Always Happy Hour: Stories(46)

And then the stories take a bad turn, as they always do, and he’s telling her about the time a guard split a man’s head open while they were on their knees, how that man was taken away and no one ever saw him again. He stands and paces, lights their last cigarette. She extends her arm, her fingers making a peace sign, opening and closing, and he passes it to her.

“You have to let it go,” she says. “There’s nothing you can do about it so you have to let it go.”

“I know,” he says. “You’re right, I know.”

“I’m serious. You have to.”

“I know,” he repeats. He walks over to the stove and opens the cupboard, takes out the flask. He unscrews the cap and drinks, offers it to her. She takes it and drinks and passes it back and he puts it away. But then he takes it out again and they pass it back and forth until it’s gone.

Terry really believes the apocalypse is coming. She’d thought it was just a game they were playing, but it’s not—he believes the end is coming because he wants it to come. When everything goes to hell, his skills will be useful again. He’ll be high-ranking, not only carrying out decisions but making them. He’ll adapt and flourish, which are things he’s been unable to do in the straight world. They are also things she has been unable to do. Her friends from home are married, two children in. She can’t talk to them anymore because they don’t tell the truth: they tell her childbirth is beautiful and marriages only grow stronger; they ask her opinion on countertops and patio furniture and dishware, things that don’t mean anything and yet they seem convinced of their importance.

They fall asleep on the couch watching a terrible low-budget show about skateboarders talking about skateboarding. When she wakes up, Terry’s in bed. She would like to sleep beside him, but he twitches and says things loud enough to wake her and then she wakes him because he’s woken her, because she doesn’t like to be awake alone.

Darcie recalls bits of her dream—someone had broken into their apartment. She can see the man’s eyes. She gets up and checks the locks on the door and then goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She tries to recall other things—where she was when she first saw him, how she would describe him for a character sketch. If she had to describe someone for a character sketch, she feels certain the man would never be found.

In this dream she woke up before he could get to her, but lately she’s begun to die: the bad guy catches her; the gun goes off; she falls and doesn’t wake before she hits the ground. She recalls a recent one in which she stood over her body outlined in chalk, a detective with his small pad taking notes. She went to her mother, who confirmed it. “You died,” she said, “and we buried you, but you came back to life.” Darcie told a few people about the dream just in case, so they could say she had predicted her own death, so they could say she had seen it coming. To know something’s going to happen is almost like agreeing to it, she thinks, crawling into bed next to Terry.





ALWAYS HAPPY HOUR

“Are you going to take off your clothes when you go inside?” the boy asks. I have my usual swimsuit on, the white one. I have always wanted a white bikini and now I have one. The boy is in the shallow end in his Superman Speedo, the alligator Crocs his mother bought him that he refuses to take off.

“Little pervert,” Richie says, squeezing the cherry from his cigarette, flicking his wrist. “Don’t ask her questions like that.”

I wrap a towel around my waist and go inside, walk the darkened hallway back to his mother’s guest room and take my suit off. I put my dress back on—bra, no panties—and open the closet to look at his marijuana stalk: it needs another week to dry. I could steal it, I think, but he would give it to me. I don’t really want it, anyway; it just seems like something that would be neat to have.

The boy wants tacos for dinner so Richie drives us to the store, the boy in the back strapped into his car seat. He seems enormous for a car seat, his long legs kicking.

It’s cold around the meat and dairy cases. Richie pushes the cart and the boy and I walk on opposite sides of it, watching as he fills it with fish, steak, tortillas, sour cream, and onions; a box of Coronas, avocados, tomatoes, two different kinds of cheese, chips and salsa—more than we need, enough to waste. I cross my arms and suck the water out of a chunk of hair. In the checkout line, I put a Diet Coke in the basket and the boy hands me a candy bar and I put that in the basket and then he hands me a pack of gum and I tell him to put it back and Richie gets out his wallet. He always has a wad and he peels off bills. He has no job, no income; he has no debit card so he has to go to the bank during regular business hours to withdraw money.

I take the boy’s hand as we walk out to the car, and he lets me hold it a second before pulling away. And then he jams his hands into my sides while making a sound like chicka chicka chicka. I laugh but it doesn’t tickle. His father likes to stick his fingers in my ribs. That doesn’t tickle, either.

“Stop it,” Richie says. “Don’t play so rough with her.” I look at the boy, place my hand on top of his head, and he looks up at me. I shrug. I don’t know how to act around him. Richie wanted us to like each other and now that we do, he wants us to like each other less.

At the house, I put my swimsuit back on and go into his mother’s room to use the bathroom—she’s in Tupelo this weekend, at a beauty pageant with Richie’s sister and her two girls. The toilet across the hall from the guest room doesn’t flush right and sometimes I have to fill the bucket with water and pour it into the tank and I don’t like to stay in the bathroom that long. If I don’t shit, if I’m pretty and don’t ask too many questions, he’ll love me. He’ll tell me things—his thoughts and ideas, where his money comes from, what he does when I’m not around. Now he just tells me the worst things that have happened to him, same as he tells everyone, like the story of his father’s race car going round and round the track and then crashing into a wall in a burst of flames as his entire family watched. He gets angry when people touch his arm, or look at him a certain way, and it makes everyone fall in love with him.