Always Happy Hour: Stories(20)

“A picture of a lady?”

“I haven’t talked to this guy in a long time.”

“Who is he?”

“He sells dope,” he says. “He’s a bad guy.”

A lot of his friends sell dope, but I’ve never heard him call any of them bad guys before. “He sells weed?” I ask.

“Huge quantities of high-grade stuff. Mostly legal.”

“That sounds like a bad idea.”

“Yeah, it’s probably a bad idea,” he says.

I’m surprised to hear him agree with me. He stops digging around in his box. I turn a page in my magazine. “How much did he offer to pay you?”

“He said to name my price. I was thinking a thousand.”

“A thousand? If someone tells you to name your price you don’t say a thousand. Did you tell him you couldn’t do it?”

“I said I’d call him back.”

“Why didn’t you tell him you couldn’t do it?” If I wasn’t here, or we were in a fight, he would already be on his way down there.

“I’m not gonna do it.”

“They’re going to kill that woman,” I say, because I want to hear what it sounds like. I want him to say no, they’re not, but he doesn’t. There she is—eating a tunafish sandwich or watching a game show on TV, not knowing she will soon be dead. It’s kind of thrilling. I wonder what she looks like, if she’s pretty.

“I’ll call him right now with you sitting there and tell him I can’t do it. I’m going to have to make some stuff up.”

“Of course, make some stuff up. I don’t care.” I flip another page in my magazine, a Cosmopolitan from November 2002. I found a whole stack of them in his Laundromat. “Wait,” I say. “Hold on a second.”

“What?”

“Let’s think about this for another minute.” This is not my life, or it is not the life I’m supposed to be living, and so I can pretend that it is. I don’t consider the actuality of my situation, which is that every day I live this life it becomes more and more mine, the real one, and the one I’m supposed to be living falls further away; eventually it will be gone forever. “Whether or not you take the picture, somebody’s going to do it and the woman’ll be dead, right?”

“That’s right,” he says.

“So either way she’s dead and all he wants you to do is take a picture. And you’re broke.”

“I’m not broke.”

He takes a sip of his beer, the beer I bought. I know exactly how much money he has because he empties his pockets out on the counter as soon as he gets home, balled-up ones and fives, sometimes a couple of twenties. He never has more than fifty dollars on him.

“People take my picture all the time,” I say. “Every time I go through a toll road my picture gets taken.”

“Not really the same thing. And when are you going through toll roads?”

“Are you sure he doesn’t want you to do anything else?”

“No, just the picture.”

“Your child support’s late,” I say, though we don’t talk about his children, who live in Virginia (a state he is not allowed to enter for reasons that remain unclear). I can just assume he hasn’t paid it. He has no bank account. When someone writes him a check, I have to cash it for him because he lost his ID, sunk to the bottom of the lake along with the boat.

“You think I should do it?” he says. “I can’t believe you think I should do it.”

“For two thousand.”

“Are you serious?”

“You’d do it if I wasn’t here.”

“No I wouldn’t.”

“Then why didn’t you tell him no right off?”

“Because he’s my friend—I was going to think about it first. I owe him that much.”

“Well call him back and tell him you’ll do it. And I get to come.”

“No, babe. I’m not involving you in that kind of stuff.”

“I’m coming,” I say, “and that’s final.” He seems pleased and I wonder if this is what he wanted all along, if I’m stupid. We stay together, I tell myself, because the sex is so good; if the sex weren’t so good, I would have broken this cycle a long time ago.

He calls the guy back and makes affirmative-sounding noises while I watch him pace. So many of my boyfriends have been pacers—it must make them feel important. He says fifteen and gestures for a pen. I hand him one and he scrawls an upside-down address on my magazine, a phone number and the name Susan Lacey. I went to school with some identical twins named Lacey. They were of average intelligence and attractiveness so no one seemed to know what to do with them.

I gather my stuff and climb the two steps into the trailer. I’m still not used to the dimensions—the narrowness of the doors, how small everything is. There are booby traps everywhere, sharp edges that need to be filed down, cabinets that fall open when you walk by. Only in the bed do I feel my normal size.

I open the closet and a light comes on; it is his favorite feature. I shove my clothes back into my overnight bag, my toothbrush and toothpaste and foaming facial cleanser. We’ll have to go by my apartment to get my camera because he doesn’t have one. I wish he had his own damn camera and find myself getting angry about all of the things he doesn’t have and how he assumes I will provide them. I sit on the bed with its ugly pilled comforter that probably came with the trailer and look at my arms, the finger-shaped bruises. I’m going to be involved in a murder, I think. There is no voice that tells me to stop, that says what I am doing is wrong. I can’t remember if there ever was a voice. I don’t remember a voice.