Lingering

by Melissa Simonson

I wasn’t exactly qualified to comment. It had been Carissa’s super-focused laser gaydar that tipped me off to Jason’s sexual orientation. He had no effeminate tics, didn’t lean toward flashy clothing the way the media portrayed gay men. His dark hair wasn’t laden down with product, and his five-day-old beard wasn’t perfectly groomed. He liked sports more than I did, could scream at the Patriots as well as any straight man.

  His eyes dimmed as he looked back at me. “How are you doing? We haven’t really talked in a while.”

  “Well, I’ve definitely been better.”

  “Jackson cried for days for days after the funeral. He wanted to set up a visit with you, but…” he trailed off with an apologetic grimace. “But to be honest, you didn’t look up for it.”

  Of course I hadn’t looked up for it. I’d caused a huge scene when I took issue with one of Carissa’s exes showing up at the cemetery. Thankfully sucker punching someone in the face isn’t all that uncommon at funerals. The incident had never been reported, the ex had left with a split lip and a towering temper, and Jackson had iced my knuckles while I stared off into space for twenty minutes.

  I scanned the crowd. “Where is Jackson?”

  “Late meeting at work.” Jason held up his glass, overhead lights setting fire to the amber liquid within. “I’m only here for the alcohol. Why’d Mather hold you back after the last meeting? To see how you’re coping?”

  “Something along those lines.”

  “You might be ducking him all night. He’s already passed by me twice, asking about you. I always thought working with him was like working with a perpetual contestant on The Price Is Right. All the whooping and cheering.”

  “I’d have ditched this thing if he hadn’t brought it up.” The bartender slid my scotch across the counter and I snapped it up. “I hate coming to this stuff alone.”

  Jason gave me the slightest of smiles. “Well if Carissa and Jackson were here, they’d be sneaking outside every half hour. Not so different than what we’re doing now. And at least Jackson never made me hold onto a purse.”

  “Yeah, well. I never minded her going outside when Jackson was with her.” I never hated that she smoked more than when we were at parties, because inevitably some moron would be out there as well, ready and willing to offer her a light, strike up some stupid conversation. It never happened when Jackson was around. He looked even less gay than Jason, what with his height and intimidating muscles encased in black skin. I’d lost count how many times Carissa had exclaimed over his complexion, accused him of getting weekly spa treatments, how else could it be so flawless?

  Jason and I used to laugh, seeing them together. The way Jackson would examine her manicures (the French nails were yawn-inducing and old lady; the deep plum fierce); how he’d bend down to let her run her palm over his bald scalp (“It’s as soft as a baby’s ass, Ben, feel it!”).

  Maybe Jason could sense which circles my mind spun in, because he reined me in with a soft ahem and a transparent attempt to change the subject. “You find any stupid bugs the engineers have missed lately? Mark accused me of throwing him under the bus when I had to mention I found one during the latest conference call.” He rolled his blue eyes and waved his free hand, taking a slug from his scotch. “Hey, I tried calling the idiot beforehand, but I think he’s been taking advantage of his lunch hour now that we’re not in the office anymore. That or he was too busy jacking it to his cartoon porn. I’d love to see his Internet search history. I bet it’s all hardcore erotica fan fiction and donkey shows.”

  “I never thanked Jackson,” I blurted out, but Jason didn’t look taken aback by the abrupt switch of topic. “He sat with me for a while, icing my knuckles.”

  “You don’t need to thank him for that, you’re my best friend, that’s what we’re for. He’d say it if he were here.” Jason studied his shoes as though he’d never seen such things before, scuffing the toe back and forth. It made me feel certain he was waiting until his throat loosened up before he spoke again; I’d done the same thing too many times during the past six months. “On the drive home he went off about what a tactless moron that guy was, the way he was carrying on. Is that why you hit him?”

  I rolled my head until I heard a sharp crack from my neck. “I think the Jim Beam gave me a nudge. I’d been drinking for a few hours before the funeral.” I passed a hand over my face, suddenly exhausted in a way that went deep into my marrow. “Carissa only dated him for about a month. She told me he was insanely jealous and possessive, would always wanna know where she was at any given time. I guess I thought maybe he’d done it, and I kept thinking about all those cop shows, how they’re always on about how the killer sometimes shows up to the funeral, to the crime scene, whatever. I lost my mind for a minute.” I shook my head. “It’s embarrassing now.”

