Debt Comes Due

The screen door was locked, which was cute. Like a deadbolt on a cardboard box. I could see through the mesh well enough to know Marcus wasn't home, and I could hear the TV going, some daytime court show, the kind where people scream at each other over a hundred bucks and a pit bull.

I knocked anyway. Loud. The kind of knock that says I'm not selling anything and I'm not leaving.

The TV cut off. Footsteps. Then her face appeared behind the mesh, half in shadow, and I remembered Marcus had mentioned a girlfriend once, in the way guys mention things they don't want you to think about too hard. She was younger than him. Pretty in a tired way, the way women get when they've been holding a house together with their fingernails.

"He's not here," she said through the door.

"I know."

She didn't open it. Smart. But she didn't walk away either, and that told me something. People who owe you money develop a sixth sense for the knock. They know the sound of it before they know who's on the porch. She'd been expecting somebody. Maybe not me specifically, but somebody.

"You want to tell me where he's at?"

"I don't know where he's at." Her voice had a flatness to it, practiced. "He left this morning. Didn't say where."

"That's a shame." I leaned against the doorframe, casual, like we were two neighbors catching up. "Because he's into me for twenty-eight hundred, and I've been patient, and patience is a finite resource. You know what finite means?"

"I know what it means."

"Good. So you understand my situation."

She was quiet for a second. The mesh made it hard to read her face, but I caught the way her jaw worked, like she was chewing on something she didn't want to swallow. Then she did something I didn't expect. She unlocked the door and opened it.

Not wide. Just enough. Enough for me to see her fully, and for her to see me. She was wearing a tank top and cutoff shorts, no shoes, hair pulled back in a messy knot. There was a bruise on her forearm, faded yellow at the edges, the kind that's a week old and came from a hand that gripped too hard. I clocked it and filed it away and didn't say anything about it, because that's not why I was there.

"Come in," she said. "He's not here, but you can come in."

I stepped inside. The place smelled like cigarettes and lemon cleaner, like somebody was trying to cover something up. Dishes in the sink. A pile of laundry on the couch. The TV was paused on a commercial for a personal injury lawyer.

"You want a beer?" she asked.

"It's two in the afternoon."

"So?"

Fair point. I said sure, and she went to the fridge and pulled out two cans of cheap lager, popped them both, handed me one. Her fingers brushed mine on the can. Not accidental. I've been around enough to know the difference.

We stood in the kitchen, drinking, not saying much. She leaned against the counter and watched me over the rim of her can, and I watched her back, and the silence got thick enough to lean on.

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Danielle."

"Danielle. Marcus ever talk about me?"

"He said you were the reason he couldn't sleep."

I laughed at that. A real laugh, short and sharp. "I'm the reason he can't sleep? He's the one who took the product and didn't pay for it. I'm not losing sleep over twenty-eight hundred. He should be."

"He is." She took a long drink. "He's losing sleep over a lot of things."

"Like what?"

She looked at me then, really looked, and I saw something move behind her eyes. Calculation. Not the desperate kind. The kind that comes when somebody's been stuck in a bad situation long enough to start thinking about the exit.

"Like me," she said.

The words sat there between us. I didn't pick them up. I've learned that when people hand you something heavy, you let them hold it a minute, see if they put it down on their own.

She didn't. She kept going.

"He's been gone three days. He said he was going to get the money. He came back with a black eye and no money and told me to stop asking questions." She set her can down on the counter, hard enough that some of it sloshed out. "So I stopped asking."

"Smart."

"Was it?"

I shrugged. "Depends what you wanted the answers to."

She wiped the spilled beer with her palm, slow, deliberate, and I watched her do it. Her hands were small. There was a chip in her nail polish, dark red, the color of dried blood. She caught me looking and didn't look away.

"You want to sit down?" she asked.

"I want my money."

"I know. But you can sit down while you figure out how to get it."

I sat. The couch was lumpy and smelled like Marcus, some cheap cologne and sweat. She sat on the other end, knees pulled up, feet tucked under her, and we faced each other across the cushions like two people about to negotiate a treaty.

"He's not going to pay you," she said.

"I know."

"So what are you going to do?"

"That depends on him."

"No." She shook her head. "It depends on you. He's not coming back. Not tonight, maybe not ever. He took his duffel bag and his PlayStation and he left me here with the rent due and no way to pay it. So whatever you're planning to do to him, you're going to have to do to me instead, because I'm what's left."

She said it without heat. Not angry, not scared. Just a fact she'd already made peace with, and that was the most interesting thing about her. Most people, when they're cornered, they flail. Danielle had gone still. Still water. The kind you don't see the bottom of.

I finished my beer and set the can on the floor. "You got anything stronger than this?"

She got up without a word and came back with a bottle of whiskey, three-quarters full, and two glasses. She poured us both a finger and handed me mine, and when she sat back down she sat closer. Close enough that I could smell her shampoo, something floral and cheap, and underneath it the faint sourness of three days without a shower.

"You're not scared of me," I said.

"Should I be?"

"Most people are."

"I've been scared of Marcus for two years. You're a step up."

She drank. I drank. The whiskey burned going down and settled warm in my chest, and I looked at her and she looked at me and neither of us said the thing we were both thinking, which was that Marcus had made a mistake leaving her here, and that mistake was about to cost him more than twenty-eight hundred dollars.