling the whole building who I am, what I am. And before I know it I’ll have some pig’s knee in my back, cuffs on my wrists. I guess I could just wait until she leaves; maybe that’s what I’ll do.

  But for now I just cruise through the city, clicking my neck from side to side, every so often images of me and some black-haired, giant kid—boy or girl, it doesn’t matter—playing catch or reading or riding on my shoulders. Maybe I’ll learn to fish and we’ll go fishing or something. Bonding shit like that. Stuff my dad never thought to do with me, since he was too busy turning me into a bullet that could be fired and then fired again.

  I go through a drive-thru and get myself a burger and fries, but I can’t eat it without thinking of Daisy and Dean and the pregnancy, so I just pull up near some homeless guy holding a cardboard sign.

  “Hungry?” I ask him.

  He’d old with open sores on his face, wearing fingerless gloves showing dirty fingernails, but when he smiles, I can see him in a suit as a younger man, maybe selling car insurance. “Thank you, young man. Thank you kindly.”

  “It’s okay, sir. Here you are.”

  I hand him the food and continue on my directionless drive. I’ve never been in this situation before, of getting close to a woman and then being pushed away. Even my mom, I was never close with her. She was always sitting at her vanity table talking about plays she had never seen and concerts she had never been to and how uptown they did things so, so, well, so stylishly , tipping her head back so that she could watch her smiling lips as she spoke. No, only Daisy, and now that she’s gone there’s this pit in my stomach even extreme violence can’t create. Even trashing my books didn’t give me this feeling. For a few moments I long for the stone-cold, dead-eyed Hound I was for most of my teens and twenties, a violent, dead-inside thug who didn’t know better. At least then I didn’t have to feel.

  I look in the rear-view mirror and do something I haven’t done in years. I pretend that Dad is sitting back there, hunched over in the seat, smoking a cigarette. Only this time I don’t tell him I miss him or he would’ve laughed the other day when one of the guys fucked up a job. This time I say: “You really did me over, old man. You really fucking did me over. I loved you, would’ve done anything for you. And you knew that, so you pulled me out of school—I liked school, truth be told, even if I told you I didn’t—pulled me out of school and put me to work and even—goddamn it, even Mom knew it was fucked. Even Mom left you because of that. And now you’ve poisoned my life, made it so I can’t even be with the woman I love. Yeah, the woman I love!” I snarl, thumping the steering wheel. “If you were here, I’d smash your nose in.”

  I’m sitting at a traffic light when I come to my senses, a family of four watching me in confusion. When the light turns green, I hurry on.

  Mac’s call comes in after I’ve refilled my gas tank. “The bar,” he says, and then hangs up.

  I’m really starting to get sick of him talking to me that way.

  But even if that’s the case, I don’t have any choice but to head toward the bar. When I get in there, Nora calls over to me.

  “He’s in a meeting,” she says. “Do you want a drink, sonny?” As she speaks, she wipes down the bar with the rag wrapped around her stump.

  “Sure, Nora. Whisky.”

  She serves it up and I drink it down. She serves another, and I drink it down.

  “Autumn’s coming. Seems yesterday summer started. Now autumn’s coming.” As she speaks, she polishes glass after glass with her stump. “You eyeing my goods, boy?” She winks at me, her wrinkled skin creasing.

  “Maybe I am,” I say, smiling. “Just impressed with you, Nora. Always am.”

  She giggles, and all at once she isn’t an older-than-old crone, but a twenty year old girl working her first shift at a bar. “I’ve seen thousands of men come and go,” she says. “Even before Mac, when this wasn’t a—well, you know.” I nod. She doesn’t want to call Mac illegal. “And then before that, when it was owned by some Italian-Americans. Oh, I’ve seen all sorts, Henry. All sorts.”

  “Henry,” I echo. “You’ve never called me Henry, not since I was a kid, anyway.”

  “You’re Henry again,” Nora says. “I can tell.”

  I want to ask what she means, but then one of Mac’s goons calls from the doorway. “Boss’ll see you now.”

 
I take some cash from my pocket and put it on the bar. “Have a good day, Nora,” I call, before moving into the back.

