Refund: Stories Read online

  Copyright © 2015 Karen E. Bender

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bender, Karen E.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Refund : stories / Karen Bender.

  pages ; cm

  ISBN 978-1-61902-501-1

  I. Title.

  PS3552.E53849A6 2015

  813’.54—dc23

  2014034079

  Cover design by Faceout Studios

  Interior design by Domini Dragoone

  Counterpoint Press

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  To Robert, Jonah, and Maia, with love

  Contents

  Reunion

  Theft

  Anything for Money

  The Third Child

  The Loan Officer’s Visit

  Refund

  This Cat

  A Chick from My Dream Life

  Candidate

  The Sea Turtle Hospital

  Free Lunch

  For What Purpose?

  What the Cat Said

  Credits

  Acknowledgments

  refund

  Reunion

  Anna Green could not afford the tickets to Surfview High’s twentieth reunion, but she walked into the Mercury Ballroom, anyway, to meet her classmates. She had seventy new business cards in her pocket, and she wanted to hand one to everyone here. The ballroom was crowded, and glossy green balloons, shaped like palm trees, stretched into the dark spangled light. She passed the boy who called himself Johnny the Weatherman; he was describing the weather across the world. Johnny used to run around the high school clutching maps and telling people detailed weather reports—he received thunderous applause at graduation, as though people were both paying tribute to his efforts and perhaps grateful that they were not him. He was now almost forty, older, angrier, but still standing in front of the crowd with, surprisingly, the same map. “There is snow in Denmark and a drought in the Midwest, and fires are raging across Mexico,” he said, gesturing to the map with a pointer. No one appeared to be listening; the room roared.

  She had not intended to come. The gold postcards had been arriving in the mail for months: Surfview High 20th! Buffet dinner, dancing, tickets, $50 each. She threw the cards out, or her husband Howard did. And then, two weeks before the reunion, she picked up the phone: Tiffany Mann, former vice president of the student body, exclaiming: “Anna Green! You sat behind me in bio! We dissected a frog together. Hey. We want you to come.”

  She listened to Tiffany, whom she barely knew. Anna longed to stand beside her in a sequined dress; she was also aware of her own deep sense of shame. “I wish I could, but I just—”

  “You must! You must! For you, our special discount. Thirty!”

  She swallowed. How did Tiffany know? “I wish I—”

  “I know! Hard times for all. No worries. Twenty! You can bring business cards.”

  Anna paused. Tiffany sighed.

  “Tough customer,” said Tiffany. “Okay. Free! We need guests! I have to see you, hon, I do.”

  Her husband had said, go, hand out business cards, just go. “Connections,” he said. They had no idea what would work. When she was getting lots of calls for her business repairing appliances, they bought a foreclosed house in the Inland Empire, 1,400 square feet, enough for them and their two children; they behaved as though they were middle class, but the money rushed in and out for nothing, it seemed, and with a few skipped paychecks, a car accident, a broken roof, they were on the edge of ruin. It was 2009, and some days the phone was silent, and now Anna sometimes woke before dawn; she jumped up, her heart like a silver bell in her chest.

  Her classmates gathered in the ballroom’s dim haze. Anna listened to them describe their lives. There were free agents, the childless, the ones living abroad, the briefly famous—there were those who were unaccounted for, there were those who were already dead—but most were, at this point in the continuum, employed and organized into the strict nations of family. There was Tiara Hanson, the popular girl who loved reunions because she was in her glory for four hours once every ten years. Her hair was abundant, her teeth perfect and unmarked. “Anna!” she said, placing her hand on Anna’s shoulder. “You look fifteen! Don’t we all.” There was Stuart McKenzie, who had been an avid collector of baseball cards and now served as a statistician for the achievements of his children, holding out photos of them engaged in myriad activities: “Benny was first clarinet in his school orchestra,” he said. The children stared, imprisoned by their father’s desire to have something to love; they peered out, wanting to run across streets, to drive cars.

  Many of the people who made it to the reunion had done well. There were photos of recently purchased objects: summer homes, gazebos, giant TVs. Anna hugged, shook hands, pressed her cards into one palm after another. Her classmates held the cards to the light, tried to see who she had become. “Appliance Doctor?” Yes. She walked into the homes of strangers to fix their washers, dryers, refrigerators, their Kenmores, Maytags, Frigidaires—she liked to see their wallpaper, the arrangement of their furniture, the hopeful attempts to claim their right to the world.

  “I go anywhere in the Southland,” she said, trying to press down the eagerness in her voice. “My prices are better than Sears, Walmart. Always. Give me a call.”

  She talked at length to Deirdre Hoffman, who rented out four houses in West Covina and thus had a number of appliances that could break down at any moment, and she learned about whom Deirdre had seen at the supermarket last week, and finally Deirdre pocketed her card and leaned toward her. “Sounds good,” she said. “But . . . what I want to know is what happened to that guy Warren Vance?”

