The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2018 (retail) (epub)

  —

  After we cross Craycroft, Brenda pulls into a McDonald’s near a sprawling brick high school I have never noticed. We’re in line at the drive-thru, three cars back from the intercom, which sits in fiberglass Grimace’s mouth. Brenda tells us, “I need you to find eight cents.” She digs in her purse, pulls out a thickly matted hairbrush and places it on the passenger seat so she can dig deeper. Lizzie and I are running our fingers in the space where the back of the seat meets its bottom. I find the buried middle seat belt, which is hardened from years of baking, but no coins. Then Lizzie finds a dime, and I hate her for it, but only for a second.

  “Good girl,” Brenda says. “Give it here.”

  Brenda never thanked me for the dollar I found back at the thrift store.

  I know not to ask for what I really want: six Chicken McNuggets, a vanilla shake, a cheeseburger and fries. I know Lizzie wants all that, too, though the shake she wants is strawberry and she’d only eat the breading off the McNuggets. But we didn’t find enough in the pockets. That’s the rule.

  Brenda orders three cups of ice water, which are free, and two hamburgers. The hamburgers are two for ninety-nine cents—with tax, a dollar seven. When we arrive at the window where we pay, Brenda also asks for a plastic knife, and a handful of ketchup packets. She likely has about twenty packets in her purse already.

  I’m hot with shame as the McDonald’s guy hands Brenda a bag with the hamburgers and the ketchup in it. He then passes her the waters, small, one by one. He smiles and thanks Brenda. She doesn’t thank him. He sees us in the backseat and I can sense he pities us, even though his own life is probably crappy. I want Brenda to speed away, but she takes her time cutting our hamburger in half with the plastic knife, licking a stray morsel of meat from the top of her hand. There are several cars behind us, and I can sense that the McDonald’s guy wants her to move, but she doesn’t care. It’s her moment to control the world.

  Brenda eats her hamburger as she drives. My hamburger half has the two pickles, so I give one to Lizzie. She puts it on her half; she doesn’t just pop it in her mouth. I know Lizzie would have given me a pickle if she had gotten both. The ice water tastes like wax and a bit like orange drink, but it’s good and clean. I take a small bite of the half hamburger and chew and chew, savoring the onions and sugary ketchup, until it’s almost liquid, and then I swish it around before I swallow. Lizzie and I do this for every bite. We do it at Burger King and Whataburger and Arby’s, too, even when we get full meals. When we were younger, we’d play mother bird and baby bird, and I’d spit the chewed McDonald’s into Lizzie’s mouth. Then she’d take a bite of her McDonald’s and do the same for me. We played it a few times before Brenda caught us and swatted me in the neck with a rolled-up magazine.

  Brenda tells us she wants to hit another thrift store. She says it tentatively, like she’s asking our permission, but she isn’t. I knew when we climbed into her car this morning that it would be a long, stifling day and that Brenda might not feed us and we’d have bad headaches by the afternoon. Lizzie had a social studies test about Mesopotamia today. I helped her study last night and she knew all the terms—Tigris-Euphrates river system, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, the Parthian Empire. But Brenda doesn’t care. We could have gone to school and Brenda could have gone thrifting by herself, but she hates being alone.

  * * *

  —

  I check the sunbaked pay phone in front of Goodwill. Nothing. Just inside the store, by the entrance, there are a few gumball machines, and as Brenda hurries towards the back, Lizzie and I check them. “Oh,” Lizzie says. “Trent, look!” She’s turning the knob on the one that dispenses rubber balls and she keeps getting free balls without having to pay. She hands them to me: two blues, a bright green, and a swirly one. I look around. No one’s watching us. The small placard behind the glass calls them “Super Space Balls,” and features an image of a purple ball that has bounced thousands of miles above Earth, which looks puny in the background. How fake, I think, but I continue to load my pockets: green, yellow, red, red, sparkles, blue, swirl…Then I hear Brenda yelling: “Trent and Lizzie, now!” Lizzie looks over her shoulder when she hears Brenda, but she continues to turn the knob. “Now!” Brenda yells, and I hear another lady tell her to shut up.

