Always Happy Hour: Stories(22)

Less than three hours later, we’re here. He pulls into a gas station and I slip my card into the slot before he can ask and go inside, buy a 16-ounce beer and a king-size Twix.

He’s still pumping when I come back out, talking on his burner. I get in the truck and take off my flip-flops—my toenails bright red, so pretty.

He hands me a receipt, which I let fall to the floor without looking at it. I type the address into my phone, direct him through the city. For some reason the sound isn’t working and I can’t get it to work even though the media volume is turned all the way up.

“Don’t you have a boyfriend that lives here?” he asks. He knows I have an ex-boyfriend who lives here. He lives in a high-rise apartment and drives a black Mercedes with a personalized license plate that means supreme ruler in some Asian language. He is a horrible person who made me go to church with him on Sundays, a Californian, a former marine, a drunk. I have no idea where I find these people.

“No,” I say.

He looks at me.

“That was like three years ago.”

“When’s the last time you talked to him?”

“Not since we broke up,” I say. “Richard.”

“Dick,” he says, “that’s right, good old Dick.”

“Let’s talk about your ex-girlfriends. Were they all ugly? Make a left at the next light.”

“I don’t date ugly chicks.”

“You know I’ve met a lot of the girls you dated?”

He sighs because I’m right—they were all weirdly tall or hook-nosed; one of them had so many tattoos she looked deranged. “How much further?” he asks.

“Farther.”

“Okay,” he says, “Jesus Christ. How much farther?”

“Three miles. If he has her address, why’s he need a picture? Why doesn’t he just send somebody there to kill her?”

“We’re going to her job,” he says, and then, “Hey, babe? Could you just stop talking for just a minute?”

We pull into the parking lot of an Office Depot. “Is this it?” he asks.

“This is the address you wrote down.”

Office Depots depress me and I refuse to get out. I open my bag and hand him the camera, turn it on and off. “This button here,” I say. “I hope she’s in there and we can get this over with. I want to go swimming, and maybe gamble. I love to gamble.” I’ve decided I’ll definitely rent a room at a casino, a nice one, and order room service and drink overpriced drinks at the hotel bar and fuck him in a huge bed with too many pillows.

I watch his back as he walks into the store: stocky and bald-headed, tattoos covering his thick arms. He’s not attractive in the conventional way but he makes beautiful babies. I’ll never have a baby with him but I like the idea of it, having a small version of him that I could control, who would listen to me and obey me and tell me every thought that popped into his head. The doors slide open and he’s gone, disappeared into the sadness of Office Depot forever. The turn of events deflates me.

Ten minutes later, he gets back in the truck.

“So?”

“No Suzie.”

“What took you so long?”

“I bought some envelopes,” he says, and tosses the bag to the floor. He hands me the camera and I immediately check to see if he took any pictures; he didn’t. I turn it off. “What now?”

“I don’t know. Let me think for a minute.”

“Drive us to a nice hotel and I’ll rent a room and we can pretend we’re on a stakeout. Set up a command center.”

“This isn’t a game,” he says, pulling out of the lot. “It’s not a fucking game.”

He drives in an angry silence. When someone is mad at me, I don’t know what to do except be mad back. He drives fast, like he knows where he’s going, and I don’t ask. When he decides to talk to me, I won’t be ready to talk to him, I tell myself, and it makes me feel better but then I start thinking about all the things I want to say. Every one of them is a question. I look out the window as he drives and I have no idea where he’s going or what we’re doing. I want to be inside his head for one minute, just one minute so I can get ahead of him, or at least not feel so behind. We could be here to kill Susan Lacey, for all I know, though I don’t think he would do that for fifteen hundred dollars but maybe it’s fifteen thousand and then I’d go to prison as an accessory because they wouldn’t believe me, they never do. I’d get five years, at least, even if all my people pooled their money to get me the best lawyer.

I tell him I have to pee again and he pulls into a gas station, throws the truck into park so fast it lurches. In the bathroom, I wash my hands, splash water on my face. I look at myself in the mirror and think, Fuck you. Fuck you, you fuckup. I think all my problems might be solved if I could look in the mirror and see my ugliness reflected back at me.

As I’m purchasing a six-pack, my phone rings and I know it’s my mother so I don’t answer. I don’t even look. She’ll call again in twenty minutes or half an hour and ask what I am doing, if I’m okay. She always wants to know if I’m okay, if I’m happy, which makes it impossible to talk to her.

“Where are we going?” I ask as coldly as possible.

“I’m dropping you off at my father’s house,” he says. “You can spend the night there.”