Read More: A brief Q&A with Mark Brazaitis
Rachel was behind the counter of the Book and Brew, staring at the stoplight swinging above the intersection out the far window, when Curtis Perrault walked in. She’d never seen him outside the prison where she’d been incarcerated for five years and twenty-eight days. He was dressed, as usual, in a dark suit, his black hair was slicked back, and his face had a golden glow, as if he’d timed his stay in the sun to give it the perfect color. Although he was an economics professor, she thought he could moonlight as a model; he would appeal to men in their forties who might be seduced into believing they had aged as gracefully as he had.
Per the terms of her parole—and of his contract as a volunteer at the prison—they were forbidden to see each other for a year after her release. She’d been a free woman for exactly forty days. When he stepped up to the counter, he said, “Rachel. Wow. I had no idea you worked here.” The tone of his voice and his smile said otherwise. “How’ve you been?”
“Good,” she said. Better now than a moment ago. Or worse.
She’d had a crush on him, which didn’t make her unique among the women in his class. Only Cheryl, who was gay, and Chamique, who was absorbed in writing what she called the Me Manifesto, a self-empowerment book, didn’t. There wasn’t much else to do in prison except fall in schoolgirl love with the handsome volunteer from the private college down the road.
At the Book and Brew, he was thirty miles from his workplace and home. She wanted to ask him what he was doing here, but she thought she knew. This thrilled her and terrified her. “You have a new outfit,” he said, teasing. The only other clothes he’d seen her in was her prison jumpsuit, its color, as Chamique described it, “what you’d get if you mixed diarrhea and piss.”
Rachel could have told him, “Fuck you.” Instead, she said, “You don’t.”
He glanced down at his pinstriped black suit, his white shirt, his red tie. He looked up, smiling. “Next time, I’ll surprise you with a Hawaiian shirt.”
There can’t be a next time.
She knew a little about Curtis from what he’d said in class and from Chamique, who seemed to know everything about everyone. He was divorced; he had no children; he’d worked on Wall Street before joining the faculty at Sheridan College. Because of what he taught, the women called him Professor Money. And because the fluorescent lights in the room where their class was held reflected the aquamarine paint of the walls onto his smooth chin, they’d given him a second, secret nickname: Bluebeard. Chamique knew a fairy tale by the same name. It was gruesome, she said, although she didn’t remember whether its ending was happy or sad.
Rachel asked him, “What would you like?”
He seemed to mouth the word “You.”
“Coffee, please. Black.”
She filled a mug for him and he found a table by the window, where he unclasped his laptop. Her parole officer might step into the Book and Brew at any minute. He liked spontaneity. But when, twenty minutes later, Curtis came up to the counter for a refill, she didn’t mention her fears.
“What have you been up to?” he asked.
She suspected he knew. How else would he have found her? But she told him anyway: She was living with her mother, going to Ohio Eastern University part-time, working.
He looked around the place. “I hope it’s all right.”
“What’s all right?”
“Your life.” He pivoted to her. “And I hope this is all right,” he said. Softly: “Me. Here. With you.”
It wasn’t all right. She would rather die than go back to prison.
“Of course it’s all right,” she said.
“Good,” he said, “because I’d like to see you again.”
With an excellent lawyer, or even a good lawyer, she could have avoided prison. But her father, who’d divorced her mother when Rachel was thirteen, was a judge who didn’t want to lose his next election. By insisting she plead guilty, he would prove he was dispassionate, fair—as blind as justice itself—even as he assured her that she would be sentenced to probation.
In high school, her classmates had cars and cell phones and wore clothes they bought off the Internet with their parents’ credit cards. Her father guarded his money like Scrooge’s more miserly brother, and her mother’s salary as a dental hygienist covered rent and food and nothing more. While none of Rachel’s friends had jobs, Rachel had worked since she was in middle school. She babysat; she bagged groceries at Food World; she drove her eighty-two-year-old neighbor, Mrs. Whitecastle, to doctor and dentist and hair-stylist appointments, receiving from the old woman, with a forced smile and a crushing sense of unfairness, the coins the tight-assed witch thought were sufficient pay.
At first, Rachel shoplifted small items: lipstick, eyeliner, sunglasses, scarves. One night, though, she broke into Crazy Carl’s Computers—crazy Carl had left his backdoor open—and was caught as she left, her arms full of a felony. She was a juvenile and therefore avoided prison. Her crime was supposed to have remained confidential, but as part of her sentence, she was assigned to a youth-services team that every Saturday in April and May, in bumblebee-yellow uniforms, picked up trash on the interstate outside of town. Her classmates occasionally drove by, shouting, “Jailbird!”
