NO ROSE BLOOMS A HUNDRED DAYS

I'd been passed along four times in two years as somebody's kept girl. The man in New York who'd been keeping me threw me over, and I had to find the fifth man fast.

I've got an honest face. Playing innocent is what I do best. So that night, in the VIP booth at the club, there was a ring of women who knew every angle.

I was the only one in a white dress. When one of the other men put his arm around me, I let my face go helpless on purpose and called to Memphis for help with nothing but my eyes.

He was the target. I'd gone to a great deal of trouble to pick him.

When the night broke up, he pushed a handful of cash into my arms. "You want to come with me?" He became my fifth man. He was also my last.

Chapter 1 The way Memphis put it, in that department I was a shecat: pat her on the small of the back and she knows what to do.

When we finished, he slapped my backside. "Rosie, you're such a good girl." Then he ground his cigarette out on the small of my back and left a pit in the skin.

After I was done crying I really did curl into him like a cat, and said, sweet and small, "Memphis, baby, look what you've done to me. I can't go to anybody else now.

All I can do is take care of you. You can't throw me away." He gave a dry laugh and patted my cheek. A man like Memphis was never going to have only me.

Maribel in Atlanta, Evelyn in Nashville, Tilda in Biloxi… served up to him like peaches. The truth is I was new to him for about six months.

He spoiled me, gave me money and jewelry, took me everywhere, would have carried me around on him if he could.

And when he got worked up he didn't use anything, said if I got pregnant, I'd have it.

Six months in he went to Biloxi, that Tilda got her hooks in him, and he didn't call me for a solid month. I couldn't sit still, and partway through the month I called him.

What answered was a lazy woman's voice. "He just finished. He's in the shower. Sweetie, he bought you a condo in Miami. You've taken plenty. With men, silence is the answer.

Making him send you off to your face, that's no good for anybody." In the empty room I lit a cigarette and watched that thin line of it burn down, a little at a time.

Garland, the one who'd brought me out, said, Rosie, you're getting older, it's normal for the man keeping you to be done with you, people get bored.

When you're a kept girl, the one thing you can't afford is a heart. Why don't you come back to me instead? I blew a smoke ring and looked him up and down.

It set him off, the way I meant it to. He kicked me in the stomach and I went over, but when I looked back at him my eyes were sharp.

He lost his nerve and backed up a few steps. "Varney's protection, all right. Grown yourself a set of wings. But no rose blooms a hundred days.

A woman gets old, her looks go, and she's expired goods. How long do you think he's going to cover you?

You'll come back and beg me in the end, nice and meek, won't you?" Garland's last name was Nantz.

He was my cousin, from my hometown, and he took me out of the hills of eastern Kentucky on the story that we were going to Florida for work.

Chapter 2 I trusted him and I loved him, and then, for one contract, he got down on his knees in front of me, snot and tears running down his face, hanging on to my hands.

Rosie, Mr. Quintrell's taken a shine to you, please, I'm begging you, just drink with him, one time, it's a few drinks, we can make fifty thousand dollars. A few drinks. One time.

I didn't know then that there was something in the drink, and I didn't know that some things, once there's a first time, have a second and a third, and that slowly the "we" he kept saying would stop including me.

I ground the cigarette out hard in the ashtray. Memphis had a casino resort in Biloxi, everything under one roof, twelve stories of it. The ground floor was a lobby done up in gold.

Above that were the slot floor, the spa, the big buffet, every kind of massage, the sauna and the steam rooms. Above that it was hotel.

The one who watched that building for him in Biloxi was Tilda.

She'd come out of college, and Memphis had built her up himself, so even now that she was older the old feeling was still there. She held on to him and his feet wouldn't move.

I gave Kincaid, the man at Memphis's elbow, a banded stack of hundreds, and learned that what Memphis liked best at the Biloxi property was the floor show, especially the aerial silks, all that thin fabric drifting, covering and not covering.

So I found a private coach and worked at it from before dawn to after dark for a month, then followed him to Biloxi and paid off the stage manager to swap me in for one of the dancers.

The lights came down and I bent backward on the silks in midair, hung upside down, dropped straight.

When the music ended the veil fell, and Memphis sat there and couldn't take his eyes off me.

He had the room cleared right then and held me close, his face in my hair, as if that whole month of cold and distance had never happened.

I made my eyes go soft and misty, like a fawn's. "Memphis, baby, did you miss me?" He didn't answer. So I knew I'd crossed a line.

All I could do was come at him like a snake and kiss his throat, his neck. When I got up my legs went soft under me — so he'd see it.

Blood from where the silks had scraped me raw had soaked through my white tights. I said it softly. Memphis, Rosie came from nothing.

All these years drifting around, everything she ate and wore and used came from somebody else, and this one month is the only thing Rosie ever got for herself.

Think of it as Rosie's gift to you. It's clean. Something moved in Memphis's eyes. He didn't waste words.

He took out his wallet and threw it down in front of me. "Take what you want." I lowered my eyes and smiled, and took only one thing out of the inside flap: a photograph of him, alone.

On the way downstairs, with Memphis's arm around me, we happened to run into Tilda. The second she saw me the smile came off her face. I stepped back without thinking.

Memphis put his hand out to shield me and scoffed. "What's there to be scared of? Her?" Tilda had to put a smile on and take it.

