by Doug Dorst
“Last one, baby,” she says, picking up the ball. She throws it as hard as she can, spilling her beer on herself and nearly capsizing the chair. Shane spins and bounds into the yard, hurls himself skyward to snatch the ball at the apex of a bounce, then takes a celebratory tumble through the dry grass and dirt. He trots back to the pool, tags jingling, and drops the ball in the water next to her.
“No more,” she says. “The girl needs to rest.” The dog cocks his head and eyes her curiously. Jo avoids his gaze and instead looks at her pink hi-top Chucks at the far end of the redwood deck. One of them has her car keys tucked inside. It’s not too late to drive out to Stockton to see Wayne, like she promised him. It’s really not. She could still get there in time for dinner.
Shane barks—a staccato, scolding burst—and she closes her eyes, forces herself to count off the reasons she can’t go, shouldn’t go:
One. It’s over. He needs to understand this.
Two. She’s had four or five or maybe six beers.
Three. Her car can’t make the trip. The transmission is screwed up. She lost fourth gear yesterday.
Four. She invited Spencer to come over and hang out after his shift. She could change her mind and he wouldn’t complain, but still.
Five. She has the test tomorrow morning all the way down in Gilroy. It’s her last chance at getting certified. She should get a good night’s sleep, show up fresh.
No, the best thing she can do is forget Wayne, forget the test, forget it all for now. Concentrate on the warm sun on skin, the cool tickle of sweat, the sweet haze of alcohol and early summer. The beer in her hand is warm now, but she shakes the last sip into her mouth anyway, swallows, shifts her weight in the chair, relaxes her shoulders.
Shane gives a squeaky yawn and pads off to lie in the shade under the bougainvillea that overhangs the deck. Jo lets the can roll from her fingers into the water, where it floats with the other empties, glittering silver flotsam. Within minutes she is asleep.
When Jo had awakened in the Crenshaws’ canopy bed that morning, she’d lain still for almost an hour, feeling spent and washed out, ignoring the phone whenever it rang. She finally got up to go to the bathroom, where she swallowed three aspirin. In the kitchen she made a pot of coffee and filled Shane’s bowl with water. She did the dishes from last night’s dinner, threw out the empty wine bottle, put away the bottle of Mr. Crenshaw’s scotch that she hadn’t remembered taking out.
When the coffee was ready, she poured it into the mug she’d been using every morning for the three weeks she’d been there. It had a photo of Shane on the side—a Halloween snapshot of the dog dressed as an astronaut, sniffing at a jack-o’-lantern. The costume looked professionally made: a shiny silver suit, NASA patches and all, a plastic helmet (without a face shield, so his snout could poke through), a jet pack on his back. What Jo loved about the photo was not that Shane looked cute, which he did, but that he also looked serene, like he was calmly weathering an indignity that he knew would be temporary, that soon it would be over and he would be able to go back to fetching balls and chasing squirrels. Jo had decided a while ago to take the mug with her when she left. Tell the Crenshaws it broke.
The answering machine in the hallway flashed three new messages. She carried the mug with her, burned her mouth on the first sip, and pressed PLAY on the machine. The first message was Rafael, her boss at JavaPlenty, telling her she wouldn’t be getting any shifts for a week, maybe more. The second was Missy Crenshaw, Jo’s best friend through high school—soon to become Dr. Crenshaw—calling to see if her parents were back from their trip yet. As an afterthought, Missy added a quick “Hi, Jo, if you’re there.” Jo didn’t mind; it had been a long time since they’d had much to say to each other.
The third message was Wayne, telling Jo he’d taken a fuckload of pills the night before and had to have his stomach pumped and he just wanted her to know.
Later she would guess that she had gone into shock, because she felt nothing. Played his message again and still felt nothing. Nothing. The next thing she’d notice feeling would be frustration—the door-slamming, wall-kicking kind—as she searched the house for her car keys, and after that, disgust when, with keys in hand, she realized she was about to do exactly what he wanted her to do. She played the message again and heard something she hadn’t heard before, a quiet hitch in his throat just as he hung up, a sound that could have been the beginning of a laugh or a sob or something else entirely.
