by Ilana Masad
Trying to distract herself from the tightening anxiety, she takes another sip of the thick lassi and opens Instagram to find a bunch of likes and comments her phone didn’t show her for some reason. She still isn’t ready to start going through everyone’s expressions of sympathy, so she just scrolls through the feed until she sees a picture of Lucia in a demure but lovely deep blue dress standing in front of one of her carved decorative bowls.
Fuck, Maggie remembers—tonight is the gallery opening of the group show Lucia was invited to join a few months ago. Her smile in the photo looks fake, and Maggie bets she’s feeling awkward and very nervous, because she knows Lucia hates needing to schmooze with people at these things. So Maggie swallows her pride—her nerves, really, if she’s being honest—and sends Lucia yet another text. Break a leg bb, ur doin great! :)
She feels awful for having forgotten all about it. Now she wonders if this is why Lucia hasn’t answered her—has Maggie been too self-involved? But her mother has died—surely, surely if there’s ever a time to forget . . . Plus, she hasn’t been consulting her planner, which she thinks must be in her duffel in the motel.
The thing about Maggie’s planner is that she considers it her version of a daily journal. She doesn’t record her feelings about events, but she makes sure that everything that’s happened in any given day appears on that day’s page. So if in the morning she only had plans to go to the gym and see Lucia, but by evening she’s also gone grocery shopping and grabbed an early drink with a work colleague, she adds those extra activities in. It serves as a memory trigger, she’s found; she doesn’t need to write down how miserable her dentist appointment on July 3, 2015, was—just looking at the way she wrote the word “DENTIST” in all caps with a manic smiley face next to it is enough to remind her how bummed out she was that she had to have a surprise root canal.
She has planners like this dating back to her twenty-first birthday, when Iris got her the first one. Maggie had been bitterly disappointed in the gift, feeling as if her mother didn’t know her at all. Later, when she began using it during school and fell in love with it, she told her father how useful it had ended up being, and he told her mother, and then Iris had called to confess that it had been Peter’s idea all along, that he’d convinced Iris that Maggie would love a planner, and look, he’d been right! Maggie was almost more disappointed in this revelation than she’d been in the gift. For a while, she’d felt a secret bond with her mother, believing temporarily in that power of parents to provide for their kids in ways the children don’t even know they need. Peter had always provided for her that way, so it wasn’t a welcome surprise to know that he’d figured her out; it was a given.
She hasn’t checked her current planner since the day of the funeral, she’s almost certain. Which means she hasn’t updated it, which means she’s also losing everything she’s doing.
Maybe, she thinks as she sees a text from a new number pop up, it’s not so bad to let certain bits of her life remain only in memory. Maggie can only assume that the Hi now you have my # :) is from Nelly.
U were right the Indian place is AMAZEBALLS, she texts back. She gets a blushing emoji smile back. Oh dear, she thinks. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
* * *
• • •
MAGGIE AVOIDS THE reception when she goes back to the motel and showers in steaming water that hurts her more than it soothes any of the driving stiffness in her back and legs. But the punishing hard water feels good anyway. She’s immensely tired now that she’s eaten and showered and, with a pessimism that she half hopes will prove correct, she puts on boxer shorts and a T-shirt and begins flipping between the extremely limited channel selection. Nelly might not get in touch again. Maggie may not need to put her outside clothes back on anyway. Might as well relax for now.
She falls asleep in front of a dubbed-into-Spanish episode of an old Law & Order, but when her phone buzzes by her head, it wakes her. The TV is showing an infomercial in English now, with an elderly, white and white-haired lady dripping in tasteful jewelry showing how simply wonderful and relaxing the mosaic kit she’s working on is. GOOD FOR ARTHRITIS flashes in yellow on the screen.
Come out, the text reads. Maggie jerks her head to the window looking out over the parking lot, relieved that she remembered to pull the curtain closed earlier. She dresses quickly in her usual going out at night uniform—black skinny jeans, a white tank top, a dark blue plaid shirt thrown over it. She finds her pomade in her bag and works the now dry curls into some order. She needs to reshave the sides soon or she’ll get that weird triangle shape to her head again.
