Contract Wife

The number was $180,000. I read it three times as I waited for it to get smaller. Numbers did that sometimes in my head, when I was tired enough. Rent shrank, the bills shrank, but this one just sat on the paper, black, fat and very sure of itself. “Ms. Hale?” The woman across the desk folded her hands. She had a kind face and a work badge with a cartoon bear on it. I hated her a little for the bear. “The surgery team needs the deposit by the end of the month,” she said gently. “If we don’t have it, Eli’s spot goes to the next patient.” “He’s seventeen,” I said. “He’s not a spot.” “I know, I’m really sorry.” She looked like she meant it, and that was even the worst part. “The insurance company called it a pre-existing condition. They denied the claim. I can give you the number for our charity fund, but the wait is about eight months.” “He doesn’t have eight months.” Nobody said anything. The doctors had said he had three months, maybe four, only if he rested and nothing went wrong. I stood up, my knees felt like wet paper, and told her “thank you,” because my mother had taught me to say it even when life was spitting on my shoes, and I walked out into the hallway. The lights hummed, somewhere a machine beeped, and another machine beeped back, as if they were talking about someone. Through the window of Room 214, I saw my little brother. Eli sat propped against two flat pillows with a sketchbook on his knees. His face had grown sharp this year, all cheekbones and shadow, his lips had a faint blue edge that he thought I wouldn't notice. The thing is I noticed, I noticed everything about him. It was the only job I had never been late for. He looked up, as he saw me, he smiled like the sun had walked in behind me. I smiled back so hard that my face hurt. “Hey, trouble,” I said, pushing the door open. “What are you drawing?” “You.” He turned the book around. It showed a girl in an apron, carrying a tray, with a cape flying out behind her. “Waitress Naomi, defender of the rich. See? I gave you a cape.” “It’s very accurate.” The smile slipped a little. “What did the lady say?” “That we’re working on it.” Eli studied me for a long moment. He had our mother’s eyes, dark,careful and too old for his face. “You’re a terrible liar, Nay.” “I’m a great liar.” “You blink twice, every time you lie.” I laughed, and the laugh cracked in the middle. The wall above his bed was covered in paper and tape, towers, and a library with a glass roof, a bridge that bent as if it were breathing. Eli had never been on a plane, but he had designed a whole airport. “For when I’m famous,” he always liked to say.” He always said when, he never said if and I loved him for that more than I could say out loud. I sat on the edge of his bed, while he leaned his head on my shoulder, the way he used to when he was six and thunder rattled the windows of our first apartment. He was so light, when had he gotten so light? “Whatever it costs,” he said softly, “ please don’t do something stupid for me.” I pressed my mouth to his hair so he couldn’t see my face. “Define stupid,” I whispered. Later that same day, by nine o’clock that night, I was carrying a tray of champagne through a room that smelled like lilies and money. I hated both. Lilies had been the flowers at my mother’s funeral. Six years later, one whiff still made my throat close. I had already worked a morning shift at the laundromat, and my hands were cracked from bleach. I had even covered the worst cuts with tape the color of skin. My borrowed shoes were half a size too small for me. Every step felt like walking on nails, it hurt so bad. The Kane Foundation Gala was the biggest night of the year for the catering company that paid me. It was three hundred guests and five thousand dollars a plate. And every one of them looked straight through me, as if I were made of glass. Tonight I might make a hundred and forty dollars in tips, I had done the math in my head, the way other people said prayers. A hundred and forty dollars per night, and about twelve hundred and eighty-six nights to reach $180,000. Eli had ninety days. A senator laughed at his own joke, and a woman in green silk complained that her yacht felt “cramped.” Two men in matching tuxedos talked about buying a company with eleven thousand workers the same way I might talk about buying a toaster. I thought about all the money inside that one sentence, imagining how one tiny piece of it could keep my brother alive, and not one person in this room would ever know my name. “Hale.” Dolores, my supervisor, grabbed me by my elbow. “Table one. Mr. Kane’s party, don’t spill anything and don’t stare, don’t even talk. Got it?” “Who’s Mr. Kane?” I asked. She looked at me as if I had asked who the moon was. Seeing my confused face, she answered “Adrian Kane….Kane Global, he is the reason this room exists, he's at table one, all you have to do is smile like you mean it.” I smiled like I meant it. Table one sat in the middle of the ballroom, under a chandelier the size of a car. There were seven people seated there on that table, six of them were laughing. The seventh person was not not laughing, he just sat at the head of the table, turning a plain black pen over and over in his fingers, like a man who needed his hands to have a job. A glass of whiskey stood beside him, full. He was in a black suit, and black tie, his dark hair was pushed back from a face that looked as if nobody had ever told it no. He looked bored of every conversation it seemed the rest of the people at the table were having. He glanced up as I came closer, and for one second I forgot I was holding a tray. His eyes were gray, more like storm gray, cold, bold and still, they landed on me like a hand on a doorknob. “Champagne, sir?” I managed. “No.” It wasn’t rude, It was simply final. The man beside him had silver hair and a smile that showed too many teeth. He took a glass and winked at me. “Don’t mind my nephew, sweetheart. He hasn’t enjoyed himself since the nineties.” “Victor,” said the man with the gray eyes. He didn’t look away from me. He only said the name. The older man’s smile went stiff,as I lowered my tray and turned to leave, a woman’s heel caught the edge of my shoe. It definitely was not an accident, I would be sure of that later, as a flash of red silk, a perfectly manicured hand, and a small “oops” that sounded far too pleased with itself. Then the tray tipped, and twelve glasses of champagne flew through the air in one bright, terrible arc, most of it landed on Adrian Kane. The silence that followed had so much weight. Three hundred of the richest people in the city turned to look. I heard somebody gasp, across the room, Dolores made a sound like a dying kettle so much that I could hear from afar. I stood frozen to the ground. Champagne dripped from his collar and ran down the sharp line of his jaw. “Oh my goodness,” said the woman in red, sweet as syrup. “Adrian, darling, I’m so sorry. The staff these days are so clumsy.” “She tripped me,” I said. The words were out before I could think to stop myself. I could feel every head in the room turn to me at that moment. “I’m sorry?” The woman in red kept smiling, but the smile was wearing thin. “You put your foot out.” My heart was pounding, but my voice stayed steady. I had learned a very long time ago that if you shook, they ate you alive. “I won’t apologize for something you did.” Across the room, I saw Dolores had stopped breathing. The woman in red laughed, a sharp and glassy sound. “Do you know who I am?” “No I don't,” I said. “Do you know who I am?” It was an absolutely ridiculous thing to say, I badly wanted to crawl under the table. But Adrian Kane, soaked and silent, only tilted his head. Slowly. Like a man looking at something he had not expected to find in such a place. Then, strangely, the corner of his mouth moved. It wasn’t a smile, It was the memory of one. “Celeste,” he said quietly, still looking at me. “Sit down.” The woman in red blinked. “Adrian—” “Sit. Down.” She sat. Adrian stood up and picked up a napkin. He wiped his jaw. Champagne still dripped from his cuff. Three hundred people watched him, it was as if the whole room had stopped breathing. “What’s your name?” he asked me. My stomach dropped. I knew it all too well, that this was where I lost the job, where Dolores took my badge. Where I lost the money I needed for rent, and then the money I needed for Eli, and then everything. “Naomi Hale,” I said. “Naomi Hale.” He said it slowly, as if testing its weight. “Come with me.”