by Zach Wyner
“That’s right,” Bill mumbled as Amare opened the front door. “The Wizard’s got it all figured out.”
You patted Bill on the shoulder, pointed at the application. “You want me to take that?”
Bill signed his name to it and pushed it in front of you where it absorbed a couple drops of spilt coffee.
“Shit,” he said, dabbing the spots with the sleeve of his shirt.
“Don’t worry about it,” you said. “Besides, I got it on good authority that the world is coming to an end.”
“The sooner the better.”
You laughed; Bill stared morosely at the television. “Hey,” you said. “Bill.”
“I shouldn’t watch these highlights anymore,” he said. On the screen, images of yesterday’s Red Sox game played out mutely. “I feel like this year is going to be the ultimate cocktease. If we just had a closer, we could win this whole goddamned thing!”
“I hear you.” You reclined and the weary rattan back of your dining room chair moaned. You patted Bill’s knee and folded your hands on your stomach.
Bill said, “If the Yankees beat us again this year, I’m gonna break into Fenway and set myself on fire in left field. Right where Yaz’s legs buckled when Bucky Dent hit the home run in seventy-eight.”
You nodded approvingly. “Sounds like a plan.”
“You want to join me? Dual self-immolations to protest years of incompetent ownership.”
“Justice for the fans!” you said.
Bill turned the television off and sighed. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees. “It must be nice working with kids sometimes. I could never do it but I get why you do.”
“This girl I’m working with today, she’s kind of my favorite person. She’s this really bright, irreverent goth-chick with green hair and black eye shadow. You know, one of those kids that sees through the bullshit and is righteously pissed off, but beneath all that is a sweet and vulnerable girl who just wants to be liked.”
“What’s she need tutoring for?”
“She doesn’t need tutoring.” You went to the kitchen and got some Advil from the cabinet. “Her parents basically send her there to be supervised.”
“Rich assholes.”
You nodded. “I’m glad she’s there though. She’s always worried about something, always stressed. She doesn’t recognize how capable she is. But I feel like she listens to me, like, when I point out that it takes real strength to question what her school and her parents tell her she’s supposed to want, it resonates.”
Bill rubbed his head. “My parents want me to come home. They think I’m wasting my time.”
“They said that?”
“They’re about as subtle as a sledgehammer.”
You glanced at the clock. If you were going to get to Whole Foods on the way to work, it was time to get moving.
“Do you think you’re wasting your time?” you said.
“What else is time good for?” He sat up and scanned the room, his eyes coming to rest on the table. “Is it cool if I bum one of your cigarettes?”
“Go for it.”
He shook one free and stuck it between his lips.
“I don’t know how you do that,” you said.
“What?”
“Smoke occasionally. I’m envious I guess.”
“Being an addict takes energy.” You laughed as he crossed the room and went out onto the balcony.
“You’re too tired to get addicted to smoking?”
He stood in the doorframe, lamely holding the cigarette outside. Smoke streamed, unabated, into the living room. “No idea when June’s coming home?”
“None. Why?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. She’s good to talk to. She’s got so many crises. In a way her life is even duller than mine, but she always manages to have this air of urgency about her.”
A throb passed through your temples and you winced.
“Is that a fucked up thing to say?”
“No.” You rubbed your head with your thumbs.
He took a drag of the cigarette, turned his head and attempted to blow the smoke outside but a breeze carried it right back through the doorway. “Tell Sadie that I hope she sees it in her heart to rescue me from a life of sloth and mooching.”
You laughed. “You should put that on your resume under current occupation.”
Bill stared at his cigarette. “I don’t want any more of this.”
“You had like two drags.”
He shrugged. “You finish it.” He rubbed off the cherry and it dropped to the balcony floor where he crushed it beneath his shoe. Then he crossed the room, holding out the half-smoked cigarette, and dropped it in your open palm. The two of you stared.
*
A line ten cars deep idled in the far right lane of Coldwater Canyon, waiting to gain entry to the Whole Foods parking lot. Typical Angelinos, many of them transplants from metropolitan areas where parking is scarce, refused to park more than a block from their destination. Not shelling out for the valet at a restaurant was a sign of abject poverty tantamount to taking the bus. You drove past the line, turned onto a familiar residential street and parked outside the house at which June had been crashing when you first started dating. Staring at the selfsame magnolia tree beneath which you’d parked every night for the first six months of your relationship, your chest swelled with nostalgia. You thought of those stories of pregnant women whose hormones cause them to weep at maudlin tire commercials. How completely fucked you were to desire a return to something so broken, a delirium that had propelled you down a landslide of poor decisions, lost opportunities, and broken promises. Your infatuation had been one big humiliation, a blind spot that had obfuscated what everyone else saw coming a mile away.
In the middle of June’s former neighbor’s yard, a defiant American flag flapped in the faces of all the secular progressives who’d gobbled up the properties surrounding the neighborhood Fox News viewer, a curmudgeon of the first order who used to yell at the two of you for laughing in the backyard past 10:00 p.m. You recalled the first time you’d really minded that flag, the first time it filled you with a sense of impending doom.
