“Join me, why don’t you?” He coldly patted the mattress space next to him.
I obeyed and climbed to the top.
“I’ve given it some thought,” Robert said after a long awkward silence. “And thought about what you said.”
“Look,” I said. “I’m sorry about what happened. I still don’t agree with you, but that doesn’t mean we can’t work out a solution to our problem here.”
“Do you remember something you said to me at the Christmas party three years ago?”
I drew a blank. No, I didn’t, so I shook my head.
“You got upset with me because you had been trying to get a job somewhere else in the organization and had interviewed with Steve.”
I nodded. It was doing something I actually wanted, and I had interviewed with the head of the division about a job where I could’ve worked from home and always worn pajamas, only to realize that he was one of Robert’s golf buddies. At the time I thought I was smart and name dropped him, which turned out to be a huge mistake instead.
“You told Steve not to hire me because you were too lazy to hire someone else,” I said.
He snapped his fingers. “That’s right. And you found out and told me that I should support you more in branching out.”
“And you told me a spider monkey with a short attention span could do my job.”
“Oh yeah.” He laughed. “God, I’m funny.”
He paused, still laughing, no doubt congratulating himself for such a great joke. He shook his head and held up a finger.
“Hold on,” he said. “The point is I have been holding you back.”
Joaquin entered the room with a piece of paper and handed it to Robert, who read it. He nodded, and Joaquin left.
“So I’m trading you to another family,” he said. “It’s sort of like this one. You’ll probably like it better.”
“Excuse me?”
“We’re cutting corners everywhere,” Robert said. “We’re all making sacrifices, and your job seemed the most unnecessary.”
“Unnecessary?” I asked. “I do everything around here!”
“Maybe you can stay on for a couple extra days and train some of the girls in what you do?”
I tried to crawl with pride and dignity off that bunk bed. “Get bent,” I said angrily, swinging a leg onto the ladder. “You can’t treat this situation like a corporate round of layoffs.”
“I have to,” Robert said. “It’s all I know.”
Joaquin waited for me a few feet away. He grabbed my arm and ushered me to the front exit of Costco. The other women watched.
“You’re not leaving us, are you?” one of them asked.
“I’ll be back,” I said. “This place is going to fall apart without me.”
“But how will we find the lotion?”
CHAPTER 11
Karma is Always Just Around the Corner
JOAQUIN DROVE ME to a part of town that used to have this really great Italian place where Bruce took me on our first date. I remember the risotto was really good and the waiter was super cute and I had to tell myself to stop checking him out.
I allowed Joaquin to drive me away from Robert and the Costco because I was angry. Fine, I thought, as I sulked with my arms folded. Let him see what it’s like. Let him have the walls come down around him or his wives starve or worse, bitch at him because there’s no more peanut butter. Then we’ll see who’s holding who back.
“Joaquin?” I asked.
He said nothing.
“Who’s the worse boss you ever had?”
To my surprise, he actually gave thought to the question. “I used to work at that Costco,” he said. “My supervisor just rode my case nonstop.” He shook his head. “I remember this one time, I was taking classes at the community college and they scheduled me during a time where I had class and I had a test. I told them I couldn’t do it, and so my supervisor fired me.”
“That sucks,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “I told her to go fuck herself and left. Then I marched out to the parking lot and saw a giant mushroom cloud in the distance and knew that nothing I cared about mattered anymore.”
We pulled up at an abandoned gas station, where someone had sprayed Ezekiel 11:10 on the door. We sat in silence, and I felt a change of heart swirling in my veins.
“What if you took me back?” I asked. “Robert has flares of moods, but he never stays mad for long.”
“They said they’d be here about now,” he said, looking around.
“Come on, Joaquin,” I said. “We could just leave. Go have an adventure somewhere else. We could do fun things like pillage mansions or finding my family. You don’t have to work for Robert or anyone else if you don’t want to.”
He stared at me in heavy silence. It occurred to me that I might not be completely understanding of where he was coming from.
“Or we can find your family,” I said. “I’m not made of stone.”
“What, and hang with you?” he asked. “You, the girl who blamed me for every time the bathroom got backed up?”
“No, just every time you ate processed cheese,” I said. “It was deductive reasoning, which I may have been wrong. It’s happened and I apologize.”
“Screw you,” he said. “This is a world where I don’t need another woman telling me what I should or shouldn’t be eating. And if I die because I ate too much fried food, then hooray. At least I died doing something I loved.”
“Fried chicken?” I asked. “This is the flag you’re waving?
At that moment, a beat up van pulled up. On the side of the door read the words “Sunshine Hills Christian Church,” but when the door opened, two people stepped out who didn’t look like they had spent much time in worship. Their faces were covered by woolen ski masks and they carried large guns with them. They marched up to the Civic and banged on the doors.
“Get out,” Joaquin said.
I obeyed, emotionally shaken up. I opened the door and was immediately grabbed by one of the gunmen, who was about half an inch shorter than me and a bit on the stocky side. They looked me up and down.
“Hey, man,” he said to Joaquin. “She’s got on a UCLA shirt. How do we know that UCLA isn’t coming back for her?”
“UCLA is dead. Don’t worry about him. She’s yours now. You got her payment?”
The other gunman nodded and went back into the van while the one who held me grabbed my sweatshirt and went to pull it off, exposing my Batman shirt.
“Dude,” he said. “Does she belong to Batman too? I’ve heard that guy is nuts; kills anything that crosses his path. If they come looking for her—”
Joaquin raised an eye at me. “Did you belong to Batman?”
“That’s a real thing?” I asked. “That’s not really a thing, is it? I thought I made that up so UCLA would leave me alone.”
One gunman turned to the other. “Remember when we killed that UCLA guy?”
The other gunman nodded. “Yeah.”
“That guy just cried that Batman was coming for him. So pathetic.”
“I think that was before I got hired here,” said the shorter gunman.
“Eh,” he said. “Killing him was good, but not great.”
“Forget it,” Joaquin said. “She’s fine.”
The other gunman returned holding three dogs of mixed breeds on leashes I incredulously looked from them to Joaquin.
“Dogs?” I asked. “Robert traded me for dogs?”
The dogs were led into Joaquin’s Civic as the gunman went back into the van and reemerged this time holding cases of shampoo and conditioner.
“Come on,” the gunman said, pushing me to the van. “Darren Warren waits for no one.”
“Wait. What? I said. “Darren Warren? That guy?”