by CL Walters
Her smile slips, and she moves, extricates herself from my proximity on that bed that isn’t a bed. She stands.
I sit up and scratch the back of my neck. “Scratchy. Not very good.” Then I stand and return to leaning against the cart, walking back through what just happened on the bed that isn’t a bed. “That is why it’s important to test it out,” I say, but it’s in my robot voice because I’m not thinking about that at all. My eyes jump up from the blue plastic plate that reads Triple B on the cart to Max who’s across the department muttering about sheets.
I push the cart after her, quiet now, taking stock of the moment, replaying it. Her laugh. The wide look of her gray eyes lost in the moment. The way her honey hair draped about her head. The way my pulse pitched to the side because the earth began to shake—my stomach following suit. I felt a seismic shift in me, pushing my tectonic plates into a new and unfamiliar mountain range, but I refuse to hike it. I know that’s a place to get lost.
After some analysis, I decide I’m not attracted to Max. Enjoyment being around her doesn’t mean there are other feelings; I don’t do feelings very well. She’s my friend. Actually, I don’t do friendship very well either. My track record is shit. Navigating the two would be a disaster.
“Are you listening?”
I shake my head at the sound of her voice as if stepping from a vacuum. “Huh?”
“Car-slave. I need you to look for the extra-long, fitted in this color. Can you do it?”
“At your service.” I crouch down to look. “Where am I supposed to find the size?”
“The label. Here.” She points.
We spend the next hour and half maneuvering down her shopping list and then comparing prices. I’m tired, like bored tired, but I hold to my agreement not to bitch since this is me making up for being a jerk on Saturday. It would be a lie to say I’m not relieved when we finally walk out of the store with all the packages.
I take Max to eat when we finish. While we wait, then eat, she chatters and asks me innocuous questions about myself. I answer some, avoid others, but enjoy listening to her, nonetheless. Then I drive us back to town. By the time we get there, the rain is sheer, misty, and temporary. I help Max cart in the bags. When I’m done, there’s no reason for me to stay, but I’m reluctant to leave.
“Want to see the cabinet?” she asks. “It’s done.”
I follow her out to the workshop.
She flips on the light.
“Wow,” I say. The light wood shines through the finish. “It’s amazing, Max. It looks completely different. Perfect really. Brand new. Your dad is going to love it.”
“He already does, he just doesn’t know I did it for him.” She runs her fingers across an edge. My gaze catches on her fingers and lingers. Her nails are painted pink, like cotton candy you get at the end-of-summer fair.
My phone buzzes.
I hold it up. “It’s your dad,” I tell her. “He says we won’t be able to paint this week. Supposed to rain tomorrow, he’s got the plumbing job to finish up, and because you’re leaving on Sunday, he’s got to help you get ready on Friday and Saturday.” I look up at her. “He gave me the rest of the week off.”
“Oh.” She runs her hand along the side of the cabinet.
My chest tingles, and I press my fingers to my heart to massage it, afraid that this might be the last time I get to see her before she leaves. I’m grasping for reasons to be able to spend time with her. Then I remember the drive. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Packing.”
“Can you take some time off from that activity?”
“To do what?”
“Go for a drive with me? I mean, I tried to take you on my first drive, and you refused me.”
She smiles. “Your first drive was here.”
“Technically, yes, but I came to get you. And I still haven’t gone.”
“Okay, SK. I’ll go on a drive with you.”
I smile—relieved—and nod. “I’ll call you in the morning to check on the time. I don’t have your number.” I hold up spider phone, then program her number into my phone.
“What did you name me?”
“Max.”
“Text me so I have yours.”
I do. “What are you going to name me?”
“SK.” She scrunches her nose, then laughs.
“Ha ha.” My tone is sarcastic, but I smile.
Silence finds its way in between our levity, and in the acoustics of the workshop with our laughter gone, the thick silence between us makes the place feel smaller. My muscles tense and turn jittery. I squash the impulse to move toward Max and step away from her instead.
“I better go.” My voice is pitched weird, awkwardly coarse. I turn to the door.
Max clears her throat and thanks me.
Then I flee. Flee from impulses I don’t trust, from a girl who I’m suddenly thinking about more and more, who’s awakened something like happiness in me, and I know I’ll ruin it because I ruin everything.
6
Mom is already awake with a cup of coffee in hand when I walk into the dining room the next morning. “You’re up early.”
“Was going to run.”
“In this?” She glances outside at the steady rainfall that blankets the view of the backyard.
“Was.” I detour to a cup of coffee and sit down with her. We sip our coffee in silence, content to be in one another’s presence. Usually, we’re moving through one another’s lives like lone planets on our own revolutionary tracts.
“You working today?” I ask her.
“Always. Just a swing shift at the hospital. Feels a little like a vacation with only one place to go.” She smiles and takes a sip of her coffee. “You?”
“Cal gave me the week off.”
“A whole week?”
I can tell she’s thinking about the money. “Yeah. Don’t worry. I’ve been saving most of it. Max is leaving for college, so he’s taking her in a few days. They’re getting ready.”
She sips her coffee again.
