Face-Slapping16 min read
Married for Money, Finding Myself
ButterPicks16 views
"I hate all of this," I said, more to the plate of cold noodles than to anyone else.
"You're twenty-three," my mother said, voice thin with the practiced worry of someone who never stops worrying. "You can't wait forever. Go on one date. Just one."
"I work," I said. "I live. I am not a timeline."
"Then I'll make the timeline." She laid a phone on the table like a land mine. "I've put your picture up online. Someone messaged. Go meet him."
"I didn't say yes to anything."
"And you won't get any younger," she said. "Who's going to take care of me when I'm old?"
She had asked that question so often the words had turned into gray wallpaper in the room. I had married my answers away during college: "I'll manage." "I'll be fine." "It's not urgent." Then my father died, then the savings sank because my mother liked risk more than bills. The rhythm of our lives tightened until every small noise sounded like a clock.
"Fine," I said, because it was easier to sign away my day than to re-fight the fight. "I'll go."
On the street I waited on a wet bench. Cars honked; incense of rain and exhaust made the world feel smaller. He was late. For once I wanted him to be late forever.
"Sorry," the man said when he arrived. He was not what my mother had exaggerated—he was better. Short hair, neat jacket, shoulders that did not slump. He smiled like someone who had practiced kindness.
"Hello, I'm Hayes," he said.
"Hi," I said.
We spoke like people practicing a script. He talked about time, about efficiency, about the best dumpling place in the city. He smiled when I said I hated seafood—he had ordered the menu for us before I sat down—and when my phone rang, I thought it would be an escape. The receptionist's voice was so calm that it sounded wrong.
"Mrs. Atkins—your mother—was in an accident," she said. "They're taking her to the hospital now."
I didn't remember standing up. I didn't remember moving. I remember the world compressing to one pinprick: my mother. I ran until my legs burned and the city blurred. Hayes's hand—it was steady—found my elbow and kept me oriented like a compass pointing to the only true north I had.
"Get in," he said. "I'll drive."
"Don't," I said. "You don't have to—"
"Get in," he repeated.
"Thank you," I said, when the ambulance called for family, when the doctor said "we need to operate," when he told me the number: three hundred thousand. "I don't have that, not now."
He looked at me like someone deciding between two maps. "Then marry me," he said.
I laughed because the world sometimes hands out absurd solutions like irony.
"This is insane," I said. "You can't be serious."
He was serious. "You can sign," he said, "we'll get the money, she'll have the operation, and we'll—" He didn't finish.
I did not have time to be proud. I needed her alive.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay," he said again. He had the voice of someone who had decided. He had money. He had a reason for decisions that coiled around the name of someone else he had loved and lost. He had a house key I would later learn the code to. For now, we were two people who had signed a paper because the world demanded it.
"We can register here," he said. "They'll be open."
"We're married," I told the clerk, because it felt like saying a password into a machine. The clerk stamped, the paper slid across the counter: two names, a date.
"I know this looks raw," Hayes said later in the sterile corridor while my mother slept under a sheet that smelled of disinfectant. "But I saw you. I thought—"
"You thought what?" I said. "That you could buy me goodness like an operation? That you could buy a name?"
He didn't answer, not with words. He sat with me until the sun came up even though he could have left. That night he held a bag of apple slices for my mother and returned with steaming noodles for me. He had a thoroughness that unnerved me and a softness that puzzled me.
"You shouldn't smoke so much," he told me once in the hospital corridor, watching the thin curl of smoke I let rise like a small, private cloud. "It will hurt you."
"Mind your business," I said.
"Then marry me properly," he said. "Not just papers. Live with me. Let me help."
"That's ridiculous," I said.
"Also," he said, "I think we will be good for each other."
"Is this about a ghost?" I demanded. "You named a ghost, and now you want to resurrect it with a stranger?"
"It is about memory," he said. "And consolation."
I kept the ring he pressed on to my finger like an uncomfortable truth. He called it mine, and I called it borrowed. He insisted on buying a nurse for my mother after surgery, one he said he'd arrange "because she's my mother-in-law now." My mother smiled like someone who had won a lottery she hadn't bought a ticket for.
"Does she know your family?" I asked once when we walked out in the rain.
"Not yet," he said. "That's fine."
