Start Without Me

by Joshua Max Feldman

  The clouds overhead had thickened, sunk lower on the horizon, matched almost exactly the ash gray of the guardrail slicing beside the highway. She drew a sharp, steadying breath in and out through her nose. “That’s all you have to say?” The exhaustion had sunk into her bones, even her hands on the steering wheel felt heavy. She wished she’d never told him, wondered why she had. It hadn’t changed anything. Of course he couldn’t help her.

  “That’s not all I have to say,” he answered petulantly. “It’s just something I was thinking. Look,” he went on, “there’s no reason to beat yourself up about it. Some things, you just chock up to a single twist of fate.”

  “I don’t believe in fate,” she answered, petulant herself.

  “Are you going to tell him you’re, y’know, pregnant?”

  She sighed impatiently. “That would just fuck things up for good.”

  “No, not him, your husband. I mean Brendan.”

  She shook her head. “It’s my fault. I told him I was on the pill. I was on the pill. He’s married, I don’t want to ruin his life, too. You don’t understand. He’d want me to keep it.”

  “Because of the Catholic thing.”

  “Yes, Adam. Because of the Catholic thing.”

  “But you’re not going to keep it.”

  She slammed the wheel with her palm. “Fucking hell, Adam!” she cried. “You think Robbie is going to raise some other guy’s baby? What am I supposed to do? Try to convince him he got me pregnant while he was sleepwalking? And that no, he’s wrong, he’d love to be a dad in about seven months? And I’ll really have to talk fast when the baby comes out looking like Brendan Ryan, who’s about as black as Frosty the Snowman. Either Robbie would divorce me now, or he’d divorce me later, but either way, I can’t get divorced. I can’t be alone, trying to afford diapers, and it’s not like flight attendant is the perfect job with a newborn at home. What do I do when they call me to go to Dallas the next morning? Pack the baby in my rollaboard?” She noticed he appeared a little terrified. She looked at the speedometer—the needle was trembling above ninety-five. “Sorry,” she said, pressing the brake. She was sweating; she pulled her coat open, fumbling with the belt, then fumbled at the armrest, lowered the driver’s-side window. “No, I am not going to keep it,” she said over the roar of air through the window, the compacted coming-and-going moans of cars in the opposite lanes. She shut the window. “I’m not that stupid.”

  When he spoke, his voice was calm, reassuring. “Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do. It’s not like you’d be the first person. Johanna got an abortion, when we got pregnant.”

  She knew better than to get him talking about Johanna again, but she couldn’t help herself. When would she get the chance to talk about this, either? “What happened?”

  “It wasn’t very complicated. We were fucking without condoms, and eventually, she got pregnant!” He laughed weakly. “It was shitty, I guess. But what else were we going to do?”

  She felt cold now. She pulled her coat closed over her chest. “You still think about it, though?”

  “Sometimes,” he answered with a shrug. “But everybody said it was the right decision. And I don’t think it would have changed anything.” When she glanced over, for once he sat very still beside her, his hands resting on his thighs. “No, I don’t think it would have changed anything,” he repeated, a kind of surprise in his voice, as though he’d never thought about it. Then he tossed his hands up. “But look, like I said, you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself. As far as Brendan goes, I get it. We all have that one that got away, that itch we never scratched in high school. Who can resist the chance to actually scratch it? Plus, y’know, the guy’s in the army, shipping out the next morning.”

  “He was going to a base in Germany, not to Afghanistan.”

  “Like there’s never been a war in Germany!” She smiled a little. “You can tell Roz you were being patriotic!” She smiled more fully, and Adam came out with an uncannily close impression of her mother-in-law’s nasally alto: “Do you know how many soldiers I slept with after I got married? Do you know, hon? All of them.”

  She laughed, and Adam did, too, really laughed, widening his smile, his eyes. It was pretty pointless laughter, considering what came next: carefully avoiding conflict with Robbie; coping with her in-laws; working another overnight; and later, but not too much later, stealing an afternoon and getting an abortion, and then somehow preserving, rebuilding her marriage. It seemed like more than she could handle—but she’d never been a quitter: Her story had reminded her of this, if it accomplished nothing else. You kept going, you didn’t wait for applause or congratulations, you kept on going, forward.

