by Leah Hampton
She turned toward him and handed him a small square napkin. He had punch on his cuff.
Robbie dotted the stain. “Your parents still liking Florida?”
“They’ve got a condo near the water. High on the hog.”
“What about you?” Robbie said. “You sure left town in a hurry after school. Making good money down there in Knoxville?”
“Nope,” said Margaret.
He held his cup halfway to his mouth and gave her an eyebrow.
“You get fired?”
“I quit,” said Margaret. “Came back home last fall, when Julie’s divorce was final. She asked me to come help out with my nieces for a little while, and I wound up staying. You remember my sister?”
“Sure, I remember Julie.”
He didn’t smile or say the name with any energy, and Margaret felt her abs loosen. He wasn’t going to ask how Julie was, if she was still a looker, all the questions men usually had. He didn’t care about her sister. Julie wasn’t the reason Robbie was talking to Margaret. They were just talking, like they used to in algebra class.
“Anyhow, now I manage the GameStop on Richland Skyway.” Margaret felt like she had to explain that last part, so she picked up a cheese blob on a toothpick and added, “I stopped giving a shit about a lot of stuff a while back.”
Robbie was wearing a bright blue dress shirt, no tie. “I know the feeling,” he said, and looked at her. He looked Margaret right in the eye. “I didn’t get a fancy career or anything. I’m just like the song.”
It was Margaret’s turn for an eyebrow.
“Electrician.” He laughed again. “I am a lineman for the coun-teee.” He put a little music at the end. “Well, kind of. I mostly do power line maintenance. All I did was get hairier. You haven’t changed a bit.”
Margaret smiled at Robbie. She hadn’t done that to anybody in a while.
“Ain’t we a pair?” he said.
* * *
Julie was two years older, but she remembered Robbie as soon as Margaret mentioned seeing him at the reunion. Margaret stopped by Julie’s almost every day, though lately her visits had become more sporadic. Julie nudged for details, so Margaret filled her in. Everybody was just as full of shit as they were in high school, but cloudier somehow. Out of focus, she said. Except Robbie.
“Robbie Barnwell. Well, sure,” Julie said. “How is he?”
She was wearing a slinky beige dress that matched her tan skin. Her toenails were freshly painted, and she was packing little lavender superhero suitcases for her twin girls, Eva and Grace. Margaret’s nieces were nine, and they were going to a slumber party so momma could have a date night with “Uncle Jack.” Jack was Julie’s latest boyfriend. Margaret had promised to drive the girls to their friend’s house after work.
While Julie clicked around in her new snakeskin stilettos, Margaret glared at herself in the hall mirror. She fluffed her hair and tried to pout, but she couldn’t hold the pose. She and Julie had the same dark hair, same build, but Margaret’s edges looked rounder, less formed. Makeup made her face feel sticky, and her shoes didn’t snap when she walked. Upstairs, the girls’ footfalls and giggles rumbled like a coming storm.
“He seemed good,” Margaret said.
Julie breezed past her to the banister and singsong-hollered up at the girls not to keep Auntie waiting. Then she turned back and straightened a family portrait hanging in the hallway. The frame held Julie, the girls, and Julie’s ex-husband Parker Hackett in a permanent cuddle. They all wore matching blue turtlenecks, and behind them, autumn mountains blazed. The frame never hung straight on its nail.
“Why don’t you take that picture down?” Margaret asked as Julie breezed past again. “It’s creepy. At least put it in the girls’ room.”
Julie’s step hitched. She looked over her shoulder and flamingoed her legs. “I can’t,” she said, one hand on the doorframe. “It wouldn’t be right. Parker would notice when he comes by.”
“Who gives a shit?”
“He’ll be here Wednesday,” Julie said. “To see them.”
“What, in the middle of the week? How come?”
“There’s a school thing. It’s—just a thing.”
“Fine,” said Margaret. “Note to self: do not visit Wednesday.”
