The Best American Short Stories 2014 (7 page)

“He's such a crude old coot,” my ex-husband said. “I should be impressed with your loyalty, but I never knew what you saw in him.”

Savannah the receptionist came for Franklin, and he went to the hospital—but not before paying the bill from a wad of money I didn't know he was carrying, and not before taking a Mexican hat off the wall, insisting that he was “just borrowing it, like an umbrella.”

“There might be an Indian uprising if we stop him,” the waiter's brother said to him. “Let him go.” He called out to Franklin, “Hey, pard, you keep that hat and wear it if they storm the Alamo.”

I thought about that, and thought about it, and finally thought José hadn't really meant anything by it, that a little shoplifting was easy to deal with, especially when the culprit announced what he was doing.

With the worried transgendered woman beside him, and Franklin holding her arm, it was amazing that he could shuffle in a way that allowed him to bend enough to kiss my cheek. “Awake, Princess,” he said, “and thank God our minions were all too smart to call an ambulance.”

He refused dialysis and died at the end of April, which, for him, certainly was the cruelest month. I spoke to him the day after I fainted in the restaurant, and he told me they'd put leeches on his foot; the second time, several weeks later, he was worried that it might have to be amputated. “You're the ugly stepsister who crammed my foot into the slipper,” he said. “And time's the ugly villain that made me old. I was a proper shit-kicker in my Luccheses. I would have had you under the table back in the day. But you're right, I never loved you. Maybe you'll find something to write about when I'm dead, because you sure aren't kicking your own shit while I'm still alive.”

If you can believe it, that Christmas I got a card from the Mexican restaurant, signed by staff I'd never even met. It could have been a crib sheet for remembering that painful day: a silver Christmas tree with glitter that came off on my fingertips and some cute little animals clustered at the base, wearing caps with pompoms and tiny scarves. A squirrel joined them, standing on its haunches, holding sheet music, as Santa streaked overhead, Rudolph leading the way. Rudolph. What had become of Rudolph?

There was no memorial service that I heard of, though a few people called or wrote me when they saw the obituary. “Was he still full of what he called ‘piss and vinegar' up to the end? You kept in touch with him, didn't you?” Carole Kramer (who'd become a lawyer in New York) wrote me. I wrote her back that he'd had to give up his cowboy boots, but I could assure her he was still full of piss and vinegar, and didn't say that it was an inability to piss that finally killed him, and that he'd drunk himself to death, wine, vinegar, it didn't really matter.

He'd mentioned squirrels the last day I'd seen him, though, so now when I saw them I paid more attention, even if everyone in Washington thought of them as rats with bushy tails. I even bought one a roasted chestnut on a day I was feeling sentimental, but the squirrel dropped it like it was poison, and I could see from the gleam in the eye of the guy cooking the nuts that he was glad I'd gotten my comeuppance.

Then winter ended and spring came, and I thought, even if I don't believe there's a poem in anything anymore, maybe I'll write a story. A lot of people do that when they can't seem to figure out who or what they love. It might be an oversimplification, but they seem to write poetry when they do know.

FROM
The New Yorker

 

W
HAT WE WERE ARGUING
about that night—and it was late, very late, 3:10
A.M.
by my watch—was something that had happened nearly twelve hours earlier. A small thing, really, but by this time it had grown out of all proportion and poisoned everything we said, as if we didn't have enough problems already. Mallory was relentless. And I was feeling defensive and maybe more than a little paranoid. We were both drunk. Or, if not drunk, at least loosened up by what we'd consumed at Chris Wright's place in the wake of the incident and then at dinner after and the bar after that. I could smell the nighttime stink of the river. I looked up and watched the sky expand overhead and then shrink down to fit me like a safety helmet. A truck went blatting by on the interstate, and then it was silent, but for the mosquitoes singing their blood song, while the rest of the insect world screeched either in protest or accord, I couldn't tell which, thrumming and thrumming, until the night felt as if it were going to burst open and leave us shattered in the grass.

“You asshole,” she snarled.

“You're the asshole,” I said.

