by K. H. Leigh
Jamie produces some bungee ties from the truck, and we strap the towering load of trash bags and junk furniture in the trailer down as best we can to make the first trip to the dump.
“You two go,” Val says. “I’ll stay here and keep working.” She lights another Newport and sucks it in with her eyes closed while we climb into the cab and pull away. Jamie drives.
We’re not in the car ten seconds before she asks, “So how bad is it?”
“How bad is what?”
“You and Ben.”
“I told you, it’s good.”
“Yeah. You told me. Three times. You said ‘good’ three times in the first two seconds after I asked you.”
“Because things are triple good.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
I know I am. But I don’t want to get into it. I glance over my shoulder to make sure our load is still secure. Jamie’s GPS helpfully suggests she turn right in 200 feet. “You still working at that ad agency?”
“It was never an ad agency, it was in-house marketing for an architecture firm. And yes, I’m still there. But I don’t want to talk about work.”
“What do you want to talk about then?”
“Mom.”
“Jesus fuck, Jamie. Why?”
“Because it beats talking about Dad. And I don’t see how much longer we can avoid talking about either of them, considering the only reason we’re even seeing each other is because we’re cleaning out his house.”
I groan. “What, so we’ve gotta stretch out on the couch and air our grievances? They’re both dead. Fine. It’s over. It’s not like either one of them have been a part of our lives for a long time.”
“Oh, that’s healthy.”
“Well, what exactly is it you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. Anything.” We hit a red light and she looks over at me. “You never say anything. Even when we were kids. You just talk and talk and don’t say anything.”
“Okay, so what is it you want to say? You want to talk about Mom, you say something.”
The light turns green. She hits the gas a little too hard, and the big diesel engine snorts. “Sometimes I think I’m turning into her.”
“You’re not.”
“How would you know? You barely know me.”
She’s right, of course, but I lie to her anyway. “I know you well enough to know you’re not Mom.”
“Greg’s fucking around.”
“I thought you weren’t with him anymore.”
“We’ve been off and on for four years, and he’s been fucking around for all of it.”
“So stay off this time.”
“I know.” Her voice has gone flat. “I should, but I won’t. Because I’m just like Mom.”
“You’re not like Mom.”
“It’s easier to have somebody there, even a shitbag like Greg, then to be alone. She could never figure out how to be alone. I envy people who know how to be alone. Who just say fuck it, you know? This is me. I am me. I am not a piece of anybody else’s anything. If I meet somebody that gets me, awesome. If I don’t, fuck it. Who cares? I always used to look at Mom and wish she could be like that, and now I look at me and I wish I could be like that. But really, part of me just looks at people who are like that and I just think, what the fuck is wrong with you?”
“You’re so full of shit.”
“I know.” She glances over, a twisted grin pulling at one corner of her mouth. “Now it’s your turn. You say something.”
“You think that rambling turn of nonsense you just did counts as saying something?”
“I think it’s your turn.”
I think for a minute. I can feel the thing I want to say banging against that cage inside. It wants out. “I don’t think you’re like Mom because you think you’re like Mom.”
“What does that mean?”
“I mean, Mom never actually thought about herself.”
Jamie turns and looks straight at me for longer than I’d like her to, considering she’s behind the wheel. “She killed herself when she had four kids, Mitchell. If you ask me that’s pretty selfish.”
“That’s not what I mean. I just mean, I don’t think she ever sat down and considered what she was doing with her life. She was never the introspective sort.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because if she had been, she would have changed it. She wouldn’t have stayed in a life that made her miserable.”
“God, you’re a fucking idiot.” Jamie shakes her head. “Have you ever, I don’t know, been a real person? Talked to one? People don’t change their life when they realize how shitty it is. They just bitch about it.”
“I changed mine,” I say.
“Did you really? Or did you just change the zip code?”
I don’t have a response to that. I turn up the radio and she takes the hint. We don’t talk for a while. The GPS tells us to turn left. Without it we probably would have gone right past the small wooden sign for the Madison Prairie Landfill. I wonder if they did that on purpose.
We pay the fee and I guide Jamie while she backs up the trailer. Unloading occupies us enough that we don’t feel the need to talk, but before long we’re back in the truck and headed back for the house. We just listen to the radio.
When we pull up there’s a red sports car parked on the curb. Not a new one. Not a nice one. I don’t know much about cars, but it looks kind of 80s, like the kind of car somebody would desperately hold onto in the hopes that one day it will be considered a classic.
There’s a huge pile of trash bags waiting beside the driveway. Jamie starts loading them into the trailer right away, but I go inside first.
The front room is empty, except for a couple of boxes. “Val?”
“In the kitchen.”
I start to walk back and Gwen appears from the hallway. “Hey, Mitch.”
“Well, look who finally showed up.”
“Go fuck yourself. Hug me.”
She looks exactly the same as she did all those years ago, those six months when she came and lived with me after she graduated high school because she had the same delusions every other kid in a flyover state has about California. She’s even dressed the same, like fashion had reached its apex in the mid-90s. Or maybe it just gave up and died.
