How to Love

I tossed and turned for half the night thinking about Jake, though I hated to admit it. Perhaps Liz had been right after all, and I really did have some kind of feelings towards Jake. I hadn’t truly liked a guy since I was a freshman in high school, though I’d had fleeting minor crushes on assorted pieces of eye candy that Alexander and Matt were friends with. I also hadn’t made any friends since my freshman year of high school, and I had forgotten what either feeling felt like. As confused as I felt about the situation, I had to push it to the back of my mind and focus on the funeral the next morning.

Luckily, the funeral went off without a hitch. Everyone was there on time, the family made it to the church a few minutes early, and they were done with prayers and out the door by the time I’d expected them to be. I was finishing some paperwork for another funeral when the doorbell downstairs rang and I glanced out the window to see Andrea’s car in the parking lot. I went downstairs to let her in and was met with an energy I hadn’t sensed from her in a while. She was smiling and joking around the entire time I showed her exactly what needed to be cleaned and how to do it. I’d left her a check-list just in case she forgot anything. I left her to her business and went back upstairs, thankful that the family had opted not to have a luncheon here and picked somewhere closer to the cemetery.

It was about two-thirty in the afternoon before Andrea made her way back upstairs and joined me in the office. I was pleasantly surprised since I’d expected her to speed through her work as our old cleaning person had. “Wow. That took a while.”

Andrea pulled the chair out from the desk over-looking the parking lot and turned it to face me. “I wanted to make sure I did a good job.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a pack of menthols. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

I shook my head. Nobody had really smoked in the funeral home since my mom had gotten sick, except for Matt or Alexander on rare occasion. Both my mom and dad were smokers, and since Mom had to quit, Dad joined her in support. “Not at all.”

“Cool.” Andrea lit up a cigarette with her Zippo lighter. The smoke quickly filled the room, and it took my lungs a moment to adjust. “So how’s school this semester?”

I shrugged. “It’s okay. I’ve got two online classes and two in-class lectures that started yesterday. They’re all right. Did you sign up for anything this semester?”

Andrea blew out some cigarette smoke. “No. I wanted to save a little money up before doing anything else with school. I don’t have a major yet, so I don’t want to waste my time with bullshit classes, you know?”

The previous semester, Andrea had been enrolled in a remedial math class and also a high school level English course. We’d had one class together, which was self-defense. That had been a good time for us to bond since we normally needed to partner off in that class and he would usually let us pick. “Yeah, I get you. What about in the summer?”

“Maybe,” she shrugged noncommittally. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“Well, you’re up to that math class I took last semester, I think,” I reminded her. I’d taken an intermediate algebra class and that class had really messed with my head since I wasn’t very good at math. Alexander had taken it the previous semester, he’d just made the cross gesture at me with his hands and said “God bless.”

She scoffed. “Fuck that. If you couldn’t pass it with a C, I sure don’t wanna take that. Not yet, anyway.” She tapped an ash into one of the leftover ash trays. “How’s school without me to entertain you?”

I laughed. “Not too bad.” When I’d started at Tri-C last semester, I didn’t know anyone except for Andrea. Alexander was also going, but all of my classes were scheduled on Mondays and Wednesdays and all of his were on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I’d kind of buddied up with Andrea in order to have some company since we were problem-free at the time. She’d tried to help me make some friends out in the smoking section, but I’d found most of the people out there to be weird and most of them had emotional problems or were addicts of some sort. After some weird hillbilly kid started hitting on me, I stopped going outside. “I think I’ll survive.”

“Do you see Gina at all?” she asked. “I miss my wife.”

“Sadly, no,” I chuckled. Gina was one of Andrea’s few normal friends, and they had some joke that everyone in the smoking section were part of some weird, messed up family, and that Andrea and Gina were married.

“What about Rebecca?” Andrea smirked, obviously remembering the concert we’d gone to with Gina a few weeks prior.

“God, if I ever see Rebecca at school, I’m just gonna cold-clock her,” I rolled my eyes with a smile, continuing to laugh. “I really don’t see anyone, though. Not so far, anyway. I’ve only been on campus once. But so far I haven’t seen Gina or Rebecca or Felicia or anybody.”

Andrea nodded. “So is it just a big lonely time for you then?”

I sort of resented the fact that she’d naturally assumed that I’d be walking around alone, friendless, but then I realized that she was completely right. “Shockingly, no. Believe it or not, I have a friend.”

“That’s one for the books,” she joked. “How’d you meet?”