“I hate you.”

“Ditto,” I said. “Ditto and square it.”

 

The day had begun peaceably enough, a Saturday, the two of us curled up and sleeping late, the shades drawn and the air conditioner doing its job. If it hadn't been for the dog, we might have slept right on into the afternoon, because we'd been up late the night before, at a club called Gabe's, where we'd danced, with the assistance of well rum and two little white pills Mallory's friend Mona had given her, until we sweated through our clothes, and the muscles of our calves—my calves, anyway—felt as if they'd been surgically removed, hammered flat, and sewn back in place. But the dog, Nome—a husky, one blue eye, one brown—kept laying the wedge of his head on my side of the bed and emitting a series of insistent whines, because his bladder was bursting and it was high time for his morning run.

My eyes flashed open, and, despite the dog's needs and the first stirrings of a headache, I got up with a feeling that the world was a hospitable place. After using the toilet and splashing some water on my face, I found my shorts on the floor where I'd left them, unfurled the dog's leash, and took him out the door. The sun was high. The dog sniffed and evacuated. I led him down to the corner store, picked up a copy of the newspaper and two coffees to go, retraced my steps along the quiet sun-dappled street, mounted the stairs to the apartment, and settled back into bed. Mallory was sitting up waiting for me, still in her nightgown but with her glasses on—boxy little black-framed things that looked like a pair of the generic reading glasses you find in the drugstore but were in fact ground to the optometrist's specifications and which she wore as a kind of combative fashion statement. She stretched and smiled when I came through the door and murmured something that might have been “Good morning,” though, as I say, the morning was all but gone. I handed her a coffee and the Life section of the newspaper. Time slowed. For the next hour there were no sounds but for a rustle of newsprint and the gentle soughing suck of hot liquid through a small plastic aperture. We may have dozed. It didn't matter. It was summer. And we were on break.

The plan was to drive out to the farmhouse our friends Chris and Anneliese Wright were renting from the farmer himself and laze away the hours sipping wine and maybe playing croquet or taking a hike along the creek that cut a crimped line through the cornfields, which rose in an otherwise unbroken mass as far as you could see. After that, we'd play it by ear. It was too much trouble to bother with making dinner—and too hot, up in the nineties, and so humid the air hung on your shoulders like a flak jacket—and if Chris and Anneliese didn't have anything else in mind, I was thinking of persuading them to join us at the vegetarian place in town for the falafel plate, with shredded carrots, hummus, tabbouleh, and the like, and then maybe hit a movie or head back over to Gabe's until the night melted away. Fine. Perfect. Exactly what you wanted from a midsummer's day in the Midwest, after the summer session had ended and you'd put away your books for the three-week respite before the fall semester started up.

We didn't have jobs, not in any real sense—jobs were a myth, a rumor—so we held on in grad school, semester after semester, for lack of anything better to do. We got financial aid, of course, and accrued debt on our student loans. Our car, a hand-me-down from Mallory's mother, needed tires and probably everything else into the bargain. We wrote papers, graded papers, got A's and B's in the courses we took, and doled out A's and B's in the courses we taught. Sometimes we felt as if we were actually getting somewhere, but the truth was, like most people, we were just marking time.

At any rate, we made some sandwiches, put the dog in the car, and drove through the leafy streets of town, until the trees gave way and the countryside opened up around us, two bottles of marked-down shoppers' special Australian Zinfandel in a bag on the floor in back. The radio was playing (bluegrass, a taste we'd acquired since moving out here to the heart of the country), and we had the windows rolled down to enjoy the breeze we were generating as the car humped through the cornfields and over a series of gently rolling hills that made us feel as if we were floating. Nome was in the back seat, hanging his head out the window and striping the fender with airborne slaver. All was well. But then we turned onto the unmarked blacktop road that led out to Chris and Anneliese's and saw the car there, a silver Toyota, engine running, stopped in our lane and facing the wrong direction.

