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  Bev nudged the vet’s finger aside gently. “Trudy, I love you, but if you touch my screen one more time . . .”

  “Sorry. Hey, Ethan! We think we found your replacement!”

  Trudy Abelard was beaming, and Ethan pasted on a smile he didn’t feel in return. “That’s awesome. Who?”

  “It’s amazing. I was editing the job posting to get it ready when my niece pinged me out of the blue. You know Marguerite, the one who was up in Oklahoma? She’d mostly been doing relief jobs up there. Her husband just got transferred back to San Antonio, and she was asking me to keep an ear to the ground for any associate spots because now that they’re moving back, they plan to stay. They’re in town right now, house-hunting. Can you believe the timing?”

  “Wow.” That timing was pretty astonishing. “That’s like . . . fate.”

  Fuck. No take backsies now, even if he’d wanted that. Not if they were bringing in a relative. Trudy’s protégée no less. She’d been so proud when her favorite niece decided to follow in her footsteps; now she was beaming at the prospect of bringing Marguerite into the practice.

  They focused on the schedule again, chattering brightly, hardly noticing when Ethan waved and headed into the back office area to write up his notes on the horse.

  It was as if they’d already started to work around him. He was as good as gone. And free to pursue his kinky entrepreneurial dreams.

  Chapter 3

  Victoria was surprised by how easy it turned out to be to completely uproot her life. She’d thought herself so settled in Providence. But after the month she’d already spent purging the excess from her studio—selling off what she could, in the end giving away things to avoid having to move or store them—she had little trouble fitting the stuff that remained in the trunk and backseat of her car. She’d allotted an hour for loading up and last-minute emergencies; she wound up leaving Providence thirty minutes ahead of schedule.

  At five-thirty on a Sunday morning, there wasn’t much traffic. She made it out of the city, down through Cranston and Warwick, her car a deep blue shadow in the pre-dawn chill. When she spotted a Starbucks sign near Mystic, she exited and made a loop to find it. She knew it was an expense she could ill afford, but something about it fed her soul. One last fling to wash down the nutty granola bar she’d been saving for breakfast. One last middle finger at Larry, too, who had always bitched about his primary competition, even as he refused to add wi-fi or any food options beyond the barest minimum of morning pastries.

  When she finally got back on the I-95 and had a chance to take a sip, she realized with a start that she could have made a better latte herself. Maybe not such a crappy barista after all, even if she had still been kind of a slow one.

  The early start got her through New London and a few more towns before the traffic started piling up. New York and a hefty chunk of New Jersey were one long nightmare, and by the time she hit the farm country again she was beginning to wonder if she’d ever make it off the East Coast. But by midday, when she stopped somewhere in Pennsylvania to stretch her legs and buy some chips, she took one deep breath of the air outside the car and knew she was in a different climate. The crisp wind bore a distinctly new flavor, pine and spruce and woodsmoke and frost that had never mixed with sea air.

  She didn’t have time to stop and sightsee. It wasn’t even particularly scenic—just a gas station across the street from a few houses that had seen better days, and wintry-bare trees all around with evergreens peeking through. Snow patched the ground, thin and grimy, more of it gray or sand-colored near the parking lot than white. Through the trees, she could see some better-preserved stretches. When she walked closer to the edge of the lot to get a better look, she spotted a set of marks crossing the surface of one low drift: perfect bird tracks, so clear she could practically envision the thing hopping along. A cardinal maybe. Or something less vivid, but she liked to think it was a cardinal, dangerously cheerful against the white background.

  Cardinals were small. How did they get away with being bright red anyway? A question for the internet to answer later, if she remembered to ask. It felt good to notice things again; since Christmas she’d been so wound up over leaving school, working, selling things off, trying to make ends meet, that she’d had no time to do so much as sketch, much less anything truly creative. With the moment-to-moment tension gone, her artistic mind was awakening again. This drive, crazy though it might be, was a short vacation from the harsh realities of her new life as an actual adult.

  It felt like vacation now because she wasn’t used to it, but it had been her way of life up until five weeks ago. One long vacation from reality. No wonder she’d done well at design; she’d never been distracted by having to deal with the entire bottom half of Maslow’s hierarchy. Sure, she’d worked for her grades, and even if she sometimes doubted her talent—what artist didn’t?—she had plenty of objective affirmation that she was good at her chosen field. But in a way, her dad wasn’t wrong. She had been taking without thinking. Stuff had been handed to her. Opportunity had been handed to her. She’d known that before, but she’d always thought of the big opportunities as the important factor: the chance to get a great private education with tutors whenever she needed them, the chance to attend the best design school. Getting to stay in a family friend’s Manhattan loft while she’d done two of her summer internships, instead of in a tiny, shabby apartment shared with five other people. Accepting last summer’s Paris internship with Balenciaga without a thought for the expense. She’d flown first class and she’d appreciated that. But it hadn’t occurred to her that the distinction wasn’t between flying first class and coach. It wasn’t even between flying first class or not flying at all. It was between never having to worry about anything and having to worry about everything because you weren’t sure you would have the money to eat that day if you paid the electric bill. Which expense was more important? Which could be put off another day or week? And how could you get the money to cover at least one expense, to take one massive, pressing concern off the endless list for a short time?