  Silence returned to the car. The signs floated by—places, ads, merges, turnoffs.

  You kept going forward, since where else was there to go? Once again, she put her stupid hand on her damn stomach, without meaning to or knowing why.

  [ 2 ]

  Walmart and the Gas Station

  Adam found it harder and harder to sit still once the name Roxwood started appearing on the signs: 18 miles away, then 13, 5, 2, like a jittery countdown. By the time Marissa pulled off 91, his legs were bouncing at the knees, the fingers of both hands playing tremolos in the air of the dashboard vents.

  Driving along a two-lane street, Route 8, they came up to a complex of big-box stores that’d sprouted like mushrooms since the last time he’d driven this way. “Hey,” he told Marissa, “I have an idea.”

  She eyed him sidelong, not slowing down. “I really need to get up to Vermont, Adam.”

  “No, I know, but I was thinking . . . It’d be better if I showed up with a coffee maker.”

  “A coffee maker?”

  “Before I left, I broke the coffeepot. Did I mention that? So if I have a new one when I come back . . .”

  “It’s Thanksgiving morning. Nothing’ll be open.”

  He sped up his tremolos. “Maybe not, but, I dunno, maybe,” he said with a hopeful shrug.

  They came to the intersection with the right turn to the stores; for once that day, Adam thought, he caught a piece of luck, as the light changed from yellow to red just as they approached. “Two minutes,” Adam promised. Her hands on the wheel didn’t move. “What if we drive around the parking lot, and if everything’s closed, we get back on the road? The house is only, like, five minutes from here.” The thought of walking back into the house without the coffee maker was like imagining walking in naked.

  She slapped the turn signal with a sigh. “Only because I need to find a place to pee.”

  This was going to work great, he told himself. He could get the new coffee maker gift wrapped. Maybe he could buy the paper and tape and do it himself.

  But he saw immediately that Marissa had been right. The stores had the graveyard silence of places of commerce closed for business: barred gates pulled in front of glass doors, long rows of nested shopping carts chained in place. All that was missing were tumbleweeds, he observed bleakly. He was about to give up and to tell Marissa to forget it when they drove by the Walmart, where a line of tents stretched to one side from the entrance. The tents were blue and red and army green, some shoulder-width narrow, others appearing large enough to accommodate eight or ten. At the end of the row stood a longer line of people, mostly men, in heavy winter coats, gloves, beanies. “Looks like they’re about to open!” Adam said.

  “Or it looks like they’ll be standing here for hours,” Marissa answered. “That’s why half of them are in tents.”

  “Lemme jump out and ask.”

  She rubbed an eye with her fingertips. “Why do you need a coffee maker again?”

  “A peace offering!”

  “Can’t you just apologize?”

  She made it sound so easy, as if it was just a matter of saying the words. “I’ll be two seconds,” he promised. Her phone pinged from the cupholder; she stopped the car with a jerk.

  “Two seconds,” she said, picking up the phone. “I’m already lat
e.” She looked at the screen and frowned.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Nothing. My sister’s texting me my mom’s address.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she hopes I’ll temporarily lose my mind and—” She cut herself off. “Are you going or not?”

  Getting out into the cold felt like dropping face-first into freezing water. He slammed the car door behind him and half jogged to the entrance. But even fifty feet away, he could see that the interior of the store was dark, deserted. He balled his hands into fists, blew on them as he looked over the doors, searching for some posting about when the store might open.

  “Fuck,” he muttered. He took out a cigarette and lit it. Behind him, he heard a car honk; he raised his hand in acknowledgment, not needing to turn to check who it was, and walked over to the line of tents. The third was one of the larger ones; a heavily bundled man sat in the portal in a lawn chair, a space heater between his legs, an iPad playing a football movie in his lap. He glanced up as Adam approached. “Can I get one of those, man?” he asked, pointing a gloved finger at Adam’s cigarette.