Julie’s feet sputtered, but soon both heels were clicking across the kitchen floor again. Margaret followed her, admiring the way the stiletto straps wisped around Julie’s ankles. She reached the line of four barstools facing the sink and leaned on one.
“Did you know Robbie Barnwell has red hair?” she asked.
Her sister scrunched her brow and bobbed her head. She folded a white cloth and wiped down a glistening granite countertop that didn’t need wiping.
“I guess?” said Julie. “Didn’t he marry Trina Bagshot?”
“They got divorced,” said Margaret.
She edged onto a stool and stared hard at Julie, waiting to see if she’d be caught in the lie.
Julie bent down and grabbed the mini-suitcases. She flopped them on the counter between her and Margaret. “Well,” she said with a wide, whitened smile.
“What?”
“Well, there you go!” said Julie, waving at her. Her gold bracelet sparkled in the light.
“Jesus, Julie. I’ll probably never see him again.”
Margaret put her elbow on the cool granite and kicked her sneaker against the underside of the bar. Julie rested her hand on the nearest suitcase and took a long breath.
“The girls’ teacher said they’ve loaned out all the books you donated for the Reading Marathon,” Julie said. “Asked if you could send more. But”—she wrinkled her nose—“nothing else with robots or scary centaurs or, you know, apocalypses.”
“But those are the best ones,” Margaret said. She had pulled a toppling stack of childhood favorites out of the old boxes in Julie’s attic for the Reading Marathon. She hoped the kids read every single apocalypse.
“They’re still little,” her sister said.
“So?”
“So Pauline Hardwick told me her son was reading about some pirate being guillotined.”
“That,” said Margaret, tapping a finger, “is a damn fine story.”
Julie rolled her eyes and shook her head. “They’re nine, Peg.”
“I know—” Margaret’s head shot up. “The hell? Don’t call me that.”
Peg was what people called her when she was a kid. Peg was short for Margaret, and she hated it. It made her sound like a piece of wood. Like a rag doll. It made her feel tiny, and senior year of high school she had quit answering to it until everyone started using her full name.
“Sorry. I’m just…” Julie tapped a toe.
Margaret glared at her sister and tried to remember the last time she’d used her former nickname.
“It’s nice you saw Robbie,” said Julie. She straightened her back and grinned. “Everybody’s getting divorced now,” she said brightly. She checked the zipper on one of the suitcases. “You might catch somebody on the second round!”
Margaret squinted. “Where the hell did ‘Peg’ come from?”
Julie started to make a meek sound, but it got drowned out by Eva and Grace tumbling down the stairs. The girls fell all over Margaret. She scooped their skinny, wiggly girl bodies out to her Honda and pretended she didn’t see Julie biting her cheek as she waved goodbye. Julie always said Margaret would get noticed more by men if she’d make a little effort, but Margaret didn’t want to be noticed. She didn’t want to hear old nicknames or talk about Robbie Barnwell or see pictures of dickhead Parker Hackett in her sister’s goddamn hallway. She just wanted everybody to leave her alone.
* * *
When Robbie walked into GameStop a week later, Margaret tripped hard on an endcap and stubbed her foot so bad her eyes teared up. The whole time he talked to her, she thought she was bleeding into her sneaker. She thought she might even lose a toe.
“Hey, Robbie,” she said. She was breathing hard and
tried not to wheeze at him.
“Hey there.” He held up a thin white box with a zombie on the cover. “My son wants this for his birthday. Is it…?”
“Violent?” said Margaret. Robbie shrugged to indicate he didn’t know the first thing about gaming.
“It’s not bad,” she said. “You want me to pick out some stuff for him?”
They wandered the store for a few minutes shopping and chatting. Robbie acted impressed at her technical knowledge. He even used the term “newfangled” when she pointed at a Bluetooth headset, more as a joke than anything; his truck outside was full of sensors and gadgets. Margaret almost didn’t notice how nervous she was. She almost forgot about her bloody, mangled toe—which it turned out later wasn’t bloody at all. Her toe was just fine. Not even bruised.
