by Tanen Jones
I nod.
Leslie gets on her bike, wobbling a little from the weight of the bag, and turns onto the sidewalk. I watch her puffy silhouette disappear past the rows of storefronts with electric luminarias lining their roofs.
Like the person, the event is never static. You could say this one is about love, about Leslie rescuing me, and that would be true.
You could say she shouldn’t have rescued me at all. That it’s about the blood in the snow. And that would be true too.
41
Leslie
I stood over the sink. The dishes were soaking. I put my hands in, turning the skin pink, and then I went to the refrigerator and poured out the last of the wine with wet fingers. When I came back into the living room, Eli looked up at me. “Euh,” he said, and reached for my glass. I sat back on the couch and closed my eyes. Mary hadn’t answered my last three texts.
Where are you?
We’re having omelets for dinner
You said you would be home by now
I picked up my phone again.
Are you still on your walk?
I drank the rest of my wine as StoryBots ended, and then I picked Eli up and carried him to his room. In his crib, he chewed on his gummy key ring, looking up at me. I shut off the light and went into the bedroom and lay on the bed. After a minute, I heard Eli start to cry. I didn’t move. I imagined him dropping his key ring through the rungs of his crib, leaning over and crying when he couldn’t see it; he did it all the time.
Footsteps on the stairs. Eli’s door clicked open and shut, and his cries grew louder as he was carried down the stairs, then tapered off again. After what seemed like ages, the bedroom door opened and Dave came in alone, yawning. I didn’t turn my head, but I could feel him standing at the foot of the bed, watching me.
“What?” I said.
The mattress dipped as he climbed onto the bed. He knee-walked toward me and seized one of my feet. “Remember how you used to wear a toe ring?”
I was surprised into laughing and it turned out more like a cough. “It was trendy!”
“Not when you were doing it.” He stroked the toe in question, causing me to yank my leg into the air and shriek. “It was 2014. Everyone else was done with that by 2007 except, like, Renaissance-fair chicks.”
“That’s not true,” I said, although I suspected that it was. “I’m just sentimental. I like to hang on to my jewelry.”
He moved up to curl himself around me. “You had a little tan line on your toe,” he whispered into my ear. I laughed harder, and tears sprang to my eyes. “Whoa,” he said, brushing his thumb over my eyelashes. “You okay?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
“I won’t make fun of your toe ring anymore. I can see I’ve really hurt you.”
I pinched his earlobe and he smiled.
“You got Eli to sleep?” I asked after a minute.
“Mhmm,” Dave said, stretching. “What was all that stuff on his face? I thought he was a goblin when I looked in the crib.”
“Your mom painted him like a tiger,” I said. “Cadence sent a video. You didn’t see it?”
“Oh, that,” he said. “I didn’t open it. I was driving.”
I glanced at him, wishing I could press the shape of him into my memory exactly, so I could return to it when I couldn’t look at him anymore. His curly hair, slightly uneven teeth, the places on his skin the sun had textured. Sometimes I wanted to crawl inside him, touch him from the inside out. Sometimes I felt like that was what he did to me.
“Are we watching TV? We’re now two weeks behind on Naked and Afraid, just so you know.”
I shifted to get under the blanket with him. “I hate that show.”
Dave shook his head confidently. “You only think you hate it until you watch it, and then you’re telling me how you could survive in the wilderness because you read My Side of the Mountain and you know how to identify mushrooms.”
“I don’t want to watch TV.” I rolled over and rubbed my cheek against his shoulder. “I want to kiss you.”
Dave raised his eyebrows. “What kind of kiss?”
“A full-on high-school make-out session,” I said. “I want to put a hickey on your neck.”
He laughed. “Everyone at work will make fun of me for being fourteen.”
My heart seized. “Too bad.” I climbed into his lap and put my arms around his neck. “I’m your wife, and that’s what I want.”
He tilted his chin up, and I leaned down to press my lips to his. He tasted like rum, and something else, slightly tangy.
“We need to be doing this in a movie theater,” he mumbled against my mouth. “For realism. Go get your toe ring and chew some bubble gum.”
I wrinkled my nose. “What do you do with the gum? Do you pass it back and forth?”
Dave snorted. “What a goody-goody. You were studying while I was gaining all this knowledge. No, you stick it on your finger so you can chew it after you’re done.”
“That’s disgusting,” I breathed.
“It’s conserving resources.” He pulled me back in. We kissed until I forgot about the bubble gum and reached for him, stroking his face.
“I love you,” I said without meaning to.
Something about my expression must have been off. He tilted his head. “I love you too, baby,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
I opened my mouth and said nothing, as I always did, as I’d been doing for months and months. I took a deep breath. “Sorry. I’m just tired. Robin’s not home yet. I don’t know where she went.” I untangled myself from Dave and reached for my phone. Where are you? I texted again.
Sunset grille & bar makin lots of friendsss, she texted back instantly.
“Is that her?” Dave peered over my shoulder.
“She always does this,” I said. “I have to—I have to go get her. I’ll be back soon.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I pushed my hair off my face and got out of bed. “I’m fine. She just needs a ride. She’s all the way across town. Stay here with the monitor, okay?” She was going to fuck everything up.
