Know Not Why: A Novel (40 page)

“What the fuck is that??” I yelp.

“Rasputina, darling.”

“That’s … a pretty name,” offers Kristy.

Arthur looks like he may cave in on himself at
any moment.

Cora seems to recognize this; she turns the
volume way down and switches it to the radio.

“Taylor Swift!” Kristy screeches.

“Uh,” Cora replies, “may I just say that
barf
?”

Kristy is too busy singing along to get too bent
out of shape.

“Hey,” I say to Arthur, “how you doin’,
buddy?”

“Oh, magnificently,” he deadpans. “This may be
the best day ever.”

I reach for his hand. He knots his fingers
loosely with mine.

“Do we get to ask where we’re going,” Kristy
says, “or is it like a guessing game thingie?”

“You all know where you’re going,” Cora replies
sagely. “It’s where you’ve been headed all along.”

“You’re going to ax-murder us, aren’t you?”
Arthur says. He doesn’t sound too broken up by the idea.

+

She takes us to Holly’s.

It’s not bad.

+

Afterwards, we don’t head straight back to work.
Instead, we stop at McDonald’s. Kristy gets a Happy Meal. Cora gets
like four pies, which doesn’t exactly seem like a healthy, balanced
meal to me, but she’s not exactly a healthy, balanced young lady. I
get a couple of Big Macs and some fries. Arthur stares at the menu
the way a time-traveling seventeenth century Puritan would watch a
Lady Gaga music video. Still, even in the face of culinary
depravity, he seems different. Lighter.

Finally, he goes with a bottle of water and
those little apple slices.

“There must be so many preservatives in these,”
he muses as we all sit down, poking at one of the apples. Then he
shifts his attention to my tray. “You got
two hamburgers
?
And French fries?”

Now seems as good a time as any for a bathroom
break.

+

When I step out of the stall, it’s to find
Arthur standing there.

“Well, hi there. How Whamly of you to drop
in.”

He doesn’t seem to care very much about me
inventing adjectives. Once again, my genius goes unacknowledged.
“Holly’s was very nice.”

“Yeah,” I say, moving over to the sink.
“So?”

“So … perhaps it wouldn’t be the worst thing in
the world if—” He goes quiet, like he can’t quite bring himself to
speak so bold a notion out loud.

“Perhaps it wouldn’t,” I agree.

He stares at himself in the mirror, then looks
over at my reflection.

“You’re not really eating
two
of that
sandwich so big it’s got an extra bun in the middle, are you?
That’s absurd. That’s a plea for death.”

“Let’s focus on the good here, Kraft.”

“If the store closes—” He sinks back into
thought.

“Yeah?” I prompt, turning the sink off and
heading over to the paper towel dispenser.

“—I would be out of a job. My parents would be –
displeased, to say the least.”

“It wouldn’t, like, contribute to their
financial ruin or anything, would it?”

“No, no, they’re comfortably retired.”

“Then why are you even still doing this?”

“Because—” He stops, and considers his
reflection again. It’s like he’s having a staring contest with
himself. “That’s a very good question.”

“I’m a very good questioner.”

“You’re a very good lot of things.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Right back atcha. I think,” I add truthfully,
“you should do what you want to do.”

He turns away from the mirror to look at me. I
realize exactly how much I want him to do this. Really, it all
comes down to one simple thing: I really, really want this dude to
have a fucking excellent life.

“Maybe I will,” he says. I think he may be
marveling.

“That’s the spirit,” I say, clapping him on the
shoulder. He catches my hand and squeezes it.

Then all of a sudden his face gets serious, and
seriously alarmed. “Cora’s going to think we’re having sex in the
bathroom.”

“Shit. She is, isn’t she?”

We speed the hell on out of there. She does
anyway.

It’s still a pretty decent lunch.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“May I just point out,” I say, “that that’s your
third taco in a row.”

“May I just point out,” Amber replies through a
mouthful of said third taco, “that shut up.”

“Mitch,” I say. “Buddy. Stop giving her
tacos.”

Mitch looks a picture as ever this morning in
his uniform: a bright yellow t-shirt and a jaunty baseball cap
sporting the Señor Taco logo. The Señor Taco logo was clearly
devised by somebody with too many thoughts in their brainspace,
because it is a sombrero with a taco on it. That in and of itself,
while obscure, maybe isn’t unhandleable mentally, but then you
throw in the fact that the sombrero with the taco on it is
on
the hat
, and it just gets confusing. Hat on a hat. Even Dr.
Seuss wasn’t wily enough to mess with that shit. Hat on a cat,
sure. But hat on another hat? There’s a line.