“At the Shell Station when Matt was working,” I answered. “I’d just put up a help wanted sign and he walked in and asked me about it. I saw him at a party the next night and he gave me a ride home. After that we just kind of bonded. Plus he’s in my psych class and we sat together in the café yesterday.”

“I’d say that’s more action than you’ve ever gotten in your life,” she cracked. I knew she was joking, but the comment still wormed its way under my skin a little. “What’s his name?”

“Jake,” I replied. “Jake Damon.”

“What’s he look like?” she raised her eyebrows coyly.

I shrugged. “I don’t know how to describe him. He’s just really good-looking.”

“We should Facebook stalk him,” she suggested, crushing her cigarette in the ash tray.

“We’re not gonna Facebook stalk him,” I laughed, shaking my head. I didn’t really want Andrea looking him up, mainly for the reason that I sort of wanted to keep Jake to myself, at least for the time being. It’s not that I thought she would see him and decide that she wanted to get in his pants or something – not that I had any say over what happened in his pants – especially since she was bisexual with a preference towards women, but I wanted to keep our friendship, or whatever it was that we had now, private. “No way. I don’t even know if he has one.”

“Let’s find out.” Before I could really respond, she kicked my chair out of the way and rolled in front of the computer, opening up an Internet page and typing in the address for Facebook. I was still logged in, so she looked him up under my name. I hadn’t added him as a friend, but Andrea took the liberty of sending him a request as soon as she pulled up his page. She whistled at his profile picture. “Hot damn. How do you look at him without melting?”

I smiled uncomfortably and let out a nervous laugh but didn’t respond. She looked at a few more of his pictures that he had up, mostly ones that he’d been tagged in at parties or other assorted gatherings, and when she was satisfied, she closed out of the window. “So is there any love action going on there?”

I fidgeted in my seat a little. “We’re just friends.”

“If you say so,” Andrea shrugged as if she didn’t believe me. “Oh, speaking of friends, I talked to Robert and Kai last week.”

I immediately frowned, flashing back to their time with us.

Robert and Kai were friends of Andrea’s that she’d talked me into letting stay at the funeral home for a few weeks at the end of the last semester. My dad and I had originally told her no, but when she showed up with both of them in tow and Kai crying her eyes out, we couldn’t exactly turn them away. The two weeks that the two of them had been there had been a huge inconvenience, but my dad took to them a lot better than I had. The original plan was that they were both going to stay with us for two weeks and then spend the semester break in Pennsylvania and get an apartment together when they came back. About a week into them staying with us however, Kai had gotten a job at some collection agency. The plan then morphed into Robert leaving as planned and Kai staying for an undetermined amount of time.

The thing about Kai was that she was a heroin addict. She claimed to have been clean since July and it was December when they were staying with us, so she had a few months of sobriety under her belt. After Robert left, she started acting weird, which I’d expected since they professed to being very much in love.

One morning shortly before Christmas, I was doing some cleaning in the office and noticed that our petty cash box had been moved. I counted the money inside and was surprised to find quite a lot of money missing from the usual two hundred dollars we kept in there. I asked my dad about it, and he admitted to taking money out a few times, but he’d left a note in the box indicating what he owed. Still, the math didn’t add up and there was at least forty dollars missing. I didn’t want to jump to the conclusion that Kai took it, especially since I was positive that no one knew about that box except for my dad and me, but it seemed like the only logical excuse for the missing money.

Later that day after she woke up, Kai told me that she needed to walk to Tri-C, even though it was winter break. I felt unsettled about this and didn’t buy her excuse for a minute, so I grew suspicious and called Andrea, who told me I was being paranoid. After about an hour though, Robert called me and asked if I’d heard from Kai. I confirmed that I hadn’t heard a word from her since she’d left, and he told me that he’d just spoken to her and that she’d been slurring her words and confessed to falling asleep at the school while waiting to make up an exam with one of her teachers. It was clear to me right away that she was using heroin again, so I called Andrea and told her to get her ass over to the funeral home.

As soon as Andrea arrived, I told her that I needed Kai out of the funeral home that night. Upon Kai coming to stay with us, my dad and I had told her that we wouldn’t tolerate any narcotic use under our roof, and she’d agreed to that condition. I reminded Andrea of that, but she begged me to give Kai another chance. I told her no, and Andrea and I got into a minor fight in the family room. My dad came in and asked what the problem was and though I was determined to hide the situation from him for as long as possible since he was busy with a viewing downstairs, I filled him in on the situation. He frowned and got very quiet and told us to let him know when she came back. Andrea and I kept watch out the window for Kai for about the next forty-five minutes, alternately taking turns calling her, despite the fact that she’d turned her phone off. Finally, we spotted her rounding the corner into the parking lot, the opposite way from the school. She was stumbling quite a bit, and when she came upstairs, Andrea laid into her. They started to yell at each other and I tried to quiet them down, all the while praying that no one had noticed her walk in fucked up like that.

