Mercy Street(44)

“My car payment is due tomorrow. Not eventually.”

“Fuck your car payment,” he said, filled with righteous indignation. “This is child support. Food and clothes and whatever.”

“I already bought his food and clothes. That’s why I can’t make my car payment. Do you get that?” Tess spoke very slowly, as though he were hard of hearing. “We need a better system. Or any system. We could set up direct deposit like Paige and Bill.” Paige, her best friend, had ditched her husband last year. To Tess she was like a patron saint of divorce.

“Direct deposit? Are you crazy?” To set up direct deposit, Timmy would have to open a bank account. He might as well send a handwritten note to the feds: I made this money selling drugs.

“I can send you a money order,” he said.

“Do money orders still exist?”

“How the fuck do I know? Tess, what do you want from me?”

Marriage, he’d learned, was a negotiation. In the beginning, Tess’s goodwill could be purchased with sex, money, or weed. By the time his son was born, two of those currencies had ceased to matter. Tess had quit smoking dope, and screwing was by then a distant memory, but they continued to fight about money. Ten years divorced, they still did.

“I want you to act like a father,” she said. “Did he tell you he got suspended?”

“That little shit,” said Timmy. “What did he do?”

She’d answer the question eventually. First he’d have to sit through an angry monologue on the inconvenience of her life, his global failure as a father, the monumental difficulty of raising a kid alone. He waited for her to finish. Then he said, “If you can’t handle him, send him up here.”

“You always say that.” Tess sounded disgusted. “You say it because you know I’ll never do it. No way in hell would I let you raise my son.”

At one time he would’ve flown off the handle. Your son? You got knocked up all by yourself? Hard years of marriage had taught him there was no fucking point.

“There are laws about this,” said Tess. “I can have your wages garnished.”

“What wages?” Timmy said.

When she hung up there was simply nothing. Timmy missed the old days, when they argued on a landline, the crude satisfaction of a dial tone when one of them slammed down the phone.

REMEMBER THE ROOFTOP? A SUMMER PARTY IN ST. PETE. THEY smoked a joint and danced a little—something Timmy never did, but somehow Tess compelled him. She danced with him. It was his first glimpse of her willfulness, the sheer force of her personality, though at the time he didn’t see it. That night she seemed sweet and dazed and dreamy, a barefoot hippie girl in a long cotton skirt. She shaved her legs but not her armpits, which shocked him at first but later seemed kind of hot.

Remember Tess’s apartment? Pillows everywhere, perfumed candles, the curtains drawn. It reminded him of the bottle where I Dream of Jeannie lived, the old TV show in constant reruns throughout his childhood. Jeannie’s bottle had one room—round, of course, with a pink upholstered couch shaped like a Lifesaver. You wanted to stick your dick in that bottle.

He’d known her just a month when she got pregnant. Remember Tess pregnant? When she slept in his arms he was holding his entire family, his future, the rest of his life. He wouldn’t have believed that a girl with a huge belly could be sexy. But it was different, everything was different, when it belonged to you.

Getting married was his idea. That they barely knew each other didn’t seem important. Marriage would fix that. It had worked for his parents (or maybe it hadn’t). Anyway, it seemed like the right thing to do.

His son was born in July, a seething Florida summer. Timmy was present for the birth, a moist and surprisingly violent spectacle that would have traumatized him if he hadn’t been stoned out of his mind. Afterward he stepped out to meet a customer. When he got back to the hospital, the birth certificate was already filled in with the name Tess had chosen, Dakota Blue.

You’re fuckin kidding me, Timmy said.

Dakota was bad enough. Dakota was some faggot on a soap opera. Dakota Blue was worse, a stripper or a hooker. A transvestite hooker. That’s what she’d named his son.

Dakota Blue Flynn, he said aloud, but what he heard was bluefin. And from that day on, he called his kid the Tuna.

Those first months were like a dream to him, the exhilaration and the exhaustion feeding each other so that weed was superfluous. Without smoking anything, he woke up stoned. He watched the Tuna while Tess went rollerblading to regain her figure, which took no time at all. You look great, he told her, but secretly he missed the big tits and belly, the sexy fat chick carrying his son.

The crazy part, the completely inexplicable part? All these years later, he still missed her. Not the shrieking bitch who blew up his phone every month, but Tess as she once was, the dazed, horny hippie girl. Remember how her hair smelled? Smoky sweet, like sandalwood incense. It gave him an instant hard-on. No other woman had ever affected him that way.

TIMMY SMOKED A BOWL TO FORTIFY HIMSELF. THEN HE MUTED the TV and called his son’s cell phone.

“Tuna, my man. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” he said in his new deep voice.

There was an unusual silence. Normally their calls had a soundtrack, an unending loop of electronic noises.

“Pretty quiet there. No Xbox?”