If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (16 page)

“Beautiful,” the doctor was saying. I thought that, once again, she’d chosen a word that seemed out of place. I opened my eyes but I didn’t see anything. I listened for a minute, but there was no sound coming from the walls. The doctor was patting Liz’s leg.

“Everything is fine,” she said. “I want you to rest a bit, then I’ll do a final check and you’re all done.” She left the room, closing the door behind her. The assistant snapped the sheet off the bed and placed a brighter one over Liz. I saw the bloodstains on the old sheet, like fresh tracks in the snow, before the assistant bunched it up and threw it in a blue wicker hamper in the corner.

For the first time since we came into the room, I looked directly into Liz’s face. She looked pale and tired, but her eyes were clear. Later, at the motel, she’d tell me how at one point she’d felt the room grow dark and thought it was raining. She could hear the rain beating down hard on the bed, soaking her skin, her clothes, even though she felt dry. The raindrops sounded like individual bullets, and in her mind she saw herself facing a firing squad in front of Eddy’s candy store on Comanche Street. They kept shooting at her from across the street. Even though they were strangers, she could see by their faces they were frustrated because she wouldn’t go all the way down. They finally turned around and began walking away. Liz said she could feel herself smiling, proud
that she had fooled them. She felt a twinge of pain, but it was only a nick where a bullet had grazed her thigh without breaking the skin. There wouldn’t even be a scar.

Up above, the sky seemed gray and overcast, as though it might really rain. We watched the gulls circling the roof, heard their beggarly cries through the tiny windows. I was careful not to touch Liz. I was afraid if I touched her something might break.

“How you doing, man?” I whispered.

She leaned forward and whispered something back. I leaned closer and said, “Louder.”

Liz put her lips hard against my ear. “Who invited Marily Weiss’s twin fucking sister? Should I wrap her tongue around her tonsils?” We started laughing. We laughed until we became hysterical, leaning into each other, snorting, gasping, until tears poured down our cheeks. The doctor came into the room, smiling. She said to Liz, “This will only take a minute.” She stood at the foot of the bed, waiting, and even when she stopped smiling, when she finally said in a sharper voice than we’d heard her use all day, “All right, girls, that’s enough,” still we couldn’t stop laughing, as the rain finally began to fall and we heard it beating against the light from the sky.

casualties

I
was on my way back from break when someone said, “Katie,” and I turned and then I realized who it was. Allie. Alphonse D’Amore was back in town.

“Allie, Jesus,” I said as he came toward me. He looked good. His face was heavier, but that was because of the drugs they’d given him at the treatment center. His hair was cut shorter so you could see how high his forehead was. That was supposed to be a sign of intelligence and Allie had always been smart. He’d always made the most money dealing and had never been busted. He gave me a hug that threatened to bust my bones. It surprised me, because Allie and I had never been tight. The truth was, even though everyone thought he was beyond cool, I hadn’t liked him all that much, ever since that time he’d hit Ginger when they were still together. Afterward, he walked into Eddy’s and ordered a strawberry milk shake as if nothing had happened. As if Ginger wasn’t sitting outside, on the steps of Eddy’s side door, crying. It wasn’t the first time, either; you could tell by the way Ginger’s eyes had flinched, as though she’d been expecting it. I didn’t like people who were too cool for this earth. There was always a streak of dirt somewhere inside them.

Now Allie put his hands on my shoulders and stared into my face.
His eyes were sunken back, but they looked clear. He was smiling deeply, as if his mouth was rolling backward. “Katie, you know who I am? I’m Eagleton.”

I looked at him and smiled. I didn’t know what else to do.

“That’s who I am now,” Allie said. “You know that guy, Eagleton? On the news? That’s me. I’m Eagleton.”

I hadn’t been there the night Allie flipped out. At first everyone just thought he was high and finally showing it; Allie had the reputation of being an iron head: acid, ludes, angel dust, THC, Allie was always the one who still knew what time it was. He’d never lost control before. They’d had to take him to the emergency room, call his parents. “Worst call I ever made in my life, man,” Billy had said, a shudder in his voice. “To see someone you know your whole life, handcuffed to the bed like that. Creeped me out, man. Allie, of all people.”

It was creeping me out now, Allie smiling that big, loud smile. He never used to smile that much before.

“They won’t let him run, they say he blew it for McGovern, but he’ll be back,” Allie said. “He’ll come back, just like I did. Say, Katie,” he said, his voice more urgent. “You saw my son, right?”

When I didn’t answer, he said, “You were at the hospital, right? When Ginger had the baby? My son? What’s he look like? Does he look like me?”

I remembered Ginger’s baby, in the hospital, Nanny saying, “You think he looks like anyone we know?” I wondered if Allie remembered that he and Ginger had been in one of their breakup phases when he flipped out and went to the hospital, if he knew that Ginger had been running amok in the months that followed. I wondered if he knew that Ginger had given the baby up for adoption and that she was living on a born-again farm in Lubbock, Texas. She had called Nanny late one night from a pay phone, but Nanny could barely hear her, and when the operator cut in to ask for more money, the connection was broken. Ginger never called back, and none of us had a number to reach her.

