by Mary Miller
“How’d the game go?” I ask. I light one of his cigarettes and look at the guy in the suit. He really does look like a dick. His sunglasses probably cost three hundred dollars.
“We lost.”
“I thought y’all didn’t keep score.”
“There was a giant on the other team. There’s no way that kid was five—I should have asked to see his birth certificate.” The boy got discouraged and went and sat with his mother and when Richie tried to make him go back in, he cried and she took him to Pizza Hut.
Before, Richie says, the boy was handling it better than any of them, but now he wets the bed and cries about things four-year-olds shouldn’t cry about. I don’t know what’s normal for a four-year-old to cry about.
“Do you think it has anything to do with me?”
“No,” he says. “I think it has to do with him losing his home and his family and his friends.”
To stop myself from touching him, I light another cigarette; hold onto my drink.
Richie calls the principal at the school for fucked-up kids but she’s never available and she won’t call him back. I don’t know if he goes and gets fingerprinted. I don’t think he does because he doesn’t say anything about it and his fingertips look normal.
We meet for coffee before I have to teach composition to eighteen-year-olds, eighteen-year-olds who text during class and correct my grammar, who are nothing like I imagine I was at eighteen. Two weeks ago, Richie left a shiny red apple on my stoop to commemorate my first day, under an index card that said Para Tu. It’s still on my desk, but eventually I’ll have to throw the apple away and all I’ll have is a card that says For You.
I usually get there before he does but I get stopped by a train so he calls and asks what I want and I tell him an iced coffee with soy and vanilla and then I get stuck behind a truck carrying chickens. I can see him from where I’m stopped at a light, at one of the little outside tables with his coffee, his book, and his cigarette. He’s probably reading something I gave him, Jesus’ Son or The Dead Fish Museum. I think about how I never call and ask what he wants but I should because he orders his coffee hot and has to wait a long time for it to cool.
I check my face in the mirror and then walk over to him and he explains that my coffee has vanilla soy milk and vanilla syrup and it may be too vanilla-y. He got me a large. I can’t drink a large, but I like that he got me one. I open my eighteenth-century literature textbook to The Country Wife and close it again, my finger holding the place. I hate all the rhymed couplets, and I hate that whenever I point out the misogyny, the professor asks if it’s a rhetorical device—was the author really a misogynist, or was he an egalitarian trying to call attention to misogyny?
“What do you have to do today?” I ask.
“Clean the pool, go to Home Depot,” he says.
“What are you going to get at Home Depot?”
“I’m going to fix that toilet.”
I think about the classes I’m taking and the ones I’m teaching, how far behind I’m getting even though school has just begun. I check the time on my phone and then go inside to use the bathroom. The pregnant girl is working. I dated her roommate, briefly, several months ago, but she wasn’t pregnant then. I pretend I don’t know her because I screwed her roommate over, because the whole thing is something I don’t want to think about and now she works at the coffee shop closest to my house.
On Saturday, Richie picks me up, the boy in the backseat. I have a beach bag with three things in it: a magazine, a baseball cap, and a spray bottle of sunscreen. I didn’t pack much because I know he will have packed whatever I might need. I’m wearing the wrong kind of shoes for the river and little black shorts over a black bikini. I’m nervous. As much as I like the boy, I can’t get used to how things change when he’s around: I shouldn’t say shit or fuck or kiss my boyfriend; I’m supposed to pretend like he is the most important thing because he’s a child.
“When are we gonna be there?” the boy asks. We aren’t even on 49 yet.
“Soon,” Richie says.
The boy bops me on the head with a foam sword and then slides it between my seat and the window, in and out.
“Leave Alice alone,” Richie says. I don’t want to be left alone. Don’t leave me alone. I change CDs to exert some authority and look out the window at the old men on the side of the highway with their truck beds full of watermelons and tomatoes. I always think about stopping but I never have any cash. I hope these men will always be there, with their umbrellas, their overalls and homemade signs, and that one day I’ll stop and buy a bag of sweet potatoes or tomatoes and say something about the weather, maybe, and the man will put his hands on his hips and look at the sky.
We pass the field of FEMA trailers leftover from Katrina: row upon row of uninhabitable boxes that the government is paying someone to store.
“Are we there now?” the boy asks.
“Two more minutes,” Richie says, and the boy pokes me with the sword again and I grab it and turn around and smile, but my stomach is starting to hurt and all I can think about is whether I’ll have to use the bathroom when we’re on the river and how I’ll manage it.
The boy and I wait outside the canoe rental place while Richie goes inside to pay. We organize his dinosaurs: which ones he should carry and which ones he should leave in the car, which ones to put in Richie’s backpack. There are lovebugs everywhere. A couple land on his hand, and he holds it up and we watch them crawl up his arm. He’s excited by how many there are and how they’re attached, and I’m reminded that everything is new to him, and that some of this newness can rub off on me.
When the ones on his arm fly off, we watch a couple of sluggish single ones on the car window.
“Those two should get together,” I say, and he agrees, and then Richie comes out with a waiver for me to sign that says no one will sue them if I die and then we gather our stuff and climb into the van. There’s a family there already: a man and a woman, two boys and a yellow Lab, a whole complete unit of big people who seem perfectly content to take up so much space. Richie talks to them while I stare out the window. If I were alone or with another woman, it would be rude for me not to speak.
