“How is that possible? How can they just make you leave in one day?”
“Well, the house is owned by the company—they could relocate us whenever they want. But they haven’t just given us a day to move. We’ve known.”
“We.” I tried not to get stuck on the word. “How long have you known?”
“A little over two weeks.”
I couldn’t stay standing any longer. The palm itch was forgotten and it was now my knees that were causing me trouble—shaking, wobbling. The air up where I was standing seemed too thick, it was impossible to swallow. Jim—why was she saying his name now? I turned away from her and sat on her front steps. A little over two weeks—while we kissed, was she already miles away? The sides of the pizza box were dented by my grip.
I felt Jenny sit next to me on the steps, her hand hovering over my back. I was grateful when she didn’t retreat, but laid her palm flat against the curve of my spine. “You can’t leave,” I said.
“I don’t really have a choice here.” Only one layer of fabric between her hand and my back. “Jim can’t say no to this offer. It’s a big opportunity for him.”
That name, that damn name—Jim—its sound, short and hard, bitter on my tongue, sliding down my throat like a spiked eel. “What about you? What about Adam?”
She shrugged. “Jim says we’ll like Bakersfield. And I bet Adam will be happy to leave. Maybe he’ll find a better baseball team there.”
I moved her hand from my back and cradled it on top of the pizza box. Dad used to read the lines of my palms and tell me stories about the things the different ones said about my future: “Wowee, that big line there means big money! You going to share any with your old man? I’d love a flat-screen!” I wondered which line on her palm had to do with me.
“But what about you?” I asked. “Do you want to go?”
“Well.” She didn’t say anything for a while. I looked away from her hand to her face and felt exactly the same as when I first saw her—an ache without a central point, equally spread in every blood-flowing part of me—I still wanted to run away with her to anywhere with sun and ocean.
“Sometimes,” she said, “grown-ups have to do things they don’t want to do. Unfortunately, I am a grown-up. I’m turning thirty-nine in December, you know?”
I’d had a feeling that she had a winter birthday. “You don’t look thirty-nine.”
She smiled. “Liar.”
She was right. I was lying. I’d figured she was in her mid-forties. I smiled back. “Okay, I was lying.”
As she laughed, she reached up to grab the end of her hair, but missed, not used to the new shorter length. She absently groped around her left breast before she realized, moved her hand up, and twirled a tiny piece around her index finger. “You can’t leave,” I said again.
She ripped a corner off the pizza box and asked me for a pen. I handed her an Eddie’s pen and she started writing something on the cardboard. “This is my new address,” she said. “Write me a letter, send me a picture of that baby of yours once it’s born.”
She helped me up. “Thanks for the pizza. Adam will be really happy to eat it one last time before we leave. Who knows if there will be a pizza girl in Bakersfield as lovely as you.”
* * *
—
TOO MUCH MONEY shoved into my hands. I wanted to say something for her to remember me by, something for her to think about on the drive up to Bakersfield, as she unpacked her boxes in her new home, in her new bed later that night, back throbbing from bending and carrying, eyes fluttering shut with exhaustion, I wanted my words to wrap around her and protect her. All I could think of to say was “If you need help moving, my Festiva holds more than it looks like it could.”
She laughed. “I think the movers can do the job just fine.”
Before I could say anything else, even think to kiss her one last time, she closed the door, said softly, “Take care, Pizza Girl.”
* * *
—
I COULDN’T FINISH MY SHIFT. The only thing that seemed possible for me to do was to go home and stand in the shower until my skin felt raw and pink and clean or the hot water ran out. I called Eddie’s from a pay phone across the street, watched Darryl pick up.
“Are you sick?” Darryl asked. “Is it the baby?”
“I just can’t. If Peter gives you shit, tell him I’ll clean the bathrooms every day for the next month.”
For the first time in I didn’t know how long, I drove without the radio on. I also realized I was crying, because my vision went blurry, only clearing after I blinked rapidly a few times, saltiness dripping into my mouth. The Festiva made so much noise that I’d never heard before, over the music.
I parked crooked in the driveway. I didn’t have the energy to fix it. Jenny was moving to Bakersfield and I just wanted to scour every inch of my body, the roughness of a loofah making me forget what it’d felt like when she put her hand against my back, how I wished for all five of her fingertips to become permanent islands on the fabric of my shirt.
Each stair to the bathroom was agony. The first step, I remembered going to the grocery store that first time and being stunned by the amount of pickle brands, not knowing which one Adam would prefer. The second step, I was inside Jenny’s house, staring at her seven shitty paintings. The third, she handed me the painting of the turtle with a dented head and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Fourth step, I tasted chicken and peanut butter, saw my reflection as I threw up into that blue, blue toilet water, could feel Billy’s and Mom’s warm breath on the back of my neck. Fifth step, Rita and Louie Booker, so madly in love. Sixth, my hands on the steering wheel, Dad’s hands. Seventh, Adam throwing that baseball against the wall over and over and over. Eighth, Dr. Oldman and the ultrasound, his mountain-range daughters. Ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, Jenny in her doorway, her ponytail still intact. When I reached the second-floor landing, I thought I might pass out.
