Second Hand (Tucker Springs) (5 page)

“I gave her everything,” I said. It seemed stupid to reveal so much to him, and yet suddenly, I
had
to say it. I longed to tell somebody my side of the story—not to justify anything, but to get it out. To purge it. I’d been too embarrassed to bring it up with Nick in any kind of detail. I hadn’t yet told my parents that Stacey had left me. Every other person I knew in Tucker Springs was more Stacey’s friend than mine. There’d been absolutely nobody for me to talk to about it. Until now.

“Nothing was ever good enough. I planned to be a veterinarian, and she liked that. Somehow, that was respectable, I guess. I did fine in undergrad, but I failed out of vet school, and everything went downhill from that point on.” Looking back, I wondered if she’d decided right then that I’d never be good enough. Maybe she hadn’t even quite been aware of it herself, but I was pretty sure she’d never felt the same about me after that.

“She’s one of those people who grew up playing tennis, you know? And golf at the country club. And she wants that life, but she wants to be an artist too, which means she has to marry well. And I no longer qualify. So now I’m stuck here, with eighteen months left on a lease in a house where I can’t have pets. Every credit card I have is maxed out because she had to have every damn thing she ever saw. I still have student loans to pay back, which I can’t help but think would be less or already taken care of if we hadn’t been so busy paying for everything she wanted. And for some goddamn stupid reason I can’t even explain to myself, I still want her back.”

I tipped my drink back and gulped it all down. I didn’t look at him. I set the glass on the table and stared at it rather than face whatever might be in his eyes. “That’s why I bought the necklace.”

He was quiet, but after a few seconds of contemplative silence, he took his foot off the table. For one second, I thought he was going to stand up, but he didn’t. He crushed his cigarette butt out in the ashtray between us, then leaned his elbows on the table to stare at me. “You know what the root of all evil is?”

I blinked at him, trying to figure out where he was going with the question. “Money?”

“No, man. It’s
stuff
. Possessions.
Things
. All that crap money buys. All the shit we tell ourselves we need. You have any idea how many people come into my shop every week and they got to trade in some gadget so they can pay the rent? The thing is, you ask them, ‘Did you know rent was due?’ Of course they did. ‘Did you realize you didn’t have another payday between now and then?’ Yeah, they knew that too. ‘So why’d you decide to drop five hundred on an iPad?’ And they don’t got an answer, and if they do, it’s something ridiculous. It’s new. It’s hip. It’s shiny. It’s loud. Their neighbor has one, or their sister, or their boss, and they can’t stand to let others have things they don’t. They’re so afraid of what others might think. Their kid is sitting there in a dirty diaper and a T-shirt two sizes too small. Thirty degrees outside and they didn’t bother to put pants on the poor kid, let alone socks and a jacket, but they drove right down to Best Buy the minute it opened to buy the newest Xbox, and now they’re scratching their heads wondering why they can’t pay for heat.

“You fell into it, Paul. Into the mindset. Into the lie. But it’s not just you. Not just Stacey, either. It’s almost every other red-blooded American out there. Now you’re at the end of it, and you can’t beat yourself up. There’s no point in punishing yourself, because it’s over. The thing is, now you know the way out.”

“I do?” I wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol or him that had me confused.

“Yeah.”

I sat there, stunned, baffled, a bit amused. I had several questions I wanted to ask, not the least of which was,
What the hell are you talking about?
What I ended up saying was, “Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Hanging out with me. Buying me drinks.”

“Is it that much of a mystery?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

A ghost of a smile played over his full lips. He raised an eyebrow at me. “You’re not worried about the fact that I brought you to a gay bar?”

Alarm bells went off in my head, but I chastised myself. Surely he was just teasing me. “Should I be?”

This time he really did smile, a mischievous one that caused butterflies to take flight in my chest. When was the last time somebody had bothered to flirt with me? Even as a joke?

Emanuel slid one of his two untouched beers my way. “Here,” he said as he leaned back to light his next cigarette, “have another drink.”

What are you doing?

The question kept rattling around El’s head as he watched his adorable, straight, hot mess of a redhead finish off his first beer and blithely accept another when offered it. El told himself he was amused, that was all. Bemused, actually, because he couldn’t quite make Paul out. Which meant he was bored and feeding Paul drinks and watching what happened as a way to pass the time.

Except he watched the way Paul’s lips clung to the glass and had to check urges to skim his knuckles down Paul’s sharp, innocent cheekbones.

What was he doing, indeed?

“So what are you going to do?” El asked, forcing himself to stop having idiot fantasies. Maybe if Paul talked about his ex-girlfriend enough, El could write him off as another sorry sap serving as a walking advertisement for why not to have relationships. Not to mention that if they both said
girlfriend
often enough, maybe El would cotton on to the fact that Paul was straight.

Paul blinked at El in drunken confusion. “Do?”

The more clueless Paul got, the more adorable he became. “About Stacey,” El prompted.

“Oh.” Paul stared sadly into his half-spent glass. “Nothing, I guess.”

Right. Obviously. “Moving on then? More fish in the sea?” El nodded wryly at the door throbbing with club music. “Should have taken you to your kind of pond.”

Paul blinked as if he didn’t understand. “Pond? Oh.” His gaze returned to the glass again. El began to wonder if Paul thought it might be some kind of alcoholic gazing glass. “I don’t think I have a pond.”

