A Better Goodbye Read online

  Sierra never noticed when Nick eased toward the guest bedroom. He stayed there until he was sure both girls were gone without a goodbye. His gut told him Ling wouldn’t be back. It happened all the time, some girls crying, some pissed off, some just screwed up, but he still wasn’t right with it.

  He parked on the freeway side of Beloit, where he could always find a space next to the rusting wire fence. Maybe the people who left the spaces empty were afraid the branches that fell off the eucalyptus trees would hit their cars. It was the kind of thing Nick didn’t worry about. His pickup was so dinged up that a few more dents wouldn’t hurt it.

  As he started toward his apartment, he saw two of the Mexicans from next door trying to lift something large and ungainly into the back of their rattletrap truck. It looked like a contraption for aerating lawns; he’d driven one the summer after he dropped out of high school, working on a golf course and getting the roughest ride he’d ever had. The damned thing felt like it weighed a ton back then, and it didn’t appear to have gotten any lighter. The Mexicans, just skinny kids really, didn’t have a prayer in hell of getting it up where they wanted it to go.

  Nick thought of the kids’ two bosses already inside kicking back with cold cerveza and walked over to see if he could help. “You need a couple boards,” he told the kids. “Then you can run that thing up in there easy.”

  They looked at him, uncomprehending, and dropped the machine, laughing self-consciously when its handle banged into the grill of the dirty Ford Taurus behind them. Okay, so there wouldn’t have been room for the boards even if they had them.

  After that, Nick didn’t bother asking if they se habla’d English, he just grabbed hold of the aerator and waited for them to realize he was willing to lend some muscle. The kids looked at each other, grinning and chattering in Spanish. One of the few words he understood was pendejo. Okay, they thought he was a sucker. But he didn’t let go of the aerator, and soon enough the kids got the message: three was better than two when it came to wrestling this big son of a bitch.

  The kids stepped up to the aerator, Nick counted off—“Uno, dos, tres”—and they lifted. Nick could hear them grunt with effort, and he felt them wobble, but when they saw the gringo doing his share and more minus the bullshit, they found the little extra it took to get the aerator onto the truck bed. The kids clambered after it to tie it down while Nick savored the blood surging through his muscles. It reminded him of the way he used to feel after sparring.

  “Gracias,” one of the kids said. He and his buddy were back on the street now, still smiling, and his buddy was offering Nick a can of Tecate.

  It was warm, but Nick accepted it with a gracias of his own, then gave them a little salute with the can and headed down the narrow, overgrown walk to his apartment. He would damned sure drink the beer once it had spent some time in his fridge and he had taken a shower. But his plans went on hold when he opened his door to the sound of a ringing phone.

  He answered it before he turned on a light, and heard Cecil saying, “About damn time. Where you been? I keep leavin’ messages you never answer.”

  “My answering machine’s been screwed up,” Nick said.

  “Bullshit. You been duckin’ me.”

  Cecil had heard Nick lie before, about how he felt between rounds, about whether he was doing his roadwork, about all the things fighters lie about. The lies hadn’t worked then either.

  Nick couldn’t help laughing. “Come on, Cecil, let me get away with something, would you?”

  “Too late to start that shit.”

  Nick knew Cecil well enough to know he was smiling. Not a big smile, just this little thing he did with the right side of his mouth.

  “How you been?” Nick asked. “You doing all right?”

  “Gettin’ old, that’s how I’m doing,” Cecil said. “You wanna hear me complain, I’ll buy you another dinner next time I’m in town. I like an audience.”

  “All you got to do is call.”

  “Now you startin’ with the bullshit again.”

  “Give me a break, would you? I been busy.”

  “Doin’ what?”

  “I found a job,” Nick said. “Maintenance. In an apartment building.”

  “That right?” Cecil asked. “Who you working for?”

  “You know the guy. You gave me his number.”

  “Maintenance, huh?”

  “They didn’t have an opening for president,” Nick said, worried that Cecil’s radar had picked up another lie.

  “My neighbor’s boy working with you?” Cecil asked.