At the river, we let the family load up first while we coat each other in sunscreen and bug spray. Then we carry our stuff down to the canoe and get situated, the boy in the middle holding onto the sides. We start paddling, looking for turtles and fish and redneck arrowheads, which is what they call trash. It’s a game they started after the time Richie stepped on a piece of glass and sliced open his foot. At the first sandbar, I walk up the hill to pee and return with a mud-encrusted 32-ounce beer can, drop it at the boy’s feet.
“Redneck arrowhead!” he says.
“Redneck arrowhead,” his father agrees. He picks it up and tosses it into the canoe and then the two of them walk into the river, to where the current is strongest, and Richie tells the boy to lie on his back and let his life jacket carry him downriver. I open my magazine, which has already gotten wet, the pages wavy and bloated. In the story, there’s a lesbian couple in a Laundromat and they are having problems but they love each other very much and are going to have a party. The boy struggles, flips over onto his stomach. I keep reading the same paragraph again and again and then put it down and put my life jacket on, the cheap orange kind that looks ridiculous on someone with breasts.
I walk slowly out to where they are and sit in the water with my feet out. I take the boy’s hand and we float together.
“It’s fun, huh?” I say, looking at my tennis shoes. “Kinda freezing, though.” When he starts to flail, I grab him and drag him back to the canoe.
Richie opens the cooler and takes out a beer, and I’m so relieved I could cry. I tell him I want one so he hands it to me and passes out sandwiches. They look fine, but they’re soggy and have too much mustard and they make me think of all the good food I’ve eaten on canoe trips: potatoes and onions wrapped in tinfoil and burnt marshmallows, peanut butter
and jelly sandwiches—the peanut butter and jelly mixed together until it is one even spread—stacked in a bread bag.
The boy brings me a rock and I set the sandwich on my knee. It is large and white, a rock-shaped hunk of concrete. I admire it before putting it in my bag so he goes and finds me more: black and white and bone-colored, shaped like teeth and eggs. Once I have a whole bunch, I pick up my bag and shake it so we can hear them rattle. Then we get back in the canoe and keep paddling. Soon we come to a rope swing surrounded by teenagers. Richie jumps into the water and puts his arms out, and the boy loops his hands around his neck and they swim over to the swing. I stay in the canoe, finishing my beer and watching them, and then I get out and walk the long way up the hill and around a downed tree to where an overweight boy is yelling at his girlfriend.
I stop to watch Richie and the boy fall into the water, the boy clutched onto him like a monkey. Usually I’m scared of rope swings, of heights in general, but it’s easier when no one’s paying attention.
The kid hands me the rope.
“What do I do?” I ask.
“You put your feet like this,” he says, demonstrating, and then he moves one of my feet higher on the tree. He tells me to let go just as the rope starts to swing back, that that’s where the water is the deepest, and I hold on tight and drop where he said to drop and it’s thrilling—how brave I can be, how easily I can follow directions.
I adjust my top and swim over to Richie and the boy.
“Did you see me?” I ask.
“I missed it,” Richie says.
“I did really excellent.” I want to do it again, but Richie asks me to stay with the boy and swims back to the swing. The boy and I hold hands and watch as he does a flip into the water, a perfect easy flip, like something you’d see on television.
. . .
We’re outside on the patio at 206 and it’s happy hour again—always happy hour, always summer—my feet sweating in my Converse sneakers and my legs shaved all the way up. Tonight the boy is with his ex-wife and Richie’s spending the night at my house so we can walk to the bars.
I’m drunk off two pints because I haven’t eaten anything today but a piece of cheese and half an avocado.
“Happy hour’s almost over,” David says, and he lets us preorder drinks, like he always does. Richie tips the difference, but that’s not the point.
“I have to use the bathroom,” I say, and I go inside, walk past the mostly empty tables and the bar, the ugly paintings and the elevator nobody uses. I stand in front of the mirror and look closely at my face and teeth to see if there’s been any deterioration since the last time I checked. I put on more eyeliner. My sister says all a girl needs is eyeliner and a good personality, and I try to follow her advice even though I know she’s completely deluded.
When I get back, Richie is talking to a guy named Peter, a guy who’s here every afternoon in his paint-and-mud-spattered clothing. I say hi and then open Richie’s silver cigarette case and take out his second-to-last cigarette. The night we met, I chain-smoked his cigarettes, though I rarely smoke, and he stopped at the gas station and bought me my own pack. The night we met, I was drunk and sucking on a piece of hard candy. I told him I was scared I was going to choke and he’d have to give me the Heimlich and he held out his hand and I spit the candy into it. Then he threw it behind his shoulder and into a bush. And later he came up to my bedroom and got on his knees and lifted my dress and I made him go home because already I loved him, because already I knew it was the kind of love where you’re so afraid they’re going to leave you give them no other choice.
