Page 27 of Cain
Kyle isn’t reliable, is he?
“Ricky, don’t be a hard ass, yeah?” I drop some bills on the bar, which the bartender, Onyx, swipes away. She brings back change. I shake my head.
Ricky gives me a measured look and then shrugs. “Men’s room. Better have a gas mask.”
There’s a yellow clapboard “cleaning in process” sign outside the men’s room.
I walk in and find her bent over a mop bucket, rubber gloves on, bleach in the air.
The bathroom smells like piss and broken lives.
She’s cleaning the sink, her hair tied back in a messy knot. Her face is blank when I see her in the mirror, which she probably just cleaned because it’s shining.
“Faith,” I say softly.
She doesn’t look up. She doesn’t say a thing.
“Faith,” I try again.
She finally looks up in the mirror, at me. “Yes”
Her voice is calm. Flat. No trace of the girl who readCiceroand let me tease her with kisses. She might as well be someone else entirely.
She didn’t steal. I know it now in my bones.
If she did, she wouldn’t be here. If she did, she wouldn’t be Faith.
Oh my God! What have I done?
“I wanted to check in on you.”
She looks away, keeps scrubbing.
“I didn’t think I’d find you like this,” I say quietly.
“Why not?”She drains the bucket of dirty water into a urinal and then flushes.
“I…you shouldn’t work here.”
She lets out a chuckle, but it carries no trace of humor. “Sure, I should. This is where I belong, right? In the dirt. With the other trash.”
“Don’t say that.”
This woman is a shell of the one I knew. I kept lamenting that she was eight years younger than me. A child. But right now, she looks as old as me. The past few weeks have aged her and not in a good way.
She’s just a kid, Cain, and you fucking had her arrested! What the fuck were you thinking?
You sent her to jail.To jail!
She walks out the door. She moves the “cleaning in progress” sign to the other side of the corridor in front of the women’s bathroom.
She tugs at her gloves to keep them in place and picks up the mop, bucket, and a plastic box of cleaning supplies, and walks to the women’s bathroom.
Finally, before she goes in, she turns, looks at me. “What do you want, Cain?”
“I need to know...did you take the money?”
It’s stupid to ask. If she took it, she won’t confess, and if she didn’t, which I have a strong feeling she didn’t, then…