  Anna didn’t know. After Deirdre moved off, she stood beside the pale glasses of champagne and wondered about Warren Vance, whom she had loved first, before all this. He had been a skinny, swaggering boy with an overconfidence that was thrilling then, as though every adult’s failure was a conscious and unfortunate decision. He was going to become a congressman, a TV news producer, a real estate tycoon. Sometimes she caught him muttering the inaugural address in his sleep. He wet his hair with his palms in the morning and brushed it so it looked like Donald Trump’s.

  She met Warren in high school auto shop, junior year. Warren was casing the class, looking for who would help him pass it. He had trouble standing in one place. But while she fixed the engine, she could sense him pausing, absorbing what she was doing, and when she glanced up at him, his face twitched; it was the one time she saw he was afraid.

  The first time he touched her face, it was as though he were cradling a piece of crystal in his palms. They dated for two years; he left when, at twenty, she did not agree to marry him. “No one will love you the way Vance will,” he said, and he vanished. It took her years before she stopped believing she saw him on the street.

  Now as Anna walked through the sequined sea of her classmates, Johnny the Weatherman brushed past her shoulder. “Screw everything,” she heard him mutter. “Hell’s bells.”

  “What?” she asked, startled, but he had moved on.
<
br />   “Anna Green,” a voice said.

  She looked up.

  An enormous man stood, blowing smoke out of his mouth. It was Warren; he looked as though he had been inflated, a large balloon. He weighed probably close to three hundred pounds. His hair, which had been lush, shining ribbons of brown, was now all gray. His blue gaze was familiar—fierce and bright, as though he had been trying all his life to peer through walls.

  “It’s your true love,” he said. He laughed and placed a large, heavy hand on her shoulder; his palm was cold.

  “Warren?” she said, carefully, trying not to seem too shocked.

  “Life’s been treating you good,” he said.

  Her legs felt unsteady. “How are you?” she asked.

  “I’ve been fab.” He was a little out of breath. “Vance does this, Vance does that. He gets tired.”

  “You, tired?”

  “Arlene,” he said. “My wife. Other wives break you for diamonds. She loves gold. Vance’s dream house went to her earrings, her necklaces. Now we’re renting a one-bedroom, no pool. Now her arm looks like Cleopatra’s. Who’s happy?”

  “You?” she asked.

  He blew out a puff of smoke. “This could have been yours,” he said. He lifted his arms. His suit fell around him like the dark wings of a bat. “Vance was a millionaire,” he said. “Twice over. He built a hotel in Vegas, he sold limos. Don’t underestimate him. He’s going to make his fucking third million by forty.”

  A waitress passed carrying a tray of tiny hamburgers. “No smoking, sir,” she said.

  “Give me one of those, honey pie,” he said. His eyes darted around the room. “So what are you up to?” he said.

  “I’m married, living in Inland Empire. I have two kids. I repair home appliances,” she said.

  “Well, hurray for you,” he said. He drained his drink and crushed the plastic glass with his foot. “Vance needs another drink,” he said, and he thundered back to the bar.

  She stood, watching him walk away.

  Johnny the Weatherman pushed by her.

  “Move,” he growled.

  “Hey,” she said. He had always moved slightly off-center, like someone had pushed him, but now he stumbled to the center of the room with a surprising aggressiveness. He stood, watching the crowd swirl around him for a moment. Then he shoved his hand into his red sports jacket and brought out a gun.

  She blinked. The gun looked like a toy. She noticed that his hand gripped the handle in a way that seemed too comfortable; she stepped back.

  “What’s the weather?” Johnny yelled. “Hey! What’s the weather?”

  He pulled the trigger, and the bullets zoomed up and hit the ceiling, their explosions trembling through her throat.

  A waiter scuttled toward the kitchen, holding his hand protectively over miniature quiches. Classmates hit the floor.

  “Did it rain in Ohio?” Johnny yelled. His face was slick with sweat. Anna crouched on the maroon carpet. It was a movement new but also oddly familiar, as though she’d been secretly figuring out how to do it for years.

  He began to shoot. She touched her thighs and arms and realized, with surprise, how deeply she loved her body. A wineglass exploded on the floor beside her foot. She cried out and pressed her face into the musty carpet. She saw Warren Vance hunched under a table. The flat carpet bristled against her face.

  The bullets were still coming. When would they stop? The wounded cried out for help. Others crawled away, like animals, in their finery. Some bent to help others, and some fled; Anna’s mind was gray, static, and she did not know where to go. She saw Warren crawl up from under the table, and he caught her gaze. His head nodded toward a side door. There was a way out. He turned and stumbled down the hallway, and she scrambled up, kicked off her maroon fake-suede heels, and ran after him. She rushed down a bare beige corridor, the linoleum cold on her bare feet, past the hotel kitchen, the oddly domestic sounds of pans clattering and water rushing into a sink; she ran, the sound of screams fading behind her, pushing through the side doors into the parking lot, and she kept going until she got to the edge of it and then stood there, in the black night. Below her, traffic streamed down on the highway. The light glowed, a pale mist, off the speeding cars.

