Always Happy Hour: Stories(50)
The patio at the Hog is mostly empty. We talk about a young lawyer-type in a suit, how pretentious it is to be wealthy and employed. Richie buys expensive shirts and then turns them inside out or cuts the labels off so he can pretend he doesn’t care about money. When the waitress comes over, we order two-for-one screwdrivers and two dozen raw oysters.
“How’d the game go?” I ask. I light one of his cigarettes and look at the guy in the suit. He really does look like a dick. His sunglasses probably cost three hundred dollars.
“We lost.”
“I thought y’all didn’t keep score.”
“There was a giant on the other team. There’s no way that kid was five—I should have asked to see his birth certificate.” The boy got discouraged and went and sat with his mother and when Richie tried to make him go back in, he cried and she took him to Pizza Hut.
Before, Richie says, the boy was handling it better than any of them, but now he wets the bed and cries about things four-year-olds shouldn’t cry about. I don’t know what’s normal for a four-year-old to cry about.
“Do you think it has anything to do with me?”
“No,” he says. “I think it has to do with him losing his home and his family and his friends.”
To stop myself from touching him, I light another cigarette; hold onto my drink.
Richie calls the principal at the school for fucked-up kids but she’s never available and she won’t call him back. I don’t know if he goes and gets fingerprinted. I don’t think he does because he doesn’t say anything about it and his fingertips look normal.
We meet for coffee before I have to teach composition to eighteen-year-olds, eighteen-year-olds who text during class and correct my grammar, who are nothing like I imagine I was at eighteen. Two weeks ago, Richie left a shiny red apple on my stoop to commemorate my first day, under an index card that said Para Tu. It’s still on my desk, but eventually I’ll have to throw the apple away and all I’ll have is a card that says For You.
I usually get there before he does but I get stopped by a train so he calls and asks what I want and I tell him an iced coffee with soy and vanilla and then I get stuck behind a truck carrying chickens. I can see him from where I’m stopped at a light, at one of the little outside tables with his coffee, his book, and his cigarette. He’s probably reading something I gave him, Jesus’ Son or The Dead Fish Museum. I think about how I never call and ask what he wants but I should because he orders his coffee hot and has to wait a long time for it to cool.
I check my face in the mirror and then walk over to him and he explains that my coffee has vanilla soy milk and vanilla syrup and it may be too vanilla-y. He got me a large. I can’t drink a large, but I like that he got me one. I open my eighteenth-century literature textbook to The Country Wife and close it again, my finger holding the place. I hate all the rhymed couplets, and I hate that whenever I point out the misogyny, the professor asks if it’s a rhetorical device—was the author really a misogynist, or was he an egalitarian trying to call attention to misogyny?
“What do you have to do today?” I ask.
“Clean the pool, go to Home Depot,” he says.
“What are you going to get at Home Depot?”
“I’m going to fix that toilet.”
I think about the classes I’m taking and the ones I’m teaching, how far behind I’m getting even though school has just begun. I check the time on my phone and then go inside to use the bathroom. The pregnant girl is working. I dated her roommate, briefly, several months ago, but she wasn’t pregnant then. I pretend I don’t know her because I screwed her roommate over, because the whole thing is something I don’t want to think about and now she works at the coffee shop closest to my house.
On Saturday, Richie picks me up, the boy in the backseat. I have a beach bag with three things in it: a magazine, a baseball cap, and a spray bottle of sunscreen. I didn’t pack much because I know he will have packed whatever I might need. I’m wearing the wrong kind of shoes for the river and little black shorts over a black bikini. I’m nervous. As much as I like the boy, I can’t get used to how things change when he’s around: I shouldn’t say shit or fuck or kiss my boyfriend; I’m supposed to pretend like he is the most important thing because he’s a child.
“When are we gonna be there?” the boy asks. We aren’t even on 49 yet.
“Soon,” Richie says.
The boy bops me on the head with a foam sword and then slides it between my seat and the window, in and out.
“Leave Alice alone,” Richie says. I don’t want to be left alone. Don’t leave me alone. I change CDs to exert some authority and look out the window at the old men on the side of the highway with their truck beds full of watermelons and tomatoes. I always think about stopping but I never have any cash. I hope these men will always be there, with their umbrellas, their overalls and homemade signs, and that one day I’ll stop and buy a bag of sweet potatoes or tomatoes and say something about the weather, maybe, and the man will put his hands on his hips and look at the sky.
We pass the field of FEMA trailers leftover from Katrina: row upon row of uninhabitable boxes that the government is paying someone to store.
“Are we there now?” the boy asks.
“Two more minutes,” Richie says, and the boy pokes me with the sword again and I grab it and turn around and smile, but my stomach is starting to hurt and all I can think about is whether I’ll have to use the bathroom when we’re on the river and how I’ll manage it.