She said my name, Rosie, and said it was just as well I was keeping Lenny company for her. Memphis frowned. When Memphis went out, Tilda had somebody bring me a box of Plan B.

I took it obediently, and threw the box in the most visible trash can there was. Memphis came back and slapped Tilda across the face without a word.

On the fourth day I got Memphis wild in the car, and afterward I took off my lace underwear and pushed it down into the seam of the driver's seat.

The car was one Memphis had bought for Tilda to drive, and it had the same camera in it he put in every vehicle in his name.

I knew that once she found the underwear she'd go pull the footage. That would be something to see. Tilda was smart, but she had one bad spot.

She'd come out of college, she thought she was quality, and after all those years as a boss with Memphis holding her up, she'd floated a little. Not like me.

I was clear about what I was. I was a pet. Chapter 3 Tilda's nose was always in the air.

She thought she was a different sort from the rest of us, and she hated Memphis for being cold, and somebody egged her on, so she went out and got herself a pretty young thing.

The night somebody got pictures of the two of them kissing, that boy took a bullet in the crotch.

Tilda was hauled out and dumped in the lowest kind of massage parlor there is, the kind on the motel strip. Inside of three months she had syphilis and her whole body was rotting.

She couldn't take it, and she actually had the nerve to start howling that she was going to the police, and after that I never heard anything about her again.

Memphis came back, shoved me down into the couch and put his foot on my chest. I didn't dare fight him. He took me by the hair and had me, rougher than any time before.

At the end he picked up a bottle of red wine and poured it over my head, and I crawled to him on my knees and put my arms around his leg.

He caught my chin and forced my face up. "If there's a woman around me you don't like, open your mouth and say so.

Don't play these little games." My head came up and the tears came all at once, and then the name he murmured at the end dropped me straight to the bottom.

The name was: "Deanna." Deanna. Memphis's exwife. The white dress I'd planned so carefully the night we met — it was her I'd dressed as.

I signed up for a baking class, and once I was good at it I put aside the money Memphis kept me on and opened a cake shop.

When Memphis found out I put my arms around his waist and gave him a coaxing smile. "You never come see me, Memphis.

I have to find myself something to do." Memphis's eyes drifted out the window. "A cake shop. That's a good idea. But baking them one at a time won't make you anything.

Margins are low and it's all labor. The best way is to make a name.

Build the brand." So I gritted my teeth and put in everything I'd saved over those years, and opened the store in the best mall in Miami, and named the brand The Red and the Black.

Then I paid a wellknown designer a lot of money to do the designs on the cakes themselves. In the end we settled on two lines: the swans and the roses.

The swan line was to please Memphis.

He said I looked like a swan when I danced, and when we were in bed he loved to squeeze my throat and make me shake all over while I couldn't breathe.

The rose line came out of something that happened to me. Nothing much.

One day I came across a girl who was lost, and when I asked, it turned out she'd driven all the way from another state to tell a boy she loved him, so I drove her over.

I watched that girl hold her armful of roses and make helpless little gestures, and then the boy went helpless too, his ears going red a little at a time, where you could watch it happen, and then, very carefully, he hooked her finger with his little finger.

I was sitting in the red sports car Memphis had given me, lighting a cigarette. Thinking, what a pure kind of love. What red, red roses.

Once my cake shop had a name, I wanted to open another one. Memphis said one was nothing. Thirty, at least. I gave him a soft, helpless smile. "Memphis, you make it sound easy.

I don't have that kind of money. Am I supposed to come and ask you for it again?" "Ask me? No." He patted my cheek. "Money is something you earn.

Once you've earned it you'll know how the world turns, how a thing gets done, what's in people. What gets handed to you, you can't hold on to.

If you don't have money, go to a bank for a loan. Leverage. That's their whole job, isn't it?" I said, "And if I fail?

An operation that size, I can't cover it." "Then you go bankrupt.

Limited liability." Memphis lifted his glass and took a sip, and then he smiled at me, which he almost never did. "What are you scared of?

You've got me." Chapter 4 I looked at him steadily for two minutes, then dropped my eyes, pushed down the sour ache in my chest, and bent to pour his wine.

Before long there were thirtytwo The Red and the Black shops up and running. Twelve million dollars in revenue in a year.

I used Memphis's connections to get a PR firm working for me, and one business magazine and newspaper after another ran features on me, with headlines like "The Rosie the Riveter of Business" and "The SelfMade Boss Lady," and I signed a celebrity to endorse the brand.

For a while I was a name. Everywhere I went, people said Ms. Asher to me with respect. That feeling really will float you up, make you think you have some ability.

I imagine Tilda felt the same way back then. But she and I weren't the same. There are rules, and a person keeps to them.

So I laid on a dinner at home and opened the good bottles, and said that since he'd helped me along, I wanted to give him a cut.

He set his glass down hard on the table, and before I understood what was happening I was pressed flat on the dining table with my skirt pushed up.

I sighed. "Memphis, you really will do anything. You don't even want to do this to me." He laughed too.

Then he got up, pulled a few stacks of hundreds out of his bag, and threw them in my face. "You? Giving me a cut?

I think you've forgotten whose woman you are." I used the movement to turn myself over, and looked back at him, smiling.

I pressed my flushed, halfdrunk face against my own wine glass, a little at a time. "Memphis, then you'd better make me remember it properly in a minute.

Whose woman I am." Memphis swore and threw me down on the bed. I