Always Happy Hour: Stories(35)

“It’s all over!” I yell. “Goodbye, so long!” And then we’re both in the water and he’s flinging his chubby arms around my neck—I love how they crease at the elbow—and wrapping his legs around my waist. I want this boy. Aggie doesn’t deserve him. He’s probably never been to the circus or an amusement park or the beach. I bet he hasn’t even been to a zoo, though I wouldn’t take him to a zoo, or I’d take him to one and explain why zoos are bad and why all of the animals should be living in their natural habitats unless they’re about to go extinct or would immediately die in the wild. I’d tell him about Inky the Octopus, who broke out of his tank in the middle of the night, slid down a six-inch-wide drainpipe and back out into the Pacific Ocean, leaving a trail of suction cup marks in his wake.

“Would you return it?” Aggie asks.

“What? I thought we’d settled this already.”

“I just want to know if you’d give it back.”

I swim over to her. Her eyes don’t look right. They don’t look right at all. “I don’t know. I guess I wouldn’t have done it—I do a lot of awful things but stealing’s not one of them.” I notice a long dark hair on my chest. I try to pull it out but it just curls. Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t stop looking at it.

“It’s not stealing,” she says. “We applied for them and they gave them to us.”

“You applied for one the day she died.”

“It was the day before, and I didn’t know she was going to die. I haven’t even used that one yet.”

“I take magazines, actually. At the gym, at doctor’s offices, everywhere but the store, so I guess I do steal, though I don’t really think of it as stealing because I usually leave one behind like a leave-one-take-one situation, though there’s nothing that says it’s a leave-one-take-one situation so I guess it’s just plain stealing. And sometimes I don’t have one to leave behind.”

“See?” she says, churning the water more forcefully. “We all steal something.”

“Okay, so here’s what you’re going to do—you’re going to keep all of the furniture and everything else and not feel bad about it. And then you’re going to cut the cards up. If you start returning stuff it might look suspicious.”

“I didn’t think about that,” she says, “but you’re right. I better not return anything.”

“Now stop thinking about it. I give you permission to stop thinking about it.”

Her arms go still but the waves keep coming.

Aggie gives me pills; this is why I’m friends with her. Otherwise, I wouldn’t drive all the way to Round Rock to swim in her pool. My apartment complex has its own pool where I swim laps back and forth and help the maintenance man with small jobs. “Will you take the hose out in half an hour?” he might ask, and I am happy to be given such a reasonable and achievable task. For the most part, I hoard the pills because I like having them, same as I like having extra toilet paper and a pantry full of nonperishable food items. I collect pill cases and put them in there all blue and white and yellow and they’re so pretty. She passes them across the table to me in restaurants—The Cheesecake Factory, Chili’s, cavernous Mexican places with half-price margaritas—like they’re Tylenol or loose change. Sometimes she gives me an entire bottle and I just stick it in my purse and try not to look around, but then I do. I can’t help it. I look around and people look at me because I’m looking at them and one time I dropped the bottle and it rolled into someone’s foot.

My boyfriend would break up with me if he knew, if he found them hidden in the suitcase where I keep my illicit things. He doesn’t do drugs or smoke cigarettes and only drinks in moderation. This morning he got angry with me about the way I squeeze my toothpaste. I don’t squeeze it right, from the bottom up. He isn’t the first one to mention it but it seems to bother him more than the others and I wonder why it’s so important. It’s just toothpaste. Luckily he lives out of town and I don’t see him that often. Ten minutes after he left, I was on my way to Round Rock, stopping at the grocery store to pee and pick up cookies before getting lost in Aggie’s neighborhood, which looks like all of the surrounding neighborhoods, and then parking in front of her house that looks like all of the other houses, everything beige and neat and treeless. The curtains closed. This is the place you move if you really want to disappear.

I climb back onto the raft—it is getting to be a desperate situation. I need another beer but I don’t want to get out and dry myself off and make my way into the kitchen, encountering Aggie’s husband on the couch, which seems perfectly nice enough, just like a couch. I imagine standing before the enormous TV, baseball or golf, and watching with him for a moment to be polite. But a few minutes later he comes out and asks if the ladies need anything.

“Will you get me another? Do you mind that I’m drinking all your beer?”

He doesn’t mind. I smile and row myself over, set my empty down and wait.

“It’s Coors,” George says, as if I can’t see that it’s Coors. He removes my huggie from the empty can and puts it on the fresh one. “We’re out of Heineken.”

“This is great. Perfect.”

“Holler if you need another.”