Pieces

by Stephen Chbosky

  “Well, I appreciate your help,” Mrs. Higgins said.

  It took Cary a minute to figure out that Mrs. Higgins was telling him, nicely, to leave her alone. But before he walked off, Louise rounded the corner, still scratching her shoulders. She locked eyes with Cary. Mrs. Higgins’s back was to Louise, so she wasn’t yet aware that her daughter had walked up. And maybe Cary imagined what happened next, but when Louise grinned at him—tilted, cocky—he thought that she was letting him know that she was fully aware that he was onto her and that she knew he would never do anything about it. It was as if she knew about the pills, about Cary’s breakdown, about his father.

  • • •

  Cary ran out of pills a few days later, and he spent that night tossing around in his bed, falling in and out of odd, obnoxious dreams, finally waking up at five because peaceful sleep was impossible, apparently. That next day while he was unloading new magazines at Harco, he tried to figure out when he could snag a new stash. He usually took the pills at lunch, but he hadn’t assisted Laskin for a few days and found no excuse to be back in the pharmacy. The next best time to steal them was whenever he worked at night, when the pharmacy was closed, when he could fix it so that he would be the only worker at the back counter near closing time. But he hardly ever had to work at night and wasn’t scheduled to do so for another few days. He began to think that he wouldn’t be able to pull it off anymore. He tried not to panic—after all, he didn’t need them.

  When he looked up from the crate of new magazines, Louise stood before him, staring at him. He didn’t know how long she had been there.

  “Hi, Louise,” he said.

  She looked away, fast, like he had scared her. She fiddled with her hair and walked back to her favorite aisle. Cary didn’t follow her immediately, but finished unpacking the glossy magazines that all smelled of expensive perfume.

  When he found Louise, she was fingering bottles of shampoo, big bottles that she couldn’t possibly place on her body inconspicuously. He walked up to her this time, instead of waiting to catch her in a steal. “Hi, Louise, I’m Cary. Our mothers know each other. Remember?”

  “I don’t remember you,” she said. She moved away from him, swung her hair out of her face.

  He followed. “How’s your mother?”

  She grasped another bottle of shampoo and held it in her hand like a phone, close to her ear. “What?”

  “How are you?”

  “Leave me alone,” she said. She turned away, still holding the bottle.

  “Okay,” he said. He let out an awkward, nervous laugh and stood where he was. “I’ve seen you steal, you know.”

  She made no expression but instead opened the bottle and sniffed inside. “This smells like cow piss,” she said and made a gagging face.

  “I could report you if I wanted.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now would you let me shop in peace? I’ll complain to the manager if you don’t stop.”

  “Okay,” he said again, and this time he walked back to the magazine rack, though he’d already finished placing them on the shelves. He tried to interest himself in the cover tag lines because his heart was pounding: “Six Things NOT to Say During a Breakup,” “What She Wants to Hear After Sex,” “How to Say You’re Sorry—Again.” He wondered who wrote such articles, who led such lives that they could proffer advice like this. Didn’t they have problems? How had they come by their wisdom? He wanted to snatch them all up—women’s and men’s magazines, it didn’t matter—and read like crazy, to see if anything in there really could help. Then he heard sneakers squishing closer and he looked up. Louise shuffled past him, out the door. She carried a green bottle of Pert shampoo in one hand and shot Cary the bird with the other.

  • • •

  At home that night Cary was tense and restless. He had not been able to steal any pills, after all. He was sitting on the floor of his room when Wes knocked and came in.

  “Hey, Champ, your mom said to get ready for dinner.”

  Cary nodded at him. He realized he was still wearing his Harco uniform, which was just a crimson red shirt top tucked into khaki pants, with the name tag pinned over his heart.

  “We’re going out to the new Italian place by the river.”

  Cary just nodded again.

  “You okay?” Wes asked, coming farther into the room, pulling out the desk chair and sitting down.

