First, Last, and in Between Read online

  After dinner, after she was in bed for the night, I sat in my apartment. I thought about the pictures of Rella and all her family and friends. Some of them had moved away, and a lot of them had died, I guessed. She still had a grand-niece who lived down in Georgia, a nice woman who called Rella at least every few weeks to check in on her, and who sent cards at holidays and flowers and gifts at her birthday and Christmas.

  I thought about who I would invite if I had a party like Rella’s baby shower. The list would have been pitifully small: just her. Maybe Kash, if he wasn’t busy. Maybe Rory, but probably not. I hadn’t heard from him since I’d left him at his apartment after we’d gone to the bank, not a word. What he had said about us being friends, about me calling him if my car broke down—he hadn’t really meant it. It hurt a little, thinking about that.

  I thought a lot about Rella and what she had told me. I had discovered that one of the women I cleaned for was pregnant, too, and it had made me think about having a baby myself. I wouldn’t ever, of course, but the idea…it was just interesting to consider. I would love him, so much, as much as Rella loved her baby Harrison, even all the years after losing him. My baby would love me right back. We would play together, and I would make sure he went to school, all the way to college, even.

  I scoffed at myself then. How would I ever help a kid with school, knowing how stupid I was with it? That alone would probably disqualify me from being a parent, along with everything else. Of course, if there was actually someone who disqualified people from having kids, then I myself never would have come into existence.

  I wondered how my mom would have felt about losing me like Rella had lost her son. Jade hadn’t even realized that she was pregnant until she went to talk to her caseworker, who gave her the bad news that her growing stomach wasn’t the result of eating too many Coney dogs. By then, it had been too late to do anything about it, so she’d had to keep me. I’d asked her a few times why she hadn’t given me over to the state of Michigan after I’d been born, and she hadn’t come back with a great answer. I’d always assumed it had something to do with increased benefits and support, but it was nice to imagine that it was because she had loved me, just like Rella loved her son.

  I stayed lost in thought until I heard a jingle of keys, right outside my door like someone was coming in, and then there was a heavy knock. I looked through the peephole into a man’s large chest positioned right where most people’s heads would be. Rory. Out of the blue, here he was, like we were really friends.

  “Hi!” I said as I threw open the door, and then realized that I sounded very enthusiastic. “I mean, hi,” I repeated, much more calmly. “Did someone let you up?”

  “Hi,” he answered, and smiled at me. His bruises were much better, but he still looked pretty beat-up. And so…appealing. He had lost the pale, unhealthy look he’d had when he’d first met me and Rella after church, and he was so big, and strong, and…appealing. That was definitely the word for it. I was smiling back, I realized further, standing in the middle of the doorframe and blocking him from coming in as I grinned mindlessly. “Sorry,” I told him, and moved so he could pass through.

  “It’s kind of late.” Rory walked into the living room where I’d been curled on the sofa bed and stared at it, then pushed on it with his palm and seemed unimpressed. “Were you sleeping?”

  “No, I’m glad you came!” Too much enthusiasm. “It’s fine,” I modulated. “I’m up. I haven’t heard from you…” I stopped myself. He didn’t have any obligation to say one word to me.

  “Did you want to hear from me?” He seemed surprised but I just shrugged. “That’s good to know.”

  I ignored what that might mean. “Were you in the neighborhood?” I asked him.

  “No. I wanted to show you something. Can you come downstairs?”

  “Uh, ok.” I grabbed my keys but he stopped, shaking his head.

  “You’ll get cold. Get something more to wear.” And when I did, he just stared at me, and his mouth dropped open a little. “Is that—where did you get that jacket?”

  “You gave it to me,” I said. “You said you got it from your brother’s college. Don’t you remember?”

  “I do.” Rory reached out and tugged on the sleeve. “It’s still pretty big on you.” It went down to the middle of my thighs. “You kept it all this time?”