  She’d thought hardship meant not getting to do things in style, or sometimes not getting to do the things you preferred. So naïve. Hardship meant your choices were between bad and worse, if you were lucky enough to get those choices at all.

  Now she was driving straight back to her parents, after barely over a month of trying to make it on her own. Sure, she’d told herself it was about returning the car and living on the cheap in Dallas, but . . . what about once she got there? For twenty-two years they’d kept her in a bubble and she hadn’t even realized it. She wasn’t sure they had realized it. They weren’t awful people; they meant well and only wanted to protect her. If she went back home and they offered her an easy way out—as they almost certainly would—did she have the strength to refuse?

  A pickup truck drove into the station, its tires scraping the salt-and-sand-strewn asphalt as it turned. The harsh sound broke the reverent winter stillness, and with a sigh and a final stretch, Victoria returned to her car. She scrolled through her playlists, finally settling on a mix of show tunes, and then pulled back out onto the road, pointed toward the narrowest overlapping segments of Maryland and West Virginia.

  At a certain point it all started to look uniformly Appalachian. Ridge-and-valley country, the part that looked like ripples on a relief map. In real life it was mile upon mile of nearly straight road edged by endless ranks of winter-bare trees, only the evergreens hinting at the colors the landscape might provide in another month or two. The land looked completely fed up with the whole stark winter beauty deal. At least the good weather had been holding since she’d left Rhode Island; the sky was a flat, pale gray-blue, as bland and drained as if it, too, was sick and tired of winter.

  Grungy little towns loomed up, unmemorable and quickly passed by. When she hit Lexington, Virginia, it was near sunset, and she scanned the chain motels along the highway. They looked clean, well-lit. From her admittedly brief research, she
knew most of them were within her tiny budget.

  She had never stayed in a motel before. She started to pull into the one she’d picked, heard her mother’s gasp of horror, and drove right past, hating herself.

  People do this all the time. This is what people do. And her only other affordable option was to sleep in the car: not a risk she was willing to take.

  She swung into a drive-through burger place and defiantly ordered off the value menu. A burger, some fries, a weirdly large soda.

  With dinner cooling, she was motivated to act quickly. She circled back to the motel, parked, and practically jogged to the reception desk inside. Paid cash up-front for the room, then found it and quickly unloaded all her things from the backseat.

  Not quickly enough. Her burger was already stone cold by the time she’d dragged the last suitcase inside, double-checked that the car was locked, and then closed and bolted the door to her room.

  She munched on a clammy French fry as she sized up the place. It looked clean enough, although it was a bit musty; the bathroom smelled of disinfectant, but there was nothing obviously gross happening there.

  The bed checked out as reasonably comfortable; when she flopped onto it faceup, spread-eagled, it didn’t poke or sink in or squeak. She lay there for a moment, then giggled and moved her arms and legs, tracing an angel shape on the orange-and-brown bedspread. Rolling over to examine the shaved-chenille fabric, she decided the design wasn’t too bad: a pattern of overlapping rings that neither drew nor deflected the eye in any dramatic way.

  “Way to turn orange into a neutral.”

  Or the way to camouflage something . . . Her mother’s fears rose up as if they were her own, and she practically flung herself off the bed with a curse, then reapproached it with her heart in her throat. She flipped up one corner of the coverlet by the foot, mumbled please, please, please a few times, then plucked the sheets back from the mattress.

  No brown or red flecks. Even in the crevices between the piping and the fabric, or tucked under the pillow top, when she finally steeled herself to start exploring further. The rest of the corners, the sheets and blankets, and the nooks and crannies around the headboard checked out, too. As did the two chairs and the curtains. No telltale spots, no tiny beasties fleeing from the glare of her cell phone flashlight.

  The burger was a semicongealed lump, but it was calories she’d paid for, so she ate it anyway, slumping in one of her bedbug-free chairs with her feet propped up on the equally vermin-free bed.

  Something had gone her way for the first time in a while. Sure, her standards had sunk pretty low if the highlights of her day were saw some cool bird tracks in the snow; didn’t encounter bedbugs. But she would take what she could get.

  Halfway through her meal, she paused long enough to pull up a video on her laptop—She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown, one of her favorite comfort watches, especially the part where Snoopy turned out to be a whiz with fabric and design. She needed a moment to chill out before the task ahead.

  By afternoon the day after tomorrow, she’d be in Dallas. She’d already chickened out on calling her mother with a specific arrival time, instead texting her the vaguest details she thought she could get away with and saying she didn’t need a ride from the airport. But at some point on the drive, she’d realized she wasn’t ready to go home at all. It was childish and cowardly and probably meant she had a rotten character. But she didn’t think she had the strength to go running home with her tail between her legs after massively fucking up her brief and ridiculously ill-considered bid for independence.

  Her parents would probably take her right back to a string of psychiatrists and psychologists, just like they’d done when she was a little kid struggling in school. Struggling compared to her older sister, Alexandra, at least, who had apparently come out of the womb reading and writing legal briefs and doing trigonometry in her head.

