The Forgetting Time(62)

But these thoughts, like the magazine’s pages, were almost worn through from too much use. Which made her go back to the other thought. Which made her think again that she couldn’t do it anymore.

I can’t hold on to hope and I can’t hold on without it, either, she thought.

She pulled out of the parking lot. When she reached the intersection, instead of heading right toward home she took a left and found herself driving out toward Dayton. She drove for a while past the even green fields, unsure as yet as to where she was going, until she saw the sign for the new Staples out beyond the mall. It was shining its big neon smile at her, as if it had been waiting for her, as if she was one of the devout who had found her way back home.

She felt a dim thrill when no one looked at her twice as she walked in the door. They kept doing what they were doing, a whole lot of nothing as far as she could tell. A girl with horrible fraying braids was paging through a magazine. A white boy with a knit cap on his head (why did they wear that indoors? unless they were bald, which this boy wasn’t) was ringing something up. She heard his nervous scales of laughter echoing through the store. She wandered for a while down the long aisles filled with dangling supplies, each with its own clear sense of purpose, soaking in the chilled air. In aisle 10 she picked up a new gleaming staple gun and walked to the back where the copy center was, feeling its heft in her hand.

There was a line of people, clutching their papers. Selling cars, maybe, or looking for piano students. She stood on line, another person with the need to multiply her longing exponentially, holding in her other hand the flyer she kept in the glove compartment for this very reason. She waited her turn and then she handed her flyer to a boy in his early twenties, a boy with deep brown skin and a smooth, amiable, bored face.

Maybe Tommy will look like that someday, she thought. Maybe Tommy will get a job at Staples. He could do worse for himself. She was letting herself think it. She knew that. It was as if her conscious mind was still back in the parking lot of the Stop & Shop and she was letting this other part of herself take over again.

“Two hundred, please.”

He took the paper from her and didn’t look at it. Bless you, she thought. Bless you for not looking. The people in the stationery store in town had gotten used to her by now; the pity in their eyes was no longer fresh but had congealed over the years into something familiar, automatic, as if Denise were a stray mutt that wandered in every now and then for a crust of bread or a pat.

But Denise didn’t need a pat, or any rewarmed pity. She needed her two hundred copies.

“Would you like that in different colors, ma’am? Or on white paper?”

“The face will be legible in different colors?”

“Sure. We can do that.”

“Then maybe different colors, this time.”

“All right. Which colors would you like?”

“You choose.”

“I’ll do yellow and green and red. How’s that?”

“Great.”

She smiled at him. She stood behind the counter, feeling its hard, sharp edge with her fingers. The feel of the pill gliding through her system. The staple gun heavy in her other hand. Henry had gotten rid of the other one. Twenty-nine dollars it had cost her and he’d thrown it right in the trash.

You’ve got to stop with the flyers, he had said.

The words flowed through her mind as coolly as the frigid air, as if they were words she was overhearing, spoken between strangers.

What right do you have to show up here and tell me what to do?

Charlie told me. That’s what. Our son. He says you aren’t even there for dinner half the time.

The boy eats. Look at him. He’s not starving.

That’s not the point. You are wearing yourself down and Charlie, too. And me, too.

What do you care?

You have to stop. Please.

I can’t. What if—

Call the doctor then. Get some help.

What if it makes a difference, Henry? What if someone sees one of them and—

For god’s sakes, Denise—

The boy was back. “Actually, the red’s a little dark for a face. How about blue? The blue’s real light.”

“That’d be fine.”

She waited. She had only to wait, her hands fingering the sharp edge of the countertop, Tommy’s face multiplying in green and blue and yellow. She let her mind linger on each of the faces as they poured out of the machine, thinking, maybe this one. Maybe this will be the one that makes all the difference.





Twenty-Three

Charlie Crawford rode his bike home slowly from Harrison Johnson’s house, his head percolating with riffs, his whole body pulsating with the thrill of victory and the first-class weed Harrison always had on hand from his brother’s friend who worked at the pizza place.

Ba DA DA ba DA DA DA DA. The way he’d extended that last beat, rolling it and then holding it so it had resonated around the garage, he’d known right away: he hadn’t fucked it up. He could see it in the way Harrison and Carson really stopped and listened for fucking once, in the grudging nods they aimed in his direction as he headed out the door at the end of rehearsal. He knew they’d been wanting to ditch him for that Mike kid at the community college, they never thought he was good enough, he’d always been the kid with a drum kit who lived nearby and could kinda sorta hold a beat. But today: he’d shown them but good. He’d killed that fucker, left it lying DEAD in the road.