Always Happy Hour: Stories(38)

He pulls up in his little white truck and gets out and you watch him get bigger and bigger. You tell your boyfriend you love him terribly, goodbye. Soon you will have a new life. You will be in love. You are in love. You are also drunk. Your husband’s head is so big when viewed through the peephole. You unlock the door as he is unlocking the door and he steps inside. He has a case of beer even though it’s Tuesday.

“I have to go bad,” you say, and you turn and run to the bathroom and pee with the door open. You’ve sprung a leak! your husband usually says, but he doesn’t say it today so you say it quietly to yourself. You spread your legs and watch one fast stream split into two and then three and then you take a handful of stomach and pinch. Your boyfriend has no idea how big you are. You are going to lose the weight before you meet him.

“Are we going to the Heifer?” you ask.

Your husband kneels in front of the refrigerator with the box. He places the cans in the drawer and then he stands and leans against the counter. His earplugs hang around his neck, yellow and squishy. The plant he works at is loud. He has to wear a hard hat in certain areas and steel-toed boots. He has a small office where he spends his days, avoiding the chatty secretary and the corporate people who pass through. The Bigwigs, he calls them. If they catch him they make him go to fish camp and eat at a round table and he doesn’t like to be looked at while he’s eating. You don’t like to be looked at while you’re eating, either.

He doesn’t feel like going out. Plus it’s too expensive, and the portions too small—this has never bothered him before. He clomps down to the basement with a can of beer. The cigarette smoke seeps into the house. You hear the garage door open so you move to the window and watch him step from one patch of grass to the other like he is trying to stamp them out. It’s about the saddest thing you ever saw but you back away from the window and sit on the couch with your laptop on your lap and double click on the Firefox icon, noticing for the first time that the fox is wrapped around a globe, and remind yourself that you are in love. You are going to have a life with a man who will take you all over the world whereas your husband doesn’t like to cross state lines even though you can’t even see them.

Up and down and up and down, cold beer, cold beer.

After a while, he comes back up and sits to watch you shred important documents, the kind he would keep. But they are yours and you are shredding them.

“You don’t even know this guy,” he says.

You pick up a strip of paper and there is your Social Security number, completely intact. He rolls the chair around to face you—legs spread, swiveling. You don’t know what to say. You only know that you are dying but you don’t say this because he would say you were being dramatic, he would say you are fine, that everything is fine, because there is nothing left for him to do but insist.

He is hungry. Now you have sobered up and he’s drunk so you drive him to Taco Bell. At the drive-thru he tells you he wants a Mexican Pizza and you tell the man you want a Mexican Pizza. Your husband leans forward to look at the menu. The man says, “Is that all?”

“And a Fiesta Burrito,” your husband says.

“And a Fiesta Burrito,” you say.

“And a Meximelt,” he says, sitting back to signal the end of his order.

“And a Meximelt,” you say, and then you decide that you might like a Meximelt, too, so you order another Meximelt and tack on a bean burrito and the man tells you to drive around to the second window without giving you your total.

At home, your husband opens his Mexican Pizza and all the cheese has been transferred to the top of the box. He is upset about this. He is more upset about this than he is about your leaving. He takes pictures to document the situation, saying he will send them to the manager and they will send him coupons for free bean burritos, which are your favorite. Of course he will give them to you. Why does he have to be so nice? You could kill him. The two of you sit side by side on the couch and eat too much and watch television and it’s just like any other night except that it will all be over soon.

At nine o’clock, he hands you the remote and goes into the bedroom and shuts the door. You don’t even wait for him to fall asleep before you call your boyfriend. Your boyfriend says this shows loyalty, the fact that you will not sleep in the bed with your husband anymore. I’m an awful person, you tell him, but he doesn’t believe you.


The next day the old lady calls and you tell her you have a roast in the oven but she pretends she can’t hear you so you tell her you’ll be right over.

You stand at the edge of your driveway looking at a bunch of mushrooms that sprung up overnight. You nudge a big one and it leans over. Then you step on a couple of smaller ones, enjoying the crush of them under your flip-flops. The rest you leave for later.

Her front door is open a crack. You say hello and step inside.

She’s wearing a housedress that exposes every bone in her chest. You could ball her up like a piece of construction paper. Her maid asks if you want anything to drink and you say a Coke please and thank you and thank you again when she delivers it, your politeness so polite it is condescending even though you don’t mean for it to be condescending. You only mean to be polite.

The two of you sit on either side of the window, where you look out at your street.

“The Mexicans are moving in,” she says.

“There must be a dozen in the green house on the corner,” you tell her, but you don’t care if the Mexicans are moving in, or the blacks, or the polka-dotted people, as your mother used to say when she wanted to demonstrate her sense of equality—they could be polka-dotted for all I care. Just then the Mexicans’ dog ambles past, jauntily. He’s a yellow Lab and there’s nothing remotely Mexican about him but he’s always loose, unleashed. On the small table between you, your glass sits on a coaster. Next to your glass is her checkbook. The old lady is rich, you are sure, though her house is always hot and her Coke always flat and the only baked goods come in plastic grocery store containers. You wonder if she will leave you any money. You know she won’t but you like the idea of it. She has no one and you have no one, but this isn’t true. You have a lot of people. You run down the list of them in your head: a mother and a father and a brother and a sister and a husband and a boyfriend and at least four friends you could call up and pour your heart out to, but what would they say? They are always running late. She will leave her money to First Baptist, or to the university where her son taught. Maybe it will be enough to buy him a wing.