“Do you even like eating pussy?”
“I think it’s an acquired taste,” Cole manages, and then Mila bursts into the bathroom, clutching their backpack.
“Mom!”
The drunk woman startles, staggers, and knocks her purse off the counter. It spills its guts across the floor.
“Miles!” She corrects herself, “Mila!”
“Awwww shit,” says the redhead, “Aww. I think I busted my heel.”
“Sorry! I didn’t know where you were! You weren’t in the ladies! You have to tell me!”
“Not your fault.” Cole sees Mila’s eyes flick to the purse and the scattered possessions. She shakes her head, short, sharp.
“I’ll get your things,” Mila says, ignoring her. Fuck. Cole takes the woman’s arm, to steal her attention, injects surprised warmth into her tone. “Hey, steady there. You okay?”
“My shoe,” she says, miserable, up on one leg and swaying, trying to see. “Busted.” She gives another little burp.
“No, look. It’s the strap. It’s come loose. Here, I’ll help you.” Cole bends down to fasten it, hoping she doesn’t get puked on.
“Well aren’t you the sweetest.” Behind her, Mila scoops up the lipstick, a set of keys attached to a foam rubber bobbin of the dancing girl-emoji, restaurant mints, a pack of nicotine gum, a used-up tube of fancy handcream, several tampons. Her fingers hesitate over the striped wallet, which has flipped open. Useless plastic cards. And dollar bills, neatly extracted, palmed away into her fist.
“Here we go, ma’am.” Mila presses the purse into the drunken woman’s arms, radiant with innocence.
“And you. You are also the sweetest.” She goes in to pat Mila’s cheek. “You must look after this one,” the woman sighs. “I never had kids. Never will. Didn’t want them, but now. Now I don’t have that choice. Nobody will ever again. It’s so sad. Isn’t it? Oh, it’s all too much. I can’t bear it.” She digs into her purse for tissues.
“You mustn’t think about such things.” Cole hands her a paper towelette to dab her eyes, so she won’t keep scratching around in there. “It’ll come right.” She steers her toward the door. “You’ll see, the whole world is working on it, the best scientists and epidemiologists.” All the fucking tests they ran on Miles back at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Her too. “Only a matter of time.” She’s trying to be cheerful, but the woman’s maudlin self-pity is wearing her down.
Victim-blaming much?
“C’mon, let’s get you back to your table,” she says as she aims her in the direction of the table and her oblivious friends.
“Good job,” she whispers to Mila as they head for the exit, not looking back. “And also: you can never do that again. We’re going to send her a check in the mail, repay every cent.”
“Sure, Mom,” her daughter the thief says, eyeroll implicit. Like Cole has a checkbook. Like she even caught the woman’s name.
Bad mother. She can’t help it.
6.
Billie: Peripheral
Knuckles like knots of pale wood on the steering wheel. Sickly sun rising wan and white. On the road to San Francisco. Isn’t there a song about that? Billie hums a few notes, trying it on. Something, something, ghosts, something dreaming of the West Coast. Driving with the headlights on, because that’s safer, even during the day. High visibility. Her dad taught her that. But the road signs make no sense. It’s an American thing, maybe, like imperial versus metric. But she might be lost. Sometimes she blinks and the landscape changes, and she’s pretty fucking sure it’s not supposed to do that.
She avoids touching the back of her head, the stickiness at the back of her neck, caught in her hair. Shadows in the periphery. Like someone in the car with her.
Not her sister.
Fuck that cow.
That useless selfish cunt. Always. She’s always been like this. So goddamn patronizing.
Maybe you should get a job-job, Billie. Said in the same placatory tone you’d use on a three-year-old who was mad they had to wear pants. Not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur.
It’s called seed capital, bitch. One in a thousand businesses take off. The rest fail and fail again and you better be willing to get up off the floor, wipe the blood off your mouth, get back in the ring, and try again.
There is blood in her mouth. She can taste it. Bitter iron. Can’t shake the idea of someone sitting next to her (dreaming ghosts), and hasn’t she seen this corpse of trees before?
Copse. Not corpse.
Concentrate. Remember to drive on the right.
Seed capital. Heh.
It’s not fair. She’s been waiting for this her whole life. It’s not her fault her sister was so unreasonable. It was a misunderstanding. It’s not like she was kidnapping him. She was going to send for her.
Cole didn’t have to hit her.
Try to kill her.
Coward. Like always.
Billie’s the fierce one. Willing to do whatever it takes. Always something cooking. Chef joke. Heh.
That’s what she was doing for Mr. and Mrs. Amato, executive chef, catering exclusive dinners in exotic locations where the law was…squishier, shall we say. From Manila to Monrovia, Bodrum to Doha. Someone has to feed the rich and unscrupulous.
Unlike her idiot big sister, she’s never been naïve about the deep, dark currents flowing just beneath the surface of polite society. Working in restaurants, you get caught up in the eddies sometimes, not just the coke dealing in the bathroom (often to staff, because the job requires late nights and sparkle), a little credit card skimming on the side, but also the big scary protection rackets. Like that afternoon at La Luxe in Cape Town when a fleet of Mercedes pulled into the beachfront parking lot, and men in sharp suits announced that from now on, their private security company would be handling all the restaurant’s needs.
But wasn’t it all a racket anyway? Barely a pubic hair of difference between the legitimate pharmaceutical industry and the drug trade, international banking and embezzlement and crypto-funded terrorism, arms dealing and illegal arms dealing. Billie had a pretty good idea of exactly who she was going to be working for when she met Thierry Amato in a members’ club in Soho, with his sharkish grin and dubious pals.
Didn’t take a genius to recognize how dodgy they were, knots of men talking in undertones in the paneled libraries, the bodyguards, the mystery packages, sometimes passing through her very kitchen. She didn’t mind the discretion pay. But it took canniness and guts to seize the chance to move upward.
Thwarted. Because her own fucking sister tried to kill her.
Fighting tears. The road blurs. She should press charges. Attempted murder. What’s the word? Sororicide.
She has to fix this. What if Mrs. Amato decides to wash her hands of the entire affair? Like Lady Macbeth. Out, damn spot. Semen instead of blood.
Billie’s golden chance. For all of them. You have to grab opportunity by the balls. Sometimes even literally. That was the beauty of it, right? Not asking Miles to do something he wasn’t doing naturally anyway.
She never laid a hand on him. Wouldn’t. Jesus. Never. But he could, himself. Easy. Do it with his eyes closed. What’s the big deal?