“Oh yes. That’s right, I forgot we were supposed to be picking up people at the laundromat.” When Paul registered even deeper confusion, El reached for his cigarettes and lit up. “It’s a joke. I told a friend of mine we shouldn’t try to make hookups in bars but at regular places, and now it’s kind of a running theme.”

For a second, El worried Paul might think that’s what this was, a hookup, but then he remembered Paul was Captain Clueless. He seemed to be considering El’s theory of relationships, though, and after a few moments of drunken pensiveness, he nodded. “That’s true. I met Stacey in the school commons. She needed someone to hold her books while she wiped up a coffee someone had spilled across our table, and she bought me lunch as a thank-you. Everything sort of happened from there.”

It was his face, El decided, the way you could see everything he thought about as it passed between his ears. Guileless, simple thoughts. For example, right now Paul was trying to figure out how he could repeat that kind of scenario. El would’ve bet money on it.

Too bad he wasn’t the relationship type. Too bad Paul was straight.

Too bad no relationship ever worked out, period.

El wondered about Paul being entirely straight, though, like when El’s conscience got the better of him and compelled him to shuttle Paul back to his house. It wasn’t the fact that Paul clung to El while he held him up—he was drunk; that came with the territory. The glances, though, made El pause. Paul checking the way El filled out his T-shirt. Staring at El’s waist after he’d poured Paul into bed. Simple things that were almost guaranteed to be El reading into his intentions.

Simple things, though, that fucked royally with El’s head.

He stopped by Rosa’s the next day and listened to her carry on about her man of the moment, listened as she spouted the same lines she always did about how they’d made a connection, about how there was something special about this one, about how she could tell by looking into his eyes that he understood her in a way no one else had. El wished he had the other seventy times she’d told him that on tape to play back to her, but it wouldn’t have mattered. She’d still be convinced this was The One, right up until the moment he cheated on her or left her without warning or some new twist proved he was The Same One as Always.

She never listened because she was lonely. El knew that. As he thought about it, he realized that was his problem too, though not in the same way. He was plugging into the same bullshit, thinking someone who felt off the beaten path could work some kind of magic and fill his life with cheesy soundtracks and longing glances.

Which was crazy. El liked his life. It was the way he wanted it. He hated cheesy soundtracks, and he never glanced longingly at anything. Paul was amusing and entertaining. Adorable too, yes. And straight.

Not that any of it mattered, because El didn’t do relationships, and he wasn’t going to be doing Paul.

So there wasn’t any harm in enjoying his company, because Paul didn’t have a pond and El didn’t want to go fishing.

Or something like that.

The morning after my night with El at the bar, I woke feeling thick-headed and groggy. The beer had been a bit too dark and intense for me, much like Emanuel himself. Still, I felt better for having spent time with him. Somehow lighter for having spilled my guts to a man I barely knew. It seemed like I should feel awkward about it, but I didn’t. El’s simple acceptance of it all, as if it were a story he’d heard a hundred times before, made it easier. It was like having gone to confession, but without any of the Hail Marys.

My mom called early in the afternoon and asked to talk to Stacey. “I thought I’d wish her a happy birthday.”

I debated lying and telling her that Stacey was out for the day, but that would only delay the inevitable. I hated to disappoint my mom, but there was really no way to avoid it any longer.

“She doesn’t live here anymore, Mom.”

A heartbeat of silence, then, “What do you mean?”

She knew what I meant. Her question had more to do with filling an awkward space than with needing an explanation, but I gave one anyway. “She left me.”

It made me sad how Mom almost sounded relieved. “Did the two of you have a fight?”

If only it had been that simple. “She decided we were going in different directions.” What that really meant was that she’d decided I couldn’t give her what she wanted, but no need to be too blatant about my shortcomings. I shut my eyes, hating that I had failed like this, hated what my mother was about to think of me. “She met somebody else. A professor at the university.”

“Oh, Paul. I’m so sorry. Are you doing okay?”

“I’m fine, Ma,” I lied.

“You’re such a nice boy, honey. You’ll meet somebody else. I know you will. Somebody who truly appreciates you.”

Leave it to my mom to pull out the most clichéd mother speech ever. And yet, it helped a bit. “From your lips to God’s ears.”

“How’s the clinic?”

“Fine.”

“Do you still like it?”

“I do. My boss is a great guy, and I love all the animals, you know?” I wished I hadn’t disappointed everybody by failing so miserably, though. I should have been the veterinarian. Instead, I answered the phone for Nick and sent out bills.

No girlfriend. No fiancée. No real job. No real life. Just some secondhand makeshift number I’d pulled out of the wreckage of what should have been.

Mom interrupted my pity party with a depressingly upbeat tone that screamed Bright New Idea. “Do you have any plans for the summer?”

“Not really. I can’t afford to go anywhere.” I could barely afford to stay put, either, but that made me think about the pink flier. “My neighborhood is having this contest for nice yards. The prize is $500.”

“That sounds like a good way to get outside,” she said. “Get some sun. Maybe you’ll meet someone nice.”

“In my front lawn?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

I laughed. My mother was an optimist and a hopeless romantic. She called me a pessimist, but I didn’t see it that way. I dwelt closer to the land of reality. “I’ll settle for the cash prize, but thanks anyway.”