  “Nobody there blamed you. He was an ass. An attention whoring ass. Wouldn’t shut up about how well he knew her, but everyone who went to the cemetery after the church were her close friends, and we’d never even heard of him—”

  “Ben!” a voice boomed over Jason’s shoulder, followed quickly by a balding head set deep into flabby neck folds. My boss moved around Jason, extending his hand to me. I couldn’t match the vigor of his handshake, nor the smile of determined cheer he wore.

  “So glad you could make it, Ben, how have you been holding up?”

  “One day at a time.” I didn’t know how or when this had become my fallback refrain, but it worked wonders in shutting down further questions.

  Mather nodded, jowls jiggling over his starched collar. “Of course. Only way to do it.”

  “Where’s that wife of yours, Gerald?” Jason cut in, tapping Mather on the shoulder.

  I caught Jason’s eyes, which were loudly broadcasting that this was my escape hatch—go, and go quickly. The trick with Mather was distraction. And by the time he noticed my absence, another distraction would catch his eye. It made conference calls hell, trying to pin him down to one topic.

  I drained the contents of my glass, saluted Jason with it, pushed it across the counter as Mather turned to Jason, and moved as fast as I could without actually running toward the exit.

  H ow was the Christmas party?” my mom asked over the sound of water streaming from her kitchen faucet as I bounced Kylie on my knee at the table.

  “Run of the mill. Monotonous.”

  “What does that mean?” Kylie asked, tapping the side of my throat.

  I cocked my head to glance down at her expectant expression. “It means it was boring.”

  Her face twisted as she craned her neck to look up at me. “How can a party be boring?”

  “If there’s not enough alcohol,” my mom offered, jamming a plate into a slot on the drying rack.

  Kylie gave me an owlish look behind pink-framed glasses. I answered her silent question.

  “Grown-up juice.”

  “Daddy likes beer.”

  “Your daddy and I have that in common.” I peeled a stray lock of light brown hair off her sweaty face, tucking it behind her ear.

  “Are you spending the night, too?” She reached for the juice box on the table, jammed the straw in the gap where her two front teeth should have been. “Then we could have a slumber party.”

  My mom threw me an over-the-shoulder glance, adjusting the huge yellow gloves she always wore when doing the dishes.

  “I don’t think there’s enough room for me, kid.” My mother rented a one-bedroom apartment; she’d already made up her room for Kylie, had planned to sleep on the couch.

  “I can inflate the air mattress for you, Ben.” Mom wriggled one hand free of her glove.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, in a tone that betrayed sarcasm in every syllable. Kylie could guilt someone into giving her their car with enough ammunition.

  Kylie blinked up at me, eyes shining, cheeks jiggling as she bounced on my kneecap. “Will you sleep in the same room as me? Mommy remembered to pack my nightlight this time.”

  N icholas Nickleby was
n’t a bedtime story I’d have chosen when I was Kylie’s age, but she seemed content enough, blankets pulled up under her chin so her head looked like a bodiless egg propped up on the pillows. It wasn’t much of a story time, not when I had to stop to explain what certain words meant every other minute, rephrase the knottier sentences, dumb down the vernacular.

  “Sorry about that.” I closed the book with a snap. “Mom doesn’t have much Beverly Cleary lying around. At least you’ll get an A in vocabulary this year.”

  She tugged the glasses off the bridge of her nose and put them on the bedside table, permitting me to kiss her cheek before turning over.

  I gave her shoulder a squeeze, said goodnight, and tripped over the air mattress on my way to the door.

  My mother sat hunched over a stack of bills at the kitchen table, her brow furrowed and a pen stuck behind her ear. I never realized how lined she had gotten until she was beneath harsh lighting. Her face looked draped with spider webs.

  She shot me a perfunctory smile and immediately looked back at the electric bill. “There’s beer in the fridge if you’re interested. Get me one too, will you?” She flicked the bill with her finger. “I’m gonna need it.”