  The experts had all insisted there was nothing wrong with Victoria; she just wasn’t performing like her older sister because she was a different child with different strengths. She excelled in art, in visual-spatial tasks, and some verbal skills, but not in pencil-paper work and standardized tests . . . which meant she was hard to quantify. Her parents had taken all that to mean she would never be able to achieve much academically. They’d sent her, along with a huge chunk of money, to the best school they could find . . . a girls-only boarding school. In small classes, with intensive tutoring, her grades naturally improved. As far as Victoria could tell, her parents never credited her hard work or considered that their assessment of her ability had been wrong; they’d praised the school and made a lot of jokes about how funding that additional computer lab had been worth every penny.

  Soon her biggest problem was homesickness. Her parents lined up extra sessions with the school psychologist, who counseled her to make friends and find a “family” at the school. Eventually she had, in a way. Mostly she’d given up feeling like her parents would ever validate her the way they did Alexandra, but she didn’t really resent it. Those were the breaks, and at boarding school her teachers loved and nurtured her passion for the arts as they would any form of giftedness.

  Victoria’s parents loved her very much. She knew that. But she was a lateish afterthought of a child who hadn’t been the perfect follow-up they’d expected, and they didn’t like it when they felt they were having to deal with her. They didn’t like a lot of cause for concern. Or a lot of questions. They liked things that went smoothly, according to the manual, and required only routine maintenance for optimal functioning. The newest model of any electronic device. A fresh-off-the-lot BMW. A child who either blew the roof off all standardized testing and went on to clerk for Supreme Court justices before vaulting into one of the youngest junior partnerships in the history of law firms . . . or perhaps a daughter who might have been an unobjectionable English or business major and had the equivalent success in sororities, then the Junior League, after finding a husband who was the male equivalent of Alexandra.

  Those weren’t things Victoria had ever said aloud to her parents. Mostly because after a few years away at boarding school—they’d put her in the residential program for “socialization”, even though they lived not five miles away from the school—she’d learned not to talk to them about anything that mattered to her. It never went well. They were nice people who loved her, but they didn’t get her and she didn’t get them. She didn’t particularly crave their approval anymore. . . but she didn’t want them to hate her.

  Unfair, ungrateful, ungracious, immature . . . Victoria was probably all of those things for wanting to throw away the advantages her parents had given her, but she couldn’t handle hearing the words from them yet. Not after the events of the last few days. She didn’t want to hear them say—or at least imply, yet again—that she was their problem. She didn’t want to be anybody’s problem. She didn’t even need to be anybody’s solution. She just wanted to be herself, and have that be enough.

  However . . . practically speaking, she did need to stay somewhere for at least a few nights until she found a job and some sort of cheap living situation. Once she had her feet under her, she would be in a better position to talk to her parents. It would be nice to have an intermediary, someone to smooth the way with them in the meantime, reassuring them that she was safe and they didn’t need to worry. And only one person could fill that role.

  Victoria and her sister Alexandra had never been particularly close. Too many years separated them, and they were so different in almost every way. But since Victoria had moved to Rhode Island they’d started to email and text each other more frequently about other things. Less like a much-older sibling with a pesky teenage sister and more like peers. Almost like friends.

  Victoria paused the video and dragged her cell phone toward her; it slid easily over the Formica table that hugged the corner of the motel room. She would miss the phone horribly when she had to give it up; it had been a lifesaver this past week, and she wasn’t sure how she
would function without GPS and the internet always at her fingertips. People did, though. So she would learn to.

  It dawned on her that some of the self-proclaimed Luddites at RISD who eschewed smartphones and carried around only the barest-boned, dumb models probably weren’t being hipsters at all, as she’d always assumed; they were doing it to save money. She’d had this realization about so many things the past month that the sensation had grown familiar, but it never got any less horrifying when she looked back and considered how insensitive she’d probably been in her blind privilege; sometimes she felt the entire world was one big conspiracy about thrift that she hadn’t been aware of for twenty-two years. Now her eyes were opening slowly, and the light was painful on her previously shaded retinas.

  She took up the phone and navigated to her contacts, taking the long way around to get to the information she needed. It really wasn’t a time for email or texting, but she hated phone calls, and this one wouldn’t be easy. But it would be easier than showing up on her parents’ doorstep in two days.

  Finally, she steeled herself and made the call. As it rang, she pulled her legs up into the chair and hugged her knees, constricting herself as much as possible.

  “Hello? Vic?” Alexandra sounded busy and distracted. She always did, though.

  “Hey, Alex. How’s it going?”

  A heavy sigh overloaded the phone for a second, then a muffled thump and curse. “Gimme a second.” More thumping, then the distinct sound of a door closing. “Okay. What the fuck is going on, Victoria? And make it quick. I have to get back to a meeting.”

  Shit. “I’m sorry. I can call you tomorrow. I—”

  “Are you pregnant?”

  “What? No. Why is that the first thing people keep—?”

  “Mom’s convinced you’re knocked up and suffering from temporary pregnancy insanity. I told her that wasn’t a thing, but she didn’t seem receptive.”

  “I am neither pregnant nor insane.”