Just Like That

by Nicola Rendell

  Dickerson puts his hands on his plump tummy and rubs his belly button. Then he pulls his signature move, taking his keys from his pocket and cleaning his ear with the key to his Cadillac.

  The worst.

  “Just came by to see where my eighteenth hole is going to go.” He looks around, surveying the land. “Figure there’s gonna be a sand trap right about here.” He stamps on the ground with his golf shoe. Still, everything is quiet. Babies don’t cry, and seagulls don’t caw. There’s utter silence as all of us stare at Dickerson, who wants to ruin our town. And who we want to ruin, too. “Sand trap would be an improvement on this hellhole.”

  “If that S.O.B. didn’t drive a hybrid…” Maisie mutters.

  I grip the wooden tangerine harder. Every single thing inside me wants to bean him right between his too-close eyes and knock him down like a bowling pin or one of those inflatable bounce-back clown dolls.

  But instead I turn away from him and summon all my anger at the day. All my fury. All my disappointment. All my embarrassment at being broken-hearted over a man I don’t even know. I ball up my shame at being so stupid and foolish about Russ, and wrap it in my anger at Dickerson for trying to hurt my home town. What I’d like to do is let loose an almighty, cleansing scream at the sky. But I settle for the second-best thing, and I break the silence with a zinger that hits the paddle, square in the middle, making the trapdoor spring open with a crack.

  33

  Russ

  For two hours I’ve been sitting in the Port Flamingo Public Library, and I’ve gotten so deep into the local newspaper archives that my vision is blurry. But one thing is crystal clear: I fucked up with Penny. Big time. And I have no fucking idea what to do about it.

  The librarian drops two small dusty boxes on the table in front of me. He’s a wizened, tanned old guy who smells like sunscreen. “That’s all the microfiche I can find, son. Everything else is on the interwebs.”

  To distract myself from Penny, I plunge myself deep into a thorough investigation of the mayor. Once I exhaust the digital archives, I fire up the microfiche reader and scroll back through the years. I discover that the “dirt” on Major Jeffers isn’t exactly the shit of Iran-Contra. It comes down to a few basic points. 1) Every single goddamned time the guy appears in the newspaper, it’s for being unbelievably, jaw-droppingly nice. One of the headlines says, Mayor Saves Girl, 3, from Choking on a Strawberry at Local Art Festival. Another explains, Mayor Rescues Raccoon from Bobcat Attack. Responding Well to Rabies Treatment. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. He’s always helping people out, sometimes to his personal and very definite fiscal detriment. Which brings me to 2) He’s broke as shit, and not because he’s crooked or because he’s an embezzler, but because his idea of investment is saving doomed local businesses from bankruptcy. He’s poured his personal money into the boardwalk carnival, the Sunkissed Diner, and also what Dickerson called “the llama farm.” A quick search discovers it’s not really a farm at all, but some sort of pack animal sanctuary. Their ancient homemade website features pictures of goats, llamas, and donkeys, “brought to our 9.5 acres to live out their days in peace and comfort. Donations accepted! Even your spare change helps.”

  Christ almighty.

  As distractions go, it’s not enough. I close up the window on two llamas and a goat sharing a bale of hay and type Penny’s name into Google. What comes back at me is an explosion of vibrant, adorable pictures, just like I saw on her fridge. In one, she’s with the mayor at a ribbon-cutting ceremony, holding a pair of huge cardboard scissors and smiling. There’s one of her with the old man I saw above her desk and on her fridge, each of them with a jar of pickles and both of them wearing aprons that say, YOU CAN TOO. Another is of her, Maisie, and Guppy together in a row on the beach, each of them wearing matching sunglasses and plastic leis. And there’s also one with her with her back to the camera, her feet dangling off the side of a swimming pool, teaching ten tiny children in orange floaties how to swim.

  She’s not just the salt of the earth. She’s all the sugar and sparkle, too.