She steps out and locks the door behind her, because the motel is old enough that it uses actual keys rather than key cards, and at first she doesn’t see anyone waiting for her. But as her eyes adjust, she sees that Nelly is also wearing black and sitting on the bed of a black truck that sits in shadow. Her smile gleams when she waves. “Come on!” she yells to Maggie. A man leans out the passenger side window of the truck and watches Maggie jog over.
“Climb up,” Nelly says when Maggie reaches her, and puts her hand out. Maggie takes it, the bodily contact heating her underarms even though the hand itself is cool, and jumps up into the truck bed. Nelly crawls toward the back window of the cab and smacks it twice. The woman in the driver seat raises her middle finger but starts the car. A thumping bass begins playing inside.
“So where are we going?” Maggie asks. She likes to think that she’s a go-with-the-flow kind of person. Or rather, she likes other people to think that. But she’s never entirely certain at the beginning of a mysterious night out what it’s going to end up like, and there’s always a certain temptation to run back home and into bed and safety. She thinks of Lucia. She should have tried calling her rather than texting again. Shouldn’t she? But no, Lucia could have contacted her today—she hasn’t. So when Nelly, whose hair is now held up fetchingly in a butterfly clip, leans in to be heard over the sound of the wind and rush of the road, Maggie decides not to think about Lucia right now.
“You said you needed a good time,” Nelly says. “So that’s where we’re going!”
Maggie isn’t sure what she means, but minutes later, when they arrive at a smallish-looking whitewashed building with a vast dirt parking lot behind it, she understands. A modest neon sign above the door to the building reads GOOD TIME BAR.
“Very literal,” she says, raising an eyebrow. Nelly laughs and looks away. Oh dear, Maggie thinks again.
Inside, it’s much like any dive. Two pool tables take up the majority of the floor space with small two-person tables squeezed in along the sides of the room. The bar itself is only big enough for three stools, all occupied by men, two stout and white and middle-aged, wearing trucker hats, and one younger dude whose sharp elbows rest on the bar as he holds court with a few others standing around him.
“Keep going, all the way to the back,” Nelly instructs her with a poke to the shoulder. Maggie walks on and sees the second room opens up to a yard scattered with wooden picnic tables and rickety metal tables and chairs, a few beach umbrellas poking up from white bases. “What do you want?” Nelly asks.
“Oh, I can get it—” Maggie starts to get up from the picnic table Nelly steered her to, but Nelly waves her off and says she’s a guest, and anyway she can get the next drink. “Okay,” Maggie concedes. “Um, gin and tonic?”
When Nelly gets back, the driver and the guy in the front seat are with her. “Cheyanne, Rob.” Nelly points in introduction.
“Maggie,” Maggie says. They all shake hands, and then the three friends fall right into a conversation she supposes they were having earlier, something she can’t follow about a couple who’s getting divorced because the dude is a creep who doesn’t want his wife going to college. She sips her G & T. It’s very strong, which she appreciates, though she feels self-conscious now because the other three are drinking bottled IPAs; she gets the feeling this is
the kind of bar where folks drink beer late into the night and only then get trashed on the harder stuff. She’ll switch to beer after this, she decides.
“So what the fuck are you doing in town?” Rob asks when the gossip being discussed has been concluded to everyone’s satisfaction. Maggie has noticed that he uses the word “fuck” at least once a sentence, so isn’t insulted by the way the question sounds.
“I’m looking for someone,” she says.
“Mysterious much?” Cheyanne looks unimpressed. She pulls out papers and a pouch of tobacco and begins rolling herself a cigarette.
“No, just, it’s a long, boring story, you know? Also, here, let me contribute,” she adds, and pulls out her baggie of weed, tossing it over. “If you want.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll tell you if you’re boring,” Cheyanne says. She doesn’t thank Maggie but begins industriously pulling apart the stems and leaves and crushing them between her fingers, keeping her other hand over the operation to shield it from any stray breeze.
