by Eden Butler
She returned a minute later, hands free of her bags, but I caught the curiosity pinching her nose, and how she stood guard leaning against her open door. “You need something?” she called to me, arms crossed tight and her back straight when I laughed.
“Sometimes,” I said, linking my fingers through the gate railing when I heard the rattle of the side hinge move as Alex jumped the fence again, “I like to retrace my steps.” Harmony shook her head, acting more insulted than she should have been. Shit, I was a lowly security man who’d lied a little and fucked her to get some intel. She was a bored rich housewife who liked to suck strange cock in her husband’s gourmet kitchen. “This,” I waved between the two of us, making sure my voice was humored, lit heavy with a laugh, “was probably the best reminder.”
“What damn reminder?” She didn’t lean on the door anymore. Her back had gone rigid like she was waiting for an insult she knew I had ready for her.
“Shitty mistakes I’ll never make again.”
“Fuck you, Ryan. You didn’t think it was a mistake when I had your dick in my mouth!” she spat, growling as I laughed before she slammed the door behind her.
To my left Alex stared at me, a small leather satchel under her arm. “Visiting?” she asked and I didn’t know what that frown meant or why I cared if it meant anything at all.
“No. Not really. You done?”
She gave nothing away, nodded like she didn’t care what I’d done with Harmony or why I’d been a dick to her. But that was Alex; Miss Ambivalent, especially when it came to working that poker face to hide whatever she was thinking. We left the cottage, dodging the rain without a word, without so much as a glance at each other or a mention of what she’d just done.
I’d helped a criminal steal from a cheater. I’d taunted a woman who had no problems stepping out on her husband. But all I could think of as we left the Quarter was what the thief had heard me tell Harmony and why the hell it bothered me so much that she had.
No one could refuse my mom’s home cooked chicken pot pie recipe. It was melt in your mouth good, slap yourself good and something she did when I was a kid that I always paid attention to. I hoped it would erase the bullshit fluster that Alex carried around her all weekend.
“No thanks” and “I’m cool” were the two constant refrains I kept getting from her since we left the Quarter the night before and holed up in my apartment. The October rain had gone stupid with great bouts of wind whipping and thunder clapping, rattling my old French doors and making it next to impossible to walk down flooded sidewalks. We’d spent Friday night watching old Twilight Zone episodes and Alex had fallen asleep on my sofa before I could let her take my spot in my bedroom. Watching her sleep had been nice and upsetting, all rolled in to one. It had made my dick restless. Not that I would have done anything, but that didn’t keep my imagination from straying into what it might be like if we did. Just fantasy, though. A gorgeous girl sleeping on your sofa will do that to a guy.
Today, all day, had been a disaster. The rain came down in sheets, clashed with the wrought iron on my balcony and congested the narrow streets so activity was a pain and inside vegging was the option of the day. I’d worked out, and let Alex run on my treadmill while I showered, then tackled the laundry while she air-dried her hair and chain smoked with her legs, arms and face outside of my balcony. The cigarette smell was clogging my damn sinuses and I’d taken to glaring at her anytime she lit up, but that only made the defiant little shit smoke more.
I didn’t know what she’d done with the leather satchel she’d lifted from Harmony’s, but a half hour phone call while she huddled outside under my awning had left her even more sullen and withdrawn than she’d been since we’d walked away from the B&E.
Tonight I decided I was tired of the silent treatment. Cooking my mom’s chicken pot pie would either do the trick or prove that Alex just was crazy as hell.
The chicken was browning in translucent onions by the time Alex came back into the living room smelling like a casino. She coughed once and I moved my eyes to her as the sound of phlegm lodged in her chest. “You need to see a doctor about that?”
“No,” she said, more interested in what I was cooking than my lecture as she slipped onto the barstool in front of the island to watch me work. “That smells good.”
“It is.” I stirred the meat around the pan, let the juices coat the chicken until it was nearly dry and had to withhold a chuckle when Alex frowned, looking worried I’d burn everything. Then, I poured in the cup of chicken stock and lowered the temperature.
