My husband dumped me for my own maid of honor, and he did it sitting down. “Samira doesn’t let herself go,” he said, looking me up and down like I’d done it on purpose. I never told him I was pregnant. Twenty-two months later, he pushed open the glass doors of the climbing gym I own.
That Thursday, Dominic was stretched out on our gray sofa with his feet on the ottoman and the hockey game on low.
I was out in the hall with a sheet of paper folded four times in my back jeans pocket.
The fertility clinic had printed it that afternoon. One number on it. 212.
Twenty-six months I’d waited for a number like that.
Twenty-six months of shots in my thigh before work, crying in my car outside the clinic, charting every cycle in a spiral notebook from the dollar store, swallowing whatever the nurse put in my hand. Dominic acted like he never saw the bruises.
His birthday was Saturday. The printout was going inside his card.
I had sixty-one names in a list I never showed anyone.
Sixty-one. I thought we’d made it out the other side.
Then the phone on his chest lit up.
Samira.
We’d shared a locker in seventh grade. She held my bouquet at the altar.
Her name came up with a little red heart after it, and his mouth went soft before he could stop it.
I knew that look. He used to give it to me.
He flipped the phone over on his chest. “Kendall, come sit down a sec.”
I didn’t sit.
My hand went flat over my back pocket like he could see through denim.
“What’s going on?” I said.
He turned the volume down. He didn’t get up. Nine years married, twenty-six months of needles, and he couldn’t take his feet off the ottoman to do it.
“I’m done faking it,” he said.
My ears started ringing.
“Dominic. Faking what?”
He looked at me then, and it was pity, which was worse than anything mean.
“Samira understands me. She wants the life I want,” he said.
A laugh came out of me, just one, like a cough.
“Samira? My Samira?”
“We didn’t plan it. She was just around when things got hard.”
“Sure,” I said. “Nobody plans to sleep with the maid of honor. It just lands on you. Like weather.”
He flinched, and then he didn’t.
“She’s disciplined,” he said. “Up at five, lifting, a plan for her whole life. With her I’m finally going somewhere.”
I looked down at myself. At what the hormones had puffed up and hollowed out. At my hands, which pulled warehouse overtime for three years so he’d get his electrician’s license without a loan. At somebody who still did her mascara for Friday dinners and still asked how his day went when he came in and said nothing.
“So she’s skinny,” I said.
His eyes went to the TV.
He didn’t say no.
My palm stayed on that pocket. Everything I’d wanted for two years was folded up in there, and I was scared what I was feeling might be enough to lose it.
I could have pulled it out. Slapped it on his chest. Watched his face do the math.
I could have said, “Happy birthday, Dominic. You picked SAMIRA THE SAME WEEK you finally got me pregnant.”
The phone went off a second time.
He looked. Only for a second. That second was plenty.
Something in me went quiet.
“Then go,” I said.
“What?”
“Go to her.”
That got him on his feet. Funny how that works, once I wasn’t crying for him.
“Don’t act like this doesn’t matter to you,” he said.
“It matters so much I can hardly stand up,” I said. “But I am NOT GOING TO FIGHT Samira over a man who promised me forever in front of her.”
His face went hard. I wasn’t playing the part he’d written for me.
“Nine years,” he said. “You’re quitting, just like that?”
I moved out of the doorway so he had a clear path to leave.
“Not quitting,” I said. “Just not staying.”
It took him twenty minutes to pack a backpack and go.
Room to think, he called it. A few days. We’d talk once things cooled off. Then he drove straight to Samira’s townhouse, because she posted before eleven.
Chalk on her hands. A climbing wall behind her. Dominic below her in the picture, holding the rope, grinning up.
Under it she’d written: Finally choosing me.
I made it to the toilet just in time, and after that I couldn’t get up off the floor, the tub cold against my shoulder, one hand flat under my shirt.
“Stay,” I said to it. “Please. You stay.”
He came back at seven the next morning for his stuff.
He had her braided leather bracelet on. There was a smear of her lip gloss by his ear. All of him reeked of that vanilla body spray she’d worn every book club night when she squeezed me hello and said, “Girl, you look wiped.”