“Oh-kay. Um.” Maggie tries to shake off the unsettled feeling. Maybe she shouldn’t have tried to distract herself this way. Maybe she should see if there’s an Uber or Lyft she can get back to the motel. She begins explaining how her mother died a few days ago—Cheyanne says, “Fuck, omigod, sorry” and Nelly puts her hand on Maggie’s arm for a moment, but Maggie doesn’t stop because she doesn’t know what to do with these reactions that she supposes she’s going to start getting from everyone. She barrels on, telling them about the letters, though she doesn’t mention that she’s already delivered one, and says she’s trying to find Harold Lake Brooks. “Actually, none of you would know him, would you?”
Cheyanne shakes her head and takes a long slug of beer. Rob shrugs and says he doesn’t know any Harold. Nelly says, “No, but does he live here? In East Blythe?”
“I don’t know, actually. The letter is to a PO box a few miles away, in Palo Verde.”
“Oh, dude,” Rob says, “That’s like small-town-city down there.” Cheyanne snorts, and Nelly looks like she’s trying to hide a giggle. “You know what I mean! It’s like, seventy people or something in that zip, they have to go to the fucking post office to get their mail.”
“Weird,” Maggie says. But it confirms what she was hoping—surely, someone will know the man she’s looking for when she goes back tomorrow.
“Not that weird,” Nelly says. “It’s the same where I grew up, we had to go to the USPS in Winterhaven.”
Maggie feels ignorant, like a city slicker who doesn’t know to bring bug spray when camping. “I’ve always lived in pretty big places, I guess,” she says. “Though they always felt small to me.”
“Doesn’t anywhere you grow up feel small?” Cheyanne asks, and the profundity of the question is undermined by Rob shrieking and slapping at something small and winged that landed on his forehead.
“Okay,” Maggie says when they’ve all finished laughing. “Next round’s on me. What does everyone want?” She gets up, and Nelly accompanies her back inside. It’s louder and thick with cigarette smoke, something Maggie can’t remember ever seeing in a bar in her lifetime. Outside, sure, even in gardens that say they’re no smoking, she’s seen people lighting up when it’s late enough and everyone’s a bit too soused to care. But smoking inside is something she’s seen only in movies and heard about from older dykes reminiscing in the lesbian bar back in St. Louis.
“Harv, come on, don’t be a dick, Ha-a-arv!” Nelly is trying to get the bartender, who appears to be studiously ignoring her, to pay attention.
“Everything okay?” Maggie asks.
“Yeah, it’s just Harv being a DICK,” Nelly yells the word at Harv, whose eyes betray that he’s heard her before he flicks them back to the customer he’s handing a beer to. “I broke up with his brother a week ago, and though Dylan is totally over it and already fucked Jamie, Harv is somehow still saying I broke Dylan’s heart.”
“Oh wow. Small town, huh?”
“Small campus, small town, small everything,” Nelly says, and rolls her eyes.
“Including Dylan’s dick?” Maggie asks.
Nelly lets out a loud cackle. “No, but really,” she says, “the community college is small, the CNA program is small—oh, certified nursing assistant,” she clarifies when Maggie shakes her head in confusion. “And yeah, there just aren’t that many places to go out and chill, so everyone knows everyone and there’s all this drama. My mom doesn’t like it, but I don’t know. I think it’s fun, sometimes.”
“I get that,” Maggie says.
“But if I get into the CNA-to-RN program I’m applying for,” Nelly goes on, her fingers tapping out a quick rhythm on the bar, words sounding almost rote, like an anxious refrain, “and pass everything and get my registered nursing license, I might move back to Fort Yuma, try to work at the clinic, help take care of my people. It’s not easy there, but at least it’s family, you know?”
“Yeah, totally,” Maggie says, though she has no idea—she can’t imagine moving home in that way, and she doesn’t know what kind of hardship Nelly is referring to, beyond the general impressions she has from things she’s read over the years. But she’s never been on a Native American reservation. She was never invited by anyone, and though Anthony and Kyle always talked about going to Santa Ynez for one of the intertribal powwows hoping to score some ayahuasca, this made Maggie feel itchy with discomfort, even in high school. She didn’t want to be a tourist in someone’s home, not when that home was taken, reclaimed, and often still threatened. It wasn’t like going to Paris or something. Lucia had mentioned a local arts festival at a reservation in Missouri a couple of weeks ago, and when Maggie voiced her concerns, Lucia had smiled sadly at her and said that yes, she thought about this too, but that an event like this fostered community, for one, and also the revenue from food sales, raffle tickets, and the table space the artists rented would be going to the people who lived and worked there. But it’s the kind of moral tightrope Maggie never knows what to do with.