  It was Wes who “rescued” Cary from his lock-in stupor all those months back. His mother had apparently sent him over to check on him. Cary remembered Wes’s repeated knocking followed by the explosion of the door nearly falling off of its hinges. Very cinematic of Wes. Wes later said that Cary was lying on the floor next to the couch with a thick literature anthology lying open next to an empty box of tissues, the carpet littered with crumbs. After talking to Cary, trying to rouse him, Wes picked him up from the ground and carried him like a bride over the threshold and took him to the condo. His mom had started crying when Wes plopped him down on the bed in the guest room—his room now—and left them alone. The next day, after sleeping on it, she would blame his little incident on stress, but that night, wiping her eyes with her thumbs, she said, “It’s all my fault, isn’t it? It is.”

  “Cary?” Wes asked again. He had leaned forward in the chair and was waving his hand in front of Cary.

  “Oh, sorry. Yeah, I’ll be ready in a minute.”

  Wes walked out of his room cautiously, as if at any moment Cary might have some sort of seizure. When he was gone, Cary pulled open the drawer again and took out the Vitamin-C bottle, shook it to confirm that it was, in fact, empty. He still hadn’t changed shirts or moved from the floor when he heard his mother shout from downstairs, “Cary, are you ready?”

  • • •

  At work the next day he had to rearrange some shelves, replenishing stock where needed, filling up the blank spots, making things look full and bountiful, that sort of thing. Dale was helping him, but Cary really didn’t listen to what Dale was saying, because he kept hoping to find a way to get to the pharmacy. But the opportunity never presented itself. In the afternoon, still at the same duty, he started looking for Louise, but the afternoon faded into evening and she never showed up. But ten minutes before he got off from work, Mrs. Higgins appeared. Cary was making room for packages of Q-tips when he saw her walking toward him. She carried a brown paper sack.

  “How are you?” she said.

  He nodded and was about to make pleasant chat, but she didn’t let him. “I need to talk with you. Do you have a moment?”

  “I get off in about five minutes.”

  “Perfect. I’ll wait outside for you.” She smiled weakly at him—it was more like a quick tensing up of her lips than a smile—and walked away.

  After he filled out his time sheet and said his good-byes, he walked outside and found her waiting by a newspaper dispenser. He noticed for the first time that she was in her tennis skirt and a jacket, wearing a visor even though the sun was rendered red-pink behind the evening clouds. She suggested they go over to her car—a Volvo station wagon—but they didn’t sit inside, just stood by it.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked, as if they were in the store still and she needed assistance.

  “Well, Louise talks about you all the time. She says very nice things about you.”

  His throat was dry. “What does she say?” he asked.

  “Well, Cary, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. You see, Louise says you give her things from the store. Because you like her, she says.”

  “I give her things?”

  She nodded her head and gave him that anemic smile again. “See, she no longer gets an allowance from me or her father—she only wasted it, and we thought she needed to learn a lesson about money, that it doesn’t grow on trees, you know. Louise said she told you all this at the store?”

  “Of course,” Cary said, stunned. It was like he had walked into a movie theater and the movie was already halfway throu
gh and he couldn’t follow things. He almost turned to try to find someone who could explain it all to him. Rush-hour car horn honks started at the intersection at the end of the parking lot.

  She continued: “Well, even after we stopped giving her money, she always brought things back with her. She tried to hide it at first, but I must admit I snooped in her bathroom and found all of this, this stuff.” She laughed and shrugged her shoulders, but Cary knew she wasn’t really feeling guilty about snooping; he could tell she thought it was her right as a parent. “So I asked her how she got those things, and she told me they were gifts, from you. She said you felt sorry for her, having no money. She called you ‘that nice tall boy with the tired-looking eyes.’ I knew immediately who she was talking about.”

  “I think you’ve got this all wrong.”

  But she was too wrapped up in her own story and ignored him. “Now, Cary, as much as I appreciate getting presents and as much as I appreciate someone being so kind to my daughter, these gifts really should stop. I don’t think it’s healthy, really. A grown man giving gifts to a teenage girl?”

