The Better Liar(6)

    I was sixteen and so beautiful that taking my body into the world was like ferrying around a stolen luxury car: just the having of it implied action. You should do something with that, I was told again and again. It was like my body was something separate from me; even the thirties-ish men who hit on my body seemed to resent the person inside it, the way you might disapprove of an eleven-year-old driving a Beemer. You don’t deserve this, their faces said, even as their mouths said, Baby, come here…

But this is what was actually special about me: I knew that I did deserve it. And that night, dragging my bedroom window closed behind me, leaving damp handprints on the glass like goodbye waves, I took my body out.

In the house, Leslie went on sleeping. I left her there, swaddled in the bed we used to share, thinking I was burying her. She’d take care of Daddy until he died, then find a husband and take care of him until he died, and then maybe if she was lucky somebody else would help her piss until she kicked the bucket at last. Poor Leslie, I thought as I ran through the backyard that night, through the pools of the neighbors’ porch lights, toward my ordinary death.





5


    Mary


I went back to my car and sat in the shadows of the parking lot’s single tree. If I craned my rearview mirror to the left a little, I could see her. Leslie. She was sitting in her car, just letting it idle. Twisting one of her earrings in her ear.

Why was she just sitting there?

I took out my phone and texted Paul.


I have something to tell you…xx.



I tipped my phone back and forth, watching the glitter in the case drift from side to side, like the tide going in and out. Then I tried to find something good on the radio while I waited for Paul to reply. I went past a dozen commercials and Christian sermons before I finally hit on a man’s voice announcing P. P. Arnold singing “Angel of the Morning,” which is just about as good a song as a person can make. I knew the whole thing, including the part where she pauses right before she says It was what I wanted now—that’s the best part.

All the glitter in my phone case had descended to the bottom. I glanced in my rearview mirror. The Honda was gone.

Ordinarily before my shifts I went to the Park 2000 shopping center off Sunset and Eastern to sit with Shea, who was forty-four years old and a busboy at Letourneau’s because his parents made him get a job for tax reasons. I hung out with him because he shared his weed with me for free in exchange for being able to look at my face up close for a period of thirty minutes. Sometimes he just took a photo of me and looked at that on his phone even though I was still right there in his car with him. I never wanted to ask why. We usually got real high and watched the planes take off at McCarran from across the street. You could see the wheels retracting from where we parked. Shea called us ornithologists.

    Today, though, I really had to see Paul. I picked up my phone, causing a small tsunami in the case, and texted him again.


where are you xxx. I have news :)



He hadn’t replied to my last seven texts either. I thumbed up the screen until I could see his last message to me.


See you tonight sweetheart



Maybe he was at home. He worked from home sometimes, although he spent more of his time at one of those freelancer offices, where people who didn’t know one another could rent desks in a big sunny warehouse and make small talk at the coffee machine, just like at a real cubicle farm. One time I’d asked Paul how come he didn’t want to work in the gorgeous three-bedroom in the Lakes that he was renting at a discount from his brother, and he said it was too comfortable, so I laughed, and then he was mad that I laughed.

I fixed the rearview mirror and checked my makeup in it, using my fingernail to scrape off the eyeliner that had gathered in the corners. Then I started the car, slouching a little so that the jetstream from the air conditioner hit me right in the face, making my teeth cold as I mouthed along to P. P. Arnold. “Just call me angel…of the morning, baby…” I whispered to myself as I turned onto the beltway.

The Lakes is this landscaped community on the west side of the Valley with its own zip code. The whole thing is built around a huge man-made pond that someone dyed turquoise, and all the houses are supposed to look like they’re in Florida. Most of them have their own little docks and boats that are named things like the Desert Rose or the Camel. Paul’s brother Bobby bought the house as a wedding present for him. Since the divorce, Paul’s ex lived in Denver with the kids, and Paul paid Bobby five hundred bucks a month to not sell the house out from under him.

    Paul’s big-ass Honda was in the driveway. Next to it was one of those Tesla cars. Either he was trying to make up for the one by buying the other, or he’d befriended a Democrat. There was nowhere for me to pull in, so I parked across the street. Before I could even reach for my seatbelt, the front door opened and Paul stepped out. He was pink and dripping, dressed in his running clothes, with big sweat patches spreading underneath his arms. He had his baseball cap on backward, like guys in movies from the ’90s, except it wasn’t the ’90s anymore so it sort of made him look old. I still liked his bright blue eyes.

He leaned back into the house and I saw his mouth move. Then a woman came hurrying down the stairs after him, adjusting the headphones around her neck. She was super fit, with visible biceps, and her hair was in two French braids, starting to frizz at her hairline. A redhead, like me. He kissed her briefly on the lips—fast, instinctive—like he could find her lips in the dark—like he already had.