by Jessica Pine
"Lacie!"
I kept walking. How could I have been so stupid? I heard him coming and broke into a run, but he was too fast.
"Will you listen?" he said, catching hold of my arm. "I don't live with my parents and I'm not married. Jesus, what is it with you and leaping to conclusions?"
"Then why did you lie to me?"
"I didn't," he said. "You assumed I lived with my parents. I didn't get to answer one way or the other."
I knew he was right. I was glad of the dark because I was probably the color of a beet right now. "You're splitting hairs," I said.
"I'm not and you know it." He squeezed both my hands and ducked a little to touch his forehead to mine. "The reason I didn't take you home is because I live in a trailer," he said. "In a trailer park. That's where I am in life right now."
I worked one hand loose and slapped him across his upper arm. "You dick! What kind of snob do you think I am?"
"I don't. It's just not something I like to admit. People have prejudices."
"Thanks for including me among those people," I said. What kind of shallow, stuck-up princess did he think I was?
"I'm sorry. I guess it was just force of habit. Look, we can totally go there if you want."
I shook my head and carried on walking. A little part of me was ashamed of myself for ruining the evening. I'd been like this all day - raw, edgy and close to tears. It was late in the month and while I knew why I was behaving in this ridiculous way it was as if I lacked the faculties to pull myself back. It was like my skin was too thin and I felt like Byron used to look, like the workings of me were on show - veins, tendons, bone.
By some titanic effort I managed not to cry. "I just want to sleep," I said, when we reached his car. "I think I'm tired."
His mouth refused to slant in its usual smile and I knew I'd upset him. I wanted to tell him it didn't matter to me where he lived but I could tell somehow that I'd only make things worse. His unspoken misjudgment of me had hurt me more than I wanted to admit and right now it felt too big and tugged at the frayed ends of all my anxieties. "I'll see you tomorrow," he said, and kissed me on the side of the mouth. He kept his lips closed and they felt hard, perfunctory. He thought I was stupid. He thought I was a flake, a princess, a drama queen.
Somehow I managed not to run after him. I went indoors and walked softly past the living room, where my Dad sat watching his nature shows. I went to pee, but when I wiped the toilet paper was still white, which meant several more days of strange behavior on my part. It was weird how it stopped the moment my period started - every single time - as if you could turn craziness on and off like a tap.
I had a song playing in my head - it had been there all day - one of those old croony numbers he liked to listen to. Sinatra, I think. I've Got You Under My Skin. And damn him, he was. He was needling under my thin, translucent skin, pricking where I was soft and stupid. Why would you bother inventing the telescope? Yes, why would you? When you could sit on your ass, enjoy the view and do the bare goddamn minimum - just like me. Oh, I was my mother’s daughter all right. Didn’t even have the guts to try.
As if to make a point, I opened my laptop and wrote several hundred words, but when my spleen was well and truly vented I looked back at what I'd written and hated myself so passionately that I began to understand those girls who got so choked with their own rage and self-loathing that they turned razorblades on themselves - not to kill, just to scar and mortify. A kind of secular self-flagellation.
I deleted the whole thing, snarled 'fuck, no' at my computer when it asked me if I wanted to save changes and slammed down the lid.
My eyes were still sore the next morning. I looked out of the window and hoped that Clayton might show me some kind of deference by not turning up, but when I stuck my head out and peered down the alleyway I could see the wing of his ratty white Honda. I crept down the stairs and got some coffee, expecting him to wander into the office and start bothering me, but he didn't. I heard the lathe turning in the workshop, then it shut off and all I could hear was the inane jibber-jabber of the local radio station that Dad refused to change.
Through the store's front window I saw a blonde head bob past Rita's bakery. Rita saved my life - she popped out of the bakery door and caught Aunt Cassandra in conversation, giving me time to flip the sign to CLOSED and dive for safety in the workshop. Of course, it wasn't safety at all because Clayton was right there looking at me like I was some kind of crazy person, but I was far too fragile to handle Cassandra today.
"Are you still mad at me?" he said.