As long as it’s been since I’ve seen her, hugging her is easy and familiar. I can’t deny Gwen was always my favorite. Just a year younger than Jamie and me, and about as different from me as you can get, but maybe that’s why she always felt more like my other half than my twin did. She could always make me laugh. Why the hell aren’t I better at keeping in touch? Seeing her now I realize how much I’ve actually missed the little turd.
“You smell awful,” she says into my shoulder.
“That would be the cat shit.” I point around the room. “Nice of you to join us after the hard part’s done. At least you helped finish up the living room.”
“We just got here a second ago. Didn’t do a fucking thing. This was all Val.”
“We?”
“I brought reinforcements.”
We go into the kitchen, where a tall guy with a stained t-shirt is twisting the refrigerator away from the wall, swiveling it back and forth, grunting.
“Mitch, Ethan. Yadda yadda.”
“Nice to meet you,” he grins with teeth the color of nicotine. I can hear bottles clinking around inside the fridge as he wiggles it across the floor.
“Might be easier to do that if we empty it first.”
“Trust us,” Val’s voice drifts up from the cupboards behind the counter, where she’s squatting and pulling out pans. “You don’t want to open that door. It’s toxic in there.”
“We decided it was better to just write the whole fucking thing off and tip it all in the dump.” Gwen pushes her hair back from her forehead and watches Ethan wrestle with the fridge.
“Well, let me go see if we have a handtruck or something.” I head back through the livi
ng room where Jamie is looking through one of the boxes on the floor. “Gwen’s here.”
“Mitchell, did you see these?” She holds up one of the file folders I’d pulled out of the desk.
“I set them aside because they looked important, but I didn’t really look at them. Why, what are they?”
“His release papers.”
“He kept them?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh. Is that weird?”
“I don’t know. Kind of. But maybe not. I don’t know.” She puts the file folder back in the box. “I mean, look around. He wasn’t exactly the type to throw anything out. Should one of us keep these? Or give them to somebody?”
“Who?”
“Hell if I know. I’m just always paranoid about throwing out official documents.”
“Put the box aside, we can deal with it later. Is there a dolly in the truck?”
“Yeah, should be.”
Even with the dolly it takes us a while to get the fridge out to the trailer. Between it and the bags Val filled while we were gone, it’s time for another trip to the dump already. “Will they let us just toss a whole fridge?” Gwen asks. “Isn’t there some Punky Brewster law or something?”
“Punky Brewster law?”
“Yeah, you know. There was some episode where a kid got trapped in a fridge. I think they made it illegal to dump them after that.”
“Because of a kid’s TV show?”
“You’re so stupid, baby.” Ethan rolls his eyes at her.
Gwen just bats her lashes at him. “But you love how stupid I am, don’t you, baby?”
I sort of don’t like the way he’s looking at her, but I really don’t like the way she’s looking back.
Val offers to go with Jamie this time. She’s hardly said a word since we got back and I think she wants to get away from Gwen for a while. They never did get along.
With the promise of pizza upon their return, Jamie and Val pull out of the driveway. “Wanna beer?” Ethan asks, popping the trunk of his bizarre little red car and pulling out an old Coleman cooler. It’s not even eleven-thirty, but what the hell. I’ve been working hard. We all take one and sit on the curb, watching the nothing go by.
Gwen starts babbling. She tells me about their apartment, and how it’s not too far away. She tells me about their dog. She tells me about their friends. It’s always their, never her. She’s in the middle of telling me about their landlord when Ethan interrupts her.
“You’re the homo brother, right?”
“I’m the only brother.”
“Yeah, but you’re a homo?”
“Yeah.”
He laughs wheezily. “Don’t worry, man. I ain’t gonna hate crime you or anything. I’m just curious.”
“Baby, stop it.”
“Don’t tell me to stop it. I ain’t doing nothing. We’re just talking. See, when you shut up for a minute, sometimes other people like to talk.” She sneers at him, but he leans around her to see me better. “You ever know anyone that talks as much as her?”
I shrug. “I live in L.A. Everyone I know talks as much as her.”
He likes that. He laughs again and points at me. A genuine fucking laugh-and-point, like they do after they catch the bad guy in every cheesy buddy cop flick I’ve ever seen. Never had a real life laugh-and-point, though. I don’t think anybody has. I might be the world’s first.
We finish our beers and head inside. Living room and kitchen done, we move down the hallway. The first door I open is the bathroom. We all stand there, staring into the abyss for a minute, then Gwen and I look at each other.
“Leave it for Val?”
“Leave it for Val.”
I shut the door and we move on to a bedroom. It takes me a few minutes to recognize it as my own. Or at least, the room where I slept weekends between the ages of nine and fifteen. I honestly can’t remember what it looked like back then. Is that the same bed? Is it in the same place? I think it was against that other wall. Yeah, because the other side of that wall is the girls’ room and we used to tap to each other in the dark.
“So you got a boyfriend?” Ethan asks.
“What?” I’m struggling with assembling a box and the question doesn’t register.
“You got a boyfriend? Or a partner, or a husband, or whatever?”
