Ohio

by Stephen Markley

  At the first dance of her high school life, she waited at the fringes of the floor along with the other freshmen, all but the bravest too uncertain to wander into the forest of upperclassmen that crowded the dark cafeteria, the light swimming and flickering like in an aquarium. Stacey’s parents had only just begun allowing her to buy makeup, and Tina helped her out in the bathroom.

  “This is the best cheap mascara,” she said, stroking Stacey’s lashes with jet-black Maybelline Great Lash Waterproof, hoping that her awkward tomboy friend wouldn’t hover beside her all night (heck, maybe she’d even get asked to dance, God forbid). Tina followed up with Almay liquid liner. “And this’ll keep it in place if you start sweating.”

  The Jaguars won 29–7, and it seemed as if 56 had done well (at least he’d clobbered the other team’s quarterback three times, leaping to his feet and screaming in triumph loud enough that the sound washed all the way to the back of the bleachers where the freshmen found space). The football players came streaming into the cafeteria after the first hour, showered and wearing street clothes. A different boy asked her to dance each slow song, many of them upperclassmen, and she accepted while watching the door. She was dancing with Conner Jarecki, a boy in her grade, when 56 came in wearing khakis and a white wifebeater. His shoulders, chest, and arms were on full display and looked like armor clicked into place beneath his skin. Each time a slow song came on she watched him and waited until he’d made his choice before allowing another boy to take a turn with her. He danced with a few girls she recognized, the popular upperclassmen, including the bubbly, curvy Jess Bealey, who didn’t own a top she wasn’t spilling out of. Tina grew increasingly frantic as the night wore on. Of course he wouldn’t ask her. He didn’t know who she was. The franticness turned to fear, the fear to hurt, the hurt to disappointment as one of the chaperones announced the last song. And then, like she had psychically willed it, he pushed through the crowd to her.

  Dan Eaton had approached to ask for the last dance (she was wary of Dan, who’d fixated on Hailey Kowalczyk in such a way that most of their class tittered about him behind his back), when a sturdy branch of an arm caught the slight, skinny boy in the chest. “I got this one, bud.”

  Then 56 had his hands on her hips, and she placed hers around his neck, though she could barely reach because of the height difference. The song was Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose.”

  “You’re Tina. Little Moore’s pal.”

  “I am.”

  She felt the heaviness of her lashes. For the first time in her life, she felt the word sexy about herself. Her eyes were at his chest where two dog tags skittered on a chain around his neck. He was never without them. Now she saw that each tag was blank on both sides.

  “Aren’t these supposed to have your name or something?”

  He looked amused, as if it was a silly question. “Why? My fate hasn’t been written yet.”

  He had his hands low, his pinkies creeping down just far enough to rest on the rise of her bottom. He held her very close, and she could feel it against her abdomen, pressed just beneath her belly button. It wasn’t hard, but it was undeniably there.

  When the lights came on signaling the end of the dance, they parted.

  “Strow’s having some of the guys out to his place for a bonfire. You wanna come?”

  She did. So badly she did. Her mom was outside waiting to take her and Stacey home, and there was literally no way on Jesus’s good grand earth she’d be allowed to do this.

  “I can’t. But do you want my number?” This was 2000, before everyone carried cell phones. Her stomach ached for a pen—maybe someone had a locker in the cafeteria.

  He waved her away. “I’ll see you at school. We’ll figure it out.”

  For the entire weekend, she was sick with worry that he hadn’t meant this. She had numerous phone conversations with Stacey until they could get together for a sleepover Saturday night. They pored over the results of the first dance. Hailey Kowalczyk of course had gotten approached endlessly by Dan Eaton, though she wanted to dance with the quarterback, Curtis Moretti. Stacey claimed to have gotten attention from Jonah Hansen, Ron Kruger, and a cute sophomore, Ben Harrington. Tina assured Stacey that she’d grown pretty decent boobs over the summer, and Ben surely noticed. Stacey had also noted that Lisa Han, who Tina didn’t much care for on account of her hyper-foul mouth, had danced several times with Bill Ashcraft, whom Tina had once liked. And in all the spinning and tumbling of high school courtship, Tina attempted to segue back to her dance with 56, which seemed to her the much more interesting development. She told Stacey about 56 pressing it against her. Stacey said, “That’s like the worst-kept secret in school. My brother says they see each other’s dongs in the locker room, and all they do is compare.”

