The Ledger

Chapter 1: The Banquet Shift 1 The catering company paid eighteen an hour and let you keep the tips if the host was in a giving mood, so I worked the nights I wasn't at the studio. That's how I ended up in the north hall of the museum on a Thursday in February, in a black vest and a bow tie I'd tied twice, carrying a tray. Twelve hundred dollars a plate. I looked it up in the staff room before the doors opened. I was good at it by then. Keep the tray level, keep moving, don't be the guy standing still with a full tray. A man in a tuxedo took two glasses off me without looking up, the way you'd take a napkin. On a normal night that's nothing. Around ten I came around the end of the bar with a fresh load, and three people were standing in front of me, talking the way people talk at their fourth drink. "That's Miss Hale." Miss Hale. I knew the name the way you know your landlord's name. Hale Properties. Towers on the river, garages, one building downtown that everybody hated. You saw the sign on the fence and never thought about it again. Hale is a common name in this city, and I'd never had a reason to take it any further than that. I stopped walking. The tray didn't move. Forty feet away, in the middle of a circle of people who all wanted something from her, was Vivian. I'd never seen her like that. Not once, not in three years. Hair up, a glass in her hand she wasn't drinking, men in their sixties standing too close and laughing at whatever she said. She was the most comfortable person in that room, and it wasn't the dress doing it. The woman nearest me said something about the ring, so I looked. Yellow diamond, throwing light from where I stood, and she said the number out loud to her friend. Eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I did the arithmetic anyway. It came out in years, more years than I had in me. "She'll marry one of her own," the other one said. "They always do." She never looked my way, which meant nothing. There were two hundred people in that room. I turned around and went back through the service door, and there were two hours left on the shift: glasses, both bars, the linens, crates out to the loading dock at midnight. I turned in the vest, got my coat out of the staff closet, and walked to the train with my collar up. 2 The light was on in our window. Second floor of a three-flat. She'd beaten me home. She'd showered and changed and she was in the desk chair with her legs folded up under her in a pair of cotton pajamas she'd had for years, the print gone at the knees. She looked up and gave me a small smile. "You're back. There's fruit on the table." She'd cut it up and put a fork in it. I didn't take my coat off. "How much was the dress?" I said. "And does it bother you, coming down here every night?" She looked at me for a long second. Then she closed the laptop, without hurrying, and said, "So you saw." "I was on the other side of the room with a tray," I said. "People waited their turn to talk to you." "Was it fun?" I said. "Three years of playing broke. Was I the NPC?" She shrugged. "Now you know. I'm not done playing." "I am," I said. I walked to the door and opened it. "All the cheap stuff I bought you," I said. "Get out." She frowned. Not hurt. Inconvenienced. "You mean it?" "I mean it. Out." 3 She got up and went into the bedroom. I heard the closet doors. I found a box in the hall closet and started in the bathroom. Her shampoo, the conditioner, the toothbrush, the hair tie she left on the sink. The mug she used, the one with the chip in the rim. Four paperbacks off the shelf with the bookmarks still in them. Three years, and I could have found any of it in the dark. I met her at a reception my studio threw downtown, three years ago in October. She was at the bar and a drunk wouldn't leave her alone, and she was being polite about it, which only makes them stay longer. So I walked up like I knew her and said something about the parking and stood there until he got bored and left. She took me to dinner the next week to say thank you. She picked the place. She paid, and I let her. It took me two weeks to stop thinking about that. She told me she worked at a consulting firm downtown. Junior analyst, development research. Long hours. I believed the long hours, because she came home with them. We took the apartment because it was ten minutes from her office. The rent was ugly and I couldn't have carried it alone, and I told her it was worth it anyway. I worked the studio job and I picked up the catering shifts, and everything extra went into a savings account. Three years of that and the number was thirty thousand five hundred dollars. Enough for a down payment on something small, with some left over to fix it up. I took that Thursday's shift for the fix-it-up part. The account had both our names on it and her card on file, because she'd asked the banker for that herself the day we opened it. Six months in, I spent a month's pay on a bag for her. She said she loved it and she carried it once, and when I asked her why, she said it was too nice to wear out. It was a good answer. I was grateful to her for saying it. Early on she told me her own bags were knockoffs. They weren't. I had no way to know the difference, so I let it go. When I talked about the house, about the two of us in it, she'd smile and let me finish. I thought she was shy. I'm from Indiana. My mother's still out there in the town I grew up in, and every few months she asks me when I'm coming home, and I always said when the money was right. Then the bedroom door opened. She came out in a suit. Dark, tailored, not a wrinkle in it, and a bag on her shoulder that cost more than everything in that apartment, deposit included. That was her. The pajamas had been the costume, for three years. She stopped by the door where I was standing. "You'll regret this," she said. She said it without heat. "Sooner or later you'll come to me for something." "Get out!" I don't yell. That one came out of my chest and it hurt. She looked at me. Then she went down the stairs, and I stood in the open door and listened to it — her shoes on the wood, the door at the bottom, the street. Then nothing. I finished the box. Her things off the shelf, out of the bathroom, out of the closet, the pajamas off the bedroom floor, a sweater that had been on the back of the chair since November. I taped it shut. I got a second box. When it was done I had two boxes and a trash bag, and I had nowhere in that apartment to put any of her things, and I decided I'd carry them down to the alley in the morning. I texted the leasing agent a little after one. One bedroom, this month, I don't care where. I read it twice and sent it. I lay down in a bed that smelled like her shampoo and listened to the train go through every fifteen minutes the way it had since we moved in, and I counted them until it got light. Author’s Note He doesn't yell — except once, and it comes out of his chest and hurts. That's the part I keep coming back to in this chapter: a guy who spent three years saving thirty thousand dollars for a down payment, standing in a room where a ring costs eight hundred and fifty thousand, doing the arithmetic anyway. He could have asked one question. He chose the door instead. I don't know if I'd have that much pride in me. Would you have asked her why, or just told her to go? If you'd like to get ahead of the story, you can keep reading on my p*****n: https://www.patreon.com/c/TranKhang