Karen Bender - Refund - Stories

TWO DAYS PASSED, THEN THREE. SHE DID NOT TELL ANYONE ABOUT HER sudden purchase of a beachfront lot. She picked up her phone quickly whenever it rang. She had been so captivated by the idea of her family and the sunset, and the idea of this, a promise, a deal, she had not considered the obvious: they didn’t have an extra five thousand dollars.

A week went by.

She did not hear from Warren Vance. The credit card bill arrived. She had allegedly purchased $548 worth of gourmet steaks from Wisconsin, $1,234 worth of airline tickets via Orbitz, and $3,284 worth of watches at Cartier.

She stood, trembling, reading his longings. Then she tried to call him, but the number was dead.

The next day, she told the babysitter to stay late and sped out to his office. The sky was blue and empty of clouds. She drove too fast, past the palm trees, the superstores, the blue-silver chaparral on the golden hills, the giant parking lots — they were all bleached by the white light, as though they had all, in some crucial way, been imagined, and she gripped the steering wheel with the same fierceness she had when she had come back from the reunion.

She turned the car into the parking lot where his office had been. A couple young, bulky men were carrying mattresses into his office. She ran toward them.

“Where’s Vance’s Real Estate?” she asked.

“This here’s Ed’s Beds. No one here by that name.”

Panic fluttered through her. She ran into the Subway outlet. Margie was at the register, her hair now arranged in a net.

“Where’s Warren Vance?” Anna asked.

Margie’s eyes flashed, as though the name woke her up. “The fucking jerk. He said he’d give me forty bucks for saying I was his secretary, bringing coffee, smiling, et cetera, and then one day he didn’t show. Where is he? Do you know?”

Anna rushed out of the store into the parking lot. The sky was so bright and hot her eyelids hurt. She started to type a number into her cell phone; then she stopped. She stood under the hard blue sky and watched the workmen bring in mattresses to Vance’s former office, one mattress after another, and she watched a few customers come in and out of the Subway.

The phone rang. She lifted it to her ear.

“Yes?” she said.

“Can she eat peanut butter? I forget, a lot of kids can’t eat peanut butter,” the babysitter asked.

“Yes, she can eat peanut butter,” Anna said.

“Okay, thanks! See you soon,” said the babysitter, and she hung up.

Anna felt the weight of the cell phone in her hand; she slid into the car, set it on the seat beside her, and began to drive home.

THAT NIGHT, SHE CALLED THE CREDIT CARD COMPANY TO CANCEL the card. “You didn’t purchase the steaks, the tickets, the watches?” asked the customer service rep.

“No, I did not!”

“Aha. Well. Unfortunately, I see that you never purchased the customer fraud insurance plan, just $8 a month, so we can’t guarantee all will be returned—”

“Are you serious?” she asked.

“You could purchase it now,” the customer service rep said, cheerfully.

It took her three more days to show the bill to her husband and inform him about the absence of the fraud insurance plan. They sat at the kitchen table, and she put the bill in front of him. He read it, and then he stopped.

“Five hundred dollars of steaks?” he said. “Did he eat a whole cow?” He paused. “And watches? Who are we subsidizing here?”

She realized that she was drawn to his moral quality because she was always waiting to be judged.

“It was an accident,” she said.

They looked at each other. He leaned forward and touched her arm.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

She closed her eyes. What? She remembered the musty odor of the hotel carpet, the sudden, surprising beauty of Warren Vance. She thought about how she had hunched under the chair, listening to the bullets, the cries as people were hit, the sound of people diving for the floor, running out. She thought of the way he nodded toward the door, and how she ran through the hallway, following him, her footsteps echoing through the empty corridor until she got to the parking lot of the Mercury Hotel, and stood at the edge of it, looking at the freeway, the cars a pure ribbon of light.

“I was almost shot,” she said.

She heard each word as she spoke them. She did not look into his eyes. She felt the sweet presence of his fingers on her wrist.

“What did you think about?” he asked. “During?”

She had had no thoughts. The chair leg, the carpet. The taste of salt in her mouth. She remembered a sense of urgency in her arms, a trembling. To move.

Then she ran.

“I’m not sure,” she said.

“Did you think about the children?” he asked.

She paused. “No.”

“Your parents?”

“No.”

“Did you think about me?”

She paused. “No.”

He leaned back. “Why not?”

“I thought about myself,” she said.

That was true. There had been the thunder of bullets, the carpet against her cheek. The slow pulse of her breath. And when she had run outside, there had been this gladness, her chest full of cool air. She was here. The asphalt was warm, crumbly under her bare feet. The light from the cars lifted off the freeway. She surveyed it all, wanting it, wanting to reach out and feel the light in her hands.

They sat in silence for a moment.

“I would have thought of myself, too,” he said. “I know it.”

How perfectly could they recognize each other’s sadness? It was the imperfection that they had married and pledged to care for. She leaned toward him and kissed him. His hand grabbed her shoulders as though they were both floating, moving without gravity through the air.

THE LIGHTS WENT ON IN ANNA’S HOUSE EACH NIGHT, AS THEY WENT on in the other houses on their street. The houses clung to the arid hills, temporarily finding a foothold in the brush. One night, Anna told her husband they had to tell their daughter good night and then leave the room while she fell asleep. He looked at her and closed his eyes for a few moments; she did not know what he was thinking. Then he opened them and agreed. Anna kissed the girl’s hair. The girl stared at them, her eyes dark and burning.

The girl screamed for twenty-three minutes and then fell asleep.

The next morning, the girl stood up in her crib. “I awake,” she said. Her tone was matter-of-fact. She stood in the fresh light, gazing at Anna eagerly. Anna stumbled toward her and lifted her out. The girl kicked softly in the air.

“You did it,” she whispered to the girl. The girl was bored; she wriggled in her arms, looking for her toys. The morning spread out, glazed and damp and blue, outside the windows. Anna clutched the girl’s soft, living weight against her chest.

The boy abandoned all cards to focus his attentions on soccer. The girl decided to eschew princesses to become a witch. She sat at the dinner table wearing a pointy black hat.

Anna and her husband lay in their bed. Her husband’s arm came over her body at night, and she held it. One night, she whispered to him the intimacy she had spoken to Warren Vance, so softly she did not know if he heard it. He said the word back softly and pressed his face against hers. They huddled in this island of time together before they would all separate again.

Ginger Klein held all the cash she owned, which came to $934.27, in an envelope in her red velvet purse. As she waited in line for the first dinner seating on this cruise to Alaska, she fingered the muscular weight of the bills. The ship’s ballroom was a large, drab room, tricked into elegance with real silver set out on the linen, sprightly gold foil bows on the walls, white roses blooming briefly in stale water. The room was filled with couples, friends, tour groups, glittering in their sequins, intent on having a good time. The guests greeted each other, their faces gilded by the chandeliers’ silver haze. Gripping her purse, Ginger watched them and tried to decide where to sit.