by Maile Meloy
“There are other ways to get money,” he said.
“I’ve tried them.”
“Have you seen those guys?”
“You know I have.”
“Why not just turn normal tricks?”
She gave him a level stare. “Do you know how many blowjobs it would take to make this much money?” She held out her hand for the other tickets.
“I’ll sell them,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to do it.”
Half the remaining tickets sold to the lunch crowd in the bar. The other half sold by the end of his shift. Some guys pretended to be helping out Acey’s girlfriend, but most of them had a hungry glint in their eyes. She was a celebrity—Lovely Rita, muse of the pager-phone, the dead guy’s girl. Steven thought he was getting an ulcer.
She was waiting outside the plant when he finished his shift. He walked toward his truck and she followed. Inside the truck, he gave her the money.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“There’s no we here.”
“What do I do? To run the raffle.”
“You put the cards in a hard hat and draw one out, and the holder of the other half wins.”
“Where does it happen?”
“In the plant.”
“Can we do it at the bar?”
“What the fuck is this we?”
“Can I do it at the bar?”
“You can’t do it alone.”
She blew her bangs off her forehead, exasperated. “Make up your mind,” she said.
“I’ll do it at work tomorrow,” he said. He pictured himself standing in front of the hungry crowd, and he was glad he hadn’t bought any tickets. If he won, having set up the raffle, they’d tear him apart.
“Thank you,” she said, and she gave him back all the stubs, checking her pocket for ones that she’d missed.
He drove her home in silence, and she kissed him on the cheek—an odd, dry, sisterly kiss. Then she clambered down out of the truck and ran through the dark to her apartment. He drove home to bed and lay wide awake, until he rolled on his back and imagined himself the raffle winner. He whacked off like a teenager to put himself to sleep.
When he got to work the next day, early for his shift, the place was crawling with white hats. They were everywhere: talking to the crews, poking around. He assumed it was because of the accident, and Acey, but Kyle Jaker told him that one of the foremen had been caught diverting stainless steel to replace the pipes in his house.
“That’s all?” Steven asked. The place looked like a kicked-over anthill.
“When’s the raffle?” Jaker asked.
“I can’t do it with all these hats here.”
Jaker scanned the busy plant. “I should’ve bought more tickets,” he finally said. “You got any left?”
“No.”
“You got your own?”
“I didn’t buy any.”
Jaker raised his eyebrows at him.
“I forgot to,” Steven admitted.
“So when’s the raffle?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “After the white hats clear out.”
“Hey,” Jaker said. “I was just asking.”
The white hats didn’t clear out, and everyone was jittery. There were too many men on the floor, and they got in each other’s way, with no one sleeping on the scaffolding. Steven kept waiting for someone to clap him on the shoulder, charge him with pandering, and throw him in jail.
Word started going around that the drawing would be at the bar, and the rumor became a kind of groundswell, it had its own momentum. The guys had given him ten bucks, or twenty, and they wanted a raffle. By the end of his shift, he had sweated through his shirt, and he changed to a new one.
He’d never seen the bar so packed. Kyle Jaker produced a hard hat and offered to do the drawing, so Steven gave him the cards. Jaker stood on a barstool and grinned down at the men standing shoulder to shoulder in the bar, staring up at him. He held the hat over his head and drew out half a card, slowly, as if performing a blood ritual. Then he held the card so everyone could see it. “Red-backed three of clubs,” he announced. “Fuck, that’s not me.”
Everyone in the room dug in his pocket or looked at the stub in his hand. Finally Frank Mantini came forward. He’d left the plant, and Steven hadn’t sold him any tickets. He handed Jaker a stub, and Jaker held it up to match the card he’d drawn. A sigh of disappointment rose up from the crowd, and there was a round of applause for Frank. Acey’s ruined foreman seemed to have some kind of right to the girl. Then the men poured out the door to go home to their families, or to bed. The built-up, waiting tension in the room was gone.
“Congrats, Frankie,” Kyle Jaker said. He clapped him on the shoulder and moved off.
Frank Mantini turned to Steven, still holding the cut card.
“Where’d you get that?” Steven asked him.
“I had twelve of them,” Frank said. “Someone called me. I came down and bought what I could off the guys. I’ve got daughters her age.”
“Don’t start,” Steven said. “I didn’t want to get involved.”
Frank handed him the halved three of clubs. A vein stuck out of his temple. He seemed to have more white in his hair than he had two weeks ago, but Steven could have imagined that. “You were Acey’s friend, right?” Frank asked.
Steven nodded.
Frank shook his head. He looked hollow-eyed. “When you see her,” he said, “would you tell her to knock this shit off ?”
Steven said he would.
He drove by Rita’s apartment after leaving the bar. He was thinking that if he had bought a ticket and won, he would have wanted his prize. He’d been thinking of her the way everyone else had, of her small hands and her wide mouth, of her straddling him with her skinny legs. She was the girl in the Springsteen song, if anyone was. Wrap your legs round these velvet rims, and strap your hands across my engines. Now he could wake her up and tell her she was free—he could be the good-guy hero. Or, he realized as he sat in the dark in his truck, he could pass off Frank’s three of clubs as his own. She wouldn’t know until it was too late. Frank Mantini would shit bricks, but Frank had already made his noble gesture, and gotten his satisfaction from that.