Her big mistake, in the summer after her sophomore year at Ohio State, was to sell drugs around her hometown. She’d wanted to buy a car. She was $120 from a five-year-old Mustang when she sold to an undercover cop.
Most of the women she knew in prison were guilty of similar crimes. Some of them had longer sentences. A few of them expressed wonder that Rachel was there at all, that her father and her skin—“You’re Snow White’s twin,” exclaimed Chamique—hadn’t saved her.
She heard from women who’d been incarcerated more than once how difficult it was to thrive or even survive in the world as an ex-con. Your record followed you, Chamique told her, like an ex-lover hellbent on extinguishing every joy in your life.
Even after she’d left prison, she sometimes found herself, upon waking from even the mildest of nightmares, sobbing and wishing she could start again. She wouldn’t do anything wrong this time, she pleaded, as if to a god who might rewind time. She would babysit, she would bag groceries, she would drive Mrs. Whitecastle to the ends of the earth and be glad for the pennies the old woman threw at her feet.
The next time she saw Curtis, he invited her to have a drink after her shift. He had in mind a bar on the edge of town. “It’s dark,” he said. “We can sit in the back.”
She’d quit drinking, even if drinking hadn’t been her problem. She wanted to be as good—as clean—as she could be. But in the dark of Wild River, she downed the drink Curtis had ordered her, Diamond Princess, a delicious potion of berries and bliss.
Curtis told her about his career. After graduating from business school, he’d done consulting. “It’s amazing,” he said, “how much companies are willing to pay someone who hasn’t even so much as punched a time card to come in and tell them what they’re doing wrong.” After a few years, he moved on to an investment firm, where, he said, laughing, “I had fun with other people’s money.” He quit to be a partner in a firm that helped companies move their operations overseas. “If we could have moved them to Mars,” he said, “we would have. No taxes on the Red Planet.”
“Now you’re a professor,” she said.
?Distinguished visiting lecturer,” he said. “The college hired me because I’m someone with real-world experience.”
“You were nice to volunteer at the prison.”
“Thank you,” he said, “although ‘volunteer’ isn’t exactly accurate. Sheridan College paid me as part of its community-outreach campaign.”
After he bought her another drink, she asked him if he was dating anyone.
“It depends,” he said.
“On what?”
“On what we’d call this.” He waved his hand between the two of them. She blushed.
At midnight, they left Wild River and climbed into his car. Its dashboard lit up like a brilliant city. He put a hand on her thigh. “I’m glad I ran into you,” he said. “I’d been wondering what you’ve been up to.”
“Now you know,” she said.
“I want to know more,” he said.
Two weeks after she’d left prison, she slept with Mike, her high-school boyfriend. It had been quick and awkward—he shared an apartment with a coworker who’d been watching TV in the next room. Mike wanted to see her again, but she declined. He’d been part of her problem. She’d sold him drugs the month before her arrest, and he wasn’t discreet about what he said around town.
Every so often now, he showed up at the Book and Brew to say hi. She didn’t welcome his visits, but she wasn’t rude to him.
“How about a little drive before I take you home?” Curtis said.
No, she thought. “Perfect,” she said.
Soon they were flying on a back road, which was either new or newly paved. She’d lived in Sherman her entire life but had never been here. She told him so.
“It’s my private speedway,” he said.
He’d spoken too soon. There was a flash of blue and red behind them. Seconds later, a siren sounded.
She thought her fear would suffocate her. She remembered standing at the entrance of the prison, tucked miles from any town and hidden between mountains, its barbed-wire fences extending on either side of the main building like enormous waves, and thinking, I won’t survive a day here.
When Curtis laughed, she was sure she’d been set up. He was in league, she feared, with everyone she hated: her father, her parole officer, the cops in Sherman who couldn’t wait for her to screw up. Her anger found a voice: “What the hell are you doing?”
“It’s not what I am doing,” he said. “It’s what I was doing. Eighty-four, to be precise.”
The officer who appeared at Curtis’s open window was young and heavyset. “License and registration, please.” Curtis made a gesture with his fingers, and the officer crouched so his ear was an inch from Curtis’s mouth.
Rachel closed her eyes. Please, God, please, God, please please please God.
