“Gimme fifteen!” somebody yells from next door.
I laugh to myself while swiping a wet towel off the bathroom sink and walking back into Rich’s bedroom. I inhale the bleach floating off the towel before dropping it in the caddy I left next tohis bed with the other towels I cleaned his dustless baseboards with.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a baseboard up close. Back in New York, Maria cleaned our apartment three times a week because AJ said I never did it right even though I’ve been cleaning houses since I was six.
I swipe my burning eyes with my forearm and glance around Rich’s bedroom for something to clean to say “Hey, I’ve been in here,” since he supposedly pays Aunt Faye, but there isn’t much. There’s nothing for me to snap a picture of to show Aunt Faye later. There are no dirty thongs, random wigs, or used condoms. There’s nothing scandalous to gossip about, and if I didn’t find all the stuff that makes a house a home hiding under a pile of tarps in one of the empty bedrooms, I’d swear nobody lived here.
The outside of the house doesn’t match the inside yet—especially Rich’s bedroom. It has modern, crisp white crown molding, engineered hardwood, and every crevice has a distinct mannish smell. It’s even buried in the fibers of his black comforter I smoothed the wrinkles out of.
I like his scent even though I shouldn’t. He smells like Platinum Égoïste—like rosemary and oakmoss. I doubt he even knows what any of that is, though. There are no pictures of him or anybody hanging up around the house, so I make up his appearance in my head while I walk to his bed and grab the wife beater and Nike Tech fleece shorts he left lying out.
He’s probably huge.
I hold the wife beater up and tilt my head at the maroon splatters splayed across it until theoh yeahmoment rings in my head and I remember that he’s a boxer… well, a fighter if he’s training with Uncle Kenny. Uncle Kenny always says there’s a big difference.
“Fighters know survival. Boxers know skill. I teach fighters skill.”
In Uncle Kenny’s eyes, fighters are the real menaces to society. They’re the guys born with so much toxic masculinity that it bleeds out of their hearts and onto the streets.
“Imagine seeing a man bury his fist so deep into another man’s side that his spleen ruptures and he shits himself right there in front of you. That’s the type of stuff them fighters do. I saw it with my own eyes when Chico dragged me in the garage bays at Lucky’s back in the day. I ran out and threw up right outside the building.” He guffawed while we watched that anniversary special about the sting at Lucky’s. “That aggression runs in their blood.”
I shudder as my eyes drag across the blood-stained wife-beater.
Jesus, his upper bodyisbroad.
The wife-beater looks like it can swallow me.
I bet he has those working hands that Aunt Faye said she liked for her men to have before she met Uncle Kenny. I saw the tiny imperfections throughout the house, like a crooked tile in the kitchen backsplash and missing caulk where some of the baseboards meet, and Aunt Faye said he could install a new AC unit at the gym. Maybe he’s renovating the house himself.
“He’s probably got that 50 Cent mumble thing going on,” I snicker, remembering the pinched expression on Aunt Faye’s face this morning when she described how the doctor had wired Rich’s jaw shut to fix his fractured jaw after I asked her what happened to his mouth.
“Just men being men, you know?” She sighed and went right back to singing along to Mary J. Blige afterward.
I didn’t know, and I didn’t bother asking her to elaborate because it didn’t actually matter to me. What matters is that it’s my second day of freedom and I’m breaking every one of AJ’s rules. I’ve been outside twice to sweep another man’s porch sothe sunrays can brush my skin. I’ve been wandering around his house, and now I’m smelling his wife-beater.
I inhale so deeply that I can taste the rosemary and sweat. I don’t even remember putting the fabric up to my nose.
“Pick them cans up before Pup get home!” somebody yells from next door.
My hand jerks, and the wife-beater falls to the floor. I rush to pick it up and fold it into a neat square, then power-walk toward the empty laundry basket next to his dresser and drop it inside.
There isn’t any use in wasting his water to wash two pieces of clothing. Aunt Faye always taught me to let the laundry build a little—so that’s what I’ll do. I’ve never had anybody complain about two pieces of unwashed clothing.
I shrug and pull Yesenia’s old, cracked iPhone from my pocket to check the time. Paco stares back at me with rosy cheeks and a gummy grin that makes my chest ache a little. There’s a vague “almost done” text from Aunt Faye, and I kind of agree with Uncle Kenny for once. It does feel weird being dropped off at some strange man’s house, but I need to get used to the strangeness. I used to help Aunt Faye work all the time.
I slide the phone back into my pocket before walking back through Rich’s bare living room and into his kitchen. Somebody cranks up a speaker next door and the house’s walls shake from the bass. I guess they figure the rest of the street should be up by now.
Inside his pewter and white kitchen, I search for more “Hey, I’ve been here” tasks while bobbing my head along to the old-school mix they’re playing.
One of his cabinets sticks out like somebody didn’t push a dish back all the way, so I walk further into the kitchen and fling it open, coming face to face with a row of tacky, cheap plastic cups. The music outside gets louder, the neighbors holler aboutthose beer cans again, and I hum to myself while looking for the problematic dish.
They’re playing the song Aunt Faye plays when her and Uncle Kenny fight.
“Looks like another love TKO…” I sing to myself while snickering at the cups.
Every now and then I think there’s a woman putting up with Rich’s amateur boxing dreams and doing her best to make his little house cozy until I find things like plastic rainbow-colored Dollar Tree cups and a stuffed mason jar that dangles dangerously close to the cabinet’s edge.
“Hm.” I reach up and grab it, turning it over in my hands to study the big chunks of weed and money inside.
