Page 38 of The Tenant
“Yes, you did.” I pull my wallet out of my pocket and toss a couple of bills on the table to cover my drink. “We’re done here.”
He scrambles to his feet, stepping in front of me. “But Becky and Krista wanted us to do this,” he protests, confirming my suspicions.
“So we did it,” I say. “I’ll take a walk before I go home. You can tell Becky how great it went. How we’re now best friends.” I shrug. “Tell her whatever the hell you want, but I’m not sitting here another second.”
I push past Malcolm, and I don’t stop until I’m out of the bar. After his half-hearted attempt to stop me, Malcolm has apparently decided to stay to finish his drink. I still can’t wrap my head around what he said to me. How couldMalcolmhave gotten my old job? He’s grossly unqualified. He must have brainwashed Wayne.
Just before I walk away, I peer through the partially fogged window of the bar to make sure Malcolm hasn’t decided to follow me. Or worse—tell Becky about how I stormed out, who will then rat me out to Krista. But he’s not following me or talking to Becky on the phone. He’s decided to join those two girls who smiled at me when I walked in. Well, I hope that asshole has a good time.
24
“Blake! Blake!”
The sound of Krista’s screams coming from downstairs jerks me awake. It takes a second to get my bearings. It’s a Saturday, I’m home in my bed, and Krista is not lying beside me. And it’s… Crap, it’s only seven in the morning.
“Blake!”
She sounds outright hysterical, and my stomach sinks. What is it this time? I’m afraid to find out.
It’s been a little over a week since the maggot episode. There still hasn’t been one word from Whitney about what I did. I’m actually starting to wonder if I imagined the whole thing. The idea of a paper bag full of rotting fruit stuffed intentionally in my cabinet does seem pretty out there. Could it have been some kind of lucid dream?
But no. You don’t imagine a paper bag full of maggots.
Plus, the fruit fly situation is substantially better. We set up a bunch of new cups that have caught, like, 90 percent of the flies. Between that and smashing them with my hand, the infestation has been downgraded to a mild annoyance.
“Blake!”
I rub my eyes, struggling to sit up in bed. “Coming!” I call back.
I throw my legs over the side of the bed. I toss on a T-shirt, but I don’t bother to change out of my boxers. I’m not dressing up for Whitney. She can deal with looking at me in my underwear.
I get halfway down the steps before I see Krista, standing in the living room. Her face is bright red, and when I get a little closer, I can see that her cheeks are streaked with tears. She’s sobbing.
Oh no. What happened?
“It’s Goldy!” she wails. “Goldy is dead!”
I sprint down the rest of the steps in my bare feet. When I get to the fishbowl, sure enough, Goldy is belly-up in the water. I’ve never seen a dead fish before, aside from at the market, but I have no trouble recognizing that she’s gone to a better place.
“I’m so sorry.” I put my arm around Krista’s shoulders, holding her close to me. “It’s…very sad.”
Oddly, itissort of sad. Despite the fact that we didn’t have a whole lot of hands-on interaction with Goldy, I’d gotten used to her presence. And I’ve been talking to her a little more than is healthy. I know she was just a fish, but she had personality. A little bit of personality at least. For a fish.
Krista is really shaken by it though. She is clinging to me, sobbing into my T-shirt. I give her a level ten hug as her tears stain my shirt. After a few minutes, she looks up at me with eyes that are bloodshot and puffy.
“I know it’s weird to be so upset over a fish,” she says, “but I just got attached. And she was our first pet as a couple, you know? It feels like…like her death is asign.”
“It’s not a sign.” I need to nip this line of thinking in the bud ASAP. “They even told us in the pet store that these goldfish usually don’t live very long.”
“But she seemed so healthy,” she sniffles. “I don’t understand it. I fed her yesterday, and she looked completely fine! She gobbled the pellets right up!”
“Huh,” I say.
She wipes her wet face with the back of her hand. “You changed her water last weekend when I asked you to, right?”
“Of course I did.”
“But you didn’t change all the water, right? Only twenty percent, right?”