  I move over to the local database and look her up there. There’s her birth announcement from the Gazette, with a fuzzy picture of her as a baby, bundled up in a striped blanket and a matching hat. Penelope Eleanor Darling was born to Alice Faith Darling and Leonard John Darling of Port Flamingo on April 9, 1982, weighing 7 lbs. 8 oz. and measuring 21.5 inches. Unlike all the other newborns on the page, who look wrinkly and puffy and pissed off, Penny is smiling, her hands outstretched, her chubby little fingers spread wide. I scroll further through the database and find an article from a few years later of her swimming, an underwater shot taken at the YMCA. The date of the article tells me she’s barely three, plump in the cheeks and arms. She’s in a purple swimsuit, her cheeks puffed up as she holds her breath. On and on, article by article, I learn bits and pieces of her past—things I don’t think anybody took the time to remember about me. I find a picture of her going to prom, her mouth full of braces, her hair styled short, sleek and straight. Even later, an article where she talks about her work at Visit Port Flamingo and how proud she is to be working for her hometown.

  My whole life, I’ve been dating women whose idea of going casual is wearing two-inch heels instead of stilettos, and whose idea of cooking involved taking plates from the cabinet for takeout. All that was totally fucking fine with me, but then here comes this little tornado of a sweetheart, with her volunteering and her home canning, and her small-town heart, and her fucking adorable aprons, and wrecks me.

  The librarian reappears. “Closing up shop shortly, son.” He taps on his watch.

  “It’s three in the afternoon.”

  “The Tangerine Festival waits for nobody.”

  I rub my face, lean back in my chair, and look up at the fluorescent lights—every other one dark to save energy. I’m not exactly sure what to do next, but I’m sure about one thing: I need a home base to do it.

  * * *

  Aunt Sharon drops the needle on a Ravi Shankar record and says, “Of course you can stay with me!”

  On the sofa, Janis Joplin extends her claws into the upholstery and plucks at the fabric while she watches me. Sounds exactly like someone cracking their knuckles. “Just for the night.” At least I sure fucking hope that’s all it is.

  “Stay for as long as you want! I’ve got an air mattress somewhere. I’m sure it still holds air. Probably. And if not, there’s always the sofa bed. You don’t mind, do you, Janis?”

  Pluck, pluck.

  Aunt Sharon swoops off toward the kitchen, her linen flapping. She squirts some ranch dressing from a huge squeeze bottle into a dipping cup and starts arranging vegetables on a tray. I take a seat in the papasan in the corner that is covered in tie-dye fabric. My ass compresses the cushion, and a haze of dust and weed ash shoots up into the air, every last speck shining in the sunset.

  Not ideal, but not the worst. Even though the place is circa 1972 and is like a cross between a failing curry restaurant and a shrine to Jerry Garcia, at least it doesn’t remind me of her. At least I’ve got a shot of being able to focus on how to fix this shit without getting stuck in a loop, thinking about how fucking bad I want her.

  But then I look at the side table, where there’s a little dish of hard candies. Mostly green left, but a few yellows and one pink. It takes me right back to eating Dots at the Urgent Care, and my heart constricts. Goddamn it. But I man up. I can’t be having heart pains over candy, for fuck’s sake. So I take the last pink one and put it in my mouth as Aunt Sharon flows back into the living room and puts the tray down on the coffee table.

  It’s not your ordinary vegetable platter. Some of the carrots are baby carrots, but littered in amongst them are some of her attempts at lewd vegetable growing. A radish with two butt cheeks, a turnip with a penis. Right in the middle is a red pepper that makes me cough-choke. “Holy shit.”

  “Vulgar, isn’t it?” Aunt Sharon says, holding it up proudly. “Never had one turn o
ut looking so much like a vulva. Wait until all those amateurs with their dildo zucchinis get a load of this!”

  I crunch down on my candy. “They’ll never see it coming.”

  But Aunt Sharon is staring at me, with her anatomically perfect lady pepper in hand. She looks uncharacteristically panicked, which is seriously concerning. She once told me the only really important thing I needed to remember in life was, There’s no need to worry unless there’s a signature on the warrant.

  “Hang on. Was that one of my candies?” Her eyes move over to the side table and then back to me. “From that dish?”

  “Yeah.” I dip some celery in the ranch dressing and shove it in my mouth to get rid of this weird lingering candy taste. I’m not surprised, though. After she went to Thailand, I got a pack of durian candy for every holiday for five years running.