Steven was about to drive away, undecided, when Rita came outside. She was wearing a white nightgown with a pink ribbon woven through the neck, left untied in the front. She was barefoot and she had been crying, and she got in the truck. He could see the outline of her small breasts inside the white cotton, and her face looked naked with no makeup. “He’s gone,” she said. “He’s gone.”
“Acey?” he asked.
“No, this guy,” she said. “My father—I wanted to find my father, so I got this missing-persons guy, you know, who finds people. He said he could find my dad, for sure. So I paid him, I gave him the cash, and he was supposed to look for my dad, and then he just, I don’t know, left. And took the money. I’m so fucking stupid.”
“I’m sorry,” Steven said.
“But you know what?” she said. “I’m almost glad. I think he would’ve found out my father’s dead.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because he never looked for me,” she said, wildly, gesturing to the world outside. “He never found me!” Then she seemed to realize that he had never looked for her when he was definitely alive, and she deflated, shrinking into herself. “I don’t know,” she said. “No one can drink like that forever.”
“Maybe he could,” he said. “He was a tough guy.”
She wiped her nose. “Yeah,” she said. “So who won the raffle?”
“Frank Mantini,” he said. “Our foreman, the one who was fired.” He fished the card out of his pocket and gave it to her. “He bought a bunch of tickets. He doesn’t want anything. He said he has daughters your age, and he wanted me to tell you to knock this shit off.”
She looked at him, wide-eyed and forlorn, then made a small, anguished noise and covered her face with her hands. Her s
houlders in the white nightgown shook. She crawled across the seat into his lap, fitting herself sideways between his chest and the steering wheel. Then she tucked up her legs and buried her wet face in his shoulder. He put his arms around her too-thin shoulders, carefully. Her hair smelled unwashed, but not in the way of adults: she smelled like an unshowered child, like summers at the public pool when he was ten.
They stayed there so long, Rita alternately sobbing and sleeping, that his arms grew stiff and the sky started to lighten. Rita finally woke, cried out, and extracted herself. At no point had she tried to kiss him, but he didn’t try to kiss her, either. It wasn’t because she was Acey’s girl. It was because she seemed to be drowning, and might drag him under.
She wiped her nose with her hand. “What do you remember about my dad, really?” she asked.
He didn’t say anything.
“You can tell me,” she said.
“I remember he came to school one time to get you, in the middle of the day. He just showed up in the classroom, and he was drunk, I guess. I didn’t really know that then. He knocked over a kind of easel thing. He called Mrs. Wilson by her first name and said he was taking you out of school. She said he couldn’t.”
Rita stared at him. “God, I don’t remember anything,” she said. “It’s like a big eraser came through that part of my brain. Did I go with him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why didn’t you tell me when I met you at the bar?”
“Why on earth would I tell you that?”
“Is that why you didn’t want me? Why you handed me off to Acey?”
“I didn’t hand you off,” he said. “Acey grabbed you and didn’t let go. He was crazy about you. He talked about you all the time.”
Her face crumpled. “Really?”
He didn’t want her to start crying again. He had to get out of the truck and stretch his legs. “Are you hungry?” he asked. He started the engine. “Let’s get something to eat.” Still in her nightgown, at a glossy diner table, she sat eating eggs and pancakes as if she’d never seen food before.
“Slow down,” he said. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
She licked maple syrup off her thumb. “I think I’m going to go away,” she said. “Maybe find my brother. Do you remember him?”
“No.”
“He was older. When we were kids we used to take care of each other. I wanted to be a ballet dancer, and he used to tell me I could, and he would draw pictures of the costumes I would wear. I remember that.”
“Did you take dance lessons?”
“No.” She laughed. “That didn’t seem to matter. Hey, can I maybe borrow some money?” she asked. “Just a little bit. I gave so much to the guy, the detective. I guess he probably wasn’t a real detective, was he?”
“Do you mean borrow, or keep?”
She made a pained face. “I don’t know,” she said. “I want to get on my feet. I’d want to pay you back.”
After breakfast, he drove with her to the bank and gave her four hundred dollars he had earned building scaffolding with Acey. And then Rita vanished. It was a family talent. Steven drove by her apartment, and there was a sign saying it was for rent.
He went out fishing a lot, after that. Sometimes he would go at night and borrow a Sunfish like they used to, because it was so easy. Other times he would sit on a dock before sunset with a line in the cool water, watching the light play on the surface. He caught fish, not as many as he remembered catching as a kid, but enough to prove they were still there, waiting for food to come by, unaware that the river was only theirs until the plant started up, and then their time was over.
He finally left the plant, months before it was ready to open, not long before his job would have run out anyway. He sold his parents’ house and moved to Florida, because there were plenty of jobs building houses there, and because it felt like a place everyone had moved to. It didn’t seem like a place anyone was from. There were girls in the bars there, too, and sometimes he talked to them. If they didn’t seem too crazy, he sometimes took them home.