I breathed deep and focused on just getting to my room, willed myself not to remember anything else. I pushed open the bedroom door and inside was Billy, standing in front of the mirror, both his hands wrapped around a gun.
11
BILLY AND I sat next to each other on the end of our bed, the gun and complete silence between us. I wanted to get up and turn on my stereo, but I worried that any sort of movement would break this fragile space we were existing in—the remaining time before we’d have to look at each other and acknowledge that there were things that we really had to talk about.
We’d stared at each other for a long moment, completely frozen. Me in the doorway, unable to cross the threshold, and Billy in front of the mirror with his back to me, my eyes on his reflection’s, the gun witness to it all. He opened his mouth and I turned around and ran to the bathroom.
I didn’t need to throw up, although I tried and dry-heaved into the toilet. Billy came in then and I thought he was going to help me, hold my hair back or kiss up and down my spine, and I was ready to push him off, maybe even hit him, but he just closed the door behind him and lay on the floor beside me. I heaved a few more times before I lay next to him and discovered that he had good instincts—the bathroom tile was cold and felt good on my exposed skin.
I was about to strip naked so every inch of me could feel the cool tile. Before I could, he asked me how I was feeling, how the baby was doing, could he get anything for us, maybe a glass of water, and I was mad all over again. I sat up and said, “Billy, what the fuck is going on?”
He looked at me like I’d slapped him. I staggered back to bed without turning back to him, pressed a pillow over my face. Images of pushing Billy into the soft sheets and whispering apologies into his ears and mouth for how I’d been acting, how I couldn’t seem to say anything anymore that didn’t come out like glass, a bottle being thrown against pavement, all its pieces jagged and uneven and scattering
like roaches fleeing light.
After a while, I heard him get up and follow me. He brought a coffee mug of water with him and I took it wordlessly, drank it all in one clean gulp.
* * *
—
BILLY NEVER KNEW when the worries would start.
Sometimes he’d make it a few hours, he said, maybe into early evening. Other times they would hit him before he even left the house, as he was making breakfast, or stepping out of the shower. A particularly crushing set of worry hit him once as he was squeezing toothpaste, and he became so overwhelmed he put the brush down untouched. When he came home after work and saw the brush still sitting there, the toothpaste dull and crusty, the crushing feeling intensified. It was never a question of if the worries would hit, but when.
There were no limitations to the worries. Billy’s brain, the thing that had done him so right in high school, was now working overtime to dissect every thought that flitted through his head, until he could barely take a step without having a minor panic attack.
Of course, every worry eventually circled back to the baby and me. Example: He’d be mowing lawns and sweating and he’d start worrying about global warming, which would lead him to thoughts about the melting of Arctic Ocean ice and the death of polar bears—my face starting to peek into the forefront of his thoughts, my growing bump. He would try and switch his thoughts to something more pleasant, like Popsicles, but then Popsicles would make him think again of sweating, of global warming—what if it eventually became so hot that every drop of water sprayed out of every sprinkler just evaporated and then, lawn by lawn, entire cities started drying out until there was no grass, just patches of dirt, and no job for Billy to do, no way for him to earn money, and if he didn’t have any money, he couldn’t buy Popsicles, and what type of childhood could someone have if they didn’t know the taste of cold, artificial cherry, orange, grape? One of his favorite books he read as a kid featured a baby polar bear, and even if he was able to afford that book, how could he tell his son that all the polar bears in the world were dead?
Billy was at work one morning when he got stuck on a string of particularly toxic thoughts. He felt so on the verge of a breakdown that he found Semi at the water cooler—Semi, whom he considered to be a guiding hand, a big brother—and told him all of his Popsicle, polar-bear worries.
Semi pulled out a joint and offered it to him. Billy said he didn’t smoke, and then Semi suggested that, well, if he didn’t smoke, why not take one of Semi’s extra guns? It sounded like what Billy was really worried about was his ability to provide for his kid and baby mama. Whenever Semi was a little stressed about money, he and his cousins would rob a convenience store or find some yuppie at an ATM to scare the shit out of. After work, Semi took Billy to his car and wrapped a handgun in a T-shirt, slipped it into Billy’s backpack before he could say anything else.
The first few days, Billy couldn’t even look at the gun. He kept it in his backpack and put it in the corner of his closet, bought a different backpack to take to work. He got through the days the same way he’d gotten through all the days before them—minute by minute, trying to keep his mind on the task ahead of him, sweating. Then, on the sixth day after being given the gun, he was home alone and lying in bed and thinking about pens, how approximately one hundred people a year died from chewing on their pen caps and choking. He began cataloguing everyday items that could pose a danger to his son, all the shit he’d have to throw away in our room before the due date. The sheets beneath him grew wet and he started wondering if it was possible to sweat to death. He vaguely remembered reading about a medieval sickness called the “sweating sickness,” which killed people within twenty-four hours—what would happen to me and the baby if he was dead? Billy jumped out of bed and ran to the closet, zipped open his backpack, desperate, willing to try anything to get his brain to stop.
