Joy

by Erin McGraw

  “No, dolly. I have to go out and get my own clothes, just like you.”

  “Grandmama makes my clothes.”

  “Gee whiz,” Frank says again.

  Where the hell is Bronnie?

  A hand rests on my elbow and I jerk away. Too late I see it’s Myra, hurt moving across her gentle face. I press my cheek against hers, soft as powder. “Thank you for this.”

  “If Mama had lived—,” she begins wistfully.

  At that moment I have two wishes: to know the rest of her sentence, and to swallow a mouthful of bourbon. I can only have one wish, and Bronnie is edging around the crowd toward me.

  “Sure,” Frank says to someone, stepping forward and addressing the rake propped against the porch as if it were a microphone on stage at the Paramount. “Here’s a little song people have been liking, ladies and gentlemen.” Just like that, as if he’d planned it, he launches into “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” his voice so jaunty a person might miss the rage. Enough light comes from the kitchen window to see his gaze, on me at first. My nieces and cousins and aunts and friends scream and fall at his feet, like the last ten years haven’t happened in Winston-Salem and Frank is still a star. His smile glints and he starts to sing to his audience, those stupid, shrieking girls. They are my people, and now they’re his.

  When Bronnie presses the flask into my hand, I kiss him, making sure Frank sees. That’s what will start the fight.

  Law and Order

  Last week I went down to the precinct and asked about ride-alongs. The cop at the counter gave me the fish eye. “This isn’t TV.”

  “I’ve got a son. He’s fourteen. I can tell him what I learn.” I dampened my lips. I don’t have a son. “Sir.”

  “Any outstanding warrants?”

  “No. I want to learn. I have respect for the law.”

  “Any of your relatives locked up?”

  I made myself quit fingering the tie I was wearing to show respect. “No sir. Like I say, I want to learn.”

  Two nights later I’m buckled into the front seat, the AC set on high even though it’s fifty degrees outside. “Vest is hot,” says my host, Vance, who doesn’t say another word to me for the first half hour. We crawl down some backstreets and he pulls over to talk to a surly young guy I would kick off of any crew I ran. You work construction, you get to know things about kids who won’t meet your eyes. Vance rolls again, shooting the shit with other cops over the radio. We’re coasting down an access road before he finally asks me what I hope to see that night. “There won’t be no bloodshed if I can help it,” he said.

  “Good.”

  “You so bored that even driving a perimeter road counts as a big night out?”

  “I’ve been thinking about bad choices and figured this was a decent way to see one.”

  “You telling me something I should know?”

  “There’s nothing to know. Believe me.” My voice cracks, and after that the silence between us is a little softer. I’m not a criminal! And don’t want to become one. “I don’t have a son.”

  “I know. I ran a check.”

  “How come you let me come?”

  “Most folks don’t want it so bad. It’s my act of Christian charity for the month.” He doesn’t look at me, I don’t look at him. This is one of the things shame looks like.

  He’s right about the bloodshed, but around one thirty he breaks up a drug deal, some punk selling weed and pills he doesn’t even know what are. The kid who slides into the back seat looks to be about twenty, blank and handsome and dumb as a post.

  “You ever been arrested before?” I ask him.

  Vance looks at me. “You a cop now?”

  “Just trying to see what got him here.”

  There’s a long, weighing moment, and then Vance says, “Answer the man.”

  “Nosir,” says the kid.

  “Did you know this might happen?”

  “Yessir.”

  “But that didn’t stop you, did it? Knowing what might happen isn’t enough.”

  The kid raises his head then and locks his eyes on mine. “Nope. Your criminals, your bad element—they just don’t think.”

  Vance whistles at the windshield, but I’m getting pissed. “You put the rest of your life on hold so you could get high for two hours?”

  The kid smiles like a skull. “What’s the rest of my life? A fuck-all job, kids to keep me locked in place? Sure wouldn’t want to mess that up. Wouldn’t want to trade it for something that might make me happy for a little while.”