“I thought you’d messed it up.” She leaned toward the island stovetop and inhaled. “That smells even better.”
“I told you.” The steam from the pan licked against the lid when I covered it. “It is.”
The island was cluttered with ingredients—onions, carrots, peas, melted butter, seasoning and a pie pan covered with doughy thick crust. My mom had always done that from scratch, but I wasn’t her, no Martha Stewart prep work for me. I’d gone for the store bought shit. Still, Alex seemed interested in what I was doing, and curious about the creation I was trying to tackle.
“What is all of this?” she asked, fingering the edge of the raw dough. Food and her own curiosity made her drop her attitude at whatever had pissed her off since last night.
“Fixin’s,” I told her, emptying a can of cream of chicken soup into the pan. Alex watched everything I did, how I moved the wooden spoon around the skillet, how the chopped vegetables slid into the creamy broth and chicken mixture.
“For?” Her eyes were wide and I grinned at the way she nibbled on her bottom lip, like she wanted to lick the whole thing right then.
“Chicken pot pie.” I didn’t expect that frown, or how the disappointment came across her features. “What?” She’d spent most of her life in New Orleans. The idea of Tennessee pot pie wouldn’t impress a native, I guess, but this shit was primo eats. It sort of irked me that she didn’t seem so impressed.
“Pot pie? Like the shit you can buy out of the freezer section?”
“Woman, you insult me. Hell no.” She watched me as I poured the filling into the pie crust, catching the overspill with the back of my spoon. She kept moving her head, squinting like she was taking silent notes and by the time I’d added the top crust over the pan, folding the edges together and pinching scallops into it to make it look nice, and had slipped the whole thing into the oven, Alex’s confusion had doubled.
“You’ve never had homemade chicken pot pie?” I asked, distracting myself from that frown with a dishrag sweeping up the scraps on the island.
“I’ve never had anything but homemade peanut butter and jelly.”
That was a punch to the gut, one that caught me off guard. She ran her fingertip against the countertop, tracing the patterns and streaks in the granite. I wanted to reach out to her, squeeze her shoulder, do something that would make us both feel less shitty, but I knew Alex didn’t want anything that smacked of pity.
Still, in her whole life, no one had ever cooked for her? “Never? Not even Ramen or soup or hell, I don’t know, waffles?” Head shaking, Alex shrugged as though she could feel the heaviness of my eyes as I watched her.
When she spoke, her voice was soft, as if she was dredging something up from memory that she wanted to describe precisely. “Ramen we had from the Dollar Store. Most of what we had came from the Dollar Store. Sure, we had bread and eggs, small shit like that and anytime Wanda got a new kid in the house her Food Stamps increased, but she generally sold the groceries or the credit she got for extra cash.”
“What do you mean?” I wasn’t blind or stupid. You deal with all types of criminals as a detective and you hear stories, see the unbelievable. But taking food out of the mouths of kids—the ones you promised to care for?
Alex didn’t seem bothered or even surprised that I asked. “Sometimes her friends gave her cash and she’d give them her card, but you know, she’d charge them a tax.” Alex’s voice had gone
monotone, like she just pushed the words out with no afterthought, no emotion about how fucked up her childhood had been. “Once she even put her card on Craigslist.” She lifted her shoulder, like this was no big deal, another job, another hustle.
“So she never fed you?”
“She fed us, but most of the time it was bread and eggs. Peanut butter was a treat. She never cooked anything.”
“What the hell did she do with the money?”
That smile wasn’t happy. It was a bitter, disgusted gesture. “Liquor, smokes, weed. She spent her weekends at the casino and she bought cars and clothes. She didn’t live with us, had a nice little condo in the Quarter. Her sons or their women stayed in the house with us.”
“That’s just… no one checked? I thought the state was pretty strict on foster families.”