She sat on the floor in the hallway with her sneakers on but unlaced, running her thumb up and down over the jags of the ignition key. Her eyes drifted to the potted snake plant, which was now a sickly yellow, and she realized she hadn’t watered anything in two weeks, maybe more. Water the plants, water the flowers, water the lawn, Mr. Crenshaw had said, pounding his fist into his palm, joking but strangely worked up, too. Mist those bromeliads. Soak that mossy-looking thing near the kitchen sink. Water the herb garden. Hear me, Jo? Water, water, water. She hadn’t forgotten, really. She just hadn’t done it.
She sat for a long time, staring at the dying plant and nursing several pangs of failure that all bled together, until Shane jingled into the room like a wind-chime breeze and blew his dog breath into her face.
Spencer’s reedy voice, calling her name. She sleepily calls back to him, then remembers she’s not wearing anything. She rolls off the floating chair into the safe embrace of the eighty-degree water.
He walks down the stone steps to the pool, carrying a twelve-pack. He looks a little like John Lennon in his Imagine phase: long and stringy brown hair; little round glasses; thin, sad face. He’s short and slight—Wayne could put him out with one punch. She probably should’ve called someone bigger and tougher, just in case, but Spencer’s the best friend she has these days. She watches him closely as he negotiates the steps; he has a problem with one of his ears and his balance often deserts him. Afraid of distracting him, she waits until he is safely seated and swirling his feet in the pool before she says anything.
“Close your eyes a second,” she says, breaststroking to the ladder. “I’m nude.”
“They’re closed,” he says.
Jo climbs out of the pool, her back to him. She knows he’s peeking but she doesn’t care. She’s grateful that he’s here keeping her company, and it’s not like they haven’t ended up in bed together before. A glimpse of ass isn’t such a big deal—maybe it’s even a small way for her to say thank you. As she wraps herself in a towel, though, she finds herself smiling ruefully, because really, it was her ass that started everything going so wrong with Wayne: they’re at a bowling alley in Lodi on fifty-cent longneck night—Wayne’s already in a bad mood, he couldn’t find his keys earlier, and she really rode him about it (hypocrite!)—Jo does a happy butt-wiggling dance back to the seats after she picks up the eight and ten, some button-down jerk-off in the next lane says something rude, Wayne shouts back as the pins reset, there’s glaring across the plastic seats while Jo laughs to herself and swigs her beer, and then there’s a volley of fists that ends with a bottle cracked over the scoring desk and a spray of red over the varnished wood. Assault with a deadly weapon. No prior record? Nine months. Bang.
Jo wraps the towel tighter. She’s going to have a hard time sleeping tonight, that’s for sure.
She walks across the deck to Spencer, kneels and hugs him hello, the smell of roasted coffee still in his hair, in his JavaPlenty T-shirt. He opens a beer and hands it to her.
“You burned,” Spencer says.
She shrugs.
“Feeling a little better?”
“Not feeling much.” She takes a long, slow sip. “Thanks for coming,” she says.
“No big deal,” he says. “I like you.” It sounds rehearsed, like he was practicing on the drive over. He’s totally into her but is afraid of pushing too hard and scaring her off; she pretends she doesn’t know. It’s simpler that way, for both of them.
She walks to the glass-topped table on the deck and sits, rock
ing back on two legs of the metal chair. “That prick Rafael didn’t give me any shifts this week,” she says. “Or next.”
“Why do you care?”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t need him anymore. You’re the goddamn Queen of the Road.”
She hesitates. “I failed the driving test,” she tells him. It’s the first time she has said it aloud.
“Oh,” he says. “Sorry.”
I’m not stupid, she wants to tell him. She’s not, she’s got the inspection procedures down cold, knows S-cam air brakes inside and out, can double-clutch with drumbeat precision. It’s just backing up that’s the problem. “You ever drive a tractor-trailer in reverse?” she says, trying to make the words sound casual, fluid, not defensive. “They make you go between all these cones. It’s hard.”
