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JULIA

This morning, I woke up in the middle of a toolbox dream.

I’ve been having these since Dad died. He left me the six thousand dollars in his bank account and the tools in his storage unit.

I sold some of the older or too-specialized things and kept the timeless necessities.

The compressor, the sander, the table saw, and the hand tools in the red steel box.

Sure, I had all that stuff already, but these were Dad’s from before I was old enough to bang a nail.

I wasn’t going to get much money for them anyway. Besides, unbroken chains are my jam.

The night I brought them home, the dreams started. I did things with hand tools that either weren’t physically possible or wouldn’t be particularly comfortable.

My therapist said these dreams weren’t about sex, necessarily.

We’d sorted out the fact that I could be Catholic, unmarried, and horny at the same time.

They were about me trying to reconnect with my roots…

the fact that I always woke up in the middle of a mind-exploding orgasm notwithstanding.

Dream sex was about connection, even if it was with a hand tool.

Last night, it was the screwdriver. I spun the shaft while the handle was inside me and the ridges ratta-tat-tatted against my clit in a way that was extremely stimulating, but not real-world possible.

I woke up so satisfied I didn’t even need to use my Lily-ultra-pleasure-soft-silicone-triple-banger.

All that dream connected me to was the fact that I hadn’t gotten laid in a year.

“At this rate, we’re two months from a new truck.” Tonya’s still in her pajamas, hair in a silk bonnet, doing the bookkeeping on the kitchen table. “Black Beauty’s transmission has one month left, tops.”

“She’ll pull through.”

We need a truck to do our job. Every time we repair our 1992 Toyota pickup, we have to pull the money out of the savings for a new one. We swore we wouldn’t do that again, but the Beauty’s not going to go down easy.

“You sure we didn’t forget something at Jaeg-off’s?” Tonya asks.

“No. Why?” I pull my head out of the refrigerator, where we don’t have the stuff I need to make a black bean and cheese omelet, which is what I really want—not the bowl of yogurt and granola on the counter.

“You have that look you get when something’s not exactly perfect.”

We got out of Jaeger’s McMansion yesterday just in time to get a day off.

He won’t pay overtime, so if we hadn’t gotten everything done, we weren’t going to stay an extra hour for nothing.

We would have had to come today, and I noped that.

We’re at one of Carol’s flips in South Bay tomorrow, and we needed a break.

“I’m sure we finished.”

“Are you?”

I do feel as if I forgot something, but I know I didn’t. I jab my spoon into the yogurt and granola. Everything was perfect when we left. I double-checked. Done, done, done.

“Punchlist was cleared.”

Something though. Something is off. There’s a puzzle piece missing and I can’t find the empty space.

“I choose to believe.” Tonya taps enter on the laptop. “Tomorrow, we can get up at six and be in Torrance by eight.”

“Six thirty. Traffic’s the opposite way.”

“Famous last words.” She closes the laptop and peers out the window, down to the circular driveway in front of our apartment building. “Gross. It’s one of those pinewood derby cars.”

I scrape up the last of breakfast before looking down with her. A Cybertruck parks in the red, blocking the gate to the dumpster.

“Could be a friend of Tomás?” I go to the sink and give my bowl a quick rinse.

“ Our Tomás? Come on.”

“Maybe he’s trying to get close enough to rip off the panels or slash the tires?”

“If he doesn’t, and that thing parks like that again, I’m gonna do it myself.” She gathers up her computer. “Did you leave me any hot water?”

“Should be ready to go.”

When she’s behind the door and the shower is on, the front gate buzzes. I check the little screen.

Duke. Fuck. This guy. The worst. He hasn’t paid yet, and if he’s here to deliver a check, I’ll fuck a drill.

“Hello, Mr. Duke.”

“Let me in.”

A lifetime of entitlement has left his voice flat with the assumption that I’ll do what he wants without question. He’s right. I want my money, so I have to play fearless girlboss.

The apartment is tidy enough to let him see from the doorway, but he’s not coming in. I wait outside the door and buzz him through the front gate. He slaps it open as if he’s personally offended by an inanimate object.

Duke’s the worst kind of politician’s son.

He acts as though his father’s God-given right to treat people like shit extends to him.

His Instagram is gross. He goes to faraway places to shoot big game that Aboriginal people lead him to, posing with his gun and his dead beast as if he did anything but take potshots at an animal someone else cornered.

He says horrible things about Brown and Black people.

He’s dumber than a hammer and meaner than a table saw.

I shouldn’t have taken the job, but he came through Carol, a prolific house-flipper who constantly needs a finisher.

I never suspected she’d be friends with a guy like Jaeger Duke.

Apparently, she’s just kept her shit beliefs to herself.

Losing her as a client would put a real dent in my income, so I took the Duke job when she said he wouldn’t even be there.

I chose to believe she was mistaken, not lying.

“Everything okay?” I ask him when he’s near enough to hear me. “I left the invoice on the kitchen counter.”

He stands too close and looks down at me, then over my shoulder into the apartment. “You forgot something.”

Tonya made me aware that I forgot something. I just don’t know what it is, and it sticks in my craw. Calling a thing “done” when it’s not makes me mad. My name attached to imperfection makes me madder.

“What?” I ask like a defendant who’s decided she’ll be found guilty before the trial even starts.

“You gonna invite me in?”

The creepy-crawly shame that always pairs with the anger at doing an imperfect job is what makes me weak. That’s why I let him in.

Ugh. And I just cleaned the place.