Free And When She Was Good by Laura Lippman

never thought about it. She had
thought about going to college, getting a job. Marriage. Her father had refused to give that to her mother, so it
must be a precious thing. Yes, she would marry him. That wouldn’t keep her from
doing anything else. She was already working and going to school at the same
time. She could do that in Baltimore, too.
    â€œYes,” she said.
    â€œWhen you come to work on Saturday, bring your
money—and a suitcase, with as many clothes as you can manage. Stash it behind
the Dumpster, and I’ll put it in the trunk of my car.”
    He showed up that Saturday in a suit, presiding as
manager. He ignored Helen so thoroughly that she began to wonder if she had
imagined his instructions. At closing he chewed her out, said one of her tables
had complained about her attitude and that he was going to make her stay late
and start inventory as punishment. Once everyone was gone, he showed her the
night’s cash receipts, waiting to be deposited. “Going to be deposited straight
in our account, baby.” They headed out of town in his car, not the sports car he
had once driven but a plain, boxy old Datsun. “Gotta keep a low profile,” he
said. “He’ll be coming after us.”
    They would get married the very next day, he
promised. Well, not the next day, but Monday, at the courthouse. They were going
to start over. Billy was going to open a real restaurant, a good one, where the
desserts weren’t made of Marshmallow Fluff.
    She fell asleep in the car. The next thing she
knew, they were in a motel room outside Baltimore, Maryland, which turned out
not to be the place that one could get married right away. That was a different
county, back in the direction they had driven. Here, in the city, there was a
forty-eight-hour waiting period after taking out the license, a fact that threw
Billy off. Plus, he was annoyed at the cost of the license. And he was out of
drugs—not that she understood that yet—and he was getting irritable, and it
turned out that maybe he had taken some things from his stepfather that weren’t
his to take—not just that night’s receipts but all those other shortages, the
booze, jewelry from his mother’s bedroom—and maybe there were other people, less
forgiving, who wanted money from him, too. See, Billy didn’t use drugs, but he
sold them, and there had been some bad luck, someone had stolen his stash, which
he hadn’t exactly paid for, but how could he pay for it if he didn’t have the
drugs to sell? They needed fast money, cash money, and the best place to make
that, Billy had heard, was on the Block, where Helen would make great tips just
for dancing. Just dancing! And what did it matter if men saw her naked? She was
beautiful; men should see her and admire her. They wouldn’t be allowed to touch
her. Other men could look, but only Billy could touch.
    Things didn’t happen as fast as Billy thought they
would. But they happened as he said they would. She got a job dancing. She made
slightly more than she’d made on the good shifts at Il Cielo. She brought it all
home, and Billy, instead of paying the debts he owed, put it up his nose.
    She started bringing home a little less, hiding
money as she had hidden it from her father. She started doing extras, to make a
little more. Lap dances. As Billy had promised, no one touched her. Nothing
touched her. He no longer touched her. She seldom seemed to catch him in the
right phase of his chemical arc for sex, and she didn’t want it much either.
    So this is it, she
thought. I fell in love with the wrong guy, an addict, and
this is the life I get. Going home didn’t seem to be an option. She
had called once, to say she was in Maryland and planning to get married, and her
father had called her a whore and slammed down the phone. Prophetic Hector. How could I be such a dope? She didn’t think she
could feel anything, ever again.
    She was