Always Happy Hour: Stories(57)

We were hungry so we ventured out to find something to eat. We weren’t the kind of travelers who researched things beforehand, and neither were we the kind to engage strangers in conversation about where we might go. We walked past hotels that looked a lot more fun than ours, young people laughing on patios, music playing. Shelly always picked the nicest but beigest places, where all the old white people stayed. She liked to be the most attractive person wherever she went and coordinated her life to make this happen as frequently as possible. She didn’t seem to understand that she would be the most attractive person wherever she went. She didn’t need to surround herself with geriatrics.

After some back and forth that grew increasingly unpleasant, she walked into a restaurant and I followed. We were already annoyed with each other and the vacation had just begun. When it was over I would be exhausted and fragile. My tan had turned out well, though, the best fake tan I’d ever had.

While we ate, we settled on a neutral topic that seemed to put us both at ease—her son—it was always hard for me to believe she had a child and had raised him nearly into adulthood. He would be going away to college next year and she was already devastated. He had a girlfriend named Sarah that he was sleeping with. He played baseball. I’d seen a movie where the men come and go so frequently in a mother’s life that a boy throws the ball to one man and it’s returned by another, but I couldn’t remember the name of it. Over and over, the men changed: a clean-cut guy in a suit turned into a plumber and then a hippie and then a college professor. I imagined this was what her son’s life had been like, at least when he was younger. She’d been dating Derek for a number of years now but wouldn’t marry him; he had asked on several occasions and she’d said no, offering him feminist reasons that neither of them believed. To me she said she didn’t think she was “in love” with him anymore, that she wasn’t sure she ever had been. She said when her son was gone, perhaps she’d get rid of all of it: the man, the house, the city, and start over. We had this in common, too. I just had less to disassemble.

. . .


When I got in bed I was a little drunk. I piled the pillows around me and thought about how comfortable it was, how soft the sheets. Then I called my boyfriend to tell him I was having a terrible time.

“That’s why I never go anywhere,” he said. “People say they like to travel but then they get somewhere and just want to go home.”

“Not everyone,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “you do, every time.”

“It’s hard to fully appreciate home unless you leave it.”

“Not me,” he said. “I know what I have here.” I imagined him looking around his living room. He was on the couch with a bowl of popcorn, an action movie paused mid-fight scene. Maybe he’d have an ice cream cone before settling into his king-size Tempur-Pedic. He was by far the dullest man I’d ever been with. “I’m happy here,” he said, “I don’t have to go anywhere else to be happy.”

I told him that was nice and said good night, goodbye. We didn’t say I love you and I wondered if we ever would; every day we didn’t say it seemed like one more reason we should never say it. We’d been dating close to a year. I liked him most when we kissed, but only the closed-mouth kind when we pressed our lips together hard.

I turned on the TV and searched for something that might be interesting enough to hold my attention, but not so interesting that it would keep me awake. Something I had seen before. I fell asleep watching Back to the Future Part II and woke up with it still on, remembering my dream. There was a man and his wife and another lady, all of them middle-aged and dowdy. They were in the lady’s house, getting ready for church. The man and his wife said cruel things to each other while the lady put on her makeup and then filled a to-go cup with coffee. The lady said that maybe she and the wife could spend the day together after church? Leave the man on his own? And the man agreed. He said his wife had never had a friend in her whole life. And that was it, the entire thing. It was so on-point that it wasn’t like a dream at all.


I woke up at eight o’clock and went back to sleep. The later I slept, the shorter the day would be. I awoke again at nine-thirty and read a few paragraphs in the book with the bird lady before running a bath.

I was dressed and ready to go at eleven when Shelly finally emerged from her room and suggested we walk to Starbucks. Like Target and Costco, Shelly also loved Starbucks. She got angry when people talked badly about any of these companies’ market shares or poor business practices because how far did it go? Should we only buy from places that sold products that were made fairly and responsibly? That paid their workers decent wages and were environmentally friendly? Because, if so, there’d be nowhere to shop and then what? She was a smart person but she had difficulty with degrees.

We walked around with our coffees, peering into store windows. I was slightly hungover and one coffee wouldn’t be nearly enough. She wouldn’t drink all of hers but I couldn’t have it.

“What do you feel like doing?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure yet.” I didn’t know anything about Miami. I’d just gotten on a plane with a suitcase full of bikinis and flimsy dresses and less than thirty dollars in cash.

“Maybe we could go to the zoo,” she said. “I bet there’s a good one here.”