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C alandra slumped back against the wall. Her skin had turned slightly ashen and her eyelids fluttered.

“Hey! Oh, drat. Crikey!” I tried to hold her up as she slid down but her descent pulled so hard on my ribs that I gasped in pain. “Calandra! Somebody help me!”

It took a few minutes, a glass of water from the salesperson, and a wet paper towel for the back of her neck before she was better. “I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I’m ok now, I’m not going to faint.” We had moved to the back room of the shop, into an employee area that had a sofa. She didn’t need a doctor or an ambulance, she promised me and the worried staff, she just needed to sit for a moment. “I’m sorry,” she told them again, and they said they’d give us time and went back to the front to deal with customers instead of medical emergencies.

Then Calandra turned to me, worried. “I think I hallucinated and then I got so dizzy. What happened?”

“You didn’t hallucinate.” I sat next to her on the couch. “I told you something that made you get faint.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, I must have heard you wrong.”

“I don’t think you did, and I know that it’s really shocking, but it’s true. Jake and I are going to get married. Judas Priest!” I exclaimed, because her eyelids fluttered again. “Calandra!”

She fought through it, though. “What?” she asked, her voice feeble. As I started to explain for the third time, I went very, very slowly and I tried to be gentle.

“So, Jake has been worried about his future for a while. He has that big house with all the bedrooms and a truck that’s has a second row ready for baby seats. He even got a tiny saddle for Chip, the miniature horse. So his kids can ride,” I explained, because she wasn’t an animal person and like me, she might not have understood the significance of that adorable little piece of leather.

“What does some damn saddle have to do with you?” she demanded. She was recovering well.

“He has an issue that he needs to take care of,” I continued, treading carefully. The Woodsmen weren’t going to announce anything about his shoulder surgery until after it was over, tomorrow afternoon. “Thinking about that issue made him get even more worried. Meadow brought up to him that she was also concerned about the future. I didn’t understand how much it was on her mind, but it turns out that she’s been thinking a lot about going back to live with Christal and what that would mean for her.”

“Oh, the poor thing.” Calandra’s expression turned immediately to sympathy. “I can’t imagine if I didn’t have my mom to depend on.”

“You’re really lucky that you do,” I said. “Meadow is cursed with Christal and with the rest of our rotten family. She only has one person, and she’s smart enough to know that I’m not enough. I don’t even have a job or any prospects for one. What will I be, a fifty-year-old dancer?” We looked at each other and she nodded; I was sure that she had the same fears. “I’ll always do my best for her, but how can she depend on someone like me?”

“You love her,” my friend reminded me, but then she nodded again. “Yeah, we both know that love’s not enough. You can’t eat it or use it to pay your water bill. But how did all this lead to you and Koval…” She fanned herself again. “Holy shit. Is it hot in here? My whole body is freaking out about this, Ember.”

“That’s how Jake felt, and Meadow, too, about our future. She was freaking out and he was also concerned, and that was why they started talking about me marrying him. I guess she even thought of it first.”

“Meadow came up with this idea?” She stared. “You’re letting a tween direct your relationships?”

“She’s a real teenager now,” I corrected. “Yeah, it started as her idea but Jake and I discussed things and we decided that we would be better as a team. A married team. He really has his life together and it’s so impressive. He has a bunch of plans for when his football career is over.” I hoped that day would be a long, long way off. “He made good decisions with the money he’s banked so far because he’s smart,” I added, and I knew I sounded kind of awed. I admired his intelligence a lot, and I also admired how he’d saved instead of doing something dumb, like the people in my family always did. My brother Evander had bought himself a hot tub when he received an accident settlement, and he didn’t even have a house where he could install it.

“How do you know about his money?” she asked.

“He told me all about his financial stuff so I would feel comfortable putting my trust in him. It shows that he makes good decisions and this one, about our marriage, could also be…” I stopped to correct myself. “No, I mean that this is definitely another good choice. The decision to get married is going to work out perfectly.”

“What in the hell are you talking about, Ember?” Calandra threw up her hands. “You hardly know this man! Have you even had sex yet?”

