Chapter 8: Live-In

Jim wasn’t particularly happy when he picked me up on Labor Day to move to my new apartment. I was ready. My things were packed and it all fit in his truck. The little hideaway apartment was spotless. I’d cleaned everything, including under the sink and behind the toilet. I’d even vacuumed the halls outside the apartment to make sure everything was in as good condition as it was when he brought me here almost four months ago.

We rode in silence to my new apartment and he helped me move in my few boxes and the bed. The apartment still smelled of fresh varnish. It was beautiful. It had probably been built in the 30s. The building consisted of five connected fourplexes that wrapped around the corner so eight units faced west and twelve faced south. The units on the corner were all two-bedroom apartments. All the rest were one-bedroom. It was move-in weekend for the first fourplex completed. I had the top end unit. A couple was moving into the unit on the other side of the landing and I could tell the lower end unit was occupied. The hall was a mess from everyone tracking stuff in on the new carpet.

“Where are the cleaning supplies and vacuum?” I asked. “I need to get right at that hall and stairway.”

“I’ll have them delivered tomorrow,” Jim said. He turned to me. “Is this going to work?”

“It’s wonderful. What do you mean?”

“You’re pregnant.”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t need to piss off my benefactor, but he was pissing me off.

“It’s a situation that sometimes occurs when you are drugged and raped. When it happens, a woman has decisions she has to make. They don’t always work out the way she planned, but she makes the decision. This woman is going to have a child and care for her for the next eighteen to twenty years. During that time, she’ll clean halls, sell real estate, and get a college degree. Life is not going to stop because I got plugged.”

“I don’t want to make your life harder. I just want to know that you’ll be capable of surviving and doing the work,” he said. “You might have told me about your condition when you convinced me you could do this.”

“It would just have made it harder for me to convince you.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” he said. He pushed his black-framed glasses up on his nose. The thick lenses made his eyes look huge. “You can move back to the other apartment if this proves to be too much. You’ll have five of these halls and stairs to clean at least three times a week. There’s a laundry room to maintain. You need to police the grounds to make sure there is no trash that collects around the building. We have a grounds maintenance crew that comes by to mow the courtyard and trim the bushes, but you need to make sure it stays neat. These apartments rent for $550 a month. You don’t get it free for nothing. It’s work.”

“I’ll let you know if I can’t handle it, but if it comes to that, I’ll get help. I’m a stubborn and determined woman, Jim. But I’m not stupid.”

Lily showed up for dinner with Chinese takeout. It was a good thing. I had a box of milk and some cereal along with a few canned goods. Fortunately, there was an actual IGA just three blocks from the apartment and I’d be able to walk there to get food. If I just needed more milk or a dozen eggs, I could get them at SuperAmerica across the street.

“Wow! It’s so sparkly clean,” Lily said. “And I love the way you’ve decorated. The echoes are charming.” We laughed. The only piece of furniture I had was the mattress in the bedroom that Jim had given me. With nothing in it, the apartment looked huge. And it did sparkle.

“Well, white is the new white,” I laughed. “I think I might need a shower curtain, though.”

“Oh, please get a see-through one,” she said. I got a little flutter in my stomach. Was that the baby?

These restorations had been done with a lot of care. All the woodwork in the apartment had been removed and stripped before being restained and installed. The hardwood floors had been sanded and refinished, even repairing some of the fancy border work where walnut had been inlaid with the oak. The living room was large, being the full eighteen-foot width of the apartment. There was a dark-framed arch with two pillared demi-arches leading to the dining room. The oddest part was that the bathroom door was just between the galley kitchen and the dining room with the bedroom door opposite it. The focal point of the dining room was a big old built-in buffet with a mirrored back and leaded glass doors on top.

Out the back door off the kitchen, I had a little deck with stairs down to the courtyard. Well, what would be the courtyard next spring. Right now it was where the workers who were doing the restoration to the other units parked. Just a muddy field. Jim said it would all be sodded and fenced in the spring. I had to believe him.

One of the coolest features of the apartment was the sunporch. It was a little room about eight by eight off the front of the living room. It had windows on three sides entirely paneled in mahogany, including the ceiling. They’d done just as careful a job restoring the woodwork in this room as they had the rest of the house. As I predicted, Lily fell in love with it.

“I couldn’t live here without paying for it,” she said.

“What does an eight by eight room go for these days?” I laughed.

“Do I get to use the kitchen, too?”

“Only if you buy food. Right at the moment, I have six containers of instant ramen noodles and two boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese.”

“You do live high, don’t you? Let’s figure it out in babysitting hours and vacuuming.”

“Do you really like it, Lily? Do you want to live here? I mean, I feel selfish hogging the big bedroom for myself when all I have is a mattress on the floor. But I’m going to need room for a crib,” I said.

“Listen. The one thing I can’t do is pretend I don’t want to share that bedroom with you. Even once in a while. But I won’t push you to that. Would I like to live here?” she asked. “Hell, yes. Even with nothing in it, this place is beautiful. I’ve got a few pieces of furniture that I’ve collected that you wouldn’t have to buy. I have a small dining table with four chairs. I have a sofa. I have a queen-size bed. Now, we need to negotiate one thing. I’d like to trade my bed for yours. I’m afraid a queen-size bed won’t fit in my new room. Your mattress looks comfy, though.”

“Better try it out,” I suggested. We went into the bedroom and she sprawled on top of my bed. She looked ... inviting. “I think I could get used to this. It’s actually a pretty comfortable mattress.” I stretched out beside her.

“Lily, I don’t know if I want to be your lover. I wouldn’t mind trying it once. God knows, I’ve tried everything else.”

“Really? Tell me about what you’ve done.” She rolled onto her side and faced me, resting her elbow on the bed and her face in her hand. I really wanted to tell her about my former life and how I got here, but I didn’t want to get locked away in an asylum. Do they still have those?

Instead, I told her what happened on prom night and she was so outraged she wanted to drive to Fargo and do some damage to Jesse. I told her what I’d done to destroy his reputation and she rolled onto the floor laughing. She crawled back up into the bed.

“What else did you do?”

“I went kind of crazy. I slept with a different boy every weekend until graduation. The first one and the last one were pretty damned good.” I told her about Carl, the fifteen-year-old.

“A fifteen-year-old virgin? And he was good?”

“He was great. He actually paid attention. I scarcely knew what I was doing, so it was really like the first time for both of us. Aside from the fact that we did it in the backseat of my mother’s car, we were really both exploring and learning about how to please each other.”

“Why didn’t you just stay with him?”

“I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times. But he’s fifteen. There’s no way he was ready to be saddled with a kid that wasn’t even his. And I wasn’t either.”