He Called Me His Plaything in Front of His Men, So I Left Carrying His Heir novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Plaything
At the Candelas' Sunday table, Aurelio calls Ximena his plaything in front of eleven men; she lays his chain on his plate, walks out through the kitchen, and on the platform finds Cosima carrying her coat.
A visiting boss looked at me over his wine glass and asked who I was.
I was standing behind Aurelio's chair with a pitcher of ice water in both hands.
I had asked to help serve that Sunday, because it was the only way to be in the room.
A dozen men sat at the long table in the back of the restaurant, and every one of them had stopped chewing.
Aurelio didn't turn his head.
He held his knife and fork the way a man holds things he has been handed.
"That's the plaything," he said.
His voice was flat and bored.
"She keeps the bed warm until I'm bored."
The table laughed.
It was a big, loose laugh, the sound a table of men make when the boss has told them it's allowed.
The visitor laughed with them, but first he looked past Aurelio, down the length of the cloth, at the old man with the roast.
I saw him do it.
The old man was Aurelio's uncle, in a gray cardigan under a good jacket, with a soft smile and rings on three fingers.
He had not laughed.
He was cutting the meat into slices as thin as paper.
He laid down the knife and said, mildly, "Now."
Aurelio picked up his fork and ate.
I stood there with the cold pitcher against my ribs.
I was nineteen years old.
I had slept in this man's bed since October, and I had never once heard him use that voice on me.
I had a positive test in my coat pocket, from the clinic on my lunch break that Friday.
The coat was hanging over the back of his chair.
I hadn't told him yet.
I had planned to tell him tonight, in the dark, with his hand in my hair, after everyone was gone.
I looked down at the back of his head.
His collar was a little crooked, which it never was.
His left hand lay flat on the white tablecloth, spread wide, with the tendons standing up in it.
It was the only part of him that wasn't still.
I thought: say something.
I thought: look at me.
He ate another bite, and he did not look at me.
I set the pitcher down on the cloth, softly, so it wouldn't spill.
Then I reached up under my hair with both hands and unhooked the thin gold chain he had given me in November.
He had bought it from a jeweler on Independence Avenue and fastened it on me himself, in his car.
He had said nothing, and kissed the back of my neck.
I leaned past his shoulder and laid it on his plate, across the veal.
The links made a small sound against the china.
Aurelio's fork stopped.
"Then you can stop being bored," I said.
I said it to the whole table, in my ordinary voice, the one I use on the factory line over the noise.
"I'm gone, and I'm not coming back."
The laughing died off one man at a time.
The visitor set down his glass.
The old man did not move, but his eyes came up and settled on me, small and pleasant and interested.
Aurelio pushed back his chair and stood.
The hand on the tablecloth had closed into a fist, and the cloth was bunched under it.
He did not touch me.
He looked at me for the first time that day, and what was in his face was not boredom.
I didn't have time to learn what it was.
"Ximena," he said.
I didn't wait for the rest.
I left my coat on his chair, because my hands were shaking and I could not get an arm into a sleeve.
I walked down the side of the room, past the waiter holding a tray, past the boss from Chicago, past two men who dropped their eyes.
I pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen.
The cooks went quiet at their stations.
His younger sister was standing by the walk-in with a ledger under her arm, in a charcoal blazer, with her reading glasses on a chain.
Her name was Cosima, and she kept the family's books.
She looked at my face, and at the door swinging behind me.
Then she stepped to one side and let me pass.
I went out the back, down the alley, and onto Southwest Trafficway with nothing in my hands.
In my back pocket was my debit card, and in my head was the schedule.
The Amtrak out of Union Station left at 9:40 that night.
It was only a little after three.
I had no coat and one plan.
I was not going home to my mother with his chain on my neck.
I walked the four miles to Union Station in my server's blouse, in March, with my arms wrapped around myself.
At the ticket window I paid $23 of my own money to the first stop east.
It was the cheapest ticket they sold, and I had nowhere else to go.
I sat on a bench under the big clock and waited for my train to be called.
I told myself I was not crying.
At twenty past nine the board changed and the platform doors opened.
I stood up and put my hand flat on my stomach, where nothing showed yet.
"It's you and me," I said, very low.
I walked out onto the platform.
Halfway down it, under the yellow lights, a woman in a charcoal blazer was coming toward me through the cold, carrying my coat.
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