She’s planning to use the money Derek gave her to put toward her credit cards and get current on bills. Once her Visa clears, she’ll make the payment. It could be worse. It’s been worse.
She could text him now, she supposes. Three days of no communication is a long time, and any normal human being would check in. The uncertainty is getting to her, so she sends Derek the most benign text she can think of. One word.
Hey.
She waits. Nothing. She slips her phone back into her pocket with a heavy sigh.
The table reeks of bleach, but at least it’s finally clean. How do parents do this? The mother of the little girl who threw up felt terrible about the mess, but she was more than happy to leave the cleaning to Kenzie. At least she’s getting paid to do it. What’s the upside if you’re the parent? Cats are so much better than kids—they’re self-cleaning right out of the gate.
“You know what it’s like having a child?” her mother once said to her, when Kenzie was eight. She’d asked to sleep over at her best friend Becca’s house. “It’s like your heart walking out the door on two legs, vulnerable and unprotected. It’s scary as hell.”
Yeah, no thanks. The world is hard enough without bringing another tiny, needy human into it.
She hasn’t thought of Becca in years. Kenzie can count on one hand the number of close female friends she’s had in her lifetime. Becca in grade school. Janelle in high school. And Isabel, her college roommate during undergrad.
She often thinks about Isabel. They met during frosh week, when Izzy walked into their dorm room with a suitcase that Kenzie later learned was half full of makeup and hair products. Izzy had gotten into college on a dance scholarship, and her only goal in life was to marry a rich man.
“It’s not like I don’t believe in myself,” Izzy had said matter-of-factly over pizza later that night. Her new roommate took a huge bite, which she’d vomit up later, Kenzie would soon discover. “My dream is to dance professionally. But I could break my ankle tomorrow. And then what? I have no other skills. That’s why I’ve got David. He’s my backup plan.”
They bonded over older men. Izzy’s boyfriend was a forty-three-year-old surgeon, and Kenzie was dating Sean, a thirty-nine-year-old real estate agent she’d met in yoga class. Unlike David, though, Sean was married.
“Yeah, I’d never go there with a married guy,” Izzy said, her perfect nose wrinkling in distaste. “But, whatever, girl. You do you.”
After freshman year, Kenzie and Izzy moved out of the dorm and into a tiny apartment together off campus. Kenzie was still dating Sean, but his wife had threatened to take the kids and leave, and there was tension at home. She could sense he was losing interest.
Izzy had moved on to a new older man, Rick, who loved to travel. In between her dance classes, he took her to Mexico, Barbados, Paris, and they even did a Mediterranean cruise, which Izzy said was boring because the median age of the ship’s passengers was “eleventy billion years old.”
“I’ll never do Holland America again,” Izzy declared when she got home. “Everybody was in bed by nine. What did I miss? How’s Sean?”
“I’m pretty sure he ended it,” Kenzie said, morose. “At dinner the other night, he said he needed some space, that he needed to focus on his kids. He actually gave me money. It felt like … severance pay.”
“How much money?”
“A thousand.” Kenzie wasn’t sure how to feel about it. “He pulled out a wad of cash, paid the check, then handed me the rest.”
“And you said…”
“‘Thanks.’”
“Girl, have I taught you nothing?” Izzy rolled her eyes. “You don’t take the first offer. It’s a negotiation. He wants you gone, he’s gotta pay to get you gone. A thousand … shit. David used to give me that every month, just because.”
“What should I have done?”
“You should have stroked his ego, played his heartstrings a little, appealed to his manly protector side,” Izzy said. “Said something like, ‘Oh, wow, I didn’t see this coming.’” Her voice went up an octave and softened, her face an exaggerated impersonation of someone who was upset. “‘I don’t want to lose you. This is real for me, and I’m not ready to let you go.’”
Kenzie burst out laughing. “Dude, come on. There’s no way I could have said that with a straight face.”