  Ripper and Hitter are grinning when I walk into the room, but the grins die when they see me. Hitter, who’s always been the less prickish of the twins, looks slightly embarrassed. Mac, as usual, is counting money and looking over documents. Part of me wants to reach across and tear those documents apart. There probably isn’t even anything on them, anyway, probably just a bunch of gibberish so he can keep men like me waiting on him. Arrogant ass.

  “Take a seat,” he says, after what seems like an eternity of rustling papers. I drop into the seat and Ripper wriggles his bent, broken nose, smiling again. One day I’d love to crack that bastard’s teeth into his skull, stop the prick smiling. Mac leans forward, and now he starts smiling, too. “We’ve heard what happened to Dean, showed up hardly able to walk, the poor fucker!” Mac lets out a coughing laugh, the sort of laugh that makes me think of a very old man looking at a young woman, a seedy laugh. A laugh that makes me wonder why I once worshipped this man as a would-be father. “I can take it this was your doing, right?”

  There’s something odd in the way he’s speaking, Ripper has that smile on his face again, and Hitter is glancing at me strangely. Was it Ripper and Hitter? Did they attack Dean, does Mac know, and now are they trying to get me to lie so they have an excuse to…It sounds far-fetched, but then, Mac has been sending me out on more and more jobs, almost the same way you’d use a saw that you knew was getting replaced in a few weeks: not caring about maintaining it, not caring if the handle snapped, not caring…Just not goddamn caring . I can’t say yes, but I can’t say no, either, because if I say no, I’ll be admitting to something worse: that Dean is in town and I had no idea.

  I just lean back and stare at Mac silently, my only choice in this situation. He watches me for a few moments, grinning, looking so different to the Mac I’ve known all these years I’m almost certain that that Mac was a performance, a trick to make this wayward hulking teenage kid respect him.

  “You’re too modest,” he says. “I get it, Hound. You’ve always been a good worker, never letting anything slide. Always very—what’s the word—you have an eye for detail.”

  “Conscientious,” I murmur. Apparently my English literature course wasn’t a complete waste of time.

  Mac snaps his fingers, smiling up at Ripper and Hitter. “Do you hear that, boys? Hound knows the score. Hound’s a walking dictionary.”

  “He is, ain’t he?” Ripper says.

  “A walking dictionary,” Hitter repeats, when Mac looks at him expectantly.

  “Let me tell you a story,” Mac says. “Once, there was a man in prison, minding his own business, when four lifers came strolling down the hallway trying to cause trouble. But he was ready. He was fuckin’ ready . He’s got pepper spray in one hand and a razor shank in the other. He blinds two of them, guts the other two, and then guts the blinded fucks. And then after that, when he’s built himself a network of good strong men, everyone who was an inconvenience to him was removed. Everyone who wasn’t what they were supposed to be.” Mac pauses, stroking his chin. “But you’re always what you’re supposed to be, aren’t you, Hound? Efficient, cold. An enforcer. Just like the twins here. No time to get soft. No time to second-guess or any of that shit. So I reckon you’ll finish the job you’re too modest to admit you started: I reckon you’ll kill Dean Dunham.”

  I have to stop myself from doing several things: gripping the arms of the chair, shouting, shaking with rage, showing any sign of anger on my face at all. I’ve worked for Mac for a decade and a half, and as far as I can remember, that’s the first time he’s threatened me.

  I don’t trust myself to answer, so I just climb to my feet, nod, and leave the office. Mac waves at me, telling me I can go. I’m in the parking lot when I feel somebody tap my shoulder. I heard them coming, so I turn around quickly, ready to fight. But it’s just Hitter, scar making his eyebrows look twice the width. “Just do what he says.” He clenches his jaws, and then says, “Maybe in a different life you could fuck off to the suburbs and read books and whatever the fuck. But this ain’t a different life. This is the life. And you need to get that through your head.”

  “Why didn’t you just kill him?” I ask. “Why not just kill him if that’s what he wants?”

  “He doesn’t want us to kill him. You know that.”

  “The old man thinks he can kill me by killing him.”

  Hitter nods, and then turns and walks away.

