I want to leave my fiancé.
I don’t love him anymore.
I’m not saying these words lightly. I’m saying them after twenty-four hours of watching my eye slowly morph into the hue of a ripe eggplant… for the third time in our relationship.
Incredibly, it’s taken me one year, seven months, thirteen weeks, and five days to come to the conclusion that any normal woman would have arrived to by now.
Ray is not a good person.
And I don’t love him anymore.
I collapse to the cold tiles of our kitchen floor in tears, wondering how I’ve ended up here. Were there red flags that I didn’t see before the first time he did this to me? Is my asshole radar completely broken? If I had a close girlfriend who had my back, would this be my reality?
Maybe not, but I’ve never had any of those. All I have is my brother, Lev, and if he had any idea what’s been going on with me, he would’ve probably tried to kill Ray by now. Of course, that’s neither here nor there, because he doesn’t know about any of this, and I’d never tell him, especially because I can’t even find him. On top of everything else bad that’s happening in my life, my brother is missing.
A heavy knock at the front door startles me out of my frozen state. Before I crumpled to the floor like a used chewing gum wrapper, I’d been sitting in one spot staring at a bowl of chocolate cake for half of the night.
“Who is it?” I ask tentatively.
“It's me, open up.”
It’s Ruby, the woman I clean houses with. She is neither friend nor foe, she’s just Ruby. I don’t think the Minute Maids Cleaning Agency paired us together for any specific reason other than that they’d hope we’d work well together and we do. We both are responsible, good at what we do, and highly focused on making money. She has a house she’s trying to save from a bank foreclosure and I’m now saving for my own higher purpose — I need to find my brother even if I have to pay someone to do it.
I don't want to answer the door right now, because I'm afraid of what Ruby will say when she sees me (she’s highly opinionated), but when I glance at my phone and see that I have five missed calls from her, I know that I must. Ruby is a senior cleaner at the agency, and our supervisor Brenda usually contacts her when she has work for the two of us. We’ve probably been booked for a job today, which means that Ruby’s not going anywhere until I open this door. She’s all about her money and doesn’t have much patience for any of my drama.
“What's taking you so long?” she fusses on the other side of the door.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” I say through the door.
“You weren’t answering your phone, and since I was at the Walmart over in Cedarville Plaza, I thought I’d drop by. Open up.”
"Hey." I finally open the door and brace myself for her reaction.
“Oh, my fucking God!”
Ruby takes a look at my eye, then the state of my living room, and shakes her head in either disbelief or disappointment that I feel deep inside my gut. I’m embarrassed. She’s at least fifteen years older than me, very judgmental, and has a motherly aura about her even though she doesn’t have any kids. I can only imagine what she’s thinking right now.
“What did that pencil dick do to you?”
“It’s not what it looks like,” I explain as she walks around the perimeter of my small living room without my permission. My house is in disarray. There are piles of mail strewn about the room, sofa seat cushions that are askew, and some sort of dried spill splattered down one of the walls.
“Not what it looks like? It looks like your apartment is fucking trashed with a black eye to match.”
I don't say anything in response because there is no real defense of what happened in here. It looks really bad because it is.
Ruby walks back over to me and walks my body in front of the long mirror affixed to one of the walls in my hallway.
“Look at your eye.”
My head is turned away. I don’t want to look at it again.
“Lift your head and look,” she demands. “This shit between you and your boyfriend is escalating. I usually mind my own business when it comes to matters of the heart, but I’m telling you what someone should have told my Aunt Genevieve years ago. God rest her soul. You’ve got to get out before he kills you.”
“I know,” I say in a defeated tone. I think back to when Ray I first met. He seemed like a nice, normal, bus driver who liked to assemble collectible Lego sets as a hobby. While he was really sweet when we first got together, I think I’ve known for a long time that I made a huge mistake getting involved with him. I’ve just have never quite figured out how to leave.
Ruby pulls a bag of freezer-burnt peas out of my freezer, grabs my hand, and sits me down in the middle of the mess.
“It’s kind of late for peas,” I tell her. “I should have iced my eye last night.”