He rolled his tees into a gym bag like it was a weekend at the lake.
Not one question about why I was so pale.
Not one about why my coffee cup wouldn’t hold still.
Not one about the clinic envelope on the counter with my name on it.
At the door he kissed the top of my head.
Nothing he did that whole year was crueler.
Mom called the following night.
“So I heard,” she said, careful. “Dominic and Samira aren’t hiding it anymore.”
Hiding.
Like I’d been the thing in the way.
“Mom, he’s still my husband.”
“Honey. I know. But Samira’s always been hard to keep up with.”
The list of sixty-one names was still up.
I hung up on her.
Five weeks on, I lost the baby by myself in an ER bathroom while Dominic and Samira went public with matching photos from the top of some canyon.
I didn’t scream.
I didn’t call him.
Nobody in my family heard a word about what the grief and the stress had cost me.
One woman went into that ER. Somebody else drove home.
By then the baby was gone, and Dominic, and Samira, and any family worth the word.
So that Tuesday I parked outside a run-down climbing gym in Sioux Falls, a paper sign taped inside its glass door.
NIGHT CLEANER WANTED. WILL TRAIN.
I read it twice without getting out.
Then I dried my eyes on my sleeve, opened the car door, and went in.
Maxine’s heating pad
The bell over the door was broken. It clunked instead of rang.
Inside it smelled like feet and chalk and burnt coffee.
A woman in her late sixties sat behind the front counter with a heating pad wrapped around both wrists. The cord ran to an outlet behind her. Gray braid, reading glasses on a shoelace.
“We open at four,” she said.
“The sign,” I said. “The cleaner job.”
She looked at me over the glasses. At the wet sleeve.
“You climb?”
“No.”
“Good. Climbers think the floor is somebody else’s problem.”
She pulled one hand out of the heating pad and pushed a clipboard at me.
“Ten to two, Sunday through Thursday. Thirteen dollars an hour. Cash on Fridays if you want it.”
“That’s it?”
“You want an interview? Fine. Can you hold a mop?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re hired. I’m Maxine.”
She slid a key across the counter on a red plastic tag. Somebody had written BACK DOOR on the tag in marker.
I filled out the form standing up. Name, address, phone.
Emergency contact. I left it blank.
Maxine read it upside down and didn’t say a thing about it. I liked her for that before I liked anything else about her.
Behind her the wall went up thirty feet. Gray plywood, holds bolted all over it in every color, little strips of tape with numbers on them.
Two college boys were stretching on a crash pad that had a split down the middle with duct tape over it.
The vending machine by the bathrooms had one bag of pretzels in it and nothing else.
“Last guy quit in February,” Maxine said. “Moved to Rapid City for a girl. They always move for a girl.”
“I’m not moving for anybody.”
“Good.”
She worked her wrist back into the heating pad and winced.
“Just so you know what you’re signing up for,” she said. “My husband built this place in ’04. He’s been gone six years. My hands are done.”
“Okay.”
“I give it till next winter. Then somebody buys the building and puts in a mattress store.”
I held the key tight enough that the tag bit a red line across my hand.
“So don’t get attached,” she said.
The spiral notebook
I started that Sunday night.
I brought the notebook with me because I didn’t know where else to put it. I couldn’t throw it out and I couldn’t leave it in the apartment.
It was green, the kind with the perforated edges that never tear clean. Twenty-six months of my handwriting. Dates and doses and my temperature every morning at 5:40, before the alarm.
On the inside cover, from the first week, was the clinic’s number. Under it was Dominic’s cell.
That was his idea.
At our first appointment the girl at intake asked who should be the primary contact for results. I started to give my number. Dominic put his hand over mine on the clipboard.
“Put mine,” he said. “You can’t take calls on the dock. You’ll miss them.”
He was right about the dock. At the warehouse they take your phone at the door. Badge in, phone in the locker, eight hours, ten if they’re short.
So the clinic called him, and he called me on my break and told me what they’d said.
Twenty-six months, that’s how I heard about my own body. Through Dominic, on a pay phone by the time clock.
