by Deb Caletti
“Depressed,” Nick says out loud. “I ought to know.”
“I vote with the gals,” Joe says. “Gay. Too pretty. Manicured nails. Probably never even been to a boxing match in his life.”
“But I bet he’s been to Rio,” Trina says.
“Italy,” Jane says.
“Why buy a mattress an-y-where else,” Luigi sings.
My shift is almost over when Funny lifts her head from the notebook she’s been writing in. “Has anyone thought about all the places you’ve ever laid your head?” she asks. “All the places you’ve ever woken up?”
Leroy walks in then. He’s so much later than usual, I had given up on him coming in at all. The bells on the door jangle, but still he’s heard Funny’s question. He raises up his hand, as if the teacher might call on him. Under his right forearm is a mermaid, with twisty golden hair. “Do backseats count?”
“Rough night?” Nick asks. He says it with a bit of longing. Nick is this nice, straight guy who would’ve had this nice, straight life had his wife not fallen down those stairs.
“Anyone got aspirin?” Leroy says.
“I do,” Funny says. She lifts her purse, rattles what sounds like twenty pill bottles in there.
“Eighteen places,” Jane says. She scrunches her nose around instead of itching it. Jane’s got allergies. “I counted eighteen places I’ve woken up. No, nineteen. One airport chair in Dallas during a layover.”
“Seventy, eighty?” Trina says.
Nick whistles.
“Roger and I did a lot of traveling. And then you’ve got…miscellaneous apartments.”
Nick blushes. He takes a sip of water that has maybe three or four flat shards of ice left in it.
“God, Trina,” I say.
“Some were just friends,” she says.
I’m almost embarrassed to admit my answer. “Five or six,” I say. Mom’s, Dad’s, camping trip with Dad, Bomba and Bompa’s. Ramada Inn with Dad. I add another, just because five seems too pathetic. I refill Nick’s water glass; the new ice sloshes in merrily.
“You’re young,” Leroy says. He winks at me. Leroy and I understand each other.
“Hundreds,” Joe says. “Hundreds and hundreds. But then again, I’m old.”
“So old, Jesus was in your math class,” I say. I crack myself up. “You probably toured the country with your boxing, right?” Jane says. She clips Jack to his leash, getting him ready for his late-morning pee. Whenever Jack sees his leash, it’s like he’s looking at two plane tickets for around the world, even if he’s just going to the corner and back.
“Oh yeah. For years. When I got back, my family barely knew who I was.” Joe’s big hand is covered with wrinkles that look like the chocolate piping on Harold’s cakes. It’s a hand that trembles, though, as he brings a triangle of toast to his mouth and crunches.
“Well, they know you now. Look at that picture they sent. Beautiful baby granddaughter,” Jane says. Joe’s got the photo propped up against a water glass.
“With her in Saint Louis, I’ll be lucky to see her before I’m dead,” Joe says, chewing. He has a lump of toast in one cheek.
“This is getting goddamned dark,” Funny says.
“You’ll see her someday,” Jane says. “Don’t give up hope.” Jack pulls her to the door like he’s a sled dog and she’s the sled. Jack is an old dog, but strong, same as Joe. If you ever saw Joe arm-wrestle Leroy, you’d know what I mean.
Right then, Bill and Marty come in, these two guys that work at True Value with Nick. I pretend I don’t know their names, even though I do. Actually, we all pretend we’ve never even seen them before. This is in keeping with the Respect Hierarchy of Names, which naturally progresses from the reverential first-name-last-name-plus-bonus-points-initial (John F. Kennedy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edward R. Murrow) all the way down to the bottom of the ladder, the hazy description (That Guy from Safeway, What’s-His-Name). One step below that are the folks so little deserving of respect you pretend their existence is forgettable. This is Bill and Marty.
Bill wears a camouflage baseball hat, which might tell you all you need to know. Marty has a mustache, though no one has a mustache anymore. Nick gives a little wave and smile that means I know you, sure, but don’t sit here. But Bill and Marty don’t get the finer points of social etiquette, because they head right on over to sit at Nick’s table. Nick isn’t dressed that differently from them—jeans and a short-sleeve chambray shirt, but it’s like a couple of Coors cans have just been set on the table with a martini.
