The Favor

  Their eyes met.

  Gabe smiled.

  “So, you wanna maybe see about doing something sometime?” Jay asked, dragging Janelle’s attention away from Gabe’s face, and the moment was lost while she stammered out an excuse about why she couldn’t. She wasn’t sure exactly what she said, just that it seemed to satisfy Jay without offending him, because the song ended and he backed off with a smile and a nod.

  But by that time, Gabe and the blonde were already gone.

  THIRTY-THREE

  SHE’D TOLD HIM her name, but typically, Gabe didn’t bother to remember it. He thought she was a Hoffman, one of the younger ones. Much younger ones. Probably not a daughter of one of the Hoffmans Gabe had gone to school with...he didn’t think he was old enough for that, though she sure as hell might’ve been.

  “Shh...” She put a finger to her lips, so drunk she tripped over her own feet and stumbled forward into his bedroom. “We don’t want to wake up your dad.”

  His old man slept like a corpse, so Gabe wasn’t worried about that. Andy, on the other hand, was still downstairs in the kitchen and would be coming up to bed at any moment. Gabe kicked the door shut behind him. The woman’s eyes went wide.

  “Privacy,” Gabe explained as he moved toward her. “Then you can make all the noise you want.”

  “Oh...I’m not a screamer.” She managed to sound coy even through the thickness of booze in her voice. She tipped him a smile he thought she might practice in the mirror—it was that good. She kicked off her shoes and toyed with the top button of her shirt.

  “Is that a challenge?”

  She fit nicely enough in his arms. His hands found her hips, jarringly bony through the sleek material of her shirt and above her denim skirt. She was light enough that he could easily lift her.

  She squealed, clutching at but not fighting him. Her mouth found his. She tasted like sweet liquory drinks and lip balm. Her fingers dug into his shoulders. She wrapped her legs around his waist.

  It turned out she’d been lying about being a screamer.

  After, Gabe pulled the sheet up over his hips and dozed, too lazy to get up and get a cigarette. Not interested in standing outside in the cold for once. The woman beside him had already started snoring lightly, and he was also too lazy to shift her awake, make her get dressed and kick her out.

  He drifted into dreams.

  Then

  Underneath all that pale makeup, Janelle Decker still has freckles. Gabe’s sure of it. She thinks she needs all that eye liner and hair spray to make herself prettier, but he likes her best this way, with her hair wet and slicked back from her face, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. Bare feet.

  “Stop bogarting.” She holds out her small hand, the nails clipped short but painted black.

  Gabe draws in smoke, long and deep. It burns, but he doesn’t care. This is decent weed; he got it from his friend Steve, who lives outside of town and grows it in his parents’ greenhouse. But it’s not great weed. Gabe passes the joint.

  Janelle’s eyes squint shut as she takes a drag. She holds it longer than he did before letting it stream out slowly as she tips her head back to look up at the ceiling. She tucks her bare feet underneath her as she hands him back the joint, then lets herself fall onto his pillows.

  They’ll smell like her, later.

  “What do you want to be when you grow up, Gabe?”

  “Grown-up.”

  She snorts softly, on her back, pointing her toes at the ceiling. “I want to be a dancer.”

  She’s a good dancer, but if he tells her that, he’ll have to admit he watches her dance. She knows he does, but he’s not going to say it, because then maybe she’ll stop. “Don’t you have to go to school for that?”

  “Yeah. Well, I guess so. I don’t want to be a ballet dancer. I just think it would be great to dance in shows.”

  “You want to be a stripper.” He laughs.

  Janelle flips him the finger. They smoke a little more. He hasn’t answered her question, but he’s thinking about the answer. What does he want to be when he grows up, other than away from this house and this town?

  “I should go home.” She curls on her side, one hand beneath her cheek, to look at him.

  He won’t ask her to stay, though he thinks she wants him to. Instead, Gabe smokes. He offers her the last drag, but she waves it away. He stubs it out in an old coffee can he seals with a plastic lid, then shoves under his bed. He lies down next to her.

