Always Happy Hour: Stories(48)

“Walk me out?” I say.

“You can stay here,” he says.

“I know, but I need to go home.” I don’t like sleeping in his mother’s guest room, waking up alone in a bed decorated with seashells, paintings of boats and empty beach chairs on the walls.

We stand in the driveway and kiss. Then I get in my car and roll down the window.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says.

I wonder if leaving will make him love me more. Maybe he’ll feel like I’m slipping away, that I’ll find someone else to watch television with and wander through the aisles of Winn-Dixie. I back out of the driveway, my windshield so foggy I can barely see. I try wiping it with my hand and then put the defrost on full blast and still nothing.

A policeman turns out of the gas station and follows me slowly across the bridge before turning off. He stays in his town, which is a nicer town separated from mine by a bridge.


Richie has an interview for a job teaching troubled kids, teenagers who have been taken out of regular school and put in a smaller, remedial school with the hope of transitioning back. He finished his degree in May and wants to use it, to stop working with his hands. Once, I overheard him tell my friend Gretchen that he was a carpenter by trade, which was something I didn’t know, which was possibly a lie. He says the house he moved out of, the one in Florida where he lived with his family, was full of furniture and art he’d made and now it all belongs to his ex-wife. But his ex-wife lives here so I’m not sure what has happened to this house, if it’s been sold, if it was ever theirs to begin with.

While I’m in class, he goes to the mall and buys a tie, dress shirts.

“I don’t know how to tie a tie,” he tells me over the phone.

“Ask your mother.”

“I’ll Google it,” he says, and I wonder about his handshake. These are the two main things my brothers learned from our father: handshakes and ties.

I’m at home when he sends me a full-length picture he takes in the mirror: clean-shaven, collared shirt, tie, khaki pants: Disguised as the enemy. He calls immediately after to ask if I got it.

“You look like a regular boy.”

“You mean man.”

“Of course, a very manly man in a pair of Duck Heads,” I say, which reminds me of an ex who wore khakis to work every day at his engineering job. We’d buy his Duck Heads at Kohl’s and once a week, I’d iron a stack of them.

“Come over,” he says.

I put my swimsuit in my purse, my toothbrush in case I spend the night. Then I drive across the bridge while listening to a Deer Tick CD he burned me. He burns me dozens of CDs he wants me to like, brings them over in envelopes with the songs neatly labeled. I stop at the gas station and pick up a six-pack, and then pull up to his mother’s house, where he’s mowing the lawn with his shirt off.

I pretend to read while watching him ride back and forth on the mower.

I think it’s a night he doesn’t have the boy but then his ex-wife pulls up in her shiny late-model SUV, and Richie drives the lawnmower over to the edge of the grass to greet them. I wonder where the money comes from, how there is always money when nobody works, and look at my old Honda parked on the street. His ex-wife: skinny with fake boobs and dyed red hair, a viney tattoo climbing up the back of her neck. She goes around to the passenger side and takes the boy out of his car seat, holding him on her hip like a baby. He has a camcorder in his hands. She puts him down and he shuffles over to where I’m sitting, drinking a beer.

“Does it work?” I ask.

“Of course,” he says. He punches a button and the red light blinks on.

“Do something,” I say, taking it from him. He climbs onto the lawnmower, hops off and kicks a tree. I point the camera at Richie’s ex-wife, who says she’ll be at the boy’s soccer game tomorrow.

After she leaves, the boy goes inside to put his swimsuit on and Richie sits on the diving board, takes the pipe out of his cigarette box. The weed is dry now. He offers it to me and I shake my head. A couple of boyfriends ago, the other one I really liked, smoked pot every day. I smoked with him the first time and never did it again; it was something that made me different from the other girls he’d been with, the sad-childhood girls who’d had to be hospitalized after taking too many pills.

“You can come to the game if you want,” he says. “Did I show you the shirts?”

The other coaches were happy being red or blue but Richie had his green shirts printed with a cumbersome, ridiculous name, something like Ninja Jujitsu Warrior Robots. “I don’t want to be around her,” I say. The way they constantly swap him has little to do with the boy or the boy’s needs—I want to say this but can’t. “Pass me that pipe.” He covers up the hole on the side with his thumb as he lights it for me and then his thumb moves on and off while I inhale. I think about the circular box with metal teeth that my ex-boyfriend had, the nubs of joints in his ashtray, how he would collect a bunch and then smoke them, too. All of these things were called something.

I take another hit and the boy comes back out, walks over to the plastic storage bench and throws boards into the water: various sizes, with various superheroes on them. He doggy paddles to the deep end and grabs onto the diving board, shows me how he can pull up. His arms are so small and thin. I like the way they feel when he hugs me at night, before he goes to bed, before I fuck Richie quietly on his mother’s couch.