Kitty's Saga Chapter Six: The Domestic

Every weekend after Sandy’s fall, Stafford dropped in to check on his grandmother.

At least, that was what he called it.

As far as Kitty could tell, most of his visits consisted of trying to convince Sandy to fire her. He made no effort to hide it. He would sit in the living room with his grandmother and discuss Kitty as though she were not standing ten feet away, sometimes for an afternoon, sometimes well into the night.

No amount of time with Stafford was short enough as far as Kitty was concerned.

“Did you even wash your hands before you cooked that?”

“Anyone could’ve figured this out by now.”

“Why are you even here?”

He seemed determined to make it known that he considered her trash. Worse, Sandy never stopped him. She did not join in, exactly, but she did not defend Kitty either. She simply sat there, indifferent to the insults, which somehow made them hurt worse. Kitty began to wonder whether Sandy secretly agreed with him.

So whenever Stafford came over, Kitty disappeared.

She found reasons to stay in the kitchen. She reorganized cabinets that did not need reorganizing. She wiped down counters she had already cleaned. When there was nothing left to do inside, she retreated to the garage and “dusted,” though there was hardly anything in the garage worth dusting.

The day after Saint Patrick’s Day, Stafford announced that he was staying for the weekend.

He arrived Friday morning carrying a bundle of collared shirts and, before the afternoon was over, had Kitty starching and ironing every one of them. By evening, he demanded that she make him a gourmet dinner from scratch.

He neglected to mention what he wanted.

Kitty inspected the kitchen. There were some leftover corn tortillas, a few cans of beans, and not much else. She decided Mexican food was probably her best chance of turning what remained into something resembling a meal.

She poured olive oil into a pan and laid a tortilla into it.

The faint hiss of oil had barely begun when Stafford appeared in the doorway.

“I can’t eat that!”

Kitty jumped. Stafford stared at the pan as if she had dropped something poisonous into it.

“It’s greasy.”

Kitty immediately pulled the pan from the burner. Then she stood there. By now, she understood that the safest thing to do when Stafford became angry was to wait until he told her what she had done wrong and what he expected her to do instead. Trying to guess usually made things worse.

“Well?”

Kitty looked at him like a deer caught in headlights.

“Cook something else.”

“There’s not a lot of food in the house right now, and by the time the bus gets to the grocery store, it’ll be closed, so…” Her voice faded.

She did not have the nerve to explain why she had missed her usual trip to the grocery store that afternoon. She had been too busy starching and ironing Stafford’s shirts because he had decided, for reasons known only to him, that this was now part of her job.

He scowled at her.

“Just when I think you can’t get any more useless, you screw up your easy job again. My grandmother better not be paying you more than minimum wage.”

Kitty said nothing. She certainly did not tell him that his grandmother was not paying her minimum wage. His grandmother was not paying her at all.

Stafford snatched his keys from the counter.

“Get your coat. We’re going to the store.”

Kitty hesitated. Until then, she and Stafford had never really been alone together, except for the first time they met at the hospital. Something about being in his car with him felt different.

For a few moments, strangely enough, he almost looked normal. Behind the wheel, with his hands resting casually on it and the dashboard lights washing over his face, he did not look like the spiteful prat Kitty knew him to be. He looked like any other man driving to the grocery store on a Friday night.

Then he started the car. Techno music exploded from the speakers. Kitty flinched and clapped her hands over her ears. The bass rattled through the doors hard enough that she could feel it in her ribs.

“Can you turn it down?”

Stafford kept driving.

“Stafford!”

Either he could not hear her or he had decided not to.

At the grocery store, he transformed what Kitty had assumed would be a quick trip for dinner ingredients into a tour of everything she was apparently forbidden to feed him.

Stafford pointed from shelf to shelf.

Not that.

Never that.

Too much salt.

Too much fat.

Wrong brand.

He would not eat that.

She should already know he would not eat that.

Kitty stood beside him holding the shopping basket, waiting for him to finally choose something. The longer he talked, the heavier it became. The thin metal handles dug into her palms until her fingers began to ache. Eventually, she lowered the basket toward the floor. Stafford noticed.

Before Kitty understood what he was doing, his hand closed around the back of her ponytail.

He yanked her head upward.

“Look.”

Kitty froze. For one strange second, the whole store seemed to go silent.

She knew people who put their hands on other people. Pam did. Plenty of people back in her old neighborhood did, especially when they were drunk, high, furious, or some combination of the three. Kitty understood those people. She understood when to stay away from them and when to run.

But Stafford?

Stafford wore expensive clothes. He had a good family. He drove a nice car. He spoke like a man who believed himself superior to nearly everyone he met. Men like Stafford were not supposed to grab girls by the hair in grocery stores.

Except he had.

And Kitty had no idea what to do about it.

She stared up at him, too shocked even to tell him to let go.

Then the store intercom crackled overhead.

“Attention, customers. The store will be closing in five minutes.”

Stafford released her. Just like that. As if nothing had happened. He took the basket from Kitty’s hands and walked toward the checkout. Kitty followed. The ride home was worse.

Stafford rolled down the windows despite the freezing night air. His thick leather coat kept him warm while Kitty sat beside him in a thin sweater, wrapping her arms around herself and shivering uncontrollably.

The music was at full volume again.

She did not bother asking him to turn it down.

Back at the house, Kitty cooked dinner exactly the way Stafford wanted it.

No salt.

No spices.

No oil.

When it was ready, Stafford and Sandy sat down together to eat.

Kitty went to the laundry room and folded clothes.

Neither of them called her to the table.

When they finished, she cleared their plates, washed the dishes, wiped down the kitchen, and quietly went to her room, making sure she locked the door.

Her GED packet was waiting for her on the desk.

Normally, Kitty looked forward to working on it. Every finished assignment was another tiny piece of proof that she was going somewhere—that this house, this job, this strange arrangement with Sandy were only steps toward something better.

That night, she could not concentrate.

Every time she looked at the page, she felt Stafford’s fist closing around her ponytail again.

So she pushed the packet aside and wrote a letter to Pam instead.

She did not know whether she would actually mail it.

When she finished, Kitty climbed into bed and stared through the window into the darkness outside.

For the first time since moving into Sandy Brown’s house, she seriously considered leaving.

The thought terrified her.

Leaving meant giving up a roof over her head. It meant giving up the place where she could study. It meant giving up the fragile little future she had begun building for herself, assignment by assignment, dollar by dollar—or at least the dollars Sandy had promised would eventually come.

But Kitty knew something about bad men.

She knew them better than she knew algebra, better than she knew proper grammar, better than she knew most of the things printed inside the GED packets stacked on her desk.

And she knew that once a man decided he was allowed to put his hands on you, the next time was usually easier for him.

Stafford was no longer merely Sandy’s rude grandson.

He had crossed a line.

And lying awake behind her locked door, Kitty understood with terrible clarity what that made him.

Stafford had become her abuser.