  It’s a double bed, but not really big enough for both of them. Not when she’s got her ass stuck out like that, right up against his hip. So when he rolls onto his side, he tells himself it’s because of the bed. But it’s not. And there’s no keeping room for the Holy Spirit between them; maybe at school at one of the lame dances he doesn’t ever go to, but not here. Janelle’s butt fits neatly into the hollow of his crotch—which rapidly becomes a bulge.

  His mouth finds the back of her neck. Her shoulder blade, exposed by the low neckline of her T-shirt. She moves against him when his hand slides over her hip, her belly. Between her legs.

  They don’t speak. They never say a word. Sometimes she’s the one with her hand on him. Sometimes, her mouth. But tonight he moves against her, his fingertips sliding beneath the waistband of her pajamas to find her heat.

  Girls have been after Gabe since the seventh grade, and the truth is, he’s gone with one or two. But he’s never made one shiver and shudder and moan this way. Janelle’s hair, soft without all the product she insists on putting in it for school, brushes his face. Gabe closes his eyes and gets lost in it. His hand moves in slow, slow circles. He pushes his crotch against her, just a little faster. When she stiffens and gasps and puts her hand over his, he knows she means him to stop moving, but he can’t. Not yet. Not until...just...a minute...more...

  He becomes aware of her soft breathing just as the door slams downstairs. “My dad’s home.”

  Janelle sits up, shifting his hand from under her pajamas with a casual effort. “My cue to leave.”

  She looks at him over her shoulder at the window. “Remember when we used to have those tin-can phones?”

  “Yeah.” Gabe props himself up on his elbow. His heartbeat’s slowing, but the heat low in his belly is taking longer to go away. He won’t get up to go to the bathroom until she’s gone.

  “We were stupid little kids, weren’t we?”

  “Yeah. Total assholes.”

  She smiles at him, almost as if she means to say more. Gabe hopes she does, though he’s not sure what, exactly, he hopes she’ll say. Instead, Janelle pushes aside his curtains and slides the window up. With one leg over the sill, she makes a show of looking down.

  “If I ever break my neck doing this...”

  He sits up straighter, thinking there’s something important she means to say. He’s a little too high for it, whatever it is. He should be more serious, he thinks. Though she isn’t.

  If she ever broke her neck doing that, if she ever fell when she tried to jump...what would he do? Would he jump after her? Would he pretend he didn’t know what she was doing? Would he lie and say he pushed her, just to keep everyone from knowing the truth?

  The next morning, not high, in fact, so deathly sober it’s like someone put a stack of encyclopedias on his head, Gabe is late for the bus and has to run. Everyone’s laughing at him when he gets on the bus, even Janelle. She sits in the middle, her mask of makeup turning her into a stranger. She doesn’t look at him until he pauses at her seat, thinking this once he’ll ask if he can sit with her. Wondering what she’d do if he leaned down right this minute and kissed her for the first time in front of everyone.

  “Sit down back there!” hollers the bus driver, and Gabe moves to the back, his usual seat.

  From there he can watch Janelle’s head and see her profile when she turns, as she always does, to look out the window. So he watches. She never looks back.

  * * *

  Gabe woke to morning light so
pale it might’ve been the moon. He blinked against it for a few seconds before remembering he wasn’t alone in his bed. The blonde beside him sprawled out, her mouth slack. Her makeup had smeared. He nudged her.

  “Get up.”

  She smacked her lips together and snuggled deeper into the pillows. He pushed her again, harder this time. Then again, until she looked at him.

  “The hell?” she said. “What time is it?”

  “Time for you to leave. It’s early. Get your shit and go before my brother gets up.”

  She stared at him, uncomprehending. “What difference does that make?”

  “I don’t want him seeing you, that’s all.” Gabe swung his legs over the edge of the bed. The floor was cold. His stomach was sour; the craving for a cigarette had become a physical burn. He wanted to light up more than he wanted anything else, even to pee. Even the “breakfast BJ” this chick-without-a-clue offered.

  “Jesus...” she muttered.