  I did as told, cracking two Sam Winters open, dangling them between my fingers as I made my way back to the table.

  “Has it been really tight this month?” I slid one bottle over, and she caught it in her hand.

  “December’s always tricky. Too many people to buy presents for.”

  “Maybe I can help you out.”

  She jammed her reading glasses further up her nose with one stiff index finger. “Maybe you should sit there quietly and drink your beer. I’ll be done in a minute.”

  I took a slug from my bottle and watched her peck at her calculator, knowing I’d wind up wiring money into her bank account, also knowing she’d pretend to be angry when she found out. “I’ve got more money than usual, you know, so I can stand parting with some to help you out. I got back all the deposits for the wedding, I don’t know if I mentioned that. Even the ones who claimed deposits were non-refundable. They’d heard what happened.”

  She glanced up at me, eyes magnified behind her lenses, her expression inscrutable. Trying to figure out whether to be happy about this news, I could tell. She cleared her throat. “Well. That’s nice of them, honey, but I’ll be fine.”

  She’d say that even if she wouldn’t be fine, but I didn’t argue.

  “Did Kylie get settled all right?” she finally asked, collecting sheaves of bills.

  “Yeah. Are you sure you’d rather sleep on the couch than the air mattress?”

  She drank a sip of beer, nodding behind the bottle as she stood. “You’re too tall to be comfortable on the couch anyway.”

  I followed her to the living room, where she flicked the TV on and sank onto the sagging couch cushions.

  “How’s work been?” I asked, sitting beside her.

  She rolled her eyes and regaled me with a few stories about annoying customers and even more annoying coworkers, talking animatedly with her hands all the while.

  “Be glad you never had to work in the service industry,” she concluded. “It can be hell. Want to watch Dateline?”

  S he didn’t quite make it through to the end of Dateline, dozing throughout until she finally succumbed to sleep, her mouth slightly open as she sat upright on the couch. I covered her with an afghan her mother had crotched and assumed that was my cue to go to bed, too.

  I crept toward the bedroom and cracked the door open. The nightlight illuminated Kylie’s sleeping face with a rosy glow, and I lowered myself onto the air mattress fully dressed, cringing at the noise it made as it groaned to support my weight.

  I hadn’t slept over at my mother’s place in years, not since college, when I needed to bum quarters for her apartment complex’s laundry facilities. This wasn’t the apartment she’d lived in then, but it felt the same. Homey but shabby, neighbors with questionable behavior, lovely view of the parking lot from out her bedroom window.

  I inhaled deeply and let the breath out slow, staring up at the popcorn ceiling. My mother claimed to be happy, satisfied with her lifestyle, but I had a feeling she’d just chosen to settle for the life she thought she deserved. Teenaged mothers may be semi accepted now, but not back when she’d been pregnant with me. Her parents couldn’t support her and a baby, so she’d had to quit school, start her long career waiting tables, leaving any dreams of college behind. Her life had never been her own; I’d made sure of that back when I was an asshole thirteen-year-old. I’d thrown a fit when I found out she’d been seeing someone, made enough of a fuss for her to break up with the man, and to my knowledge she hadn’t dated since. Maybe she’d have been married by now if I hadn’t had that tantrum; maybe she’d have a house and not this grotty apartment.

  The mattress squelched as I turned onto my side, away from the nightlight’s glare and the moonlight filtering through the flimsy curtains. No wonder my mom had forgone the air mattress. I was going to wake up with a spectacular backache, and if I wasn’t mistaken, that sibilant sound I kept hearing was air slowly escaping my makeshift bed.

  My cell phone vibrated in the pocket of my jeans as the glowing green numbers of the alarm clock on the bedside table ticked over to midnight. Getting it out resulted in a squeaky struggle, and I hoped it wouldn’t wake Kylie as I blinked into the cold blue glow of the illuminated screen. Then I hoped I wouldn’t wake Kylie as I swallowed a strangled gasp.

