by Barb Johnson
“I’m not afraid,” I say to Maggie’s back as she’s leaving.
“You are,” she calls over her shoulder. “And you’ve been smoking, too. But I know you. You’ll pull it together.”
“I’m still sorry,” Maggie said every morning for months after we got back together. I was still mad, still hurt or worried, or I don’t know what. What I did know was that I didn’t want her waiting around for the blessing of my forgiveness. I didn’t want it to be up to me to switch the light back on in our dark time. “Quit saying that,” I finally told her one morning, and she did. But she still hasn’t stopped waiting for a sign, a signal that the bad times are officially over.
The next time I go out for a smoke, my friend, Pudge, comes wobbling around the corner of the building. He sprained his ankle, or broke it, and he’s made a cane out of a piece of galvanized pipe. He clangs down the sidewalk with it, checks the pay phone for change, then leans against the wall next to me.
“He’s been sleeping in there,” I say, jutting my chin toward Luis, who’s still in the BMW. “And I don’t know how he got them, but I saw your dog tags hanging on the rearview mirror the other day.”
Pudge puts his hand to his chest where his dog tags have hung ever since I’ve known him. He nods and exhales, his breath flammable. “I know,” he sighs. “I know.” He lights a cigarette and looks away from the street. Luis is his son, though Pudge hasn’t gotten around to telling the boy. “Deysi told him his father died in the war,” Pudge blurted out late one night, years ago, long after we’d all heard that story from Deysi herself. Then he cried until he passed out drunk right about where we’re standing now.
I’m pretty sure Deysi has slipped down the rabbit hole of meth. Her boyfriend, Junior, is the neighborhood boss, and he has somehow sidestepped the efforts of Child Protective Services, which I’ve called twice. I’m not sure CPS would get Luis into a better situation anyway. Shouldn’t we all take care of him until Deysi can?
“Pudge,” I say. “I wish I could get him to sleep in the back.” I’ve turned the back storage shed into a guest room with all the amenities, including a door that can be bolted from the inside.
“Did you tell him the room is for him?”
“You know how Luis is,” I say. “You can’t give him anything without him thinking it’s a trick. He knows I leave it unlocked.”
“Well, maybe tell him not to go in there. You know, like reverse psychology.”
I try to think of what reverse psychology would get Pudge to pull himself together and take charge of his own son. “Hmm,” I say.
Out of the blue, he asks, “What was that old boy’s name that you were engaged to back in the day?”
“Calvin?”
Pudge pulls a card out of his wallet. Lafleur’s Windshield Magic is printed on it in an elaborate, raised script. Calvin Lafleur, Proprietor, it proclaims. Before Calvin quit Spanky’s Automotive, Maggie and I used to run into him and his wife, Janet, at the po-boy shop, which is right behind Spanky’s. I haven’t seen either of them now in a couple of years. “Where’d you get this?”
“Calvin Lafleur. He was fixing a windshield down the street.” Pudge turns back toward the BMW, checks on Luis, uses the side of the building to roll the ashes on the end of his cigarette into a neat cone. “He does good work,” Pudge says, meaning Calvin, I guess. “Said he could teach me the business.”
This last part sounds improbable. One look at Pudge and Calvin would write him off. “Did he remember you?” I ask. My loft dream floats up to my conscious mind, and I am tempted to believe that I have pulled Calvin into my present tense with just a dream.
Pudge tells me that Calvin didn’t seem to remember him. “I’ll tell you what, though,” he adds, “I didn’t remember him right off, either.” He strums the greasy strings of hair on top of his head. “But then I was just walking down the street the other night, and I thought, I know how I know him. That’s Delia’s old fiancé.”
Fiancé. I haven’t thought about Calvin that way in a long time. I cheated on my fiancé because I was in love with Maggie Kelly. I never told Calvin that. We split up not long after Maggie and I made music up in the loft that first time.
“You got an interest in that kind of thing, Pudge? Fixing windshields?”
“I-I gotta get him away from Junior,” Pudge sputters, nodding toward Luis.
“What’s that got to do with windshields?”
