Always Happy Hour: Stories(11)
AT ONE TIME THIS WAS THE LONGEST COVERED WALKWAY IN THE WORLD
“I’m dead,” the boy says.
“You’re not dead,” his father says.
“I’m dead,” the boy insists, draping his body over the arm of his chair. The people at the next table look at him, at me, and smile.
“Don’t be weird, son,” his father says, opening the boy’s shark book. “Look at this one—what kind is this?”
The boy looks at it. “Hammerhead,” he says. His father turns the pages, and he says: “cow shark, prickly shark, zebra.” He takes a swig of his root beer, which is in a brown bottle like our beers.
“Did you know that you shouldn’t wear a watch or other shiny things in the ocean?” I ask the boy. “A shark will think you’re a fish and try to eat you.” He shakes his head. “It’s the glint,” I say, “like fish scales,” tipping my bare wrist back and forth, but he doesn’t know what a glint is. He’s only four. I look at his father, my boyfriend, who is texting someone, probably his ex-wife.
The boy’s burger comes and his father cuts it in half and the boy takes a bite out of one half and puts it down and then picks up the other half and takes a bite. My boyfriend waves the waitress over and asks for ketchup. I order another beer. There is something wrong with my stomach, an ulcer maybe, and I know I shouldn’t be drinking but I seem to be incapable of living the kind of life where I eat nutritious meals and exercise and go to bed at a decent hour, or I can only live like this for a short period of time before fucking it all up again.
Flies circle the boy’s burger. One lands on the edge of the basket and makes its way along the rim. The boy and I watch it while my boyfriend stares at his phone. The fly moves so fast I can’t see its individual legs and then it stops abruptly and crosses one leg over another and scrubs them together. I wave my hand around. My boyfriend sets his phone down and unfolds a napkin, lays it over his son’s food.
It is August, too hot to be sitting outside. I look at the kid, who would never pass for mine, and hate him a little. He has a white scar that snakes up the middle finger of his left hand (from a skateboarding accident when he was two, he tells me), blond hair, and brown eyes. My boyfriend’s eyes are blue. I want to ask my boyfriend what color his ex-wife’s eyes are because if they’re blue then the boy isn’t his and we could be spending our nights alone.
On Saturday afternoon, I go over to my boyfriend’s house to swim. He lives with his mother because his ex-wife got the house and everything in it. He talks about his circumstances constantly—the things he used to have, how he owned his own home at twenty, how badly he wants to get out of this town but can’t.
He and his wife grew apart, he says, which could mean anything, but more than likely it means she found him intolerable or fell in love with someone else.
On the kitchen counter, there’s a paper bag containing beer and vodka and mixers and I know I won’t be going home tonight, that I’ll end up staying in the guest bedroom, wishing his body was pressed against mine. And in the morning, I’ll wake up and tiptoe into the room where he and his son will be passed out on top of the covers with their hands in their pants. I like the idea of the boy, how much a father can love his son, but I don’t like the actual son, who is screaming because he can’t find his swim trunks.
“Where did you last see them?” I ask, bending down so I’m eye level, my voice high and false. I don’t even speak this way to dogs.
“Would you grab him a Capri Sun?” my boyfriend says to me. “Let’s put on Jamie’s,” he says to the boy, leading him into the other room with a hand on his back.
I pluck the tiny straw off, unwrap it and poke the uneven side into the pouch as indicated, while my boyfriend helps the boy into his cousin’s swim trunks. Then he comes back into the kitchen to mix two vodka and tonics and the three of us go outside.
They do backflips off the diving board and swim butterfly as I paddle back and forth, avoiding their wake, because I have my contacts in, because they remind me I’m a girl. I wonder how my boyfriend would act with a daughter, if he’d teach her to change a flat tire and skateboard and play soccer, or if he’d love her less because he’d failed to teach her to do these things. One time my father tried to teach me to drive a stick shift; for weeks after, I practiced in my sleep.
My boyfriend wraps his limbs around one of the wooden beams that holds up the porch, shimmies up it in increments like a bug, and climbs onto the roof. The roof is flat. I could see myself up there: looking at the stars, smoking a joint. He jogs to the other end and then turns and runs, launching himself into the middle of the pool.
He swims beneath me, raking his fingers down my body as he goes.
Later, the three of us are in bed, watching men surf the biggest waves in the world from his laptop. When the waves break, the men get lost in the white foaminess and Jet Skis rush out to search for them.
“Is she going home?” the boy asks. “I think she should go home now.”
“She’s staying here tonight,” he says, an arm around each of us. I’m not uncomfortable with the situation, but then I think about it and decide that I should be uncomfortable and then I am.
“Come tuck me in,” I say, yanking on my boyfriend’s arm. He follows me back to the guest bedroom and turns the fan on, stands there while I take off my shorts and move all the pillows to one side and get under the covers. He sits beside me, pulls the sheet up to my neck like my mother used to do. Then he kisses my forehead and closes the door behind him.