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I had thought it was special he insisted we ride together tonight. Normally, he let me do my “burlesque thing” while he did “important businessman things” and mildly complained about the hours. I’d tease him that if he hadn’t been one of my spectators, we’d have never met.
Not once had I questioned what a guy like Frederick had been doing at a hole-in-the-wall speakeasy. He was the type to get his steak served by Wolfgang Puck, not Bill from Albuquerque.
Thelma and her scandalous disdain forPretty Womanhad almost gotten me. I should have listened to her bitching about how he never would’ve looked at her twice if she’d been bagging his groceries instead of his dick.
I got into the back of the Mercedes. Frederick slid in next to me and buried himself in his phone. Yet another thing he paid for and controlled. I posted the same pics of old performances I normally do to build excitement and gain an audience. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Don’t ever call me on that thing,Thelma used to say.Your prince might be a perv. I don’t like pervs. Jimmy from the cul-de-sac was one, you know.
Jimmy from the cul-de-sac was a fifty-year-old from my grandma and Thelma’s old neighborhood in Yorba Linda doing five to ten for the massive amount of child porn law enforcement had found on his “friend’s” computer he was “just borrowing.”
“Park in the back,” Frederick said. His eyes glinted when he looked at me. “I don’t want them to see the prize until you hit the stage.”
My belly roiled, but I nodded. “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”
“Something like that.” He spun on the heel of his expensive loafer and left.
I kept my breathing steady as Frederick unloaded me and my suitcase and escorted me all the way to the dressing room. The theater was eerily quiet. Where were the sound and light techs? The stagehands who arranged props? Usually, I was in a set with other performers, sometimes other burlesque acts, or musicians, or even comedians. Tonight, I was the only name on the marquee, and...this wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
The dressing room was empty. Guys paid by Frederick and men who paid Frederick a ton of money waited for me toperform.
My hand gripped the handle of my suitcase so hard I wouldn’t be surprised if I created divots.Even breaths. I hung up the garment bag and opened it like I had every intention of putting on my fringe dress, sequined bra, and kitten-heeled black velvet shoes.
Voices and laughter rang from the bar beyond the long hallway that led to the stage. On the other side of the dressing room was another hallway that led to the kitchen, the restrooms, and the emergency exit. An obnoxious alarm was supposed to blare if the door was opened, but the owner hadn’t paid for the repair yet.
I checked the time. So close. I sat at the prep table I usually used with lights surrounding three sides of the mirror and started twisting and curling my dark hair until I looked like a 1920s flapper. When the last pin was in place, I situated on top the sequined headband with pale blue feathers that I would gift to spectators in the crowd.
Frederick popped in. “Everything good?”
No, dickwad, you know it’s not.“Yeah,” I said, my voice full of confidence. “I just have to get dressed.”
His lewd gaze raked down my body. “Twenty minutes.”
“Perfect.” I checked the time. It was eight ten. On the dot.
When he disappeared, I counted to five before I dug out the burner phone. A new message was waiting.
Your chariot awaits. See you in a few hours.
A shot of relief dulled the sharp anxiety in my belly. I had started over plenty of times. This was no different. Maybe, for once, it wouldn’t end the same way it always had: alone and betrayed, with only an old woman living in the middle of nowhere to bail me out.
My new beginning couldn’t last long. I was down, but I couldn’t be out. My mom depended on me.
I rose, took my Firecracker Red lipstick and scrawled out FUCK YOU SHIT STICK on the mirror, followed by the juvenile outline of a cock and balls. Then I lifted my suitcase and checked the hallway. Clear. Frederick thought I had no money and nowhere to go. He was wrong. I walked right out of the emergency exit with no working alarm to the car Thelma had waiting for me.
Two
Cody
I rolled my head, stretching my neck from side to side. I hadn’t wanted to move my furniture to rent a house for the summer in Crocus Valley, North Dakota, but the effort might’ve been worth it.
The office chair had a left tilt that fired up a spot in my hip that screamed and reminded me I just turned forty. The desk was too short, and my forearms were as tight as the muscles in my neck. My vision blurred, and I blinked at the screen.
“Daddy?” Ivy flounced into the room, the tulle skirt of her summer dress whispering her arrival. Ivy had never whispered a thing in her life. She was loud and brash. If my father hadn’t been alive when she was born, I’d wonder about reincarnation, but Ivy displayed tact and empathy. My father had not. “When we gonna play?”
I held in my groan. I had so much goddamn work to do, and toiling away during afternoon quiet time and after both of my kids went to bed wasn’t enough time to do it all. This summer was a chance to spend as much time with them as possible before they left for school. Otherwise, ten-year-old Grayson and seven-year-old Ivy would be off to live with my late wife’s parents and attend the private school their mother had always wished they’d gone to in the first place. We’d been in Crocus Valley for two weeks, and all I’d shown myself and my kids was that I knew how to work.
I could use a break. I’d been staring at a screen full of numbers all morning.