  She brings her hands to her cheeks, like that painting The Scream. “Those aren’t candies, Russ.”

  I stop cold with my carrot in the air. “Don’t tell me I just dosed myself.”

  She nods gravely. “100% sativa, low CBD, ultra-high THC.”

  Shit. But no, c’mon, whatever. I’m not worried. I might not be a guy that loves to smoke weed, but I weigh two hundred and fifty pounds and I can throw down four shots of tequila before I even get a buzz. I’ll be fine. “My frat house always spiked the brownies in the dining room. We’re good.”

  Aunt Sharon blows out an exasperated gasp. “Russy! This isn’t street corner schwag from a sandwich bag!” It’s like I’ve offended her down to her very core, the way most Apple users react when you insult their iPhones. “That’s top-grade product. Smuggled it from…Jesus, no. Never mind. Better if you can plead ignorance. The important question is, what color did you eat?”

  The only color. Her favorite one. “Pink.”

  Aunt Sharon moans, and her turquoise rings clatter. The weed ash hangs suspended in the air, and the sitar music switches to a minor key. Janis Joplin rubs her face on the sofa cushions and tickles the fabric with her tail. And then very slowly and with a controlled deep breath, Aunt Sharon lowers her hands to her lap. “Buckle up, honey. You’re in for a hell of a ride.”

  * * *

  According to the clock on the cable box, only an hour has passed, but that’s fucking impossible because I've been sitting here for at least four hours. “You should call your cable company. That clock is totally fucked.”

  Aunt Sharon drapes me in a rainbow-knitted blanket. She hands me a glass of milk and then places a few little black balls into my hand. “Chew these.”

  I study the spheres in my palm. They look like homemade bird shot. “If this is peyote, I’m going to pass.”

  She honks with laughter. “Bless your upstanding, tax-paying, military-serving heart. No. That’s black pepper. Bite down on those.”

  I put the pepper in my mouth and snap the peppercorns between my molars. It stings my nostrils and makes my eyes water like I got maced, but it does help. Kind of. I don’t feel like I’m on the light end of the see-saw anymore at least. I sniff hard and rub my nose with my knuckle to try to loosen up my sinuses. “I hate weed.”

  “I’d suggest a neti pot, but you know what’s hard to do when you’re stoned?” Aunt Sharon says, lying flat on her back on the floor and looking at me.

  I can take a wild guess, in spite of the fact that the Jerry Garcia tapestry on the wall is starting to look a lot like Jesus. “Using a neti pot.”

  She nods knowingly. “Correct. And showering. And going for a walk. And asking the internet How to come down off a marijuana high.” She pulls her phone from her bra and pokes in some letters. Then she holds it up to me to show me.

  Google has auto-filled the possible responses:

  How to come off a marijuana what’s that word

  How long will this high last what do i do fuck

  I’m too high help

  I try to will my way out of it, blinking hard and trying to focus on real things. Like the cat, right now disemboweling the throw pillow, and the ceiling fan, and my pants. None of it feels quite right or quite real. Without even meaning to, I drift back to being in bed with Penny, feeling her breathing slow after another epic, bed-shaking, fingernail-raking orgasm. That’s real. She is real. And the way she’s got me feeling is absolutely real, too.

  On the table by the window is a framed photograph of Aunt Sharon and her first boyfriend. She’s got a bandana around her forehead and so does he. They’re both making peace signs at the camera, and I’m pretty sure that’s Jimi Hendrix on stage behind them. Uncle Tim, she always calls him. He never came home from Vietnam, and she’s been holding a torch for him ever since. After a guy like that, Mayor Jeffers never had a chance.

  “All right, I know this isn’t exactly the time for a heart-to-heart,” I say, easing back into the papasan and putting my feet up on an Indian silk footstool.

  “Not the worst time, if you’re down for some circular logic.”

  “So...” I clear my throat. Fuck, I never thought I’d say these words, but here goes: “How do you know when you’ve found the one?”

  Aunt Sharon straightens up. “I take it back. You sure you want to have this conversation right now? When I get too stoned all I want to do is eat orange sherbet and put my feet in the fridge. You want to talk about the one?”