  “We better go,” I say, and I pull Lizzie by her shoulder.

  “I want to get another sparkly one!” she says, batting my hand away. She’s chewing the side of her mouth like she’s concentrating.

  Soon, I’m forcing my hands into pockets of men’s jeans. One pair smells like gasoline; another, like cigarettes. If they’re Levi’s, I check the red tag on the back pocket for the capital letter E, which means that they’re old, and Brenda can sell them to the Japanese man who comes to the swap meet every few months. There are no old Levi’s today. Brenda will soon learn that Lizzie’s still at the gumball machines, draining one of them of its contents, and I’m nervous. So I search faster. A nickel. A nine-volt battery. A to-do list that begins with pick up Jenn at 4.

  When I’m rushed like this, the urge to piss is overwhelming, so I weave through the overloaded racks of clothes towards Brenda. She clutches a metal Welcome Back, Kotter lunch box. She’s grinning widely. She tries to remain calm, but I recognize her leaking excitement. “I bet I can get forty for this,” she whispers, like I’m her coconspirator. “At least thirty-five.” This makes the back of my neck tingle in a pleasant way that warms and tickles my inner ears. I like being on her team. I like it when she finds a treasure and holds firm on a price when swap meet people try to haggle her down.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” I say.

  “That’s it?” she says. She’s angry. “I don’t know why I even bother.” She scratches at the inside of her thigh. The pinkness means she’s already been scratching a lot. “I drive all over and search and search,” she whines, “and finally I find something good and you can’t even congratulate me or thank me.”

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “And you’re welcome for lunch.”

  “I probably said thanks.”

  “I was waiting for it and neither you nor your sister said it.”

  I was the one who found the dollar that paid for the hamburgers. But I don’t gripe.

  “I hate it when you force me to call you an asshole,” she says, “but you’re an asshole, Trent.” Now she’s practically crying, and I really have to pee. “A mother shouldn’t call her son an asshole, but you’re an asshole.”

  A woman with a mop of dark curls turns her head from a shelf of mismatched dinner plates and coffee mugs. “Keep your family’s business to yourselves.” She wears a pink bandanna around her neck. Her teeth are small and sharp, like grains of rice.

  Brenda hands me the lunch box and takes a few steps towards the woman. “We’re trying to have a conversation here,” Brenda says. She sniffs and tilts her head sideways.

  “You don’t want to fuck with me,” the woman says. She wears an oversized black Kenny Rogers concert T-shirt. The letters that spell “Kenny” are puffy and red. She also wears baby-blue terry cloth gym shorts that feature her legs, which are thick and tan, not fat but not muscular—like big hot dogs.

  And very quickly, the two women are pulling each other’s hair, scratching and hitting each other. “Bitch. Cunt. Fucking whore.” I don’t know who says what; I can only think about my bladder. Brenda looks over to me and says, “Help me!” The lady has Brenda by the hair and she’s kicking her in the knees.

  I don’t help my mother. I can’t. I’m frozen and it feels like a nightmare, like I’m about to wake with a start. Maybe part of me wants Brenda to feel pain and lose this fight. I watch her reach behind her back for anything. Her hand lands on a waffle iron from a shelf of housewares. Its frayed black cord swings in an arc as Brenda clobbers the woman with it. The woman’s hair is soon drenched with blood. Brenda steps away and place
s the waffle maker back on the shelf. The woman wipes her neck, watches in disbelief as blood drips from her hand. She wobbles, and tumps. Her body makes a double wet slap on the floor.

  This all happens in about twenty seconds but it seems like an hour. I just stand there, holding that lunch box by its handle, wondering when Brenda will be arrested, barely noticing the warmth trickling down my leg and soaking my droopy tube sock.

  I feel intense relief unrelated to my bladder.

  Brenda digs her nails into my shoulder and pulls me through the aisles towards the front of the store, grumbling, “Baby! Wetting your pants!” We pass two teenage girls, one of them wearing thick-framed glasses, both of them looking through men’s flannel shirts. The one in the glasses says, “Oh, my God!” when she sees I’ve wet myself. The other says, “Shut up! He might be special!”