The insurance was his too. His union plan, once he had his license.
The license I paid for.
That was in the notebook as well, in the back pages. Every overtime shift for three years, in pencil, with the hours and what it came to after taxes. The program at the tech college was $9,800, plus books, plus the exam.
When he passed, he picked me up outside the testing center and spun me around until my shoe came off.
“This is it, Kenny,” he said. “We’re going somewhere now.”
He said that a lot. Going somewhere.
Samira came to the party we threw him that night. She brought a sheet cake from Hy-Vee with a lightning bolt on it in yellow frosting.
She threw her arms around me in the kitchen. “Girl, you’re a saint. I’d have made him take the loan.”
Samira always had a plan. She told everybody at book club she’d own her own gym by forty. She had a vision board on her fridge with a climbing wall cut out of a magazine, right in the middle.
I used to think that was cute.
My mom loved her. Mom said Samira had drive. She said it the way you’d say somebody had a nice car.
That first night on the job I mopped the whole floor twice, because nobody told me how much was enough.
Chalk comes up white in the water. It turns the bucket gray in about ten minutes.
There were chalk handprints on the mirror over the sinks. On the door. On the side of the vending machine. Hands everywhere, every size.
I scrubbed them off, and the next night they were back.
Around one-thirty Maxine came out of the back office with a shoebox under her arm. She set it on the counter in front of me.
“You any good with numbers?”
“I did inventory at a warehouse for six years.”
She took the lid off.
It was receipts, hundreds of them, and a bank statement on top with a negative balance circled in red.
Ten to two
I worked that shoebox every night after the mop, at the counter, under the one light Maxine left on.
It took me eleven nights.
The gym had a hundred and forty members on paper. Forty-one of them hadn’t been charged since the fall, when the card reader died and nobody set up the new one. It was still in its box under the counter.
Maxine had been paying for new holds out of her own checking account.
The men’s room had a pipe running behind the wall since summer. The water bill was three times what it should have been.
I wrote it all down in the green notebook, after the overtime pages.
Pablo was the first one who saw it.
He set the routes. He came in after midnight on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when nobody was on the wall, with a drill and a bucket of holds and an extension ladder.
He was forty-four, beard going gray at the chin. He worked days at a tire shop out on Minnesota Avenue and did Maxine’s routes for a free membership and pizza.
The first week he didn’t say one word to me.
The second week he said, “You missed a spot,” and pointed at a chalk print on the ceiling of the bouldering cave, twenty feet up, where nobody could reach.
It took me a second to get that it was a joke.
The third week he looked over my shoulder at the notebook.
“Is that right? Forty-one people climbing for free?”
“Forty-one.”
“Huh.” He set the drill down. “Maxine know?”
“I’m telling her tomorrow.”
Maxine cried a little when I showed her. Not a lot. She blew her nose on a paper towel, said “Well, goddamn,” and set up the new card reader herself with her wrists in braces.
Then I told her the other thing.
Every warehouse in this town lets a shift out at eleven or at two in the morning. Hundreds of people, wide awake, with nowhere open but the gas station.
I knew because I’d been one of them for six years.
“Night memberships,” I said. “Ten to two, while I’m mopping anyway. Twenty-five a month.”
Maxine looked at me like I’d asked to borrow her car.
“Who climbs at midnight?”
“People who can’t climb at six.”
I made a flyer on the library computer and taped it up in the break room at my old warehouse. My friend Heather from receiving put one up at the meatpacking plant where her sister worked.
By August we had sixty-three night members. Forklift drivers. Nurses off a late shift. A guy who drove for a bakery and came in still smelling like bread.
That month the shoebox came out in the black for the first time since Maxine’s husband died.
Mom called in September.
I hadn’t talked to her since the night I hung up. She’d left voicemails. I deleted them without playing them.
That time I picked up because I was on my break and I was tired and I wanted somebody to say my name.
“Honey,” she said. “I wanted you to hear it from me.”
“Hear what?”
“Dominic and Samira got engaged. Saturday, at that place downtown with the rooftop.” She waited. “I went.”
I was perched on the crash pad with the split in it. I picked at the duct tape.