She opened her eyes when she heard the officer laugh. A moment later, he retreated to his car, made a U-turn, and drove off, his taillights dissolving into the night.
“What did you tell him?” she asked.
Curtis said, “I reminded him that we’re part of a persecuted race and gender, and we need to help each other if we’re going to survive in this cruel and unjust world.”
“No, seriously,” she said.
“I am serious.”
As Curtis started up the car, Rachel thought of Cheryl, whose son was born with cerebral palsy so severe that, even as an adolescent, he couldn’t control his bladder or bowels. She’d slapped the face of a police officer who came to arrest her at the grocery store where she worked and from which, every so often, she stole adult diapers, toilet paper, soap, and hand sanitizer. “I swear,” she told Rachel, “the bathroom was the only room in my house I stocked illegally.”
Before Curtis’s subdivision, they first had to first at a guard booth. Curtis exchanged words with the guard in what seemed to Rachel like a secret language, punctuated with both men’s laughter. She wondered about the women who’d preceded her past the gate in Curtis’s car.
His three-story house was immense and turreted and made of gray stone. When they were inside, he directed her to his living room. She sat on his couch, which was dark and so soft and warm it might have been made of the fur of a living animal. He brought out a bottle of red wine and two glasses. After filling the glasses, he touched his glass to hers. “To being outside prison,” he said, “and inside my house.”
After they drank two glasses, he gave her a tour, beginning with the attic, which had a telescope below a large sky light. The second floor contained four bedrooms, three bathrooms, an office, and a hot tub. On the first floor was the largest kitchen she’d ever seen. “In my next life,” Curtis said, “I’ll learn to cook and actually use it.” He smiled. “So,” he said, “you’ve seen my house.”
“The basement?” she said. “I want to know you top to bottom.” She was drunk enough to think her innuendos were clever.
“Of course,” he said. He clicked on the basement light and led her down.
The basement was carpeted but unfurnished. Off the main room were a bathroom, whose door was open, and a room whose door was locked. “What’s in here?” she asked him as she tried the knob.
“My secrets,” he said. “I know what you all nicknamed me.”
“Professor Money?” she said, surprised by his voice, which contained a low hum of offense and injury.
“Bluebeard,” he said.
She began an apology, but he waved as if at a fly and said, “It’s all right. I’m flattered to be thought of as a pirate.”
She thought he might be thinking of Blackbeard, but she didn’t correct him.
He didn’t show her what was in the locked room. It didn’t matter. Minutes later, she was where she most wanted to be.
Three months after she’d first seen him at the Book and Brew, she was spending most nights with him. When he was at work, she sometimes wandered around his house, reading and re-reading its walls and carpet and shelves, hoping they might tell her something she didn’t know about the man she’d fallen in love with.
He treated her to meals at out-of-town restaurants and bottles of French wine in his living room. He gave her gifts of Belgian chocolates and lotus persimmons from Japan. He bought her silk slippers. Although she made only minimum wage, augmented by whatever people dropped in the tip jar on the counter, she reciprocated: a pair of candles, a blue silk tie, a Swiss Army watch (which brought the balance in her bank account down to $110.29).
She’d asked him about his past lovers and his ex-wife. Smiling, he always deflected her questions or, pretending to be on a witness stand, invoked his Fifth-Amendment rights.
Rachel suspected that the locked room in his basement contained memorabilia from his past relationships: photographs, letters, gifts. When she was in an especially dark mood, she believed it might also house evidence of his current relationships. There were times he didn’t invite her to stay overnight with him—and times she called or texted him and didn’t hear back from him until the following day or even several days later.
One Saturday morning, he told her he was planning to throw her a party. It would celebrate, he said, her anniversary.
“What anniversary?” she asked him. They were in bed, sunlight spread over them like a blanket. He turned over to gaze at her. Even after a night’s sleep, and after the two bottles of wine they’d drunk preceding it, he looked exquisite. His hair was in place; his breath smelled like spring; his golden skin glowed. “The one-year anniversary of the day you left prison,” he said. He kissed her. “Of course, I won’t tell our guests this.”
“Guests?” She’d never met anyone in his family or a single one of his friends.
“Please invite whomever you’d like.”
Even the list of people she might conceivably invite wasn’t long: her mother; Tim, who owned the Book and Brew; Tina, who’d shared her biology notes before Rachel dropped the class.
“I’m having it catered,” he said. “I’m hiring a band. The dress code is semi-formal.”