“Well, no.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “Mother fu—”

“Ladies, how are we doing?” the store manager asked. She glanced between us as we sat on their couch. “Are you ready to try standing and walking?”

We took the hint and yeah, we were ready to get out of their hair and get on our way. I had asked Calandra to meet me at this store, one I’d driven by before and one I thought might have something I could wear, but maybe we could come back another time. “Sorry,” we both apologized again.

“I think I need a beer,” she said as we left, but then looked at her phone. “Damn! It’s not even noon.”

I treated her to a coffee at the shop next door instead. My wallet was full to overflowing right now because when Jake had left this morning, he’d handed me a thick fold of bills. “Take this,” he’d ordered. “Yeah, take it,” he reiterated when I hesitated. “The place I rented is a house, so there’s room if you two want to come. You could fly in for a weekend when it won’t disrupt school and when you’re up to traveling.”

“Ok,” I had agreed. “That sounds like a good idea.”

He’d stepped toward the garage, but then he’d hesitated and turned back to look at me for a long moment. “You’re going to be fine. I know it,” I had said, and he’d nodded before he walked through the muddy yard and then was gone for real.

I wasn’t touching his money, though. That wasn’t why I had agreed to all this…why had I agreed to all this? Calandra, who also hadn’t touched her coffee, was leaning forward over our little table and asking me the same question. “What are you doing?” she asked me. “I get that you want financial security, so what’s your plan? Are you going to get knocked up? You know that those payments only last until the kid is eighteen, and then what will you do?”

“No, I’m not planning to get pregnant.” I paused. “Not right away, but I do want to have kids and so does Jake.” I paused again. “Oh, hot tamales. We’ll be having sex.” Now I had to fan myself as she had.

She covered her eyes briefly and groaned, loud enough that a man at another table looked over at us. He saw my black and blue face, frowned, and looked away.

“Do you remember when we met?” she asked me, and I nodded. It had been my first night at B-Dzld. “You were on your phone, entering your name into three different sweepstakes. You told me, ‘I might win a lifetime supply of loofa sponges, or enough turkey feed to last five years.’”

“The other one was for a free trip to Latvia, and I was so interested in that. I didn’t win any of those prizes though,” I said. It was probably a good thing about the turkey feed, but I could have asked for the cash equivalent or I could have donated it to the shelter where Jake kept adopting all the homeless animals.

Calandra was frowning again. “You act like you’re so down to earth and practical, but you’re not.”

“I am,” I protested. “Entering contests doesn’t prove anything about me.”

She took out her phone and opened to her texts. “Hey, what’s happening with Seyram Adiang?” she read aloud. “I have a really good feeling about it. What if he falls in love with you?” She looked up at me. “Does that sound familiar? You wrote that, and then you put all the hearts and started talking about different cartoons with princesses and some cup named Chip.”

“Haven’t you seen that movie? Anyway, I didn’t really mean anything about you and Seyram,” I excused myself. “I was just making conversation…but you have to admit, it’s exciting that you guys could get together, forever.”

“Ember, that doesn’t happen in real life. People get together for a while, then they fight, and then they move on.” I nodded in agreement, but she glared at me. “This is exactly what I mean! You’re pretending to think so, but then you’re marrying a guy because he’s your prince charming, just with a ponytail and thighs that are bigger than your waist.”

He was very strong, but I protested. “No, I’m not trying to marry some prince!” I wasn’t, was I?

“You work in a strip club,” she continued sternly. “You, of all people, should know that love and marriage don’t mean much when another girl is pushing her tits into your man’s face. What do you think you’re doing with Jake Koval? Are you actually hoping for a happily-ever-after scenario with him? What’s your plan?”

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I admitted. “I have no idea. I have no clear direction, nothing beyond finding a nice dress so that when he gets home, we can go to the courthouse and have a ceremony. After that?” I held up my hands and shook my head. “Nope, nothing. I’m not a planner, Calandra. From the time I was fourteen, I’ve roamed around with no direction at all.”

