Free Lay the Favorite by Beth Raymer

greasy-haired security guard with dirty fingernails. What I loved was being in strangers’ homes and listening to their secrets. Inside the maze of suburban split-levels, hunting cabins, summer homes, and doublewides, intricate, vulnerable human urges were revealed. There was no ordinary structure. Every encounter was unique. Life was in the here and now and I loved the feeling of being wildly alive to it all. Never turning down a call, I took every opportunity to dress up and playact. Some customers took me to shoot pool, some asked me to watch them masturbate. Many asked me to remove my shoes so I wouldn’t wake the kids.
    There was only one customer with whom I felt uncomfortable. He was an English professor who preferred the lights on low as he instructed me to get naked but for my heels, straddle a bar stool, and read to him from
In Cold Blood
. Out of all the fantasies I was asked to fulfill, this one made me feel the most exposed. That it was a murder story never even crossed my mind. I just didn’t have the confidence to read aloud. I was so afraid I would mispronounce a word that I barely managed to enunciate anything. My posture caved. Red blotches the shape of crescent moons appeared on my neck and chest. Sweat trickled from the backs of my knees into the heels of my stilettos, making their plastic arches even more slippery. I scanned each page for words that might trip me up. The first one appeared on page ten:
abstemious
. There was along pause as I searched for an excuse as to why I couldn’t say the word. My damp palms turned the page’s edge transparent.
    “I don’t like this word,” I said. “It makes me think of bad things.”
    The professor seemed genuinely interested. “Bad things? Like what?”
    Like it made me feel stupid, for one.
    “Can’t we do something else?” I said. “Can’t I just dance for you?”
    Ten months passed. Each afternoon, when I awoke, it became my habit to arrange my savings into piles of one thousand dollars and place them atop my bedspread, side by side. The rows of green stretched before me like a lifetime of summers, each one more promising than the last. There was nowhere I had to be, no outstanding bill I had to pay. I unplugged my alarm clock and forgot about it for a year. The moldy, metallic smell of money lingered in my sheets and before bed I’d pull the covers close to my nose and inhale, deeply, until I fell asleep.
    My feelings about the job changed after an evening with Charlie. A friendly fifty-year-old southerner and Nightmoves regular, Charlie told animated stories about his two tours in Vietnam and his life after the war when he began working for the CIA, or so he claimed. It never mattered to me whether or not Charlie’s CIA stories were true. The only thing that bothered me about him was that he seemed to have something wrong with his memory. Sometimes I would spend two hours with him in the afternoon, go home, and later in the night he’d call again, forgetting that I had been to his house that very day. Still, I thought his stories were interesting, and I much preferred listening to him than to the downhearted, heavy-drinking cops and accountants I visited.
    One evening, I sat on his couch and looked through his photo albums. I saw Charlie as a teenager, his long hair pulled into a ponytail, and Charlie with a buzz cut, grinning in front of a chopper. In one picture, a smiling Vietnamese boy handed Charlie asharp animal tooth, which Charlie still wore around his neck, attached by a hemp necklace. The albums’ last pages displayed more recent photographs: Charlie at fifty, in different exotic locales, his arm draped around girls in their twenties. Assuming the girls worked for places similar to Nightmoves, I asked Charlie why he never invited me to Cambodia or Panama. “Too dangerous,” he said. In the photos, the girls were wrapped in Budweiser beach towels and Charlie was sunburned and smoking a cigar. It didn’t look so dangerous. I