  I nodded. I had managed to, even though it had always been hard for me to keep track of my belongings when I’d been a kid. “And I have your shirt, too. Do you want them back? I guess I should have offered.”

  “No, you can keep them.” He smiled at me again, as if he was pleased with me. That expression had scared me before, but now here I was, basking in it like a cat. “I’m just surprised you still have that stuff,” he said. “Come on downstairs. I saw the elevator’s working.” He held the door of the building for me and then gestured me down the sidewalk, stopping in front of a new, big SUV.

  “What is this?” I asked, confused.

  “My car. I have a car that fits me. Come on, come for a ride.” He beeped the doors unlocked and I got in, breathing the fresh leather smell. I’d never actually ridden in a brand-new car, although I had broken a few windows to get at what was inside some of them.

  “How did you get this?” I asked as Rory got into the driver’s side. The car didn’t rock or creak when he did, I noticed, unlike how mine behaved under his weight. “Did your brother—sorry, never mind.”

  “No, my brother didn’t buy it for me,” he answered.

  “Then how—” But I managed to stop myself again. It was none of my business how he got the money to get a car even though he owed people. Bad, scary people. “It’s really nice,” I said instead, and ran my hand over the dashboard. “This is great. I hardly feel the potholes.”

  “It doesn’t feel like we’re going to fall into one and not get out, like in your car,” Rory agreed, and laughed a little.

  I hmphed, but smiled, too. “I like my tin can. I tolerate it, anyway.”

  “But now we can ride in this.”

  “Where have you been?” I asked.

  “Busy with work. Did you need me?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “I just thought I might hear from you. What have you been building that kept you so busy in the woodshop?”

  “Not the shop. I’m still working there, but I got another job, too.” He got on the Lodge, not far from where my car had broken down last winter, and headed downtown under the streetlights. “It’s a nice night. We can look at the river,” he commented, but I was still thinking about the last thing he’d said.

  “What other job? What are you doing?” Kash really hated it when I pried into his work, but I felt like I could with Rory. He had brought it up himself.

  But he didn’t answer right away as he kept driving. “I’m doing security,” he said eventually.

  “Security? Like, night shifts watching a bank or something?” I hoped for that, a lot, but I had a bad feeling.

  “No, security like I used to do. Some of what I used to do.”

  I felt like someone had popped me one in the face, the kind of smack that shocked you with the burst of pain. “That was why you went to jail,” I said faintly. “That stuff you used to do.”

  “No. No, I’m not going back to prison.” Rory sounded very confident in that. “I’m doing more personal protection now.” He snorted. “My new boss likes it that I’ve been inside and what I did to people to get myself there. It was why he hired me.”

  “So, you’re not working for the same, um, boss?” Gang? Crime lord? I wasn’t sure how to phrase it. I meant, was he still with the bad guys from before, when he had lost eight years of his life in prison because of what they were doing?

  “No, a different guy is in charge and I told him that I wasn’t interested in going back to that.”

  I nodded hard. Good. That was good.

  “Most of the guys I knew are dead or locked up,” Rory mentioned casually, and I stopped nodding. “That nig
ht when I gave you my bag was basically the end of our crew.”

  “A bunch of you got arrested at once that night? Like, it was a sting or something?”

  “Something like that,” he agreed.

  I considered this new information. After my rush to drop Rory off and then hurry home to meet Kash that day at the bank, I had almost forgotten that I’d overheard him talking into his phone in the scariest voice I’d ever heard. He had been threatening someone, saying that he was going to find him to get his money back—it was the guy who had the other key to the safety deposit box. “So not everyone got arrested back then,” I said slowly. “There were a few people who didn’t, who stayed out of trouble.”

  “Yeah. Some guys had good lawyers and some guys got very lucky.” But the low, grim way that he said it made me look across the car at him.

