Pizza Girl

by Jean Kyoung Frazier

  Hit me, I can’t have this conversation, hit me, please, anything other than this. “I—I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I don’t feel you get up in the middle of the night and come back hours later?” He was still crying and his voice was cracking. He had to stop in the middle of his sentence to wipe his runny nose on the sleeve of his shirt. “I haven’t said anything and I haven’t gone inside the shed because I believe in privacy and I know you’re struggling, I know your dad dying has been hard on you—”

  “It hasn’t been hard on me.”

  “Why don’t you talk to me anymore? We used to talk all the time. We would just lie in bed holding each other and telling the other every little detail about our day, stories from before we knew each other, everything we hoped we would do together. Do you remember that? I think about it all the time.”

  I did think about those days. Maybe not all the time, but I did think about them. I was hurt that he even had to ask, that he couldn’t trust the beauty of those moments, that he didn’t know that in those moments I had been so happy I was almost sad, knowing that those moments would end and I couldn’t live forever in that bed with him. “I do remember,” I said.

  “I just miss you so much. I know you’re going through a tough time, but so am I, I hate this. Have I done something to get us here?” He pushed himself up and crawled over to me, grabbed my hands again, but softer this time. “Tell me what I’ve done and I’ll fix it.”

  “You haven’t done anything.”

  I wiped the tears from his cheek, ran my thumb over his bottom lip, and kissed him. He kissed me back and he tasted so like him—a taste that wasn’t describable, but made me think of comfort and how the roads smelled after it rained. I hoped before our kiss ended I could figure out how we could go back to before, to my bedroom when we had just met, and talking was as simple as opening our mouths and saying whatever thought popped into our minds, the words flowing out like Froot Loops from a never-ending box—colorful and sweet and so light that you could hold a whole handful without feeling like you were weighed down by anything.

  * * *

  —

  WE DIDN’T TALK FURTHER, fell asleep before nine, before Mom was even home from her shift.

  I actually did sleep, heavy and dreamless, but only for a few hours. I woke up at 1:32 a.m. soaked in sweat. I looked at Billy next to me and got out of bed as quietly as I could, pulled on my sweatshirt, and turned to leave, and Billy was awake and sitting up.

  “Do you have to go?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  12

  THE NEXT NIGHT, at 12:21 a.m., I was driving to Bakersfield with Billy’s gun in the passenger seat.

  I’d planned none of it—I’d gone to my shift that afternoon and been called into Peter’s office. He asked me if I liked how he’d decorated it. I said that I liked the wallpaper and he said that there was no reason I should know what his fucking wallpaper looks like, that if I ever left work in the middle of my shift without getting his permission, I would be fired. “You do not want to see this wallpaper ever again.”

  My shift felt purposeless knowing Jenny wouldn’t call. Everyone I delivered to seemed nice, but I couldn’t look at them without wondering what their lives were like when they closed the door behind me.

  An old lady with hands so shaky she nearly dropped the pizza box—so many years she’d lived, how many people had she destroyed in her life?

  A bearded man in a once-white T-shirt who I could smell from the doorway—did he ever leave his apartment, did people call to check in on him?

  A teenage girl with bangs that covered her left eye—be careful, keep those bangs long, hide yourself.

  An apartment window with an absurd amount of cactuses in front of it. They grew so tall I couldn’t see their ends past the top of the window. They were so dense that when I tried to look into the apartment in the thin spaces between them, I couldn’t see anything. I rang the doorbell several times and no one answered. I stood, a warmish Hawaiian pizza in my hands, and wondered if a man or a woman owned those cactuses.

  When my shift ended, I stopped at a liquor store. It was on my way home and I knew that I would need more than my last remaining beer that night. Even as I was stepping out of my car, standing in front of the liquor store, watching people go in, searching for a friendly face, I still wasn’t visualizing Bakersfield and Jenny’s arms, how they’d wrap around me when I pulled her from bed. I was just thinking about how impossible sleep would be that night, how long I would have to wait next to Billy before I could get up and go to Dad’s shed, open one of the beers I was hoping to have bought.