She rang Robbie up instead of letting one of her part-time clerks do it. She was bagging his son’s presents when he said, “You getting off soon? Let’s get a cup of coffee or something.”
“I’ll be done about four,” she said. As simple as that.
* * *
They had coffee a couple of times; then he took her to supper on a Tuesday. Right after he dropped her off and she had watched his truck disappear around the corner of her condo complex, he called her.
“You don’t date much, do you, Margaret?”
“Not really.” She tugged on a striped curtain and watched the space between the highway and the condo office where Robbie’s truck had just been. She wanted to say, No, never. Never ever. Please, I am invisible.
“How come?”
She could hear the wind blowing around inside the cab of his truck. He had the window down and was shouting a little.
“Do you like men?” he asked. “It doesn’t matter. I’m just asking, because—well. Sorry. I shouldn’t be talking to you like this.”
The roar quieted on the other end of the line. He had rolled up his window. Margaret imagined his burly shoulders rotating as he shifted in his seat to hear her better.
“Hello?”
“I’m here,” she said.
“Are you mad at me?”
“No, Robbie. I just … I’m weird, that’s all.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Why do you care who I’m dating?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It just seems like we’re still the same, you and me. Still friends. I’m just curious.”
He swung by the GameStop three more times the next week. He didn’t buy anything. Margaret would take a break and sit outside with him while he complained about his job or his marriage or asked her questions she didn’t want to answer.
“I don’t want to answer that,” she finally said. Robbie had stopped by on his way home from work and wanted to know, again, whether she ever had a boyfriend in Knoxville.
Margaret stood under the store’s awning and flicked her fingernails with her thumb. Robbie made her uneasy now. He looked soft. She clenched her jaw to keep from saying things to him. She wondered how often Trina and he slept together, if he liked it when they did. She asked him about the new fiber optic lines under the high school. Robbie said he didn’t work on that stuff, so she asked whether it was hard to climb telephone poles, and what happened if you touched two power lines at the same time.
“Does it close the circuit?” she asked. “Would it kill you?”
Robbie said, “You ask way more questions than I do.”
Margaret touched her stomach.
“Listen,” he said. “How about we write to each other? You can ask me anything you want. You’re good with computers. Is that easier? To talk that way, tell each other stuff?”
“You got stuff to tell me, Robbie?” she said. Robbie shook his head, tried to laugh to lighten the heavy air between them.
So they started writing. In between lunches, they wrote each other a thousand data fragments going back twenty years. A few weeks later, Robbie sent a thread of yellow chat bubbles saying he’d had a big crush on her since sixth grade, and someday, if they ever got together and made love, he wanted Margaret to stick her finger way up in his asshole.
* * *
He wrote all kinds of things to her, actually. Not just sex. And not right away. First they got reacquainted, and Robbie managed to get Margaret to admit she’d kind of liked him in school, too. They texted every day, which they never mentioned when they saw each other. The apps were a separate realm through which they confessed all manner of small crimes.
“I told my sister you were divorced,” she messaged him. “Just for fun.”
It took Robbie a while to reply.
“If only,” he said.
Margaret liked the tacit agreement the technology forced on them. She liked typing simple, obvious things she didn’t tell other people, like how jealous she was of Julie’s clothes, or how sometimes she lied on the store’s time sheets so the better clerks got paid a little extra. These electronic conversations buzzed and charged underneath their face-to-face meetings.
They used email and chat apps, three or four different methods. Robbie had a cabin near the state park where he often spent weekends with his son. There was no internet there, so it sometimes took multiple methods to reach each other. Margaret only had a vague idea where Robbie lived. She didn’t know what Trina did in his absence, or what she must have thought when her husband was gone for such long periods. She decided she didn’t care. Robbie was married, and Margaret didn’t care.