Kai made a beeline for the bathroom after a few moments, obviously pretty dope sick. Andrea apologized and said she had to go to work, but we could deal with the situation later. I told her to go ahead to work, but I was dealing with the situation with or without her. Kai came out of the bathroom a little while later and then locked herself in my room, slamming the door shut behind her. I was half-tempted to go in and yell at her, but decided against it since the viewing was still going on. Eventually the first half of the viewing ended and my dad was able to come upstairs and fully know what was going on. We talked about it and agreed that Kai had to leave, though my dad looked a little sorry to come to this conclusion.

Soon after, Robert started to call my dad to ask about Kai. My dad told him our decision, and Robert offered to drive from Pennsylvania all the way back to Parma to pick her up. We agreed and began our several hour wait. In the meantime, we were trying to figure out what to do with Kai until then. After about a half-hour, Kai wandered out crying and promising that a situation like this would never happen again. I waited for my dad to kick her out or tell her that she had to leave and find somewhere else to go, but he kept staring straight down at the table silently.

“Damn right,” I finally said to her. “You’re Goddamn right it will never happen again. You can’t stay here anymore. We talked about this when you first moved in. You had one chance and you blew it. I need you to pack your things.” I kept my voice low like Dad usually did. I wavered in anger once or twice, but I tried to even my tone out.

Kai started crying again and then turned to go back to my room and collect her things. We didn’t hear any sound coming from my room, so my dad decided to go back and check on her after a few minutes. He knocked on the door but got no answer. He tried to open it, but it was locked again. He knocked one more time, finally raising his voice to call through the door, “Don’t make me do this the hard way.”

Apparently he was going to have to do it the hard way since Kai still wouldn’t unlock the door. My dad made his noises of anger and irritation, cursing under his breath as he walked to the office and grabbed a letter opener to unlock the door. He finally got the door open and kind of yelled at her about locking the door and not answering. She was slumped over on my bed and seemed to be fighting to stay awake. He grumbled half to himself and half to me, “She shot up again.”

I asked him if I should call an ambulance, but he said no. He instructed me to keep checking on her periodically since he had to go back downstairs since the viewing was starting again. I sat down in my makeup chair and faced the bed, making sure that she didn’t lie down or fall asleep. I tried talking to her a little bit to keep her awake, but everything that came out of her mouth was unintelligible. I studied her for a few moments and realized that she couldn’t move half of her face and that one eye was bruised over. I felt the need to busy myself while she sat there and got a few trash bags from the kitchen to begin packing her things since she was obviously in no condition to do so. While I threw things into the big black bags, she started talking to me a little, and I was finally able to make out certain sentences.

“I’m so sorry,” she kept apologizing. “I can’t believe I’d do this to you of all people.”

I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant by that, but I sort of shrugged her comment off and continued to pack her things up so that they’d be ready to go when Robert arrived. I finally got all of her things together by the end of the viewing and Kai started to look a little better, though she kept complaining about a killer migraine. Robert arrived about twenty minutes after the last person left. He spent a little time talking to Kai, but she didn’t quite want to pay attention to him after he told her that he had to take her back home.

“No,” she protested, bawling the entire time. The entire reason behind Kai and Robert moving in in the first place was that Kai couldn’t take living with her mother and said that her mother beat her. “My mom told me that if this ever happened again, she was gonna call the cops. I can’t go back there. She’ll kill me.” She gave me a look like she was expecting me to jump in and save her.

“Well,” I spoke evenly, “I guess you should have thought about that before you did this.”

She continued to cry while Robert went back and forth between my bedroom to the parking lot, carrying all of her belongings out to the car. She continued to apologize, saying, “I’m so sorry. I understand if you never wanna talk to me again.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to say to that but I finally told her, “I can’t make any decisions regarding that right now, but as of now, I really don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

She sniffled and nodded. Finally Robert had packed up the last of her things and helped her out of the car with her yelling dramatically, “Goodbye forever!” as they walked out. I watched them make their way to the car from the family room and when they drove away, I sat down at the kitchen table and put my head between my hands, rubbing my temples. Dad came behind me and placed a hand on my shoulder, squeezing. “How’re you doing, kid?”