The mechanics of being 'ours' as opposed to being 'mine' felt foreign. We merged days like two different songs into a playlist that often had awkward fades. I had a job doing small, painstaking art work for a studio that wanted to charm players with pretty rooms. The job paid little—but it was mine. Then the company announced closure. Contracts were canceled. People left like leaves in wind. I felt like the world leaned on me in ways that left bruises.
"You're fired?" Hayes asked with an odd impatience that made my skin prickle.
"My whole department," I said. "They are shutting us."
He smiled small and unreadable. "Work at my company then. I can arrange it."
"You mean... hire me because we're married?" I said.
"Yes," he said. "If you want."
I sent back a blunt message: I don't accept conditions. He read it and laughed, a short bark that might have been a grin. "Then take this," he said. "If you want a job, quit cigarettes for me and come interview."
That was coercion wrapped in a temptation. It was a test. It was, I thought, another price he put on me. But the money I needed for my mother's follow-up therapy wasn't an abstraction. It scrabbled at the base of my days. I wanted to be entire; I wanted to be honest. I was tired of bargaining with my life.
"I quit yesterday," I lied over noodles.
"Good," he said. "I expect you."
I took a job at a dim bar—pronounced in neon and cigarette smoke. It embarrassed me to sing for money. But the manager, Brielle Ilyin, needed faces and voices. A pretty face brought customers in; a decent voice kept them there. I sang haltingly at first. Men shuffled their chairs and took pictures. A few strangers streamed my performance and the bar's small stage broke into a tiny, viral frenzy.
"You look different in videos," someone said to me. "You look luminous."
"I don't feel luminous," I told them. But the likes stacked like coins and my phone would not stop ringing. I went from being someone who ate instant noodles in hospital waiting rooms to someone whose face people reposted.
It should have been easy after that. Money comes when cameras look. But life is not tidy.
The first real crisis came when a gang of men kicked our door open at midnight. One of them, Eben Duke, wore a crooked grin and a scar like a folded map across his knuckle.
"Where's the money?" Eben shouted.
"What money?" I said.
"Your mother signed. She promised us monthly payments. She's been late," he said.
My chest hollowed.
"You have proof?" I demanded.
Eben tossed a neat pile of sheets on the living-room table, signatures dark with thumbprints. The debt had swelled into a monster line—one my mother had mortgaged behind my back. My mother had lied, thought she'd be lucky, thought she could chase loss into gain. The numbers were real. The men were real. I sat down because my legs had gone soft.
"They can go to hell," my mother said, with that small grin of hers, the one that convinced herself like a child.
"They can't," I whispered. "Not unless we sell everything."
"Then sell it," the oldest of them said. "Or we'll sell what's left."
I thought of my father's hands building a house, of a childhood that fit the inside of those rooms like pockets. We had no choices that night. We had groggy sleep and fear that folded into our clothes. I stayed up all night, the pipes of my mind playing worry-songs.
Hayes, who had a knack for cutting out problems like thorns, stepped in. He had power—people deferred to him like a tide to the moon. He bought the house outright through a lawyer without asking me, saying softly, "We can't leave you in the hands of men with knives."
"You can't buy my life," I said.
"We'll put it in your name," he said. "Now you own it."
The house felt different the day I walked through it as an owner. Some things changed; some remained stubbornly hollow. My aunt—Katharina Fisher—who had always worn another person's pride like a coat, claimed the house with a voice that had been trained on entitlement.
"This was our right—left to us," she said, eyes sharp as knitting needles. Her son, Dixon Keller, had the look of someone used to taking the smaller spoils of other people's labor.
"You have no right," I said. "This is my father's house."
She laughed like a sound heard through a crack. "You? Living in the city? You? Sell it and I'll make it worth your while."
"Not happening," I said.
"Then move out," Katharina snapped.
I didn't want a fight in a small village square. But I was not a small girl anymore.
Later, the difference between taking back what is yours and letting things slide was thrown sharply into the open. I had friends who helped: Cora Schneider, who worked night shifts and brought me hot soup; Ming Cohen, who played soft piano in the back at the bar and knew more about people's hearts than their faces; Felix Cook, who taught me little tricks with a guitar so my voice would not fall on its own. Hayes drove down that awkward dirt road with me and stood like a pillar at my back. He bought a life between us and then handed me the keys again, saying, "This is yours."