  Cary had never heard himself referred to as a “grown man.” It rattled him. He paused a few minutes and said, “There’s been some misunderstanding, Mrs. Higgins. You see . . . I mean, Louise steals those things.” He didn’t look up to see her expression. “I let her do it, I see her do it, and for some reason I haven’t stopped her.”

  “Steals?”

  “Yes, ma’am, she steals. I don’t want her to get in any trouble. Louise has a problem, I guess, but—”

  “No, no—you’re the one with the problem,” she said. She fiddled with her visor, situating it better on her head, took a deep breath, and seemed hesitant in what she was about to say. “I know about you, Cary. Everyone always refers to you as that Dinsmore boy. Loraine and John’s son.”

  Cary wanted to find his car and drive away, or maybe go back into the comfort of the store. But he couldn’t help picturing people at dinner tables, talking about him, pitying him, some maybe laughing at him. He pictured Jackie and her tennis partners, trading volleys at the net, laughing and talking about the “poor Dinsmore boy,” so depressed, so nuts, so broken up about his father and his slutty mother who drove the man away. Once a bright kid, that Dinsmore boy, now a college dropout, stocking shelves at Harco. Suddenly, Cary felt sick to his stomach. And he ached, ached for a pill. He wanted to float away from this place.

  “I sympathize with you, Cary, I do. I understand your problems, and I sincerely hope you work through them one day. You can’t help it, considering certain things.” She gave him a knowing glance. “But please, don’t start making silly accusations about my daughter.” Her tone had shifted from phony concern to real, tentative anger. “I wanted to give this back to you.” She handed him the paper bag she had been carrying. “I tolerated your giving gifts to Louise, at first. But with this you went a bit too far.”

  He looked into the bag and saw a white box. He pulled it out and looked at it for a moment, at the pink and blue writing, the cropped picture of a man holding a woman, both of them smiling. Even after he read the product name—Easy Step—it took him a few moments to register that this was a home pregnancy kit. He quickly jammed it back in the bag. He couldn’t look at Mrs. Higgins now, so he just stared at his shoes. But he could feel her peering at him, and all he could think about was Louise having sex with some pimpled boy or Louise having sex with Dale in the back alley. He looked up. “I don’t know what’s going on here,” he said. “Louise steals those things. She shoves these things down her shirt. I’ve seen her. And one day she’s going to get caught.” He said this all without raising his voice.

  “I see, and you let her do this, you let her steal? No. Listen, please stop giving Louise gifts, or I’ll have to talk to your manager.”

  “Talk to Louise,” he said. “You need to talk to her,” he said.

  Jackie opened up her car door and got in, smoothed her skirt out, fastened her seat belt, ready to shut the door and drive away.

  “She dresses like a tramp. How can you let her look that way?” he said, walking to her door and resting his hand on it so she couldn’t close it. “Mrs. Higgins, she steals those things.”

  “Take your hand off the door.”

  “She steals.” His voice was still quiet; he felt choked.

  “Get some help.”

  He moved his hand and she slammed the door. But before she drove off, she rolled down the window. “If Louise brings home one more of these gifts, I’m talking to your manager.”

  After she was gone he stood there for a minute, with the bag clutched to his chest. He dropped it on the ground and found his way to his car. On the drive home he felt as if someone had lurched up out of the dark and slapped him a good one. It was the same kind of feeling he had gotten when his father had left him a note on his bed a few years back, explaining that he had found work in Texas and had to leave right away, to settle in. An empty, stunned sort of anger, with a sort of powerlessness about it. The worst thing was that his father left while Cary was working as a youth counselor at the Episcopal church camp, where the kids drank wine coolers and smoked clove cigarettes and some even had oral sex down by the creek. He had hated it, the responsibilities, the kids he was supposed to counsel—all of them surly and spoiled. Being a counselor had been his mother’s idea—it will look good on your resume, she said, it will show leadership. But all he did there was get bitten by mosquitoes and read scripture, sing a few songs, and drink cheap beer smuggled in by one of the other counselors.

