Always Happy Hour: Stories(19)

I pick up the remote control and press a button, a warning sound that means if she keeps barking she’s going to get shocked. The dog doesn’t respond to the sound at all. She doesn’t respond to the shocks, either. Despite her problems, she has a few charming qualities. Some days, before my husband gets home from work, we lie in bed and spoon. Every time I open my hard drive, she comes running to see the CD make orbs of light on the walls. When I wash dishes, she likes to watch the water ripple on the cabinets, the pots flash.

We go into the kitchen and look at the refrigerator: coloring book tear-outs with Diamond’s name in jostled letters at the top, a photograph of Roxie in reindeer ears.

“It took us forever to get a couple of good ones to use as Christmas cards.”

I take the rocky road from the freezer, and she eats a bowl while looking around at the cheerful wallpaper and plum-colored curtains, the clean white appliances. The woman who lived here before decorated the house and my husband moved in and then I moved in.

We listen as he comes clomping up the basement stairs and then he’s standing with us in the kitchen, filling a glass with ice. His shirt is soaked through and there are flecks of grass and dirt all over him.

“What do you want to do?” I ask Diamond, who is gazing up at my husband. My husband is tall and good-looking but insecure about his looks because of his high forehead and too-thin chest. He lifts weights in the basement four times a week. He likes beer and football and reads motorcycle magazines with bikinied women on the covers, though, to my knowledge, he’s never been on a motorcycle. But this makes him sound like a dick and he’s not a dick, not at all. He spent weeks combing the nits out of my hair when I caught lice from one of the white girls—a tedious and time-consuming ordeal—and insisted on sleeping next to me in bed.

I drive Diamond across town to the mall; it’s the kind of place I hate but drive to without thinking. There’s a park next to the mall, a walking path around a lake, and sometimes I put on my tennis shoes and go there. Sit on a swing and look at the ducks. If I take the dog with me, I have to keep her on a short leash so she doesn’t try to bite anyone.

At the food court, I order a box of chicken nuggets and a small Coke and we sit at a table and eat while the other children play on the plastic tree, a replica of the one at Disney World. I look around—sometimes we run into girls who are back home with their families. We talk to them with our eyes and hands when their people’s backs are turned.

“I’ve seen the real tree,” I say. “It was fake, too. I ate Moroccan food and went on a safari and there were lions and tigers and bears, oh my.”

She stops chewing and cocks her head at me.

“I wish you’d been there,” I say, as I help her take off her shoes.

She walks over to the tree and climbs the trunk, sticks her head out and waves before sliding down. She befriends a Mexican boy and slaps him on the ass once, good and hard, but nobody seems to mind. I move to the bench with the other parents and watch them ride a squirrel together, Diamond in front like the man. After a while, she gets bored and pushes him off and then stands and waves at me with her whole arm.

The woman next to me, a blonde in spandex, asks if she’s mine and I tell her no. She’s the kind of woman who comes on Wednesday nights to bring movies and popcorn. These women smile too much and won’t use the bathroom, and it makes me want to steal their husbands so they can see how quickly life can rearrange itself into unfamiliar and unpleasant patterns.

“I work at a temporary shelter for abused and neglected children,” I say, hating myself for wanting this woman to say I’m good, that what I am doing is a good thing.

“I bet that’s very rewarding,” she says.

“Not really.”

I close my eyes long enough to imagine the world dark and full of noise, and then open them and find Diamond. I stare at an old man eating an ice cream cone, spinning the swirl of vanilla over his tongue. I watch him the same way he watches me—blankly, without interest—and wonder if Diamond will remember that someone loved her once, if she’ll have any memory of me at all.





UPHILL

The RV park is nice and shady. The residents are mostly older and quiet, but the bugs are loud. There are all sorts of bugs and they are all so loud.

I’m sitting at the picnic table next to the trailer he has just bought, carefully avoiding the piles of bird crap while watching him fashion a wooden chute for the sewer hookup. He’s impressed with himself, using nails he’s found on the ground and wood from a scrap pile. Every few minutes he stops to admire his work.

“Our shit travels uphill,” he says.

“That’s amazing.”

He sits across from me and I watch him dig around in his box full of small tools.

Before the trailer he lived on his uncle’s boat, but he sank it, and before that he lived in a van in his boss’s garage. When I get drunk, I yell at him and call him homeless and we don’t talk for weeks but then I find myself with him again—just a cup of coffee, just as friends—and the cycle repeats itself. We’re at the beginning of the cycle now.

“So I got this call earlier,” he says. His voice has the high, strained quality it takes on when he’s lying or asking to borrow money. “This friend who lives in Hawaii wants me to drive to Biloxi to take a picture of a lady.”