Her Inconvenient Groom by Niomie Roland
Chapter 3
By the time Dustin pulled up in front of his apartment, he was dog tired. After putting in a full day at the tattoo parlor, he’d turned around and spent another four hours ferrying passengers around for his second job as an Uber driver. It had been a particularly eventful shift. Two guys and a girl had asked to be driven to an upscale hotel at the other end of town, and had made out frantically all the way there. It would be an interesting evening for the trio, he figured. More power to them.
His next passenger, a young woman, seemed to be leaving her boyfriend. Midway during the trip her phone had rung, and a screeching match followed. The lady in the back seat, who was crying so hard that rivers of mascara ran down her cheeks, began detailing every sin her boyfriend had committed throughout their relationship. But the guy must have been a sweet talker, because by the time she’d reached her destination, she’d decided she loved him anyway and demanded to be taken back home.
He got the impression it was a frequently played out scenario.
His final fare had been three 80-something-year-old women who were off to “the bingo” and had argued all the way to the church hall about who had dibs on “that hot young Hector”, who, Dustin discovered, was only 75, and therefore quite a catch.
Some days were like that, he supposed. He was exhausted.
“Dustin? That you?” Kim’s voice floated down the hallway at him as he kicked off his shoes and tossed his car keys into the little ashtray on the side table. His stepmother met him halfway, rolling up in her wheelchair, tilting her head towards him. Her skin was the color of Hershey’s milk chocolate, her face narrow, with a pointed chin, and lips that were always smiling. He noticed she’s had her Bantu twists redone. Kim’s hairdresser came to the house frequently to attend to her, saving her the inconvenience of heading downtown. The new ‘do seemed to have lifted her spirits, and she was practically bubbling over.
“Hey,” she said in welcome.
“Hey,” he said, and pressed a kiss on the crown of her head. He was terribly fond of her; she was an awfully nice person, and even though the whole ‘hating your stepmother’ thing was a huge cliché, Dustin enjoyed her company. He didn’t even feel awkward knowing that she was only about five years older than he was. His father had loved her right up to the day he died, and that was enough for him.
He walked inside, and she wheeled along behind him.
“You hungry?” she asked hopefully. Kim had a thing about feeding people. She was a great cook, and had gotten even better since her accident a few years ago. She was on disability from her former job as an office manager. She picked up a few hours of work as a telemarketer, but the job was brutal, and she dealt with rude people every day, in exchange for a small commission that never seemed to be enough.
Daily, she visited the hospital, where her 19-year-old daughter, Dustin’s half-sister Arabella, languished, waiting for a match for a new kidney. She spent a few hours trying to keep the teenager’s spirits up, watching movies or playing games. She was a mean Call of Duty player.
Apart from that, Kim filled her few remaining free hours watching cooking shows, trying to replicate what she saw, and then force-feeding the result to anyone within range. Dustin liked to tease her that in her last life she’d probably been a Greek grandmother. But he understood that her obsession with cooking helped fill the aching gap in her heart left by his father, who’d been killed in the same crash that had crushed her vertebrae and destroyed one of Arabella’s kidneys, leaving the other permanently damaged.
He felt almost embarrassed to answer. “Uh… I had a burger earlier.” He hated not coming home hungry, because it meant that Kim’s labors in the kitchen would be wasted, but between the drunken threesome and the runaway bride he’d been starving. Hence the burger.
“Aw, man!” Kim threw up her hands in exasperation.
“Never mind, Mom. I’ll take the leftovers to the tattoo parlor tomorrow. Might even share them with Squeak.”
She grabbed one of the pillows from behind her back and tossed it at him, but he adroitly sidestepped it. “Don’t call me that!”
“Mama?”
“No.”
“Mumsie?”
“Augh! Nope!” She looked around for something else to throw.
His seventeen-year-old half-brother Aaron, who was much paler in complexion from Kim, appeared in the doorway to the living room, leaning on the door jamb. Aaron, too, had benefited from the hairdresser’s visit. His loosely curly brown hair was in an intricate cornrow pattern. Aaron liked to swagger about with big brand logos braided into his hair. Today, it was Nike.
“Dustin, will you please stop torturing my mother?”
He grinned. “But it’s so much fun!”
He followed Aaron into the living room and sat down. The TV was on, set to one of those trapped-in-a-mansion slasher movies where only one person got out alive by morning. He pointed at the screen. “Body count?”
“Too many to number.”
“Cool.” He put his feet up and began to watch.
Kim came wheeling in, balancing three plates. “You might not be hungry enough for dinner, Dustin Spencer, but I spent hours on this key lime pie, so you better eat it all up and count your blessings.”