LITTLE BEAR
Laura watches her kid slide down the slide again: three bumps and then dirt. It took her twenty minutes to talk him into it and now he wants to do it over and over. He has gone down the slide now thirteen times. She stands with her hands on her hips. She has lost all of the weight she gained when she had him and is proud of her body, which is mostly the same save for some stretch marks and a vagina that doesn’t appreciate her husband’s girth as much as it once did. After he comes, she finishes herself off with her pink rabbit. Sometimes, even though she’s perfectly satisfied, she does it anyway and makes him kiss her neck and ears, anywhere but her mouth.
She checks her phone. It’s after six o’clock and her husband should be home by now. She doesn’t want to go home, but neither does she want to watch her child, Kevin, named after her husband, slide down the slide again. She imagines herself alone on an island. She would love it there. And yet she knows she would grow tired of this lonesome island after a very short period of time.
“Do it!” her son says as he scurries back up. “Do it to it!” It is his new favorite phrase.
She wishes she had a friend with her but she seems to have fewer and fewer friends, or her friends are busier or maybe she’s recently realized that they like their lives a lot more than she likes hers so it’s harder for her to be around them.
His joy at the bottom of the slide astounds her at number sixteen, and she laughs as she picks him up. He feels heavier than he felt only a few hours before.
“What have I been feeding you?” she asks.
“Hot dogs,” he says, though she rarely gives him hot dogs.
She sees a bird with white wings fly into a tree and points it out to him. The temperature is cooler—fall on its way, her favorite season. But then Kevin kicks and screams to be put down and she feels dulled and slightly disoriented, as if she has no idea how she came to this place, this life.
“Again!” Kevin says. She wishes they had chosen some other name for him. There is no good nickname for Kevin. Mostly, she calls him Little Bear because the books he likes best have bears in them. Last month, they took him out to Yellowstone where they saw a black bear cross the road in front of their car, just gallop across it like a dog. It wasn’t that big or menacing-looking, though her husband reported it to be about 500 pounds. Yellowstone had been disappointing, overall. They were in their car the majority of the time, making a slow loop—first the southern one and then the northern—and traffic would frequently come to a complete halt while people got out of their vehicles to photograph elk or bison and Kevin had had to pee in bottles on two separate occasions, Laura holding his tiny uncircumcised penis. On another, they barely got him to a toilet before he had an accident. Old Faithful had not been particularly impressive, though they’d had to wait for over an hour with a gang of bikers and Japanese tourists jostling for position, and so, by the time it went off, it wouldn’t have been impressive even if it had been.
Kevin took hundreds of pictures—never of the family unless Laura specifically asked, but of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and Yellowstone Lake and Hayden Valley and the Grand Prismatic Spring—the best of which he posted to Instagram (hashtag nofilter, hashtag familyvacation, hashtag Yellowstone, hashtag summer). But she’d tried to be a good sport because he’d done all of the planning himself.
Their hotel room had been very nice.
“One more,” she tells him. “One more time and then I’ll make you a hot dog since you like them so much.”
“No,” he says. “Fifteen-sixteen thousand more.”
“One more,” she repeats, as he begins his ascent. She thinks of the bear again, how it trotted on all fours. Her husband hadn’t been quick enough to get that shot.
She touches her stomach, as if she has just remembered that she’s pregnant, though it isn’t possible to forget something like that. It’s always there, like a slight headache or a vaguely sore throat. She hasn’t told anyone but her husband and she only told him because she had to tell someone. She expected him to be excited or disappointed, but he was neutral. Well, he said, well, okay. That’s good, right? And later that evening, he said perhaps the children would have to go to public school now.
What happened last time: bed rest, gestational diabetes, Netflix and Hulu and HBO GO and frozen pizzas and her husband, Kevin, who was at work most of the time, whose arrival she simultaneously ant
icipated and dreaded. But when he was more than half an hour late, she would text him repeatedly to ask where he was and when he’d be home followed by a series of question marks.
“Okay,” Laura says, “that’s it. That was the last one.” She catches her son and picks him up.
“I don’t like you,” he says.
“Of course you like Mommy,” she says. “You love Mommy.” She smooths back his hair a little too roughly, her hand pulling through a knot. “Mommy is the best mommy in the world.”
“No.”
“You should get me a T-shirt,” she says. “That way everyone will know how good I am.”
“No,” he says again.
She hopes this next child is a girl.
She buckles him into his car seat and starts the engine, but then she just sits there in the quiet, wondering how long it will take him to start screaming. She watches a black family set up for a birthday party. There are so many of them. There are balloons and hats and an older guy manning the grill and banners and children running about. A couple of the smallest children walk tentatively up to a girl with her dog. The girl smiles and they pet the dog and then they’re all smiling and petting the dog. Laura wants to join them. She thinks of her own family, how they have spread out: both of her sisters in Texas—one east, the other west—her brother in Tennessee, their mother dead. Their father lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, where he moved to get away from them all, to not have to deal with them, though there was never much to deal with, she thought. Nothing so terrible. Her brother said he has a new family now, but she doesn’t know anything about that. She wonders if he likes his new family or if he’ll move someplace else soon and start over again with brand-new people, people who will seem so promising in the beginning. There was nothing so terrible, she thinks again, putting the car into reverse. There was nothing so terrible at all.