A part of me will always be grateful to Señor
Taco, because without it, I never would have gotten to know Mitch
in the first place. The rest of me is just glad that I surrendered
to the overpowering urge to get the hell out of there three weeks
after getting hired. Sure, a baseball cap doesn’t have the same
emasculating properties as, say, a quaintly crafted apron, but the
whole taco-on-a-sombrero-on-a-baseball-cap conundrum – too much
fodder for thought. Not to mention the fact that somehow I just
know that eventually, that job would have ruined tacos for me.

Mitch has worked at Señor Taco for three years.
Nothing ruins tacos for Mitch Ballard. He’s too mighty a man. And
he really likes tacos.

“Mitchell,” Amber says, in her loveliest of
girly tones, “can I have another taco please?”

I frown at her as Mitch sets to work.

We are, needless to say, the only people at
Señor Taco at ten thirty in the morning. Well, Mitch’s coworker
Jerry is here, but he’s sprawled across one of the tables and
snoring, so I’m not sure how much he counts.

“Amber,” I say, “it’s ten thirty. You are eating
very, very many tacos. More tacos than
I
could eat at ten
thirty in the morning, and I went through a two-month phase where I
had potato chips for breakfast. I point this out because I
care.”

“He’s putting extra lettuce on them. Would you
chill? I’m nervous. Please just allow me, in this instance, to eat
my feelings.”

“Kristy’s not going to do anything to you. She’s
like God’s gift to everyone.”

“I know that!” Amber snaps. “That’s what’s so
nerve-wracking about it. She’s like the best person that’s ever
lived and
I’m
the leviathan superbitch who attacked her with
unpleasant life truths and profane language.”

“Excuse me, at what point during that
confrontation were we trolling the deep sea?”

“What?” Amber says blankly, and finishes off
Taco 3.

“I think ‘cause, ya know,” Mitch contributes,
“Leviathan. Sea monster. Rarrrrr.” He thrashes his arms in a way
that makes it abundantly clear that they’ve turned into tentacles,
and little flecks of lettuce fly around.

Amber groans. “Why are you talking, taco
slave.”

“Yeah, man. What’s up with that? What’s – dare I
say –
kraken
?”

“Things are about to get
Nessie
.” Mitch
grins broadly. “You know. Like, messy.”

“Eff, yeah!”

“My best friends are boys,” Amber intones
miserably to no one. (Or maybe Jerry.) “Why oh why did I make that
horrible life decision.”

“Hey,” I say, pointing at her. “These could be
fart jokes. Bad punning knows no gender limitations.”

Mitch has been driven into an impromptu
freestyling frenzy. “I spit rimes like a mariner / Kristy’s really
scarin’ her / it don’t make no sense / ‘cuz there ain’t no Care
Bear carin’-er—”

Amber looks up at him, eyebrows scrunched.
“Mitch.”

“Sorry,” he says dutifully. “Tacos.”

“No, not that. I – did you just make a Coleridge
reference?”

“Yeah,” Mitch says, smiling way too proudly for
the moment to be casual. “He was a Romantic poet.”

“I know he was.” After the longest pause known
to man, she says, none-too-tactfully, “…how do you?”

“I read some things,” he says nonchalantly.

For some reason, I feel struck by the sudden
concern to help the guy. I’m not sure how, or why, but Amber looks
all discerning-eyed and Mitch looks sort of flustered and there’s a
taco on the sombrero on his hat and sometimes, sometimes, a man
must trust his instinct to do his best-budly duty.

“Care Bear,” I say, like this is the brilliant
remark that will revolutionize the conversation. “
Care
Bear
?” See you later, Sammy Cool.

“Dude,” Mitch says, totally heartened. “Care
Bears are awesome.”

“Really?” Amber says. “Really? You get all
flustered about Coleridge, but you willingly admit that
Care
Bears
are awesome?”

Damn it, Amber.

“Coleridge is awesome,” Mitch says, all my
carefully concocted segueing thwarted. “It’s too bad about that
whole opium thing.”

Amber stares at me. “Have you been talking to
him about Romantic poets?”

“Amber,” I say, “when do I ever talk to anybody
about Romantic poets?”