“Money, Delia. Real money that I could give to Deysi. Then she can tell Junior adios.” He shakes his head no then nods to himself like he’s listening to both sides of an argument. “Well, that’s not right, sleeping in a car,” he says indignantly. “And Deysi’s not gonna do anything. I mean, she can’t right now, you know?”
I do know. But I wonder what makes him think Deysi wouldn’t just hand the money over to Junior to buy the smoke that’s causing the problem in the first place. “Maybe time for a paradigm shift,” I try. Paradigm shift is a phrase Pudge used a lot back in the day. For a while he seemed committed to getting free of his dependence on his piss-poor veteran’s benefits, which were constantly being cut or arriving late or not at all. I’ll tell you what, he used to say. I’m sick of waiting on the VA to get their act together. The only one who can turn this thing around is me. It’s time for a paradigm shift.
Pudge ignores the paradigm thing and goes back to his business plan. “So you think he’s on the up-and-up? Calvin’s a good guy?”
“Calvin’s the best,” I assure him.
“Well, then all I gotta do is get the start-up money together, and I’ll be good to go.” He pauses to see if I’ll jump in to volunteer cash. I don’t. I never do. I’m pretty sure it’s why we’ve stayed friends so long. Pudge nods his mournful nod. The sharp bones of his face all point toward the cleft in his chin, the telltale chin that’s planted on Luis’s face as well. Pudge’s sunken cheeks make him look forever on the verge of tears. He’s told me that he was a fat child, which is hard to believe. He’s rail thin, with a high beer belly, no ass to speak of, his pants perpetually slipping toward his ankles.
While Pudge is waiting to be sure I’m not going to chip in start-up money for his business, he turns his attention to Luis. The boy has strapped a miner’s light on his head, and he’s flipping through the green catechism book I found stuffed under the front seat of the BMW one day when I was checking the car for drugs, for needles, for anything that might hurt Luis.
Without looking away from Luis, Pudge says, “Maggie told me you’re working pretty hard against having a party for your anniversary.”
“An anniversary party is just asking for it,” I tell him.
“Asking for what?”
“For trouble, Pudge. Remember last time?”
“Or maybe,” Pudge says, “maybe you’re yanking Maggie’s chain.”
I take a long drag and tip my head back to release a prayerful smoke signal, three rings floating up to heaven: Jesus, Mary and Joseph. “Yanking her chain? I’m not yanking her chain,” I tell Pudge. “What does that even mean?”
“It means that if Maggie thinks this anniversary party is a sign that everything’s okay, and everything’s not okay, Delia’s gonna keep the party from happening instead of saying everything’s not okay. ‘Maybe I’m going to make those invitations, and maybe I’m not.’ ‘Maybe I’ll send them out in time, maybe I won’t.’ ‘Maybe I’m over what you did, maybe I’m not.’”
“That’s some logic you got there.” I pick at a chip of paint on the side of the building, exposing bare wood. Layers and layers of old lead paint. I squeeze the little chunk of poison between my fingers. “What you just said there? That doesn’t make a lick of sense. That is not how Maggie and I work.”
“Yeah, I know. You and Maggie have been to therapy, and now you talk through your differences. Now you’re all mature about what’s eating you.” Pudge shakes his head side to side. “You can’t shit me, Delia Delahoussaye. You think this party is some kind of big sign that you’ve move
d on, and you’re not sure if you’re ready to be over it entirely.”
“Uh, headline: I’ve been over it, Pudge. It’s been over. We’ve already moved on.”
“Then why haven’t you sent out the invitations yet?”
“Why are you so worried about what I’m doing or not doing?”
“Hmm,” Pudge says, payback for hmm-ing him earlier. He puts his cigarette out on the bottom of his shoe and drops the butt into his pocket. Lights two more and hands one to me.
After that, we smoke quietly. It’s a comfortable silence. Except for the very obvious, Pudge is my perfect mate.