"I don't know. Are you?"
He rubbed his hands on a rag. "I dunno. Why would I be mad at you?"
"Because I'm stupid," I said. "And I make stupid assumptions about people and work myself into tempers over nothing."
He said nothing. The inside of my head felt like a pressure cooker. "I'm apologizing," I said. "Now it's your turn."
"For what?" he said.
I couldn't believe him. "Don't be obtuse, Clayton."
"I'm not," he said. "Whatever that means."
"It means you're playing dumb. Which you are. You know exactly what I was pissed about."
"Okay," he said, folding his arms. "I'm sorry you took offence, but can you honestly look me in the eye and say you're fucking thrilled to find I live in a trailer park?"
It was about to say that was the worst non-apology I'd ever heard, but I was cut short by the approaching click-clack of Aunt Cassandra's heels. "What the hell is going on?" she said, ducking under the garage door. "Why is the store closed?"
"I had to go to the bathroom," I said.
"So ask Clayton to mind the store. What's got into you lately?"
Clayton's eyebrow slid northwards; oh yeah - his brain went there. I could tell.
"Nobody's asking you to do anything complicated, Lacie," said Cassandra. "You're lucky to have your family give you a job straight out of school..."
I thought of the '& Son' hanging above the door and my palm itched. "Yeah - and I'm grateful," I said, but it came out more sarcastically than I meant it to.
"You?" said Cassandra. "Grateful? That'll be the goddamn day."
Clayton had the useless look of man caught in the crossfire.
"I'm sorry," I said, my temper flaring. "What do you want me to do, Cassandra? Prostrate myself every morning? Put on sackcloth and pour ashes over my head because I'm so unworthy?"
"No," she said. "Just a smile now and again would be good. Or some indication that you mean to do something with your education."
"And what exactly am I supposed to do?"
"I don't know," she said. "Write that book. It can't be that difficult, can it?"
I wanted to scream. It was like she could see through my eyes and she'd seen the mess I'd made on the screen the night before - the moronic, self-indulgent squealings that told me I could never, ever, in a million years hope to write anything that anyone would care to read. Then to my intense surprise Clayton coughed.
Aunt Cassandra turned to stare at him. She was almost a full foot shorter than him, but I swear he was trembling as he spoke. "It...might be," he said. "If you've never done it before. Do you know how to do it? Because I sure as hell don't."
"No," said Cassandra, unmoved. "But do you have a four year degree in Literature?"
He swallowed. "No."
"There you go then," she said. "Open the store, Lacie."
This was so much worse than I could have ever imagined. The tears came bubbling to the surface before I could even think of getting a grip on myself. Aunt Cassandra just sighed and said, "Fine. I'll do it," as if I'd started crying just to spite her. I'd run out of reasons to be mad at Clayton and let him hug me.
"Come on," he said. "She doesn't have a four year degree either, so what the fuck does she know?"
Everything, I thought. She knew. She knew I was lazy and insecure, which was enough to set me off again. "I'm sorry," I said. "I'm a mess."
"You're not a mess."
"I am."
"Okay, so you're a little messy right now," he said. "But in general - you're not that bad. I've known worse."
I shook my head. "You can't. It's impossible."
"Is too. You should meet my friend Bog. Look up 'mess' in the dictionary - it's right there next to his picture."
"Bog?" I said, searching for a spare Kleenex. "You have a friend named Bog?"
"Yeah," he said. "It's not his real name, obviously. It's just he used to get letters mixed up and say things like 'Bog knows' when he meant 'God knows', and so it kind of stuck. It suits him. He's nuts. Seriously. Thinks he's the great great something grandson of Genghis Khan."
I sniffed hard. "Well, he could be."
"You're shitting me."
"Is he Asian?"
"No. Russian, I think."
"Then he could be," I said. "If there was one thing Genghis Khan liked nearly as much as violence it was sex. And sometimes he liked to combine the two. There's a whole lot of Temujin DNA out there, and it's not just confined to Mongolia. I think Dostoevsky was one of his possible descendants."
