He shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it.”
“But…” I pause, feeling nervous suddenly. “I thought that was both of ours.”
“You’ll get your half. I promise,” he says. He reaches into the envelope and takes out two twenties, handing them to me. “Here, that’ll hold you over for now.” Then he grabs our bags and heads out the back door without further explanation.
We don’t talk for the entire bike ride, and when we arrive back in Riverwest, Tristan says he has an errand to run and leaves me by the door of Bremen Café, alone. “I’ll be back in a couple hours,” he says, then disappears down Bremen, towards Humboldt Avenue.
I lock up my bike and head inside, using the cash Tristan gave me to buy a breakfast bagel with eggs and cheese, a pack of cigarettes, and another coffee. Then, since I have nothing better to do, I sit down at the desktop computer near the side entrance to use the Internet. Bremen has two desktop computers with internet that any customer can use. Most people own laptops, and this will likely become redundant enough to remove within a year or two, but for now it’s a lifesaver, since I left all my things at my parents’ house and haven’t returned since.
I begin by looking for an apartment sublease; but there is nothing in my price range of almost no money, not even one with the five hundred dollars Tristan disappeared with, so next I begin searching jobs on Craigslist. Sure, I had stolen one wallet, and broken into someone’s home. But I’m not intending to continue going to parties and stealing wallets. Surely I could find a job, at least a temporary one till I figure out what my next move is. It wouldn’t even have to be in Milwaukee necessarily. It could be in Chicago. The Greyhound to Chicago is only ten dollars. I could swing that. The problem is that after an hour of searching, I don’t find anything I am qualified for that doesn’t pay minimum wage or sound horribly soul-killing. The closest thing to real money would be cleaning apartments, and even that is only $12 an hour to start. I even check if anyone needs Russian or English tutoring, but there’s not much demand for foreign language skills in Milwaukee. Only a couple of ads requesting Chinese lessons.
I take a break from this depressing endeavor and head to MySpace.
Ignoring the several apologetic and concerned messages I’ve received from Margot, I open a second browser window and login to my Facebook. I want to check in with Zoya. But Zoya’s accounts on both Facebook and MySpace have been deactivated. Strangely this doesn’t sound any alarm bells in my head. I figure there must be some kind of technical issue on her end. But then I log in to my university email.
In between some notices from UWM about my lack of securing payment for the next semester resulting in my temporary suspension from school, there are a few new emails from Zoya. The first one is dated yesterday.
“Hey, sistreechka,” it says. “I don’t appreciate the ‘cold shoulder,’ as they say in America. We are running out of time.”
The following email is less nice. I will spare you the colorful language. The basic summary of it is that if my dad doesn’t take the DNA test and acknowledge her as a daughter for her Israeli immigration application, Zoya would sue him for eighteen years of child support. I don’t know if that’s legal—or an option—here in the US, but my first reaction is only that it doesn’t sound like her to write something like this. I should have expected it, but I’m still in total shock. This isn’t what we agreed to. Even if she didn’t have a chance of winning, it would destroy his marriage, and possibly his whole life. I scroll down the end of the page, my heart in my throat.
“We can avoid all this if you just have him sign the attached letter acknowledging he’s my father. Of course, if he sends me $5,000 for moving expenses, I can be convinced to let it go. Or you can send it; I really don’t care. But I will not be ignored any more. If I don’t get either the signed letter or the money within one month of this email, I will tell everybody what your family has done to me. Including your mother. And a lawyer. Then we can let the court decide how much money I am owed.”
This message, so different in tone than her previous correspondence to me, sends a shiver through my spine. Tristan was right. Zoya had been conning me. Was that whole mix-up with the DNA test a lie? Our friendship? Was that too a lie? I reach into my new pack of cigarettes and light one, hoping it will soothe my spirits, which had been so high before, in the cloud of seclusion I’d created. That’s all gone now. Where had Tristan gone with our money? What does Zoya intend to do? I can’t let her destroy my parents’ lives. Not when the whole thing is my fault. I’d been duped, not my dad. I would need to get her the money somehow, I realize. And that much money in so little time? I couldn’t exactly go the legal route. I would need to use my overactive brain to get us out of this mess without any more people being hurt. I sit there and smoke and think for what feels like a very long time. I consider all the ads I saw on Craigslist, and everything Tristan has told me about his past, and an idea starts to form in my mind. With a sigh, I click on the email and open a new message to reply.
“Zoya. Leave my parents alone. I will get you the money.”
ANNA
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CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I know from the calendar in the Shorewood mansion that whoever lives there will return in a matter of days, and I have no other leads of places to sleep, so after the first home I “clean,” a nice condo in Bayside, I tell Tristan we need to find a better solution. This is when I discover Tristan already has an apartment. Turns out the place he told me about when we first met, where he was staying with friends, was really only one friend, a bartender named Chris who was leaving town for the entire month of January. Tristan said we could have been staying there the entire time, but that it was more fun to see what I came up with. I found this revelation bothersome, but chose to ignore it, because I was so relieved.
I expect some dank, dirty studio loft without a real kitchen and am happily surprised to find it otherwise. In reality, it’s a two-bedroom apartment at the outskirts of Riverwest, just past a new park that was an abandoned concrete slab of graffiti only months earlier. The apartment is astonishingly modern for Riverwest; it has brand-new hardwood floors, two large, open living rooms, and a kitchen with recently installed granite countertops and new wooden drawers and cabinets. Chris the bartender is apparently also Chris the carpenter. He’d refinished the entire place after it became an abandoned warehouse. There are even built-in bookshelves and bike hooks where we can hang our bikes; a far cry from the hobbled-together assortment of furniture at my former apartment, where every couch and armchair were a different color and material, and we had more art supplies than dishes. This place is actually nice.
For a while it is easy to imagine we are a normal couple living together. We get into a good rhythm. I meet with my potential “clients,” clean their homes, and report back to Tristan if I see anything worth taking. If there is, I set up a time to meet for our lessons at the Alterra in Bayshore Mall, because the parking lot is such a nightmare there it gives Tristan and me a good cushion of time to prepare an exit strategy. Having the actual stealing happen out of sight is a nice perk, and leaving the homes spotless alleviates some of my guilt, though I don’t really feel as bad as I thought I would. Because Tristan is right: rich people have insurance. It’s really the insurance companies we are hurting. These billion-dollar industries can afford a few hundred dollars’ loss.