  The first guy I asked looked at me and shook his head in disgust, the next said he would do it if I gave him a handie in his car, the third just walked right past me. Finally, a girl a little older than me walked up. Her hair was in a loose ponytail, not as long as Jenny’s old one, but she had that same kindness, warmth. She gave my stomach a long look, but agreed, took my cash, and went inside.

  She came out a little while later with a thirty-rack of Miller and a small flask of Evan Williams.

  “Thank you so much,” I said. “My dad is having a bad day and—”

  “Hey, it’s okay. You don’t have to give me some bullshit story.” She handed me the beer and the whiskey. “I’m sure you’ve got your reasons.”

  She walked away and I stood there for a moment watching her ponytail swing behind her, the beer heavy and cool against my hands.

  I made it through the rest of the day. Mom, Billy, and I ate dinner together. While they did dishes, I snuck the beer and whiskey from my car into the shed. After, we watched TV. I even made them laugh, told them a story about a guy I delivered to once who shoved Hot Wheels up his ass, how he told me he did it because it just felt so damn good when they were taken out. It felt normal and comfortable, and when Billy grabbed my right hand, Mom grabbed my left, I didn’t even mind, squeezed both of their hands back.

  In bed later, Billy and I were holding each other quietly. Sleep was tugging on my eyelids when Billy asked, “We’re going to be good parents, right?” Through the dark I could see the panic in his eyes—this wasn’t a rhetorical question. “Right?”

  I closed my eyes tight. “Right.”

  Even as I was getting out of bed, walking downstairs, pulling my shoes on and double-knotting them tight, I had no idea that in an hour I would be speeding down the highway blasting rock ballads, a gun rattling to the bass in the seat next to me. In the shed, I pulled out a beer, and the fullness of the fridge made me relax, the Evan Williams bottle on top of it a beacon of hope.

  I was halfway through my second beer when I pulled out the piece of pizza-box cardboard that had Jenny’s new address written on it. She was already there, was just settling into bed in a new strange place that she’d now call “home,” the word tasting weird on her tongue. I traced my fingers over the cardboard, admired her handwriting, some of the letters loopy and carefree, the “a”s and the “o”s and the “c”s, others tight and cramped, those poor “t”s and “l”s, unable to stretch and loosen and exist how they were supposed to—this was not when I decided to go to Bakersfield.

  This was:

  I remembered one of the last conversations I had with Dad.

  I’d been walking home from a party. My friend Alisha offered me a ride, but the booze was making me feel alive, and nothing felt more alive than walking home in that easy Los Angeles night, the only music my breathing and the neighborhood sounds.

  I was five minutes away when I saw Dad walking from the opposite direction. There was no way to avoid him—we both needed to turn down the same street. He raised his hand. “Hey, there. Looks like we had the same idea.”

  “No, I had an idea. You’re just too drunk to drive. I bet tomorrow we’ll find your car in the mid
dle of the park again.”

  He laughed and we walked next to each other.

  “I think the Dodgers have a real good chance to get to the World Series this year,” he said.

  “The Dodgers were eliminated from playoff contention two weeks ago,” I said.

  “Ah, right. That sounds right. They just rip our fucking hearts out every year, don’t they?”

  “Dad, why’re you so fucked up all the time?”

  I tripped. An uneven stretch of sidewalk and I was on the ground, the knee of my jeans ripped open, dirt and blood. He knelt down next to me, pulled a flask out of his pocket, poured some whiskey over my cut, and blotted it dry with the sleeve of his jacket. “This is how they did it back in the Old West, before doctors and peroxide.”

  I pushed his hand away. “Do you know how much you hurt Mom every day? Me? I don’t even know what you actually smell like, you always smell like booze and sweat.”

