Page 14 of The Vacancy In Room 10

“Those lions are gay,” I hear an unfamiliar voice say from the doorframe. I look up to see a kid about ten years old who I don’t recognize.

“Pardon?” I say, and he nods to one of a half dozen picture books on a rack near the toilet. The one on top is called Noah and the Flood.

“The lions marching into the ark. They both have manes, which means they’re both male. That’s inaccurate, or else we wouldn’t still have lions today,” he says.

“Uh, yeah. I guess you have a point,” I respond, and then the littlest kid, Kevin, runs into the bathroom where I stand once again hovered over the drain, giving it a final snake, and he picks up the wet hair clump before I can stop him and runs at his sisters with it. By the time I’m in the living room, they are already screaming and flailing out the door and chasing each other around the pool deck, and the strange Biblical expert child has run outside with them.

“I owe ya one,” Crystal says, then screams after them, “Close the door, Tiffany, goddammit!”

I go and close the door and sit on a plaid recliner, wiping my hands with a soiled kitchen rag.

Crystal pushes a bag of White Castle burgers across the coffee table. “Want a slider? There’s chicken-ring ones in there.”

“I’m good,” I say as she lights a cigarette and laughs at an audience member on the show who stands at the mic, hand on hip, saying something about someone’s “baby mama” and something about a “broke-ass bitch.”

“Who’s the kid?” I ask.

“Oh, that’s Frank. Mary’s grandson. He’s visiting for a while. But between us, I think his mom took off with some meth head and moved to Tampa, so he might be around awhile.”

And then the kids explode back into the apartment; the oldest girl is sobbing. She has the clump of hair stuck to her neck where Kevin apparently threw it.

“Now that is it,” Crystal says, trying to maneuver her way to her feet. The other girl starts crying for no apparent reason. “That’s what you get for giving Jasmine a haircut in the tub, I told ya!”

When she finally does get to her feet, Kevin starts to run, but she grabs him by the arm and swats him on the butt. “And if you can’t behave yourself...” she begins, but Kevin is just laughing at her. He wriggles away, running to his room before she can say anything else. She gives up easily and crashes her weight back down into the sofa with a sigh.

I wonder for a minute who Jasmine is and why a six-year-old would be giving someone a haircut, and then I see the poor bald Aladdin doll on the coffee table—the Disney princess is surrounded by LEGO and sports specks of orange Cheeto dust in her buzz cut.

Crystal is wiping Amber’s neck like she’s expertly wiped a thousand hair clumps off a child before this one and consoles her with a SpongeBob Pez dispenser. The girl sits and shakes out colorful candies into her sticky little hands; her nails are pink and chipped, and she looks up at me with pouty lips as though I’m to blame for all of this because I unleashed the hair clump.

I ache for Reid and our home and the babies we planned to have and the life that was stolen from me, and it’s all I can do in this moment not to burst out crying, and I’m not sure why. It’s no worse than any other wretched moment on any other demoralizing day in this pit.

So I pick up my tools and leave, unnoticed. The girls and their mother have already moved on from the situation and are talking about fairy glitter lip gloss colors. Video game noises rumble from somewhere back in Kevin’s room as I exit.

I sit in the front office and swirl around in the desk chair, fanning myself with an old Better Homes & Gardens, thinking about what to say at my job interview this afternoon. The Egg Platter left a message and said I could come in and talk to the assistant manager about some night shifts, and even though the tips are better for cocktails than for huevos rancheros and corned beef hash, I’m gonna take it if they offer.

I watched a late-night show once where some guest talked about meditation and how it can change your whole life because it’s all about your mindset, and I tried it. I really gave it a shot one night. I sat on the beanbag someone left in a storage unit in the basement, and I put on some music I found on YouTube with flutes and chimes and shit, and I tried to think about nothing.

But they don’t tell you that it’s impossible to think about nothing at all. Like, unless you’re dead, your brain has thoughts, and so when you try to make it all still and quiet, that’s when the real dark thoughts poke through. It reminded me of a church we went to when I was little.