“Yeah, but you told me you were saving money while you did that. You bought cars, you rented places to stay, you got jobs. You probably paid taxes. Wait, did you?” When I nodded, she continued. “You weren’t totally aimless and stupid! And since you got here and took Meadow, you’ve been really directed. I can tell,” she said. “You’re acting with a plan every day, and the plan is to make a better life for her.”

“And marrying him would be a better life for her! It’s undeniable. Why would you try to talk me out of it?”

She finally noticed her cooling coffee, and took a sip. “Yeah,” she admitted. “Of course it would be better for her. I worry about you, though.”

“Well, who’s to say it wouldn’t be a good thing for me, too? I would have a great life, at least for a while. I could get my GED and figure out a real career. I mean, I feel like I have to jump on this and hold on for as long as I can.”

“Yeah,” she said again. “You’re right. You’d be crazy to say no. But…”

“He was crazy to ask me in the first place,” I mentioned, and I could tell that she was trying not to agree too much or too quickly.

“What, exactly, is he getting out of it?” she asked carefully. “Why is Jake all in? Why hasn’t he gone for, uh, another option? Like one of the Woodsmen cheerleaders, or any of the other women who throw themselves at the football players?”

She didn’t need to sugarcoat it; I knew that he was scraping the bottom of the barrel but I hesitated before I spoke. This was just like when Jake had asked me about Meadow’s life and I hadn’t wanted to overshare her personal business. What he had told me about himself, about his shyness and fear of being alone? That was private, too. “He’s not interested in looking for a relationship,” I said, also carefully choosing my words. “I think he sees this as the easy way out. I’m here and available and there are no expectations. There’s no drama because we’re clear about what we’re doing.”

“Are you?” she asked doubtfully, but then shrugged. “A hot girl with the body of a stripper, literally, got dropped into his lap. Not many guys would say no to hooking up, but marriage? Why? How worried about his future could he be—oh, shit! He’s not having some kind of operation to have his heart removed, is he? Is that what you meant when you said that he has an ‘issue?’”

“His heart is fine,” I assured her, although that was exactly what I had thought, too. “I think he’s pushing for this because he cares a lot about Meadow. Remember how he got the lawyer to come to the meeting at the school with me, to protect her interests in case I did a bad job? He was a kid who didn’t have a lot of stability himself, and he wants to give that to her. That means so much to me.”

“It’s really nice,” she admitted.

“I told you that he was.” Marrying him would be a huge win.

“Yeah, Seyram said that he was a nice guy, too,” she said. “You remember Seyram, the man not falling in love with me, prince-style?”

“Why?What’s wrong?”

She drank more coffee. “He wanted to come into the club to watch me perform. You get it.”

“Oh.” Unfortunately, I did understand what she meant. There was a certain subset of guys who were all excited about dating a dancer. They liked the thought that their girlfriend was hot and that other men had to pay for what they got for free. “What happened after he saw you?” I asked. Because in my experience, it could have gone two different ways. One was that Seyram would still be turned on and revel in his superiority over the paying customers, or…

She looked very sad, so I knew that he had gone the way of option two: he was disgusted. “He wasn’t happy,” she sighed.

“Fiddlesticks, I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t want him there,” she told me, “but then he got weird, like, what are you doing that you don’t want me to see?”

“A lot,” I filled in, and she nodded.

“But what was I supposed to answer? So I said sure, come and watch, and ever since, he won’t text me. It’s one thing to imagine your girl strutting around in some cute outfit and men throwing money and wanting her, and it’s another to sit at a dirty table at B-Dzld with a watered-down drink when the fan in the men’s room is broken so the whole club smells like shit. He got a true view of the ‘glamour’ and he didn’t like it. Now, he doesn’t like me.”

“Oh, Calandra. That’s too bad.”

“Yeah,” she said sadly. “We had fun when we went out, and he didn’t seem to mind that my world includes a little boy and a mom who are just about everything to me. But it’s ok. Life isn’t some princess cartoon movie,” she stated, enunciating each word and looking me in the eyes as she said them. “Right, Ember? You getting married isn’t going to end with riding off on a white horse, a sword fight, or you wearing a crown.”

“I know that it’s probably—definitely going to end in divorce,” I said. “I know! But in the meantime, it could be good.”

