Always Happy Hour: Stories(27)

“Why won’t he just let her come in?”

My boyfriend says it’s not our business, so I tell him I want pizza and he gets out his cell phone and orders what I like and I don’t think he’d ever put me on the internet so I should just stop worrying about it. I should let him keep his videos. I like how skinny my face looks when sucking dick, from that angle. I look strung-out, crack whore. My boyfriend is sweet, though. He orders me pizza and takes me out in public and when I say I want to go home, he takes me home. I could rest my head on his shoulder and he’d kiss it, no matter who was around. I’m so lucky.

The fat girl drives off, taking out a garbage can, maybe, and Coach comes back in and sits down.

“We don’t care if you’re fucking a fat girl,” I say.

“I’m not fucking her,” he says.

“Of course you are.”

We throw another round of cards and then the pizza comes and I take a pill that Coach gives me even though my boyfriend doesn’t like for me to take pills because the Blockbuster girl took a lot of pills. She was a pillhead and he has no respect for pillheads. She spent all her money on pills and didn’t respect her body. I don’t respect my body, either, but I tell him I do. I tell him I wish I’d been a virgin when we’d met and he was the only person I’d ever been with, stuff like that.

We hear a car followed by a loud series of knocks, and the fat girl comes barging in wearing sweatpants with elastic around the ankles, her hair in a banana clip. I haven’t seen a banana clip in a long time, but it’s a nice look. Maybe if I could get a bunch of people to start wearing banana clips we could bring them back.

“I’m Amy,” I say, and hold my hand up, though she’s just a few feet away.

“Ginger,” she says.

Coach laughs his hoarse crazy laugh and deals four stacks and she sits next to him and calls him a shithead. She taps the bill over his eyes and he takes the cap off and throws it across the room. Help yourself to some pizza, he says to her, and my boyfriend and I look at each other. He puts an arm around me and I feel solid, like we are the model for a good life and happiness by comparison, which is how everything is measured.

We take turns tossing cards into the hat and the fat girl wins and it’s decided that I have to pay because she doesn’t want to sleep with me and therefore I can’t stiff her. I take a quarter from my purse and hand it over and she’s happy and gloating and I wonder how she can get out of bed in the morning without wanting to die she’s so fat and not the kind of fat girl where people are always commenting on how pretty her face is, either. She goes into the kitchen and comes back with a plate with one slice on it, eats it daintily with a napkin on her leg. I ask my boyfriend to take me home.


When I wake up, I can tell it’s sunny outside, a good day for the river, but I don’t feel like going to the river. I don’t feel like getting out of bed. I miss my ex-boyfriend, I think, and this feels right, but there are so many of them now and I’m not sure which one I miss. Lately I’m running one behind so I only stop missing the last one when the current becomes the ex and then I miss him so I’m never fully with the one I’m with, which is maybe why they keep leaving me.

I look at my boyfriend—eye boogers, dried spit around his mouth—and know I’ll miss him, too. I’ll miss the orgasms he gives me, and how he smells, and I’ll be sad I didn’t accidentally get pregnant while I had the chance.

I get up and go to the bathroom and wash my face. Then I go into the kitchen and take a Diet Rite from the refrigerator, drink it while putting on my sports bra and tennis shoes.

The wheelchair man is parked in the sun. He’s about my age, but seems a lot older. I know he’s in a wheelchair because he was drunk driving and got into an accident and killed somebody, which is something that could have happened to me many nights but hasn’t. I wonder if his dick works, if it would help if I sucked it. He nods and says hello (hello!) and I walk to the end of the driveway and then I start running. I wasn’t planning on running but I know he’s watching me. I run as fast as I can until I reach the main road and then turn around and run back, thinking faster, faster. I think: When I get to that stump, that mailbox, that car, I can stop, but I run past all of them.

He’s still there so I stop and lean against the brick wall to catch my breath.

“I should really stop smoking,” I say, but I don’t like the way it sounds, like a lie, so I say, “No, I’m just out of shape.”

“I see you jumping rope out here every day,” he says.

“I’m a little hungover.”

The wheelchair man has found God, or maybe we just assume this because the church pays three-quarters of his rent every month.

“I used to drink,” he says, “you probably know that. I’d get into fights a lot.”

“Did you win?”

“Nobody ever really wins.”

“So you lost.”

“No,” he says, and he looks up into the trees like I am boring him completely so I tell him I’ll see him later, and he says, “Have a nice day,” and I go inside and finish my Diet Rite and wonder what he thinks about me, a pretty girl who jumps rope and doesn’t work even though she has two legs that can run so fast.

In the bedroom, I lie on top of my boyfriend but he doesn’t budge so I go back to the kitchen and get out the bacon. The bacon smell will wake him up and then we’ll eat breakfast and start drinking beer and I’ll feel better.