There was one who moved in with him, who was a few years older than he was. She had been a mermaid at a water park, and she looked like a mermaid, with wavy blond hair. She showed him some of her act once, in the pool at his apartment building, with the kids coming out on the balconies to watch her do backward somersaults. It was convincing even without her green tail, and in that moment he thought he might love her. But he kept comparing the way he felt about her to the way Acey had seemed to feel about Rita, and it was a hard standard. After a few months he broke it off, and felt better. He didn’t want anything that felt like it had a history to it.
When they started to drain a swamp where birds and fish had lived, for a new housing development down the road from his apartment, Steven watched the protests and the preparations with interest. The bird people were furious, the developers unmovable, and Steven was filled with relief that the fight wasn’t his. Nothing here was his: the streets weren’t full of things he’d done with Acey, or places he’d ridden his bike in grade school, and nothing reminded him of his dead parents. Even the old people were older than his parents had been. He thought there should have been something sad about how little he was tied up with the place, but instead it felt like freedom. He was free because it wasn’t his water here, and they weren’t his fish.
ONE JANUARY EVENING, when the doctor’s new house felt warm and inviolable against the wind and cold outside, his younger brother called. They hadn’t spoken for months. Aaron assumed George wanted something: a larger share of what their parents had left them, or a loan, or some other favor that would annoy him. But George’s desires were hard to predict, and what he wanted, this time, was to invite the family skiing, over Presidents’ Day. A new girlfriend had put him up to it, he said. She thought they should spend time together. It bothered Jonna—that was the girlfriend’s name—that the brothers spent Christmas apart. She worked with George as a ski instructor, and she craved a family, not having had enough of one to understand what a pain in the ass it was.
“So are you inviting us skiing or calling me a pain in the ass?” Aaron asked.
“Don’t be a jerk,” his brother said.
“I’m the jerk?” Aaron wished he could play a recording of the phone calls for a third party and get some satisfaction, but George usually managed to make him sound childish, too.
“Just say no,” George said. “So I can tell Jonna you don’t want to.”
“Tell her no yourself.”
“I can’t.”
“Then get a new girlfriend.”
“She is a new girlfriend. That’s why I can’t say no.”
“Since when is Presidents’ Day a family holiday?”
“Oh, hell, Aaron,” George said. “It’s a weekend people go skiing. She just thinks we should get together.”
“Do we have to chop down a cherry tree? Recite the Gettysburg Address?”
“I’ll tell her you said no.”
“We’re coming,” Aaron said, before George could hang up. It was not the first time he had done something solely because his brother seemed to want him not to. He would have to ask his wife, and Bea would remind him of his altitude sickness and his constant fighting with George, but he could manage all of that. “We’ll be there,” he said.
“Suit yourself,” George said, as if the trip were Aaron’s idea. “Make sure you bring Claire.”
“I’ll see if she’s free.”
“I already asked her,” George said. “She’s in. You just have to fly her home.”
Aaron hung up and spent the rest of the evening fuming at George’s presumption. Aaron’s daughter, Claire, was now a sophomore in college, but he didn’t think of her as someone who could be invited separately on a trip. She was the little girl who had climbed on his head, who had asked him if people could see inside her mind, who had loved his old Mad magazines as he thought no girl had ever loved Mad, giggling at them wh
ile he read the paper, asking sometimes to have things explained. Into her teens she had stayed home on weekend nights and watched old movies with him, curled under his arm on the couch, while Bea wandered off, losing interest. He could still feel the weight of his daughter’s head against his chest, and see, cast in silver light from the TV, the rapt absorption with which she watched. The only movie they disagreed on was Rebecca. It was his least favorite Hitchcock, but she loved the sweet, simple girl meeting the rich man with the dark secrets: “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool,” shouted from his hotel dressing room.
His brother might have despised Claire, since he hated everything else Aaron had. He liked to say that Aaron’s career as an orthopedic surgeon was mercenary, his marriage to a fellow doctor bourgeois, and his modest house on a hillside an environmental nightmare. So he might, by extension, have declared Claire a spoiled, entitled brat. But Claire wasn’t spoiled, and George loved his niece. He had courted her from the time she could walk and talk, bringing her presents from his adventures. He played invented games with her, endless games for which no one else had patience. In her favorite, he was the Fire, chasing her around the house and the backyard, never quite catching her, while she squealed with terror and glee. Aaron had tried to be the Fire a few times, out of fatherly duty, but he didn’t do it with the correct enthusiasm. Claire tried to direct him but soon lost interest. She could play it for hours with her uncle.
When she was old enough, Claire learned to ski. She was fearless, and George advanced the theory that the fearlessness came somehow from him.
“How do you think that would work?” Aaron had asked.
“She didn’t get it from you two,” George said. “You’re both so conservative.”
“No we aren’t.”
“In terms of your life choices.”
“Maybe we made her feel safe,” Aaron said. “So she can be brave.”
“It seems genetic,” Aaron said. “It could be. Diabetes is passed that way—over and down, like a knight in chess.”