  “Yeah, sure,” Adam said, offering him the pack. He pulled off the thick yellow work glove he wore, took out a cigarette, put it to his lips, and lit it with Adam’s lighter. Adam heard Marissa honk twice, but he ignored it.

  “Appreciate it,” the man said. “My brother was supposed to come by with a resupply this morning, but no sign of him yet.” He was late middle-aged, with patches of grayish stubble on the tops of his cheeks, and wore sunglasses on a neoprene band and a camouflage canvas hat with earflaps. He reached into his canvas jacket, produced a silver flask, and offered it to Adam. “Would be grateful to repay the debt.”

  Adam shook his head. “Nah, I’m allergic.”

  “You get hives or something?”

  “No, I turn into a giant, self-destructive asshole.”

  The man frowned, then shrugged. “Ten-four,” he said, took a sip himself.

  “So are they opening soon, or what?” Adam asked.

  The man shook his head as he returned the flask to his coat. “Another three hours or so.”

  “Shit. How long’ve you been out here?”

  “Eighteen days.”

  Adam whistled as he blew the smoke from his mouth. “I wouldn’t sit out here for eighteen days if they reanimated Elvis and he did a one-night-only show in there.”

  The man chuckled. “If you only knew, brother. Tent’s got a generator, Wi-Fi, a bunk with a minus-thirty sleepsack, a grill, and a hot plate. It’s as good as being at home. Quieter, actually.” He winked. “My brother comes by every other night to relieve me. Hot shower, see the kids. He did the oh-eight-hundred to eighteen hundred, Monday through Friday, last two weeks so I could go in to work. This is our fifth year out here. We’ve got the whole thing down to a science.” He leaned forward and took a black, three-ring binder from under his chair, handed it to Adam. There was a piece of masking tape on the front, on which was written in Sharpie, “walmart door busters 2016.” Adam opened the binder. Inside were torn-out pages from a Walmart circular in plastic sleeves, items on each page circled in red marker: cell phones, laptops, video games, HDTVs, a snowblower. “That’s the kill list,” the man told Adam with satisfaction.

  “So you’ll, like, run around trying to grab this shit?” asked Adam, flipping through the binder.

  The man chuckled again, ashed on the sidewalk. “Negative on that. After the employee got trampled in Long Island a few years ago, they have a whole system. In a couple hours they’ll give out numbers to everyone in line, and then let us in in groups. You get tickets for the bigger items. Like I said, it’s a whole system.”

  “Huh,” Adam said. He had stopped on a page with a red arrow pointing to a little kid’s bicycle—pink with a cartoon princess’s face on the seat. “And then you’ll give this stuff as Christmas gifts?”

  “A couple things,” the man replied, leaning over to put the cigarette out on the concrete. “Most of it I’ll put up on eBay. I’ll probably clear a few hundred bucks in the end, but if you crunch the numbers, you don’t even make minimum wage. It’s not about the money. It’s about the experience.”

  Adam watched the trail of smoke rising from the tip of his cigarette, wafting skyward and disappearing in the air. As someone who had spent years of grueling hours in front of a keyboard for far less than minimum wage, and often in environments far less hospitable than this man’s tent, he concluded he was in no position to judge. In fact, he felt like he understood: the man’s shared effort with his brother, the myopic and thus liberating focus on a particular goal, however obscure to the larger world. Fuck, this guy was practically a kindred spirit. “What’s your name?” Adam asked.

  “Reginald.”

  “I’m Adam. Good to meet you, Reggie.”

  “Reginald.” They shook hands. He heard Marissa honk three times: staccato, staccato, marcaaaato.

  “Look, Reginald, would it be cool if I stayed in your tent until they opened? I gotta pick up a coffee maker.”

  “Can’t do it, Adam,” he said gravely. “That’d be cutting.”

  “Right . . .” His eyes fell again on the iPad. “Hey, do you have a charger for an iPhone in there?”

  “iPhone, Android, whatever somebody might need out here.”