  He plopped down on the sidewalk next to me. “You know, I try to quit every morning I get up. I lay in bed and I look up at the ceiling and I say, Hey, motherfucker, this is the day everything changes. Sometimes I make it days, weeks. I was sober the first year of your life, believe it or not.” He took a swig from his flask. “But some days, I don’t even make it an hour. I get out of bed, go downstairs, and I need to pour myself a drink. Because you know what I’ve learned, no matter how long I wait? That I will never be someone that is effortlessly good, it’ll always be hard work for me, and I’m not that strong.

  “I think some people are just born broken. I think about life as one big Laundromat and some people just have one little bag to do—it’ll only take them a quick cycle to get through—but others, they have bags and bags of it, and it’s just so much that it’s overwhelming to even think about starting. Is there even enough laundry detergent to get everything clean?”

  “People aren’t born broken,” I said.

  “Well, if they’re not, that’s scarier. Because if I wasn’t born broken I don’t know when it happened. I can’t look at any point in my life and say, ‘Aha! This is the moment!’ ” He put the flask to his lips, paused. “Sometimes I think your mom and you would be happier if I just moved to an island in the middle of nowhere.”

  I took the flask from him, had another drink. “That’s not true.”

  We sat there quietly for a while, looking out at the street in front of us, wondering when we could get up and start walking home.

  I hadn’t thought about that night in a while. I finished my beer and grabbed an armful more from the fridge, put the whiskey in my pants pocket, ran out of the shed. I had lied to Dad that night—Mom and I probably would’ve been better off if he’d just packed up all his shit one day and never come back—I thought that and I lied.

  I put the beer in the Festiva and walked quietly back to my room, pulled Billy’s backpack out of the closet, and put his gun in my other pants pocket. Dad may have sat back and given up, but I wasn’t going to be like that. I wasn’t born broken. I wasn’t going to live alone on an island in the middle of nowhere.

  * * *

  —

  JENNY WAS LETTING THAT MAN, that Jim, tell her what she needed.

  I knew she had to be awake right now, unable to stop her mind from twisting, no way to turn off that small part of her that still hungered for a life of her own making. The navigation said I was thirty minutes away from Jenny’s house in Bakersfield. I pressed my foot harder on the pedal, ready to get to her house and tell her that it didn’t have to be this way, not for either of us, I was there now and we had all the time in the world to figure out our laundry situation, which bag to start with and every drop of detergent needed. I reached for another beer, my hand brushing against Billy’s gun in the process.

  You needed to bring it, I told myself. You need to be able to protect yourself and Jenny. I’m sure she’ll want to take Adam wherever we go. Jim may not handle it well. When he learns that his wife and his son are leaving him, he will probably yell, scream—animals that are backed into a corner do desperate things. You will not have to fire the gun, I told myself. But you have to be ready.

  * * *

  —

  I STOPPED AT A GAS STATION just outside the city limits. The tank was still half full, but I liked the idea of me showing up at Jenny’s to offer her a car with a full tank of gas, a car of possibilities. I bought a Coke from the attendant and then emptied it out in the bathroom sink until there was only a small layer of soda covering the bottom, poured the whiskey in. I was about to get into my car when a police cruiser pulled up to the pump next to me.

  Two cops stepped out of it and began walking in my direction. I opened the driver-side door and reached over to the passenger seat, adjusted my hoodie, prayed that it was covering the whiskey, the beers, the gun.

  The taller of the two, with a mustache I wondered if he’d had before he became a cop, stopped in front of me, looked at my belly before he looked at my face. Even my baggiest T-shirts were starting not to fit. “It’s late,” he said. “You should get home. Lots of sickos out right now.”

  “Yes, Officer,” I said. “Of course.”