Alex’s harsh laughter had me feeling like an idiot, but I sucked it up, let her laugh at me. “Wanda wasn’t exactly a legal foster mother. She had a system with some connected asshole. He’d send her hopeless kids, arranged for her to get a check every month and she got labor and hustlers she could train to siphon in more money to her little organization. We did everything—ran the jobs on the tourists, worked scams on old men, hell, she’d pretend to be this destitute single mother and would get all these free Christmas presents from whatever Good Samaritan groups organized the toy drives during the holidays. She’d tell them she wanted her kids to have ‘one nice Christmas.’”
“I take it that never happened.”
“Hell no,” she said, picking at a flake of dough left behind on the island. “She made us take the toys back to Wal-Mart and get the cash. If we were lucky, we got pizza. Depended on how much cash we came back with.”
That bitch deserved to be in jail. I’d read Alex’s file, I’d glanced at the article on her foster mother’s trial, but it wasn’t until that moment that I was genuinely glad the woman was off the streets. Shit, what a greedy bitch. I understood the system. There was a real need for it, but for every fifty decent families who struggled, who could only survive by leaning on the system, there was another asshole who milked it dry. How the hell had Alex come out of that without being more hostile, angrier than she already was? I was starting to see the shit that had landed all around her; the motivation to escape made sense. People like me who were cared for, who were loved, had no damn idea how lucky we’d had it.
“Don’t give me that look, Ryan.” I hadn’t noticed her staring at me until she spoke. Alex leaned on the island and nodded at the seat to her right, telling me to sit and I did, pulling my knee away from her leg when I brushed it. “I had a shitty life, yeah, but hell, you think mine’s the worst? It’s wasn’t.”
I wanted to tell her I thought she was a badass. I wanted to tell her that I’d shovel so many damn homemade meals into her that her ass would spill over the round stool she sat on. But I got the feeling Alex didn’t need to hear that. She wasn’t looking for a rescue. She was doing it herself.
“One thing I’ve learned, pretty quickly, is that there is always someone worse off than you. There is always some poor bastard begging for more, that has no food, no clothes. It’s… well, that’s why I testified against Wanda, eventually.”
Alex’s attitude had thawed, and whatever I or Timber or her bullshit life had made her sullen left her as she recalled what she’d survived, that she’d survived. Damn, she hadn’t even tasted the pot pie. I must be good.
Now she seemed eager to talk, to let me know her story without it sounding like a burden, and I wanted to hear it, to understand how she had gotten to the point where she could so easily slip into a stranger’s house and take what wasn’t hers. My brain wasn’t wired that way, but I was starting to understand why hers was.
“So Wanda got worse?” I asked and Alex snapped her gaze at me, blinking like she was surprised I had figured that out.
“Way worse.”
“Think I need liquor to hear this?” I took that grin for agreement and grabbed two Abbey Ales from my fridge. We were doing chicken and I wanted something that would break the spice in the pot pie with the figgy hint of fruit from the beer. Alex looked suspicious, like she wasn’t sure what was in that dark bottle, but she grabbed the neck when I offered her the beer. “So?” I said, sliding back onto the stool next to her. The smell of cooking pie filled the room and I laughed when Alex squinted toward the oven across the room, rubbing her lips together. “It’ll be at least another 15 or 20 minutes, then it will need to cool for a bit.”
“Damn, that smell is making me hungry. I guess I can wait, though. Smells good…” she cut herself off with a sip then widened her eyes, looking inside the neck. “Shit, this is good.” Another swallow and she sighed through a grin.
“You say that now but when you have that and the pot pie, you won’t notice the spice until it kicks your ass. I’d suggest moderation.”
“Gotcha.” She held the bottle between her slim fingers, rubbing the neck with her thumb and I thought she might be working up what she wanted to say or how to make the words organize into sense. I didn’t press, wanting to know more of what she’d done, of how it had all landed her into my mom’s home on a night when I’d been too drunk to worry about a break in, but not wanting to make her feel badgered into giving anything up.