“I want to be with you at the end of the world,” June had said when the towers came tumbling down. She put her head on your shoulder as your restless feet rocked the patio swing back and forth, back and forth. “We can tell each other anything, whatever we’re feeling, and know that no matter what, we’ll be safe because we won’t be alone.” You were speechless. All day long you’d been wolfing down coffee, cigarettes, and television news, dreading the moment when you would have to stop consuming and close your eyes. Then there was June, taking your hand, trying to coax out feelings that you ordinarily dissembled beneath a veneer of equanimity and Xanax.
You’d gone back inside, turned off the television and returned to her room—an unmade bed of twisted sheets already imbued with the memory of the first frightening phone call from your father—and made love like the problems of the world were nothing but a storm cloud blown back out to sea.
“I want to see my mom,” she said, as you lay beneath the ceiling fan, panting and sweating in one another’s arms. “Will you go with me? It would make her happy to see you with me.”
“She hardly knows me.”
“I think she thinks that as long as I’m with you, she can die in peace.”
You sat up, frowning. You had an inkling of what you were supposed to say here, but you couldn’t bring yourself to form the words. Besides, it had been a long morning. Perhaps staring at footage of bodies dropping like tears from the faces of crumbling skyscrapers was making her mom’s demise feel more imminent.
She stared at the ceiling, her tangled hair fanned out across the pillow; beads of perspiration glistened on her forehead. Cinematically, she turned her gaze to the open window and spoke the words, “My
mom’s really sick.” You braced for tears but she didn’t cry; judging by the tone of her voice, you guessed that it would be a long time before she would.
June proceeded to reveal the truth about her mom’s cancer and her resistance to treatment, a resistance that sounded more like a resignation to die than the fear of fighting. Until that day, June hadn’t wanted to talk about her mom, and you hadn’t encouraged her to go opening fresh wounds. Now you needed more information. Because it hadn’t occurred to you that there might be people hoping that June would end up with you. Your desire for a lasting commitment was like the cure for cancer—yet to be discovered. June’s mother’s hope—that you might be the one whom, in the event of her death, looked after her picky little girl—was a powerful revelation.
That afternoon the two of you walked, down this street and others just like it—residential and tree-lined. “All these pretty green lawns,” she said.
She walked like she didn’t want to get anywhere, as if the faster she moved, the closer she would draw to a future she feared she couldn’t avoid, no matter her footwork, her partner, her pills, her plans. A pick-up truck with oversized tires drove by, blasting some country-western dreck; an American flag, thrust out the open window by a proud, pale, patriotic arm, flapped in the wind.
“What the fuck,” she said.
“That’s only gonna get worse.”
“It’s true,” she said.
“First it’ll be flags and anthems, then it’ll be demonizing Muslims. War with some impoverished Middle Eastern country will be an easy sell. The Democrats will fall in line because they’ll be afraid to look like pussies with our dimwitted cowboy of a president swinging his dick around and, meanwhile, there’ll be no self-reflection, no accountability, no rethinking of…”
She took your hand. “Josh.”
You stopped.
She kissed you, stroked your cheek. “I love you,” she said. Then she wrapped her arms around your waist and kissed you some more. A neighbor walked by, dragged by a large, panting dog, but June didn’t seem to notice. Ordinarily, she was uncomfortable with public displays of affection; you’d learned to resist the urge to touch without first gauging her mood. Not that this bothered you; in fact, it made physical contact that much more meaningful. Because it wasn’t habit, you felt like each touch was deliberate, compelled by a fresh feeling. For all her faults, June’s love was never stale. Sometimes it simply wasn’t. But this made it all the more thrilling when it was. And on that particular day, with her mother dying and New York City’s iconic skyline crumbling, entropy amplified your love. You were one another’s solace.
You returned from your reverie, gripping your phone. You tried to summon the strength to push these memories down into some dark, inaccessible place, but in your brief life, there’d only been one dying mother whose frail hand you’d held amongst the cloying stink of get-well bouquets and made a promise.
You dialed. Her phone rang twice and stopped. You heard voices, the clatter of silverware and porcelain, the faint peal of a siren.
“Hello?” you said.
“I didn’t know if I was going to hear from you.” Her voice was flat, detached. You drew air into your lungs as though you were preparing to retrieve rings from the deep end of the pool. You exhaled. “Aren’t you going to ask where I am?”
“Where are you?”
“What difference does that make?”
“Where did you go last night?”
“I need a ride home.”
“Home, as in my apartment?”
“Is it your mission in life to make me feel shitty?”
You absorbed the body blow and pressed forward. “I’ve gotta work. Tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up in a couple hours.”
June was quiet. The siren wailed louder and louder.
“Or you could take the bus.”
“I’ll call someone else.”
“That’d probably be better…for you I mean.”
“Right.”
The connection severed. The American flag hung limply in the hot still air, its colors bleaching in the implacable sunshine.
