Karma in the Kitchen

              Colin bounced the solitaire ring in the palm of his hand and then grabbed it in a tight fist, jokingly shaking it at Jan. “I hope you’ve given up, finally,” he said. “Admit we’ve failed as jewelry thieves and the universe obviously pushes us in a different direction.”

           Jan smacked his hand and held out her palm, offering to relieve him of the faux ring from their failed heist. “We put the warmth in the party tonight. Everyone enjoyed playing with your thermal conductivity diamond tester. They even believed you invented it years ago when you worked at your parents’ jewelry store.”

           “Good thing the dean of my department didn’t come. If he’d found out I’d gone along with such an inventive lie, it could mean my credibility at work. You do need to tell me beforehand if you decide to add a lie like Colin invented something to the script,” he said, sitting on the bed to remove his Italian leather black shoes and to kick free from his tuxedo slacks. “I should have added that substances recently created in labs transfer heat just as quickly as diamond. Nowadays, that device isn’t a true test.”

           “Glad you didn’t chime in like that about all the rings.” she said synonymously. She continued, “The evening would have ended in a clang, wringing out the ding-dong fun everyone had passing around the diamond tester.”

           He smirked at her word play.

 Jan stretched and yawned. “No need to worry about believability. All my parents’ friends admire you, fortunately. We float way above suspicion.”

“I think you forget I teach literature, not aerodynamics, and speaking of work, I have to prepare a lecture tomorrow. REM sleep calls my name. Fortunately, no one will suspect me of wrong-doing in my sleep.”

Jan hung her little black dress on its satin padded hanger in the closet and slipped on her red silk nightgown. She dabbed Channel #5 behind each ear. “We can talk more about an improvement plan in the morning.” She yawned and turned off the Tiffany lamp on the nightstand.

           Colin listened as her breathing slowed. He laid a hand on her stomach, and nestled against her warm, relaxed muscles. She was a very sound sleeper. His mind raced through the events that led to this evening. The last few months all replayed in a backwards flash at first, and then he slowed and rewound to replay his first memories of her.

           Remembering the scene in the dark, touching her, Colin felt his face flush all over again.

           “Oh, my favorite student,” he muttered aloud.

           Jan must have heard him and took a deep breath, but she didn’t wake up. He closed his eyes, trying to invite sleep, but his dreamy mind recalled their all-to-unusual beginning.

           Just before she’d arrived, he had scanned the empty classroom in the Ohio Reformatory for Women where he’d spent the last two years teaching creative writing to the female prisoners. The grant money for his salary would soon come to an end, and the prison guards had stopped bribing the prisoners to attend his classes to give him time to apply for other work.

           With his freshly printed Ph.D. soon to arrive in the mail, he’d applied to several colleges to teach. In the few interviews he’d been granted, he sensed he’d been called in to sate the curiosity of the interviewer about the prison environment. The interviewers had asked more questions about whether he felt safe in his current position rather than about his teaching strategies or content.

           Breaking his train of thought about job searches, he remembered Jan entered his classroom with a swagger that would suggest she was dressed for one of her parents’ fancy parties instead of the orange prison jumpsuit she’d donned that morning, like every morning for the last two years. She needed no make-up on her lustrous olive complexion, that radiated—at least in his mind—like a rare green moonstone’s adularescence. He looked into her eyes, two beautifully matched, sparkling cornflower blue sapphires.

If his father knew he had thoughts like this about the worst of criminals, at least in his father’s opinion she was the worst—a jewel thief—he’d be furious. Somehow this only made her more attractive, given his father’s disgruntlement that he’d refused to take over his family’s five profitable jewelry stores in Florida. After all, Jan’s crime could be explained. She was just a young college student who had been talked into a snatch-and-run. Unfortunately, she’d run out of the store with a ring worth well over $10,000, so even her rich daddy couldn’t get her out of a couple of years in lock-up. Fortunately for me, Colin thought, she was there every day to brighten my dreary duty.

           Colin rolled over in bed. He thought he heard a noise on the front porch but discounted it as a new creak the old Victorian home made by spring’s Midwest high winds. He closed his eyes, relaxing, while remembering their budding relationship.

She leaned over her student desk and tutted, “You and I have someplace to go, together. We’re both being released in two weeks, you know; me from my sentence, and you from trying to teach proper sentences to the uneducated.”

           His mind reeled again back to the prison. She slid her book of poems in his direction. “Turn to the back,” she said.

