Time Off for Good Behavior Read online

  I felt Walter’s hand on my arm. “Wanda?”

  I opened my eyes. “I’m sorry. Phantom music. I know the tune, but it always goes away before I can place it.”

  “Are you seeing anyone?” he asked. My heart did another ba-doo-boom-chaaa until I realized he was speaking of my mental health, not my sexual availability.

  “I’m not crazy.”

  “I never said you were.”

  I shrugged. Whatever. I picked up the check and waved it in the air. “How much do I owe you?”

  Walter shrugged, and I could see the tension ebb. “By my count, nothing. I didn’t do anything, I didn’t say anything. I’m just a messenger.”

  He stood up. His gray suit fell in perfect straight lines along his body, and I was picturing the form underneath it before I could stop myself.

  “I have to give you something,” I said quickly, waving the check again. “I mean, I’ve been in an office with Edgar Dowd before. The man’s certifiable. You deserve to be compensated.”

  He smiled. Hoo-wah.

  “I don’t need anything. I just wanted to give that to you.” He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed, the kind of awkward gesture a Pee Wee football coach gives to the runt he wouldn’t put on the field. “I have to go. Just thought you could use that. Thought it might give you a little breathing room. You know, while you look for a job.”

  Ouch. I could see a slight flinch when he realized he probably shouldn’t mention my employment, or lack thereof. The same way I shouldn’t have mentioned his wife. We were in a dead heat for Most Awkward Moments in a Single Conversation. I pasted on a smile. “Thank you.”

  He was gone a moment later, and I was standing in the middle of my living room, holding ten thousand dollars and having no idea which foot to step with first. Then the phone rang. I grabbed it off the counter, still staring out the open door where Walter had just been.

  “I’m calling about the ad.” The voice was male. Husky. Sounded like the kind of guy who puts up drywall.

  “Ad?” I was confused. This definitely wasn’t Laura, who had already called, confessed, and been forgiven. The case was closed.

  “Yeah, from the paper? Is this Wanda?”

  “Yes, this is Wanda, but...” Maybe Laura had been calling about the wrong ad. Or this guy was. Maybe everyone in Hastings was dyslexic. Maybe I shouldn’t have paid for two weeks. I cleared my throat and tried to put some meat into my tone.

  “Yeah, this is Wanda. Are you the one...?” I trailed off, distracted by some movement across the street that I thought for a moment might be Walter. I stepped closer to the door and saw it was Manny, my mailman.

  “Well, I don’t know, baby. Are you the one?” He was trying to sound seductive, but the chewing noises, followed by the distinct patooey of what I imagined to be a tobacco-laced loogie, kind of ruined the effect. I cringed.

  “Ewww,” I said, and hung up the phone. Thirty seconds later I was listening to a tinny ringing, waiting for Jennifer to pick up at the Hastings Daily Reporter.

  “Hi, this is Jennifer with the classifieds department at the Hastings Daily Reporter? I’m not here right now, but if you’d leave a message, I’d be glad to call you back?”

  I hung up and looked at the clock: 12:47. Catching another whiff of Lysol and Scotch, I tossed the phone on the counter and headed for the shower.

  Chapter Four

  “Forgive me, Father, but I’m not Catholic.” I blew my nose into the handful of tissues I had been swiping my face with since the crying jag hit. That was the danger of the shower: if your life sucked, you were most likely to take notice when you were naked and wet. Might be the reason why depressed people tended to go so long between showers.

  It all started with the damn Ivory soap. I haven’t bought Ivory in three years, because it was George’s brand and the smell tended to turn my stomach. “So why buy it?” you ask?

  Good question.

  My stupid but honest answer was that I bought it on an internal triple-dog-dare, a game of emotional Russian roulette in the personal hygiene aisle. I did it to prove to myself that I was not going to allow my choice of soap to be dictated by a shitty ex-husband.

  It made sense at the time.