“She got greedy,” Alex finally said, not looking at me, seeming more concerned with the slide of moisture over the bottle. “Whoever the asshole was that sent kids her way had his hands in a lot of sketchy shit. Wanda wanted to take advantage of that. I guess she thought she could blackmail him, maybe fatten her pot by threatening to rat him out.”
“Not smart,” I said, meeting Alex’s nod.
“No, not at all.” She took a slow sip of beer, rubbing her bottom lip with it as a distraction and I cleared my throat, needed to look at something other than the glisten wetting her mouth. “Anyway, he played her. Hard. Told her he could get her to play middle man between these lowlife gangs dealing in trafficking and he’d cut her in with forty percent. All she had to do was shelter the girls for a couple of weeks. That stupid bitch actually bragged about the whole thing.
“But this guy, he’d worked with Wanda for years. He had so much shit on her. He knew how she bilked the system. He knew how she treated her kids. No one was loyal to her.” Alex stopped speaking and I caught the quick glint of something like anger, maybe fury working behind her eyes. “Putting those girls into her house, knowing what she’d have them doing, well, they’d talk if they got out, wouldn’t they? They’d say one asshole took them and put them into some crazy, greedy bitch’s house with no food, no clothes and barely any protection.” Another sip, this one deeper and Alex slumped a little in her seat. I could only watch her, leaning on my balled fist as she talked. “She tried to play it off during the trial. She wanted to pretend she’d rescued those girls, but two of them got out, and everything blew up in her face. I’m pretty sure her contact, whoever the hell he was, organized that whole escape.”
“But she didn’t name him.” That was usually the first thing that got mentioned. Few lowlifes had any loyalty, especially if they were facing jail time.
“No. After I testified against her, how’d she’d made us live as kids, what we had to do for her, well, her lawyers starting begging for pleas. This asshole who set her up is connected, that’s for damn sure. Had to be him that arranged it and in exchange, no one ever found out who he was.”
“And you got hassled?” Half of Alex’s bottle was gone and she started to answer, but then the timer on the oven sounded. I hadn’t realized so much time had passed; everything had gotten so relaxed and easy between us. Stretching as I stood, I took a swallow of my own beer before walking around the island to the oven. “Finish,” I told her, fitting oven mitts over my hands and pulling out the steaming hot pot pie.
“I’d rather eat.”
“Of course you would. This shit is good. But it’s going to need to sit a few minutes before we can eat it.”
Alex fel
l in right beside me, pulling out plates and forks as I took out the pie and I liked it, us bustling around together in my kitchen. Hadn’t realized how much I’d missed this being with someone else, having them fill in the moments of loneliness just by being there.
When the plates and flatware were on the island and I’d grabbed another couple of beers, we sat back and I picked up where we left off. “This information about Wanda, about you being hassled, could be useful. There are no coincidences. Besides,” I said, sliding a steaming helping of pot pie in front of her, “you can eat and talk. No table rules here, lady.”
Alex did a small grinshrug thing when she agreed with anything. It was cute. I mean, it was nice, dammit, this woman has me thinking shit was cute. Well, she did that just then, the grinshrug before she dug into the pie. “I got hassled before I testified,” she said, holding her fork in front of her mouth, and blowing on it to cool it down before trying it. I wasn’t paying attention to anything but her reaction when she took her first bite of my mom’s genius recipe. “You don’t talk, that’s rule number one out there,” she said around the slip of the fork into her mouth and then, she closed her eyes. “Holy fuck.”
Shit-eating grin, right on my face. “Right?”
“My God, this is like… this is better than sex.”
I choked on a piece of chicken as it went down my throat and Alex noticed, smug smirk making her dimple dent hard on her cheek. “Well, I don’t know if I’d say that,” I told her, trying not to picture anything with sex or nakedness or general depravity. God knows I’d fucked up enough in past few months. I’d never quite forgiven myself for sleeping with Harmony before the kitchen suck off. Just thinking of it made me feel like a loser. Another shrug and Alex took a few more bites, forgetting that she was explaining to me what had happened with her foster mother. “So you didn’t want to talk?”