  “Hey. I didn’t promise you eggs and toast in the morning.” Gabe shrugged and got up to pad across the cold bare floor to find a pair of pants and a pullover shirt. He looked over his shoulder at her, still tangled in his sheets. He remembered her name now. Gina Hoffman. Definitely related to the Hoffmans he went to school with, and definitely a younger sibling, not a kid. The light of morning showed off the crow’s-feet and lines around her mouth that proved she wasn’t as young as he’d thought last night.

  “No, I guess you didn’t.” She ran a hand through her hair and got out of bed. She found her clothes, moving slowly but steadily enough. “I didn’t know you were going to kick me out before the sun was barely even up, though. I’d have left last night.”

  Gabe shrugged again, showing her it wouldn’t have made a difference to him, one way or another. Gina frowned. She pulled her shirt on without her bra, which she shoved in her purse. She hooked her fingers into the impractical stiletto heels and carried them with her out the door, where she paused.

  “Should I bother giving you my number?”

  Gabe looked up from the dresser, where he’d been sorting through his top drawer, searching for cigarettes and finding none. “I’ll probably just see you around.”

  She sucked in her lower lip. Then nodded. “Yeah. I guess so. See you around.”

  Gabe let one hand lift, but didn’t look in her direction again until he heard the creaking of her footsteps on the steps. When he heard the front door open and close, he went downstairs. The living room smelled faintly of body odor, a little like urine, a little like onions and grease. He looked at the litter of fast-food wrappers and empty cola bottles on the dining room table and muttered a curse.

  “Watch your mouth.”

  Gabe should’ve known the old man would already be awake. He hardly left the recliner anymore and probably had even slept there last night. “You’re not supposed to eat this crap. You know that.”

  His father shrugged and looked at him with bleary eyes. “Your brother brought it home for me last night, since you couldn’t be bothered to leave anything for me.”

  “You’re not a cripple. You can make yourself a sandwich.” Gabe gathered the trash, crumpling it in his fists, mindful of the way the sloppy leftover mayo squished through the paper and onto his hands. “This stuff’ll kill you. On second thought, let me run out and get you an egg, cheese and heart-attack biscuit.”

  His father laughed, the sound like rusted gears no longer capable of turning, but trying hard. “You’re a son of a bitch. You know that?”

  “So you’ve told me my whole damned life, old man.” Gabe paused before grabbing the last bit of trash. “You should get out of that chair. Do some exercise or something.”

  “What’s it to you?” the old man asked with a weak shake of his fist. “Don’t act like you wouldn’t be tickled spitless if you came down one morning and found me in this here recliner, already cold.”

  Gabe’s lips skinned back from his teeth in something more grimace than grin. Sometimes even liars told the truth. Sometimes they just lied. “Naw. That would break my heart.”

  His father snorted, yanked his hanky from his pocket and hawked into it. He folded the cloth over the mess and raised a crooked finger at his son. “Go make me some eggs and potatoes. That crap your brother fed me last night went right through me. I’m empty.”

  Cigarettes were still foremost on his mind, food a close second and a long, hot shower as soon as possible after that. Without answering, Gabe found a pack of smokes in the pocket of one of his jackets hanging in the hall closet. Leaving his dad muttering behind him, Gabe stalked through the kitchen to the back door. The first cigarette he pulled from the pack was broken, precious tobacco spilling from the white tube, but he had the second tucked between his lips in seconds. His lighter flared. He drew in the smoke, slow and deep. Let it out.

  “It’s a little early to be lighting up, isn’t it?”

  Startled, he almost dropped the lighter, but caught it with fingers already tingling with cold. Janelle, bundled in a hoodie with the hood pulled up, perched on the concrete steps of her grandmother’s back porch. She’d sounded teasing, but didn’t smile.

  Silently, Gabe held out the pack to her. He didn’t expect her to take one—not from him, anyway, even if she still smoked, which he doubted. She heaved herself upright and crossed the two squares of pavement to stand below him. She held out her hand.

  Gabe pulled the pack back. “No way.”

  “Don’t be a jerk, Gabe. You offered. Gimme.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t really want one.”