While the sky was still falling after our last anniversary, after our breakup, our separation, my brother, Dooley, had an anniversary of his own. Years before, he parked his truck outside a baby boutique and left his daughter sleeping in the crappy car seat he hoped to replace with one he’d seen in the window of the store. Just a spontaneous decision. He could’ve driven on home. He could’ve gotten that car seat another day, but he stopped that day and left his baby in the truck because she needed a nap and had finally fallen asleep. When he came out of the store—just a few minutes later, he always emphasizes when he tells the story, which isn’t often—his daughter had died of heatstroke. In just a few minutes. And last year, on the tenth anniversary of that awful day, Dooley went into a tailspin and ended up on the psych ward at Charity.
It was Maggie I called first. It was Maggie who sat with me, who sat with Dooley, who took a leave of absence from her job to take care of the Laundromat. She left us only to sleep at the breakup apartment she rented a few streets over from our house.
“Come home,” I said to her one night on the phone. “This is stupid. Just come home.”
There’s real trouble in the world. The kind that can’t be fixed. The kind we lie awake keeping vigil against. Love is not trouble. It is all we have to light our days, to bring music to the time we’ve been given.
When there are only two weeks left before the big day, I still haven’t started the invitations. I’m in the Laundromat’s big kitchen, folding and wrapping, and Maggie comes in to quiz me. “How’s the invitation going?” she asks. Maggie’s a patient person, but her tone says she’s about had it with me.
“I’m working on it.” And maybe I am. It always takes me a while to know what I’m actually up to.
Maggie goes back out front. I follow her. I want to tell her that I’m not sure why I’m dragging my feet. I want to tell her about the conversation I had with Pudge last week. I want to invite her up to the loft so we can make a little music, some soulful cello, the sweet strings of the violin. The ta-da of horns. And, since the affair, the inescapable jangle of the cowbell, the misstep. Words have a way of swimming off in the wrong direction, but music is always true. Before I can say any of this, I notice a blank spot on the wall.
“Hey,” I say. “Where’s the picture of Saravuth?” Saravuth is one of the men whose fight face Maggie has captured and hung on the wall.
“Shot.” Maggie sighs. “I gave the picture to his brother to carry at the funeral.”
Maggie goes to sit out front, and I stay to stare at the rash of empty spots on the wall. One a month, almost, is how fast the men disappear. There’s real trouble in the world.
The day the party is supposed to happen it rains. Hard. Palmyra Street floods quickly and often—ankle deep, shin deep in a rain like this—and I think I might not have to confess after all. If I’m lucky, it’ll flood, and Maggie will think that’s why no one came.
I told Pudge we were having the party, of course, and Big Luce, his old aunt, who owns the building that the Bubble is in and who serves as the Den Mother of Us All. Dooley’s band will come. Enough for a party, I guess. I should’ve mailed the invitations. I made them, showed them to Maggie, even, but then I dropped the whole stack in a box of comics Pudge put out in the shed for Luis.
Six inches of water has collected in the street, and it gurgles around the bottom of the BMW’s tires. I slosh over to check the car’s interior and find Luis sound asleep in the backseat. In the front, rainwater drips rhythmically through the bullet hole in the windshield, keeping time to Luis’s dreams. When I knock, he jumps up with his fight face on.
“Come on and get some biscuits,” I tell him and wade back to the Laundromat.
Maggie is at home. She and Dooley are cooking for the nonexistent party tonight. I’m supposed to be decorating, moving the folding tables around to make room for the dancing. Big Luce came to the Laundromat this morning and brought me biscuits for breakfast, along with a case of lemon ices for the party.
Luis empties half a jar of fig preserves onto a couple of biscuits. High from all the sugar, he zips around the room helping me put up decorations. He stops and points at the newest empty spot on the wall. “Saravuth got a dirt nap.”
I say, “He sure did.”
“He was a badass, but they still got him anyway.”
I want to tell Luis something helpful; I want to say, I got your back, no matter what. But having somebody’s back is what you do, not what you say. “People don’t have to shoot each other to get their point across,” I try. I check Luis’s face to see if this makes any difference to him. It doesn’t seem to. “I mean, you can talk about why you’re mad, you know. Work things out,” I say. Like Luis and I are on some jacked-up version of Sesame Street. When you care about someone, there’s no end to the ways you can fail them.
