The Long Term Plan (With Short Term Fixes)

XXVIII

For three months, Evangeline and Jacob had stayed in a one room in downtown Marseille. Eventually, perhaps a few weeks after purchasing the place, the pair had settled into a routine. At the end of each week, Jacob went out into the city for two reasons: one, budgeted grocery shopping, and two, Cole.

Evangeline had realized after a week in Marseille all of her assets had been frozen, her accounts deactivated, her cards reported as "stolen." Yet she understood her husband's precautions and accepted them as a necessary defeat on her part. Jacob began brewing at the tea house down the street, bringing in a small but steady income through which they paid for their measly, market-based meals for two and the rent of the room.

She spent most of her days indoors, aching feet up on the battered birch coffee table, eyes glazed over staring at the pale pink wall in front of her. Often times she contemplated why she'd married at all, seeing as here she was, alone. No one had been there beside her to see them and their milestones, when they'd turn around or kick so hard she thought they'd bust through her belly.

In the evenings, they sat across from each other, the coffee table between them, drinking cold leftovers he'd brought from work. Evangeline cried every night, and for a whole month, Jacob never understood why.

"I'll never love another. Not my husband. Certainly not Cole. Never my children."

"And them loving you isn't enough?"

"Not to them," she'd groaned.

"I'm sorry," was all he could say.

In her mind, she'd realized that it was too late. Opaqueness had clouded her vision of things and uncertainty had consumed her marriage. When she'd married Noah, she'd signed every paper imaginable except a prenuptial, and now that he'd ostracized her financially, who was to say he wouldn't finish the job and divorce her?

In the midwinter, December, the two of them attended a party for a colleague of hers after a successful ballet season. On the way back, they'd stopped inside a small restaurant and Jacob had a glass of wine. They headed back out, brushed back by the chill in the air around them.

From a window above, Evan heard a distinct shrieking of a disgruntled woman's voice. Jacob turned to look where she had.

"What is this?"

"It's a cathouse, Evangeline."

Her eyes narrowed in curiosity. "'Twas not a shriek of pleasure, Jacob."

"Then one of her customers must've upset her."

She found herself nearing the door of the whorehouse, arm outstretched and fingers yearning through the biting cold to grasp the tarnished knob.

"What compels you to enter there?"

"It's a feeling."

Jacob scoffed. "Throughout your vagina?"

Evangeline ignored him. "What if he's there?"

"Then he's finally found a source of decent income for himself. We should be gone..."

"Let me just see. Perhaps we aid a scorned woman." She opened the door.

"Hardly a woman. More-so a common whore," he disagreed while scrunching his nose at the odor from the entryway. "Shall we not call a serpent a swan?"

"How dare you," she half laughed as she bounded the narrow, rickety staircase before them. "Nowadays a woman is not named by her job, nor her husband."

"As you've thusly proven." He followed her excessively tentatively up the stairs to a single door.

The tips of fingers had not yet graced the brass knocker when it flew open and who they assumed was the shrieker burst out.

Her blonde hair was knotted, a four-inch fluff of a halo off of her face. Evangeline grabbed her by the shoulders to keep her from pitching herself off the staircase in her state of distress.

"Are you the proprietor of all... this?" Jacob asked her when she'd calmed down.

"Are you the officer in charge of detaining me?"

"Well, no."

"Then I am." She smiled, revealing worn down teeth, seemingly stained permanently with her red lipstick.

"You're the one who screamed?"

"I am," she said again.

"May we ask why?" Jacob tried to get around her and open the door but she nearly scratched him with an acrylic nail and he drew his hand away.

"I had a usual customer... terminate our agreement. Or perhaps, I... yes... I terminated an agreement with a customer. He was calling for someone else."

Evangeline's heart fell for the woman, but she asked her nevertheless, "What was the agreement?"

"He could stay here if he kept the place warm at night." The woman let out a hacking cough and giggled, biting her finger. "He's still in his room, stone cold like a tomb at the moment. Gotta go, I guess. 'S only midnight, start of shift and all..." She slinked down the rest of the stairs and out the door.

While Evan had watched her go, Jacob had opened the door.