"Wait, I've heard of him. He was a writer? Russian guy?"
"Yep."
"Wow," he said. “You're serious? Bog could be the real deal?"
"It's not outside the realms of possibility."
He shook his head. “The things you know.”
After the store closed that day he came creeping into the office and leaned on the back of my chair. "You okay?" he said, gathering my hair up in his hands.
I tipped my chair back against him. "I guess," I said, feeling tired.
"So...you want to come back to my place?"
"I thought you'd never ask."
He bent over me and I felt his breath warm on my scalp as he spoke. "Just...you know. Don't freak out at the mess. And don't say I didn't warn you."
"I won't. I promise."
It was enough just to get the hell out of Westerwick for a few hours. And a bed. An actual bed. He had Christmas lights strung over his bed, even though it was August. "It's ambient," he said, pronouncing it with an absurd faux French accent that made me laugh. "Like mood lighting."
He stripped off his shirt, revealing his stupid tribal tattoo and another on his shoulder blade - an old-fashioned sailor design, all bluebirds, roses and scrolls, adorning a giant red heart. I sat on the end of his bed and tried to look demure, like I wasn't there for sex, but he made it impossible when he dropped his pants, taking his underwear with them.
"Come on," he said. "I think it's about time we evened the score, don't you?"
"I can't think what you mean."
"Yes you do. You’ve seen me naked." He came over to me and pushed my knees apart so that he could stand between them. I pressed my face to his skin, my arms around his waist. "No fair," he whispered, swaying against me. His cock swelled under my heart and I thought about distracting him by sliding to my knees. "Clothes," he said. "Lose 'em."
When I felt the touch of his bare skin on mine I regretted that we hadn't come here and done this a whole lot sooner. It was insanely sweaty and afterwards we were too hot to touch one another, so we lay side by side. I could see where the moisture pooled in the dip of his belly button, and the humidity had made a magnificent afro of his pubes.
"I guess I should have mentioned the lack of air-con," he said.
"I don't mind."
He rolled over and propped himself up on one elbow. "No," he said, peering down at me, his hand on my hip. "You don't, do you?"
"Nope. Why did you think I'd mind?"
He traced the edge of my navel with a fingertip for a moment. "You got me," he said. "Projecting, I guess. This wasn't where I thought I'd be in life."
"You shouldn't be so hard on yourself."
Clayton sighed. "No, maybe not." He sat up to rummage in his jeans pocket and I got a good look at the tattoo on the back of his shoulder. The scroll read 'Bryan'.
"Your brother," I said, tracing it with my finger.
He fished a joint out of his pocket and straightened it out. "Yeah," he said, lying back down beside me. He propped an ashtray in the middle of his chest. "I'm still surprised the tattooist even agreed to do it - I didn't think they tattooed drunk people."
"The good ones don't," I said. "They have policies." I felt a weird little flash of fear - what if he'd got hepatitis from a dirty needle and passed it onto me? We'd been careful since that first night and from the way my hormones were acting I was pretty sure I couldn't be pregnant, but that was all it took. Just once, as they used to tell us in health class. I squashed it down - it felt somehow rude to think of him as diseased, especially since he was so sensitive about living in a trailer.
"Why your brother?" I asked. "Why not 'Mom'?"
He took a long draw on the joint and passed it over. "I told you he was in Afghanistan, right?"
"Yeah."
"Well, after a while it got so I couldn't watch the news any more. Every time they talked about another US casualty I'd be bouncing off the walls, freaking out, thinking this was it. I felt it. I told myself that whole twin thing was real, and that if anything happened to him I'd know. I'd feel it - like telepathically or something, you know?"
"I've heard of that," I said.
"Well, it's bullshit. I stopped watching TV, avoided it as best I could on the internet. I got so good at tuning it out that it was like nobody died over there. In my head it became every inch the clean, casualty-free, America fuck-yeah war they were trying to sell way back in 2001. But when it actually happened I felt nothing. No telepathic connection, no spooky twin sense. Nothing. I was hanging out on the treadmills at the gym where I worked at the time. It was about this time of year - 2008. I remember it clearly because of the election. When I came back from showering there was a message from my Mom and I just remember thinking 'That can't be right - not Bryan. I would have felt something. I would have known.'"