“You went.”
“She invited me, Kendall. I’ve known that girl since she was twelve. What was I supposed to do?”
“Not go.”
“Don’t be like that. They asked about you. Both of them did.”
“What did you tell them?”
“The truth. That you’re cleaning at that rock-wall place on the west side. Nights.”
The tape came up in a long strip.
“And Samira said, well, isn’t that funny,” Mom said. “Because she’s been talking to the owner of that place since spring.”
$38,400
I asked Maxine the next night, before I even got the bucket filled.
She didn’t pretend.
“Nice girl,” she said. “Teeth like a toothpaste ad. She wants to tear out the cave and put in mirrors and a smoothie bar.”
“Did she say who she’s marrying?”
“Some electrician. He’s going to rewire the whole building at cost.” Maxine shrugged. “That counts for a lot, in a building this old.”
I thought about the pencil columns in the back of the notebook. Three years of Saturdays.
“How much did she offer?”
“Two-forty. Business and building. She’s got a letter from her bank.”
“What if it was me?”
Maxine laughed, the way you laugh at a kid with a lemonade stand.
“With what, honey?”
“The house,” I said.
Dominic had filed in June. He wanted to keep the house and buy me out. His lawyer, a man named Chase who wore a fleece vest to every meeting, slid a number across the table at the mediator’s office.
Fourteen thousand.
For my half of a house I’d paid on for nine years.
“That’s generous, considering,” Chase said.
“Considering what?” I said.
He didn’t answer. Dominic looked at his phone.
I said no. I said the house gets listed and we split what it sells for, and I’d sit in that office every week until Christmas if that’s what it took.
It sold in September to a couple with twins. After the mortgage and the realtor, my half came to $38,400.
“Thirty-eight thousand,” I told Maxine. “Cash. October.”
She pulled her glasses off the shoelace and looked at me without them.
“Get a bank to give you the rest,” she said, “and I’ll take less from you than I’d take from her.”
So on a Wednesday in October I wore my one blazer to a credit union on 41st Street.
The loan officer was named Tucker. He was maybe twenty-six and he kept saying “awesome” about things that were not awesome. Our water bill. My income.
He liked the night memberships, though. He liked the shoebox, which by then was a binder with tabs.
“This is real,” he said. “Honestly. You turned this place around in five months.”
He typed my name in to pull my credit.
Then he stopped saying awesome.
He turned the screen so I could see it.
“There’s a collections account here,” he said. “Opened in July. Medical. Eleven hundred and forty dollars.”
“I don’t owe anybody.”
“It’s from the fertility center on Louise Avenue.” He squinted. “For a first pregnancy ultrasound. Scheduled for April ninth.”
I never had an ultrasound.
Window four
The clinic’s billing office is in the basement, down a hall that smells like carpet glue.
I’d been in that building maybe sixty times. I had never been downstairs.
There was a sign over the windows. PLEASE WAIT TO BE CALLED. I waited.
The woman at window four was named Riya. She had a cardigan over her shoulders and a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST AUNT.
I slid the letter from the credit union under the glass.
“I’m trying to find out what this is,” I said. “I never had this appointment.”
She typed for a while. She read for a while.
“Okay,” she said. “So it isn’t actually the appointment you’re being billed for. Your coverage was terminated.”
“By who?”
“By the subscriber. Effective the Monday after your last cycle. Once that came through, the insurance pulled back what they’d paid on the last round. It went to the patient. That’s you.”
“Where did the bills go?”
She turned the screen a little. “The address on file. Same as the subscriber’s.”
The house.
Dominic had stayed in the house until it sold. He got the mail every day.
“Can I see the whole account?” I said. “Everything. Every call.”
Riya looked at me for a second longer than she had to.
“Give me a minute.”
The printer behind her was slow. It made a sound like it was thinking about each line.
She slid three pages under the glass. They were warm.
Most of it was two years of the same thing. Labs drawn. Results called to primary contact. Dominic Rourke. Dominic Rourke. Dominic Rourke.
Then the Thursday.
3:42 PM. Outbound to primary contact, D. Rourke. Beta hCG result: 212. Voicemail left.