"Are you doing this for image?" I asked once, when the world felt thin at the edges like paper.
"I am doing this because I cannot stand you being hurt," he said.
"And if I leave?"
"Then I'll follow you," he said.
I never believed in easy endings. Life had thick layers that took work to peel. So we worked. I kept a ledger, every cent I borrowed or he gave. I learned the code to his alarm and how the light changed in his living room at three in the morning. Hayes had old wounds; he held them like a secret. He spoke sometimes about a woman, a name burnt into a photograph: she was gone, and he believed bringing me close to her face would stitch the wound.
When the city gave me a face on a screen, it also gave me trouble. A man—Clark Campbell—who had been charming to a woman named Yana in a hotel corridor, had been exposed for his cruelty when a woman stormed into a room and saw another woman's child nearly left alone. Hayes and I intervened; we seized proof of what he had done. The hotel scene became a viral thread of accusation. The man we forced out was mean and angry; the woman who had cried that night was small and brave. She wanted justice. The police filed a report.
"Do you want me to follow through?" Hayes asked me after the hotel. His hand was like a weather vane: he always turned toward action.
"No," I said. "I want to keep my hands clean. I want to be the kind of person who survives without dragging anyone down."
But the world did not only circle my own small decisions. My aunt and cousin did not stop. They tried to gather neighbors to pressure me. They put signs and rumors on the street. They said I had no right. They said Hayes had bought me a house and that the house should belong to the village. The rumor mill turned faster than a child's wheel.
We decided to answer not with more secrets but with sunlight.
"Let's do it publicly," I said to Hayes. "Let's gather those neighbors. Let everyone see the bills, the signatures, the lawyer papers. If they're going to shout, let them shout into the open."
"You're sure?" Hayes asked.
"Do you want to be the kind of person who runs away?" I asked back. Sometimes his silence answered more than words.
We set a day. The square in front of the village hall filled with people who came because scandals were a kind of sport in small towns. There were cameras—phones in pockets and hands raised. Katharina and Dixon came with a swagger, expecting to be judged in their favor.
"Give me one good reason," Katharina said, "why the house should be yours."
"Because the deed has always had her father's name," I said. "Because we found the signed documents in the house, with the date, in the presence of witnesses. Because I will not have my childhood stolen by those who think they can take what they did not earn."
"You're nothing but a city girl," someone in the crowd muttered. "You don't know."
"You're the kind of woman who thinks everything is for sale," Dixon said, voice loud. "You sold the house in secret; you should not be allowed to keep it."
I turned my face toward the circle of people who had gathered. Cameras flicked like insects. The mayor, stoic, called for order.
"Everyone, quiet," he said. "Let's see the papers."
Hayes stepped forward and placed a manila folder on a small folding table. "These are the purchase documents," he said. "All legal. The seller released the deed today."
"Who gave you the right to sign papers?" Katharina demanded, the sound of accusation curling into her throat.
"The right to be left alone," Hayes said. "The right to protect what remains of someone's life. You assaulted her property with men at night. You will answer for that."
The crowd stirred. Someone began recording. Someone else whispered, "He bought it. The rich man bought it."
"Show them the signatures," Katharina snapped.
Hayes opened the folder. The papers were arranged like a deck of cards that proved that the house belonged to me. The notary's stamp glowed. People leaned in. For a tense second I felt like an animal beneath a magnifying glass. Then someone—a neighbor whose face I recognized from street corners—started clapping slowly.
"That looks real," he said, to the world.
The clamps of accusation loosened a little. Katharina's face tightened. She moved toward the table to snatch the documents and slap them down, but the mover in her hand registered on everyone's phone as the precise act that would be remembered.
"Standing there stirs little wolves," the man beside me whispered.
"Record it," I whispered back.
He did.
Then I stepped forward. "You came to my home with men who threatened me and my mother," I said. "You tried to sell what my father left, as if memory were banknotes. Today, the law stands with me. You can take it to court, if you want. But in front of everyone here, I ask you: how do you justify bringing strangers into my home at night?"
Katharina's face shifted from bluster to a smaller, more human expression. There was a stammer that turned into an accusation of me; she said I had no right. Dixon cursed. The crowd deliberated in murmurs.