           In the back he read a name and an email address. On the next line, she had inscribed Job title: Chief Resident for Half-way House for Women Transitioning from Incarceration.

“That’s where they’re sending me, a city called Dayton, Ohio, near my parents’ home,” she said. “You get the job, and we’ll live there together. You’ll be paid a small wage along with free housing and food. In the daytime, the residents are required to go to work and go to counseling sessions. You’ll have time to write every day in your private quarters. All you have to do, really, is keep within the budget they provide for groceries and make dinner Monday through Friday. On the weekends, the residents cook for themselves and you.”

           His feet felt cold, not like he was about to get married. They were freezing cold, like a man who’d been ordered to walk a plank, but an order is an order. He immediately sent a resume and cover letter to the prescribed account.

           This arrangement presented several problems for Jan’s parents. First, they’d lied to everyone, including close relatives, saying Jan was studying poetry and literature in Europe for the last two years. As soon as they heard she’d been sent to a half-way house and she’d found a Ph.D. boyfriend, things happened fast. Within a week, Colin had a professorial position, complete with a cozy Victorian house in Oakwood near the University of Dayton’s campus. But unbeknownst to everyone, including Colin at first, Jan hadn’t given up her dream, the dream of becoming a jewel thief.

           Colin was sure he heard a door open and close downstairs. Sometimes Jan didn’t pull the over-sized, solid front door shut. He thought he’d better check and make sure it had been secured for the night.

           At the bottom of the steps to his left, Colin saw a beam from their neighbor’s motion-detecting light spilling through a partially opened front door, but when he saw movement from the corner of his eye, he quickly turned right into the kitchen area. On the other side of the kitchen’s island in the living room stood Brett.

Brett had a gun.

           “Brett? What are you doing in my house with that?” Colin hoarsely asked.

           “You two thought you were entertaining tonight. Real funny showing off your diamond tester and proving to my fiancé that her diamond was a Cubic Zirconia, not a diamond. You knew, didn’t you? I’ve had a background check run on you, you son-of-a-jeweler. Well, she broke up with me. Said she was mortified.”

Brett’s hand shook, and the gun wobbled.

           “Look, Brett, I won’t lie. We intended to steal the diamond from you.” Colin said. “True, we had an identical engagement ring with a CZ made. True, Jan had planned to switch your ring with our fake, when Sara, the germaphobe, washed her hands at her parent’s kitchen sink, but we never dreamed you’d bought Sara a CZ. When we tested it in front of everyone, we thought it was rea.”  Colin multi-tasked, talking and thinking: “You had bragged you had bought the large stone at a fashionable jewelry store and paid nearly $20,000. I hadn’t seen it before tonight. We, along with everyone else, assumed your well-heeled parents paid the jeweler top dollar as you claimed since they made it known they were ecstatic about your union with Sara.”

           Colin looked down at the gun. He smelled the abundance of alcohol sweating from Brett’s every pore. Brett simply shook his head to indicate he wasn’t buying the whole story. He was probably too drunk to even process it.

Colin hoped if he talked long enough Brett might calm down or sober up enough to come to his senses. Colin’s mind reeled with what to say next to pacify Brett. “Jan should have said the battery in the diamond tester went dead. I told her so in the car. It’s not worth killing me over, is it, Brett?”

           The sweat on Brett’s lip and forehead shone, even in the dim room. “I’m not here for you. Jan did this for revenge against me and my frat buddies for putting her up to that little jewelry grab. I know the truth about Jan. I warned her not to interfere with my marital plans. I warned her I’d let people know where she spent the last two years. I kept quiet, and this is how she repaid me. Sara never would have known about the ring. Never.”

           Colin felt his stomach stand up, surprised at this news, and then sit down again on his intestines, hard. “You, you put Jan up to the snatch-and grab?” he asked with a squeaky voice.

           “Yeah, me. She never told you? You still don’t get it, do you? She stole the ring and handed it off to me in the alley, and I pawned it just a few blocks away. The jeweler has proof, a video of me selling the ring, supplied by the pawn shop owner after the pawn shop owner sold the ring, which he had every right to do, since the ring wasn’t found and claimed within the legally allotted time. See, you’re not the only ones with a sense of humor. The pawn shop owner thought it was pretty funny he’d gotten such a sweet deal from the jewelers’ loss, his old competitor. But sending me to jail wouldn’t give the jeweler his money back. The jeweler said he’d keep quiet if I paid for it, and he waited through my engagement. He took my parents’ twenty grand and made a faux ring for Sara, but now your pretty delinquent exposed everything. I’ve suffered two years of agony, dating that hand-washing clean freak. Jail had to be more pleasant, but I’m not going there next. Before I shoot myself, Jan dies.”