  “Don’t you tell me what I want!” Her gaze went hard and flat. Glittery.

  Shit. Gabe tucked another cigarette in his mouth, lit it. Handed it down to her. He tucked his bare hand under his armpit and shifted to keep warm. Janelle puffed, coughed and puffed again.

  “Gross,” she complained, but didn’t stub it out. Her second drag seemed to go down easier. She gave him a slight smile. “Rough night? Or just long?”

  “Not really that rough. You?” He wondered if she’d gone home with that loser from the night before. He didn’t think so. He hoped not. He wondered if she’d been sitting out here when Gina left the house, and if she’d seen her leaving. He hoped no to that, too.

  She hesitated. She had circles under her eyes, he noticed now. And the hollows of her cheeks were too deep. She looked away with a shrug.

  “Nan had a rough night. Yeah.”

  “Which means you did.”

  Janelle nodded silently. She let the cigarette burn between her fingers for another few seconds before putting it to her lips again. “I hate smoking. It tastes like shit, it stinks, it costs too much money. It gives you yellow teeth. And cancer.”

  “So don’t smoke.”

  She looked back up at him with a frown, tossed the cigarette to the pavement and ground it out with the toe of her boot. “Okay, Mr. Chimney. How about you don’t tell me what to do?”

  He took the last drag off his own smoke and stuck it into the coffee can on the porch railing. He held up both hands. “Peace.”

  Without another word, Janelle turned and went inside her house with a slam of the door. Gabe stared after her for a minute. He considered another cigarette, but his rumbling stomach convinced him breakfast would be a better order. Inside, the sound of laughter drew him to the living room, where he waited in the doorway, watching.

  The old man watched raptly as Andy told him some story about what had happened at work the day before. Andy could tell the hell out of a story. Probably because he forgot so many of the words he wanted to use and had to rely on gestures or phrases he made up to get his point across. He’d always been a clown, but he’d become a talented mimic. He stuttered on some of the phrases, but that just made their dad laugh harder.

  Andy looked up. “Gabe! Did your friend go home?”

  Gabe stifled a groan. He knew it had been a mistake to bring that girl back here. Usually he went to their houses so he could make a quick
escape, no witnesses. Now he was sure Janelle knew—of course she did, because she’d been at the bar last night and seen him with the other woman. And not that she should care, or that he should care if she knew. But now Andy knew, too, and Gabe did mind about that.

  “She’s not...yeah.” He scrubbed at his hair with his hand and rubbed his eyes. “She did.”

  “Should’ve asked her to stay for breakfast. I’m going to be make toad-in-the-hole. Or frog-on-a-raft. Your choice.” Andy grinned. “Dad, what do you want?”

  “Jesus, just eggs and toast,” their dad said with a shake of his head. “You and your fancy schmancy stuff.”

  Andy dropped Gabe a wink. “How about you?”

  “Eggs. Toast.” Gabe yawned, thinking how nice it would be to crawl back into bed with a full stomach and nothing to do all day but sleep. No work, no chores, no errands. Nobody breathing in his ear. A shower first, though, because he wanted to rinse off the stink of skank. “I’m going to shower. I’ll be down by the time you’re done. Eggs over easy. Toast not burned.”

  By the time he finished in the hot water, though, his eyes stung, and not from the shampoo, as he’d thought. It was the burn of smoke, and as he stepped out of the shower, the smoke alarm went off. Cursing, Gabe wrapped himself in a towel and hopped down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he found Andy running his hand under water at the sink while the old man limply waved a tea towel under that alarm.

  “Open the back door, for God’s sake,” Gabe cried, and did. Then he turned on the fan over the stove, and the ceiling fan, too. He waved his hand in front of his face, coughing. “What happened?”

  Andy turned from the sink with a frown. “Nothing. I just let the toast go a little too long, and we didn’t have butter so I used some oil for the eggs, but that made them too slippy, so when I was turning them, I almost dropped the pan.” He lifted his bad hand, frown deepening. “It was my damned fingers. They just gave out.”