Page 35 of Brenna, Brat

“I’ll come by the gallery,” he wrote, and I got the feeling that he didn’t want to use his phone too much.

“Why are you standing there smiling?” Dion asked me the next day as I stood behind the lacquer table. I had planned to go over the budget, because tax day was around the corner and I had doubts about Alecta’s ability to pay what she owed for her business. But I hadn’t gotten very far besides trying to make her old laptop turn on, and it was possible that I had been standing here just as my coworker had accused.

“Did you start organizing the basement like I asked you to?” I responded, and I made sure that if I had been smiling, I wasn’t anymore.

He didn’t look happy either. “That’s full of loads of shit.”

“I know,” I said, patient as always. “That’s exactly why I told you to go clean it, obviously.”

“You’re not my boss,” he informed me. “Just because you tell me to do something doesn’t mean that I have to do it. I don’t even have to consider it.”

He mostly refrained from working even when his real boss, his aunt Alecta, directed him, and I hadn’t actually expected him to accomplish anything in that nasty basement. It had been more of a ploy to get him out of my—

“Oh, shit!”

Dion had screamed those words after a huge bang sounded in the street, like maybe a truck had dropped a dumpster and it made an echoing, metal clang. But he reacted like it was something else and as he yelled, he dropped onto his stomach and covered his head with his arms.

“Dion!” I ran around the side of the table and checked the road, but there was nothing. “What are you doing?”

He was now getting up and brushing himself off, and if the floor was dirty? Well, that was his own fault. He was supposed to have done the cleaning on Friday afternoon but he had gone home instead, and he hadn’t completed any of the items from the opening checklist this morning, either. “What is this?” he asked me, picking a nasty object from his sweater.

“That’s a hairball,” I said, and batted it back onto the floor. It was red hair, mine, because I’d been in the bathroom doing a lot of styling. “Why did you just hit the deck like that?”

He had edged to the window and was peering out as well, craning his skinny neck back and forth to see what had caused the noise. “There’s nothing,” he told me.

“I know that. Why did you flip out?”

But now he was fine, so he shrugged and shook more grime off his pants. “It startled me a little.”

“A little?” I’d never seen him move so fast, not since one of the artists had set fire to a garbage can in the alley and he’d bolted out the front to leave me to deal with the problem.

But again, Dion had moved on. “Alecta texted me that she’s coming in,” he mentioned.

“Why?”

He shrugged. “It’s her gallery,” he reminded me. “I think she said something about electricity.”

I glanced anxiously at the lights, which were still illuminated above us. But all these scary murder videos constantly playing must have used a lot of power, and maybe she thought that I would have trouble paying the bill when it came in. I also checked the account online and yes, the amount due for the next cycle was going to be a lot higher. It was just very unusual that she would have looked at that herself.

And it turned out that Alecta was having trouble with the electric company, but it was the service at her own home that was theproblem. “It feels like they should give you more notice before they turn it off completely,” she complained when she arrived at the gallery a little while later. No one else had come in to see anyone here, not yet. “Like, maybe they could blink the lights a few times so that you’re aware of the problem. Then you could do something about it. Do you guys like this?” She patted her new wig.

I ignored that question. “If you want your power to stay on, then you’re supposed to do something when you get the bills,” I commented. “You’re supposed to pay them. Didn’t they send a shut off notice? Don’t they have to?”

Behind her, her nephew nodded yes, but our boss shook her head. “I had no idea this was going to happen,” Alecta answered solemnly, but then brightened a lot. “Did I tell you that I’m going to Lima? The one in Peru, not Ohio.”

“Why?” I asked, but she ignored me and went to fiddle with the screens, making one get out of focus and turning another off completely so that both Dion and I had to intercede to try to fix the installation.

“You could go and look around the basement while you’re here,” I suggested, in order to get her out of our hair. It hadn’t worked on Dion, but maybe it would on her. “It’s a mess down there and it should be organized.”

“It’s all my mom’s shit,” she said vaguely. “I think there’s stuff upstairs, too.”

There was. I loved going to the second floor, actually, because it was a little like a time capsule. It had been her mom’s atelierwhere she’d designed, met clients, and sewed. It looked like Chic Cathay and her assistants had walked out one day, meaning to return, but had just forgotten. There was a big, paper desk calendar turned to May 1987, and it was covered in hand-written notes about appointments and reminders of things to do. That was when she had abruptly closed down her business and flown to Mexico, where she’d lived on and off for a few years before returning to Detroit. Someone had cleaned out (or stolen) the fabric and notions from the back room, but I had found a pair of shears (which I had kept) and some Chic Cathay business cards, which I had put in a little frame and planned to hang in my own atelier. As soon as it stopped raining inside there, I would do it.

Alecta preferred not to help in the basement, on the second floor, or anywhere else. Instead, she went to her office (our breakroom) and forced Dion to help her move her ridiculously sized and empty desk back into the center of the room. Then she proceeded to talk to her friends, telling them loudly and in minute detail about the guy she’d had sex with the night before. It was enough to say that they hadn’t done it in the usual way…no, it was very far from anything that I had considered doing or what my sisters had done, as far as I knew. Even Dion started to get annoyed and maybe disgusted, and he put in his earbuds so he wouldn’t have to hear her. He also couldn’t hear me telling him to vacuum; the floor really was nauseating.

Since there was a lot of my own hair and since I didn’t want to hear Alecta either, I took up the task instead. Dion started singing, too, and all that combined with the snarling, bonecrunching, and bloody squelching noises from the videos made it get loud in the gallery.

That was why I didn’t hear the scream signaling that the front door had opened. I screamed myself, though, when a hand fell onto my shoulder.

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