  The package of Ivory sat in my bathroom while I showered with a dwindling sliver of Dove. A week of Albert was more than the sliver could handle, and so I opened the Ivory, took one whiff, and spent the next thirty minutes curled up in the tub in a fetal position, flooded with vivid memories of the worst years of my life.

  Those years started when George and I met in college. Well, I was in college, anyway, he was a bouncer at Pappy’s, the bar my friends and I used to frequent. He was ten years older than me, sexy and dangerous, a biker guy with a tenderness hidden deep inside, a tenderness only I could see. The reason I was the only one who could see it, of course, was that it existed only in my imagination, but that’s neither here nor there.

  Okay, maybe it’s a little there.

  George used to flirt with me at the door at Pappy’s, tease me about my fake ID, make jokes about how tight my ass was. Looking back, I find it mortifying that I was charmed by that. But a nineteen-year-old who memorized facts about Sarasota, Florida, just in case anyone questioned her fake ID was not someone with her finger on the pulse of reality.

  George had a motorcycle. He wore leather jackets, and he knew the cousin of the drummer from Whitesnake. He smoked and ate greasy food and drank until he passed out. He had long hair and a beard, and my parents were going to hate him.

  In other words, he was perfect. Exciting and dangerous for a start, but then once we got married, he would change and settle down and be an exemplary husband and father, and we would laugh about the old days and how rough around the edges he had been before love changed him.

  Yes, I really was that stupid.

  Even after he hit me the first time, I still had a Pygmalion-style future in mind. He proposed to me after he broke my arm, and I wept as I said, “Yes,” over and over again, just knowing that marriage would change him for good, and he would be the George I knew he could be, and we would spend forever lounging naked on the floor, smelling of Ivory soap and watching our dreams come true before our eyes.

  I was right about one thing: my parents did hate him. When I told them George and I were getting married—less than twenty-four hours after I promised over the hospital telephone lines that Id never see the bastard again—my mother stopped talking to me. My dad cut off most of our communication but occasionally still sent birthday gifts with cards that said things like, “Everyone has days for which the only cure is Scotch.” Turned out he knew much more about what my future held than I did.

  George had successfully accomplished step one in the Abusive Shit Heel Handbook: he separated me from my family. From there, it was a short ride to driving off all my friends. And then when I finally dumped the deadweight, I was alone in Hastings, Tennessee, where the smell of Ivory soap would turn me into a pathetic sobbing fetal mass in a sage-green bathtub.

  I managed to complete my shower and get dressed, but I couldn’t stop crying. I’d pull it together for a minute, then I’d remember my mother’s face when I first told her I was moving to Tennessee with George. I’d get a few solid calming breaths in, and then I’d remember how my father’s voice cracked when I called to tell him that George and I were getting married. Dad’s last words to me were, “Go ahead and marry that bastard if you want, but don’t expect us to watch you throw your life down the shitter.” Or words to that effect.

  I had thought about calling and telling them about the divorce, but it would have just led to painful silences and unanswered questions like, “If you love me so much, why did you abandon me to an abusive shit?” And who needed crap like that around Thanksgiving?

  I hobbled out of the shower and managed to get dressed, pausing whenever the crying became too overpowering. I tried to busy myself with housework, but there wasn’t much left to do. As time passed and I couldn’t stop cryin
g, I started to panic. What if I never stopped crying? What if I died of dehydration and became nothing more than an annotation in a bathroom reader, wedged between the guy who hiccuped himself to death and the chick who bungee jumped off an eighty-foot bridge with a ninety-five-foot bungee cord?

  I had to get out. I had to go somewhere. I had to talk to someone. But there was nowhere for me to go and no one for me to talk to. I could have called Walter, but the idea of being the object of his pity again only made the sobbing worse.

  So I went to St. Benedict’s and weaseled my way into the confessional.

  “You’re not Catholic?” The priest’s voice was cracked and warm. I couldn’t see much of his face through the grate between us, but he sounded old and wise. I hoped he’d live up to that impression.

  “No,” I said. My sobbing had quieted, but the tears were still flowing. “If you want me to leave...”

  “No,” he said. “That’s okay. Is anyone waiting out there?”