He took his plate without arguing. “Gracias, Mamacita.”
Kim turned to her son. “Aaron, can you hit him for me? I’m never fast en—”
Before she could finish speaking, Aaron’s fist had shot out and caught him good on the bicep. “Ow!”
“Sorry,”
The pie was great; delicious enough for him to forget that he really wasn’t hungry. What a bizarre day it had been! Some strange, beautiful woman walking in off the street and informing him that she’d had herself impregnated using his sperm. Asking him to marry her as though she were ordering a cup of coffee.
And offering him a million dollars for the privilege.
Of course, he was right to turn her down. Just because she’d happened to select his profile for her insemination didn’t mean they were connected, anyway. And if he was honest, he was a teeny bit offended that it had taken so long for someone to pick him out of the catalogue.
I mean sheesh!
“Come in, Dustin. Hello, hello, do you read me?” Kim made a big show of tapping an imaginary microphone, blowing on it and repeating herself. “Do you hear me?”
He smiled. “I drifted away for a bit.”
“Yeah. Like you were in an armchair filled with helium balloons!”
“Sorry. You were saying?”
“Just asking about your day. You went to see Arabella? You said you would.”
Just the mention of his sister’s name made him brighten. “Yeah, I dropped in before I went to the parlor.”
“I missed my visit today because I had physical therapy. How’s she doing?”
He shrugged, trying not to communicate his concern. Arabella had been hospitalized for months, because the doctors were increasingly concerned about her condition. Her need for medication and dialysis was growing, and the search was on for a suitable kidney donor. It would just take time—and money. Much more money than he had.
“Looking good. Working on a massive puzzle, the kind that doesn’t have a picture on the cover. Four thousand pieces, I think.”
“Girl’s nuts,” Aaron said.
“We know.” They all grinned at each other, warmed by the mere idea of his sweet-natured teenage sister, but under their masks of smiles there was real concern.
Apart from the anxiety and uncertainty of waiting on a donor, there were also the finances. Arabella’s medical bills so far were enormous, and even though Dustin had taken another mortgage on the tattoo parlor—as Chantelle Moreau’s investigators had deduced—he’d barely made a dent in their debt. Their father’s small life insurance policy had taken care of his funeral and some of the bills, but it had also been eaten up by Kim’s immediate care after the accident, since she, too, had suffered serious injury.
Now, with the money all spent, and Arabella ineligible for Medicaid, the costs continued to grow.
As if reading his mind, Kim wheeled over to the coffee table and picked up an envelope. Immediately, he spotted the hospital’s logo in the upper left-hand corner. That couldn’t be good. The only mail that came from the hospital these days was bills.
Without saying a word, he took it from her hands. She’d already opened it. He pulled out the thick wad of papers, a long litany of itemized charges which he skipped over, preferring to zoom straight on the bottom line.
They owed several thousands of dollars. Not in total. In addition to everything they already owed for Arabella’s care.
Dustin felt light-headed, as if the ground was swaying and rising, then shifting away from him.
How the actual hell did anyone expect him to pay this?
He looked down to see Kim’s eyes fixed on him. They were wide, anxious, scared. He looked over, and Aaron was there, too, waiting for a reaction.
He schooled his features, willed them to reveal no emotion. None of the panic and frustration. None of the sinking, hopeless anxiety that he was feeling right now. He was the man of this family, and it was up to him to make sure they were all right.
The problem with that was… he didn’t know how.
Silently, he folded the sheaf of papers and tried to stuff them back into the envelope. But they didn’t seem to fit.
Great. Wonderful.
He wanted to slap them down onto the coffee table, fruitlessly channel his frustration that way, but didn’t like to alarm anyone. Instead, he put them down carefully, straightened his back and said, “Gonna take a shower.”
The others nodded, knowing it was a bad idea to ask any questions.
As he walked up the stairs, his whole body burned with anger, frustration and shame. He was the go-to guy, dammit, especially since his dad, God rest his soul, was gone. Dustin knew that everything was up to him.
Except that now, Dustin had no idea what to do. How to help. Sell the car? Sell the shop? But if he did, how would they eat?
Sell more sperm? The idea came out of nowhere as he began to undress, with the shower water running, heating up. That idle thought made him laugh. Even if he sold a thousand samples, it wouldn’t be enough to make a dent in the family’s debt. And the idea was just too stupid.
As his jeans hit the floor, he spotted a bit of white sticking out of a pocket. He bent over and retrieved it.
“Huh,” he breathed. He hadn’t even remembered placing it in his pocket. A business card, a rectangle of richly textured linen stock. All it said was: Chantelle M. Clark and a couple of numbers.