As we got closer we saw a woman—girl—coming toward us down the center of the road, her face flushed and her eyes wet with what might have been the effects of overwrought emotion or maybe hay fever, which was endemic here, and we saw a man—boy—then too, perched on the hood of the car, shouting abuse at her retreating back. The term “lovers' quarrel” came into my head at the very moment the girl lifted her face and Mallory yelled, “Stop!”

“It's a lovers' quarrel,” I said, ever so slightly depressing the accelerator.

“Stop!” Mallory repeated, more insistently this time. The guy was watching us, something like an angry smirk on his face. The girl—she was no more than a hundred feet away now—raised her hand as if to flag us down, and I eased up on the gas, thinking that maybe they were in trouble after all, something wrong with the car, the engine overheating, the fuel gauge on empty. It was hot. Grasshoppers flung themselves at the windshield like yellow hail. All you could smell was tar.

The car slowed to a halt and the girl bent to my window, letting her face hover there a moment against the green tide of corn. “You need help?” I asked, and those
were
tears in her eyes, absolutely, tears that swelled against her lids and dried in translucent streaks radiating out from her cheekbones.

“He's such a jerk,” she said, sucking in her breath. “He's, he's”—another breath—“I hate him.”

Mallory leaned over me so the girl could see her face. “Is he your—”

“He's a jerk,” the girl repeated. She was younger than us, late teens, early twenties. She wore her blond hair in braids and she was dressed in a black tank top, cut-off jeans, and pink Crocs. She threw a look at the guy, who was still perched on the hood of the car, then wiped her nose with the back of her hand and began to cry again.

“That's right,” he shouted. “Cry. Go ahead. And then you can run back to your mommy and daddy like the little retard you are!” He was blond too, more of a rusty blond, and he had the makings of a reddish beard creeping up into his sideburns. He was wearing a Banksy T-shirt, the one with the rat in sunglasses on it, and it clung to him as if it had been painted on. You could see that he spent time at the gym. A lot of time.

“Get in the car,” Mallory said.

“You can come with us—it'll be all right.”

I turned to Mallory, blocking her view of the girl. “It's between them,” I said, and at the same time, I don't know why, I hit the child lock so the door wouldn't open. “It's none of our business.”

“None of our business?” she shot back at me. “She could be abused or, I don't know,
abducted
, you ever think of that?” She strained to look around me to where the girl was still standing on the blacktop, as if she'd been fixed in place. “Did he hit you, is that it?”

Another sob, sucked back as quickly as it was released. “No. He's just a jerk, that's all.”

“Yeah,” he crowed, sliding down off the hood, “you tell them all about it, because you're Little Miss Perfect, aren't you? You want to see something? You, I'm talking to you, you in the car.” He raised one arm to show the long red striations there, evidence of what had passed between them. “You want her? You can have her.”

“Get in,” Mallory said.

Nome began to whine. The house was no more than half a mile up the road, and he could probably smell Chris and Anneliese's dog, a malamute named Boxer, and maybe the sheep the farmer kept behind the fence that enclosed the barn. The girl shook her head.

“Go ahead, bitch,” the guy called. He leaned back against the hood of the car and folded his arms across his chest as if he'd been at this awhile and was prepared to go on indefinitely.

“You don't have to put up with that,” Mallory said, and her voice was honed and hard, the voice she used on me when she was in a mood, when I was talking too much or hadn't got around to washing the dishes when it was my turn. “Come on, get in.”

“No,” the girl said, stepping back from the car now, so that we got a full view of her. Her arms shone with sweat. There were beads of moisture dotting her upper lip. She was pretty, very pretty.

I eased off the brake pedal and the car inched forward even as Mallory said, “Stop, Paul, what are you doing?” and I said, “She doesn't want to,” and then, lamely, “It's a lovers' quarrel, can't you see that?” Then we were moving up the channel the road cut through the greenest fields in the world, past the pissed-off guy with the scratched forearms and a hard harsh gloating look in his eyes, down into a dip and up the next undulating hill, Mallory furious, thumping at the locked door as if it were a set of drums and craning her neck to look back, as the whole scene receded in the rearview mirror.