  “Pull over,” I say to Vance.

  “What’s your hurry? We’re on our way back in.”

  “Just—please.”

  He makes a big show of driving as if the car is made of glass, but he eventually pulls up next to the curb. I get out of the car and try to open the back door. “Can you open this?”

  “Fuck are you doing?” says Vance.

  “Please. I won’t make trouble.” I can see Vance reevaluating his Christian charity, so I let a little waver crack my voice when I say, “Please.” Eventually he flips the switch and I climb in next to the kid, shutting the door behind me.

  The kid slides as far away from me as he can get on the hard plastic seat. Doesn’t matter to me—I know which of us belongs back there. Tomorrow I will go to work again, and the day after that. My manager, who shakes my hand like I have leprosy and who axed the only project I cared about, a halfway decent housing unit where a crack house and an extinct gas station currently stand, drives an Acura that I already keyed twice. It hasn’t stopped me from day-dreams involving car fires and kerosene. The psychologists say that if you’ve thought out a game plan for a crime, you’ll commit the crime. Now I rear back and slam my forehead against the window. I do it again. I saw a guy do this on COPS once, but he was drunk.

  “Grab him,” says Vance to the kid next to me.

  “Do it yourself, dude. He’s not mine.”

  I’m dizzy, feeling great. The part of the window I’ve been hitting is getting warm, so I move to a cool spot.

  “Christ, man, stop it. What are you doing?”

  I glance around the seat in a small ecstasy of pain, looking for something sharp, but there isn’t anything. I get in one more good hit before the kid grabs me.

  “Shit. Stop it.”

  “I told you—no bloodshed,” Vance says, driving fast now. “Don’t fuck that up.”

  “No promises,” I say, laughter bubbling up my throat.

  “This here’s a promise, all right. You hit that window one more time, you’ll be looking at the inside of a cell, and I got no promises about when you’ll be out.”

  My manager’s mouth always hangs just a little ajar. In meetings I imagine sliding a knife in there.

  Yanking away from the kid, I smack my head against the window again, closer to Vance so he’ll remember me. Twice, to make sure.

  Love

  You were dancing at the tailgate party, and I heard people call you Lorraine. I was too shy to come up to you, but I have eyes. You look like another girl I used to know.

  My brother-in-law has gotten sober, and it’s like he’s got religion. He always has the answer, no matter what he thinks my question is. The other day he said that once we turn thirty, our main task is making right everything we did wrong up till then. Sometimes when I think about things, the shame boils up my throat like vomit.

  Lorraine, I’m sorry. It didn’t come out the way I meant.

  I’m a grown man, remembering a girl he hasn’t seen for ten years. Going over every memory, and then making himself stop, in case a memory can be worn out and then he wouldn’t have the clamp at the heart. The worst thing I can imagine is not caring that once you turned your head when you heard my voice. Just that. You were happy to hear me, and turned toward the sound. This is pathetic. I know.

  There is nothing wrong with a paying customer going to Greek Burger. There is nothing wrong with saying, “Hello, Lorraine.” Don’t make me feel worse than I already d
o.

  When a person is lonely, everything he says comes out sounding like a threat. This is not a threat.

  I stayed employed right through the recession. Sometimes I fed my sister and her husband. He told me that I should talk about the things I was proud of, so I told him I was proud to be bringing home a paycheck. I didn’t mean it ugly. My sister said that not everybody had my advantages, and that made me laugh till I choked.

  Driving home, I saw a girl who looked like you. I pulled up next to her and smiled when she glanced my way. She smiled back—a kind girl, like you. Then the light changed and she pulled away and I was left with my heart feeling like it had gone through the shredder.

  No, Lorraine, you do not owe me a single thing other than correct change. I understand. But I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m clumsy, I know. That isn’t a sin.

  She was right to leave. I was gentle around her, as if I was trying to coax a bird to come, but sometimes she’d glimpse a harder side, and I could see her step back. No one can be gentle all the time, and eventually I would have frightened her. If I could have had one more month with her, watching the light fade from her eyes, would I have taken it? This is how stories about domestic battery get started.