Then something happened I had not planned. A woman in the throng—Mrs. Rasmussen, who ran the bakery next door—stood up and said, "We all saw them come. We were afraid. We were quiet. But quiet is a choice too. Choose to be brave."
"Bravery is expensive," someone said.
"Not as expensive as the cost of silence," Mrs. Rasmussen said.
Her words spread like light. Phones were raised. People recorded their own versions. The evidence—the papers, the notarized deed, the receipts Hayes had provided—made a chain too heavy to break.
At the peak of the crowd's noise, a camera zoomed in on Katharina's face. She went from anger to frown to shock. "This is slander!" she cried. "You cannot lie in public!"
"Take your slander to the authorities," Hayes said cool as winter. "But we will not be bullied in our own home."
A few neighbors began to yell at her—voices not unkind yet pointed, like whips of social disapproval. "How long have you been taking advantage?" someone asked. "How can you do this to family?"
I watched Katharina's mouth open, shut, and then open again. She began with bluster, then slid into denial. The progression of drama moved with the rhythm the rules had promised: first she looked triumphant, then surprised, then foully rebellious.
"You're lying!" she said. "This is nonsense! We were the rightful tenants!"
"Is that what you call moving in at night with men?" someone shouted back.
"No—no—" Katharina stammered, searching for footing, but the crowd had already moved. Phones clicked. People whispered about proof, about kindness, about where a house's memory belonged. My hands trembled. Hayes, who had stood all day like a column of marble, spoke into a microphone the market had loaned us.
"This house was bought," he said. "Legally. There is no theft here. Only the theft of dignity by intimidation. We ask the authorities to look into the threats that took place at night. We ask that those men—Eben Duke and his crew—be identified. We do not take pleasure in shaming family, but we will not let crime be cloaked as tradition."
The crowd shifted. Some clapped. Cameras panned. Katharina's eyes had gone glassy. Dixon tried to salvage authority with a snarled voice, but he could not hide the tremor of his shame.
"People," the mayor said into the microphone, "we can't stand here and yell. File a complaint, and we'll have the police investigate. We will not take matters into our own hands."
Even so, the social punishment—a communal turning away—began. When the police took a written statement, Katharina's arrogance cracked. She lowered her voice, tried to bargain with neighbors—to buy back rumors with gossip. People who had once nodded to her aloofly now treated her like someone who'd overplayed her hand at the wrong table. She moved through the crowd, finding fewer friendly faces. Dixon had to catch her arm to steady himself when she began to sway under the new weight of disapproval.
"Please," Katharina whispered when the cameras had moved to other things. "This is my family. We have rights."
"Not the right to terrorize," replied Mrs. Rasmussen. "You will have to explain why men came to her house with payment demands."
The humiliation had the dignity of truth. Katharina's face changed through stages: triumph, doubt, denial, then an inward collapse. Her throat worked; she tried to meet neighbors' eyes but found them turned away. A woman shoved a phone in her face. "You did this," the woman said.
Katharina's cheeks became damp.
"How could you—" she muttered. Then louder: "I'm not going to live under these accusations!"
But the narrative had shifted. People were not on her side. They began to take videos, to speak in small group huddles about the ethics of neighborly behavior. The stream of witnesses grew. The law was now no longer a whispered rumor but a living possibility.
At the end of the morning, Katharina and Dixon were left flustered and shrinking. They had been pushed to the edge of public shame in front of the whole village. The neighbors who had once been hesitant had begun to confront them. The force of public opinion, fed by evidence and a chorus of witnesses, had done something the law could not yet accomplish: it had taken away the comfort of assumed dominance.
"You're leaving?" Katharina asked later, voice small and brittle.
"You decided to make our house a place to sleep," I said. "You decided to bring strangers in. People saw that. You cannot find your footing in the light you tried to steal from us."
Dixon's face crumpled. He was the kind of man who had always assumed inequality was normal. "Please," he said. "We were just trying to—"
"To steal our future," I said. "Yes."
He sank to his knees on the dusty step of the porch, the action like theater for the crowd that had gathered. "Please," he said, tears sudden and ugly. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry! Don't break me!"
There it was, the arc I had been told would happen: triumph to shock to denial to collapse to pleading. He had been forced to kneel in public remorse.
