He Called Me His Plaything in Front of His Men, So I Left Carrying His Heir novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Coat

Cosima hands over the coat, the test and an envelope of wages, and says her uncle will want to know; Ximena goes home to her mother's step and gets a voicemail with her name said twice.

Cosima stopped an arm's length from me and held the coat out by its collar.

"You left this on his chair," she said.

I took it.

It was still warm from the car heater, and it smelled like the restaurant, garlic and floor wax.

The test was in the right pocket, where I had put it.

I felt for it and found it, a little plastic stick folded in a tissue.

I thought: she knows.

Cosima watched me find it.

She did not say a word about it.

"There's an envelope in the inside pocket," she said. "It's two weeks of wages, in cash."

"I was never on the books," I said.

"I know. I put you on them for two weeks." She pushed her glasses up her nose with one ink-stained finger. "You waited tables without being paid. So you're paid."

"I don't want his money."

"It isn't his money."

She said it quietly, and that was all she said about it.

A conductor called the first boarding.

I put my arm through the sleeve at last, and the cuff caught on my wrist.

Cosima reached out and pulled it straight, the way you fix a child's collar.

Then she took her hand away as if she had touched a stove.

"Get off at Lee's Summit," she said. "Not Jefferson City, not Sedalia. It's twenty minutes, and there's a bus back to the Westside in the morning."

"How do you know where I live?"

"I keep the books, Ximena."

She looked back up the platform toward the station doors, and then at me.

"Uncle will want to know," she said.

She said it in a flat, tired voice, like a woman reading the weather off a card.

"Know what?" I said.

"Anything." She turned up her collar against the cold. "Whatever happens at that table, Uncle wants to know."

I looked at her.

I thought she meant the old man with the roast, the one who had said "Now."

I did not ask what she meant by it.

I had a train to catch.

"Go," Cosima said.

I got on.

I took a window seat in a nearly empty car and put my forehead on the cold glass.

The train pulled out through the freight yards.

We passed the black bulk of the West Bottoms and a long string of tank cars.

Cosima stood on the platform with her hands in her blazer pockets and did not wave.

I counted the envelope on my lap, because counting was something to do.

It held $640.

It was the most money I had ever held at one time that I had not earned on my feet.

At Lee's Summit I stepped down onto an empty platform with a bare light bulb and a vending machine.

There was no bus until six.

I sat on a bench until almost one in the morning.

Then I called a rideshare and gave the driver my mother's address.

I had run out of ideas, and my feet hurt.

My mother's house is a small rented one on the Westside, with a crooked porch and a bad back step.

The kitchen light was on, as it always is.

She cooks the parish's early breakfast at the church hall, so she is up at four.

She sleeps in her chair when she can.

I did not go in.

I sat down on the back step in the dark with my coat pulled over my knees.

After a while the screen door creaked.

My mother, Perla, came out in her robe with her hair loose and a dish towel over her shoulder.

She is forty-four, built broad and low, with forearms that can lift a stockpot of beans without effort.

She looked down at me, at my hands, my face, my thin blouse.

"You're not wearing a sweater," she said.

"No, Mamá."

"It's March," she said.

"I know," I said.

She sat down on the step beside me with a small grunt, and for a minute we looked at the yard together.

"I'm pregnant," I said. "And I'm done."

I had practiced a longer speech, on the walk and on the train.

I had a speech about him, and about the table.

It had gone out of my head.

My mother did not ask who the father was.

She didn't ask whether I was sure, or how far along, or what he had done.

She put her hand on the back of my neck, where the chain had been, and left it there.

"Are you hungry?" she said.

I started to cry.

I cried the way I had been telling myself I wouldn't, with my whole face, into her shoulder.

She let me, and said nothing, and rubbed my back in slow circles.

When I was finished, she stood up.

"Come in," she said. "I'll put on the comal."

I sat at her kitchen table in my coat and watched her warm tortillas on the black skillet.

She had done the same when I was seven and my father had just died.

She set a plate in front of me, beans and cheese rolled up in one.

The tortilla came from the factory where I worked nights, because she buys them from the day shift.

I knew the hands that had made it.

I ate two.

She sat across from me with her arms folded and asked her first question only when my plate was clean.

"Is he a good man?" she said.

I thought about the dock at three in the morning.

I thought about a man in a good coat standing in the cold, eating a hot tortilla with both hands, asking me what I was studying.

I thought about the table.

"I don't know," I said. "I thought so."

She nodded slowly, as if that were a complete answer.

"Sleep," she said. "Tomorrow, you decide."

My old bed was made.

I lay down in my coat on the narrow mattress, under the glow-in-the-dark stars I had stuck to the ceiling at twelve.

I took my phone out for the first time since noon.

I had silenced it in the restaurant.

The screen lit up my hand.

There were fourteen missed calls.

All of them came from the same number, a landline on Independence Avenue that I knew by heart.

There was one voicemail, left at 11:52.

I put it to my ear.

There was breathing, and the faint hiss of a bad line.

Then came a man's voice I would have known in a crowd of ten thousand, rough and low.

"Ximena."

A pause.

"Ximena."

That was all.

The line stayed open for a long time, and then it clicked off.

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