Robbie wrote about his job. He wrote about his son, who was named Thomas and who would soon need braces. He wrote about wanting to divorce Trina, but he didn’t want a bad breakup like all his friends had had, so he stuck it out. Margaret wrote about Knoxville and how she never really liked it much, how when she had come back to Bentley last fall, she was almost, almost glad to come home.
“I tell people I came back to help Julie with the girls,” she messaged, “but she doesn’t really need me anymore. Probably the other way around.”
Somewhere in the stream of pings and notifications, Robbie began to send her his fantasies. They were tame compared to what the pimply teenagers at GameStop snorted about when the store wasn’t busy. Robbie got more detailed, until finally one night while Margaret was putting a whitening strip on her teeth before bed, he emailed her a bulleted list of positions:
“69,” the first bullet said.
“More face sitting,” said the second one. “I’ve done it, but not enough.”
“Tied up. Nothing kinky, no chains.”
“Butt stuff … could be a whole sub-list. Is this weird?”
And so on.
Margaret liked the format; she liked that it was bulleted, not numbered. His desires weren’t ranked, but they were organized. Clean. The cleanliness somehow absolved her of shame. She didn’t say she’d do any of it. Instead she replied, “Interesting assortment,” and signed off.
In her bathroom, she pulled off the whitening strips and rolled them into tiny, tight balls that she stuck on the edge of the pink washstand. She stared at them and wondered what it would be like to be with Robbie. She imagined his beard rubbing against her while she fell asleep at his cabin. The state park was mostly forest; she might hear animals or hunters in the night while she lay next to him. As she clicked off the bathroom light, she reminded herself she’d never tell a soul about their conversations. She especially wouldn’t tell Julie, because that would spoil everything.
The next day Margaret felt like she owed Robbie a consolation prize for dismissing his bulleted ass-fingering list. When they met for a slushie, she could tell he was embarrassed. So that night she curled up on her sofa and wrote Robbie about how she was invisible, but really, she did want to be seen. She did. She just didn’t know how, because of Julie, who was so much prettier and more at ease. And because of Bentley being such a conservative town, and how different she’d always felt here, and all the heaviness that never went away for her after high school the way it did for other people.
Robbie’s avatar on their prefe
rred chat app was a buck.
The buck head asked, “What kind of heaviness?”
The buck head asked, “Why do u still feel like u did in h.s.?”
The buck head blinked and waited.
But Margaret went to bed. That was as much confessing as she had in her.
The next day, Robbie brought her an iced coffee at work. They sat on his truck bumper. It was hot, and Margaret sweated under her polo. The shirt was red, with the word “Manager” embroidered over her left breast. She hoped Robbie wouldn’t try to kiss her, not while she felt so sticky and gross, and not where her employees, especially pimply Caleb, who sometimes leered at her, could see.
“So,” Robbie said, “what you wrote last night. Tell me what you meant.” It was the first time he’d brought up something from their electronic conversations. He was breaking the rules.
Margaret scratched her head and lied, “I don’t know. What’d I say?”
“High school. You said you don’t like to talk about certain things.” The way he said it, the tone, made Margaret think maybe Robbie already had some idea, but she couldn’t name what he might have guessed. Not even to herself. That’s how far down, how deep she kept it.
She shrugged and looked at her feet. “Long time ago.”
“Yeah, but Margaret.”
Robbie was leaning toward her. She hunched her shoulders.
“Look, all I’m gonna say is…” He took off his baseball cap and crossed his legs, one foot on his knee. He cocked his ear to the hum of a transformer at the edge of the parking lot. “All I’m gonna say is, Parker Hackett is a fucking asshole. Is and was.”
Margaret took the words like a punch. She figured she was supposed to start crying, start wailing and show scars. Instead she laughed. Not loud, just a little snort. She waited a second to see what happened. Her chest tightened, but that was all, so she snorted again.