She considered and then shrugged again. “Well, let’s get down to the important stuff. Am I invited to the wedding, and what are you going to wear? Is that why you wanted to shop today?”

We planned a little over our coffees until she had to pick up Dreyden and I had to go, too, because I had a job interview. It was risky to do it when I was still looking so bad. This position involved manual labor (bagging groceries and carrying them to people’s cars), so I also had to convince the store manager that I really was physically capable of performing the required tasks—no, I couldn’t do them right now, but soon.

The interviewer was nice enough and I thought it was going ok until he read my application more carefully and saw my last place of employment. “Oh,” he said, “B-Dzld.” He eyed me. “I haven’t been there myself, but I’ve heard about it from friends. You were a…”

“A dancer,” I filled in. And after that, he’d acted less interested in my answers to his questions and more interested in my boobs, which really weren’t front and center (they weren’t placed there for his viewing pleasure, I meant). I had purposely chosen the same mature, trustworthy outfit that I’d worn for the last meeting at Meadow’s school, the place where she spent so much time and felt so lonely…

Crumbs! This day wasn’t going very well so far, but there was a chance for better things. I started to drive home—to Jake’s house—and I saw a sign at the movie theater saying that they were looking for help. Wouldn’t it have been fun to get a job where you could watch new releases and maybe eat the leftover popcorn? Sure, that would be great! “We’re so impressed with how you organized the boxes of candy,” they might say, “that we’d like you to work in corporate.” It could happen.

I tried for a deep breath to settle down but it hurt my ribs and I ended up coughing. The grocery store manager had told me that the competition for the bagger position was stiff, and that I shouldn’t get my hopes up too much. Then he’d also said that he could take me out for a drink to discuss other options, but I’d said no.

Yeah, I was sorry not to have a steady paycheck. I wasn’t going to go out with him, though, or do anything else to get one…but I was worried about money. I was worried about Meadow. I was worried about what I’d agreed to do with Jake—the marriage thing. I was worried about him, since he had headed downstate for surgery this morning after I’d made a terrible phone call and had reported a physical altercation with Christal. No, I wasn’t going to tell the police, I explained to Meadow’s caseworker, and I was ok. I answered all her questions, of which there were many, but finally I’d convinced her that I was fine, Meadow was fine, and as for Christal? I was keeping us both away from her.

Jake had sat next to me the whole time, nodding when I looked over at him and once patting my shoulder when I got stuck because a little emotion clogged up my throat. Maybe that was how marriage would be: he would pat my shoulder when I needed it, and I would do the same for him. It wouldn’t be like my mom’s husbands numbers four and five, the only two that I remembered very well. The fourth one, Roger, had been a drunk so bad that he’d practically filled our house with his empties, and his kids were terrible when they’d lived with us for a while. I’d hidden in the basement for a lot of the time that she and Roger were together.

The fifth and final one had been worse. The most vivid memory I had of that guy was when he’d left, because he’d backed his truck through the big living room window of our house. I remembered her smoking as she sat at the kitchen table, using one of our cereal bowls for an ashtray. “You want to go with him?” she’d asked.

“No,” I’d said firmly, coughing on the dust of the wreckage.

“Figures,” she’d answered. When he’d pulled away, he’d taken the refrigerator instead, and we’d never seen him again.

Jake wouldn’t run off with the refrigerator. He really wouldn’t, because it was built-in and anyway, it was his house. I’d be the one leaving when we were done. But as I thought about the appliances, I realized that we hadn’t talked about how we would split the expenses, the upkeep and the bills for his home. We hadn’t talked about how we’d split the space, either. Would both of us be in the bedroom at the end of the hall that belonged only to him right now? We wanted children, but we hadn’t discussed how we’d get them…of course, you didn’t need a bedroom for that. I briefly considered having sex with him, but then shook my head. I’d deal with it when it came up. Literally.

