The People We Keep

by Allison Larkin

  “Or get snow tires,” I say. “Trade in your Saab for a Jeep?”

  “Thin blood,” Ethan says into his hands and shakes his head from side to side. “I have thin southern blood. I’m going to freeze to death.” He hugs his arms around his chest and chatters his teeth. “I’m cold just thinking about it.”

  There’s a reason he works in theatre. I wonder why he’s a behind the scenes person instead of an on the stage one.

  “Why aren’t you staying here?” I ask, trying to keep my disappointment hidden. It’s not like I thought I could live in Asheville forever, with a regular gig, and a comfy bed, and Ethan refusing to let me pay rent, but I’m not ready for it to end either.

  “Oh, you know,” he says. “Bad breakup. Time for a change. Tomorrow was supposed to be our anniversary. You waste three years of your life on someone, it seems like a good idea to get out of town when you wake up.”

  I drink my coffee and push pamphlets around the table. So many weird names I don’t recognize. Carnegie Mellon. Brandeis. Sarah Lawrence. And then there’s one I do: Ithaca College.

  “Here.” I tap the Ithaca brochure with my finger. “Go here.”

  “Ithaca?” Ethan says. “That’s a great program. Cold, but good.”

  “It’s warmer than where I grew up,” I say. “And snow feels nicer in Ithaca. I don’t know why. Everything is nicer there.”

  “Do you play in Ithaca a lot?” Ethan asks.

  “I lived there for a bit.” The air catches in my throat. “It’s a hard place to leave.” I stare into my coffee cup and will my eyes to stay dry. “And,” I say, taking a deep breath, pulling myself back together, “it’s a super gay place. You’d love it.”

  “Super gay?” Ethan says. “Would I have to get a cape?”

  “No,” I tell him. “But tights aren’t frowned on.”

  — Chapter 46 —

  I decide to make Ethan an anti-anniversary dinner to celebrate that we got all of his applications in the mail. I check my wallet so many times before I get up to the checkout. My heart thuds in my throat until I make it out of the store, like groceries are the beginning of the end, even though I know they aren’t. Some things get written into your body and your mind can’t reason them away.

  I walk home with my bag full of food. Pasta and sauce from a jar. Some onions and peppers to dress it up. It’s the most I really know how to cook, but it’s something. I’m hoping the thought counts more than the end result.

  There are tulips blooming in front yard flowerbeds and the air smells full and mossy. It’s not quite dark when I get home. The door to the sun porch is open wide and the door to the living room isn’t closed all the way. I hear Ethan say, “That wasn’t what I meant,” and his voice is full of tears.

  I stand on the sun porch and peek through the open door. There’s a man in the living room holding Ethan against the wall. Ethan’s nose is bleeding down his neck. I hold my breath and push the living room door open slowly.

  The guy screams, “You’re the one who should be sorry. You’re the one who had such a big problem with it!” He’s screaming so loud he doesn’t hear me come in.

  When Ethan sees me, he turns his face away. The guy slaps Ethan’s cheek, and then the other. “Look at me when I talk to you!”

  My body feels like it might never move again, but Ethan is crying and the guy doesn’t look like he’s going to stop. I’m still holding the groceries, so I grab the jar of sauce and throw it at the guy. It hits with a thump between his shoulders and falls to the floor, exploding, sending sauce and glass everywhere. “Stop!” I scream. “Stop!”

  He drops his hold on Ethan and turns. His face is bloated, cheeks trembling. Red eyes. Raw knuckles. He looks like he’s going to come after me instead. I chuck a pepper and catch him on the side of his head and then an onion that hits him right in the eye and I scream and scream and throw everything from the bag. I pretend I’m bigger than him and bigger than everyone and if I look at him hard enough, he might just burn up and die. He might turn into nothing. He gets in my face. His breath smells so sour. I can see in his eyes he’s deciding if he’s going to hit me too. I’m all out of groceries. There’s nothing else to throw. He grabs my hair, all of it, in his fist and pulls me out of his way. Away from the door and I don’t know what he’s going to do. He pulls so hard. I stumble. Hit the floor, hip first. All I can think about is the bruise it will leave. Dark purple. I can feel my blood pooling.