  When Cary got home from camp after two weeks, dropped off by the church-owned bus, his mother met him at the door and hugged him, smothered him. His father and mother had been having problems—arguing over how she spent money, how he worked too much, how she flirted like it was a sport; through the years they’d always fought and made up, but as they, and Cary, got older, the fights grew in number and the apologies shrank. Sometimes Cary found it hard to believe they’d ever been in love enough to have a child.

  Of course, the camp gig was a way for them to get Cary away from home while they dealt with the sticky, logistical divorce details, which they’d finally decided on. So when he saw his mother at the door the night of his return, he somehow knew then that his father was gone. He walked, slowly, to his room and found the note. It was written on a piece of a grocery bag, in a felt-tip pen, the scrawl barely legible. Just a note about Texas, his new start, where he promised Cary could visit. Soon. While he read it—over and over again, all seven lines of it—his mother told him that his father had wanted to visit him at camp, to explain things.

  “But I told him he shouldn’t,” she explained.

  “You did, huh?” he said, but he could barely speak much more than those few words because he was choking. He had so many words he wanted to shout at her right then.

  His mother hugged him from behind, and he stood rigid. Then he felt her begin to cry and shake, and her tears started wetting the back of his shirt. Eventually she pulled away, sniffling.

  “See, I knew he would just upset you, and I wanted you to have a good time before you came home.” She went on and on, and only stopped when Cary climbed under his covers and started shouting, finally, into his pillow.

  • • •

  After he got home from Harco, Cary sat in his room the whole night, claiming he had a stomachache. His mother brought him Pepsi and crackers but mostly left him alone. He fell asleep with his clothes on and woke up while it was still dark out. He wasn’t set to work until the afternoon, but he showered that morning, put back on his uniform, and went to Harco anyway.

  When Cary entered the store, he saw Dale unloading packages of gum at the candy stand below the front counters.

  “What are you doing here?” Dale said, glancing up, then back down again, as if unloading gum required his full attention. “You don’t work until later.”

  “I just wanted to stop by.” Before Dale could respond, Cary felt a tap on h
is shoulder and turned to see Mr. Haynes.

  “I didn’t expect you until the evening, Cary.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Cary smiled. “I didn’t have anything to do, so I thought I’d drop by to see if you needed me.”

  Dale stood up and walked off with the empty gum box without saying a word.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re here now,” Mr. Haynes said. He was wearing a light blue long-sleeved shirt with a too-short brown tie, a pocket protector empty of any pens, and his tiny glasses that made him look benevolent, like Benjamin Franklin. A kind man. Cary wanted to hug him.

  “I’d like to talk with you in my office.”

  “Sure,” Cary said.

  “Well, why don’t we go on back.”

  When Cary sat down in the back office—just as he had months ago when Mr. Haynes interviewed him—Cary all of a sudden felt that everything was wrong, especially when Mr. Haynes shut the door behind him. He was no longer a calming presence, but a threatening one. Had Mrs. Higgins already called him as she had threatened? Cary sat there with a chilled dread rising up in him.

  Mr. Haynes wasted no time, offered no cushioning buildup to what he was about to say. “Cary, I know you’ve been stealing pills.”

  Cary was silent but he looked Mr. Haynes in the eye. “It’s not my shift right now, as I said, but I could mop up if you want. The floors look sort of dirty,” he said.

  “Laskin did inventory last week and noticed them missing. Now, we began questioning employees and, well, someone has said that they saw you actually doing it. Stealing the pills. Do you want to deny it?”

  Cary just sat there. Dale, it was Dale who told—he was sure.

  “Are you in trouble, Cary? Are you okay?”

  “What?” he said, still trying to process what was happening.

  “Cary, I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.”

  On Mr. Haynes’s desk the picture frames were all turned down. It was unbelievable, Cary thought. Why have pictures and not look at them? Cary picked up a brass frame. In it was a photo of a heavy woman in a blue dress, perhaps Mr. Haynes’s wife or sister. She held a white rabbit, a real one, and a carrot. She stood in front of a church and she was squinting because it was sunny.