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By Root 688 0

white couch. Even when they were happiest, she knew David had been going to the strip clubs. She hadn’t liked it, but she’d dismissed it with the rest of his odious lifestyle. After days of his pathetic pleading, she’d even accompanied him once to such a place. A humiliating mistake. Positioned uncomfortably in a leather chair as David and his friends cackled and threw fifties at the freakishly bosomed entertainment, Nada had tried not to cause a scene when Amoyo, fueled by tequila and testosterone, assaulted her right there with his fondling hands and open mouth. She’d pushed him away and taken a cab home, and now she wondered if it had been later that night, perhaps in one of those tiny curtained rooms where the strippers periodically led their best customers, that David first met Sandy.

Even before she began surveilling his BlackBerry, the clues that gave away his afternoon affairs had been subtle: an extra dirty water glass in the dishwasher, an unfamiliar divot in the couch cushions. David’s voice, when lying, raised a quarter note in pitch. He began scheduling his underwear, donning his favorite silk boxers on days when he and Nada would be apart. There were unexplained withdrawals from the tank of David’s Jaguar, only half a gallon once or twice a week, but to Nada’s special eyes—the eyes that had brought them together in the first place—the millimeters lost by the gas gauge were like telltale anomalies in lie-detector ink.

That last night, thirsty Nada hoped to find unexpired milk in the harsh refrigerator light. She didn’t. On the top shelf, however, was a bucket of soy margarine. She flipped open the butter tray. Empty. She pulled on the drawer labeled MEATS. Nothing. That pole-dancing vegan slut had emptied omnivore David’s fridge (with its B-flat drone) of all animal products.

Amoyo had never changed a thing for Nada. Not his fishy cologne or his oily mousse or the Nagel prints in their bedroom. Yet after one month with this whore—a literal whore—he’d given up meat? And, for Chrissakes, butter?

Funny, then, that they first met in a steak house at the Monte Carlo. Nada was collecting on a meal she’d won in a prop bet with a poker pro named Yeager. It had taken almost no effort from Nada—repeating verbatim the first ten minutes of dialogue from a newly released movie he paid for. At dinner, as Yeager tried to impress her with nonstop chatter (an unpleasant departure from his silent persona at the felt), she pushed the lever in her mind and muted him, eliminating all sound from his direction. Cutting Chicago-style into a thick rib eye, blood crimson on the inside, glancing indifferently past Yeager’s silent, flapping lips, she first spotted David, first noticed his unlined skin like fired clay, his deeply inset cat’s eyes, his undersized mouth with the thick lower lip and the thin upper that opened again and again into perfect dark ovals when he spoke. She observed the grooming about his eyebrows, the diligent maintenance around his sideburns, the round and white manicured tips of his fingernails. She noted the fit of his shirt, brick red silk and long-sleeved, which surely had been tailored for him, unless (she allowed herself to imagine) he maintained the sort of torso underneath—thin and tapered and fit—to which an unaltered, one-size-too-small shirt loves to cling.

On the street, Nada banished the image with a shiver. She hadn’t even said good-bye to Bea because Nada knew she wouldn’t be able to lie. She would have to tell Bea about her night with David, and she was just so tired of people being disappointed in her. As for Wayne, how could she look him in the eyes after, well, everything.

For many years, she had avoided returning to Chicago, the city where she had been raised. She had avoided watching even movies or TV shows that had been filmed there. For a long time, the thought of seeing its streets had paralyzed her. To Nada, this city was just another of her father’s old things, things she had abandoned long ago. They weren’t just reminders of him; they were evidence. Evidence of his love for her,