  Tina barked a laugh. “Boys are messed up.”

  “We should go back to throwing mud at them.” Then Stacey gave her a side-eyed glance. “You should be careful, though. I know him some through Matt. He only wants one thing from you.”

  She hated Stacey intensely for that comment, the way you can hate only a close friend so acutely. Shortly thereafter, she turned her back and pretended to sleep.

  On Monday, 56 found her between classes and asked her out for ice cream at Friendly’s. The anxiousness then transferred itself to what to wear, how to do her makeup, how many pimples would appear between now and then. She lied to her parents about who she was meeting and how she would get home, and her mom dropped her off (“Guess Stacey and them all aren’t here yet. It’s okay, I’ll just get a booth.”). Then she went around the corner to stand beneath the awning of a dentist’s office (William Ashcraft, DDS) and waited until she saw his huge black truck pull in.

  They sat across from each other with dueling glasses of ice cream sundae.

  “Want my cherry?” he offered. “I don’t like ’em.”

  “How can you not like cherries?” she exclaimed, taking it from his red-stained fingers. “That’s the best part. That’s why they say ‘the cherry on top.’ ”

  He was grinning, admiring her. “I like some cherries, just not these cherries.”

  “Oh, so you like the ones with pits still in?”

  He laughed hard at this, but she didn’t understand why. “That’s right. The ones with pits.”

  He took a large bite of his ice cream, his tongue volleying it into liquid.

  “My friend didn’t think you’d actually ask me out.”

  “What?” He swallowed a huge gulp of vanilla and fudge. “Why not?”

  “She said you could have any girl you wanted.” She amended Stacey’s comment. “So why a freshman?”

  “Your friend sounds jealous.”

  Yes, Stacey was jealous. That was so obvious to her now, sitting across from him with his letter jacket, black and patched with his football letter on the breast. His hair gelled into tiny, neat spikes over a heavy, severe brow. His smile that curled half of a thick, lovely lip. Who wouldn’t be jealous of her?

  “This is going to sound stupid,” he said. “Promise you won’t think I’m a creepy dork.”

  As if there was any way she could think this.

  “Last year I stayed over at Matt Moore’s house and the next morning I went with him and his family to church. Which was your church.”

  “Really? I never saw you there.” Oh, but she had. Now that they were older, she cursed Mrs. Moore’s new rule forbidding anything resembling a coed sleepover.

  “Naw, we were in the back, but I had this view of you the whole time, and man.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “I was just like, ‘That’s the most beautiful girl I ever seen in this town.’ ”

  He was blushing, which made a similar heat rush to her face. She looked down at the melting suds of her ice cream and tried not to smile like a mental patient.

  “Alls I knew was I had to be single when you finally got to high school.”

  He laughed loudly at himself, his face grew a shade pinker, and she finally lo
oked up to admire the jagged horizon of his top row of teeth.

  * * *

  She noticed the gas gauge dwindling. She had enough to make it to New Canaan and could get gas on her way back but . . . so many uncertainties lay on the other side of that. Like if she’d even be coming back. Better to do this menial task now, have the full tank, and be prepared for whatever happened between her and 56. She pulled off the highway into a Pilot station, reached for her debit card (mindful there was only $73 attached until the end of the month), and thought better of it. She had $14 in her wallet, enough for about four gallons. She rummaged in the change drawer and put together another $2.84. She put every last cent into the pump, giving the gas nozzle tense, spurting squeezes to land on $16.84 exactly. She tucked one of Cole’s ball caps onto her head, went inside, landed the money on the counter, said, “Got it exact,” and breezed back out. Perhaps it had been a bad idea to stop. She now regretted it, but love would keep her going. Love shoved aside second thoughts, regrets, fear. She had to do this. She had to see. No matter what it meant for her parents or poor, wonderful Cole.