  Brenda keeps pulling me, gripping my shoulder tighter, guiding me out the emergency exit, which buzzes loudly and makes my stomach drop.

  “We didn’t pay for this,” I say, holding up the lunch box.

  We wade through the heat pumping up from the asphalt until we reach the car, where Brenda rifles through the trunk and pulls out a Tucson Weekly. “Sit on this,” she says as she pushes my head down and forces me into the backseat. “Where the hell is your sister?” She looks back towards the store. I notice a scarlet scratch flaring from her ear to her throat. “I can’t go back in there,” she says. “That crazy bitch started it.” I can’t remember who actually did start it. “I don’t like to cuss,” Brenda says. “You know that.” She sits in the driver’s seat and starts the car. “You make me cuss.”

  “What about Lizzie?” I say.

  “Shut up,” she says. “God!”

  She speeds out of the parking lot. The tires even squeal.

  “But Lizzie is stuck in there,” I say.

  “Sometimes mothers have to teach their kids a lesson.”

  As we pull onto Flowing Wells, I stare at the corny rendition of Mr. Kotter pointing to an F he wrote on Epstein’s quiz, and I imagine that Lizzie’s looking for us. Her shorts’ pockets and hands are full of rubber balls. Maybe she has made a basket out of the front of her shirt to accommodate them all, exposing her belly to everyone, but not caring. Now Lizzie must be panicking. She searches everywhere for me and Brenda, calls for us. Maybe she sees the woman on the floor. Or the woman’s blood. The police will be there any minute, and she hides, squats under a rack of dresses until she’s discovered by the strange man with long, stringy hair, the same man who put the turd photo in the overalls. He’s been tracking us all day, waiting for Lizzie to be alone. “Wow,” he says, “those are great rubber balls.” And she follows him to his car and rides with him to the desert, to a concrete foundation of a house that was never built, a stage, and when Lizzie realizes what’s transpiring, she’ll drop the balls, and they’ll bounce and bloom outwards and look like a big, happy firework before they roll off the edges and disappear.

  This story, these images of Lizzie and the strange man, take residence in my gut and sit there like a tumor, so when we stop for a red light at Prince Road, I open the door, jump out of the car, and hurry down the dirt shoulder back towards Goodwill. My wet shorts chafe my thighs. Part of me wants to stop and drop down there in the dust next to a drained Big Gulp and a smashed Sammy Hagar cassette, but I keep moving, and even start to run.

  Lara Vapnyar

  Deaf and Blind

  THIS DEAF AND BLIND MAN, my mother’s friend’s lover, was on his way to spend the evening. His name was Sasha.

  My mother’s friend’s name was Olga. I had known her since I was a baby, so I considered her my friend, too. She was beautiful. More beautiful than my mother. She had a long soft body and pitch-black hair that reached to her waist. My mother and I also had dark hair, but ours was messy and thin and forgettable, while Olga’s hair made people stare at her. Olga lived in a town on the Black Sea, but she visited Moscow often and she always brought a gift for me. My favorite was a necklace made of seashells. I loved to put it on and dance, while Olga clapped and sang. “Poor Olga, she’s so good with kids,” my mother would remark. I was only a child, but I was very close to my mother, so close that I couldn’t help hearing the smug note in her voice. “Both of them really wanted a baby,” my grandmother explained to me, “but only your mother was able to have one.”

  My mother and Olga had met while undergoing fertility treatments at some sort of experimental program in one of the Moscow clinics. Inpatient, two weeks long, run by a mustached woman in military boots. The patients had to sleep in the same room and undergo procedures together. There were five of them. All women in their thirties, all (for some insane reason) Ph.D.s. My mother’s Ph.D. was in math, Olga’s in philosophy. Olga’s subject was perception. My mother’s was negative numbers. Their beds faced each other, so they had no choice but to become friends. They shared food, books, stories, jokes. My mother told me that Olga wasn’t that funny herself, but she always laughed at my mother’s jokes. After a couple of days, they began sharing urine. The mustached woman demanded that all the patients produce urine samples every three hours. They were required to pee right before going to bed, at eleven p.m., and then set their alarm clocks for two a.m. and five a.m. My mother took the two a.m. shift. She would get up and pee for herself and for Olga. And Olga did the same for her at five a.m. That way, they could both have a half-decent night’s sleep. Neither of them cared that this could destroy the validity of the mustached woman’s research. “Olga and I are pee sisters!” my mother loved to say. I was jealous of her. I hoped to have a pee sister of my own one day.