  He wants to kill me, kill the part of me that confuses him, the part that has grown over these past couple of years. Hitter knows about the books and the suburbs, which means Mac knows, which means the whole organization probably knows. Which means they probably know about Daisy, too. When I’m in my car, I call Denton.

  “’Sup, man.”

  “I want you to tail Daisy Dunham and call me if anyone moves on her. Take a partner. Work shifts. I also want somebody outside Dean Dunham’s hospital. I need the name of the hospital, too, and the room number.”

  “Shit, man, but there’s a game on!”

  “Just fucking do it!” I snap. “You’ll be paid.”

  “Damn right I’ll be paid,” he says under his breath, before hanging up the phone.

  I have to keep her safe, because I know one thing for certain. I’m not killing her father. I’m not being the attack dog anymore. I want to see Daisy, I want to see Dean. I want to make this right. I want to be a part of her family, since my family has never wanted much to do with me.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Daisy

  I go to the window and look into the garden, watching them, unable to stop myself from smiling. The land for miles around is scorched dream-earth, unimagined, but that doesn’t matter to me. All that matters to me in this whole world is down there, playing in the yard. Hound—Henry, now; he was Hound a long time ago—is picking our child up over his head and flying around the yard with them. The child is neither a boy nor a girl, not yet, but they are laughing and shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” I tug my apron on and fry the bacon, taking great pleasure in the methodical movements. I’m no cook, I warned Henry long ago, but I can fry some bacon and butter some bread, squeeze ketchup onto the crispy meat. When I carry it out to them, Henry’s hair is a mess around his face, and his ice-blue eyes are alive with life. He takes the sandwich from me and devours it in two bites. After giggling, our child does the same. Then we’re all rolling around the freshly-mown grass, fighting, playing, Henry laughing, our child laughing—

  I’m woken by a nurse nudging me in the shoulder.

  “Excuse me, Miss Dunham? Miss Dunham?”

  “Yes? Yes? Sorry.” I rub sleep from my eyes and look up into her face: fake-tanned, tightly-drawn features, a no-nonsense look about her. “Is he—awake?” I almost asked if he was dead for a second then. I’m surprised to find that the world has turned dark, the light shining in through the windows streetlamps and moonlight. “Or…”

  “He’s awake,” the nurse says. She gives me the room number where I can visit him and then walks away to deal with somebody else.

  I’m nervous as I walk through the hospital, afraid of what I’ll find when I enter Dad’s room. They were working on him because his injuries were serious, which means he must look pretty bad. I catch myself thinking this and wonder if that’s the sort of thing you should be thinking in a situation like this. But when you’ve spent your entire life trying to avoid one particular thing, the prospect of being met with that thing doesn’t exactly fill you with hope. But I can only walk slowly for so long until I’m standing outside the door. I feel tears well in my eyes and force them back down. Pregnant, the father possibly involved in this, my own father coughing behind a hospital door.

  I force away the tears and then open the door, telling myself to be strong. When Mom had cancer, she was strong, right up until the end. She never complained. She never let herself cry, at least where I could see her. Sh
e was strong for the people around her and that’s what I have to try and be. But it’s easy to promise yourself that before you’re met with cold bloody reality.

  Dad’s face has ballooned to twice its size, covered in stiches and bandages, his body splayed out like a collection of meat and bones. IV drips feed into his veins, and a urine bag is attached to the side of the bed. His finger hovers near a Call Nurse button. When I enter, his eyes turn to me, but his head doesn’t. His head is propped up like a baby’s.

  “D-Daisy?” he manages to say, thought it comes out more like Dassheee , because of his swollen lips. “Oh, th-th-thank God!”

  I sit beside the bed, moving to take his hand before I see that it’s all swaddled in bandages. Seeing him like this is almost too much to handle, but I’m surprised to find that a big part of that doesn’t come from love or sadness, but from anger: anger that he would let this happen to himself after I’ve done so much to try and avoid it. Even as the anger grips me, I know, on some level, that it’s selfish. But it’s all too much to handle: the baby, Hound, and now this. I feel like screaming, I feel like hitting something.