  It had been difficult to learn to love him. In the weeks after he came to church with her family, they’d meet for lunch in the break room. Their conversation would be stop-and-go as they cast about for suitable topics. It was hard to look at his elongated, alien-shaped skull, the thin brown fuzz above his upper lip with one hairless vertical line, a scar from a cleft palet surgery he’d had as an infant.

  “Do you like carrots?” he asked, holding a baggie of slimy baby carrots.

  “Not really. They have no taste.”

  He nodded and pretended to pay enormous attention to snapping a Ziploc bag closed, folding it up, and putting it back in the plastic Walmart bag he always brought his lunch in.

  He aroused nothing in her, and she often found her mind wandering to any of the other men she’d been with. (Though it had been almost a decade, one in particular cast his ever-present ghost over her desire.) He asked her out several times, but she made excuses.

  “He’s awkward,” she explained to Beauty. “And it looks like God put the teeth in his mouth drunk.”

  Beauty’s head whipped back in laughter, and then she slipped quickly into a pout.

  “Not nice, Teen. He’s sweet. He just hasn’t had a lot of girlfriends, and the one he had—Sarah Wiloxi?—she wasn’t nearly as pretty as you. He’s just intimidated.”

  They were hidden in the bedding aisle, taking their time restocking. The store was as empty as it ever got, and Gary had the day off, which meant everyone was moving at an unafraid half speed.

  “He just doesn’t do much for me, you know? It ain’t like I need him to be Luke Bryan, but he’s just—argh, he reminds me of a big, tall bird. And he’s got that gross scar on his lip.” She shook her head. “I dunno. I was thinking of going out to the bars this weekend. Just seeing what’s out there with the fish in the sea situation.”

  Indeed, that weekend she found herself a sturdy boy in a camo Budweiser hat who might not have been Luke Bryan, but at least when she got around his beer gut there were strong arms and a broad back she could cling to, really wrap herself around. For a few months, she went on to see Darren of the camo hat (he never went without it, she realized, because he was covering a rather oddly clean bald spot on the top of his head). Maybe everything would have turned out differently with her and Cole if her dad hadn’t taken a fall on the ice following a winter storm in early 2010.

  He was coming out of F & S Flooring late, and someone must have missed a spot with the salt in the parking lot because her dad caught a slick piece and took a fall, shattering his hip. He was technically part-time at F & S, so no insurance, no workman’s comp, and the surgery alone pretty much wiped out her parents’ savings. Credit cards took a bite, and their lives became defined by interest payments and medical debt. Then there was the issue of caring for him once he got out of the hospital. Her mom had to cut back her hours at the YWCA to be home—and Tina had to be there whenever her mother wasn’t.

  Her dad, always fiercely independent, hated this, and it made him a difficult patient. Every four hours or so he’d have to go to the bathroom (though she suspected he held his bladder out of stubbornness sometimes). He also needed to be fed, helped to the shower seat, and his pill regimen enforced. She did physical therapy with him, extending his leg in different directions, yet even these slight movements made him grit his teeth, sweat, and mutter rare cusses. He’d never looked so old to her, shuffling along with his walker, jowels looser, the last of his hair vanishing from the top of his head to reveal dark, pulpy liver spots. One time when both she and her mom had no choice but to be at work he wet the bed, and when Tina found him, he was furious, not at her but for some reason at the doctors, who he was convinced had botched his surgery, which was the reason he still couldn’t walk.

  “Those incompetents butchered my leg,” he raved, slapping his water off his nightstand, scattering plastic mug, lid, and liquid across the floor. He’d calmed down only because this unusual rage had brought her to tears while she stooped to clean up the ice.

  Suddenly, without her dad’s hours and her mom working half as much, her parents were in serious trouble. Their church rallied to help. They brought food, raised money toward the bills, and put together a volunteer sign-up sheet for people to stay with him so that her mom could go back to work.

