Always Happy Hour: Stories(14)

“Not that authentic, really.”

“Which one is the scariest?” he asks.

“This one,” I say, indicating the one I’m holding. I open its jaw and stick my finger down its throat, make a puke sound.

After she leaves, my boyfriend sits next to me and squeezes my leg just above the knee. “This is how the horse eats the apple,” he says, which is something we say to each other, something we do.


I meet my boyfriend and his son for happy hour. Dinner, we call it, when it’s the three of us. Tonight the boy brings along an enormous book of every bird that ever existed. You press a button to hear the call of a cardinal, an eastern brown pelican, a mockingbird. I turn the pages and drink vodka and cranberries, two for one. We read about the dodo and how its extinction was due to a combination of its inability to fly and its fearlessness of humans. This seems profound: a large, unwieldy bird that couldn’t fly, a species that developed in isolation so it never learned to fear.

After ordering his son’s food, Richie goes inside to take a shot at the bar, or to use the bathroom—he doesn’t say—and I continue looking at birds with the boy, flipping the pages without interest now that he is gone.

“There’s an owl at my house,” the boy says, digging a matchbox van from his pocket. “My mom’s house.” He sets the Volkswagen on the table and looks up at me and I poke him in the stomach. He looks confused and then pokes me back, a little too low. I press a button and we hear the call of the great horned owl. He shows me the inside of the van, how there is a table and a sink, how it is just like a real one.

My boyfriend sends me a text: I met someone who knows you.

How interesting, I text back, sure it’s a girl, probably the hottest girl I know, begging to suck him off. Twenty minutes later, he comes back out, pays the bill and collects his son.

After he takes the boy home and puts him to bed, he comes over and crawls into bed with me.

“It was a guy named Darren,” he says. Darren tried to convince him that he believed in God, that all of his good deeds, which mostly involve helping stranded motorists, are based on his desire to get into heaven.

I went home with Darren one night from a bar.

“How do you know that guy again?” he asks, as if we’ve been over this before.

“I met him at 206.”

“He acted like he knew you pretty well.”

“He doesn’t. That was before you.”

“Yeah, but the guy is insane,” he says. “He’s crazy.”

After Darren and I slept together, he told me he was psychic. I was drunk and all I could think to ask was when I would die, if he could tell me when I’d die. He had no information.

“I can’t relax,” I say. “I can never fully relax with you.” When you leave me, you won’t really be leaving me, I think, you’ll be leaving the girl you thought I was, who was kind of like me, but not. He presses his lips to my forehead for a long time like boys do when they love you or want to convince you they love you so you’ll have sex with them.

“What can I do?” he asks, and I tell him he’s already doing everything, which is true. He calls me all the time and brings me gifts, drives across town to see me every day; it is more than anyone else has ever done. We kiss for a while. When we kiss, I don’t think about how it is for him, if he’s enjoying it—it is possibly the only time I am myself. I flip over and pull his arm around me. Then I push it off and get out of bed and open the window. I like to hear the trains pass through when I’m up at night with my hand on his chest, listening to him breathe and grind his teeth, thinking about what I might do differently in order to keep him.





BIG BAD LOVE

The roller skates are busted and the bikes have flat tires and the wagon is full of leaves and rainwater, but they’re used to these things. They pedal harder, skate without bending their knees. They make adjustments. I sit in a chair by the door and sweat. Fat drops race down my sides, cool and itchy as bugs.

Diamond pulls the wagon in front of me and the handle smacks the concrete. I ignore her so she shoves it into my legs and I continue ignoring her so she goes and stands in an ant bed. When she starts screaming, I run over and pick her up, move her to the sidewalk and take off one of her sandals, swipe at the ants while she stomps.

Inside, we sit on the couch under an enormous photograph of the former television star. The photograph is a head shot, black-and-white with a loopy signature at the bottom. The former television star comes at Christmas, brings presents and lets the children touch her arms. She wears her hair in a ponytail so we’ll think she’s a real person.

I put Diamond’s legs in my lap and smear Neosporin on her bites.

“My legs ashy,” she says, dipping her fingers into the Neosporin and rubbing.

“Don’t do that. I’ll get you some lotion.”

“Lemme do your hair.”

“My hair’s already done,” I say, though it’s only hanging loose, wash and go. I touch the darker spots on her arm, places that haven’t healed well.

In my boss’s office, I open the supply cabinet, which is full of Dial soap and Suave shampoo, a box of thin plastic combs in primary colors. I take out a comb, red and bendy, and hand it to her. Then I sit in one of the kids’ chairs and she sits on the couch and rests her legs on my shoulders. She brushes my hair back roughly with her fingers.