4:10 PM. Inbound from primary contact. Spoke with Ingrid, RN. Six minutes.
4:16 PM. First OB ultrasound scheduled, April 9, 8:15 AM, per primary contact.
And under that, in the box for notes, in whatever words the nurse had typed with the phone on her shoulder:
Spouse states he will tell patient in person, wants it to be a surprise. Requests clinic not contact patient directly.
I read it twice.
I got home a little after six that day. He was already on the sofa.
He’d known since ten after four.
He knew when he told me to come sit down a sec. He knew when he said Samira doesn’t let herself go. He knew when he stood in the doorway with the backpack.
There was one more line, from the Monday.
8:02 AM. Inbound from subscriber. Cancels April 9 appointment. States patient no longer under this practice’s care. Coverage termination to follow.
Five weeks before I lost it, he’d already canceled the first time anybody would have let me see it.
“Ma’am?” Riya said.
I had both palms flat on the counter on top of the pages.
“He’s still the primary contact on your account,” she said. “Do you want me to take him off?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to set up a payment plan for the balance?”
“No,” I said. “I’ll pay it now.”
I paid it with the debit card from the house money. Eleven hundred and forty dollars, standing in a basement, under a sign that said please wait.
That left me $37,260.
Riya stamped the bill PAID IN FULL and slid it back with the three pages. Then she did something I didn’t expect. She reached under the glass and put her hand on top of mine for a second.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “We should have called you.”
I folded the three pages four times, the way I’d folded the first one. I put them in my wallet behind the 212.
Tucker called the next week. With the collections gone he could get me a small loan. Not enough. Not close.
So I took the binder back to the gym that night, before the mop, before anything.
Maxine’s office door was shut. The light was on under it.
I knocked.
Twenty-two months
Maxine said yes in December.
Owner carry, she called it. I put down $37,260 and I’d pay her $1,900 on the first of every month for fifteen years, like rent. Tucker’s loan covered the new pads.
She kept her membership and the heating pad and a key to the back door.
“That girl’s bank letter was bigger,” she said, signing. “But she was going to put in mirrors.”
I named it KC Climbing. Kendall Cruz. I didn’t change my name back so much as just stop using his.
Maxine called Samira herself to say it had sold. She didn’t say who to. I didn’t ask her to keep it quiet. She just didn’t think it was Samira’s business.
It took a year to make the place look like somebody loved it.
Pablo and I tore out the old counter on a Sunday and built a long new desk out of bowling-alley maple he found at a salvage yard in Brandon. I learned to set routes on the easy wall. Heather quit receiving and came to work the front desk. A kid named Joon who climbed every night after his shift at the bakery started teaching the beginner class.
Nobody ever fixed the vending machine.
Twenty-two months after that Thursday, on a Thursday in January, I was at the desk with a clipboard of membership forms against my hip. Pablo was next to me arguing that the purple route was a 4, not a 3.
The glass doors pushed open and let the cold in.
Dominic.
A long gray coat, good haircut, a Rourke Electric van idling at the curb behind him. Samira came in right after him in a white puffer coat with a folder under her arm.
He saw me and grinned. The whole grin, like we were old friends from high school.
“Kenny. Hey,” he said. “Your mom said you’d still be here.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Look at this place.” He turned in a circle. “You guys did a lot. Seriously. Listen, we’re here to see whoever owns it now. KC something. We’ve got a number for them.”
Samira was looking at the new desk. At the maple. She had the folder pressed flat against her chest.
“We tried to buy it last year,” Dominic said. “The old lady sold out from under us. No hard feelings. But Sam’s wanted this exact gym for two years, and I’m in a good spot now, so. Can you go grab the owner?”
Heather had a hand over her mouth.
“She’s the owner,” Heather said.
Dominic laughed. Then he looked at Heather. Then at the clipboard. Then at me.
“Come on.”
“KC,” I said. “Kendall Cruz.”
“With what money?”
“Half the house.”
“My house?”
“Our house. You offered me fourteen thousand for it.”
He looked at Samira. Samira was looking at me.
