Always Happy Hour: Stories(36)

I thank him and push off. George doesn’t know about the credit cards. He would kill her, she says, or beat her to a pulp. But where does he think the money’s coming from? Perhaps she told him her mother had cashed in a policy or had an emergency savings account they didn’t know about. Perhaps he trusts her.

George is older than Aggie by ten years, his hair gray and bushy, and Aggie is older than me by another ten, or twelve. He must wonder why I’m friends with his wife. I can’t look at him without thinking about the things I know that he doesn’t know—that she steals—not just this credit card scam but from stores, too. She gets away with it, she says, because she doesn’t look the type; frequently, she’s with her children. And she contacts men over the internet and goes over to their houses or meets them in motel rooms because George can’t get it up anymore. I’ve told her that this is insanely dangerous and irresponsible, but I like hearing about these men.

Aggie is a storyteller, describing the situations in great detail: how they feel the need to explain themselves, how she goes through their things when they’re in the bathroom or taking a shower. They leave their wallets on the counter, along with their keys. She could take anything, and she does, though she carefully considers whether it is something that might be noticed. She shows me these tokens—voter ID cards and movie stubs and matches—spread out on her bed when we lock the door from George and the children. They remind me of the souvenirs of serial killers.

Mostly I’m surprised that they go through with it, every time. Never has a man taken a look at her and backed out. Never has Aggie driven somewhere, parked, and decided against it, opting instead for a cheeseburger and a milkshake.

There was an accident years ago. I know the basics: a car crash; someone died. She was in a coma for a long time and they didn’t think she’d come out of it and then she did. I didn’t know her before the accident but it’s clear she’s not the person she would have been. There are her eyes, for one, which aren’t like regular eyes. And there is the way her brain works, which is not like a regular brain, and there are all of the pills, which she began taking in order to cope.

I had a friend once who was divorcing her husband because she despised him and then she had a seizure and forgot that she despised him and called the divorce off. Her husband was still the same guy he’d always been but her brain had been reset to the time she’d met him, back when he was her one and only, when she couldn’t remember all of the things that had happened in between falling love and filing for divorce.

When I think of the Aggie I know and the Aggie I might have known, I think of this friend I’m no longer friends with and whether I would still be friends with her if she hadn’t had the seizure.

Alexander screams because he sees a salamander. He loves the baby salamander. He gets down on all fours to look at it and then Nathan scrambles out of the pool and kneels beside him and they give us updates about its movement. They wonder where his family is and if he’s lost, if he’s sad. Alexander asks if they should kill him, if they should put him out of his misery, and this makes me reconsider Alexander and my blanket dismissal of him.

Aggie takes hold of my raft, pushing me back and forth in a lulling, pleasant motion.

“Want me to blow it back up for you?” she asks.

“Maybe in a minute. Thanks.”

I wonder what they’ll have for dinner, if they’ll invite me to stay. This past Thanksgiving, I couldn’t fly home so I ate with them here. Everything had come from a box or a can and I met her mother and her mother’s husband and her brother and his family and they were all wearing pleated blue jeans and sweatshirts with various designs and decorations and I had loved the whole affair—the blandness and mediocrity of it—and how they’d had no idea it was bland or mediocre. Tombstone pizza, perhaps, or frozen meatballs boiled in Ragú. Bunny bread on a plate, potatoes made from flakes, half of a pound cake in half of a plastic box.

She stops pushing and I touch her hand; the pushing resumes. She tells me she’s doing the best she can, that she does the best she can.

“I know,” I say. “We all do.” I close my eyes and think about this. I could do better, it’s completely within my ability, and Aggie could do better, but we allow ourselves to neglect the most important things as we tell ourselves we’re doing our best. I open my mouth and close it, decide to keep this information to myself. I think I might fall asleep but then I hear thunder in the distance and remember the place I lived before moving to Austin, how those two years were full of storms and I’d stop whatever I was doing to go out to my balcony and watch them. When the parking lot flooded, the cars would pause before the water. Sometimes they reversed and turned around but mostly they just plowed right through.

“My counselor says I have low self-esteem,” I say, perhaps as a way of evening things out.

“I’m sorry,” she says. She seems really sorry, like this is terrible news.

“I think I’m going to stop seeing her—I spend most of my time thinking about her life. And there’s nothing really wrong with my life. My life is perfectly fine.”

Aggie is nearly unresponsive but she keeps pushing and I keep talking about my counselor and her shoe collection and how she doesn’t wear a wedding ring but maybe she takes it off before sessions? On my worst days, the only way I can get through the fifty minutes is by imagining her alone in a dark apartment drinking vodka martinis. And then I start telling her about my boyfriend and how glad I am he doesn’t live here, how he wants me to be someone else even though he liked me fine at the beginning. Loved me, even, just the way I was, and this is how it always goes. I end my soliloquy with, “Men, you can’t live with ’em.”