Jorge’s pause is two seconds too long. “Commission is new. Just started.”
“Uh-huh.” Martina looks at me, rolls her eyes. The first wave of guilt rolls through me, nibbling its way across my stomach. “This is some serious bullshit, Jorge. You owe me like three hundred bucks.”
“Okay, okay. I pay you next time.”
“No, you listen to me. There won’t be a next time, not until I get that money you owe me. Do you understand what I’m telling you? Not one more person until you pay.”
There’s another long pause, then a sigh. “Fine.”
“Fine,” Martina barks back, then disconnects the call. She drops it on her lap with an angry squeal. “I can’t believe he did that to me. What a snake. What a dirty, disgusting snake.”
Guilt flares, heating me from the inside out. If anyone’s a snake here, it’s me. I wrap both hands around the wheel and wince. “I just assumed he offered you the same deal he did with me, Martina. I never even considered...” I shake my head, glancing over. “I feel like such a shit.”
She brushes away my apology with a wave of her hand. “You’re not the shit. Jorge is the shit. He’s the one I’m mad at, not you.”
“Still. I’m really, really sorry.”
At my apology, her anger vanishes as quickly as it appeared. She turns to me, and her smile is big and real. “See? This is what friends do. We apologize. We forgive, and then we do better the next time. If you have a problem, you come to me and we’ll talk about it, okay?”
I nod. “Okay.”
“Great. So now it’s my turn.” She inhales, long and deep through her nose, then blows it out in one giant huff. “Okay. Fine. I don’t like the way you look at me sometimes.”
“How do I look at you?”
“Like you think I’m about to tackle you. Like you think I’m after however much is in that thing hanging at your waist. But I wouldn’t do that to you.” She points a finger at my face, wags it in the air between us. “You and I, we are friends, and I wouldn’t hurt a friend that way, Beth. I wouldn’t.”
She says it just like that—like it’s decided, like it’s a fact. She is to be trusted. We are to be friends. She holds me in her brown stare for a few more seconds, and I can’t deny her message tugs at something inside me. The thing is, I like Martina. Even though I haven’t believed much of what she’s told me so far, I think this might be the nugget of truth I was searching for. I was wrong about her dealings with Jorge. Maybe I was wrong to be suspicious of her, too.
“I believe you,” I say, and God help me, I mean it. I believe Martina when she says she wouldn’t take my money. I just pray it’s not a mistake.
The car behind me leans on the horn, and I press the gas and slide forward, smiling.
The truth is, it’s nice to have a friend.
Unexpected. But nice.
* * *
Martina tells me she’s twenty-eight as we work our way through the nave of the church later that morning, stacking Bibles and hymnals in the cubbies between the seats, dropping in bulletins for the evening service. Her family has either died or moved away, all except for a younger half brother, Carlos, a boy half her age about to start high school at Grady—which I gather is a different place than the hospital where she claims to have been born. The two share a father, a deadbeat drifter who last she heard was playing drums in dives up and down the West Coast. Carlos’s mother is kind of a bitch, but she doesn’t drink or forget to buy groceries, and in Martina’s mind, that more than makes up for any snarky remarks.
Martina talks and talks, a constant stream of words to plug the silence, and I don’t interrupt. As long as she’s the one talking, I don’t have to do anything but listen.
As we’re nearing the last row of a section, I step on something hard and lumpy. I reach down, pick up a baby’s pacifier. It’s grubby and cracked, the pink face missing its ring. “Should I throw this thing away?” I say, holding it up.
Martina takes it from my fingers, tosses it into an empty box. “We never throw away anything here, ever. We take it to lost and