Oh god. He’s one of those people, isn’t he? “Yeah. His name’s Ben.”
“And what is he, then? Your boyfriend?”
“Yeah.”
“We need some music in here.” Gwen pulls out her phone and starts scrolling through. A few seconds later a song rings out over the tiny speaker, and I know it from the opening chord.
“Jackson Five? Really?”
“You bet your ass, Jackson Fucking Five.” She starts dancing around, lip syncing with baby Michael’s wails as the intro plays on.
I roll my eyes at her and start dropping books into the box. Some of them were mine. I examine a few Louis L’amour paperbacks with my name printed neatly on the inside covers. I couldn’t tell you the plots, but I remember how it felt reading them.
Gwen’s still dancing, and Ethan is sat on the bed, watching her bounce around. “Ben,” he says. “That short for Benjamin?”
“Bennett, actually.” Why the fuck does he care?
“Mitch, dance with me.”
“Gwen, clean up with me.”
“Mitch.”
“Gwen.”
She grabs my hands and pulls me toward her, pulling my arms back and forth in time. “God, when did you get so boring?”
“I’ve always been boring.”
She lifts my arm and twirls beneath it. I wonder if she’s high. She’s not letting go of my hands anytime soon, so I finally relent and bounce around with her for a bit. Ethan leans back on his elbow and whistles as I twist her around in a pretzel, ducking under and around our own arms and only getting mildly tangled up in the process. Gwen sings along with Michael, and I take up Jermaine.
I want another flash of memory. I want to remember doing this with her as kids. But I don’t think we ever did.
The song ends and she squeezes me around the waist before picking up her phone again to look for another.
“This was my room, you know. I moved in here after you left,” she says.
“Really? So this is your shit I’m cleaning up while you’re goofing around?”
“Yup.”
I throw a Judy Blume at her and it hits her in the shoulder. She glances down at it, then squints up at me. “I honestly can’t say if that’s yours or mine.”
I throw another. She laughs and dodges it.
"When's the last time you were here, anyway?"
She shrugs. "April, I think."
"This last April?"
"What month is Easter? It was Easter."
"Why?"
She shrugs again. "I came by a few times a year. We only live an hour away."
"Yeah, but... why?"
"I don't know."
"He was an asshole. And a convict."
"So's Ethan."
"Six years. Armed robbery," he confirms, still stretched out on the bed, staring at me with dark eyes, daring me to pass judgment.
"Hope you stole something worthwhile." Jesus. My sisters sure know how to pick 'em. I wonder what Billy's deal is. He probably hunts crippled bunnies for sport. Or blows a fortune in online poker. Loves scatplay. Something.
"What's worth six years?"
"I don't know. The crown jewels? The story alone would be worth at least three."
Ethan smirks, then grins. "Yeah, man. The crown jewels."
At least my little sister's redneck ex-con boyfriend thinks I'm funny. I've got that going for me.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. “It’s Ben,” I lie as I slide my finger across the screen.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“How’s it going?”
“Okay. Hold on a second.” I navigate the maze of junk to the doorway. Gwen makes a kissy face at m
e as I pass. I shove my gloved palm against her nose, and she squeals and turns her face away. Once I’m outside I walk around the house and lean against the garage door. “Okay.”
“Can you talk?”
“Yeah, for a bit.”
“I can call back.”
“No, it’s fine. Now’s fine.” I don’t want to say it, but it’s coming out anyway. “I miss your voice.”
“I miss yours, too.”
Jesus. I shouldn’t be saying this shit to him. I shouldn’t be saying this shit at all, but if I was going to say it to anybody it should be Ben.
“You surviving?” he asks.
“It’s good, really. Kind of weird at first, but it’s okay. We’re actually kind of having a good time.”
“That’s great. I told you, you were worried for nothing.”
“Day’s not over yet.”
“God, you’re such a downer. When are you coming home?”
“Tomorrow. My flight gets in around seven.”
“Want me to pick you up?”
I hesitate. “No.”
“Oh.” He tries to sound casual, but he’s terrible at it. “Is Ben picking you up?”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“Of course.”
This. This is the moment, when I’m feeling just like this, when I’m hating myself and I’m hating him and we’re both hating everything we’re doing to each other, this is when I should end it. This is when I should just tell him it’s over. This is when he would understand, or at least when he wouldn’t pretend not to, when neither of us would pretend not to, and then it would be done.
But I don’t. I won’t. I never have before, and I won’t now.
Instead I just wait for him to speak again, wait for his voice. As soon as I hear it the moment will be over. He takes his time. All I hear is breathing. Then, “So when?”
“Soon.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” My chest feels like I’ve swallowed a ball of string. “I’ve got to get back. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
We don’t say I love you. We never do.
After we hang up I just stare at his name in my contact list for a while. That empty star hovers near his photo like a ticking bomb. I’m tempted to fill it, to tap it with my thumb and watch it turn gold, declare him once and for all to be what he is. A favorite. But I won’t, because in the back of my mind is the nagging fear that somehow Ben will see it. He’ll glance down and that glaring five-pointed beacon of betrayal will burn in his eyes and then he’ll know.