Ready

-Are you ready?

Raquelle took a deep breath. Her boyfriend, DH, had already asked her that at least a dozen times since they got up three hours ago.

They got up at eight but they were supposed to get up at seven. It was the first thing he asked her, before he realized the time. Then it was why she hadn’t set the alarms on her phone the way she was supposed to. But it was him who was supposed to set the alarms on his phone. She didn’t say that though.

There had not been a reason anyway to get up that early. DH had decided they should do yoga that morning and go for a run to prepare their bodies. He always had silly ideas like that, she thought.

Instead, they made breakfast, running through the plan again before going down to the car. Raquelle had made a fake license plate, painting a piece of cardboard of the correct dimensions in the darkest blue paint before black and a gold color. There were cameras everywhere and the plates were supposed to throw off anyone who might be looking for them later.

They’d be long gone by then, if things went according to their plan.

She knew she was ready. She assumed he was too. She always did, and he usually was, because of her. But she didn’t know that.

-Yes, she told him, giving the same answer she had given him every time. Not that it would’ve made a difference.

They had made the drive out into the suburbs and were around the corner from the bank president’s house.

She looked over at DH sitting in the driver’s seat, checking himself out in the rear-view mirror while talking to her. Probably looking for gray hairs in his moustache.

He wouldn’t have taken no for an answer, in any case, so Raquelle wasn’t sure why he kept asking her if she was ready. Well, she was sure why he was asking. Because he had to hear himself ask the question to reassure himself. Her answer was just there so he wasn’t talking to himself. He might as well be. If it were up to her, they wouldn’t be doing this. DH was a dreamer and a thrill seeker. Why didn’t he just go to the casino like a normal young male?

In any case, her part of the plan was supposed to be simple. She goes to the banker’s house while DH goes to the bank. She takes the hostage.

-Let’s go over it again, DH said to Raquelle, turning from the rearview mirror to her.

-We’re going to head over to the house. You’re going to drop me off there, then go to the bank.

-Yes, that part’s obvious. What are you doing when you get there?

-I knock on the door and sell him on decluttering services, she said, turning to the back seat to point to her attaché case. I tell him I’d love to show him some before and after samples.

-And?

-Oh! And tell him that his wife had expressed an interest and that’s why I’m here.

-That’s really important, Raquelle, DH intoned. It won’t make sense that you’re at his door on a random sales call. Not for decluttering services.

Door to door sales was DH’s first job out of college, so he thought he knew a lot. He thought he knew a lot about a lot. And he did know about a lot, but he didn’t know much about anything.

He’d come across this particular plan in an old movie, and the core element of a door-to-door salesman made the whole thing feel like something he could pull off. Because he’d done it for a couple of weeks. Raquelle didn’t prod though.

He’d also preferred to have been the one going to the house, but Raquelle would never be able to handle the bank on her own, what a ridiculous notion, and he didn’t trust any of his erstwhile associates with that task either. This was the big one. They wouldn’t have to work afterward, so he needed someone he could truly trust.

Raquelle would do everything he said. She’d communicate like she’s supposed to. She wouldn’t have her own ideas or try to back-seat drive the whole operation. She adored him. She thought she loved him, and when he thought about it, he thought she did too.

But he didn’t think about it much. It’s not that he took her for granted, specifically or especially. He’d been the youngest of four siblings, the rest all girls, and so had gone through his whole life always having at least one girl doting over him. He’d be lost without it. The presence of maternal figures was the water in which he swam.

Raquelle, on the other hand, was an only child, whose parents didn’t pay her much mind. She treaded. She met DH the summer she graduated from high school. He had made enough money on the door-to-door sales job in just a few weeks to try to shoot an independent film he’d been writing since high school.

He needed young actresses—it was an erotic take on some Greek play, any of them would do, and it didn’t get far enough where the specific one would matter. But Raquelle was not an actress. She had reached out because DH was looking for a set designer as well. He’d just broken up with his last girlfriend, who reminded DH of his oldest sister, and Raquelle reminded him of his youngest.

She’d called about the set designer position and they met at a coffee shop, just down the street from the bank DH was headed to this day, as it happened. He asked her, quite cheesily, whether she was sure she wasn’t an actress. She knew it was cheesy but she let it work anyway. It wasn’t Hollywood, but the town had offered some kind of new film credit—it was what had driven the scammer side inside DH to the film idea, even if only subconsciously. And of course she’d heard how Hollywood worked, maybe even for set and costume designers.

DH took her back to his place, but in the end they just talked all night. He was a dreamer and a thrill-seeker, and he wanted to dream about his thrill seeking with her. He let him amuse her because it tickled the creative side of her. She could see herself helping him with his hare-brained ideas. It was like performance art. And he’d be so hopeless without someone.

He managed a little bit of a cash flow before the film project fell apart, and was able to get a few people paid, including himself and Raquelle. They stuck around and got closer together.

She was quite proud of the fake license plate she’d made, and her outfit for the day’s house call.