  “You like little girls now?” he says to Ethan.

  “Go!” Ethan screams. “Ivan! Leave!” His face is wet, nose pouring snot and blood, all the color drained right out of him.

  Ivan kicks my leg, hard. And then he finally walks out the door, slamming it behind him. I scramble to latch the lock. Push a chair against the door, and then I run to Ethan. He’s holding his face, sobbing so hard. I think maybe it will hurt if I hug him but worry it might be worse if I don’t.

  “I’ll call the police,” I say.

  “You don’t really think the cops are going to want in on a fight between a couple of queers, do you?” Ethan says, sniffing and wiping his face with the back of his hand. Blood smears across his cheek.

  “Hospital?”

  “I don’t want anyone to see me like this. I don’t want to go out there. I don’t want—” His face wrinkles. It hurts him to cry and that makes him cry harder. You can see it—how it hurts.

  “Okay. It’s okay,” I say over and over because I have no other words. I run to the bathroom and get a washcloth. Soak it under the faucet and bring it to him. He’s crying so hard his whole body trembles.

  I clean his face. Wash the blood from his hair the best I can. And then we sit on the floor in the middle of all the smashed groceries and I hold him and tell him everything will be okay, because that’s what I always wished someone would tell me whenever I got hurt.

  “I shouldn’t have tried,” Ethan says. “I knew better. But he was here when I got home. He still had the key, and I missed him. I didn’t realize he was drunk. I let myself hope.”

  * * *

  When he’s stopped crying, I slide the refrigerator against the back door in the kitchen. My hip aches when I push. I pile more furniture in front of the front door and check every window latch. We sleep in Ethan’s room, with my arms around him, the TV on like a night light, my buck knife hidden under the mattress, just in case.

  The next morning, I get up before Ethan does to clean the tomato sauce and blood and broken glass off the carpet the best I can. I call Robert and ask him to help me change the locks.

  Ethan cries when he wakes up. We hear him all the way downstairs. I bring him a wet washcloth. His nose is swollen and bruised. The cut on his cheekbone is thick and crusted over. It’s hard to tell where one bruise stops and the next one starts. He holds his stomach. Tries to stop crying. He can’t. I kiss his forehead and clean his face. When I change the bloodied pillowcase, Robert sits on the bed and lets Ethan rest his head in his lap.

  Robert has some Percocet left over from a back injury last year, so we give that to Ethan and I get him more ice for his nose and hold his hand. When he falls asleep, we go down to the kitchen and pull together something for him to eat. Scrambled eggs, yogurt, and canned peaches, because it will be easy on his jaw. We wake him up. He looks at us and chews when we tell him to, but he’s not really there. I’m sure it’s easier not to be.

  * * *

  “I wish you’d met Rodney,” Robert says while we’re cleaning up the breakfast dishes. He’s wiping the juice tumblers with a bright blue sponge that squeaks against the glass. “Ethan and Rodney were like the romance you always dreamed you could have, you know?” He stacks the glasses gently in the drying rack. “They were so happy. It made everyone around them feel better to know there was love like that in the world.” When he scrubs the frying pan, dried yellow flakes of egg fall into the sink like leaves.

  “Why did they break up?” I ask, swigging the rest of my coffee, handing my mug to Robert t
o wash.

  He puts the mug down and it clanks against the porcelain sink. “I don’t know why I thought you’d know about that.”

  “I just got here. I’m basically a stranger.”

  “This,” Robert says, waving his hand toward the living room, where the blood on the rug will never come out all the way, “this makes us not strangers.”

  He picks up the mug and wipes it down with the soapy sponge. I’m convinced he’s not going to tell me what happened, and then he says, “Rodney died in a car accident about four years ago.”

  I think about how Ethan’s eyes look older than the rest of him, and the weary way he carries himself to bed at the end of the day.

  “They were going to adopt a kid,” Robert says. His eyes are red. He doesn’t try to hide it. “This little girl from Mexico. She was beautiful. They got pictures in the mail. They were planning their trip to pick her up. And then, Rodney was on his way home from work. A tractor-trailer…”

  I cover my mouth with my palm. Robert rests the mug in the sink and wipes his eyes with the back of his hand.