“Mom, may I ask you something?”
She sets her mug down and leans forward to give me her undivided attention. In that moment, I see her as someone with a life I don’t understand. After getting the car and watching that whole thing play out with Bill, I feel like maybe I want to understand her better. I haven’t done a good job of being a good son.
Her eyebrows shift with hesitation, and she’s back to my mother. We aren’t a family of deep conversations.
“It’s about Dad.”
Her features harden into rocks. “I did say we should probably talk about him.”
“Did you divorce him because of prison?” I’m really asking about the other family, but not asking, in case. We aren’t a family who talks directly about deep shit either; I don’t want to hurt her.
She leans back in her chair, and I wonder if she’ll avoid the question. She surprises me. “Partly.”
“How so?”
“It was the lying, mostly. He lied about a lot of things: what he was doing, where he was, who he was with.”
I look up from her coffee cup to her face. “Phoenix told me once that he has another family.”
She considers, picking up her mug again, then nods. “One of the things he was lying about.”
“What else?”
“His whole life really. Told me he was a mechanic—and he was at one time—but money has a way of changing people.” She moves her thumb back and forth over the handle of her cup.
“So how come you didn’t date anyone, after?”
She looks closely at me as though measuring my questions for their reasons but can’t decipher them. “Is this about something specific?”
Yes. “No,” I lie. “Just curious.”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I think, at first, I was so hurt by your father’s lies I didn’t trust the idea of opening up to anyone else. You and Phoenix were my life, and as you grew, you were going through your own stuff. I didn
’t have the energy.”
“Phoenix was what?”
Mom and I both turn toward the voice. Phoenix, rumpled from sleep, is standing at the opening between the hallway and the dining room. His long hair sticks up around his head, and black mesh shorts are askew on his hips. He shrugs into a green t-shirt before walking past the table.
“Just talking,” Mom says. “About your dad.”
Phoenix walks into the kitchen, gets his own cup of coffee, then joins us.
It feels strange to all be sitting at the dining table together. I glance at my brother and wish we were closer; wish for the ability to walk the stretch of time between us, but the bridge is so unstable.
“Did you ever see them?” I ask her. “The other family?”
“Why are you bringing that up?” Phoenix asks. He sort of spits it like the words taste nasty, and I recall when he spilled the info all those years ago. He sounded similar then.
Mom puts a hand over his arm. “It’s okay. Griffin has a right to know. I’m okay.” She pats him and looks at me. “I saw the woman in court once, before your dad was sentenced. That’s when I found out.”
I think about it, wonder how that went down, but don’t really want to know that story. Imagining it just makes me upset for her, for us, and I can understand why the knowledge makes Phoenix mad. “And he has another kid?”
“I saw her once,” Phoenix says, mostly to himself, the focus of his gaze somewhere else.
“How?” I ask, thinking about his postcards. I attempt to balance those two pieces of information together. “Where do they live? The city, right?” I study Phoenix, who’s looking at the cup he spins around and around on the surface of the table. “You said you were traveling around.”
His eyes drift to Mom, then back to me. I feel him shuffling around information in his head, trying to figure out what to say, how to say it, filtering it, making sure it lines up into the parameters he’s already set. I recognize it because I’ve done it. “I was in the city for a while.”
“And you didn’t come home to see us?”
He looks down at his coffee cup, and I know he’s withholding information. “I was mad, okay? I got kicked out.”
“No. You left.” I look between him and Mom, and she’s looking at her coffee cup. They look like two sides of the same coin. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Leave it alone, Griffin,” Phoenix says.
I stand up and take my coffee cup to the sink, finished with this impersonation of an actual family. “You know why this family sucks?” I turn from the sink in the kitchen and look at them, the counter bar between us. “We never talk about real shit. We just stuff it into boxes like secrets we figure will go away if we ignore them long enough.” I stare at Mom. “You divorced him because he was a liar? Well, what the fuck are we then?” I ask and leave the room.
I hole up in my bedroom and listen to the low voices of Mom and Phoenix talking, unable to make out the words through the doors and walls between us but note the forceful and sometimes harsh tones. I take out Phoenix’s postcards and flip through them, rereading. Mom’s voice is clear when she says, “You need to tell him.” Then I hear her leave.
I make Max a road trip playlist, wondering what I need to be told, rereading those stupid postcards. There’s no making sense of them, so I stuff them back in the drawer of my nightstand.
“What are you doing today?” Phoenix asks, walking into my room without knocking.
“What the hell,” I say without any fire. “Knock.”
He glances at the open drawer next to my bed where I stashed his postcards. There’s also a nearly empty box of condoms and some other junk in there.
I push the drawer shut. “Max and I are going for a drive.” I don’t tell him where. I don’t want to offer the obligatory invitation.
“Your boss’s daughter?”
“She’s my friend.”
He makes a humming sound. “So, what are you doing?”
“Making a music playlist.”
I feel him lean over my shoulder.
“You should get that fixed,” he says about my phone. “Griffin’s Road Trip Playlist? Shouldn’t you name it something more creative?”
“Do you need something?”