  Adam took his phone from his pocket. “Would you mind? It’s been dead all day.”

  “That one I can do for you.”

  As Reginald went inside the tent to plug in the phone, Adam jogged back to the Sonata. He passed a man leaning against the back of a silver Crown Vic, sipping from a thermos, dressed in a Red Sox hat and a heavy red-and-black checked coat. The man gave Adam a peculiarly antagonistic sneer—curling his lips behind the rim of the thermos, narrowing his eyes accusatorily. Panic briefly tightened Adam’s chest, as if he’d been caught. But caught doing what? He hadn’t done anything, he reminded himself, returning a what-the-fuck glare. This guy was just an asshole.

  Marissa was flipping through Facebook on her phone when Adam got to the car. He tapped on the driver’s side window; she lowered it, dubious. “Why aren’t you getting in?”

  “This guy has an iPhone charger,” he told her. “He just plugged mine in.”

  “You really are incredible.”

  “I know, so lucky, right?” Then he realized he’d misunderstood. “It’ll just be, like . . .”

  “Two seconds?” she said curtly.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  She tossed her phone into the passenger seat. “You see that gas station up there?” Over the roof of the car, he could see the gas station at the top of the parking lot: six pumps and a shop under a green-striped roof on pillars. “I’m going to fill up the tank and pee, and if you’re not there when I’m done, I am sorry, I am going to have to drive to Vermont. Okay?”

  “I’ll be there,” he promised.

  “I’m not kidding, Adam,” she said, then raised the window and drove across the lot to the station.

  He knew she wasn’t kidding—she really would leave him there. And he wouldn’t blame her, either. She was too smart, too practical, to put up with much more of his shit. This was something you became attuned to when you were an alcoholic: whose kindness you could take advantage of, and exactly how far. It was a heartless way to go through life, sure, but when your priority was getting your load on, day after day, you needed other people to help attend to details like where you slept, whether you ate.

  As he walked back toward Reginald’s tent, he glanced over to the space where the dick in the Sox hat had parked, but he’d vanished. Those spasms of guilt were pretty common since he’d stopped drinking—like he was an escaped convict, a murderer on the run or something, trying to escape the cost of all the heartlessness and fucking-up by acting normal. All he could do was start to do better, he told himself. He needed to be more like Marissa: practical, self-sufficient.

  He handed Reginald another couple cigarettes in return for charging
his phone. The battery was still in the red, but at least the screen could light up now. Whatever relief this gave was immediately displaced, though, by a sickened feeling when the messages waiting for him appeared: four new voicemails, six new texts. He decided there was no point reading or listening to any of them. Instead, he walked to the edge of the sidewalk and called Kristen.

  It didn’t even ring before she answered. “Adam?” There was a pained, cautious note in her voice: She didn’t know what she’d hear.

  “Hey, Kristen,” he said, as calmly—soberly—as he could. A long pause. He could guess what was happening in that pause: her relief, her anger. “I’m an asshole.” She didn’t answer. “Kristen?”

  “I’m here,” she said. “I’m here at the house, with our family. Where are you?”

  “Y’know that Walmart they opened on Route 8 . . .” Another pause; he could hear her breathing, long and slow, like a yogic calming technique.

  “What the hell, Adam,” she finally said. “What the hell.”

  “I’m trying to find a new coffeepot!”

  “Do you know what you did to Mom and Dad?”

  “I texted Jack—”

  “Are you coming over today or not?” she interrupted.

  “Yes,” he said firmly—and he couldn’t help adding defensively, “Why do you think I even flew out here . . .”

  “Then I’m coming to get you.”

  “Are you serious?” he shot back. “You think this whole time I’ve been—”

  “I don’t know, Adam, and to tell the truth, I don’t give a shit. But if you think I’m going to let you just disappear on everyone for another three hours—”

  “Okay, okay, okay. Just chill out, all right? Y’know that gas station, the BP? I’ll be waiting there.”

  “Okay, I’ll chill out, Adam,” she said, with brutal sarcasm. “You just keep your ass at that gas station.” She hung up.