  “Ethan saw the accident on his way home from work. He saw the car. Followed the ambulance to the hospital, but they wouldn’t let him in to see Rodney because he wasn’t immediate family.” Robert’s hair is falling in his eyes. He pushes it away. “So, Rodney died alone while Ethan was sitting in the waiting room. They wouldn’t let him in. Ethan fell apart and he couldn’t adopt his little girl so he lost both of them all at once.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, which seems like the wrong thing, but I can’t think of anything right.

  “After that, Ethan seemed frantic to replace what he lost. Or maybe he knew he never could, so he was ready to settle. Whatever it was, Ivan took advantage.”

  Robert yanks the rubber band from his ponytail and lets his hair fall around his face before he pulls it up and twists the band around again. “It was hard to watch. But you can’t make a friend break up with someone. If you tell them they should and they don’t, you lose them. I didn’t want to risk it.”

  “You can’t blame yourself for this,” I say, because he looks like he does. His eyes are so sad.

  “I never thought Ivan was this out of control. I didn’t like him, but Ethan kept telling me how great he was, and I thought—I mean, Rodney was my friend. I thought maybe I didn’t want to accept Ivan because it meant Rodney was really gone. If I’d known Ivan was this bad, I would have done something.”

  Robert gives up on the dishes. We sit at the bottom of the stairs together so we can hear Ethan if he wakes up. So we can be right there if he needs us. We don’t say much. We just sit there, knees touching. When Robert starts to cry, I hold his hand.

  — Chapter 47 —

  Ethan spends a few days in bed. Robert and I take turns with him so he’s never alone. Robert gets a substitute chef when I play at the restaurant and I stay with Ethan when I’m not playing.

  We lie in bed and watch soap operas. Matty is in a coma. If he wakes up, his fiancée is going to tell him the baby isn’t his. She has conversations about it with her new lover in his hospital room.

  “He’s lying right there!” I yell, twisting the edge of Ethan’s quilt in my hands. “She’s such a bitch.”

  “I wouldn’t have guessed you for a soap fan,” Ethan says. He smiles as much as he can manage. The bruises around his nose and jaw are dark purple.

  “I know him,” I say, pointing at the TV. “Jake Jacobson. I know him.”

  Ethan gives me a blank look. “You understand this show isn’t real, right?”

  “The actor who plays Jake Jacobson. Matty—Matthew Spencer. I know him. I used to.”

  “Like know him, or know him?”

  “Second one.”

  “Do you miss him?”

  “If someone changes so much that they’re barely the same person, who are you even missing?”

  “I miss him, you know,” Ethan says. I think he’s telling me about Rodney, but then he says, “I’m sure no one wants to hear it. But it’s not like I didn’t love Ivan. It’s not like every bit of him and me was a fight. It didn’t start out that way.”

  He looks at me. The bruises and the sadness in his eyes are almost too much to bear. I grab his hand under the blankets and squeeze it tight.

  “I still miss him and it hurts and I wish he would come back and be okay and love me and not hurt me again,” Ethan says, all in one breath, like it’s a relief to say the words. “There were good parts. There were tiny little parts of a good person and I miss having hope that those parts would take over.”

  He starts to cry. He tucks his head into my shoulder and I rub his back.

  When he falls asleep, I go into the bathroom and hang a towel over the mirror so he doesn’t have look at his bruises until they’re better.

  — Chapter 48 —

  Robert’s Friday night band at the bar cancels. It’s not my scene. It’s not Ethan’s either, so he stays home to paint. It’s the first time we’ve left him alone since Ivan showed up. His bruises have faded from purple to green. They look like shadows. He promises he’s fine. Says the alone time will be good for him. I check the locks on the doors before we leave.