He put his hands in his coat pockets and took them back out again.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Fine. Good for you. I mean it. But be real for one second, Kenny. You mop floors. You don’t know how to run a business like this. Sam’s been planning this her whole life. She’s got a business plan, she’s got investors, she’s got a bank letter for two-eighty. Cash at close.”
He took the folder from Samira and laid it on my desk like a menu.
“Two hundred and eighty thousand dollars,” he said. “You’ll never see that kind of money again. You could go do anything. Move somewhere. Start over.”
“No.”
“You haven’t even looked at it.”
“No.”
“This is about her.” He pointed at Samira without looking at her. “That’s what this is. You’re doing this to get back at me. Twenty-two months and you’re still doing this.”
I took my wallet out of my back pocket.
I unfolded the clinic’s printout with the one number on it. I set it on his folder. Then I unfolded the three pages from the basement and set them next to it.
Dominic didn’t look down. Samira did.
“What’s 212?” she said.
“It’s nothing,” Dominic said. “It’s old. It’s from before.”
Samira picked up the pages. She read them standing right there in her puffer coat with the doors still letting the cold in behind her.
She got to the notes box. Her lips moved.
“Wants it to be a surprise,” she said.
“Sam.”
“You told me she quit.” She looked up at him. “You said she quit the shots in January. You said she gave up on you.”
“I said it was over. It was over.”
“You knew she was pregnant. You knew when you came to my place that night.”
“It was a number on a voicemail.” He threw up his hands. “That’s all it was, Sam. A number. It wasn’t anything yet. I wasn’t going to get stuck for eighteen years with somebody I didn’t want, over a phone call. I did everybody a favor. I did her a favor. Look at her. She’s fine. She’s got a gym.”
Nobody said anything.
Joon had stopped halfway through the door of the beginner room with a rope coiled over his shoulder.
Samira put the pages down on the desk very carefully, lined up with the edge, like she was afraid they’d get dirty.
“Where is it?” she said to me. “The baby.”
“An ER bathroom,” I said. “April.”
She closed her eyes.
Dominic opened his mouth. “That’s not on me. That could have happened to anybody. You don’t get to put that on me.”
Samira picked up her folder. She held it against her chest again. She walked past him and out the glass doors without closing them, out to the van, and she didn’t get in it. She kept walking down the sidewalk in the snow.
“Sam,” he said. “Sam, come on.”
He turned back to me. The grin was gone. I’d never seen his face without something on it.
“You kept that in your wallet for two years?”
“Twenty-two months,” I said.
Pablo came around the end of the desk. He put his hand on my waist, light, and didn’t take his eyes off Dominic.
“Door’s behind you, man,” he said.
Saturday
Mom left a voicemail that weekend.
Samira had called her. Samira had told her all of it, the 212 and the notes box and the ER. Mom’s voice on the message didn’t sound like her. It sounded like somebody reading off a card.
“Honey, I didn’t know. Nobody told me. Call me. Please call me.”
I played it all the way through. It was the first one I hadn’t deleted.
I didn’t call her back. Not yet.
I live upstairs now, in the room that used to be Maxine’s husband’s storage. A hot plate and a mattress and a window that looks down on the lot out front. That’s what the house turned into.
The green notebook is in the desk drawer in the office. The 212 is still folded inside the front cover. The sixty-one names are still right where I typed them. I haven’t deleted those either.
Joon moved to days to teach the kids’ class, so on Saturday morning I made a new sign on the printer and taped it inside the glass door myself.
NIGHT CLEANER WANTED. WILL TRAIN.
A little after ten a hatchback pulled in and parked facing the doors. A woman in a gray hoodie sat behind the wheel with the engine running.
She read the sign. Then she read it again.
I went over and pushed the door open for her before she could change her mind.
“You climb?” I said.
She shook her head.
“Good,” I said. “Neither did I. Come on in.”
If this one stayed with you, pass it to somebody who’s starting over at thirteen dollars an hour.
For more family drama and long-overdue comeuppance, read “His Assistant Had My Bangle On” and “Dad Told A General I Never Counted. I Paid For His Shop.”.
