She joined a women’s support group. She signed up for an aerobics class at the Y. She began going to work even earlier and, if it wasn’t group night, staying even later. Half a dozen fast food places were within a few blocks of the store. Her little office was quiet and private. She had a comfortable old recliner chair and a little TV back there. She continued putting money away, for her own use this time, for sometime three or four years from now, when she couldn’t stick it anymore. She knew she would leave Bert eventually, the time just hadn’t come yet. She managed to encounter him only over occasional breakfasts or sometimes very late at night when he staggered in and fell on the couch. She kept food in the refrigerator for him. She did his laundry. Up until the house arrest, they’d managed to get along without real damage.
And that was the story of her life, which had now taken this totally unexpected and ridiculous turn, leaving her miles from home with a screaming cube in her hands and nobody to ask for help. Though, sensibly, asking for help would be exactly the wrong thing to do! She turned to Mami’s litany, instead.Help yourself, Benita. Youcan if you will. Think for yourself, Benita. Make a life for yourself. Take a deep breath and figure out what needs to be done.
She closed her eyes, trying to clear the fog in her head, then leaned forward, gripped by a sudden cramp in her middle, or in her chest, or somewhere she couldn’t locate, all of her at once totally occupied by a spasm of pain that seemed to pull her apart, arms off in different directions, legs gone swimming away, head only vaguely attached, all the world going gray and hazy. She gasped, opened her mouth to scream, but was unable to make a sound, felt the gray go to black . . .
And then it all went away, all at once, the pain, the grayness, all of it, and she stood up, breathing deeply, wondering what in the hell had happened to her? Was that a faint? A swoon? How remarkable.
She climbed into the car and turned on the blower to air it out. The pain had filled her entire being, but now she could find no lingering evidence of it. Not the tiniest ache. Everything around her shone with an almost crystal clarity. She had never seen things so clearly. So. Figure out what came next.
First thing: hide the cube and the money. Bert must not get his hands on either the cube or the money. Just counting it had dried her mouth again. She had never had any money except what she’d earned, and she’d always cashed her regular paycheck and paid the bills in cash so there wouldn’t be anything left for Bert to drink up. The other check, the secret check that included all her overtime and hourly wages above minimum wage, had gone into the secret bank account.
She took the remnants of her lunch out of the pack, put the cube and money on the bottom and covered them with the sweater, the poncho, the leftover wrappers, peels and crusts from lunch, plus the empty soda can along with a couple more she’d found lying near the road. The mushroom bag went on top. She turned the car and started back down the road, the way she’d come, reaching out every few moments to touch the backpack, just to be sure it was there. A hundred thousand dollars! Oh, what she could do with a hundred thousand!
Though maybe it wasn’t right to take money for doing one’s duty, which this thing probably was. It felt complicated and troublesome enough to be duty. If she was going to do what the aliens had asked her to do, well, actually hired her to do, then she would need some of the money to get to the right people, whoever they were. Not her senator, Byron Morse, with his new, sort-of-Hispanic wife and his far-right friends. Goose had worked for Morse’s opponent during the last election, and he’d talked about the unethical stuff Morse had pulled. Her congressman, though he was also a hyphenated-Hispanic, would be a better bet.