He shakes his head, raises his beer in sympathy. “At least you tried.”
“I get one more chance,” she says. “Tomorrow. If I fuck it up again, they might still let me be a dispatcher.” But she doesn’t want to be a dispatcher, she doesn’t want to live down in the Sunbeam Tomato Freight dormitory and wake up every morning just to go sit in an office. She wants to be out on the road on her own, hauling tomatoes through the western states, doing speed to stay awake, making the thirty-five thousand dollars per season that the brochure promised. She wants to live her life like that Little Feat song, driving her rig from Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah. She wants to drive. She finishes her beer, throws the empty in the pool. “But I’ll probably fuck it up again,” she says.
“Hey,” he says. It’s supposed to reassure her. He stands up quickly and takes a step toward her, but he wavers, arms circling almost comically as he tries to gain his balance. She calmly realizes she won’t be able to catch him if he topples over, so she doesn’t move, just watches, hopes for the best.
He rights himself, then turns away from her and stares into the water. “Tell the Crenshaws to have the pool cleaned,” he says after a few seconds of silence. “It’s growing cans.”
“What?”
“Forget it. Dumb joke. I suck.”
Can’t you please just relax, she wants to say. The last thing she needs is anyone else to worry about.
The phone rings while Jo is changing. She yells from the bedroom for Spencer not to pick it up. She is surprised by how loud her voice is.
She walks into the hallway half-dressed and stands in front of the machine as Wayne leaves a nightmare of a message, careening from anger to calm to weepiness to anger again: he can’t believe she didn’t come see him this afternoon, but maybe she’s not answering because she’s already on her way, and he really doesn’t like to get so fucking mad but she doesn’t understand how bad things have gotten for him, and what’s wrong with her that she can’t or won’t understand, and she owes him, she owes him, she has to at least understand that she owes him the simple fucking courtesy of talking to him and it’d better happen soon.
She walks into the kitchen, where Spencer is dropping ice cubes into the blender. He nods toward the phone. “Crazy,” he says. She nods and sits at the kitchen table, watches him make the margaritas. Happy drinks, he calls them.
“Do you want something extra? To take the edge off?” he asks.
“Like what?”
He holds up a small baggie full of yellow pills. “Percodan,” he says. “I bought them off my brother.”
“Do it,” she says.
He drops some of them into the blender. How many, she can’t say.
Spencer pours the drinks and Jo thinks about the first time the two of them slept together. It was a Tuesday night, she remembers—evening visiting hours at the jail—and she’d really meant to go because she hadn’t for the last three weeks. She never missed the visits intentionally, but it was an hour and a half through traffic, and it was hard to see Wayne in there in those orange coveralls, and she hated having to wait in the lounge with all those people coming to visit the real criminals, and she especially hated the security pat-down and the way the guards eyed you so suspiciously that you’d begin to wonder if you really were up to something. So, instead, that night after work she’d gone for a quick drink with Spencer and the rest of the JavaPlenty crew, and whoops, look at the time, oh well, make the next one a double. She knew Wayne had nothing else to look forward to, no one else to think about, no one but her, but he didn’t understand what a burden that was. She couldn’t live up to that. No one could.
The blender rumbles and grinds, drowning out something that Spencer’s trying to say, and the sound makes Jo think of cracking teeth. Finally, Spencer sets the two salt-rimmed glasses on the table. He moves a chair so he can have her talking to his good side. “Do you think he’s dangerous?” he asks.
She makes an effort to sound confident. “Not really,” she says. “It’s just Wayne.”
She can’t remember why she and Spencer went into Missy Crenshaw’s old bedroom in the first place, or how long they’ve been in Missy’s bed together.
“Pictures,” Jo says. There used to be pictures on the wall, photos of her and Missy together as kids, at an apple orchard, at a soccer game, on their eighth-grade double date with the Fagelson twins. All gone, replaced by Missy’s diplomas, three of them, smartly mounted and framed. By moving her head, Jo can make the moon reflect off the glass of each of them in turn.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing,” she says.