“Hey, Killer,” Bill says.
Nick grimace-smiles. “It gets funnier every time you say it,” Nick says. “Ha, ha, ha.”
“I hope they’ve got corned beef hash,” Marty says. He takes his napkin and wipes his mouth, as if there’s some layer of slime there even he can’t stand.
“Excuse me,” Nick says. “I was just heading out.”
Nick rises and walks to the register to pay, takes his wallet from his back pocket. He still wears his grimace-smile. “Should I spit in their coffee?” I whisper.
“Arsenic’s better.”
I give Nick some thin mints wrapped in green foil. Nick’s face just makes you want to give him something. This is the kind of shit he takes from these guys day in and day out. I’d love to tell them off myself, but Jane says they’re our customers. This means that we may secretly hate them but still have to smile and take their money.
“See ya, Killer,” Bill says one more time and waves.
“Ooh, boy, you got me again!” Nick says. He pushes open the door and goes through it, his back looking sadder than I’ve ever seen a back look.
I give the idiot bookends their menus, but luckily Zach (who works the afternoon shift) arrives, so I don’t have to serve them. Instead, I untie my apron and lift it over my head and grab my backpack from the back. I cut a piece of apple pie with crumble top and wrap it up in foil for Mom, say good-bye to the Irregulars.
Trevor isn’t there yet, but I see Jane and Nick talking at the curb. Jack stands politely, alert as a secret service agent, his eyes surveying the territory for any criminal cat, squirrel, or bird activity. Suddenly, though, I can’t believe my eyes when I look down at Jane’s hand. I feel a rising wave of anger. Now, I’m not what anyone would call conservative—people at my school probably called me anything but that. I think they thought I was weird, but I noticed that every time I changed my hair, a bunch of girls would come the very next week with an attempted version of it until I changed again. I didn’t really care, which is exactly what my friend Melanie said people loved and hated about me.
But I’m straight about one thing, and that’s smoking and drugs, and I’m not sure why I’m so crazy about it except that drugs fucked up Trevor’s life for a while and cigarettes are just nasty. We had this police officer come to our class in the fifth grade, and she brought us glass jars filled with a healthy person’s lung tissue (aside from the fact that the lung tissue was minus a body, which is not generally a healthy thing) and a smoker’s lung tissue. The former was pink and spongy-looking and cheery, and the latter was this desperate, dingy shade of gray that made you think of motel rooms where crimes had been committed. You saw this sad lung as a hopeful straight-A student who’d somehow tragically descended into a life of heroin and prostitution and had died with a needle in her arm. That’s how gray and wretched it looked. I never forgot it, and it frankly just pisses me off to see people smoke, knowing what they are doing to their poor, formerly positive lungs.
So anyway, I look down, and there’s this cigarette held between Jane’s fingers, and it’s right down by her side where Jack is just breathing all this shit. And Jane doesn’t even smoke.
“What are you doing!” I shriek.
Jane looks a little shocked. She swivels her head around as if there must be some robber with a bag of loot running around somewhere nearby. There’s the crime, right in her own hand, and she doesn’t even realize it.
“No! You! There!”
I point.
“Indigo, jeez,” she says. “You scared me to death.”
She thinks I’m kidding, but I’m not. “You should be scared to death, ’cause you’re certainly gonna put Jack in a coffin, not to mention yourself.”
She looks down at herself. I can’t believe it. She still doesn’t get it.
“Your cigarette,” Nick offers helpfully.
She holds it up as if she has no idea how it got there. “This?”
“Ugh, God, put it out, I can smell it,” I say. I wave my hand in front of my face. I hold my breath so none of the three thousand toxins and tars and chemicals can get in.
“It is a nasty habit,” Nick says, giving me another reason why I like that guy. “I didn’t even know you smoked,” he says.
“I don’t,” Jane says.
“This is just a mirage,” I say.
“No, I mean, I haven’t. For years. Wait,” she says. “Why am I explaining myself to you people? I’m a grown woman. I can smoke if I want.” But she tosses the burning stick of tar and chemicals to the sidewalk and smashes it with her heel.
