Always Happy Hour: Stories(49)

“What do you want for supper?” he asks the boy.

“Tacos,” the boy says, which is what he always says before he’s reminded of his other options.

“What about hamburgers?” Richie asks.

“Yeah!” the boy says, pushing off.

“That okay with you?”

“I can feel all the muscles in my face,” I say, touching my forehead, pulling at my cheeks.

“It’s because you’re smiling like that.”

“I’m smiling?”

His mother comes out with one of her granddaughters, the younger pageant girl. She’s blond and blue-eyed, wearing a lavender swimsuit with a ruffle around the waist. She walks over to me and points a tiny finger.

“Who is her?” she asks.

“Who is she?” Richie says. “Alice.”

The girl turns and walks back to Richie’s mother, who puts floaties on her arms. It makes me want a sassy beautiful little girl who will be a cheerleader and Homecoming Queen and Sigma Chi Sweetheart, all of the things I rejected outright because they weren’t options.

“She’s amazing. I want to steal her.”

“I’ll sell her to you,” he says. And then, “I got something in the mail that says I’m supposed to get fingerprinted on Wednesday.”

“That’s good.”

“I assume.”

“They’ll probably drug test you, too,” I say.

He tells me he’ll get something to flush his system, that he’ll pass. I like this kind of confidence; even if he failed, I’d be impressed. He starts messing around with his plants, pulling off dead leaves, so I go to his bedroom and sit on his bed, take my swimsuit out of my oversized purse. I’ve slept in his bed once. The sheets smelled clean but felt dirty, just like I’d imagined. The next morning, he had to get up early to help a friend move but before he left, he kissed me and told me to sleep in and I felt loved.

I look at the guitars hanging on the walls, an expensive stringed instrument he brought back from India. He couldn’t check it and had to hold it in his lap through the entire flight. There are bookshelves full of books, camping equipment, a piano, stacks of pictures and letters and clothes, his son’s toys scattered across the floor. A life that once filled a house compressed into a room.


I swim breaststroke, counting to ten laps before letting myself rest. I know Richie thinks I should be playing with the kids or throwing the half-deflated ball to his dog instead of swimming back and forth. I try to keep the count straight in my head, but then I lose track and start estimating and then the boy pushes a board at my head and I stand in two feet of water. It feels strange for so much of my body to be exposed.

I hold the board steady while he kneels on it and then I let go and he attempts to stand while he’s still wobbly and falls off.

“Get your balance first,” I say. He tries again and again, doing the same thing each time, and then gives up. I look over at the girl.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Keeton,” Richie’s mother says, and I watch her happily admiring her legs as they chop the water. If she were mine, we’d go everywhere together; we would never be lonely and she would renew my faith in humanity.

The boy hasn’t done this for Richie.

“I hear you were in a pageant,” I say, and she says something I can’t make out and Richie says, “Tell her about your trophy, Keeton.” She uses her hands to show me—round as a globe and tall as a skyscraper. I get out and lay a towel by the side of the pool, lie on my side and watch her drown the boy’s dinosaurs while the water dries on my skin.


The next afternoon, Richie picks me up in his Bug and we drive out to the country. We pass convenience stores with handwritten signs advertising meat and cigarettes and God.

“I have anxiety,” I say. My hair blowing everywhere doesn’t help. I gather it to one side and hold it.

“Why?” he asks.

“I don’t know why.” Because we drink all the time, I think. Because I’ve been having panic attacks for years but you wouldn’t know anything about that because you don’t know anything about me. Lately I’ve been buying books about it: The Worry Cure, The Chemistry of Calm. The books say I have distorted thoughts, that these distorted thoughts create feelings, and these feelings result in my body’s responses—shortness of breath, shaky hands, upset stomach, rapid heartbeat.

“Do you want my hat?”

“I’m fine.” I twist my hair into a knot and tuck it into my shirt but it keeps blowing and I keep fooling with it and finally he takes off his hat and hands it to me. It’s an old-man hat that has come back into style, a button on top and a mesh back. I saw Brad Pitt wearing one in a picture; he was on a child’s bicycle, playing with his son in a lush green yard.

“Is my camera in the backseat?” he asks, as we pass another dilapidated barn. I try to breathe and look out the window at the wide flat yards and skinny pines, the houses set back from the road; three grubby children play on a stack of mattresses beside a mailbox. Other than the children, the country is eerily empty.

“Fuck it,” he says, turning around in someone’s driveway.

He drives up and down the main drag, my town laid out flat and ugly as a strip mall.