“I could go get her if you want,” Dave offered. “You’re tired.”
“No,” I said. “You’ve been out all evening. You don’t need to go out again.”
He didn’t answer. I watched him reach for the remote.
* * *
—
I’d never been to Sunset before. It was on Lomas, near the Downs, with one of those plain white signs on the façade. $2.50 Michelob. There was an older bald man in a denim jacket standing beside the front door, thumbing through his phone. He gave me a once-over as I passed him.
The Sunset’s ceiling hung low over a collection of red vinyl seats and tabletops. The middle of the room had been cleared for dancing, but no one danced. A carpeted stage, full of amps and wires, with a screen and a mic for karaoke, overlooked the bar, and a woman with round-brush bangs presided, belting “Last Night I Didn’t Get to Sleep at All” to a group of friends leaning against the pool table. I scanned the room for Mary’s blond head and spotted her down by the L-shaped bar at the far end of the room, where several old men in ball caps shifted on their black barstools. She and a man with broad shoulders and a ponytail were bent over one of the nearby tabletops, holding hands.
I had to walk across the dance floor to reach them, and my heeled loafers made it sound like there were a dozen of me. The women by the pool table stared, but Mary didn’t seem to notice me.
“Okay, so see this joint, and how long it is? That means you’re really logical, and you need to be careful to listen to your emotions more.” She said this last part gravely. She was reading the man’s palm, I realized.
“Mary?”
They looked up. Mary was still holding his hand, and she squeezed it when she sa
w me. “Leslie! You got my text!”
“I sent you a dozen texts,” I said as calmly as I could. “You weren’t answering. You said you’d be back for dinner.”
“Oh, I ate,” she told me. “You don’t have to worry about me. Come sit with us! Amos, Leslie. Leslie, Amos. Amos, can you get my sister a drink too?”
Amos’s shoulder jerked, and then he grinned. “Nice to meet you, Leslie. What’ll it be?”
Mary jumped in. “She wants what I got. Two more.”
“I need my hand back for that,” Amos said.
Mary laughed and released him to the bar, then patted the vinyl seat beside her as the woman on the makeshift stage fitted the microphone back in its stand with a crackle of feedback.
I shook my head. “Let’s just go home.”
“Aw, you don’t want to go home.” Mary shook her head at me. “I can see it in your face. You want to stay here with me and have a gin and tonic on Amos. Rough day?”
The bar was briefly quiet while the next woman got up on the stage and adjusted the karaoke screen. I hesitated, then pulled out the chair with a scrape, and sat down. Mary gave a little hoot of approval. “What are you doing here? With…Amos?” I asked quietly, my gaze drifting toward the ponytail bending over the bar, trying to get the bartender’s attention.
“He paid me to read his palm,” Mary said. “I charge twenty bucks per. Guess how much I made today.” She grabbed my wrist and pushed my hand into her purse, sitting on the chair beside me. My fingers felt a crumpled nest of bills. I pulled my hand away.
“I—” The next song started, something I didn’t know, classic rock. Mary looked at me. She was red-cheeked, her light hair fluffy at the ends, lips chapped and free of lipstick. She smelled a little sour, like she’d been out in the rain. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I said, instead of telling her she shouldn’t read people’s palms at a bar, which had been my first instinct. It seemed like such an intimate thing to do for a stranger. But she had read my palm too, when we’d met. And I had been a stranger then. It wasn’t even what I had come here to be upset about.
“Do what?” Mary asked, sucking on the dregs of her old gin and tonic. Several soggy citrus slices sagged at the bottom of the drink. She dug one out and picked off a little string of lime flesh.
“The whole thing,” I said. “Dinner with Albert…I didn’t know it would take this long.”
Mary slipped the lime flesh into her mouth and licked her lips. “It was your idea.”
“I know. But not like this. I didn’t know where you were today.”
“So are you—”
Amos set two highball glasses in front of us. “That took forever.”
Mary grinned at him. “Amos, you owe me twenty dollars, please.”
“I thought the reading came free with the purchase of drinks,” he suggested.
She shook her head. “I figured that was just your generous nature, right?”
He stared at her, and then decided to laugh, digging a couple of tens out of his wallet. “I’m trying to keep listening to my emotions,” he told her. “Like you said.” He leaned across the table as Mary stuffed the bills into her purse and zipped it up.
“Oh, I’m so glad you heard me, Amos,” she told him, leaning back in her seat. “I could feel it when we were holding hands, that you were really listening to me. Now I need to talk to my sister. She’s having a personal moment. Could you give us some time?”
“We weren’t done,” Amos said. “You only did one of my hands.”
“They match, honey,” she said. “We’re bilaterally symmetric, like moths.”
“I want my drink back, then,” he said, and reached for the highball glass. Mary leaned over and spat in it.
“What are you—?”
Mary slid my glass over to her and spat in that one too.
“I’m leaving,” Amos said, and scraped his chair back, adjusted his ponytail, and flung himself toward the bar.