  The crowd was expecting a Blue Öyster Cult cover band. I sprayed my hair so there are curls in every direction and lined my eyes with black shadow. There’s big hair and acid-washed jeans everywhere. I think about playing Don’t Fear the Reaper, but it might be twisting the knife, and the guitar part is too complicated for me anyway. I stick to my angrier stuff, hit my strings as hard as I can. I keep scraping my knuckle. Sometimes the crowd listens; mostly they drink. After I’ve played a few songs, half the bar clears out. The ones who stay seem to like me. At the very least, they buy a lot of beer.

  Robert tends bar. The liquor shelf lights change from blue to purple and back to blue, chiseling his face into sharp lines as he moves from one side of the bar to the other. A woman with big boobs corralled in a leather vest leans over as she orders, showing off her wares. He gives her enough attention to keep her buying drinks and leaving wadded bills on the bar.

  He brings me a beer. I tuck it under my stool and take it with me to the bathroom on the break. I don’t want to be rude, but after Ivan and his breath in my face, the smell of alcohol makes me sick. I pour my beer down the sink and leave the empty on the end of the bar.

  When everyone’s left and Robert is slopping out the spill mats, I slip behind the bar to help him.

  “Whatcha doing, cowgirl?” Robert kicks my boots lightly with his toe.

  “Helping.”

  It’s weird to be with him out in the world. We’ve spent so many nights at Ethan’s together. He’s different here. He has his hair down, tucked behind his ears. He’s beautiful.

  “Thank you,” he says. “April.” And the way he says my name is like he also knows something is different.

  “Robert,” I say back. I feel my face flush. I take the rag that’s hanging from his back pocket and spray club soda on it.

  I wipe down the bar. He refills the napkin holders.

  “Why aren’t you Rob?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, honestly, like it’s just occurred to him that he could be Rob if he wanted to be.

  “Well, think about it and get back to me,” I say, smiling. Just to say something. I’m not sure if it’s okay to feel the way I’m feeling. We’ve been through something together. I don’t know where that leaves us.

  After I’m done wiping down the bar I hop up on it, swinging my legs over the edge while Robert finishes counting out the drawer. His eyebrows furrow, lips moving ever so slightly as he stacks bills on top of each other.

  When he’s done, he pours himself a drink and climbs on the bar with me. “Thanks for helping,” he says. He leans in and kisses me, and it goes from being a friendly kind of kiss to a ravenous one, like every moment spent sitting together on Ethan’s staircase or brushing past each other in the kitchen has added up to this.

  Some drunk
s bang on the window. They can see us because the neon beer signs are still lit up. “Hold on,” Robert says. He runs around pulling the chains on the signs to turn them off so no one else will know what we’re about to do. He climbs back on the bar.

  — Chapter 49 —

  On the nights I don’t play, Ethan and I curl up on the couch with popcorn and ice cream watching old black and white movies. Tonight, it’s Top Hat and too much mint chocolate chip. When it’s over, Ethan hits the remote on the stereo, drags me to my feet, and tries to twirl me around like Ginger Rogers.

  “You’re too stiff,” he says, shaking my arm to loosen me up.

  “Trying to dance like Fred Astaire to R.E.M.,” I say, shaking his arm back, “is your first problem. Second is that I’m a terrible dancer. Terrible.” I head back to the couch to sit down.

  “It’s just what was in there,” Ethan says. He’s smiling, and it’s good to see him smile. His bruises are yellowed ghosts. You can only see them from certain angles. “Come on. Try. I’ll find something that fits better.”

  He thumbs through his CDs, puts on Ella Fitzgerald, and offers his hand to me. I take it. He tries to teach me the foxtrot and I step all over his toes. He lets me stand on his feet until I get the steps, singing Cheek to Cheek in his best Fred Astaire voice, even though Ella is singing something completely different. He spins me out and back in and my feet start doing the right things.

  “Look at you, Ginger.” He presses his cheek to mine. “You, here, makes my whole life better.”

  I cry. Big fat tears rolling down my face, splashing on Ethan’s cheek. “Jerk,” I say, sniffing and laughing and wiping my face. “Why did you have to say that?”

  “Because”—he sops tears from my cheeks with his sleeve—“it’s true. And I get the feeling not enough people have told you how much you matter. How amazing you are.”

  “You’re the only one crazy enough to think it.”