  By the end of the program, my mother and Olga had confessed to each other that their marriages weren’t happy. Olga explained that her husband loved her like crazy, but she’d never felt more than affection and respect for him. She wanted to know what it was like to love somebody “with every fiber of your being,” the way people did in books. She was sure that she would love her child like that. My mother told Olga that she did love my father with every fiber of her being, but she wasn’t sure if he loved her back. She had a feeling that he was getting tired of their marriage. She hoped that having a child would bind him to her.

  They both lost in the end. Olga’s treatment didn’t work. And my mother had a child, but my father left her anyway. I was five then. By the time I was seven, my father had a new wife and a new baby. That baby was often sick. Every time my father planned something with me, like going to the children’s theater or the zoo, the baby would get sick and he’d have to cancel. The good thing was that every time he canceled he promised something else, something much more exciting than the thing we had to skip. I would think how lucky I was that I couldn’t go to a concert, say, because now I would get to visit a theater! And when the theater was canceled I was promised the circus. And then the circus was canceled, too, and I was promised something really special: a cross-country-skiing trip. We’d take a train to the countryside and spend the whole day together. We’d ski through the woods with backpacks full of food, and we might even see some winter animals. I thought what incredible luck it was that my baby sister had been sick for the concert and the circus and the theater! And we would go really soon. My father said next weekend. “Next weekend” turned out to be an elusive time frame. The weekend after next was technically “next weekend,” too, and the weekend after that, and the weekend after that. “You’re breaking her heart!” I heard my mother scream on the phone. She was wrong, though. I was okay with all that waiting. I knew that one of the next weekends would have to be “next weekend.” I didn’t doubt my father even when winter officially ended. “Everybody knows the March snow is the best,” my father said, and I repeated it endlessly. “My father and I are going on a ski trip soon. We’re just waiting for the best snow.” Meanwhile, the snow in Moscow was melting at a discouraging rate. “There is still plenty of snow in the country,” my father said. In the mid
dle of March, a neighbor’s sick dog died. I asked my mother, “Why won’t my baby sister die, too? It would make it so much easier for everybody.” She scolded me, but I overheard her recounting the conversation to my grandmother and laughing.

  My father and I did eventually go on that ski trip. It was March 31, the date when the snow becomes simply perfect for skiing. All expert cross-country skiers know that. “See, there is snow!” my father said when we got off the train. I could hear that he was both surprised and relieved. We put on our skis and went into the woods. We didn’t ski for long, because the snow, though pure and brilliant, was too sticky. After a few minutes, a layer of about two inches of it was firmly attached to our skis, so we couldn’t really glide; we had to walk on our skis as if we were wearing platform shoes. We didn’t see any animals, either. But it was still a magnificent day. My father showed me how to make a campfire in the snow, and we made tea using snow instead of water. We drank that tea crouching by the fire, laughing like crazy whenever one of us lost his balance and fell backward into the snow. On the way home, my father said that we would do it again every year on March 31, the date for the best snow. He also told me that I should never wear my backpack on the train, because I could accidentally hit other people with it. What I needed to do was to remove the backpack before I boarded the train and carry it in front of me, or drag it by one of the straps if it was too heavy. This stuck with me. I always take my backpack off before I board a train, even if it’s a tiny backpack. I don’t remember any other life lessons from my father.

  When I got home that night I told my mother that I loved my father more than I loved her. That was true, but I don’t know what cruel demon possessed me to share it. Perhaps I blamed her for failing to make my father stay with us. Perhaps I sensed that she blamed me for the same thing. Anyway, if she regretted her fertility treatments that night, I would certainly understand her.