“High school was a shit show.” His hand trails his neck, scratching at the back of his head. “We moved all over. We’d be at a big-box store—Walmart, Target, Kmart—and I’d pretend to slip on one of those waxy papers they put inside shoeboxes.” He motions a sliding gesture over the table, landing with the butt of his palm. “Then he’d threaten the managers with a lawsuit. A few weeks later, we’d get a check in the mail from some insurance company.”
“So after he scammed the stores in one area, you had to move on,” I say in understanding, remembering his words from our day on the connector, his despondent expression as he said:You can only run so many hustles in one place before you have to skip town.
He nods in confirmation.
“I’m so sorry, Eli.”
He leans back, clearly needing some space. His hair falls over his forehead in a way that gives me a glimpse of the teenage boy he used to be, scared and alone, but also resourceful and resilient. I feel a sudden visceral urge to protect us both from the world and all the shitty people in it, including our own parents.
“I got caught a few times,” he admits. “The store manager would always call some cop, or detective, or a child services officer to come deal with me.” He stares toward the door, where Augusto just walked out minutes ago. “My dad would always blame everything on me.”
“And they always believed him?” I add, more a statement than a question.
“Of the two of us, he definitely is the more talented con man.” Eli tries to give the words a sarcastic edge, but the truth behind them is too sad to be funny.
“Where is he now?” I ask, hoping his dad has disappeared for good.
“We hadn’t seen him in years, but back in March,” he says, the line of his jaw hardening, “he showed up, spewing some bullshit about making amends.” His eyes cloud over, their expression turning angry and resentful. “I wasn’t home, and Pearl let him in. He stole a checkbook, left straight for the bank. Cleaned out Pearl’s college fund.”
“What?” I ask in disbelief, leaning forward in my chair. “How could he do that?” Immediately, it dawns on me. “You have the same name.” I think back to that first meeting at the Happy Hooker, how prickly he became when I called him by his father’s name.
“I was about to lose my fucking mind.” He shakes his head, pulling at his hair, one leg wrestling under the table. “Pearl had been working her ass off to get into art school in Savannah. We’d been saving for years. And in an instant, it was all gone. Every last penny.”
We sit back in our chairs, Eli looking exhausted from all the awful memories.
“Is that why you were running hustles at Ginny’s?” I ask, knowing the answer.
He nods, his eyes cutting away uncomfortably, shame coloring his cheeks. He avoided his father’s fraudulent way of life for so long, and now his own father’s actions made it his only option.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” he tells me earnestly. “We pieced together some scholarships, but they wouldn’t cover everything. Student enrollment and housing fees were due.” He looks away, past the window to the highway. “I was desperate.”
“Did Pearl know?” I watch him sink into the chair, getting smaller under the weight of it all.
“No,” he says tightly. “And I’d like to keep it that way.” He meets my gaze expectantly. I nod. “You and Holly walking through the doors of the Happy Hooker”—he scoffs—“it was like a fucking miracle. I never thought it possible.”
I think back to the sapphire bracelet and that awful trip to the pawnshop, how sick I felt selling that piece of jewelry to pay off someone I believed to be an unscrupulous scammer. How wrong Iwas. Little did I know that my crime just might fix one man’s life, and save a young woman’s future, in some crazy karmic justice payback that I never could have imagined.
And maybe, just maybe, meeting Eli was—for me—a lucky twist of karma, too.
CHAPTER 26Holly
We’re sitting around a conference table, forty-five minutes into an hour-long, end-of-day event staffing meeting, and Irma’s in full-on astrology guru mode. She’s already informed us, in excruciating detail, about Pluto’s long transit through Sagittarius and next Thursday’s Mercury cazimi. It’s time for me to get this meeting back on track.
“Okay, folks,” I announce. “Let’s move on to the Midnight Society’s Costume Ball.”
A collective groan fills the small conference room, and Justine dramatically slouches onto the table, her forehead resting in her hands. “God, I hate this event,” she says.
I pull up a checklist on my tablet and prepare to move us through the details of the Midnight Society Costume Ball, which will kick off the summer season.
The ball appears, on the page, to be more or less the same as an evening wedding reception, a debutante ball, or a black-tie charity fundraiser. But, in practice, there is something radically different about this event. Members and their dates see dressing in costume as a chance to cut loose, to “live a little.” For staff, this “good time” brings out a side of these high-society types that we’d rather not witness, and it generally translates into a cluster of ugly messes, lawsuit-worthy slip-and-falls, broken stemware, and trashed powder rooms. In other words, our worst nightmare.
“I’m hiring an extra cater waiter, and I’ll take floor duty,” I announce, trying to sound nonchalant. If Luisa, Eli, and I want our plan to go off without a hitch, I’ll need to be right in themiddle of things. And we’ve decided the best way for Luisa to show up incognito is as a member of the waitstaff.
“Wait,” Justine cuts in. “You’re just gonna volunteer for the most hellish task on the most hellish night of the year? Without even putting up a fight?”
“You stayed on floor ’til the bitter end last year,” I say, even though the real reason is that I want to be able to keep an eye on Eli and help out if I need to. “So it’s probably my turn.”
“And oh how bitter it was,” she spits. “Eighty-pound grown-ass women should know better than to drink a gallon of Long Island iced tea.”