  “Someone from Vegas? Not that I know of.”

  “My neighbor in the ’Shaw.” Cecil sounded agitated, the way he used to get when Nick didn’t stick and move. “DuPree.”

  It took a moment for Nick to realize Cecil was talking about the guy Scott had brought around the apartment, the one who had mad-dogged him and maybe hurt that girl Hanna. The hard-on with the ex-con stare.

  “Oh, yeah, I met the guy,” Nick said. “Hangs out with my boss. But he’s not working there.”

  “Don’t be bullshittin’ me,” Cecil said, surprising Nick with the sharpness of his tone.

  “What the hell, Cecil? You pissed off because I didn’t call and say thanks, I got a job because of you? Then I’m sorry, all right? I apologize. I’m grateful for the help, you know I am. But jump back, would you?”

  Cecil wouldn’t. “Been botherin’ my ass since I give you that number,” he said. “I don’t want you havin’ nothing to do with that boy DuPree. You hear me? Nothing.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “He’s evil.”

  “How about we split the difference and call him an asshole?”

  “You ain’t hearin’ me,” Cecil said. “This muthafucka’s a criminal. You give him half a reason and he will put you in the ground.”

  “If he tries,” Nick said, “he better bring a big shovel.”

  18

  The morning of her first shift, hours before she had to make the short drive to Ashton Avenue, Jenny kept wondering if there was a genetic explanation for the life she was going back to. Her mother had used her body as a means of survival too, although the circumstances in her case had been far more extreme, maybe even life threatening. She had nothing else at her disposal, poor Eun-Chu Yee, abandoned in Seoul by the farm boy who got her pregnant with Jenny and beaten by the sweet-faced GI who took her for a wife and brought her to America.

  He beat her there as well, on the ragged lawn of an apartment complex in Downey, a blue-collar refuge obscured by the glare of L.A.’s glamour. Her screams cut through the hum of traffic on the 605, but not until years later did Jenny learn about the miscarriage and the little sister who was never born.

  Eun-Chu Yee was brave to talk about such things, brave in a way Jenny couldn’t be about the GI who had sneaked into her bed to touch her and make her touch him. Jenny had always imagined that he went straight from one of their forlorn assignations to the strip club where he found her mother a job. He was leaving for a post in Germany, and he wanted to make sure the two of them could get by without any help from him. What he didn’t count on Eun-Chu finding in that cinderblock fleshpot was the power she held over men.

  Maybe the source of it lay in her sculpted cheekbones and sumptuous breasts, or the shimmering hair that flowed to her waist until she decided it was boring and chopped it off. Even then, shorn to the ears, eyes gleaming at the shock she inspired, that self-made gamine looked better, sexier, more intriguing than any woman Jenny had ever seen. But there was more to her mother’s impact on men than the desire she stirred in them, and it was written in her impetuousness.

  Eun-Chu Yee was a creature of impulse, forever embracing a new enthusiasm and then dropping it in a heartbeat for the next one. Jenny suspected it was that way with men, too. She had seen the parade through the tumbledown places where they lived, the broken-walled apartments and converted garages where she learned to hate the smell of kimchi and picked
up the physical mess in her mother’s wake. The psychological mess was for Eun-Chu Yee to handle on her own, no matter how limited her resources.

  The only break she got was named Dailey Watkins. Jenny thought her mother had met him in the club where she danced, as if that mattered, as if you think less of an oak tree because it grows in a junkyard. Dailey’s black skin scared Jenny at first. It was, she thought, an understandable reaction after the way black GI brats had bullied her in Korea and black school kids had welcomed her to the States by mocking her slanted eyes. But if Dailey sensed her fear, he said nothing, preferring to win her with his laughter and the offer of his hand to hold. “You one more princess, ain’t you?” he said. “Just like your mama.” And he won her heart, just like he’d won her mother’s.