“I’ve got to get back to work, Allie,” I said, gently removing his hands from my shoulders.

“But you saw him, right? In the hospital? I was in the hospital, too.” It was like a light had been snuffed out suddenly. Allie slumped down, his arms dangling at his sides. He was wearing a green velour pullover and work boots, even though it was August and like ninety-five degrees out. He looked at me and his eyes were anxious. “I was in one hospital, he was in the other. They had me tied down, that’s why I never went to see him. You saw him, Katie, right? Does he look like me?” Allie was almost shouting now. People were watching us. All the people in aisle seven were looking at me and Allie. Desmond, the store manager, was walking toward us from the produce department, where he’d been inspecting cantaloupes. Another man I didn’t know was coming up behind him. The man came right up and put his arm around Allie. “It’s all right, Allie, everything’s okay,” he said, his voice smooth. He wore glasses and had a bristly mustache.

“Everything all right over here?” Desmond asked.

“It’s fine, it’s fine. Miss, I’m sorry, I’m sorry if he—he’s not well, he hasn’t been well, he—”

“I know him,” I said. “We’re friends.”

The man looked relieved. “Okay, then,” he said. “Okay. That’s good, that’s good, he just got re—he just got home, he hasn’t seen too many people yet.” His eyes were blinking nervously behind his glasses. “Gotta, gotta get back in the swing here, right, Allie? Back in the saddle.”

“I should get back to work,” I said. Desmond nodded and walked toward the manager’s booth at the front of the store.

“Oh, you work here?” the man said. “That’s good, that’s, that’s nice.” He held out his hand. “I’m Sam D’Amore, Allie’s father. Call me Sam, please.”

“I’m Katie,” I said, holding out my hand. He shook it firmly.

“Dad, she knows my son!” Allie said excitedly. “Katie met him, she was at his hospital. What’s he look like, Katie? Does he look like me?”

“He’s beautiful, Allie,” I said. Allie beamed. He beamed like a normal, proud father. I turned away and started walking toward the checkout registers at the front of the store. I was on register number four.

Behind me, Allie’s father said, “I heard her, son, yes I did. Come on, now. Let’s go home.”

•   •   •

T
hat kid a friend of yours?” Martha asked. “Nut job in aisle seven this morning?”

“He’s not a nut job. He has some problems,” I said.

Martha snorted. “Drugs, that’s his problem,” she said. “I heard him shouting up at the front of the store. Nut job.”

“Would you stop calling him that,” I said.

“Just calling it like I see it,” Martha said. She took her sandwich out of the brown paper bag. It was wrapped in wax paper. We were allowed half-price sandwiches from the delicatessen department, but every day Martha Muldoon brought her lunch to work in an aluminum lunch box. She was eating her egg salad sandwich with tiny, fastidious bites, which was weird because she was a big, rawboned woman with a high, ruddy color and that insane home permanent, with iron-gray curls that looked like they were waiting to spring free from prison. She was the most senior cashier at the A&P and never let you forget it. She was also a tattletale, always running to Desmond if one of us was a minute late coming back from break. She told on Jerry Tuttle and Terry Noonan for punching each other in on time even when one of them was late. She told on Cathy Strutz for not emptying the ashtrays when it was her turn to clean the break room. She was never late for work, hadn’t called in sick once in eighteen years and was always the last one out the door at night. “I’m a proud representative of the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company,” she’d tell anyone who would listen, including the customers on her checkout line. None of us could stand her.

Martha had finished her egg salad sandwich and was wiping her mouth with dainty little nips from a napkin. She opened the lunch box and took out a Saran-wrapped package of carrot sticks. Next to that she put a proud red McIntosh. She always insisted on paying for her fruit, whether it was a lone apple or a handful of cherries, even when Gus, the produce manager, said she could have it for free. “I pay my own way,” she told him firmly, standing at the scale, making sure he charged her to the penny. “Sex with that broad must be a barrel of laughs,” Gus would say, watching her march up the aisle. “Probably keeps a meter running in her snatch.”

