The one thing I didn’t know was how much Steve was supposed to be paying in child support, but he paid something. For much of my childhood, my mom and I lived in a small white rental house with two bedrooms and a huge backyard we shared with the family who owned the main house. I was allowed to play on the trampoline if I was invited, but our landlord’s kids were older and hardly ever included me in their games.
One winter, the checks stopped. Mom took a second job, waking up at three thirty in the morning to deliver newspapers in the frigid dark, before she got me ready for school. Sometimes she put her head on the kitchen table and passed out cold while I ate my oatmeal.
“Why don’t you tell on Daddy?” I asked, shaking her arm.
“Who would I tell?”
There was a call-in part of the morning show, where viewers could dial in and talk to Steve or Stacey about a local issue, like zoning for a new mall or a scandal with the school board. I had watched so many times I knew the number by heart.
“715-777-1515,” I sang to her, making a phone with my fingers. “Hello? I’m a longtime resident of Marathon County and I’m calling because one of your employees is a very bad man.”
This made her laugh, but not as much as I hoped. She rubbed one eye with a knuckle.
“And I think you should fire him,” I continued.
“Don’t say that,” she said. “Then Steve really wouldn’t be able to help us.”
You forgive the guy who writes the check. You stay optimistic that it will all sort itself out, while you try to fill in the gaps created by his negligence.
She accepted our landlords’ invitation to attend a meeting at their house about a business opportunity to achieve financial independence by working only part time. All we had to do was brush our teeth with Glister toothpaste and start taking Nutrilite vitamins.
“You and me,” she said, “we’re dreamers.”
There were black vinyl organizers filled with cassette tapes of motivational speeches that she listened to in the car to and from work, to and from seminars. Show the plan, share the dream! I chanted it with her. Our positive thinking must have worked: the proof was in the visit from a couple in her upline, who drove to our house in their tan RV and I got to go inside for a tour. I thought everything would be miniature, like a dollhouse, but the bed inside was way bigger than my own. I marveled at the way a little table folded down from the interior wall. If this was the house they lived in when they were on the road, what did their real house look like?
Our monthly product order, the tapes, the tickets to seminars and conferences, gas to drive to meetings, the copies of Rich Dad, Poor Dad and How to Win Friends and Influence People—all went on her new credit cards.
“I’m fired up,” she told me.
So was I. That summer, I was allowed to go on the trampoline whenever I wanted.
I still didn’t know how much my mom lost, trying to go Diamond.
* * *
...
Our kitchen smelled like old bananas. There was a coffee-stained Rachel Maddow mug and a small tower of plates stacked in the sink. A take-out container speckled with rice had been left out for at least two days. Was the sheen of grime on the countertops representative of the slob I cohabited with or was it evidence that my beloved was too dedicated to his art to be disturbed by domestic chaos? According to the fridge magnet John got me for my birthday, I should “Keep Calm and Drink Wine.”
“I was just about to do those,” he called, when I had already started soaping the sponge. I ignored him and scrubbed at the brown ring around the faucet handle and the old scuzz under the dish-drying rack. I pictured Evan at home, lighting a fire by tapping an app, commanding Alexa to play Nina Simone, drinking something expensive in a glass with a single giant ice cube, examining the life choices that had brought him to this moment, the privileges that protected him from being held accountable sooner.
“You can take out the garbage,” I told John.
“Not tonight.”
“Yes tonight.”
“I’ll do it first thing tomorrow,” he said, planting a kiss on my head. I was trying to scrape some congealed egg off a plate with my thumbnail. It wasn’t even my egg. It was his egg. John poured me a glass of pinot grigio.
“Listen to this.” John held his phone in front of his face. “This woman on Facebook—her profile picture is an American eagle holding a gun. She posted this under an MSNBC clip: So what if Jared Kushner met with the Russian ambassador? Hillary didn’t win, libtards!”
“Do you want to get Thai tonight?” I said. “Or Indian.”
“So I commented: Reagan would be rolling over in his grave if he knew how many American conservatives were fans of Putin.”
“That’s what Obama said.”
“What?”
“What you just said. Obama said that.”
“Maybe,” John said, frowning. “Empanadas?”
“I’m sick of empanadas.”
“The fancy mac and cheese place?”
When my hands were dry, I found our most recent order and clicked Add to Cart, charged it to my credit card. John hadn’t said anything about the money he borrowed and I carried around his debt like my pet, stroking it when I wanted to remind myself how much he owed me.
On our first date, John showed me his business card. On one side, there was an outline of a ghost. On the other, the same ghost but with a silhouette of a man inside. I thought this was very clever, possibly because this was the first date I’d been on with someone important enough to have their own business card.
“How much does someone get for ghostwriting a celebrity’s book?” I asked him.
“Guess,” he said.
“A million dollars.”
His cheeks burned red and he shook his head.
“Two million dollars?” I hadn’t yet learned how to read his expressions.
“No, it’s usually a six-figure deal and I get a percentage of that. Some upfront, some later. But I’m, uh, in between projects right now.”
“Let me buy the next round,” I said and he didn’t argue.
John’s ex cheated on him for months and he never had a clue. Once she finally told him, he was so depressed he couldn’t work. He lived on unemployment and credit cards. I met him while I was working at my nonprofit, so we were broke equals. We went on cheap dates: take-out arepas, dark dive bars with pitchers of bad cold beer, midnight showings of classic movies where we smuggled in our own Raisinets.
We’d only been out a few times when he started telling everyone about me. The breakup with his ex had been so bad, like stage IV cancer, a life-threatening event you don’t recover from, and I was his miracle remission. I was his prize for surviving. Like a minor celebrity, I was beloved by people I hadn’t even met. When John read his friends’ emails and texts aloud to me, I flushed with happiness. One said, after seeing my picture, that we’re biologically drawn to people with big eyes, because it makes us want to take care of them. I thought I could take care of myself just fine thank you, but if my eyes made John choose me, then yes, I wanted to be chosen.