“Only until I get my advance for the book.”
“Finn.” Every time he said my name it sounded like an expletive.
“Steven.”
“It might be time to consider getting a real job.”
“Like hydro-seeding the neighborhood?” Yeah, I went there. “This is my real job, Steven.”
“Writing trashy books is not a real job.”
“They’re romantic suspense novels! And I’ve already been paid half up front. I’m under contract! I can’t just walk away from a contract. I’ll have to give it back.” Then, because I was feeling particularly stabby, I added, “Unless you want to bail me out of that, too?”
He grumbled to himself as I knelt to sop up the puddle of grounds on the floor. I could picture him at their spotless kitchen table in her immaculate designer town house over a mug of French-pressed coffee, pulling out what was left of his hair.
“Three months.” His patience sounded as thin as the hair on the crown of his head, but I kept that to myself because I needed a babysitter more than the satisfaction of whittling away at his fragile male ego. “You’re three months late on the mortgage, Finn.”
“You mean the rent. The rent I pay you. Cut me a break, Steven.”
“And the HOA is going to put a lien on the house if you don’t pay the special assessment bill they sent you in June.”
“And how would you know that?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. He was banging our real estate agent, and his best friend was our loan officer. That’s how he knew.
“I think the kids should come live with me and Theresa. Permanently.”
I nearly dropped the phone. Abandoning the wad of paper towels, I stormed from the kitchen and lowered my voice to a harsh whisper. “Absolutely not! There is no way I’m sending my kids to live with that woman.”
“You’re hardly earning enough in royalties to pay for groceries.”
“Maybe I’d have time to finish a book if you hadn’t just laid off my babysitter!”
“You’re thirty-two years old, Finn—”
“I am not.” I was thirty-one. Steven was just bitter because I was three years younger than he was.
“You can’t spend your whole life shut up in that house, making up stories. We have real-life bills and real-life problems you need to deal with.”
“Jerk,” I muttered through a thin breath. Because the truth hurt. And Steven was the biggest, most painful truth of them all.
“Look,” he said, “I’m trying not to be a jerk about this. I asked Guy to hold off until the end of the year, to give you time to find something.” Guy. His frat-brother-turned-divorce-lawyer. The same Guy who’d done too many keg stands and puked in the back seat of my car back in college was now the attorney who golfed with the judge on Saturdays and had cost me my weekends with my kids. On top of it, Guy had conned the judge into taking half of my advance for my last book and giving it to Theresa, as recompense for the damage I’d done to her car.
Okay, fine.
I concede that getting drunk and stuffing a wad of Delia’s Play-Doh in the exhaust pipe of Theresa’s BMW may not have been the best way to handle the news when he’d told me they were getting engaged, but letting her walk away with half my advance and my husband felt like salt in the wound.
From the empty dining room, I watched Delia twirl what was left of her hair around a sticky red finger. Zach whined, fidgeting in his high chair. If I couldn’t earn a paycheck in the next three months, Guy would find a way to take my kids and give them to Theresa, too.
“I’m late. I can’t discuss this with you right now. Can I bring Zach to you or not?” I will not cry. I will not—
“Yeah,” he said wearily. Steven didn’t know the meaning of weary. He had coffee and got eight uninterrupted hours of sleep every night. “Finn, I’m sorr—”
I disconnected. It wasn’t as satisfying as a knee to his groin, and yes, it was probably childish and clichéd, but a small part of me felt better after hanging up on him. The very small part (if there was any) that wasn’t covered in syrup and late for my meeting.
Whatever. I was still not okay. Nothing was okay.
I felt another tug on my slacks. Delia looked up at me, tears brewing in her eyes, her hair sticking up in blood-matted spikes.
I blew out a heavy sigh. “Duct tape. I know.”
Musty autumn air rushed in when I opened the service door to the garage. I flicked on the light, but the cavernous space was still dim and depressing, empty except for the oil stain left behind by Steven’s F-150 on the concrete and my dust-coated Dodge Caravan. Someone had drawn a phallus in the grime on the back window, and Delia hadn’t let me clean it because she’d said it looked like a flower, and it all felt like a metaphor for my life right now. A workbench lined the back wall of the garage, topped by a giant pegboard for tools. Only there weren’t any tools. Just my ten-dollar big-box-store generic pink planting trowel—one of a handful of things Steven hadn’t taken when he’d cleaned out the garage. Everything else belonged to his landscaping business, he’d said. I dug around in the scraps left behind on the workbench—loose screws, a broken hammer, a near-empty bottle of upholstery cleaner—and found a roll of silver duct tape. It was as sticky and hairy as my children and I carried it inside.
Delia’s teary doe eyes were gone. She looked at the roll of tape with all the assurance of a girl who had yet to be let down by the most important man in her life.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked, holding a fistful of her tawny strands.
She nodded. I grabbed a knit hat off the coatrack in the foyer and turned back to the kitchen. Zach was watching us, a piece of waffle stuck to his head, pushing and pulling his sticky fingers together and apart with a wide-eyed expression that bordered on mystical. I’m pretty sure he was taking a dump.
Great. Steven could change him.
My scissors were buried under a pile of dirty breakfast dishes, so I drew a knife from the block on the counter instead. The tape peeled away from the roll with a loud shriek, and I held the strands of clipped hair against the side of Delia’s head while wrapping the tape around her like a hideous silver crown until the hair was (mostly) secured in place. The knife was dull, barely sharp enough to hack the tape from the roll.
Jesus.
I forced a smile as I pulled the knit cap over her head, just low enough to conceal the evidence. Delia grinned up at me, her tiny fingers raking the mop of Frankenstein-like strands from her eyes.
“Happy?” I asked, trying not to cringe and draw attention to the chunk of hair that had fallen loose and was now resting on her shoulder.
She nodded.
I stuffed the knife and tape in my shoulder bag along with my cell phone and plucked Zach from his high chair, holding him high enough to get a whiff of his droopy drawers. Satisfied, I slung him on my hip and slammed the door behind us.
I was okay, I told myself as I slapped the remote door opener on the wall of the garage. The motor lit up, a horrible grinding noise drowning out the children’s chatter as it hauled the door open, flooding the garage with autumn-gray sunlight. I loaded us all into the minivan, setting Zach’s sagging drawers gingerly in his car seat. It wasn’t as satisfying as a kick to my ex’s groin, but today, a sticky two-year-old in a shitty diaper felt like the best I could do.