  They lived in Long Beach, in the house on Obispo Avenue where he had taken them, its flower beds perfectly tended, its stucco walls painted just so. He never complained about the kimchi and he said he loved Korean barbecue as much as he did the ribs he brought home from Compton. Jenny believed every word because she had watched him in the yard with her mother, cutting roses to put in a vase, and she had seen how he stroked her mother’s hair. There was something approaching reverence in that simple gesture, something that crystallized the love Eun-Chu Yee had done without for so long.

  She had a year to treasure it, and then it was gone, stolen from her by the accident that killed Dailey on the construction site where he was working. “He was the man God sent me to love,” she told Jenny. And what was there to say after that except goodbye to the security he had given them? They were princesses no more, thrust back into a life of drifting and jobs that Eun-Chu Yee never discussed. Jobs in hostess bars, Jenny guessed. More jobs stripping. And with them came men introduced by only their first names, men who craved her mother’s beauty and mocked her broken English, men with beer and liquor and Polaroid cameras who would take her mother into the bedroom after she had posed for them wearing nothing but a stunned smile, her legs spread wide.

  It should have been a relief when she found religion, but the transformation only produced another kind of madness. Every mundane act, every conversation, every breath seemed to evoke a burst of praise for the Holy Trinity that Jenny’s mother had somehow reduced to two, “the God and the Jesus.” Jenny couldn’t bring friends home for fear they would be sermonized, proselytized, anesthetized. She was hardly able to bear the thought of going home herself until her mother backslid into more booze and rump shaking.

  Saturday night had triumphed over Sunday morning, and Jenny felt like celebrating until the police woke her with the news that Eun-Chu Yee had died in a one-car crash with only a bottle of cheap Scotch for company. Jenny was sixteen when she was thrown into the survival test called life, and now it was six years later and she was wiping away tears she hadn’t expected to cry. They were all she had to offer the memory of her mother, unless she wanted to include her new job. Her mother might not have approved of it, but she certainly would have understood. Maybe it really was genetics.

  Okay, a little lipstick, a little blush. Forget about Elizabeth Bishop and prepare to get naked. La-la-la-la, la-la, la: just like that, she was Coco. It was easy for Jenny to make the transformation because life became so uncomplicated when she turned herself into this fantasy creature who existed solely for sex. All she had to do was laugh and be pretty and she was insulated from real life.

  When she showed up for her first day in Scott’s harem, she would have sworn she could feel a change, but maybe it was the new thong she was wearing. She rang the apartment from downstairs and a man answered. Must be the security guy, she told herself, and didn’t give him another thought until he opened the door to 824 for her.

  “You’re early,” he said.

  “I’m kind of obsessive-compulsive,” she said.

  “Me too,” he said. “Just don’t expect to find anybody else like us here.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” she said, smiling and getting a crooked, almost boyish grin in return. She liked it. All she’d been hoping for was someone who wasn’t drooling, and here was a guy she wouldn’t have minded hitting on her in a club. And yet he was different from the lawyers and software designers who usually took a run at her. They didn’t flow when they walked, and he did. Their eyebrows and cheekbones weren’t riven with scars, and his were. She didn’t need to look at his fists to know she was in the presence of a tough man, but that was cool. She’d never met one before. Her only real question was, what would she talk about with him? She would figure it out soon enough. At the moment there was something else she needed to know: “Is Scott around?”

  “He’s not exactly a morning person,” the security guy said.

  “Oh.” For a moment, she thought about explaining what had happened when Scott interviewed her, how she had been late and that really wasn’t like her at all, hence her arrival at 10:23 A.M. Instead, she reminded herself of who she was supposed to be and said, “I’m Coco,” and offered him her hand.

  “They told me you’d be here,” he said as he took it. “I’m Nick. Any problems, I’ll take care of them for you.”

  His grip was comforting, like he was saying she could trust him. His eyes said the same thing. But she saw sadness in them, too, and she got the feeling that the sadness was there to stay.

  Jenny was wondering what that was all about when she realized she hadn’t let go of Nick’s hand. When she did, she tried to hide her embarrassment by glancing around the apartment. “Nice place,” she said. It was better than saying it was just like every other upscale massage operation she’d seen. She wondered if they all got their room dividers from the same store.