  Some guys got lucky, but he’d been sent away to prison. If I was Rory, I would have thought that one of the “lucky” guys was a snitch. I bit my lip, considering how much I could ask. I saw the tight set of his jaw, and I decided to stop talking about it. He obviously didn’t want to discuss that part of his life with me, and it was none of my business. If I had learned anything with Kash, it was to keep my mouth shut.

  “Tell me what you did today,” he said, and I thought immediately of my boyfriend coming over and the spring digging into my back as he moaned in my ear and told me how good he was, how good he made me feel. I wouldn’t tell Rory that part.

  “Well, I got great news,” I reported. “Not exactly my news, but I found out that one of the women I clean for, Ameyo, is having a baby.”

  “She told you?”

  “No, not exactly. But she left a book in her—she left a book next to her bed, that one about what’s going to happen in every month of pregnancy.” It had been inside the drawer in her bedside table, but close enough to being on top of it. And I’d seen that her husband had cancelled his hockey season tickets, which told me that he was going to be needed at home. “I’m really happy for her. She’s been trying to get pregnant for a while and she and her husband have the nicest life together.” I told Rory more about them, like how they had desks that faced each other in their library so they could talk while they worked in there, all the pictures from their amazing vacations, how close she was with both her parents and how excited I thought they’d be. “Ameyo and her husband are a perfect couple, aren’t they?” I finished up.

  “I guess so. They sound happy, but nothing’s perfect. Everybody has problems.”

  That was what my mom had said, too, when I’d told her about Mrs. Tollman’s hoarder room. “Everybody’s got something,” she had said over our lunch. “We all have something to hide.”

  “What?” Rory asked me. “Why did you make that sound?”

  “Huh?”

  “Like you moaned a little. You ok?”

  “Yeah,” I answered, embarrassed. “I was just thinking about something Rella told me today. Something sad about her past, and it made me get all, I don’t know, depressed or something. She always says to count my blessings but sometimes it’s hard.”

  “Are you comparing yourself to that woman you work for? Ameyo?”

  “No, of course not! She’s not someone I could ever compare with,” I scoffed. “Didn’t you just hear me talking about her life? And she’s really smart, too. She went to college and graduate school.” She and her husband had their degrees hung on the wall of their library. I had dusted them today, running a rag over the gold frames. “She has her own business doing some financial stuff. They’re going to pay off her husband’s medical school loans pretty soon because she does so well. She’s really amazing. He’s so proud to be married to her.” I found myself talking about the love notes her husband left, how after seven years of marriage he was still so obviously head over heels. “Once, when he was going to a long shift at the hospital where he works, he left her a note that said, ‘I won’t see you tonight but I’ll dream about you.’ Isn’t that amazing? He dreams about her.”

  “Or he knew the right thing to say.”

  Now I definitely made a noise, a frustrated one. “No, he loves her because she’s so cool. And they’ll be amazing parents, too, loving their kid so much. That’s a lucky baby.” Rella’s baby would have been lucky, too. I had been jealous when she’d told me about being pregnant, jealous of the baby that she’d loved so much and who would have had such a wonderful life with her. I got hot with shame as I remembered it.

  “Good for them. Good for the baby,” Rory said.

  “You have that,” I pointed out to him. “You’re lucky with your parents, right? You told me some about your family, how much you love each other.”

  “Yeah. I was very lucky,” he said briefly. He pulled into a parking spot and stopped. “Let’s go.”

  “We’re stopping? Here?” I looked out the window. “Why?”

  Rory was already coming around to my side of the new car. “I like to walk at night. Come on.” He put out his hand and I took it to get down from the high seat. But when I pulled to let go, he held on, turning over my palm to look at it, and cradling my hand in his. Mine looked very small in comparison.

  “You have calluses.” He ghosted his fingers over my skin. “And a scar.”

  “Yeah, my hands are a mess from cleaning.” He was touching me so gently. “The scar is from glass, from when I was a kid.”

  Rory moved his finger down the jagged line that extended onto my wrist. “This must have hurt. How many stitches?”