"Enough," the mayor said. "If there is wrongdoing, the paperwork will be filed. The police will investigate the late-night threats. But this village will not tolerate intimidation anymore."
All afternoon the square hummed with news. People who had once been indifferent now came to me with gentle apologies, with offers to help move the old furniture and repaint the cracks in the plaster. They said, "We should have said something sooner." They said, "You have taken such courage." Their eyes were not pitying but steady. It felt like a kind of resurrection.
That was one punishment—public, messy, undeniable. But there were others. Clark Campbell, the man from the hotel, faced his own unraveling. I told the woman in the hotel—Yana—what evidence we had. She took her video to the bar. Brielle posted it. The man went from being a swaggering stranger to someone wearing the weight of exposure. He was called out, cornered by a chorus of strangers who recorded his denial. He begged. He cried. He tried to claim it was mistake. He was forced to stand in the bar's center while people recorded his apology. The camera caught him as he moved from cruelty to shock to pleading to collapse.
"Please," he begged. "I'm sorry."
No one applauded.
It's strange to watch a villain shrink. There is a dull satisfaction in seeing justice—not the law, but the people's law—take effect. It is not perfect. It is loud and messy. It is public and therefore inescapable.
I thought that once these things had happened, the pressure would ease. Hayes and I continued to disentangle the practicalities. He pushed me to quit cigarettes properly; I told him I would quit on my own terms. He put a necklace around my neck one morning before he left for work—soft, heavy—and said, "Don't take it off."
"Isn't this possession by another name?" I said.
"It's mine to give," he said.
"Then keep your giving," I answered and left the string around my throat.
The bar sold out every night. People lined up for my voice and for a momentary glimpse of the person they'd been watching on small stolen screens. Money came more slowly than it looked on paper. But money came. We paid the debt collectors with receipts Hayes burned like candles into the dark. We did not forget to do things cleanly: we gave receipts, made calls, filed papers. I learned to lean on other kinds of courage too—the kind that starts with work and ends with sleep.
There were moments of small tenderness. Hayes would prop his ankle on mine when we watched bad films and complain about the music. He would stand guard in the convenience store while I bought instant ramen and pay with a card so I wouldn't have to feel small. Sometimes he teased me about my stubbornness. "You are stubborn enough to dig a tunnel to China," he said once.
"Someone has to be," I said.
When the news settled, when Katharina's screams faded into self-reproach and Dixon's apologies grew thin, I learned that being married for a rescue does not mean living without agency. I had said yes to a stranger under blinking hospital lights; I had signed a paper; I had bargained with fate. But I had not sold myself.
"Do you regret it?" someone asked me once, late at the bar, as the last patrons wandered out and Felix tuned his guitar with quiet hands.
"I regret the things I can't control," I said. "I don't regret the choice to keep my mother alive."
That night the bar smelled of lemon and cigarettes and the last song hung in the air like a promise. Hayes looked at me from across the room like a man who has found something he does not want to lose.
"I will not let them touch you again," he said.
"Then don't," I said. "Be better."
He smiled. "I will try."
"I don't ask you to try," I said. "Be."
There were more fights. There were nights when I wanted to walk out and take my old small life like a coin and vanish into the crowd. But every time I thought of leaving, I thought of how the village had stood with me that day, and how strangers had helped my friend Yana find her voice. I thought of the public shame and how it had stripped the pretenders. I thought of the men who had come to threaten and how they had left because they could not stand the light.
It is not romantic. It is a slow, difficult life. There are nights I cry alone in Hayes's spare room. There are mornings when my mother laughs too loud and I'm afraid for her heart. But there are also long afternoons when I sit in our small kitchen and fold laundry and Hayes puts a single cup of tea next to my hand as if that little cup can mend everything.
One afternoon, months after the square, Katharina came around. She had changed from swagger to a sheepish stiffness I had never seen.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"I heard you on the mayor's call," I said. "The police talked to you. Did you change for me, or because people watched?"
She hesitated. "Maybe both."
"Good," I said.
She nodded as though we had signed a treaty.
Later, as the sun chased itself across the ceiling, I looked at the ring on my finger, at the necklace Hayes had given me. I thought of the time my mother liked to say in a whisper: "One day you will laugh again."
"Maybe I will," I told the ceiling.
And when I laughed, it sounded like someone else was there to hear me.
The End
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