I wondered if he'd lived with the woman who had broken his heart and moved away, if I’d open drawers in the big bathroom and find a stray hair elastic, or maybe I’d fish out one of her socks from behind the dryer. I wondered if I would be enough of a substitute to keep him from missing her, and I hoped so. Calandra had said I was hot, and I didn’t know about that but I had certainly used my looks in the past to get men, jobs, money, and whatever else I needed. I didn’t think my appearance alone would be enough to keep Jake interested, though. There were hot women everywhere, and more important than that? There were smart women.

The one who had left him…I tried to remember what Noah and Audrey Boone had called her. Arabella? I knew it was definitely unusual and pretty. Anastasia? Yeah, that was it. Anastasia probably had a good education and a good job—she definitely had the job, because she’d moved to another city for her work, like she’d been recruited for it. She hadn’t just packed up her car and driven off, hoping to find something that didn’t involve being naked and without any guarantee that she’d have a bed to sleep in that night. His ex had a plan and a purpose. She probably also had a nice family, two parents and a big brother who loved her, a dog, and maybe even a horse. That was the kind of woman for a person like Jake.

He was getting me instead and that wasn’t much of a win for him…but it could be, I decided. I had changed things around for Meadow: I’d come up here, put my name on a lease, and checked “yes” to receive text messages from the parent club at her school. I could change things for him, too, and I wondered what would make a marriage to me worthwhile.

And then I asked myself why I would even bother. Why couldn’t I just accept this good thing as a win? I’d had my name picked in a raffle once, in Fresno. I’d gotten a free neon tetra, a small tank, plus a year’s supply of anti-algae tablets. I hadn’t said, “No, sorry! I can’t take that fish, because I don’t really deserve it. I’m not good enough for a neon tetra, so you can just keep it.” I had gone to pick up the tablets, the tank, and the fish, and when I’d left Fresno, I’d found him a good home.

I would do that again, I decided—no, not setting up a fish tank, but accepting the boon I’d been granted, and keeping it for as long as I could. Problem solved.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was doing something wrong. I kept worrying, and when I got back to Jake’s house, I called him. He had pre-surgery appointments this afternoon, a meeting with a lawyer, and one with his agent about some endorsements, but he picked up.

“What’s wrong?” he answered.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just calling to talk, which is what people in a relationship do.” That was what I had heard, anyway. “We aren’t in one yet, I guess, but I figured we could both get used to it now.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, but then there was silence. “Did you need something, though?”

“I think I just wanted to hear you,” I admitted. “Are you ok?”

“I am,” he told me. “I feel better after talking to the surgeon again, and I talked to the PT people, too. They’re pretty upbeat and they’ve dealt with this problem a few times. Davis Blake used this guy.”

“Oh, well, that’s definitely reassuring.”

“Do you know who Davis Blake is?”

“No, but I figured it was a good thing from how you sounded just now,” I explained. “You said his name with a lot of reverence.”

He laughed quietly. “Blake was a great quarterback for the Woodsmen, and I do feel a lot of reverence toward him. He married the former mascot, the girl who wore the chipmunk costume.”

That was something that Meadow was going to have to explain to me. “I’m glad you feel better. I wish I were there but I don’t know what I would do for you.”

“Nothing, because I’m fine.”

“I mean, I would like to do something,” I explained. “You’re taking us on, this big burden of two extra people. One is the person who carved a penis into your truck and one is me, and I would like to be of service.”

“I don’t expect you to be a servant to me, Ember.”

I wasn’t expressing this right, but I struggled to find the words.

“Meadow and I talked about her vandalizing my truck,” Jake mentioned. “She apologized to me again and she meant it. She cried, too.”

“She did?”

“Don’t cry, yourself,” he ordered, but it was too late. At least he couldn’t see me. “She explained it, how she was feeling bad and that it wasn’t fair about how life was going. I said sure, everybody gets like that sometimes. You just can’t take a rock to someone’s door.”

“When have you felt like that?”

He thought about it. “I felt it on draft night, in college. I watched a few guys get picked before I did and I thought, shit, I’ll work harder, I’ll do better than they will. I thought that it wasn’t fair, but it turned out well because I like where I am and they’re doing fine, too. That was a weird night, anyway. The network wanted me to be on their broadcast because I was supposed to get chosen in the first round. But there was no one I wanted to have with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“They usually do segments showing guys at home with their families and girlfriend at draft-night parties. I wasn’t doing anything,” he explained. “My family was interested in being on TV but I didn’t want to pretend.” He paused and then said, “You don’t have to break out a violin, because I’m not complaining about having a tough life while I talk about getting picked to play professional football. That was just how it was. We’re not close and we never will be, but it would have been good to have people around. It was nerve-wracking.”