  “None. I wrapped it up like I did for you.” I pulled my hand away. “Where are we going? This isn’t very safe.”

  “You’re safe with me,” he stated.

  Maybe I was. He was so big, and really, pretty scary-looking if you didn’t know him, especially with the fading bruises. When he started to walk towards the Detroit River, to the path that edged the water, I came along, too. I watched all around us and I listened closely. There was no such thing as being too careful.

  “Look at the stars,” Rory said. “There aren’t as many down here as at home. Where I grew up,” he clarified. “I used to think about them a lot when I was locked up. There’s Ursa Major.” He pointed to the sky.

  “What?”

  “The big bear. It’s hard to see it.” He put his hand on my shoulder to direct me a little, and when I swung my head back and forth, he cupped my chin with his big, warm palm and I froze. “There.” I heard him laugh softly. “I wish I could point your eyes. Do you see the Big Dipper?”

  “What’s a dipper?”

  “Like a ladle.” His hand dropped from my jaw to signal something in the sky. “Look, that’s the handle, that’s the cup part.” He shook his head. “It’s so much fainter in Detroit. Too many lights down here.”

  “I don’t know anything about stars,” I said.

  He directed my chin again. I could feel his calluses, too.

  “That bright star is Polaris. It’s part of Ursa Minor, the Little Dipper, but it’s impossible to see. There’s Orion. He’s the hunter but he’s tough to pick out, too. You see those three bright ones, spaced apart so perfectly?”

  I tried to figure out what he meant. “I think so,” I said.

  “That’s his belt. The three stars are Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka.”

  “They have names?” I asked, and Rory nodded. “You know a lot about this stuff,” I commented.

  “I used to be out at night a lot. My brother and I used to go out together, but then he got sent away for high school so I was on my own and I used to run pretty wild. I loved to drive at night, as fast as I could, and hang out the window to look at the stars.”

  “That sounds really dangerous.”

  He huffed. “No one has ever said that I made good choices. But I loved the feeling. Like I was totally free, that there was nothing at all holding me to the Earth, almost. It was like…” He stopped. “I was going to say it was like being high. Do you know what I mean?”

  I shrugged.

  �
��When I was locked up, I thought a lot about that. Not about drugs—not all the time about drugs,” he corrected himself. “I thought about the freedom of the sky at night. The stars. I got books out of the library to read and learn about them. I bought my favorite one when I got out. You could borrow it, if…” He stopped.

  “I can read,” I told him. “I’m not that dumb.” Somehow I had managed to move up a bunch of grades without really understanding how words went together but I did ok now. Rella had sat with me and helped me until I was much, much better at it.

  “I meant that I could loan you my book about the constellations if you’d be interested in it,” Rory said. “I didn’t know if you would be.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” I said quickly. I was touchier about that subject than usual, because of what had happened earlier in the day. When I’d arrived at the Tollmans’ house, Mrs. Tollman had handed me a list of extra chores she wanted me to complete. She had tapped the paper with her carefully painted nail.

  “Is this clear to you?” she’d asked suspiciously as I’d looked over the items. “Do you understand these things as I’ve written them?”

  She had thought that I couldn’t read, but I had understood everything, from, “1. Organize cans in pantry: labels forward, stacked no more than two high, alphabetized, straight lines” to, “8. Remove lint screen from dryer, scrub with liquid soap (use only the soap provided!) and small brush next to utility sink.” It had been a toothbrush and dish soap, and I’d read all that dumb stuff and done exactly what she’d asked. When I was finished, I’d gone into her hoarder room to look at her latest acquisitions, like a set of plastic, red and green bowls that said, “More Pasta!” on them, and a new pile of empty wine bottles.

  After that, I’d felt like Mrs. Tollman and I were close to being even again.

  “Isobel?” Rory asked, drawing me back to the present, and I stopped thinking about that awful woman.

  “Why do you call me Isobel?” I asked curiously. “You’re the only person I know who doesn’t use a nickname.”