We had a sleepover one night, and they called it a lock-in, which sounded kind of scary to me, but we laid our sleeping bags out on the church floor and had pizza and fruit punch that they called “refreshments,” which I thought was fancy-sounding, and we got to watch The Sandlot projected onto a wall from an old-timey projector, and then we whispered to each other after lights-out until we fell asleep. And in the middle of the night, it was inky black in the big room except way, way up high where there were rows of tiny windows that looked like flashlights in the darkness. They pierced the room in creepy beams of moonlight, and I remember being really scared and peeing in my new Rugrats pajamas... That’s exactly what meditating is like.

It’s the laser beams of sharp, horrifying thoughts slicing through the stillness in your mind and taking you to all of the places you’re not supposed to be thinking about.

It usually starts at the beginning, for me, with a mental list of things I did wrong. I never got the associate’s degree I started ’cause Reid talked me out of the “masculine trade” even though I loved it. But it’s not really his fault, is it? It’s mine for being a dumb sheep. I had choices. And then, of course, I think about all of my choices and how most of them were bad, and then I think about how I worked at a Pick ’n Save. Why? Because I didn’t get the damn associate’s degree. And then what did I do? Stupid idiot me, I moved in with a guy who never wanted to get married, and I ignored all the red flags. No matter how unsupportive or distant or hot and cold he acted, he was Reid Chapman. He was the real estate god with his photo on the side of a bus—with the floppy hair and poppy biceps who all the single chicks from far and wide seemed to giggle over and gawk at no matter where we went.

Out of all the girls in fur boots and titty shirts and expensive highlights who sipped green apple martinis at the bars we went to and wrote their numbers on cocktail napkins, he chose me. Sure, it sounds pathetic when you say it out loud, but I felt really special when it was happening.

It started with a few after-bar, drunk kinda deals, but then, somehow, we made each other laugh a lot. I never thought I was funny, but he thought I was and said nice things about me. Then drunk nights turned into weeks and actual daytime dates, not just 2:00 a.m. stuff...and we morphed into a couple.

And then he bought one of the houses he was showing because he just couldn’t pass it up—it was a mid-century with potential, and a good investment. When he wanted me to move in, I felt like I was in a fairy tale. It’s different than keeping a toothbrush at his place and sleeping in the bed he had sex with a buncha other girls in over the years—this was our new start. I thought we were really something together. I even went to special trouble to never tell him when I had to fix his bad drywall work or retile something behind his back after he left for work. It was a labor of love. If I’m honest, I rebuilt half the damn house from the ground up practically, in my almost five years there. I thought I was literally building our life together.

So maybe Kimmy is the young waitress he’s been banging in the walk-in cooler for at least a year at the Bulldog where she works, but she can’t be the first. I was one of those women I hate. I just didn’t want to see it.

I pick up my phone from the desk and start to scroll to Kimmy’s Instagram to cyberstalk her one more time today. I have a fake name on Insta—Brandy Alexander. My theory was that she’s too stupid to know it’s the name of a cocktail, and she’s too desperate for attention to deny a follower, so I get to see all the intimate details Cass Abbot cannot. I remember the other waitress at the Bulldog who stood there in awe—Jessie was her name—the day I showed up and screamed at Kimmy, who was beet red, holding a giant tray of steak dinners next to a family seated in a corner booth. I flush with shame at the memory of this—how unhinged I was when I found out about the betrayal, but that doesn’t stop me from commenting on Kimmy’s photo right now. Her Insta post says golfing with my baby, and she’s holding a golf club laughably wrong in her white shorts and sports bra outfit. You don’t like golf, you stupid bitch, you’re just clinging to Reid on his day off. But guess what? If he can do it to me, he can do it to you.

He’s fucking Jessie at the Bulldog, I type and send. It’s childish and terrible, but I smile a satisfied smile, and then I see Callum at the block of mailboxes outside the office door. He pulls out a handful of junk ads from his box and tosses them in the bin. Before he can get away, I yell to him from the open window.

“Hey!”

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