I shook my head. “I’m fine. Just tired.”

He nodded, making his way over to the refrigerator. “It’s been a long day.” He pulled a bottle of wine out of the fridge and grabbed two glasses from one of the cabinets. He rejoined me at the table and poured two hearty glasses of wine, sliding one over to me. “I’m sorry I wasn’t much help.”

“It’s fine,” I repeated, waving him off. “It’s done, it’s over. Nothing more to worry about.”

“What do you think happened?” Dad asked after a moment of silence.

“Well, I think she met somebody down the street, traded some favors to get some shit, and got herself beat up,” I told him. “Then whoever picked her up must’ve dropped her off. There’s no way she could’ve walked any distance like that. And I think her face was frozen like that because she probably shot up in her neck or something.”

“I meant I was curious about what made her do that,” Dad corrected himself.

“I don’t know.” I drank the entirety of my glass in one large gulp. “I’m gonna go change my sheets and air my room out. It smells in there.”

Dad nodded and looked down. “Okay.”

“Did you hear me?” Andrea asked, snapping her fingers in front of my face. I blinked, snapping back to attention. “I heard from Robert and Kai.”

“Oh really?” I tried to sound as uninterested as possible so that maybe she would shut up about Robert and Kai. Naturally, Andrea was not capable of taking a hint.

“Yeah,” she continued. “She just got out of rehab.” When she’d gone home, Kai’s parents had apparently just cried for a really long time and then arranged for her to go to a rehab center in Florida for a thirty day program, with optional extra time.

“I thought she’d stay for the extra ninety days,” I said. Obviously she needed it.

“No,” Andrea shook her head. “She’s staying in a halfway house now.”

“Wonderful,” I commented.

“Yeah,” Andrea agreed, though I’d been sarcastic. “And I guess Robert’s-”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, but I really don’t care,” I cut her off, snapping.

“Oh, come on,” Andrea pressed. “They were your friends, too.”

I scoffed. “For all of two minutes.” When Robert and Kai had come to stay, I figured that I’d at least be nice to them and make an effort to be friends with them. We got along well for a short amount of time. Kai and I had the same psych class, so we’d spend time complaining about certain students and make fun of them. But eventually the two of them got to be too much together. They fought constantly and were very hot and cold towards each other. Robert talked constantly and was possibly one of the most boring and irritating people ever, and Kai cried over the stupidest things and was very over-dramatic. I soon shied away from them, spending minimal time with the two of them. I didn’t really want to be friends with a heroin-addicted twenty year old and a thirty year old man with the emotional maturity of a thirteen year old boy.

“Well, I mean, you should care,” she insisted. “They really liked you. Kai said she misses you.”

“She can keep missing me,” I shrugged coldly. “I told you, I don’t care. I don’t need people that are gonna bring unnecessary drama to my life.”

Andrea sighed in defeat. “Fine then. I’ll see you later. Let me know when you need me to come in and clean again.”

I nodded silently and she walked out just as my dad was walking in. He gave Andrea a slightly puzzled look as she made her way down the hallway and then turned the expression to me. “What was that about?”

“Nothing,” I shook my head. “We were just talking about Robert and Kai, that’s all.”

Dad sighed and shook his head in response. “Veronica, you’ve gotta let that go. It’s not healthy to hold onto all that hate.”

“I don’t hate them,” I countered. “I just disapprove of the way they used us. And that last night was absolute bullshit.”

“You sure can hold a grudge like nobody’s business,” Dad rolled his eyes, and then half-smiled. “You definitely get that from your mother.”

I wanted to argue that Dad wasn’t very good at letting things go either, but I kept my mouth shut. “You can’t tell me that that didn’t bother you. I mean, it’s obvious she took that money.”

“It’s likely,” Dad agreed. “But we can’t prove it. I did ask her about it when she called me the next day, but she swears up and down that she didn’t take it. We might’ve messed up in the calculations somewhere.”

“Forty dollars is a lot of money,” I mumbled. “And people lie.”

Dad sighed again and changed topics. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I just came in here to remind you that we’ve got Alexander’s birthday dinner tonight at six-thirty.”

I nodded. “I know.” I didn’t bother reminding him that I was the one that had informed him of the time in the first place a few days prior.

“Also,” he added before walking out, “Andrea did a really good job downstairs. You can actually smell the clean.”

I laughed a little. “Good to know.” Dad headed out and I thought back on the entirety of my talk with Andrea. I wasn’t exactly sure I wanted her to come back and clean if every conversation was going to go like that.