I'd gone this far without interrupting, but it was impossible not to ask. "But he was okay?"
"Yeah. But for a while we didn't know anything. He was on the other side of the fucking world and we didn't know if he was gonna make it through the night. I remember wondering if he was conscious and if he felt nearly half as alone as I did right then. My Mom was falling apart, Brad was still a baby to me - fifteen."
I brushed my lips against his shoulder. "You can't have been that much older yourself."
He sighed. "I was twenty. Thought I knew it all - as you do. I wanted to tough it out but I just...snapped, I guess. I got my fake ID, got blackout drunk and woke up with a fresh tattoo. I must be good at seeming sober when I'm hammered - get it from my old man."
"Your Dad - is he still around?"
Clayton rolled over, stretching out his belly, his head on his folded arms. "Not so much. He's back in Chicago - Twelve Stepping. Keeps writing me these fucking e-mails about how sorry he is and how God says he needs to make things right."
I tried to imagine how that would make me feel, coming from my mother, but I couldn't picture her writing anything. I couldn't remember what her handwriting looked like. I'd never seen her at a keyboard. I saw her knuckles in my mind's eye, white on the steering wheel. "Do you want to?" I asked. "Make things right?"
He screwed up his nose. "Will you think I'm a terrible person if I say no?"
I shook my head and carded my fingers through his hair. He had nearly as bad a case of bedhead as me. "I don't think it's my place to say so."
He didn't say anything for a while, just gave me a long, thoughtful look. His eyes were bronze-green in the late evening sun and I could see the faded spatters of old freckles on the high bridge of his nose. With the lights of red in his tousled hair I could make out the carrot-topped kid he'd once been, one of a matched pair. "You have a clever way about you," he said. "I like that."
"What do you mean?"
"You could have said yes, you could have said no. But you say it's not your place."
"It's not," I said. "It's n
ot my business to tell you how to feel about your Dad. I don't know what happened between the two of you."
"All of us," he said. "We all suffered from his drinking."
"Was he violent?"
He laughed. "God no. Sometimes I wish he fucking had been - that way my Mom would have given up sooner. He was the sweetest drunk you ever did meet. Funny, charming, a good guy. A good buddy. He always knew the words to all the dirty songs, always led the chorus. He always knew the jokes and how to tell 'em. Charmed the pants off of women. The kind of guy that when they come to put him in the ground the church is going to be crammed to the rafters with his drinking buddies. And they'll all cry and they'll all fight and they'll all drink to him and sing those awful fucking maudlin Irish songs. And us? The kids? The widow? We're afterthoughts. We were never part of the good old boy pose."
"But he's sober now?"
He sighed. "Yeah. For what it's worth. Still manages to make it all about him, though. When he writes it's all about how God wants him to get right with me. You know he has a personal relationship with Jesus now? But it's still him. Still the same selfish prick he always was. It's just kind of...I don't know...filtered, I guess. Like if I don't forgive him right away then I'm not only offending him but offending God too." He sighed again and sat up, scraping a hand through his messy hair. "But fuck him. And fuck his AA bullshit too."
His smile was too tight and too brief, as if he was trying to reset his mood to normal. "So," he said. "You want to come meet my brother?"
"Yes. Please," I said. "I always want to meet the people that you love."
He leaned over and kissed me on the mouth. The warm salt smell of his sweat was turning sour, and when I lifted my arms to wrap them round his neck I saw his nose wrinkle. "Maybe shower first?" I said.
Clayton exhaled and buried his face in my shoulder. "Yeah, I wasn't gonna say anything..."
"You totally were. Is it bad?"
"It's pretty terrible."
We crammed into his tiny plastic shower cubicle. "Your brother is going to know exactly what's up if we both show up with wet hair," I said.