I say the one thing I know will affect her, whether it’s true or not. “Smoking is for Republicans.”
“That’s just mean,” she says to me. “I’ve been under a little stress lately,” she says to Nick. “In regard to what we were just discussing.”
“I can imagine,” he says.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing,” Jane says.
“What!” I ask again.
“If I wanted everyone to know, I’d get a billboard.”
I let it go, because just then we hear knocking on the glass of Carrera’s. We look that direction, and there’s Bill in his yeah-right-I-almost-mistook-you-for-a-tree hat, gesturing heartily at Nick. He’s waving, then pantomimes slashing his finger across his throat, drops his head down and gaggles his tongue out.
“God, I wish I could get out of this place,” Nick says.
I hear the growling rumble of Trevor’s Mustang before I see the car itself. Then it turns the corner, pulls up along the curb. Trevor parks, gets out, opens the door for me. For a reformed pot-head, he knows how to be a gentleman.
Trevor doesn’t kiss me, because he also knows how I feel about public displays of affection in front of my boss. I say good-bye to Jane and Nick, edge onto the cream-colored seats that Trevor says are “pony interior,” though I don’t have a clue what that means, other than there are horses on the seat backs.
“God, I’m starving,” Trevor says. “Cheeseburger. Beef attack, baby! Fries, shake. You don’t mind if I stop, right?”
I guess everyone is hungry for something.
3
“Baby, look at this,” Trevor says. He taps the odometer in front of the steering wheel, and I lean over him, my elbow on his thigh. We’re in the parking lot of XXX Root Beer, which sounds like a porn theater, but is one of the last drive-ins in the history of mankind or at least in the Seattle area, and has the best hamburgers you’ve ever had in your life, with buns as big as salad plates. Trevor’s got the top down because it has gotten warm, and there are napkins and balls of crumpled foil on the floor around us. Carnivorous massacre. The Battle of the Burger.
“Two hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred sixty,” I read.
“You know what that means.”
I’d been with Trevor long enough to guess. We met two years ago when I was walking home from school past the Mountain Academy, which is where the druggies and pregnant girls go when they get shunned from regular society. Trevor was one of the former. Now he’s formerly of the former. When we met, I was in my crunchy phase—natural, no makeup, braids, sandals, flowy gauze skirts. I’d started the guitar the year before, still couldn’t play worth crap, but I wanted to be Joan Baez, who was even before Mom’s time, in the days of folk music, peace, love, groovy, and love your brother. I had enough gauze for a harem by the time this got old, but I thought it was great then. Trevor started talking to me when I passed. Actually, he said, “Hey, gorgeous,” which shows what a sucker for a compliment I was (am). I liked the way his eyes danced. It was like he had an internal joy flame always lit. Other people’s eyes are flat as ash, but Trevor Williams has flames. Anyway, we’ve been together ever since, so when he says, You know what that means, I know what that means.
“Three hundred thousand miles,” I say. Trevor likes stuff like that. He’ll call you into the kitchen to watch the microwave clock change from 1:10 to 1:11, or to 1:23, or better yet, 12:34. He’d phone me up on my birthdays, the exact minute I was born, 4:17 a.m., setting his alarm clock for four fifteen, to make sure he had time to become conscious and dial.
“This is an occasion,” he says. “We should celebrate.” This is another thing Trevor likes. He’ll celebrate anything—the vernal equinox, Secretary’s Day, not having to get X-rays at the dentist.
“What do you have in mind?” I say. I lick the inside of his ear, which usually drives him crazy, but he isn’t even thinking that direction.
“Let’s drive up to the falls. Let Bob turn three hundred thousand in a special place.” Bob is the Mustang’s name. Bob Weaver, like bob and weave, because of the time he needed a new axle, and the car curved and swerved all over the road.
“Great.” I buckle up. People who drive without seat belts are asking for trouble, and I didn’t want to end up as one of those sad yearbook pictures of the kid who died. On the freeway, the air whooshes at us, smelling good enough to eat, sweet and warm as ripe blackberries, and my hair whips around my face and catches in my mouth. Trevor turns some music on, that heavy metal crap that’s his favorite, all electric guitar and not acoustic, but it’s his celebration so I don’t complain.
