In Summertime Saga

The TV was on when I came through the front door and Jenny was on the couch with her feet on the coffee table and a bowl of cereal balanced on her stomach even though it was dinner time. She was scrolling her phone with one hand and eating with the other and the TV was playing a reality show where someone was crying about a wedding dress and Jenny wasn't watching it. The TV was just noise.

She didn't look up when I came in. Standard.

My shoulders hurt. My chest hurt. My legs hurt from the walk and my arms hurt from the gym and my lower back had a new pain that I was pretty sure came from Kevin correcting my squat form by physically pushing my hips back while saying "bro, engage your core" and my core had not engaged. Third gym session. Still pressing the empty bar. Still pathetic. Getting less pathetic in increments so small I had to pay attention to notice them.

The kitchen smelled like roast chicken and Debbie was at the stove with her back to me, stirring something in a pot. The bathrobe was gone today. She was in actual clothes. A white blouse and a pleated skirt, like she'd gone out somewhere today or was planning to. Her hair was down instead of pulled back and it sat on her shoulders and moved when she stirred.

"Dinner in twenty, honey." She didn't turn around. "Wash up."

"Yeah. Heading up."

I grabbed a glass of water from the sink. Jenny's cereal bowl had left a ring on the coffee table and Debbie hadn't said anything about it and Jenny hadn't noticed and the ring was going to be there tomorrow. A cat was sleeping on the windowsill in the living room. I didn't know we had a cat. It was orange and fat and it opened one eye when I walked past and closed it again.

I went upstairs. The hallway was dim. Jenny's door was closed, but she was downstairs, so it was just closed and empty. The bathroom was at the end. Debbie's bedroom door was between mine and the bathroom, and it was open a crack. Just enough that light came through and her voice carried into the hallway as I walked past.

She was on the phone.

I stopped. My hand was on the bathroom doorknob and I stopped because her voice was wrong. Tight. Controlled.

"I understand the terms, I just-" Pause. "I know. I know the rate." Another pause, longer. "Two-fifty." She said it flat. "Two hundred and fifty thousand, yes."

I stood in the hallway with my hand on the doorknob and the water glass in my other hand and I listened.

"The interest alone is- I can't- Frank had a payment schedule, I think, but I don't have his records and the bank-" Her voice thinned. Got higher. "I understand. I'll figure it out. I always figure it out."

Through the crack in the door: a slice of her bedroom. The edge of the bed. A nightstand with a lamp and a framed photo and a box of tissues. Her feet on the carpet, still in the low heels she'd worn out, and one of them was tapping the floor in a rhythm that had nothing to do with patience.

"Thank you. Yes. I'll call next week."

She hung up. The room went quiet. Her feet stopped tapping.

Then she breathed in, and the breath hitched, and the hitch turned into a sound that I'd heard before but never like this. She was crying. She was trying not to and she was failing and the sound of it was small and ugly and private, the kind you do when nobody's listening, when you've held it together for the phone call and the cooking and the smiling and the "dinner in twenty, honey" and now the phone is down and nobody's watching and the number is two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and you're alone.

I stood in the hallway and listened to Debbie cry.

In the game, this had been a text box. "Return home. Overhear Debbie on the phone about money." Click. Next. I'd played it on my laptop with a beer and my feet on my desk and I'd clicked past it because the phone call wasn't what I'd installed the game for. The crying wasn't content I cared about. The number wasn't a number I needed. The debt was plot, and plot was the thing between me and the next woman who took her clothes off, and I'd mashed through it the way I mashed through all of it. Skip, skip, skip, where's the sex scene.

Now I was standing outside her bedroom door holding a glass of water and her crying was coming through the crack in the door and it wasn't a text box. It was a sound. Wet and ragged and broken in the middle where her breath caught and she'd swallow and try to stop and fail and start again. The tissue box on the nightstand was for this. She'd put it there because she knew this was coming. After the call, after the cooking, after everybody was accounted for and she could stop holding things together.

Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. A mortgage she'd taken out because Russian mobsters were going to show up at her door and demand money that her dead partner supposedly owed. He didn't owe it. He'd stolen it from them because he'd found out what they were doing with it. She didn't know any of that. She was going to pay a quarter million dollars to protect a household from a debt that was manufactured by the people who killed the man she loved. And she was going to do it alone because there was nobody to help her.

I knew all of this because I'd read it on a wiki between loading screens.

She didn't know any of it. She just knew the number.

I went to my room. Shut the door. Sat on the bed.

The house was quiet except for the TV downstairs and the very faint sound of running water that meant Debbie had turned on the bathroom sink so nobody would hear her cry. Below me, Jenny was still on the couch eating cereal. She didn't know. Or she knew and was handling it by not handling it, which was its own way of being twenty-two and scared, which was a generous reading of someone eating cereal on a couch while her mother cried upstairs, but I didn't actually know Jenny well enough to judge. I'd skipped her grief too.

I sat on the bed and I thought about what I knew.

Frank was dead. Murdered. Hanged by a Russian enforcer named Dimitri who'd enjoyed it. The debt was fake. Frank had taken the money because he'd discovered the Bratva's operations through his job at the bank. He'd hidden the cash. In a boat. A boat called... I couldn't remember the name. Something with a D. The Dink. Maybe. It sounded right. The money was in the boat and the boat was at the treehouse and the treehouse was somewhere in the forest and I'd followed a walkthrough to get there without reading why.

There was also an attic. A keepsake box. A photo, a key, a lockbox at the bank. Evidence that led to the mayor. I'd held the attic key in my hand on Day 1 and put it back. I still didn't know the full chain because I'd never cared about the chain when it was a game and now it was real and the chain was the only thing that could fix this and I'd skipped the instructions.

Debbie was downstairs now. Pots and pans in the kitchen, water running. She'd washed her face and come back down and she was going to serve dinner and smile and say "eat up, sweetie" and nobody was going to mention the phone call because that's how this house worked. Debbie held things together. Jenny didn't look up. And the kid whose body I was wearing had been grieving his own father and probably hadn't noticed any of it.

I lay back on the bed and stared at the popcorn ceiling. The same ceiling I'd stared at on my first morning here, when this had all been funny. When it had been a joke, a good one, a dead playboy in a porn game. Worse things have not happened. Ha ha.

I was going to fix this. I didn't know how yet. The evidence chain was a blur and the money was in a boat I couldn't find and the Russians were coming and my stats were garbage and I had zero dollars. But I was going to fix it because the woman downstairs had made me breakfast every morning since I got here and her eggs were good and her smile was getting less wrong every day and she was carrying a quarter million dollars on her back because nobody had told her she didn't have to.

Save Debbie's house. Deal with the Russians. Find the money. Find the evidence. Protect this household.

I didn't know the specifics. I'd figure them out.

Downstairs, Debbie called up the stairs. "Dinner's ready, sweetie."

Her voice was steady. She'd put it back together. Tissues away, face washed. The woman calling me to dinner wasn't the woman I'd heard through the door, and I was the only one in this house who'd heard both.

I went downstairs. Jenny was already at the table, phone in one hand, fork in the other. Debbie set a plate in front of me. Roast chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans. She'd made a meal like the world was normal.

"Looks great," I said.

She smiled. The wrong smile. But she meant it.

I ate everything on my plate.