Luis shrugs, climbs up a ladder near the front window and loops one end of the lanterns on a hook put there for just that purpose. He runs upstairs to the loft with the other end and threads it between two balusters. Back and forth, back and forth, he goes between the balusters and the hook over the window until the lanterns fan out in a V that creates a canopy of light between the two places. He looks down to where I’m stuck staring at the empty spot Saravuth has left. “Shootin is just lazy,” he announces.
I have no idea what he means by this. Even his tone is hard to figure. I wish Maggie were here. She’d know the right words.
I go in the back and get the big extension cord to connect all the strings of lanterns. When I plug it into its usual place, nothing happens. Then I remember that we overloaded that socket at the last party, and it blew. “Help me pull this out,” I say, and we jerk at the snack machine, which no one has cleaned behind since Big Luce had her Laundromat here. The opening reveals years and years of compacted lint and dirt and squashed detergent boxes used to level the machine’s feet. There’s a child’s handmade valentine and an empty bottle of Pop Rouge, which hasn’t been available for quite a while. I sweep the mess out and give the plug to Luis, who’s small enough to slip right into the gap behind the machine.
“Look at this,” I say, pulling the valentine from the pile of trash. A red magic-marker heart contains a child’s profession of love: Crazy for Deysi. “Did you make this?” I ask Luis.
“That’s my mama’s name.”
The valentine is printed on the kind of paper we wrap the pickup laundry in, but a thicker, sturdier version; like the Pop Rouge, that grade of paper hasn’t been around for quite a while. “Did you make this?” I ask again.
“You can’t call your mama by her name.”
I hand Luis the old valentine, proof of some bygone love. “Bring this to your mama,” I tell him. “Girls like to know they’re wanted. Even big girls. Especially big girls.”
“We’re still us,” Maggie said, after her suitcases had been emptied, after her clothes once again hung next to mine in the big closet upstairs. Months and months ago, this was.
“We’re not,” I argued, directing Maggie to the spare bedroom—the punish corner, she called it. “We’re all broken to pieces, and we are not still us.”
A few hours before the party is supposed to start, Dooley and the guys from the band are setting up at the front of the Laundromat. Maggie and I are in the kitchen emptying chips into bowls, transferring beer from the pantry to the big galvanized washtubs in the next
room. There’s food for a hundred people here, and I can’t stand to think what’s going to happen when Maggie finally figures out that I haven’t invited anybody. That this is it. Next to Maggie, at the sink, a drop of water swells at the mouth of the spigot. I look away so I don’t have to watch it fall.
“Maggie,” I say, finally, when she pulls out a warming tray for the barbecued shrimp. She’s not looking at me. She thinks I’m going to ask where the rest of the ice is. She thinks she’s going to say, Out in the shed, and I’m going to go get it. “Maggie,” I say again, and my tone makes her look right at me. “I messed up.”
“Did you forget to get more ice?” she asks. “You always do that. It’s like you do it on purpose.”
“I didn’t send the invitations,” I say, and Maggie’s face tenses almost immediately, the way it does when she’s asleep, when she’s trying to connect the dots without talking.
“But you showed them to me. They looked great.”
“I didn’t send them, though.”
“Goddammit, Delia.” Maggie slams the warming tray onto the counter, jabs the plug into the outlet and turns her back on me. “If you didn’t want to have this party, why didn’t you just say so?”
“I tried to.”
Maggie whips back around to face me. She’s puffing her cheeks, trying not to cry.
I should feel like an asshole right about now, but I don’t. I feel the gash of the affair opening again, just a little, a tear in my soul that just won’t heal. Its presence makes me furious. “I told you I didn’t want to have this fucking party. I told you. I told you every way I knew how, Maggie.”
“Well, if this is your way of doing a little ‘Got you last,’ congratulations. I feel gotten.” Maggie fires out the back into the courtyard, the screen door banging against the building and then slapping back into the door frame. My face burns with the angry sound of it. I should probably go after her. We should probably try to talk about it, like we learned in therapy. But I don’t want to talk. Instead, I finish moving beer from the pantry to the galvanized tubs. Enough beer so that each invited guest can consume a case if she chooses.