She hears a series of plastic clicks. Spencer, setting the alarm. Responsible.
“Give me another,” she says.
“Another what?”
“Pill.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t want you to die on me.”
“I can handle it,” she says.
“You’ve had enough.”
She crawls under the covers and goes to work on him. When she’s done, Spencer, red-faced and sheepish, drops two pills into her hand. She takes one and feeds him the other, then closes her eyes and rests her head on his chest, feels his fingers trace the back of her neck. “Happy,” she says. “Happy.” She says this word again and again. She doesn’t know if she means that she is happy, or was, or will be—if it is a statement, a lament, or a hope—but the sound of the word comforts her, lulls her as she falls away.
At seven-fifteen Jo is jolted awake by the clock radio, tuned to a jazz station. Loud. A squealing, sick-cat saxophone. Spencer doesn’t stir. For a moment, Jo is worried, but she feels breath when she puts her finger under his nose. He’s not dead, just wasted and sleeping with his good ear down.
As soon as she sits up, she feels ice picks behind her eyes and a burn in her stomach. She makes her way to the bathroom and pops four aspirin. In the shower, she tries to shake the heavy fog in her head, running through the checklist of inspection procedures, but she keeps missing steps, easy ones. She can feel herself start to sweat—stinky, cold flop sweat—even as she’s drying herself off. She almost decides to blow off the test, just bail on everything, crawl back into bed, hide, but she takes another look into the medicine cabinet and sees a prescription bottle labeled MARY CRENSHAW—KLONOPIN—AS NEEDED FOR ANXIETY. She shakes a few into her hand. They’re small, so she swallows two. After she dresses, she puts three more tablets in the pocket of her cutoffs, just in case.
She walks softly into the laundry room, where Shane is sleeping on a fluffy tartan dog bed, and she sits down next to him, watches him breathe, in and out, in and out. His ears twitch when she scratches his head. “Shane,” she says quietly. “Wake up, Shane.” He opens his dark eyes halfway, looks at her dreamily. “You want to tell me good luck, baby?” she says. Shane sneezes and falls back asleep.
In the kitchen she makes coffee and pours it into a travel mug. The unrinsed blender sits on the counter in a dried margarita puddle. Broken glass in the sink, pizza scraps on the table, sticky dog tracks across the floor. The phone rings but she just takes a deep breath and walks out the front door into the sun and the dew and the mist of the tick-t
ick-ticking sprinklers she left on all night. The lawn gleams and there are puddles all along the blacktop. Water, water, water.
She climbs into her car, the blue Fiesta she’s been driving since high school. She’ll have to back out of the U-shaped driveway because Spencer parked his Beetle facing her car, with only a foot or so of space separating them. There’s resistance when she tries to shift into reverse, so she forces it. More resistance, and she hears a grinding noise, then a metallic whine. Still not in gear. She tries again: up off the clutch, then down, shift, grind, whine. Again. Again, until she pulls back on the stick shift so hard, she feels a twinge in her shoulder. She curses the car. No fourth gear, no reverse, but it better get her to Gilroy. Now.
She shifts into first and tries to steer around his car. When the bumpers meet she gives it a little more gas, trying to nudge it out of the way. Fortunately Spencer left it out of gear, so it slowly rolls backward, and a few feet later Jo is free. In her rearview mirror she watches the Beetle ease forward again, settling comfortably back where it had been. She is so focused on the gentle motion of Spencer’s car, though, that she’s slow to realize she has gone off the driveway and is leaving a deep muddy track in the Crenshaws’ sculpted lawn. Fuck me, she thinks. Can’t worry about it now, though. Got to drive.
When she gets to the freeway, she turns on her hazard lights because the Fiesta can only do forty these days. The transmission slips whenever she tries to accelerate hard. Somewhere south of San Jose, in one of those moments before the gears catch, with nervous heat running up her spine and that goddamned sweat dripping down her sides, she dry-swallows another one of Mrs. Crenshaw’s pills and prays to no one in particular: Please, just let me get there. I need this.