And it explained why he wanted a family of his own, I thought, kids and a wife who would be close to him and wouldn’t show up only for media exposure.

“My parents and half-siblings aren’t bad people, they’re just not very interested,” he said. “They do their thing and I do mine.”

“But would you want that? Would you want your kids to be like that, so separate—”

“Hell, no,” Jake said before I’d even finished. “I don’t want that at all. I want to be at their games, go to their teacher meetings, play in the yard, read books together. When they grow up, I want to live close by so we can still see each other, besides on a Christmas every five or so years. I want to talk on occasions other than when somebody needs money.”

“Ok, good. Because that would be what I would want, too,” I said. “I guess there’s a lot of stuff we should probably discuss. You know, if you still want to get married…which, by the way, I’m not holding you to.” Now that he felt better about his surgery and future football prospects, it was very possible that he’d changed his mind, and I wouldn’t have blamed him in the least. I would have felt bad, very bad—for Meadow’s sake and for what she would miss out on.

“I haven’t changed my mind at all,” he stated, and he sounded confident and assured. “Have you?”

“Noooo,” I said, but I drew the word out long as I considered my answer. I hadn’t changed my mind, but there was definitely a lot that I hadn’t thought about when I’d agreed to it.

There was talking in the background then, and I heard someone say his name. “I need to get off the phone. I’m making them wait for me,” he explained. “I’ll write up some stuff about myself and you do the same, all right? We’ll get to know each other better.”

“Ok,” I agreed. That would help me to sort all this out. “Ok, bye.”

“Wait,” he said. “Did you have fun with Calandra?”

I had mentioned that I was meeting her, but I hadn’t mentioned that it was to go wedding dress shopping. I hadn’t said anything about my interview at the grocery store, either, and now I was glad that I didn’t have to explain why I wouldn’t be working there.

“It was ok,” I answered. “I think things between her and Seyram aren’t working out, though.”

“Really? I thought…shit, I do have to go. Bye, Ember.” And that was it.

But then later, when Meadow was home from school and trying to convince the cat to take a bath (the cat did not agree that it was a good idea), I got a text from him with an attachment that was hard to open on my phone.

“Meadow, can I use your school tablet for a minute?” I asked.

“I guess. Jake just sent me a message,” she told me, so it seemed like he was busy. “He says we should use his gym if we want.” She looked skeptical, but I jumped on it.

“Yes! Let’s go do that,” I said. It was a sign of our improved relations that she didn’t immediately say no just because I had said yes, and we went to find clothes that were more exercise-appropriate. She helped me print out the attachment, too, and it was multiple pages of single-spaced typing in a font too tiny to comprehend without my glasses, and maybe even with them. It seemed like Jake had a lot of ideas and expectations for marriage, but I decided to look at them after we worked out. After all, that was supposed to make you happy, and when I read about the ways where I might not measure up, I would probably need a little emotional boost.

His set of weights was terrifying and between us, we weren’t going to lift even one, so we moved to the machines. It took a minute for Meadow to figure out how all they worked, but she got the treadmill rolling and I started to row. She seemed to be doing fine and was even singing while she went, but me? It was a lot more difficult than it looked to pull the handle and simultaneously slide back and forth, and I imagined it would only be worse if there were actual oars and a current involved. I started to cough and then it was hard…it was hard to get enough air, and I really wanted something to drink right now.

“Ember, are you ok?”

“I need water,” I said. I felt like I was choking.

“Ember!” She was leaning over me, because I didn’t seem to be on the rower thing anymore.

“I’m ok,” I assured her, but it didn’t feel like I was. “I’m fine. This is normal for someone out of shape.”

“Oh, shit!Ember!”

“Don’t swear,” I told her, but then I couldn’t talk very much anymore.