She told him he shouldn’t go to the trouble. To celebrate, she said, she would be just as happy—happier, even—to spend the evening alone with him. She didn’t tell him that, with her woeful wardrobe, she would worry about embarrassing him.
“Nonsense,” he said. “You deserve a blowout bash.”
Later the same day, as she stood behind the Book and Brew’s counter in jeans, an old blouse, and tennis shoes whose laces were frayed, she wondered if she could ask Curtis to loan her money for a new dress, makeup, new shoes. But he’d been overly generous to her, and he was throwing her an elaborate, expensive party. She thought of her mother. But from the day Rachel left prison, her mother had been clear: She could stay in her childhood bedroom, but she would have to cover her share of the household expenses. Her father, meanwhile, had called her the day she left prison and not once since.
The afternoon passed slowly. During its traditional down time, at three-thirty, the Book and Brew was empty. When the door next opened, Mike, her ex-boyfriend, walked in. He was tall and thin, with brown hair to his shoulders. In the past year, he’d acquired tattoos on each of his forearms. One was of the ace of spades. She couldn’t tell what the other one was of and didn’t want to know. He said, “What’s up?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Thank God.”
He leaned over the counter. Although the place was empty save the two of them, he whispered, “Will you fix me up?”
“Are you serious?”
He explained it would be only once, and for good money. He was dating someone new, he explained. She was having a party.
“I wouldn’t know where to find what you want,” she said.
She was lying, and he knew it. He told her what he’d like. She calculated what she would make off the deal. It was more than she made in a month at the Book and Brew. She imagined walking into Eve’s Apple, her favorite store in town, and paying cash for any dress she liked.
The next day, exhilarated by the prospect of replacing her tired wardrobe, Rachel strode into Eve’s Apple. There was a single saleswoman, an indifferent college student from Ohio Eastern, behind the counter. She was painting her nails when Rachel left the store with a purse pressed to her right hip.
Back at Curtis’s house, she worried about what she’d done. She hadn’t seen any security cameras in the store, although she wondered now if they’d been hidden behind mirrors or in light fixtures on the ceiling. Cleaning out the pockets of her jeans, she discovered a tube of lipstick, its color a cross between ruby and rose. She didn’t remember pocketing it. Even her subconscious, she thought, was a thief.
She calmed down. Everything was fine.
She coated her lips. When Curtis saw her, he said, “You look amazing.”
Before work the following morning, she stopped by Bosco’s Bacchanal to speak to Henry Black, its owner. Years before, his business had nearly been ruined by Internet outlets that sold wine, coffee, and craft beer for a fraction of the prices he did. But he’d found a sideline. Santa Julia Malbec, Don Pablo Supremo Coffee, and Modelo Especial weren’t his only imports from Latin America.
With his rosy cheeks and boisterous laugh, Henry was usually as jolly as Santa Claus. But standing behind his counter, with its cup full of organic chocolate lollypops and bottles of acai berry energy drinks, he seemed devastated to see her. “Rachel,” he said like he might say cancer. “How may I help you?”
“The usual way,” she said.
His frown deepened.
“One last time,” she said. “I swear.”
He owed her. After she was arrested, she’d told the police nothing about him.
On the day of the party, three weeks later, Rachel didn’t expect her mother to come home before she left for Curtis’s house. Therefore, the knock on her bedroom door startled her. Reluctantly, she said, “Come in.”
Her mother, she feared, was what she would look like in twenty-five years: gray hair exploding from her crown; a face thinned by time and worry; a body so bored with itself it was trying to become invisible.
For several moments, her mother merely stared at her new dress, her fresh makeup, her new earrings and bracelets. Her mother’s sigh sounded like a landside or a building’s collapse.
“My boyfriend,” Rachel said, “bought all of this for me.”
It was obvious her mother didn’t believe her because she closed her eyes and held them closed. Her mother needed a moment in the dark to convince herself she didn’t know what she knew. She opened her eyes and forced a smile. “He’s very generous,” she said. […]
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Mark Brazaitis is the author of eight books, including The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala, winner of the 1998 Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Incurables: Stories, winner of the 2012 Richard Sullivan Prize and the 2013 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Sun, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, Guernica, Under the Sun, Beloit Fiction Journal, Poetry East, USA Today, and elsewhere. A former Peace Corps volunteer and technical trainer, he is a professor of English, the director of the Creative Writing Program, and the director of the West Virginia Writers’ Workshop at West Virginia University.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Mark Brazaitis