Amber liked to do what she considered men’s work; something she claimed her husband was allergic to. The new house they had built was completed, but she taught herself to lay ceramic tile and to finish drywall and to do rough and finish carpentry with the ambition of upgrading the amenities with which the house was originally furnished. She would sometimes call me and tell me that she was performing a manly task which her wimp of a husband couldn’t do; such as the time she was finishing a basement wall with drywall compound while in the nude. She said that it made her horny filling the seams of the gypsum with gobs of white mud. By the time our conversation had ended I had ordered Amber to dab various parts of her body with drywall mud, and ultimately to masturbate to orgasm for me. I think she got her rocks off as much by the fact that she was doing work that her wimpy husband couldn’t do as she did from the sexual act.
In any event, I sat waiting, my head turning every time a car pulled into view, for our first meeting in the parking-lot of an appointed fast-food restaurant in Wichita Kansas while Sarah picked at the salty french- fries from the carton of her kid’s meal. As much as I had longed to enact a physical encounter with Amber the truth was that given the circumstances I was more concerned with Sarah’s and my future living arrangements; the natural order of human necessity—food-shelter- sex—having predicated my disposition. I hadn’t given Amber much time to make the arrangements and I hoped that she did not intend to place us in some cockroach infested shanty; that is if she was able to make any arrangements at all. My money would not carry me far if I had to continue to pay for motel rooms.
I watched as a pretty young brunette with a pale complexion and a small lithe frame walked toward me and then past me. Sarah and I had been waiting for over an hour past our scheduled meeting time of one-thirty and I began to worry that Amber would not show. I watched as the brunette made her way along the cars in the parking-lot as if she had lost her car, but she had only just pulled in a few moments earlier in a blue mini-pickup truck. The young woman turned back once again surveying the cars until she stopped at my car door and signaled for me to roll down my window.
“Nice car! Are you Mathew?” she smiled.
“Yes.” I was more than a little confused. This girl did not look like the woman in the photograph that Amber had sent to me nor did she sound like Amber. She was dressed in a low-cut leather miniskirt, the sort that I imagined a prostitute might wear, and long matching leather boots, with fat two-inch thick heels, that ended just below her knees. In her exposed navel she wore a diamond bellybutton ring with a stone the size of a sunflower seed. Her top, a plain white but low- cut blouse, was tied by the tails in a bow above her narrow midriff. Her breasts were smallish, the size of oranges, but were pushed together so as to look as if they were larger than they actually were. Her face was made-up just a bit too heavily. She had narrow lips and a pug Irish looking nose that looked cute below her large green eyes and her long black eyelashes. “You’re not Amber…are you?”
“No silly; Amber couldn’t make it.” She waved her hand back airily as if amused at my mistake, “She said something about being followed by her husband and asked me to meet you here. My name is Melanie. I used to work with Amber. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for
Amber.” She said stroking a set of long neatly manicured red fingernails across her breastbone. Amber had mentioned a girlfriend she had been intimate with once upon a time and I wondered if Melanie was that someone.
“That’s great.” A knot balled up in my stomach at the thought of having come so close to being caught. I was thankful that Amber had been as alert as she was. “Did Amber make any living arrangements for us?”
“She did, but I don’t know if you’re going to like them. She hasn’t found you a place yet so she asked me to let you stay at my place. It’s not very big but I live alone. And it’s safe.” She gave a knowing smile revealing a perfect set of pearl-white teeth. “Follow me. I’m in the little blue pickup.” She swayed her hips and pointed in the wrong direction and then giggled and corrected her mistake.
Melanie sashayed away; her tiny butt cheeks flexing alternately in a manor that suggested that she knew how to attract attention, and she climbed into her little blue mini-pickup-truck. What choice did I have but to trust the young friend of my friend? I pulled behind her and followed.
“Who is she daddy?” Sarah looked up at me with a petulant frown, as if threatened by the competition of another female.
“She’s just someone who’s going to help us for a few days.”
“Okay.” Sarah said cheerfully and went on playing with a toy she had pulled from her kids’ meal (a black, red robot gismo) as if her discontented mood were contrived.
We drove along the main thoroughfare for a few miles, past clusters of modern storefronts and fast-food restaurants, before turning down side-streets lined with well kept cottages and bungalows with small but neat green lawns and stretches of road that subsidized the long narrow driveways as additional parking space. We drove until we reached a typical aluminum sided white slab- ranch home with black shutters and an asphalt roof. I followed Melanie into the driveway and watched as she got out and waved to me at the side door signaling me to come in.
I pulled Sarah by the hand trying to hide her reluctant resistance to enter the house of a stranger. Once inside the kitchen, the room to which the side door opened, I was overcome by a surprising barrage of smells: cinnamon, brown sugar, olive oil, freshly baked almond cookies, Italian bread and the faint whiff of the fruity, almost tropical, perfume worn about the slender wrists and narrow neck of our hostess. Melanie didn’t dress like a homemaker but her kitchen indicated otherwise. From another room I could hear the ting-ting-ting of a symbol being rattled as an upbeat jazzy lyric-less tune softly hummed through a hi-fi stereo. The kitchen, for such a small and older home, was spacious and modern with a vaulted ceiling and maple cupboards and Corian countertops. The dinette table was covered with baking items; a thick pasty wad of brown cookie dough, a variety of cookie cutters, rolling pins, pie-tins and cookie sheets. A set of salt and pepper shakers molded as Pilgrim and Indian, precursors of the upcoming holiday (in my grief and haste to escape I had forgotten how close the holiday was), lay perched on the edge of an almond colored stove.
“I’m sorry. We’ve interrupted your baking.” I said trying to discard the awkward sensation of my intrusion into the privacy of a stranger’s personal space. I felt, as when I was forced as a child on untolled family vacations to stay in the homes of unfamiliar aunts and uncles, the uncomfortable self-consciousness of an interloper, completely unsure of the invisible lines that separated the acceptable level of impingement from the requisite measure of penetration. Our selfless benefactor, apparently recognizing my emotional displacement, raised her cheeks in a genuine display of smiling teeth and waived us forward as she backed through the doorway to the adjacent room.