A knock at the glass door of the villa brings me back to the present. It’s Lena, and she’s dripping wet, holding a low ball of whiskey in her left hand and twirling her bikini bottoms around her right pointer finger. This woman is relentless, but I need to seriously contemplate what I’m going to do with this sudden new information I’ve been given from the other woman I’ve got holding on the line.
These are the times that I wish I was still close with Seven. I could tell him exactly what this Karma woman said, and he would tell me to hold off on making any rash decisions, and then we’d talk things through. But I can no longer depend on that type of brotherly counsel, so I choose the next best thing, because I usually come up with some of my best decisions when I’m balls deep in some pussy.
I motion with a hand gesture for Lena to open the sliding glass door and tell this mysterious Karma woman, “I’ll call you back.”
4
Karma
It’s day two since I left Ray.
Ruby and I are working another foreclosure clean-out in one of the most upscale neighborhoods in the city, so I’m bagging up kitchen cutlery and other utensils in a house that probably costs over a million dollars. It’s no wonder the house is in foreclosure, I think to myself. Who can afford to live in a house like this? What kind of job do you need to have to pay a mortgage on a freaking palace?
With earbuds in my ears, I pretend to be in a good mood as I do my work and bop around the kitchen listening to the same playlist I’ve had on my phone for over five years, but really, I’m totally distracted.
Now that Ray knows that I’ve left him, he’s been blowing up my phone all morning with calls that I send straight to voicemail (I’m afraid to even listen to them) after he sent that lone, toxic text message yesterday.
Ray: You’re a fucking cunt and you’re going to regret this.
My nerves are frazzled, and it doesn’t help matters that I haven’t heard anything back from Bronx Masterson since he hung up on me yesterday. It makes me wonder if my brother got it wrong, because this guy doesn’t seem interested in helping me out at all. Perhaps I should have led with the fact that I have some money saved to pay him.
Ruby startles me when she taps me on the shoulder. “Hey.”
I pull one of my earphones out and let it dangle from the white cord. “Hey.”
“Are you hungry?”
She’s eating what looks like a lemon poppyseed muffin, if I had to guess.
“What’s that?”
“Some kind of lemon cupcake thing.”
I thought so.
“I pass, Ruby. That thing is probably full of preservatives. Nobody cares about using good ingredients in their baked goods anymore.”
“I forgot you fancy yourself a baker extraordinaire. Well, you can skip my cupcake appetizer then, but how about some of those organic heat and eat meals from Whole Foods in the fridge? They look fresh. I checked the dates. I could pop one or two of them in the oven and we have a feast.”
“You’re breaking like eleven different company rules,” I say, as my stomach grumbles just thinking about how delicious the food would be. Minute Maids Cleaning employees aren’t allowed to eat anything we find in a client’s home. Technically, it’s stealing if we don’t have the owner’s permission and there’s also some sort of liability issue for the company.
“Did I mention that it’s organic? Would you rather us throw the food out and waste it?”
“If we applied that philosophy to all of these types of clean outs, then we should take whatever we want for ourselves, but that would be stealing.”
“Seriously, Karma? You’re more uptight than my wife gets when the neighborhood kids play hide and seek on our lawn. I’m talking about eating some bougie ass Chicken Parm’ not taking the family jewels.”
As if on cue, my stomach rumbles again with hunger, loud enough for Ruby to hear.
“See!” She points to my stomach as if it has a vote.
I just sigh.
“Let’s do it,” I comply, feeling slightly guilty that I’m eating this family’s last supper. “I didn’t have any breakfast.”
Ruby notices the light on my phone flash as another call silently comes through. I see the picture of Ray pop up and send it straight to voicemail again.
“It’s him?” she asks with concern.
