Always Happy Hour: Stories(45)

“I’m going down the water slide,” he says, taking a long drink. The water slide is a little concrete ditch where the water pours in, but it’s so low the kids have to use their hands to push themselves out. He doesn’t move. She goes on reading her magazine. After a few minutes, one of his friends shows up, a girl named Amber. Wherever they go, he has friends. They’re mostly girls—girls he went to high school with, girls his friends dated, girls who skateboard, girls who are friends with his sister. No matter how many Darcie meets there are always more, and nearly all of their names begin with the letter A—Allison and Alex and Andrea and Anna—and now this Amber, a pretty, ageing blonde unfurling her towel in the spot in front of them.

“This is my girlfriend, Darcie,” Terry says. They shake hands and say it’s nice to meet you and then Amber goes back to her towel and takes off her shoes with her feet. She steps out of her skirt and pulls her shirt over her head. She’s too thin, with colorful tattoos blooming across her chest.

Terry asks about Amber’s boyfriend and she says he’s a great father but a terrible partner—they’re splitting up—and then she’s telling Darcie how he got her hooked on drugs.

Amber gives her the whole story—how they smoked crack on their first date and he said she smoked like a choo-choo train and then they were smoking every day and shooting heroin, too. Darcie looks at the dark lenses of Amber’s sunglasses, glad she can’t see her eyes.

Amber says she’s been sober since the day she found out she was pregnant. Her boyfriend came home and she told him she was carrying his baby and they flushed the crack rock down the toilet together. She was never a crack whore, she tells them, gathering her fine hair into a ponytail. She was almost a crack whore but her boyfriend manned up. She gives Darcie the rundown of getting sober—sleeping for seventy-two hours, shitting herself—and says she still dreams of drugs. In the dreams, she can never get high.

“I dream I’ve got a needle as big as Terry,” she says, “but I can’t find a vein or all my veins are collapsed.” She mimics trying to stick this Terry-sized needle into her neck, lifts one of her legs as if to scout out a vein there. “Or I dream a gigantic cartoon crack rock is chasing me.” She pumps her arms and looks behind her to see if the rock is gaining. Darcie is reminded that she doesn’t fit into Terry’s world, that she doesn’t fit anywhere except maybe at home with her parents, but she doesn’t fit there either. Not anymore. She digs around in their backpack for the other Four Loko. She hates the taste but it has 12 percent alcohol and she can easily get a buzz off half a can.

Amber finishes her story, tightens her ponytail, and situates herself. Darcie watches as she lifts her hips into the air to adjust her towel, and then she watches Terry stand and wade out into the water. He cups his hands and pours the water over his head, rubs it into his face.


On their way home, they stop at Shady Grove. Terry doesn’t want to spend the last of their money on beer when they could buy eggs and tortillas, but she insists. They sit at the bar and she orders a Blue Moon with a lemon while he drinks ice water. They look around at the other diners, mostly overweight tourists and old people at this hour.

Halfway through her beer, the lights go out. Everyone’s quiet for a moment and then they’re loud. Darcie’s excited that they’re finally going to witness a rolling blackout—it feels like the beginning of something, the thing she’s been waiting for. She wonders if they have power at home and then she’s thinking about the tall Mexican candles and the box of Popsicles in their freezer. She imagines standing on the street corner, handing them out to passersby.

She looks around at the other diners, the waitstaff—all of them looking around as if they are finally able to see each other, as if they are finally allowed to look.

“I like to call them roving blackouts,” she says. “It sounds like an eye in the sky, like somebody watching.”

“It’s technically correct,” Terry says, and then he starts talking to a man at the end of the bar and before long a man at a table tells them it’s a squirrel, that a squirrel has chewed through a power line and this blackout may last awhile, until they can string a new line.


At home, Terry takes a joint out of his wallet and presses it into her hand. “Should we smoke it?” he asks.

“Where’d you get it?”

“Amber gave it to me.”

“I’m tired of saving things,” she says, wondering when she gave it to him, if he paid her for it, and if so, how. Darcie resumes her seat on the couch, looking out the window. Terry sits next to her and she leans over and bites down on his shoulder until she’s sure her teeth marks will remain there for some time. He never tells her to stop or makes any sound at all, just waits patiently until she is finished doing whatever she’s going to do.

He lights the joint and takes a drag, passes it to her. It burns better than the joints he rolls. She takes one more drag and he smokes the rest, leaves the roach in a glass candleholder. And then he’s talking about the time he fermented alcohol under his bed, paying twenty dollars for a pint of Blue Bell; he tells her about studying for his college degree and the guards who proctored his exams even though they weren’t supposed to because he was on closed custody.

“I knew a lot of good people in prison,” he says. “A lot of good people. I hope I never see them again.”