  But after a couple months that goodwill began to dissipate. People had worries of their own. You could see that plainly enough on Thursdays when the church provided to anyone who came—not just members—a free hot meal. She’d gone a few times with her parents in the years since they moved to Van Wert (“It’s just nice to take one meal of the week off the grocery list,” her mom liked to tell her dad when he was insistent that they didn’t need to go), but lately the church rec center had been getting ever more crowded. So crowded that the line sometimes went out the door. She and her mom went each week and brought a plate home for her dad until he could manage to get there using his walker. But one hot meal a week wasn’t enough, and Tina took on extra shifts, worked as much overtime as she could (although she was sure Gary was going into the computer and rounding down her hours). They made too much to apply for an EBT card, but her dad would never have allowed his family to take government handouts anyway. Van Wert had a food pantry where she could sometimes help her parents stretch paychecks, but even with extra dry cereal and Oodles of Noodles, they were overwhelmed.

  One day she went outside on her break to smoke a cigarette without Beauty as her partner in crime (something she did rarely) and cry (something she did frequently). Cole must have spotted her and followed. He found her trembling with the mitten portion pulled back from her glove so that the digits were free to hold the cigarette.

  “Everything all right?” he asked from ten feet away, like he was afraid to approach any closer.

  She wiped her face and snorted back snot.

  “It’s fine. I’m just a bit on the stressed side. My dad and all. Can’t wait to get my raise.” She laughed without knowing why. In April she was due for another $1.07 an hour. “It’ll make a big difference.”

  “Look, if y’all need help, I’d be glad to help out,” he offered. “We got sorta different schedules, you know? I could, like, come over and help out your dad when you and your mom are at work. That way maybe you could pick up more hours?”

  She sniffed, looked up at Cole. “Really?”

  “Sure, it wouldn’t be no problem. I really like your dad.” Said as if they’d met more than that one time.

  For some reason this made her cry even harder.

  “I mean, I don’t have to.”

  “No.” She sobbed, then sucked it all back in, wiped her tears with her jacket sleeve. “No, it’s just that’s really kind of you, Cole. Everyone’s been so kind.”

  And that was how Cole began spending a lot of time at their house, the little two bedroom on Jennings Road. He’d sit and watch sports with her dad, help
him to the bathroom, bring him newspapers or magazines, refill his water. One of the worst things about the injury was that her dad clearly needed the company. He hated being dependent on others, but Cole gave him an excuse. He could see it as just guys watching sports. Cole also brought over a lot of food. Casseroles and noodles and homemade burritos and salads and fried chicken and mac and cheese. Tina went from opening up their refrigerator and finding nothing but some butter, jam, and a dwindling loaf of bread to constantly finding Cole’s leftovers.

  “Cole, you cook all this?” her mom asked him. “Not so bad for a boy. Let alone a bachelor.” Her mom had never looked at 56 this way, with genuine surprise and fondness.

  “It was just me and my dad after my mom died, so we learned to cook together,” he explained.

  Tina knew how much it was probably costing Cole to do this, but at least her trips to the food pantry became less frequent.

  When she slept with him, it wasn’t necessarily as a thank-you. She’d started to think maybe there was something to what Beauty had said. There was something attractive about a person so selfless, so relentlessly decent, who clearly cared about her so much that he made her family the first priority in his life. Her parents went to the church’s Thursday night dinner, and she told them she wanted to skip to go see a movie with Cole. Instead, they went to her house, and he saw the ugliness of her stomach for the first time, heard her feeble explanation about a childhood accident while climbing a fence. He wasn’t nearly as bad in bed as she would have thought, and after kissing him that night, she stopped noticing the scar on his lip.

  * * *

  After gassing up, she kept on straight to New Canaan. The closer she got, the more she experimented in her head with what she’d say. She wanted so badly for it to be perfect, and now she’d spent weeks, possibly months (but really, years), thinking of what she’d tell him. Still, nothing seemed entirely right. How do you describe love, though? It was a totally ungrippable idea. A slick bar of soap you had to snatch out of the air with one wet hand.