You Love Me(You #3)(50)
“I fucked him,” she says. “I fucked Phil.”
“In high school. I know.”
“No, Joe. I’m talking about a few weeks ago, when MK was outta town. Go back to my condo. I dare you. I am so behind on laundry so you can take my panties to a lab. They’ll find Phil’s DNA, I promise you.”
Another story, no doubt. I want your panties not her panties and I take her phone out of my pocket and she laughs. “Oh come on,” she says. “I’m a teacher. I don’t sext with him. It’s an affair. You just have to trust me…” She rubs her calf, as if she’s pretending her hand belongs to a man, to your fucking rat. “Remember when Jennifer Jason Leigh mounted Bridget Fonda’s boyfriend in Single White Female? It’s kinda like that. We are talking a ton of blow jobs.”
She drinks directly from her jug.
“Melanda, this doesn’t matter.”
“Wrong,” she says. “This changes everything. Now you know my dirty secret. You can let me go because I don’t want Mary Kay to find out about me and Phil. And you don’t want her to find out about you and me.”
I don’t want there to be a me and Melanda—why can’t your friends be normal?—and she crosses her legs. “You don’t believe me.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“So, it started after my thirtieth birthday, not the best time in my life, as you might imagine… MK wanted to throw me a surprise party, but you know how it is…” What the hell would I know about surprise parties and would you recognize your strawberries if you saw them on the sidewalk? “I told her no, but she insisted. So I got all dressed up, figured we’d be at the pub, maybe somewhere in Lynwood…” Oh, Melanda, learn how to tell a story and oh, Mary Kay, I am sorry about your fruit. “But then MK picks me up. She drives us to her house…”
Is she making this up as she goes along? “Can you just get to the point?”
She twirls her hair. “Go on my Facebook. Look at the pictures. It wasn’t a party for me, Joe. It was a fuck-you to me. All families. All kids and babies and it’s not like I don’t like kids and babies, but come on. I’m thirty years old and I don’t even have a boyfriend and Phil was supposed to bring this guy from his band who seemed decent and he’s not there and I’m literally the only person at my birthday party who doesn’t have a husband or a kid.”
I dig up the pictures on her fucking Facebook and I see you. I see all the children, but like most pictures, these don’t tell the whole story. Melanda curls up like a college kid in an emotional circle jerk. She says she got drunk and passed out on your sofa before the party ended.
“I woke up… I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know what year it was. You know that kind of drunk?” No. “That dirty thirty kind of drunk…” She’s Bridget Jones now, she’s fucking British. “Anywho, Phil comes downstairs.” She gulps, in a way that makes her story seem legitimate. “He whipped it out. I could have told him to bugger off. But I was just so mad at MK. I wanted to suck his cock, Joe…” Bridget didn’t talk like that. Too crass. “And I wanted to do that because of what she did to me with that pretend party. So I did it.” She arches her back, a mix of pride and shame and joy and you deserve better, Mary Kay. “And that’s that. Our ten-year anniversary is coming up and I do not want to be here to ‘celebrate’ it. I also don’t want to be forced to come back here for some stupid court hearing about all this… so this is where we are.”
“You expect me to believe that Mary Kay has no idea about you and Phil…”
“I’m a very good liar, Joe. You of all people should know that.”
I shove her phone in my pocket. “This has nothing to do with our situation.”
“Are you kidding? Don’t you get it? I want out. I hate the person I’ve become. I hate that I slowly, unconsciously settled for this man just because he calls me Ruby and I hate that I became someone who got off on pulling one over on my best friend. I hate my condo. I hate my job. I hate my noisy fridge and I hate the guilt and I hate that I’m actually happy I missed Christmas because it meant that I didn’t have to sit in their house like some overgrown orphan and go home and gorge on Hostess Cupcakes while I sit on my couch just hating myself. I swear to you, you are in the clear because I want to be in the clear. I want out.”
I see your strawberries on the sidewalk. I see the rain washing them away.
“Okay,” she says. “You don’t believe me. You need details…” No, Mary Kay. No. “So, a few years ago he got this day job… I mean the man does not belong at a desk…” She says that like it’s a good thing. “I would sneak out of school at lunch and park a block away and go into his office and… you know. He said he couldn’t live without me and it’s terrible, but it was so exciting, sneaking around, sucking him off, and going back to teach all the kids about Zora Neale Hurston.” She’s waving her arms as if this weight has finally been lifted and it all feels real but she might be faking it. She has been studying some of the world’s most phenomenal actresses and you’re a fox. You would know if your best friend and your husband were boning. Foxes see things. “I don’t know, Melanda…”