  Sirens sounded. Emergency personnel leapt out of red trucks. Her clothes held the odor of champagne and smoke, of a celebration, not a crime. She walked to her car, past the sign in the parking lot: GO OTTERS! WELCOME CLASS OF ’84. Her classmates stumbled out of the hotel, clutching key rings imprinted with photos of themselves as young people; they stood around weeping or fled into the night. She did not realize she was trembling until her hand could not fit the key through the lock in the car. The night air was light and cool on her arms. She looked around for Warren Vance. She wanted, urgently, to run to him, to kiss him, to thank him for showing her the right door. She walked slowly around the parking lot, looking, but he was gone.

  SHE DROVE HOME, TWO HOURS DEEP INTO THE INLAND EMPIRE where she lived. Her family resided in a community splashed onto an area that should have remained desert—pale stucco houses pushed aside rattlesnakes and coyotes, and the newly made streets burned with a glaring heat. It was late, and on the freeway she passed a man shaving in his car with his interior lights on, a pickup truck full of drunken teenagers, a driver of an oil rig listening to Italian opera. Everyone drove with a giddy foolishness, obeying the traffic rules. She had to think carefully to remember to grip the steering wheel, to press the gas. Was she, in fact, alive? How did she know? Had she, in fact, been hit by a bullet, and was she now dying on her way home? Then she realized she could not be shot because they could not afford to fix her. She pressed the hard, ridged pedals with her bare feet. The dampness of the vinyl steering wheel came off on her hands.

  It was almost midnight when she returned. She opened the door quietly and crept upstairs. Everyone was awake. She heard the monotone voice of her husband reading to the children. For a moment, unnoticed, she watched. Her husband appeared to be reading nursery rhymes to the stale air. The girl, who was just two, was wearing a pink ball gown, and her face was smeared with red lollipop. She was climbing to the top of her brother’s bunk bed and diving off it into a single pillow. The boy had emptied hundreds of cards he was collecting—Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, baseball and football heroes, idolatry of all persuasions—into the middle of his room and was organizing them feverishly. The children were so tired they looked drunk.

  Her husband’s family had divorced bitterly when he was seven, leaving him to be raised by his grandmother, and he had become a social worker, to help others with their sorrow. She and Howard had met when she installed a dryer for him, and he had, like the others, asked for her ID. “Anna,” he read, matter-of-factly; she had not realized until then that the suspicion of her customers caused her pain. She would stand at the door, and the homeowner would look at her, as though she were wearing a costume of a repairperson and that she could not do what she did, and a part of her enjoyed tricking them, seeing their expressions turn from concern to relief. But with Howard, there was no suspicion. He told her about his clients, who were struggling with prison and bankruptcy and child care and runaway teenagers; she listened to how he helped them with small steps: getting a driver’s license, a new apartment, an order of restraint. Sometimes these steps moved his clients along, sometimes they did not, but she loved the way he looked into the chaos and tried, with a form or a phone call, to find a way out.

  They were married; one child came into their home, then another. The children sat in their pink and blue onesies, smiling, toothless, but she was aware that the hats with the puppy ears, the outfits decorated with trains and cats and roses were useful in distracting parents from noticing the darkness; from the breathless, gasping love the children elicited and that made the parents sit up in the middle of the night, listening. They were always listening; there was always a simmering fear.

  SO HERE THEY WERE, IN THEIR LATE THIRTIES, PERPLEXED BUT TRYING to get on with it
, and recently, the girl had developed a problem going to sleep. It seemed sparked by nothing: the sight of a witch on a video, an awareness of the end of herself as a baby. She now refused to go to sleep at night. She rejected all offerings of comfort—toys, juice, songs—and stood in the dark light, screaming.

  “We have to just let her cry,” she had told him one night.

  “How?” he said to her, to anyone who advised him to do this. “It’s how she tells us how she feels.” Recently, he had turned thirty-nine, the age his parents had been when they divorced. Now, every night, he crawled into the little girl’s bedroom. He lay on the carpet while the girl fell asleep in her bed. For months, Anna had woken alone in their bed to find him curled up on the carpet of their daughter’s room; he said he wanted the child to wake up to his face, as though to the sun.

  But it was ruining him. He staggered up at dawn and sat at the kitchen table; when he left the house one morning, he drove the car into a tree. Then he began loaning money to his clients, for groceries, for textbooks. He waited for them to pay him. They waited. The girl stood in her crib and screamed.

  Now it was 11:45 PM, and she watched them; she wanted to rush in and gather them in her arms and feel the sweet thrum of their bodies—but she could not. She was afraid something inside her might crack apart, and her weeping would frighten them. She stood, instead, silent, dim, in the hallway, trying to remember that she was real.

  Then she stepped into the room.

  “They’re still up?” she asked.

  The girl looked at her and shrieked with joy. The boy jumped up. “Did you get me a toy?” he whispered, seductively, into her ear.

  “Oh,” said her husband. “I thought you were staying for the whole thing—”

  “Something happened,” she said.

  “She took my Harpie Lady card!” yelled the boy.

  “She didn’t take it,” said her husband tiredly. “She found it.”

  “She stole it!” yelled the boy.

  “Welcome home,” said her husband. He looked like he had endured a brawl. “Good night.” He stood up, zoomed into the bedroom, and collapsed onto their bed.