*
Whole Foods greeted you with a thick wall of conditioned air. Sadie rang up items at the far register. For a few seconds you watched her deftly scoop, scan, tap the register keys, and chat with a customer. It was easy to tell that she was good at her job. You guessed she’d had a lot of practice. As far as you knew, she’d worked there since high school. You wondered what dreams she’d put on hold, whether she’d tried another career and failed, returning to this place with her tail between her legs. Whatever her story was, her posture, the way she rooted her feet so firmly in the ground and held her chin high, projected confidence unconstrained by regret.
You ventured into the aisles in search of peanut butter, but the only kind that you could find was the hippie shit with the puddle of oil on top that you had to stir every time you wanted to make a sandwich—the kind of product that no self-respecting 7-Eleven owner would dare peddle. You read the brief list of ingredients on half a dozen different brands. None of the Whole Foods peanut butters seemed to contain sugar. Some of them didn’t even have salt. Other than some poor soul with congestive heart failure and a low-sodium-or-death diet, you couldn’t imagine who would buy this stuff. Finally, you discovered a brand containing something called evaporated cane juice. Close enough, you thought.
You filed into Sadie’s queue, peanut butter in tow; she caught sight of you out of the corner her eye and winked, as if she’d either already known you were in the store or had been anticipating your return. The old man in front of you, dandruff dusting the shoulders of his navy blue cardigan, scratched his closely cropped white hair and pointed at the register display.
“What’s that?” he said.
“Your total, sir,” said Sadie. “Sixty-four dollars and fourteen cents.”
“I only bought food for tonight,” he said. “I’m having my daughter and my grandson over for dinner. He’s four years old, eats like a squirrel. You think I need to spend sixty-four dollars to feed my daughter and a squirrel?”
Sadie smiled at you. Not nervously, like you would have expected, but inclusively, as if the truth of her job didn’t embarrass her in the least.
“Would you like me to ring up the items again, sir? Maybe I made a mistake.”
“Ring ’em again.” The old man turned to you. “Gotta keep an eye on ’em and make sure they don’t scan anything twice. These people make mistakes all the time.”
You shrugged. “She looks trustworthy to me.”
Sadie debagged and rescanned. Boneless chicken breasts, teriyaki sauce, green beans, a few lemons, a bottle of wine, a bottle of cranberry juice, and some chocolate chocolate chip ice cream. “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s still sixty-four-fourteen. Would you maybe like to put something back?”
His fingers trembling, the man struggled to remove his credit card from his wallet before grudgingly handing it over. “Charge it,” he said. “Thieves is what you all are. I could have taken them out for steak dinners.”
“At Sizzler maybe,” you said.
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing,” you said.
Sadie stifled a laugh. The man’s head whipped around and she coughed to mask her smile. He glared at her and then you, before pushing his cart of groceries through the sliding doors.
“I’m an asshole,” you said.
“Don’t sweat it. He’s a regular. He knows the prices. I think that half the time he just comes in here for an outlet.”
“Here.” You handed over the application. “I told Bill I’d give this to you on my way to work. He doesn’t have a car yet.”
“Cool.” She gave the application a cursory glance and placed it next to the register. “I like Bill. He’s funny.”
“Bill’s hilarious. And a hard worker to
boot.”
“He told me that I reminded him of a cousin he had a giant crush on when he was a boy.”
You laughed. “Really?”
“Yep,” she said, grinning. She scanned your peanut butter. “Ooh. I love this stuff, but I get the crunchy kind. So good.”
“I have to admit, ordinarily I’m a Skippy man.”
“Oh no, no, no,” she said, shaking her head side to side and clicking her tongue. “We must reform you, Joshua. Once you develop a palate for the natural stuff, you’ll never go back to that processed crap, no matter how sweet your tooth.”
You stroked your cheek and nodded, as though she’d addressed a character flaw of serious consequence.
“Six-fifty-two,” she said.
Your eyes widened but you caught yourself in time to suppress any other physical indicators of outrage and handed her a ten.
Sadie took your money and opened the cash drawer. As she withdrew three ones she smiled coyly and said, “The same principle applies to women you know.” Then she laughed, whether in response to your startled expression or her own brazenness you couldn’t tell. You blushed intensely. Sadie was flirting with you. It dawned on you that she wasn’t embarrassed by the sex you’d had years ago; she appeared to be interested in who you were now, not who you had or hadn’t been then.
“Avoid the processed ones?” you said.
“At all costs.” She broke the seal on a roll of quarters and spilled some on the floor. “Oh Sadie,” she scolded, bending over and surfaced like a diver coming up for air. The squint of her eyes issued a gentle challenge and quickened your pulse. You stared at them for a beat too long without saying anything; a self-satisfied smile spread across her face and she handed you your change. The middle-aged woman behind you, who’d unloaded enough groceries from her cart to feed a junior varsity basketball team, cleared her throat.
“Afternoon, miss,” Sadie said, grabbing a pair of romaine lettuce heads and entering their code from memory. “You having a nice day?”
“Yeah, yeah,” said the woman.
You shoved your change into your pocket and drifted away like a leaf carried on the surface of a stream.