  “I didn’t see anyone else.”

  He released a soft sigh, sounding slightly disappointed. I briefly considered pulling a Debbie Manney and trying to convince him that the lack of penitents was because he was such a good priest and no one was sinning, but he sounded like the kind of guy who could tell horseshit when he heard it. Besides, it was my understanding that God frowned on blowing smoke at priests.

  “Would you like to tell me what’s bothering you?” he asked.

  “I’m alone.” My voice was quivering. I cleared my throat and tried to continue with a stronger tone. “I married a real bad guy a few years ago, and he drove my family and friends away.”

  There was a pause. Then, “No, he didn’t.”

  “Huh?” I wasn’t expecting to catch interference from the father.

  “He didn’t drive your family and friends away. You did.”

  I leaned closer to the grate. “Do I know you?”

  “No,” he said. His tone was strong—not accusatory, but not terribly tolerant, either. I got the feeling this wasn’t the kind of priest who’d be cutting me a whole lot of slack. “If you chose him, you chose him for a reason. On some level, you wanted to drive your family and friends away, and this guy was probably the most expedient route to that goal. If you want to get over this, you have to take responsibility for those choices.”

  I felt a flash of fury fly through my gut. “Oh, yeah? I wanted to be completely alone and have no one other than a hard-ass priest to talk to?”

  He chuckled. “In a nutshell.”

  I thunked my head on the back of the booth. Now I knew why no one was there. Wednesday was the Day of His Holy Hard-Ass. “Okay,” I said through clenched teeth. “Fine.”

  “Are you angry?” he asked.

  “Hell, yeah, I’m angry.”

  “Good,” he said. “We’re getting somewhere, then.”

  I mimicked him silently. Friggin’ priests.

  After a moment, his voice poked at me through the grate. “Can I tell you what’s bothering me?”

  This was an unexpected turn of events. I shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”

  “I sit here, day in and day out, and listen to people confess. Most of it is small-time stuff. ‘I lied about my weight, Father.’ ‘I had impure thoughts, Father.’ ‘I wished horrible things would happen to my ex, Father.’”

  I shot up. “Is that bad? Is that like a get-into-heaven deal breaker? Because I do that a lot.”

  He went on, ignoring me. “They have a tally of sins they check off. They come in here and read the list to me. I give them a few Hail Marys and I see them again the next week and it’s all the same stuff.”

  There was a pause. I leaned a little closer to the grate and spoke softly. “Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?”

  “A little, yes.” He sighed. “But most of the real stuff that people do, the things that really hurt them and the people they love, they don’t confess to, because they either don’t realize they’re doing it or they think it’s someone else’s fault.”

  I nodded and took a moment to process this before speaking again. “So what you’re saying is, George didn’t run my family off?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “So what you’re saying is, I’m completely alone in the world because I choose to be?”

  “In so many words, yes.”

  I watched as the tears splashed onto my hands, falling faster as my breathing went all choppy. My voice came out high-pitched and whiny. “This isn’t working the way I hoped it would, Father.”

  “Sometimes what we hope for isn’t what’s best for us.”

  I took a moment to gather myself as well as I could. “Okay. Well, I guess I’ll be going. Do I need to do anything, a Hail Mary or something?”

  “Do you know what a Hail Mary is?”

  “No.”

  I could hear a soft laugh come through the grate. “Then just go out there and do something meaningful to you.”

  I froze. “What did you say?”

  “I said you should do something that has meaning for you.”

  I half sniffled, half chuckled. “What, is it like National Do Something Meaningful Month or what?”

  Another laugh. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. It doesn’t sound like a bad idea, though.”

  I tucked my tissues in my pocket and rubbed my face with my hands. “Father, what if I can’t find anything meaningful to do?”

  “Then it will find you.”

  I nodded, having absolutely no idea what the hell he was talking about. Sure, it sounded like a good priestly answer, but I would have preferred specific instructions, like the kind you get with a bottle of shampoo. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. That I can work with.

