Always Happy Hour: Stories(40)

. . .


At your parents’ house, your father makes three drinks, vodka over ice with lime and a splash of tonic, and then goes outside to smoke cheap cigars.

“When did this start?” you ask your mother.

“It’s been a while,” she says, and she tells you that she smuggled him a box of Cubans when she went to Grand Cayman but he doesn’t like the Cubans. Your mother is a compact woman of sixty. You can’t imagine her smuggling anything, nor can you imagine that she might get in trouble for doing so.

Your father comes back in and pours another round of drinks and then there is the inevitable talk of pizza. You want a pizza but you don’t want to be responsible for the arrival of a pizza.

“What do you think?” your father asks, and they turn and look at you.

“We’ll order the thin crust,” your mother says.

“Thin crust veggie?”

“Thin crust meat-fest,” your father says. “I can’t eat no fucking rabbit food.” He looks at you and grins. This is also new, his use of four-letter words.

“We’ll order you a veggie and your father a meat lover’s,” your mother says. She goes to the phone and the little dog comes over and sits on your lap. Pot-licker, your father calls her, dump truck. You pet her heavily, rougher than you should but she doesn’t seem to mind. If you had a baby, you might manhandle it. You might make it cry and feel terrible. No you wouldn’t, of course you wouldn’t. You’d love it more than anything. You would die for it, probably. The world news comes on. You don’t pay attention but the noise is comforting, like your parents’ house is comforting, like regression is comforting before the hole opens up and turns you inside out. You can always go home, you tell yourself. You can always get in your car and go home.

You go upstairs and call your boyfriend. He tells you he sold his truck to a friend for two hundred dollars. It was worth at least a grand but it wouldn’t have made it all the way to Tennessee and his friend needed a car. In California, apparently, this is how people operate. You take off your clothes and lie in bed. You get under the covers and listen as he reads you a story but you lose interest and then you fall asleep and dream you’re in San Francisco, riding on his handlebars as he bikes around the city and you are thin and beautiful and balance easily but you wake up because you have to pee and can’t go back to sleep because you are excited about your new life even though there is nothing to be excited about, as far as you can tell, at least not immediately.





HAMILTON POOL

Darcie hasn’t seen rain in over a year. She looks out the window, watches for signs. In the mornings, it’s cloudy. At night, there’s a breeze. These things don’t mean anything anymore but she tracks them regardless.

This morning it is unusually cloudy. She sits on the couch drinking coffee while Terry boils eggs. Downstairs, the baby begins to cry; somebody is moving something or bumps into a wall. Their apartment is on the second floor of a house, a married couple with a baby below—the man an architect, the woman a lawyer. The baby is often strapped to the chest of the woman, who goes about her business as if he isn’t there.

Darcie watches the fat-bodied quail pick through the dirt and gutted-out pecans. They make a lot of racket. The birds here are loud and insistent and have different calls than the birds back home because they’re different birds. It makes her feel lonely to think about it—her mother and father having drinks together in the living room, talking about the dogs and what they’re going to have for dinner. She wonders if they talk about her, or her sister, Laurie. She wonders if they’ll ever meet her boyfriend, but she knows they wouldn’t like him because he’s covered in tattoos, because he was in prison.

Terry hands her a bowl with two eggs rolling around. “Do you want salt?” he asks.

“Yes, please.” He brings her the salt, a paper towel. “Where are your eggs?”

“I ate them already. I’m going to heat up some tortillas. Do you want one?”

“Are they stale?” she asks.

“I don’t think so. When did we buy them?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I think it was Tuesday,” he says. “What did we do Tuesday?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t remember Tuesday.” He goes back to the kitchen, which is the only place she can’t see him from the couch, and she picks up an egg and knocks it against the bowl. The eggs are brown and spotted and come from the next-door neighbor’s chickens. Their shells are more fragile than the bleached eggs she used to buy at the store: you set them on the counter and they break; you squeeze them in one hand and they bust. She’d always heard you couldn’t break an egg this way.

Terry hands her a tortilla and then sits on his side of the couch and eats, looks out the window. She thinks about her last boyfriend, how he was always so eager to go out. This boyfriend isn’t like that. He’ll sit around with her all day. He says he’ll never cheat on her and it’s easy to believe him because they’re hardly ever apart.

“It looks like rain,” he says.

“It’s not going to rain,” she says, rolling the tortilla up. It has bits of jalape?o in it, her favorite. “It’s just fucking with us.”

“It, what?”