Always Happy Hour: Stories(12)

My boyfriend has his son every other night. Every other night, I don’t see him, or I see him and the boy, or I feel guilty because he has passed the boy off on his mother. This afternoon, he has passed the boy off. He comes over to my house and stands on his head and falls and then stands on his head and falls again and I picture the guy who lives below me looking at his ceiling, waiting for the next thud. “Let’s go kick the soccer ball,” he says, jumping up. I don’t know how to play soccer, though I used to watch my ex-husband play. I’d hand him bananas for leg cramps, cold bottles of water.

He skateboards on the sidewalk while I follow, his soccer ball under my arm like an athlete, circling back so I won’t get too far behind. Talking the whole time. His energy makes me nervous and dull, like I have nothing to say that might interest him, like I won’t be able to hold his attention for long. When he’s like this, I find myself unable to locate words, lose my train of thought. I jog to keep up and the cars don’t honk like they do when I’m just a white girl in a dress walking alone. He leads me to the train station. It is one of the things I like most, how he doesn’t force me into the position of having to admit I don’t know what I want.

“At one time this was the longest covered walkway in the world,” he says, and I lie on his skateboard, which is actually a longboard, a type I’ve never seen, and he pushes me down the covered walkway. I turn my head to look at the rusted train cars and a series of low, redbrick buildings, the puffy clouds splotched with dark spots. The sun disappears behind one of them and the world goes dim and I’m reminded that the ugly derelict things only make the world more beautiful. I put my feet on the concrete to stop myself, and he bends down and kisses me. I touch his face, slick with sweat.

He pulls a bandanna from his pocket and offers it to me first. Then we kick the soccer ball back and forth. I try to kick it up into my hands like he does, but I miss until he says, “Like that, but put your hands out.” It’s like magic. Like keep your eye on the ball.

He does a backflip, lands on his feet. “You should do that in the grass,” I say, as a bus pulls up. No one gets on or off. The driver stares straight ahead and keeps his hands on the wheel.

“Come on,” he says, skating while I dribble. “Don’t let it get too far ahead of you,” he says, “stay in control of it.” Cars fly by. I look at the people inside, more grotesque than the ones walking around in the world, turning their heads to look at us. I wonder if they just pick up fried chicken and drive back home, if they ever go anywhere besides Walmart. I kick the ball into the street and he skates out to retrieve it, kicks it to me. We’re like a gang, the two of us, and the kid tucked safely away at his mother’s so we can recall the cute things he said about how babies are made and life after death and smile.

I follow him to a park, a small grassy area and a fountain. The last time we were here, we saw a couple with a picnic basket being photographed in the dark. He reminds me of this. I remind him how he slipped and fell on his back so perfectly I thought he’d done it on purpose.

We walk over to the fountain, which is surrounded by concrete benches, spaced in such a way that you shouldn’t jump from one to the other of them, but he does, and then I stand on one and look at the next one and he says, “You can do it.” He holds out his hand and I swat at it and jump, and then jump another, following him around the fountain feeling drunk and careless, like if I hurt myself it will be his fault, which makes hurting myself seem okay, necessary even. And then we stop and take off our shoes and cover up as many water holes as we can with our feet and hands.


I shower while he goes outside to smoke. He comes back and smashes his forehead to the frosted glass, his hands cupping either side of his face. I pretend not to see him and then I look at him, surprised, and turn the water off.

He hands me a bundle of tiny weed-like flowers so small they can’t be put in water; they would float like tea leaves.

“You make me so happy,” I say.

“That makes me happy,” he says, digging the pads of his fingers into my scalp. My hair drips onto the mat.

“How come?”

He shrugs and says, “I’m going to take a quick shower and then let’s go out.” He loves going to bars, drinking and stepping into hair-trigger conversations that could easily deteriorate into fights. He won’t admit this, though—he says it’s his face, that it attracts fists.


While we wait for our sushi, we sit at the bar and drink, draw on napkins with tiny pencils. I write: I ? Richie. He draws a picture of a dinosaur, smoking and taking a shit. The caption above it says Dinos died from Sneezys.

“What’s a sneezy?”

“It’s a blunt,” he says, “or a whore who won’t leave you alone.”

“That’s like every entry in the Urban Dictionary.”

I push my napkin in front of him and tell him I love him. He doesn’t say anything and then he says he can’t say it back. If I’d thought there’d been a chance of it, I wouldn’t have mentioned it.

“How do you know you love me?” he asks.

“I don’t know—because sometimes it’s all I can think. Sometimes it’s the only thing that’ll stay in my head.”

He considers this and says, “It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It only means I can’t say it.” And then he gives me some reasons but I don’t listen. Probably he is saying love is terrifying and financially ruinous and stuff like that. I scratch out I ? Richie and flip the napkin over. I draw more hearts, dozens of them, in all sizes, that grow closer and closer together until there’s no more room. Then I pencil them in. I’ve always doodled hearts; it has nothing to do with anything.