  I look at the tapestry. No more Jesus. “Yeah, I’m good.”

  She lies back down on the ground, and Janis Joplin comes over and sits on her stomach. “I mean, you just know. You feel it. Like when you know you’ve got a sunburn, or eaten too much tofurkey, you just…” She glances at me. “Know.”

  “You think it can happen in two days?”

  Aunt Sharon scoffs. “I’ve known it to happen in one second, honey. Happened to me at Woodstock. At the very instant I saw your Uncle Tim, Jefferson Airplane started playing Somebody to Love. Kismet.” She kisses her fingertips. “I was never the same.”

  The room gets a little weird again. The sitar music sounds like the off-screen voice from Peanuts, that wah-wah-wah. And in that gap, wherever I am, however long it lasts—two seconds, twenty minutes—I think about Penny and how simple it all is, really, if I strip down all the bullshit and all the work and the space between us. How simple it is that I feel something I haven’t felt in a long time. And that I feel fucking happy about it, right down to my very core.

  “Honey? Did you hear me?”

  I gulp down half the glass of milk and look at the clock. Exactly one minute has passed since last I looked. “Hit me again.”

  Aunt Sharon comes up to standing and takes the picture of Uncle Tim from the table. She looks at him with utter admiration and presses the frame to her heart. “I said that time doesn’t matter, not when it comes to love. When you find your person, you’ve got to do whatever you can to keep them. Because if you don’t…” She looks back down at the picture, her eyes dewy, “You never know what tomorrow’s going to bring.”

  It really is that simple. It’s what I want, and it’s what I need. But I don’t need to just win her back. I need to get serious, and blue carnations aren’t going to cut it. So I decide right then and there that as soon as this buzz wears off and I can drive without seeing weird shit in my peripheral vision, I’m going to lay it all out there for her. I’m going to show my hand, with all the cards on the table.

  And then it’ll be up to her.

  34

  Penny

  Our yoga mats are side by side. The sliding glass door is open, and the sea breeze sways the curtains. Our rum and Cokes are mixed. Maisie conceded on the throat singing, and it’s Adele instead. Happy hour yoga is officially underway.

  “Bring that breath into your belly,” Maisie says, with her hands perched on her knees, thumb and forefinger pinched together like Buddha. Sort of.

  I mimic all her movements, but I’m every inch an ugly duckling. She’s a natural at this stuff. Sometimes I think she was born to plank and hold it, hold it, hold it. I, on the other hand, have been know
n to lose my balance with both feet on the ground. She holds her breath and finally exhales. “Honor it, and let go.”

  I do, feeling very dizzy and more certain than ever about one thing: I can’t. I can’t let him go. All day, I’ve felt terrible. Defeated and silly. Terrible that I let a man in cashmere socks make me weak in the knees. Defeated that I got tangled up with yet another undateable man. And silly because I liked him before I even really knew him but liked him so much all the same.

  “Let your thoughts come, and go. Come, and go.”

  Roller coaster, bed. Kiss outside Urgent Care. Palm reading. All the namastes in the world aren’t going to get rid of these feelings.

  “Whatever your thoughts are, recognize them for what they are. Passing ideas. They are just your mind clearing itself, like bubbles down the drain.”

  Showerhead. No condoms. Ass pinch. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.

  “Go down into plank.” On her elbows, Maisie perches herself over her straw and takes a sip. “Squeeze those buns. Squeeeeeeeeze.”

  I give them my best squeeze, but they’re already burning from all the amazing romps in the sheets from the last forty-eight hours. I flop down onto my stomach with a gasp.

  “You’ll be teaching yoga in no time with form like that,” Maisie says, and takes another plank sip.

  I stay where I am, flat on my belly, and plant my forehead into my bent arms. Guppy nuzzles my ear, his face wet and extra drooly from a visit to the water bowl.

  “What did you say to him, anyway?” I ask, with my face mashed to the mat. I haven’t asked all day, because I thought this sting was going to fade. It hasn’t. If anything, it’s only gotten worse, because now on top of all the other feelings, I’m so curious about what a man like that is doing in a place like this.

  “I have no idea who you’re talking about. Annnnnd, exhale…child’s pose.”