He returns to the doorway, leans against the doorframe, and taps a tube of papers against his thigh, staring off at something abstract rather than the doorjamb in front of him. He glances at me as if he wants to say something, then looks down at the paper in his hands and twists it into a tighter tube. I wonder if this has to do with his and Mom’s argument.
“What’s that?” I ask him just to fill the silence, nodding at the tube of paper.
He looks at it as if it’s the first time he’s seen it. “Possible jobs.”
I want to roll my eyes because it’s taking him a long time to find a freaking job. “That’s good,” I say instead.
He straightens and taps the doorframe with the paper tube. “Yeah.” He clears his throat. “Good talk, Baby Bro.” He offers a Phoenix smile as he backs away, using the tube to point over his shoulder. “I better get going.” Then he disappears, having said nothing at all.
By the time I park in front of the farmhouse, I’m still in a funk about my family. Max runs through the rain, her face tucked under the hood of her yellow raincoat, and I resolve to forget them the remainder of the day.
“I made a playlist,” I announce when she gets in the car.
“On that monstrosity you call a phone. Are your fingers bandaged?” She grabs my hand to inspect it.
I wrench my hand free, disturbed by the intense shockwave that shoots up my arm. “Wow.”
“Seriously, you should get that fixed.” She leans to look out the window at the weather. “Is this a very good idea?”
“It’s supposed to be clear at The Bend. And my phone still works.” I back out of the parking spot. “Just push play.”
“I’m not touching it. It’s going to sliver my delicate fingertips with broken glass.”
“Don’t be such a baby. I can’t. I’m already driving.”
“Fine.” She pushes play, and the opening guitar riffs of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” play over the car’s speakers. Max looks at me agape. “Oh my, Griffin! What is this? Are we headed toward the afterlife?”
“It is a ghost town.” I grin at my cleverness. “The playlist is from all of the band shirts you wear.”
With a serious look, she shrugs out of her raincoat and turns so I can see that her bright yellow t-shirt is sporting AC/DC in the center. “Have you been spying on me? Do I need to add stalker to the list, SK?”
“What? No. Completely coincidental, but if I was truly a serial killer isn’t stalker inclusive?”
“You make a good point.” She smiles—a good one. “Seriously, Griffin, this is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.” She bobs her head a bit with the bass guitar rhythm.
My insides flop over with her smile but tighten toward discomfort with her words. I can’t remember anyone ever using Griffin and thoughtful in the same sentence. Griff and selfish, Griff and asshole, Griff and dick, Griff and dumbass are most of the pairings. Her words do something more integral to the threads that hold me together, and I can’t trust them to maintain their strength. But I smile at her, then force myself to focus on the road. I’d like to stop for some reason and just look at her. Maybe something more. I squeeze the steering wheel and shove the thought into the appropriate box for safe keeping.
“I think it’s time for some better friends,” I say.
“Well, since I’ve mostly forgiven you for the Saturday debacle–”
“Wait. Mostly? I thought that’s why I was car-slave. This nicest-thing-anyone-has-ever-done-for-me playlist should have put me in the clear.”
She smiles. “Almost.”
“What now?” I’m worried.
“Here’s the thing, SK; I have traced your emotional degradation on Saturday night to one moment.”
“Woul
d you please speak English.”
“I am. Is this Def Leppard?” She reaches over and turns up the volume, then gets lost in the music. I look over; her eyes are closed, and she mouths the lyrics. My heart thuds in my chest watching her, her mouth, hypnotized.
“T-shirt.”
She opens her eyes to look at me, still swaying to the music, and sings the song. Pink paints her cheeks.
“Saturday?” I prompt trying to get her back on track because I’m finding version of Max a little too erotic. I focus on the road and chant in my head: just my friend.
“Right. Sorry. I was thinking about it, and I think besides the obvious restroom-side chat, your mood soured when we talked about this character named Tanner.”
I tighten my hands on the steering wheel, all erotic thoughts vanquished. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Which is why I think you should.”
“Did you plan this?”
“What?” She puts a hand on her chest and bats her eyelashes with feigned innocence. “Me? No. How could I have known we’d be stuck in the car for–” she picks up the phone and looks at the navigation app– “an hour and fifteen-minute drive?”
“Yesterday. When I told you.”
“True.”
“I’m beginning to wonder if you’re the serial killer.”
“A serial killer of bad moods.” She snickers at her joke. “Griffin, you should really talk about what bugs you.”
The observation slams me back to the stilted conversation I had with my mom and brother just hours prior, and my criticism that we don’t really talk. I’m just as bad.
“I already told you about him. We became friends when we were fourteen. We got in a fight.” I grind my teeth together, stubborn. What had I said: We never talk about real shit. We just stuff it into boxes like secrets we figure will go away if we ignore them long enough.
“Superficial, SK. I want the details. The moment I mentioned the importance of the friendship, you freaked out.”
“It’s more involved, and I don’t want to really get into it.”
She faces forward, puts her stocking feet—her socks are black with yellow bees on them—on the dash because she’s taken off her shoes, and rests her arms on her legs. She goes silent.