The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,32
Make it seem like there’s a man around….” Her mother made it sound like Santa Fe robbers called first before stopping by. The next message was a hang-up.
Lucy turned the television on. It was almost one A.M. It had been a hard, long night at work. A copy-desk editor decided that he hated the lead of the Melissa Baca story for no particular reason—”it just sounds funny” was his only excuse. Lucy had to track down Tommy Martinez, and the two of them tried to rewrite the lead. In the end, the copy editor decided that the original lead was better. Sometimes, Lucy hated copy editors.
Lucy kicked off her shoes and changed into her sweats. She flipped channels without really noticing. The vacuum was calling her name. Her carpet was so dirty it crunched. But she was sure that the neighbors wouldn’t appreciate the noise at this time of night. Her apartment was the typical Santa Fe layout—kiva fireplace, rough-hewn vigas lining the ceiling.
Lucy was used to living in rented houses. None of the commitment of buying a house. You could just pack up and leave when you wanted. Lucy had gotten really good at getting out of long leases. After Lucy’s dad left them when she was eight, she and her mom and her brothers had moved to L.A., then to Atlanta, and finally to Florida. They settled in Tampa but still moved from house to house for years, depending on where her mom was working as a nurse. Lucy always kept half of her stuff in boxes to avoid the hassle of unpacking and repacking all the time. When she moved to Santa Fe, Del persuaded her to unpack all the boxes. They bought a bottle of wine, ate pizza, and burned the empty boxes in the fireplace. A symbol of commitment, he called it. Or had she called it that?
After Del moved out with all his stuff, she had to figure out how to eat using only spoons since she didn’t own any forks. She also had no dresser, so she just piled her clothes on the floor. It was when Del came over one day two months later and said, “By the way, the coffeemaker is mine,” that she finally decided that it was time to get some new stuff. She took a trip to Kmart and picked up forks, a coffeemaker, and a weird picture of a horse, which she hung in the bathroom. It was definitely bathroom art.
She liked to think of her decorating style as eclectic, but interior designers would probably have called it mishmash. The multicolored wooden fish from the Bahamas clashed with the Georgia O’Keeffe print on the wall next to it. Her beige furniture had been bought as a group from Goodwill for a hundred dollars.
In her bedroom were five chairs that used to match a wooden table long since tossed out. The chairs were pushed up against the wall, making her bedroom look like a waiting room. She sighed. That image was accurate. Men waiting to get into her bed, followed quickly by her waiting for them to get out.
In the corner of the living room was the chest, painted yellow and red, she’d gotten with Del more than four years ago. She had been a cops reporter and he had been a photographer, both just starting out at an Orlando paper. They had graduated from the University of Florida but somehow never met. They didn’t have a first date. They went to her house after a work party and he never left. Within a week they had bought the painted chest together; it replaced her orange crates as their new coffee table.
The chest was awful, really. Gaudy without having any character. Del loved it, she hated it. When they moved to Santa Fe last year, they sold all their furniture, except the chest.
He was supposed to come by a half-dozen times in the past few months to get it, but never did. It was always, “I’ll get it when I move to a bigger place.”
It was now pushed into a corner and covered with a lace cloth, only a tiny part of the red-and-yellow paint visible. She put pictures of her mom and her brothers on it to chase away the Del demons. She had no pictures of her father left. Those had gone into the trash years ago. She wondered if he was still living in New York. Her mother refused to say that Dad had abandoned