One Good Hustle - By Billie Livingston Page 0,20

lowers his bearded face to take a bite off the bacon slice in his right hand. A regular lumberjack. Lou’s like Paul Bunyan. Everything looks miniature when he’s nearby. He lowers his head to his fork and takes a mouthful of pancake. A little syrup dribbles into the fur around his lips.

“How are you this fine morning, Samantha?” he says, sitting upright when he notices me.

Lou is kind of formal. At least with me. So polite I figure he’s joking half the time.

“Ducky,” I say, and sit across from him.

When he smiles, the balls of his cheeks squish right up under his eyes. I try to picture Lou at Oakalla Prison ordering criminals around, rapping his club against iron bars, telling them to shut their damn traps. He must have a desk job.

Lou’s got thick, dark, wavy hair. Like Jill’s. I glance at Ruby’s short steely curls. Marlene would die before she’d let her hair go grey while a guy like Lou sat at her table. She’d sooner go bald.

If you went bald, I’d shine your head every day.

The phone rings.

Ruby gets up and starts toward the hall off the kitchen but the ringing stops. She keeps going. In the hall, I hear her open the door down to the basement. “You got that, Jill?” she says.

My name is croaked up from the basement as if from the bottom of a swamp.

Ruby steps back into the kitchen. “Sammie, phone’s for you.”

I get up slowly. What if it’s Drew on the other end? I dreamed about him. So it seems like it must be him. I bet Marlene gave him the number here. Now I’m going to get my head chewed off for going AWOL. I don’t blame him. I’m a shitty friend these days. I really am.

Rubbing my hands on my pyjama pants, I try to remember the details of the Drew dream before I pick the receiver up off the hall table. People always like it when you dream about them.

“It’s me,” my mother says. Her voice could cut through bone. “I suppose you’ve got it pretty good over there.”

I stare at the wall. There’s a little notepad in front of me, with a pencil dangling by a string:

Jill—Crystal called.

Mom—Adele called.

“Were you planning to come home at some point and do this laundry or what?”

“Um.” That’s all I say. From behind me I hear the slow thump of Jill coming up the basement steps.

“What about the dishes? Are you ever going to do anything around here?”

“Yeah, I—um.” I glance over my shoulder as Jill reaches the hallway. Eyes squinty, she trudges into the bathroom and shuts the door.

“Jesus Christ, Samantha.” Marlene almost never calls me Samantha.

“I’ll come over. In around an hour?”

“Fine,” she says, and the line goes dead.

Standing in the hallway, I forget which door I was about to go through. I turn toward the basement. I should get dressed.

“Sammie?” Ruby calls.

I come back to the kitchen entrance. “My mom. I just have to go home for a bit. There’s a bunch of laundry.”

Jill steps out of the bathroom and through a yawn says, “What’s going on?” Ruby exchanges a glance with Lou, who doesn’t look at me, just grabs another pancake and mops up the syrup on his plate.

“Call her back and tell her you’re not coming,” Ruby says.

“I just have to do—”

“You don’t have to do anything. Marlene has to clean up her own mess.”

I don’t like the way Ruby says Marlene, like it’s a swear word or something.

Jill is right behind me. I can smell her Opium perfume. Her old boyfriend Roman bought her that. (I’d bet anything he got it hot.) Everything Jill owns is choking with that musky Opium smell. Enough to make you boke, as she would say.

I move to the side and let her pass. She just stands there, though, tightens the belt of her fuzzy purple bathrobe and says, “Mom’s right.”

My face is heating up. “Some of it’s mine too. The laundry …”

“That’s fine,” Ruby says.

“I can help her out if I want.”

“You’d be doing her a bigger favour if you said no,” Ruby says.

I bite a hangnail and look at Jill’s fuzzy bathrobe. I wish I could curl up in mountains of purple plush right now.

“Call her back and tell her you’re not coming,” Ruby says again, trying to keep eye contact with me.

I turn back into the hall and look at the phone. I pick up the receiver. There’s a spot of blood where the hangnail used to