  I took a sip from the Coke can, got into the car, put the Coke between my thighs, and pulled out of the gas station, waving to both of them. A drop of sweat collected under my nose, but I couldn’t take my hands off the wheel to wipe it. The cop had been standing close enough to me that he could’ve reached out and wiped any sweat from my face, close enough that he could’ve smelled whiskey on my breath. My foot twitched on the gas pedal. I was trying not to drive recklessly fast, not to drive suspiciously slow.

  I kept my eye on the rearview, waiting for red and blue lights, and wondering why the fuck I couldn’t have waited to take a drink until I was safely buckled into the Festiva, the cop car growing smaller behind me. The only answer I could come up with was an honest one: I don’t know. I just remembered standing there and bringing the can to my lips—second nature, muscle memory, a little like breathing.

  After a mile with no red and blue lights flashing behind me, I sped up, lifted the Coke can, and took another drink.

  * * *

  —

  JENNY’S STREET was empty and quiet. Like in her old neighborhood, the houses were so big I didn’t understand what all the extra space was used for, the lawns green and trimmed tight, the sidewalks probably safer to eat off of than the plates of some restaurants I’d been to. I parked my car a few houses down and got out, Coke can in hand, the gun in the front pocket of my hoodie. With each step, I waited for every light in every house to flick on, people awakening, knowing there was an intruder in their neighborhood.

  I crept around Jenny’s house, the gate to the backyard was easily unlocked just by reaching over the fence and unlatching it. As I tiptoed across the grass, I thought about alarm systems, motion-detector lights, an attack dog even. I walked in the dark, looking for blinking red lights and listening for the growls of a dog, until I was in front of the back door, unscathed.

  The glass in the door window was not very thick. I elbowed it twice and it gave away, spraying onto the hardwood below. I reached my hand through the opening, turned the handle from inside, and walked in, sweeping aside pieces of glass with my shoe. I didn’t want Jenny or Adam to cut themselves on our way out.

  I half expected Jenny to come running once she heard the glass shatter, but the house was pitch-black and quiet. Unopened boxes piled high, only the couch that Adam and I had sat on unpacked. I tiptoed around the boxes and listened for any sign of movement. The kitchen dark, the fridge empty, nothing for her to re-sort. I found her shoes at the front door and held them for a second; I’d never seen her wear them. When she left me with Adam, she’d been wearing slippers, fuzzy green ones. All the other times I’d delivered her pizza, she’d been barefoot. These shoes were sporty, all black with neon laces. I pictured her running in them. Swe
at gathering at the top of her head, sliding down her face, over the slope of her nose, the curves of her cheeks, the point of her chin, dripping, her skin glistening. She looked relaxed—her body working, her mind free and clear, able to let her thoughts run as she did. These were the shoes that she’d wear when we took our long walks together.

  I put the shoes down. I moved up the staircase quickly, careful not to take too much time on each step to think. A few images slipped through—Billy waking up to an empty bed, deciding to finally open the shed to see what I was up to, finding only crushed beer cans and a foam football, running to Mom’s room, the two of them hollering my name, searching every corner of the house for me, the way the asphalt in the Eddie’s parking lot glittered in the sun after I hosed it down. At the top I thought about the guy that picked up our garbage every Thursday, how he always whistled when he got out of his dump truck, as he heaved and threw each bulging, stinking bag, the tune and force of his whistling never changing, only stopping when he got back into his truck and drove away to the next house. I could never place the song he was whistling and it drove me nuts.

  The first room was a closet, the second a bathroom, the third room completely empty. At the next room, the door got stuck halfway. I squeezed my way in and stepped on a stuffed hippo I recognized as King Cotton Candy, Eric the moose beside him. Stuffed animals covered the floor, Adam lay asleep without a single one with him in his bed. I watched Adam sleep and wondered what the stuffed animals had done to make him throw them all onto the ground. I ran a hand through his hair and whispered to him to sleep well, deep, everything was about to change.

  The only room left was the one at the end of the hall. I stood in front of it, took another drink from the Coke can, and, for the first time since I’d left Dad’s shed, I felt hesitation.