Page 26 of The Progressions

Chapter 6

“I’m calling the police.”

“Iva, no.” I took the handset from her and hung it up. “He comes and yells for a minute, and then he leaves.”

“This is private property!” she said, as the words “whore” and “skank” reverberated around the parking lot. “He’s scaring you and he’s bothering the tenants.” She picked up the phone again, and this time she did call. I had done that myself, and the cops were aware of what was happening. He would be gone by the time they arrived but maybe, with someone else reporting it too, they would go to his house. But maybe that would make him madder…

“I can’t believe this is still going on,” she said when she hung up again.

“It really is better, though. There are a few people stuck on it, like that guy, but mostly they’ve moved on. Luckily for me, their attention spans are short.”

“It doesn’t seem lucky.” She shifted in her desk chair. “Was this always so uncomfortable, or is it only because I weigh as much as my car now?”

“It’s the chair. You look beautiful,” I assured her. She was very large with the baby but I thought she was gorgeous. “Are you positive that it’s ok for you to be out of bed?”

“I had to leave my house,” she said. “I can’t stare at those same walls anymore. This is the closest place I could think of where I could sit down and look at something else.”

“And you came on water delivery day, so thank you for that,” I told her, and she nodded. I hated dealing with Cody at any time, but especially when I was alone. “Lucky you. You got to see him, and you also got to hear a nut screaming trashy stuff in the parking lot,” I added, smiling, but she didn’t think that was funny.

“What has Tyler Hennessy done about it?” she demanded.

He’d finally talked to his girlfriend, for one thing. When he’d gotten back from the team trip, he had told me that she’d unblocked him. “Shay is going to be quiet about you now,” he’d stated, and that was true. She hadn’t said anything else about me breaking them up, which also meant that she hadn’t said that she had been wrong, and she certainly hadn’t apologized. Instead, she had started a feud with another influencer over a post that she’d claimed copied one of hers and that took a lot of the heat off me as her fans rallied against some other girl.

“What was he supposed to do?” I asked Iva, and she had ideas. The top one was that Tyler should have come out in my defense and announced that he wasn’t involved with me at all.

“No. No, they would have said that he was lying,” I told her. “That would have made it seem like he cared enough to defend me, that I actually meant something to him. He was getting crap, too.”

“No,” she told me back. “Not like this. People were saying he was such a player and whatever, but it was like…it was admiring,” she said, finding the right word. “He’s a dog and he sucks, but they could excuse it because what did anyone expect from a guy like that? What should any of us expect from our boyfriends?” Then she put her hand over her eyes, like Shay Galton had done in the video that had started all the problems for me. Unlike the woman online, Iva didn’t pretty-cry. Tears started to pour down her cheeks and snot came out of her nose, and she got blotchy fast.

“Iva!” I ran over and bent to hug her, very awkwardly. This clearly wasn’t about my problems, because only one person made her upset like this. “What’s wrong?” I asked, but the real question was, “What has he done now?”

She shook her head. I got a box of tissues and some water, for when she uncovered her face. Then I rolled my chair over to sit next to hers and waited for a moment, until she looked up, wiped her cheeks, and took a sip from the glass.

“Is it Dominic?” I asked, because it always was.

She blew her nose. “He moved out.”

“What? He moved out of your house?”

“He said that there’s a job in New Jersey producing music videos. It does sound like an amazing opportunity.” She blew again.

“He doesn’t have any background in video production, does he? Why would he get hired for…ok, I’m sorry,” I said, because she was bawling again.

“He took everything,” she said, gasping out the words. “He packed everything. If he was only going for a while, why would he need the boxes of his stuff from when he was a kid? Why would he need the pictures of his mother and father? Not just one, but all of them! He took everything he owns, even some of the furniture. He said he’d be back and I asked him for a forwarding address, but he doesn’t have one yet. And now his phone isn’t working.”

“If he doesn’t have a place to live, then where is he putting the furniture?” Good grief, I needed to stop with the questions. “We’re going to find him and make him help you with the baby. We will.”

“I don’t want to do this on my own!” she wailed, and I managed not to ask how she had thought it was going to go, even if stupid Dominic had stuck around. Iva already did everything for them, handling every aspect of their lives just as she had handled things at this complex.

But my silence didn’t help, either. “I know you think that he’s a bad partner,” she accused me, but that wasn’t correct. He wasn’t any kind of “partner” to her at all. “He used to take out thetrash sometimes. Did you know that?” she asked. “He bought groceries. He picked them up when I ordered,” she corrected herself. “He would hold me…he was there!” She took another tissue and covered her eyes again.

“I’m not criticizing him,” I told her, and I was not doing that anymore, as of this moment. “Now isn’t the time, because we need to figure out how you can go into the future.” The house in which she lived had belonged to stupid Dominic’s parents and they had left it to their son even though Iva paid for its maintenance and took care of all the bills out of her salary. I wasn’t a real estate lawyer yet, but I was aware that it wasn’t great if her residence depended on the guy who’d just taken off. “He’ll have to give you child support,” I mentioned, to reassure both of us. But how, and with what money? I didn’t know.

“You mean that I’ll go into the future alone. I don’t want to go without him!” she told me. “Dominic was really excited about our baby. Didn’t I tell you that he put the crib together?”

“That’s nice,” I said. He hadn’t contributed any money to its purchase, though, and I was pretty sure that he had…my thoughts on this didn’t matter, and they never had. Iva didn’t want to hear a word against him. She kept talking about the things he’d done for her and their child, all of which she was able to list because there were so few of them. I only nodded and didn’t argue with her, even when she paused and eyed me, waiting for it. But eventually, she got tired, maybe due to her pregnancy or maybe because she was sick of trying to convince me and make herself believe it, too. She needed to go back to theplace that her boyfriend legally owned, to rest in the shelter of the same walls that were making her bananas.

We checked the parking lot but it was clear of weirdos, and I walked her out to her car. She had already installed the seat in the back, ready for her baby, and I thought about her doing that by herself. Not that stupid Dominic was such an amazing partner (no matter what Iva said), but if he was gone? Then she was going to be truly alone. She had moved up here to be with him; she didn’t have any family and besides me, she hadn’t met a lot of people. Her life had been all about him, like working two jobs sometimes so that they had enough money, helping him with the various schemes he dreamed up, and taking care of their house so that he had a comfortable place to live.

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