She squeezed fresh orange juice, a thing I’d seen done only on TV or in movies. I knew that I didn’t buy oranges, that I had maybe never bought them in my entire adult life. Why buy oranges, ever, when they grew everywhere for free?
“Where did these come from?” I asked, sipping it slow, letting the juice cool my throat. I was hopeful for some vodka to mix up a screwdriver, but I knew there wasn’t any more of that in the cupboard. We’d finished the bottle together.
“Picked them from your yard.”
“I don’t have a yard.”
“You know what I mean. Outside.”
The apartment complex had a dingy central courtyard that boasted a shriveled acacia and what I’d thought was a stunted lemon tree. The peels in the garbage can were greeny yellow and small. I wondered how she’d even known they were good.
“Why don’t we have this on the balcony?”
I thought about what it would take to get the plates and cups outside; the glass top was filthy and so were all the seats. It had rained on and off through the night, and frogs liked to hide underneath the chairs, sometimes reaching out a small hand to tap stickily at your legs. It made me scream, no matter how many times it happened. I didn’t want Lucinda seeing me like that, ever. Goofy and afraid of a tiny amphibian, like I didn’t slice open animals for a living.
“It won’t kill you,” she said, and I nodded, already feeling squirmy. I followed her through the sliding glass door and breathed in the humidity. She held both our plates, leaving me just my coffee to hold while I looked around sheepishly, scared a frog might pop out.
My balcony overlooked the parking lot and some scraggly palm trees that waved over the adjacent rooftops. Outside normally smelled like other people’s food, pungent aromas of meats and spices steaming all day in Crock-Pots. I kept all my windows firmly shut in an attempt to keep out everyone else’s business. But that early, with the wind blowing heavy with unshed rain, it smelled more like the earth turned up next to the water: the heavy odor of crushed plants, mud teeming with life.
Lucinda’s hair caught the sun and glinted shades of red. Brynn’s hair always caught blonde, sometimes amber. She’d loved the sun, but hated getting up early. Brynn always ate breakfast after 2:00 PM. The week before she left, I made her Belgian waffles on an iron I’d bought at a garage sale. She seemed so happy, ripping the waffles apart with her fingers and dipping the mess into whipped cream. We fed each other pieces and took a nap together, drifting off in the afternoon sun. She leaned into my ear and told me she loved me more than anything. How can a person seem that happy and leave you a week later?
“This is nice, right?”
“Yeah,” I replied, sipping my coffee. No frogs in sight. “It’s nice.”
We ate our eggs in silence, dipping crusts into the drippy yellow yolk, watching cars slide past on the street. It was relaxing, the kind of lazy morning I’d watched my parents share growing up. Lucinda handed me the paper and I opened it while she sipped her juice, wondering if we were gonna do the crossword or some other weird, coupley thing. It felt strangely normal, a domestic scene I’d only ever thought about when it came to other people. I took the rest of the eggs off her plate, she snaked my last bite of toast. I knew I could ask Lucinda for a crumb of affection, the barest bit, and she’d stay over the rest of the day. Did she have someone else she went home to when she left me? I didn’t know, but it seemed likely. The stocky woman I’d seen coming and going from the art gallery talked with Lucinda the way I wanted to; with a hand on her arm, thumb stroking the crease of an elbow. Lucinda was the kind of woman who would make someone’s life easier. If I wanted, I could ask her to stay and maybe she’d do it for a while. Instead, I sat silently while she waited for me to ask. When we were done, she gathered up the breakfast dishes and carried them inside. The shower turned on and I went to get dressed, pulling on a pair of holey old jeans that were coming apart at the seat.
Once Lucinda came out from the shower, she was inaccessible again. She allowed me to kiss her cheek goodbye, but wouldn’t give me her mouth. I watched her walk out, taking all the good of the morning with her, and wished the room would swallow me.
Because he’d lost his license and didn’t have ready access to a car, Bastien needed rides to work. I picked him up from my mother’s house as soon as Lucinda left, and the two of us got coffee at the gas station down the street from the shop. It tasted burnt and was always full of grounds, but we could refill our giant foam cups all day long. Chugging from our bottomless supply of tarry black acid, we stood side by side in the back, working over the pelts and mounts. Sometimes he’d do the scraping, sometimes I would, but we took turns with the most monotonous tasks: stitching work through the legs, boiling flesh from skeletons until our hands sang with blisters.
I preferred the tedious work. It got me out of my head. Bastien didn’t seem to mind it either. He took every task I gave him in stride, even petrifying hamsters. Once I let him work on the pieces with me, we got into a good groove. It was comfortable now, most of the time. He’d learned my routines. How to be quiet. Minimal talk, just another warm body. He studied reference material for the various animals and how to utilize the death masks to find the best angle for the neck and ears. He kept his own scrapbook with tabbed indicators for different species he’d worked on: rabbits, squirrels, foxes, deer.
Being alone too long, staring into the dead eyes of an animal, had a way of making you feel you were nothing but a sack of meat. Working with Bastien reminded me a little of being with my dad, who’d known exactly when I needed a specific tool or a cut of thread. Like my father, Bastien had a natural way with bodies; knew what to do with their legs and how to pose their necks so they didn’t look stiff. He turned out deer capes faster than Milo ever had, and sometimes gave me a run for my money. These parallels to the past gave me vertigo: I was my father, Bastien was me, and those dead animals—always the same empty faces—forever perched on the table between us.
“Are you going out early?” he asked, finishing up the last pelt of the day. We’d been working for hours, hunched over a stack of deer mounts. Sweat plastered his hair to his neck, dripping a damp line into his shirt collar.
I took a sniff of my armpit and winced. Sour. “I’m meeting a friend for drinks.”
He scrubbed his face with a clean rag and tossed it in the direction of the sink. “Okay. Guess I can close up.” Bastien didn’t ask me about my personal life and I didn’t ask him anything either. The feeling—that neither of us needed any additional baggage in our lives—was completely mutual.
“Call your dad.”
“Right. Guess I’ll be here for a while.” Milo wouldn’t be off work himself for another few hours. If he’d even gone in; it was hard to know where he was or what he was doing. It was just as likely that he was home sleeping. He hardly ever answered his phone. Most of the time he didn’t even have the thing turned on, just kept it tossed in the back of his truck, a lifeless brick.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” I said, grabbing a spare shirt from the cabinet near the door. I pulled the dirty one over my head and Bastien turned around to give me privacy, fiddling with some of the tools he’d already cleaned. “Good work today.”