“Oh, please. You make Gay Or Consumptive? Keats
jokes all the time.”

“That, lady fair, is my prerogative as a
reluctant English major at a shitty community college.”

“Hey,” she scolds. “Your mom works there,
remember. It’s not shitty.”

“Yeah, well, for a not-shitty establishment, it
sure hires some shitty professors.”

“Like who? Oh my God, are you
still
mad
about that one guy taking five points off your Shakespeare
essay?”

“Uh, yeah,” I say. “That.”

“Why are you reading about Coleridge?” Amber
asks Mitch.

“I just remember you mentioned him awhile ago,”
he says, shrugging. “And I hadn’t really done any reading since the
Potter ended, and I thought, ya know, Coleridge, I bet he’s cool.
And he is. Like, Christabel, what was
that
? They were
totally girl sexing each other, right? But in this spooky way.”

“You read Christabel,” Amber says, awed.

“Yeah,” Mitch says, like it ain’t no thang.
“Tu-whit, tu-whoo! It’s a bummer he didn’t finish it. I was all
getting into it, and then it was just, like,
the end
. That
was harsh.”

Amber just stares at him for ten straight
seconds, like she’s never looked at him before in her whole life.
There’s naught but Amber looking at Mitch, and Mitch looking at
Amber, and the sound of Jerry snoring. Finally, I reach for one of
Amber’s taco wrappers and start crinkling it up, just for the
noise.

“There’s a Victorian horror novel by J. Sheridan
LeFanu called Carmilla,” Amber says. She sounds a special kind of
weird: it’s, like, 50% reciting-a-textbook and 50%
chick-flick-dialogue-with-a-sensitive-indie-song-in the-background.
“It draws heavily from the plot of Christabel. Lots of lesbian
subtext and vampirism.”

“Excellent,” Mitch says. His expression is
turning sappy, and God help me, God help us all, I don’t think it’s
because of the lesbian vampires.

I need to
fix this
. “Like, porn-type
excellent?”

“No,” Mitch says. He throws me this minuscule,
pathetic excuse for a glance before steering his eyeballs right
back to Amber. “Like,
awesome
excellent. You should make me
a book list.”

“A book list?” Amber repeats, disbelieving.

Oh, jeez, why not just
ask her to marry
you
.

“Sure. Reading’s flippin’ sweet. Plus, Rudy and
me are almost done with our epic Xena rewatch, so I’m gonna have
lots of spare time on my hands.”

“A-all right,” Amber says, along with this cute
weird little laugh that doesn’t sound very much like her. “I’ll
think up some books for you.”

“Cool,” he says happily.

“Cool,” she echoes, just as cheerful.

They smile at each other.

This … is weird.

“
I
dig Xena. How come Amber and I didn’t
get invited to partake in the epic Xena rewatch?” It’s the only
thing I can think of to say. Unfortunately, I say it really
friggin’ abnormally loud. Jerry goes ‘Whuuut Xena whuttt?’, sits up
for two seconds, and then falls asleep again.

“Dude,” Mitch says to me, very seriously, “you
have to
respect
the Xena. It’s only the world’s greatest
story of love and redemption. You guys would just be all bantery
and stuff.”

“We can be unbantery,” I protest.

“No we can’t,” Amber says. Which is, okay, fair.
“Are you really expecting us to believe that Rudy respects the
Xena?”

“Rudy pretty much respects any chick who could
beat him up,” Mitch explains.

“I suppose my spectacular lack of upper arm
strength explains why he starts chuckling like a demented ogre
every time he sees me,” Amber says, rolling her eyes. “And because
he thought you and I—”

She dwindles off. Is she blushing? Is
he
blushing? Oh, crap, this will not stand.

“Okay!” I say. “Let’s go visit Kristy!”

“But – tacos—”

“Hold up a sec,” Mitch says gallantly. “I’ll get
you one to go.”

“You are beautiful,” Amber sighs.

You know what, I’m starting to develop the very
acute suspicion that if I do not separate them right now, they’re
going to start licking each other’s faces.

“It’ll go totally okay!” Mitch says. “Kristy
sounds really nice. And you’re really nice.”

“And hopefully John’s really nice,” Amber adds.
“Since I’m about to volunteer to blind date him.”

“Yeah,” Mitch says, crestfallen. “John. John …
too. I bet he’s just … huggable. And … well-groomed. And
punctual.”