“What can I get you?” the bartender says, finally turning to Maggie, still ignoring Nelly.
Maggie smiles. She can almost feel Nelly’s vibrating annoyance next to her. She hasn’t picked up on someone else’s signals in a while, and it feels good. Lucia reads her, but she can’t read Lucia, at least not yet. She thinks she could read Nelly, though. She orders beers for everyone and gets the four sweating bottles pounded on the bar.
Back outside, Cheyanne waits until Maggie sets the beers down and gives her the joint she’s finally rolled to her satisfaction. “Your shit, you do the honors,” she says, solemn. Maggie smiles, now glad she’s come out, and relieved that despite how unstable she’s been feeling the last few days, she still knows how to do this, how to socialize with new people and make fair-weather friends. It’s what she’s always been best at, fitting herself into other people’s groups, never becoming the center, retaining the freedom to drift away and back. She lights the joint and inhales once, deeply, before passing it on to Nelly.
There is a strange thing that Maggie discovered with smoking weed when she was in college. By then, she was comfortable enough with the drug that it didn’t excite her the way it did when she first started, when it had felt all delinquent and naughty. In fact, she’d gone to the other extreme, pretending a world-weary exhaustion—fuck, she’d been young!—as if she was so over it and just smoked it like a regular cigarette. But she’d noticed in college that smoking with someone you were flirting with turned into an almost erotic experience, especially that moment when you pass it and the other person, if interested in you, makes a point at brushing your hand and looking you in the eyes as they take their toke.
Which is exactly what Nelly is doing, as Cheyanne and Rob look at her, impatient. But Nelly takes her time, drawing the smoke into her lungs and holding it in and keeping her fingers and hand cupped around the joint. As she be
gins to let the smoke out, she shows off, doing a couple rings before her face changes to surprise or chagrin and she succumbs to a cough. Cheyanne and Rob crack up, and Maggie smiles. The urge to ask Nelly how old she is rises in her, but she tamps it down. She’ll ask if it comes to it—right now, it would just be an awkward buzzkill.
* * *
• • •
WHEN THE BARTENDER, Harv, comes out to tell the folks in the back that it’s last call, Maggie is good and wasted. She’s another joint in and has had three more beers. Her stomach feels full in a familiar, yeasty way. She and Nelly trail behind Rob and Cheyanne to the truck. “Aren’t they drunk?” she asks Nelly.
“Chey is,” Nelly says. She hiccups, then giggles. “Me too. But Rob stopped after the second beer, like two hours ago. And he didn’t smoke at all!” She grabs Maggie’s arm and fake whispers, “He’s such a good guy. Don’t you think he’s a good guy and that Cheychey should give him a chance?”
Cheyanne turns and scuffs her heeled boot in the dirt, inexpertly flinging sand at Nelly. “Fuck off!” she says, but she’s laughing. When Rob steps on the running board, he turns back to Maggie and Nelly, puts two fingers to his mouth, and flutters his tongue in between. Nelly runs into his chest and hits him all over with her small fists until he pushes her off with a triumphant jeer, and slams the door in her face.
Maggie helps Nelly up into the bed of the truck, and her muscles tense as the younger woman snuggles up into her as they pull out of the lot. The lights are spaced far apart on the road, and they keep passing through patches of dark. “It’s so quiet out here,” Maggie says.
“Yeah, there’s never any traffic this late,” Nelly says, sleepy, her breath hot on Maggie’s neck. Sizzles run up and down her flesh. The fear and anxiety of attraction, the possibility of maybe touching this person next to her, the proximity—it’s all bringing her groin alive, and she can feel the tug low in her stomach that she associates with desire. But she can’t make the first move. She always makes the first move, and besides, she isn’t in a position to make any moves at all. She won’t, she decides. Though she isn’t sure what she’ll do if Nelly kisses her.