  “You want to hang up your stuff, the master bedroom’s that way,” Nick said.

  “Thanks,” Jenny said, grateful he had looked at her face and not her boobs.

  She had everything in a tan canvas tote: a pink teddy and a white one, a black slip dress, a short red-and-gold robe, a bunch of thongs all jumbled together, two pair of heels, cheap oil and lotion, the fancy unmarked bottles she would put it in, and her music. There were the CDs she’d bought on her own—Sade and Enigma—and CDs she’d learned about from older men she had dated, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Chet Baker’s Chet. Plus Mazzy Star, of course. She hadn’t listened to them since she’d fled the Valley, but she knew one thing: Her first client would hear Mazzy Star whether he liked it or not.

  When she came out of the bedroom, everything put away neatly, Jenny wanted to ask Nick why the place was so clean, but Sierra was already there answering the phone so she kept her mouth shut. Didn’t want to sound like she expected to work with a bunch of slobs even though she did.

  “Hi,” Sierra said when she hung up.

  “Hi,” Jenny said. “Your hair looks great.”

  It was dyed a champagne color and cut in a way that reminded Jenny of Jane Fonda in an old movie she’d seen. Jane Fonda as a hooker. She wondered if Sierra realized it.

  “Thanks,” Sierra said, flashing a real smile. “I thought I’d try it, you know? Like, it’ll grow out if it’s a disaster.”

  Jenny decided she didn’t know about the Jane Fonda movie.

  “They’re calling already,” Sierra said. “I booked an eleven-thirty for you.”

  “Thanks. Was it, like, anybody you know?”

  “I don’t think so. Said his name was”—Sierra checked her steno pad—“Greg. All I can tell you is, he sounded like a guy that needs to get off with a hot Asian.”

  “Rice chasers,” Jenny said, laughing. “The story of my life.”

  And so it began again, in that high-rise a block south of Wilshire: Jenny opening the door for a stranger who would be seeing her naked inside of ten minutes, and letting her instincts dictate what happened after that. They were in the guest bedroom; no amount of flattery would have convinced Sierra to give up the master when they had appointments at the same time.

  Greg turned out to be slender and darkly handsome, with a hundred-dollar hai
rcut and teeth so white they looked like they had been dipped in high-gloss paint instead of merely capped. When she heard his voice, a baritone oiled with sincerity, Jenny started thinking she had seen him before. It took a couple of minutes before she realized where it had been: on the TV news. Not one of the big stations, one of the others. She thought the news was propaganda—why didn’t those people just come out and say that George Bush wanted to blow up the world?—and she was tempted to tell him so. Yeah, and his name wasn’t Greg, either. But first things first.

  “Ready to turn over?” she asked.

  “Do me a favor?” he said.

  Uh-oh, she thought. “What kind of favor?” she said.

  He reached into the briefcase he had been careful to set beside the futon. He pulled out a toothbrush.

  “Would you stick this up my ass?”

  “No,” Jenny said with seen-it-all-before calm even though she hadn’t seen this before.

  “Coco, come on,” he said. “If you do that with the toothbrush, I’ll come like Vesuvius.”

  “I’m sure you’ll do that anyway,” she said.

  “Please, Coco.” His baritone was reduced to an unbecoming whimper.

  “I told you no,” she said. “Now please turn over.”

  “You’re sure, huh?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “Okay.” Rolling onto his back, he looked like a little boy who’d been cut off on seconds at dessert. “You won’t tell anybody, will you?”

  Like who am I going to tell? Jenny thought.

  The phones had stopped ringing, the way they usually did after lunch, and Sierra was in the master with a regular who walked in apologizing for canceling the day before. It was the only quiet time Nick was likely to have until evening. He was reading the sports section from a USA Today he’d found abandoned in a coffee shop, the rest of the paper lying at his feet. The new girl was curled on the other sofa, lost in a hardback book she had pulled from her tote and not noticing when Nick glanced over at her. He liked what he saw.