He didn’t have to hold the gun long to know that he would never be able to rob anyone. No matter how desperate he got, it made him nauseous to imagine pointing the gun at another person, much less pull the trigger. An image that made him even more ill—his son visiting him in jail, pressing his hand against plexiglass.
But that day, Billy found something else that was helpful.
Holding the gun made him feel calm. The gun was sleek and black and heavier than he thought it would be, felt so solid in his hand. He stopped entertaining the idea that he would do anything with it and started just holding it and staring at himself in the mirror. The person looking back at him in the mirror was someone he trusted, a person that stood tall and didn’t spend his waking hours in his mind, a man of action, a man that never started sentences with “Could I” or “Would I,” because he knew in his heart that, yes, he could, and, yes, he would. This man was someone that didn’t cry in the shower every morning or feel the need to pinch the inside of his thighs or dig his nails into his palms because he was so scared that he would never be able to make the love of his life and his unborn child happy.
* * *
—
WE WERE LYING down on the bed. When Billy started talking, he’d been facing me. I don’t know who did it first or at what point, but by the time Billy stopped talking, we were both on our backs, side by side, not touching, eyes glued to the ceiling. It helped not to have to look at each other.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
“Why are you home from work now? Your shift isn’t over until 8:00 p.m.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Billy sat up. I tried to avoid eye contact with him, but he wouldn’t let me, hovered over me. “It has everything to do with everything—you never talk to me anymore, so how could I possibly feel comfortable talking about anything with you? What chance would I have of actually getting through to you?”
“What do you mean, you never have a chance to talk to me? We see each other all the time.” I patted the bed. “We live together.”
“Yeah, exactly. And that’s about it.” He was off the bed now, pacing, scratching the side of his neck, like he always did when he was nervous. “We see each other all the time, but we never talk. The little we do is about nothing; I mention the baby, our baby, and you turn to stone.” Billy stopped pacing and looked away from me to a point above my head, a blank wall—my room had no decorations. “I’m so lonely.”
He said it so softly, so genuinely, and for a moment, I remembered him on that first day we hung out—how rapidly he ate scoop after scoop of ice cream, the crumbs of the cone falling into his lap, the napkins he ripped in halves, quarters, flakes of paper snow, how everything he said made me want to rip my heart into halves, quarters, throw the tiny pieces on top of his napkins.
He looked back at me and then I was the one that wanted to look away. “Sometimes I’ll stand in front of that mirror talking to myself. I’ll tell myself stories about my day, or stories from my past, my future, things I dream about, that I can only see when I close my eyes. When I get tired of talking about myself, I’ll pick up something to read out loud. Books, newspaper articles, receipts, ingredients on the backs of snack foods—did you know on Goldfish bags in addition to all the chemicals and shit, it says ‘Made with smiles’?” Billy himself smiled for a second at that, but then seemed to remember who he was talking to. “Basically, I say everything that I should be saying to you.”
It was impossible not to hear the anger in that last statement and impossible to ignore that that anger was because of me. Did he ever talk to his reflection about me? Was his voice this angry whenever he mentioned my name? I remembered that the other day I was sitting at the kitchen table and he asked me, “Do you want your eggs scrambled or sunny side up?” and I said, “Yeah, sure.” I used all the hot water in the mornings, and he never said anything about the cold showers he would take after mine. I ignored so many of his phone calls, our text conversations were filled with long, lovely messages from him a
nd short, choppy replies from me, if I even bothered to reply. He got me roses a few weeks back just because, roses that I never put in a vase, just let sit in their wrapping on the windowsill slowly wilting until they were brown and their petals had fallen in a dead heap on the floor. I never saw him clean them up. I just woke up one day and they were gone.
I couldn’t stand looking at him anymore. I rolled off the bed and sank down to the ground, on top of a pile of dirty clothes.
A few seconds later, Billy was in front of me, on his hands and knees. He grabbed my face between his hands. “Are we okay? I just want us to be okay.”
I stared at Billy, the person I loved, the father of my baby. “We’re not okay.”
His hands slipped from my face, drifted down to the tops of my knees. “What does that mean?”
“Just that—we’re not okay.”
“You said that already. Can you say more?”
“I don’t know what else to say. We’re just not okay.”
Billy’s grip on my knees tightened. “Please stop fucking saying that.”
“Let go of me.”
He quickly stood up. “Okay, if we’re not okay, you’re the reason why.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck me? No, fuck you!” It looked like Billy was going to hit me, rage distorting his face as he brought both his fists up above his head. I closed my eyes and waited for them to come down against me. Nothing came. I opened my eyes and saw Billy back on the floor, crying into his fists.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you so much and I’m so mad at you and I can’t even tell you how mad I am at you. The other day I woke up and went into our bathroom and there was water all over the floor, you’d left the sink running all night. I went back into the room ready to fight about it, wanting to fight about it, but when I opened the door you were just sitting up in bed, looking out the window. I stood in the doorway for a full five minutes, and you didn’t even turn your head.” He looked up at me, tears dripping off his cheeks, and I wished he had hit me. “What do you do in the shed in the backyard every night?”
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