  I thanked him for his time and pulled back the curtain. There was a woman kneeling in a pew. She crossed herself and stood up, heading toward the booth. I pulled a fresh package of travel-sized tissues out of my jacket pocket and tucked them into her hand.

  “You’re gonna be needing these,” I said, giving her a pat on the shoulder.

  ***

  “Hastings Daily Reporter, this is Jennifer. Can I interest you in a personals ad, four lines for four dollars for the first week?”

  “Oh, don’t give me that crap, Jennifer.” I was trying to pull a sweatshirt over my head with the phone tucked between my ear and my shoulder. I’ve had better ideas. The phone fell from my grip; when I picked it up, I heard Jennifer’s soft southern drawl. “I’m sorry? Who is this?”

  “It’s Wanda. Wanda Lane. I called about the ‘Do something meaningful’ ad. Remember?”

  “Oh. Yes.” Complete silence. I grabbed the crinkled newspaper off my bed and held it up to the phone. I knew she couldn’t see it, but I thought maybe hearing that distinctive newspaper crinkle would put the fear of God into her.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You wanna tell me what the hell this is?”

  Small pause. “I put the ad in for you? Just like you said? In two lines?”

  “You said you’d make the font smaller!” I stared at the ad in front of me, which was circled in furious red ink.

  “Well, turns out we couldn’t do that? So I just edited?”

  “Edited?” I shook the newspaper again. In the back of my mind, I knew I looked like a Thorazine candidate, but I went with it. I clutched the paper and read the ad. ‘“Who are you? Wanda wants to know,’ With my phone number! What the hell is that?”

  “You said four lines was too expensive? So I edited?”

  “It was too expensive, you bunch of crooks! But the original request was, ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ not ‘Who are you?’That’s not editing.”

  I tried to keep my voice even, but it was a task. When I returned from my visit with His Holy Hard-Ass, there were three messages on my machine. I had picked up a paper to continue my job search and listened to the messages as I grazed through the classifieds. I assumed the first message was a wrong number, just some guy rambling about his job. Then there was a woman who said my name
and asked if I was a reporter. My eyebrows furrowed and I shook my head, figuring it was time to make my number unlisted, and then I looked back to the classifieds and I saw it.

  Then I called Jennifer.

  “If you’re unhappy with the ad, Ms. Lane, you can write a letter to the paper and we can process a refund.”

  “Refund! How about you process all the goddamn phone calls I’ve been getting from people telling me who they are!”

  “Have people been calling you? Like who?”

  I pulled the phone away from my ear and gave it an “Are you nuts?” look before tossing it back on my shoulder and sputtering, “What?”

  “Who’s been calling you?”

  “Oh, for crying out—I don’t know. People. Strangers. Weirdos. Someone named Laura. It’s really not the point.”

  “Maybe it is?” she said. “Maybe this is your chance?”

  I was expecting either attitude or acquiescence. Jennifer’s conversational, coffee shop tone was throwing me off. “What?”

  “Your chance? To do something meaningful?”

  “That’s it!” I stomped through the apartment, slamming doors for effect. “Take the ad out of the paper. Now!”

  “Well, it’s too late to stop it for tomorrow, but I can have it out of the paper by... Tuesday?”

  I breathed through my clenched teeth. “Fine.”

  “Okay, then? Is there anything else I can help you with today? Are you trying to sell a pet, home furnishing, or car? Because the Hastings Daily Reporter has competitive rates—”

  I pushed the talk button so forcefully that my thumb hurt, and tossed the phone onto the sofa. I thought briefly about going to the store to get another bottle of Albert, then busted out crying.

  My life was a Lifetime movie. I was an out-of-work single woman naming bottles of Scotch, receiving death threats from an abusive ex-husband, and getting phone calls from strangers. They probably wouldn’t even be able to get Farrah Fawcett to play me. It’d probably be Kathy Najimy’s first dramatic role, and the critics would pan it, saying it’s unbelievable that anyone would be as stupid as that Wanda Lane, and then I’d have to move to Tijuana and change my name to Lupe.