“I feel like we’re lacking something here,” I shout.
“Wha’dya say?” Trevor shouts. We head down I-90, toward the Snoqualmie Falls exit.
I turn the music down. “It’s a monumental day for Bob. Let’s spice things up.”
“Hats?” Trevor suggests. See, before I insisted he get straight, he would’ve said, A toke? Or, Tequila? I didn’t want some guy who was all smeary and glazey who wasn’t present. Hey, I could’ve conversed with my lava lamp if I wanted that. I wanted what was real.
“Nah,” I say. “I’ll know it when I see it.”
Trevor shrugs. We keep driving. We pass a storage rental facility, a couple of coffee stands, a museum set in a train car, a place where they sell garden statues. A place where they sell garden statues!
“Trevor. Turn around. Look.” Trevor flips a U right there. Arcs into the gravel of the lot, tires crunching. He knows I love walking up and down the outdoor aisles of those places, checking out five-foot cement ladies holding cement urns spilling cement water, plaster frogs, birdbaths, and tiki heads big enough to scare God. “Let’s find someone to ride in the backseat.”
“Cool.” He shrugs again.
We meander along the paths, to the sound of trickling fountain water and the kershun-kershunk of gravel under our feet. “A gnome?” I suggest, mostly because he’s small and affordable and I like his red hat.
“Nah. Gnomes go on trips all the time. You know those gnomes that get abducted from some old lady’s garden and then she starts getting postcards with his picture from the Eiffel Tower? Shit like that.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” We crunch along a bit more, X-ing out huge mermaids and enormous lions for obvious reasons. Trevor’s strong, but hey.
We’re in the Buddha aisle. Big, bowling-ball-tummied ones that smile like they’re up to something nonreligious, huge head-only’s, with dangly earrings that are fashion don’ts for anyone. Then I see them on a table—medium-size Buddhas sitting cross-legged and wearing tall, bumpy hats. Their faces are long and graceful and missing the pudge of the others. Plus, they look like chick Buddhas, not guys, if that’s possible. My knowledge of Buddhas is on the slim side.
“How about her?” I point.
“Is it a him or a her?”
; “I can’t exactly tell.”
“Lift it up and look underneath,” Trevor says, and chuckles. “Hey, sure, why not? She’ll look good later in your mom’s front yard.”
There are about twelve of the same figure on the table, and we check them all out to find the best one. She’s heavier than she looks when I carry her over to the sales guy.
“We better make sure she’s not some fertility god or something,” Trevor says, and pinches my butt. “What’s her name?” he asks the chubby man who’s drinking a Fresca behind the cash register.
“Ron,” the guy says. Trevor and I look at each other and we try not to crack up. We both realize the guy has just misheard Trevor and told us his own name. He fishes around behind the counter, puts the statue in a Budweiser box, and hands her over. Trevor carries the box and sets it in the backseat.
“Buckle Ron in for safety,” I say, and Trevor snorts a laugh. He buckles the seatbelt around the Budweiser box, and off we go. It feels more festive now that there are three of us.
Trevor heads to the falls. The music is back on, and we are in the cool, damp air of the forest, curving toward the top of the falls, where a hotel and visitor’s center sit at the cliff’s edge. “Two hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred ninety-eight,” he announces. “I want it to change right by the falls.” Trevor eats up another mile finding his perfect location. He has a mile left, and drives forward and back about seven times before he uses enough mileage to fulfill his goal. Already, two cars have honked at us, and a motorcycle roars past in a pissed-off fashion.
“Here goes,” Trevor says. “Three. Hundred. Thousand.” He rolls neatly to the side of the road, where our view of the falls is perfect. The water is meringue white, frothy, steamy, thunderous. I can feel mist on my face.
Trevor kisses me, and his mouth is warm. After a long while, we come up for air. “How you doing back there, Ron,” Trevor asks.
I’d forgotten about Ron the Buddha. I look back at her, and she seems so serious with her head sticking up over the Budweiser box that I crack up.