  After enough time passes, memories aren’t memories anymore, just habit. So when I think of you after I get up in the morning, it’s not because I miss you—I’m just in the habit of thinking of you as my legs swing out of the bed where I sleep alone. My brother-in-law explained this to me. I picked up his Coke and poured it in his lap. In my truck, I turned the music up as high as I could stand it. That’s my habit.

  I don’t go to Greek Burger anymore, because I thought you didn’t want to see me again. If I’m wrong, I’d just as soon not know that.

  For a while, I avoided your old place. I didn’t even drive past it, so it took me half an hour to get home from work instead of fifteen minutes. I thought that I was being healthy. Maybe I got sick again. Or maybe I figured out that whether I drove past your place or not, you still weren’t there. Now I drive past every day. When your sister sees me, she waves.

  Mindy, the receptionist at the shop, tells me I’m a catch. “No kids, no record, decent hair. Just go to a bar. You’ll be looking good.” My sister says I’m attractive. My brother-in-law says I’m a tragic hero. I don’t know who they all see when they look at me, which I wish they wouldn’t. I look at myself and see a mug shot, even though I’ve never even had a traffic ticket. People can’t be arrested for what they think, but maybe they should.

  After you left here you lived for a while in Philadelphia, and then Connecticut, places so far away that I wonder if you’re trying to get away from me, though I shouldn’t think I’m so important. On search engines your name is still associated with your sister’s, which makes sense. It’s also associated with someone named Amelia. I don’t think she’s a girlfriend, but what do I know? It’s easy to get a little bit of information. Every day I promise myself I will not look, and most days I don’t.

  It’s not when I’m drunk that I look. When I’m drunk I whack off and go to sleep, which is why I like going to sleep drunk, no matter what my brother-in-law Jesus has to say. I look when I’m stone sober, moving from room to room and feeling the pressure of you like a tightening headache. I watched The Avengers over and over, and went to the condo gym eleven times in two weeks. But sometimes I look, just to ease the pressure. If I know where you are, I still feel a little bit close to you. I know something about you, even if it’s only 1415 Stanley Lane.

  Lorraine, I was not following you. It was coincidence. I live in this town, too.

  Knowing one thing makes you want to know another. That’s obvious, isn’t it? Like Newtonian physics, which I spent half an hour reading about on Wikipedia. Energy cannot be destroyed or created, only changed.

  After you’ve drunk all you can, and jogged through three pairs of shoes, after you’ve watched all the movies and talked to your family, after you’ve visited the animal shelter to feel miserable about dogs you’re not home enough to take care of, after you’ve tried other women and shied away from the possibility of men, after you’ve eaten and gone without food and played Minecraft until your eyes dried out, after you’ve envied your brother his kids and your sister her asshole husband, after you’ve gone without sleep for a week and then fallen asleep in the Hardee’s drive-thru, after you’ve rethought every thought you ever had and didn’t need, after you’ve tried religion since you were on your knees anyway, her image might start to waver a little. There are things you don’t remember. Maybe it doesn’t matter that you can’t recall her license plate. Your fingers, white from gripping, start to slip, and you see the hole your life holds, cut to her exact size. A thousand things could fill that hole—coaching basketball. Making beer. This isn’t hard. You feel a light, cooling breeze brush the edge of your superheated heart.

  Please respond.

  Management

  Teenagers twine around each other and complain to me about the lame music. Do they think I can do anything about it? “Manager” isn’t the same thing as “Management” at Dogs ‘N More. I’m the hinge on a greasy door that lets in frantic moms who can’t control their kids, horny teenagers feeling each other up, sullen cashiers who figure they’re too good for a hot dog shack. You come to Dogs ‘N More, you get what’s coming to you.

  Which is what I say to myself every morning, every night. Me with my bachelor’s in business. Me with the used BMW I’m still paying off even since it got sideswiped, because there’s no way out of the contract I signed when I told myself a Beamer would look right in the corporate parking lot. I subscribed to GQ until seeing it in my mailbox made me mad.

