Contenders. Erika Krouse

really douchey,” Nina told the Rolex man.

      “A what?”

      She shouted over the bar din, “Douchey.”

      The corners of his mouth pulled downward. He said, more quietly, “Nobody talks that way to me.”

      “Not to your face, maybe.”

      His nostrils flared, one and then the other. “If you were a man, I’d kick your ass.”

      “If you were a man, I’d kick yours,” Nina said. But this felt wrong somehow, like she was taunting a caged animal. Ugh, she thought, and spun away on her barstool.

      Rolex pulled on her shoulder and turned her around again to face him. She wiped his hand off her shoulder. “Don’t touch me,” she said.

      He wedged his knees between her legs, spreading them. “I’ll do what I want to you,” he said.

      So she punched him in his open jaw. Every bit of her meanness exited her body through her fist as his jaw clacked against it. It was in him, now, and his face slackened at the impact. He fell off his stool.

      The bar fell silent. Rolex blinked on the floor, but didn’t get up.

      Nina slipped off her seat. The friend’s mouth was stuck open. Nina drained the rest of Rolex’s dirty martini and wiped the brine from her mouth with her wrist.

      “Forgive me,” she told the friend, “for I care not what I do.”

      The wallet lay on the bar. She flipped through it. There must have been five hundred dollars in there. The bar collectively murmured as she deftly pocketed the wallet and then bent down to slip the Rolex from the man’s damp wrist.

      A flat male voice said, “Someone stop her.” Nobody did. Nobody ever did.

      She reached for the diamond ring. The chain left a red crease on his neck before snapping and snaking from her hand to the floor.

      The Rolex(less) man opened one eye and said, thickly, “Not the ring.”

      The female bartender reached for a phone.

      Nina looked at the diamond in her hand. “But I’d like a reminder of the man you can’t help but be.”

      “I misspoke.” His voice rasped so hard, Nina had to lean forward to hear him. “I found my girlfriend in Ohio, but she told me to fuck off.” He groaned. “I keep it with me in case she changes her mind. Don’t take it.”

      Nina spun the ring once around her finger. She dropped it onto his chest.

      The man closed his eyes, just as if he weren’t lying down on a barroom floor. “Everybody needs a little redemption,” he said.

      The crowd parted to let Nina pass through the bar, their hands up in finicky gestures. Untouchable. She erupted out the back door into the bright street, sirens in the distance. She couldn’t breathe.

      The air above the street condensed in the heat, making straight lines curve. Nina felt like she was swimming. She ran through a parking garage. As the sirens grew closer, she took a shortcut through a hotel where she had once spent the night with a German tourist, through an alley, through a back kitchen, and out the front of a pho restaurant.

      She couldn’t wait for the bus—she’d have to zigzag back to Capitol Hill on foot. What had she been thinking, anyway? The bus? This wasn’t a desk job. You don’t commute. She couldn’t take success for granted. Jackson used to say, “Tether even a roasted chicken.” A swell of loneliness mingled with the backwash of adrenaline. The sirens took a lateral turn, but she kept moving. The Rolex cut into her palm. She hoped it was real.

      She caught a flash of red in the dusky air, a man carrying a big bunch of red roses, “I’m sorry” flowers. You can tell a lot about a person from the back of his head. He had an expensive haircut, the kind you have to blow-dry. Same asshole, different pants, she thought. This man would bring the flowers home to his wife. His wife would smell the roses, not the perfume on his neck, which he’d shower off the minute he got home. “Racquetball,” he’d tell her. “I’m disgusting.”

      Later, Nina would remember the other details caught in the dirty filter of her memory: that he was smiling back at someone through a window, that he looked scared, that he looked familiar.

      But right now, she only noticed flowers, crimson against the gray concrete. They were some other man’s redemption, for some other woman, someone loved. Nina wanted them, too.

      ~

      “What if she’s dead?” Kate asked, carefully carrying her fast-food tray.

      “She’s not dead.” Isaac pointed with his elbow at an empty table by the window. “Sit there.”

      On their way to the table, a boy Kate’s age with froggy glasses stuck out a foot to trip her. Isaac opened his mouth, but Kate had already stopped. She looked down at the foot, and then at the kid’s freckled face.

      “I’m an orphan,” she told him.

      He withdrew his foot slowly, sneaker scudding against the carpet.

      Jesus, Isaac thought.

      They sat, and Isaac rubbed his forehead. Kate leaned over her beige tray, which was covered with food in varying shades of beige—beige bun, beige french fries, Sprite. Isaac squirted ketchup on the tray for color, and went back to rubbing his temples.

      By day three of their trip, they had gotten lost eleven times, and were no closer to finding Nina than when they started. Isaac checked his list, scarred with cross-outs. They had visited every Nina Black listed in the Denver-Boulder metro area. Each person at the door was exactly wrong—a short African American woman, a sixteen-year-old girl, a housewife with a lazy eye, a shut-in who weighed at least four hundred pounds, and an elderly woman who kept saying, “Actually, I don’t know what my name is.”