Always Happy Hour: Stories(5)

Like Melinda, Ben is also a poet, but he doesn’t write about fruit or trees. He writes about McRibs and factories and Walmart. He writes about me. There’s a poem about the time I threw his I Ching at Crescent City, another about the afternoon we met at a Waffle House in Memphis and how he knew by the texture of my skin I’d slept with someone else. And then there’s the one where I’m in my panties reading Don DeLillo while he makes lasagna. He gives me ways of seeing myself differently, provides me with images I wouldn’t otherwise have. I wouldn’t remember reading Don DeLillo in my panties, wouldn’t remember any of the things he has deemed important. It’s like I get to have my own memories and his too.

I rest a hand on his knee, my fingers searching out the hole in his jeans so I can feel his skin. A guy in a wheelchair rolls through the door. He looks at me and I look away because one time he told me I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen and I was embarrassed for both of us because I’m not that pretty, because he was only able to approach me in that way because I’d never be with him.

We order shots of whiskey and another round of beers, but when karaoke starts I ask him to take me home.

Ben pulls up to my house and we sit there for a minute with his car running. The basketball that’s been rolling around in his trunk is finally still. As we kiss, I wonder what it would be like to want to fuck someone so badly you’d do it even though it goes against everything you truly desire.

I climb the stairs and find Melinda at the dining room table with a glass of red wine and a full plate: half a chicken, vegetables, and spinach in a separate bowl. She never allows herself more than one glass of wine and only with a meal.

“You’re like a European,” I say. “What time is it?”

“I don’t know—nine? Ten? Where’d you go?” she asks, but I don’t want to tell her. She would never go to Shenanigan’s, would never be friends with Ben, and can’t understand why I would. Anytime I date anyone at all, for even a minute, she tells me I’m too good for him.


In the morning, I listen to Melinda bang around: opening cabinets and slamming them, pots clanking. I can’t believe how loud she is, how little regard she has for me. It is seven-thirty and already painfully bright outside. I need curtains but this seems completely beyond the realm of possibility—where would I get them and would they be long enough? I’d probably have to have them made. I watch the occasional big-winged bird fly by and think about what I have to do today. I don’t have class until six. I have a few stories to read but that shouldn’t take me longer than thirty or forty minutes. Despite my teaching schedule and three classes a semester, there is so much time.

I call my ex-husband. He picks up on the third ring. He always makes me wonder if he’s going to pick up but he always does.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“On my way to work,” he says, taking a sip of something. And then he says, “Guess who died?”

“What?”

“Guess who died?”

“Mrs. White.”

“Mrs. White already died.”

“Oh yeah.” She was old, ninety-seven or ninety-eight, our next-door neighbor. “Who then?”

“Jonah,” he says.

“Jonah?”

“Jonah,” he repeats. “One night he drank too much and didn’t wake up.” He sounds excited about it.

“Wait, what are you talking about?”

“He drank too much one night and didn’t wake up.”

Jonah was our closest friend, though I haven’t seen or spoken to him since I left Meridian. I’ve hardly even thought of him because I’ve done my best to put everyone and everything in that town behind me. It hasn’t been difficult. Once you leave a place like that, so long as it isn’t your hometown, you know you won’t ever have to see any of those people again.

“Jonah’s dead?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s really messed up that you would tell me like this. Why didn’t you call me? And why would you say it like that—guess who died?”

He explains that Jonah had been going downhill for the past year. He’d stopped coming over to the house; he hadn’t even seen him in months.

“When?”

“Three or four weeks ago.”

“Well this is all very upsetting.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and then he doesn’t say anything else so I hang up. I won’t contact him again—there is no news he could give me that might make me glad I called. Jonah. Jesus. There was a time when I thought I might have been in love with him, though I was just unhappy and had wanted someone to do something about it and he’d been the likeliest candidate. I can see him in our kitchen with one of his girlfriends, an older divorced lady who didn’t want to hang out with us so we’d been seeing him less frequently. They’d come from the tennis court, were wearing their tennis whites. I try to picture him at the Mexican restaurant we frequented or sitting next to me in a lawn chair while my ex grilled hamburgers, but I can’t remember him with any specificity at any time or in any place other than this one. It makes me wonder how my closest friends will remember me when I’m gone—what completely insignificant moment will they recall?

He used to burn CDs for me, music he thought I’d like interspersed with the songs he’d written. I don’t know where they are; there were so many and I had thought so little of them.