           Colin reached for a knife sitting on the upper shelf, just below the island’s counter-top. As Brett turned to go upstairs. Colin lunged across the counter, stabbed Brett in the back, and as Brett fell, Colin pulled the gun from Brett’s grasp with one hand while pulling the knife back out with the other.

           The solitaire fell from Brett’s shirt pocket and bobbed across the floor. Colin’s first thought was to simply wait for Brett to bleed out and stop breathing. Colin quickly strode around the counter into the living room.

           Brett groaned, laying on the floor, hugging himself, reaching for the wound on his back.

           While waiting for Brett to die, Colin remembered wealthy clients to whom he’d sold expensive jewelry, especially an older lady one summer during a college break. She had ordered the largest diamond earrings that had ever been sold in any of his parents five stores. His parents were excited about the sale, and they decided to let him close it. When the lady came to pick up the earrings, he helped her put them on, but her elderly ear lobes were thin, and the diamonds weighed down her lobes. The diamonds hung down, facing her shoulders, showing the mountings and diamonds’ girdles, rather than their sparkling tables and facets. Colin was sure he’d just lost the huge sale. The woman squinted into the mirror on the counter, and squawked in her craggy voice, “They’re perfect. They’re larger than anyone else’s diamonds at the club.”

She wrote a check.

Brett flailed on the floor, trying to right himself.

Colin despised people who bought gems for status rather than acting as living models to display Earth’s beauty that had been compressed from the simplest of elements under immense heat and pressure only a volcano could provide. People who wear jewels should think of themselves as serving the volcano gods, protecting the god’s treasures. Servants, nothing more.

           Brett had made his way up on one elbow, moaning, and Colin knew that wouldn’t do. He couldn’t lose the life he’d wanted for so long. Jan had pulled him from Limbo. Then he had an epiphany as Brett worked another elbow off the floor. He didn’t need Jan’s reputation intact just for his benefit, but he’d truly fallen in love with her even if, and maybe especially if, she were a jewelty thief. While waiting for her to write her next poem, he endured a hunter’s suspense. Life without her wordplay would be gameless.

He loved the way she talked; she often spoke with enjambed lines, the same style she used for her poems. Even when she said something ordinary, she released each word as if she’d sprung it from entrapment into the wild, chaotic, unpredictable world. Most people just say: Someone needs to take the trash out.

           Not Jan. She made him want to listen, especially when she tweaked the ordinary, and rhymed and elided homophones into poetic jokes.

           ‘ere, ‘ere

           the trash

           lay bare

           courting

           a fresh lair.

           Meaning, he needed to take kitchen scraps out to the compost heap. She believed in Earth friendliness.

           Brett managed to kneel, one hand on the floor, bobbing on his knees, trying to stand.

           Colin remembered rabbit hunting with his dad and being assigned the gruesome task of lopping off the bunny’s head, and then handing the wide-eyed fuzzy face to the family dog for a treat.

Colin knelt in front of Brett, readying for an unfair duel. “You can’t tell anyone where Jan has been the last couple of years, and you can’t kill her, either,” Colin said as he slit Brett’s throat, careful to use an angle that would support a claim of self-defense. He’d spent his freshman year of high school binging on crime shows and mystery books, a year of wasted reading he’d regretted until this moment.

He freed Brett from the need for status, his gloating he’d bought his fiancé the most expensive engagement ring at their club, and from justifying the pain he’d caused Jan.

He knew he must next focus on rehearsing a believable story to the police and remembering it verbatim in case they called him back to repeat it. Brett entered their unlocked front door and threatened me with a gun. I, Colin, picked up a knife and stabbed Brett in the back but managed to retrieve the knife. After I grabbed the gun, Brett slit his own throat, muttering, “Might as well make this quick.” Colin picked up the gun, placing his own fingerprints on the gun. He’d allow the police to figure out motive, letting them feel smart for puzzling out their part in discovering of Brett’s fake engagement ring at the party.

After the police became convinced of his innocence, he would concoct a plan to satisfy Jan’s proclivity to swipe diamonds without her getting arrested if she was still so inclined.

           Colin called the police, and hoped the coroner could remove the body without waking Jan. She was a very sound sleeper.

           His parents had tried to teach him about honesty, but paying money for what nature worked so hard to create and turning it into hubris wasn’t honest. Inauthentic people should wear inauthentic gems.