  My brother Randy was pissed when I let the subscription go. He had liked the articles about ties and protein diets, and he said I’d left him with nothing but daytime TV. This was not even close to true—for starters, he could try washing a dish once in a while. But he says that the sink is hard to reach from his wheelchair, and anyway, I’m the one who does most of the eating. True that.

  I bought the wheelchair he liked, the one with a narrow wheelbase that he could maneuver. I found the one-floor condo with the accessible pool. We never talked about it. I was the one driving the night he went through the windshield and broke his neck. He was drunk, I was not. He had a nose full of coke, I did not. He grabbed the steering wheel, screaming with laughter, just when an SUV showed up in the opposite lane. It took all my strength to wrestle the wheel away from that SUV, and bury the nose of Randy’s stupid Jeep in the post of a speed-limit sign. Randy was three feet deep inside a bush planted next to the highway. The city eventually billed me for that bush.

  The bill sat with all the others on the kitchen counter. Hospital, convalescent hospital, doctors I’d never heard of. The ambulance alone was close to $1,700. “Who was operating the vehicle?” asked all of the insurance forms. In the end, I declared bankruptcy. When I was interviewed at Dogs ‘N More, the supervisor told me I was lucky to get another shot. He could have been snotty about it, but he actually looked sorry. I appreciated that.

  After work I stop by the grocery store and bring home dinner. I know what Randy likes—pork chops, fried potatoes, ice cream. Beer. I buy it, he drinks it, neither of us says anything.

  On the weekends I’ve started doing a little construction work. I don’t have skills, but I can carry buckets and mix cement, and we need the money. When the alarm goes off at five thirty on Saturday morning, sometimes I just stare at it. Randy’s a light sleeper, and he hears the alarm from his room. He doesn’t see why I need it to ring four times before I get up.

  I’m bad at the work. Once I dropped a nail gun from a rafter, and no one has forgotten that. I’m soft on the shoulders and around the waist, and I get sunburned. At the end of one day when I had stepped in wet concrete, the guy working next to me asked what I was doing there, anyway. “My brother’s a paraplegic,” I said. It was the first time I used Randy as an excuse, and it seemed fair. He uses
me often enough.

  One morning I got to the site early. It was July, and the sun was already high, the sky blue and shiny as enamel. I stared at the clean lines of the rafters against that sky for fifteen minutes, until a crew member drove up and we started unloading the truck. “Nice morning,” he said. “Sometimes it’s not bad, getting out of the house.”

  “Sometimes it’s the only part of the day that hasn’t gone straight to shit.”

  He let that ride before he said, “I’m going to take a big guess that things aren’t great for you at home.”

  “It’s nonstop party.”

  “Things get better. Hang in there.” Studying his clipboard with the day’s schedule, he was imagining I had a wife at home, slamming around the kitchen, or maybe a kid who didn’t want to read. He wasn’t thinking about changing a twenty-six-year-old man’s catheter.

  It had been another nice day, pre-accident, summer tipping into fall, when Randy and I went to a party at a guy’s house whose parents were gone. I was too old, already out of college, but they were Randy’s friends and there was a girl I wanted to see. When she smiled her mouth quivered a little. She said no when I asked her to dance, but then she said, “Ask me again after the sun goes down.” So I did.

  “No,” she said again, but she pulled me outside, where the sky after sunset looked almost green. The neighborhood was nice—every direction was swimming pools and lawns and clusters of flowers that looked like bouquets coming out of the ground. My heart was beating hard up high in my chest. Randy was somewhere inside, taking care of himself. When I kissed the girl, her mouth quivered under mine, and I kept kissing her.

  Later, before the guys who lived there told me to take my brother home, she and I sat in lawn chairs, looking at the party going on inside. “It’s like watching a TV show,” she said. “They have no idea we’re here.”

  “We could run away,” I said.