Mary pushed my gin and tonic back across the table and motioned for me to drink it. I stared at her. “I’m not sick,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
I left the glass where it was. “What was that for?”
She stuck the straw in her mouth. “I got you a drink. For free. He’s a drip, he won’t be back.” She chewed her straw and regarded me cautiously. “I did it all the time when I used to go out in Vegas.”
“Albuquerque isn’t Vegas.”
Mary seemed to relax. “I know. I’ve barely even thought about Sam or Paul since I came here.”
“You don’t think Sam would come after you, do you?” I asked, feeling myself soften. I remembered Mary’s face as she’d been crushed to his chest outside the restaurant.
“He misses this,” she said, unzipping her purse and pulling out a handful of cash, then letting it flutter back inside. A few men at the bar, including a red-faced Amos, watched her do it. Mary propped her chin on her palm. “Otherwise, there’s nobody in the world who would notice if I disappeared right now. Except you. You came all the way out to the bar to look for me. You could have just texted me ‘Get your ass back home, young lady.’ ”
“I was worried about you,” I said. “You never tell me where you’re going.”
Mary gave me a brilliant smile and downed the rest of her drink in one long effort. “Last week no one was worried about me. And last week no one knew you were deep in some shit you couldn’t talk about. So we’re both a little better off than we were, huh?”
“Don’t disappear,” I said. “Not until after the dinner.”
Mary reached for my gin and tonic. “Then don’t chicken out. Deal?”
I nodded.
She rested her slightly damp head on my shoulder and reached up to touch my earlobe. “What happened to those earrings you had on?”
I opened my mouth to reply but was drowned out by the bartender’s voice over the sound system saying, “Uh, ‘Careless Whisper’?”
“That’s me!” Mary announced, and bounced up from the table, jostling the remaining glasses with a clatter. “I’ll be right back.” I touched my ear uncomfortably.
She crossed the blond-wood dance floor, shuffling a little in her Adidas. When she got onstage, the knot of women by the pool table stopped their game to watch her adjust her polo dress and bend to tie her fluffy hair up into a topknot. “Okay, I’m ready,” she said into the mic, over the opening saxophone.
She caught on to the beat a little late, closing her eyes and swaying, forgetting to open them again until the second line had scrolled over the karaoke screen, throwing blue-and-white light across the planes of her face. The woman who’d been singing when I arrived shouted the first line to her, too late; Mary laughed and started in the middle, stumbling until she caught up with the verse. She had a decent voice, a little scratchy, higher than I would have predicted. But her face was the reason to watch her. I’d never seen her on a stage before, and even the weak light of the karaoke screen picked out her features in a way that seemed to spotlight her on purpose. She wanted my attention, leaned toward it; when the chorus hit she opened her eyes wide and pointed at me, motioning for me to sing along.
I thought: She reminds me of…, groping for an actress, and then recalled what she’d told me in the hotel room, how people always did that to her, comparing her to all the other beautiful people whose faces began to run together. I never reminded people of anybody but myself. I wondered if it was better to look like what you were. I felt glass-faced, transparent; it was only because nobody looked at me that no one had seen through me yet.
I didn’t sing along. I couldn’t. The rest of the room joined in, and Mary turned away from me, soaking it up, pink spreading across her cheekbones. She opened her arms as if to embrace them.
A door opened and closed behind me, barely audible over George Michael. I glanced over my shoulder an
d saw the man in the denim jacket from outside talking with an older man behind the bar who must have been the manager. Amos hovered at his elbow. We made brief eye contact.
As Mary hit the second chorus, the man in the denim jacket strode across the dance floor and onto the stage. “Hi there,” Mary said into the mic.
He ducked his head and tried to speak into her ear, but she shimmied away from him, pulling the mic from its stand. “Guilty feet have got no rhythm,” she sang to him playfully.
I clenched my jaw as his face darkened, reaching for my phone instinctively. But who did I think I was going to call? Amos approached the stage, brushing past me. Mary saw him coming and dragged the mic down the stage steps, darting behind one of the women at the pool table. She motioned for me to leave in the split second that Amos and the bouncer couldn’t see her. Her purse with the money in it was still sitting on the table in front of me, and I stumbled to my feet, trying to zip it closed.
“The way I danced with you!” Mary sang through laughter, coming to the end of the microphone’s cord and twisting past Amos.
“Turn off the music,” the manager was saying, loudly enough for me to hear. I slung both our purses over my shoulder and wove through the chairs and tables under his gaze.
“You don’t have to kick me out,” Mary said, her voice echoing over the backing vocals. “I wasn’t hurting anybody. Sheesh.”
I pushed the door open and stepped out into the night. Stubby cigarettes littered the asphalt around the entrance.
“I don’t even have it anymore,” I could hear Mary saying inside, still into the mic. “I could get you guys arrested.”
I waited, tucking Mary’s purse under my arm and checking the time on my phone.
After a few seconds, Mary appeared in the doorway, giggling. “I lied about your heart line,” she said to Amos before shutting the door behind her and stumbling over to me.
“You’re drunk,” I said.
“So are you.”
“No, I’m not. You spat in my drink.”