  I waffled with what to do as the phone vibrated for the third time—I couldn’t talk normally while Kylie slept, but I couldn’t do it outside the bedroom without waking my mother up. Her front door always stuck; fighting to get it open was a loud and miserable tussle that wouldn’t go unnoticed.

  In the space of less than a second, I decided Kylie was less likely to wake during a hoarse phone call and slapped the phone to my ear with a choked hello.

  “Hi,” Carissa’s voice said, and I felt my heart splinter into a million pieces. One syllable was all it took to make my eyes sting and my mouth go dry. How many times before had I taken hearing her voice for granted?

  “I can’t believe it’s you.” I rolled onto my back and shot a nervous glance at Kylie’s outline, some two feet above me on the bed, oddly haloed by the misty orange light of the streetlamp shining through the curtains. “The last time I heard your voice was when I called your voicemail.”

  I didn’t know how it was possible for a machine to insert her laugh in just the right place. “Well, it is me. I think. Sorry I called so late. I just got the all clear from someone. I guess they had to test for glitches.”

  If I were less desperate to speak to her, the talk of glitches and all-clears would have wrenched me clean out of my euphoria, but I brushed it aside.

  “It’s not a bad time,” I lied, though it didn’t feel dishonest, not when I’d been waiting for this for three days straight.

  “Liar. I can always tell. You know that. Why are you whispering?”

  “I’m just sleeping over at my mom’s, and Kylie’s in the room.”

  “Maybe you should call me back at a better time—”

  “No,” I said emphatically. “Now’s fine.”

  She paused for a few beats. “How is Kylie?”

  “Good. We started reading The Art of War.”

  “Oh, a fine book for a seven-year-old, Ben. Bravo.” She didn’t have eyes to roll, but I knew she would be right now if she was living.

  “Hey, I tried tempting her with Goosebumps and The Boxcar Children. She wouldn’t have it. She tried to make a case about Lolita, even.”

  “I can’t say I can imagine any scenario where Kylie would act like a normal seven-year-old,” she said. “Unless it’s something to do with nail polish.”

  But my mind had recoiled from the moment she’d uttered the word scenario. It was a little thing, insignificant, really, but it woke me up from my elation as suddenly and completely as if someone had just blared
a foghorn in my ear. I could overlook the mentions of glitches, but not this. “That’s not how you say scenario.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t say it like that, you don’t say sen-AIR-io, you say sen-ARE-io.”

  “Sen-ARE-io?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. I’ll remember.” She waited a few moments for me to chime in, but I didn’t. “Are you all right?”

  I pressed my fingers into my eyes hard enough to raise red constellations. “Yeah. Sorry.” I exhaled, loud and slow, the heat from my phone seeping into my cheek. “Can I call you back tomorrow? I’m sorry, I just—It’s just that it is kind of a bad time,” I lied. It might be a bad time, but that wasn’t why I wanted to hang up. The mispronouncing, though small, was jarring. Like I’d been tossed into a vat of quicksand, it sucked me out of the moment completely.

  “Sure.” And I couldn’t tell if it was just my imagination, but I thought I detected a slight tone of hurt threading through that one little word.

  “Okay. I will.”

  “I’ll talk to you later, then.”

  “Wait—Carissa—hold on.” I tried to pull myself up into a sitting position on the air mattress, but it was like yanking myself out of a Venus fly trap. “I love you.”

  “I love you more,” she said, and my eyes stung again, that she remembered that stupid competition we had between ourselves. “Talk tomorrow?”

  “Definitely.”

  The line went dead. I hadn’t expected a no-you-hang-up-first battle, she hadn’t been that kind of girl, but as soon as that dial tone stuttered in my ear, I immediately missed her voice. But I’d have to get used to that, I thought, stuffing my phone back in my pocket. This couldn’t go on forever, me talking to a machine, and I’d have my whole life to miss her.

  I turned over onto my side, dragging the threadbare blanket over my shoulders, noticing when I did that the nightlight was glittering over Kylie’s eyes, which were open.

  For one wild, spiraling moment I blessed her nearsightedness, thinking it would be my one saving grace, until I remembered that she had a problem seeing, not hearing, and I’d just given those ears of hers one hell of a mystery to toy with.