Everybody hated Martha, but the tide turned somewhat when she got fired for letting Sugar Lady slide for two bags of sugar. It was ironic, because we were always letting customers slide at the register and we lived in fear of Martha finding out and reporting us to Desmond and here she was the one getting fired. It was a silent conspiracy among the checkout girls and bag boys who worked the registers; while waiting on our friends’ parents, former teachers, our mothers’ canasta partners, we’d push several items onward without ringing them up. Times were hard; you could see it on the checkout lines, when customers would look at the total and ask you to void a few things, or around the meat department, where more people were buying chicken necks and gizzards than ground round or fryers because they were so much cheaper, and little kids kept coming around the butcher’s door to beg for soup bones for their dogs. Everyone knew at least one family where there’d been a layoff, and if we were in a position to help out, why not? As long as we didn’t get caught. We always warned everyone to act like they didn’t know us while we rang up their groceries. To act like complete strangers, as though they’d never seen us before in their lives. This way, the people on line in back of them were less likely to notice that the price we rang up was substantially less than it should have been. Most of the time everyone complied because they didn’t want anything to happen to any of us or to get in trouble themselves. Our friends’ mothers, our own mothers (on someone else’s
checkout line, of course) would hold out their folded tens and twenties with quaking hands, collect their change and scurry out of the store with their shopping bags. Every once in a while there were slipups, though, like the time Conor and Billy came in to buy beer for the Labor Day beach party. I rang up a case of Budweiser at a dollar fifty, and Conor cried, “Whoa, check this out! Katie, man, you are such an outasight chick!” The two of them were trying to hug me and carrying on and I had to practically push them out the door to get rid of them. Thankfully, nothing happened. But most of the time, things went pretty smoothly, because we never talked about it and because Meghan Leary, the head cashier, was extremely careful about who she passed on to Desmond for hiring. “One wrong person in here could blow the whole thing sky-high,” she’d say.

The day of Martha’s firing was cold for summer, with a nagging rain beating on the big windows that looked out over Main Street. It was a Monday and over the weekend the price of sugar had tripled. In all the aisles, you could hear the customers exclaiming over the rising price of practically everything: tomato sauce, Campbell’s soup, nectarines, tomatoes. But the price of sugar was extreme, and by the time Sugar Lady came in, we’d been hearing comments on the checkout lines all morning. Sugar Lady was so called because she had twenty-three grandchildren and used to buy two or three bags of sugar at a time because she loved baking cookies for them. They were good cookies, too; she once brought us a huge tin of them at Christmastime, wrapped in aluminum foil and tied with red and silver ribbons. Sugar Lady was a short, stout black woman with tremendous breasts and a behind that looked like she had another person following her. She must have had some of those grandchildren living with her, because her grocery cart was always filled to the brim and on holidays she’d be pushing one cart in front of her and lugging another one in back. She always dressed to the nines, too, in flouncy dresses and stockings with seams and flowered hats that looked like they belonged in church. She wore those stubby old-lady shoes with
the crooked heels, black in winter, white in summer. These past few months, though, Sugar Lady had cut back like everybody else and her cart was only half to three-quarters full by the time she reached the checkout line.

She was on Martha’s register that Monday when she began unloading her groceries, which included the customary three bags of Domino sugar. She must have taken them off the shelf without looking at the price, though, because when she saw the total, she actually gasped. She looked at everything, turned over cans of stewed prunes and boxes of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, and when she saw the sticker price on the sugar bags she gasped again, turning one of the bags over and over. “Oh, my,” she kept saying. “Oh, my.” Then she told Martha, “Please, miss, take off two bags of sugar from the bill. Can’t afford but one this time.” Freddy, the best-looking bag boy, whose nickname was Good-Looking Freddy, told us she looked stunned, “like she was coming off a sugar rush herself, you know, all dazed and everything,” he said.

So Martha, straight-arrow Martha, that proud representative of the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, put a void slip into the register and subtracted the money, asked Desmond to sign it, which he did, put the slip at the bottom of the cash box, as we were instructed to do, and when Desmond went back to the manager’s office, she shoved the other two bags of sugar down the belt for Good-Looking Freddy to bag up with the rest of the groceries. At first, he was confused and looked at Martha, wondering if she’d made a mistake. He said the look she gave him was so murderous and fierce, he just shoved the sugar into a bag. Then Martha handed the change to Sugar Lady, who didn’t seem to know what had happened, Freddy said, and just as she was lifting the bagged groceries into her cart, a voice called out, “I saw that!”

The voice was loud, you couldn’t help but hear. You couldn’t. We all looked up and saw the red-faced woman in back of Sugar Lady. She was a semi-regular customer who kept her eye on the cash register the entire time you were ringing up her purchases, the kind who snapped, “Those
are two-for-one, go read the sign!” acting like you were intentionally robbing her instead of making an honest mistake. She’d snatch the receipt out of your hands and stand there reviewing it, refusing to budge out of the way so that you could begin ringing up the next customer. When all the prices jibed and no errors had been made, her mouth was still tightened with distrust. She never replied when you told her to have a nice day. We called her Evil Eye.

“Manager!” she called loudly, in the direction of the manager’s booth at the front of the store. Sugar Lady, oblivious, was getting ready to wheel her cart outside. Freddy began sweating, he told us later. Evil Eye had probably seen him bagging the illicit merchandise but he didn’t want to leave Martha in the lurch, because he thought she’d done a noble thing. “I mean, really, man, who would have thought the tight-assed bitch had it in her?”