by Naomi Niles
“I sure don’t,” I muttered.
Marshall studied me quietly from over his cereal bowl. “Damn, you guys must be having a really bad time.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because that’s at least the second or third snarky comment you’ve made about her since you sat down. If you really hate her that much, you ought to set her free. You’d be doing both her and yourself a favor.”
“Maybe so. I guess I just thought we had been having some growing pains in our relationship, and that they would work themselves out in the end.”
Marshall shook his head. “I’ve seen relationships that are just going through a rough patch, and I’ve seen relationships that are in serious trouble. When you find yourself starting to hate each other, that’s when it’s time to move on.”
“Yeah, but it’s nothing we can’t fix, right? Mom and Dad’s relationship had some rough spots in the early days.”
“Yeah, but me and your mom never hated each other,” said Dad. “We had our disagreements like all couples do, but there was never a moment when I could have imagined myself being married to anyone else. It was either her or nobody.”
“Here’s what I always do when a relationship isn’t working,” said Marshall. “I shut my eyes and imagine myself taking her out on a date. Then I imagine that we’ve just broken up, and if the thought of breaking up with her fills me with peace, then there’s no real reason to stay in the relationship. I text her and tell her it’s over. I’ve never regretted it.”
No one said anything else for a great while, and I went on eating my potatoes in silence. Carlotta and I had had so much fun when we first started, but all the pleasure had been leeched out of our relationship ages ago. Maybe Marshall was right; maybe I would be happier moving on and taking my heart elsewhere.
“I’m not saying you need to decide now,” he went on. “But before very long, you’ll have to decide whether you want to commit or cut her loose.”
“I guess we’ll just have to see.” I drained the last of my orange juice and set the glass down on the table with a loud sigh. “I never was very good at breaking up with girls. I sometimes worry I’ll end up married to a woman I don’t want to be with just because I couldn’t bring myself to call it quits.”
“Sometimes you’ve got to,” said Marshall. “It’s the merciful thing to do in the long run. Forcing yourself to stay in a terrible relationship is torture.”
“It’s not much fun, I admit.” I rose from the table and set my plate in the sink. “Y’all ready to go work on the barn?”
Chapter Six
Penny
Before I went to bed that night, I pulled up one of my dance playlists on Spotify and scrolled until I found ABBA. I turned the volume down low so as not to wake my dad and spent a few minutes belly-dancing to “Dancing Queen.”
At one point, I caught a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror that hung over my door. I was wearing a pair of plaid shorts and a green top that went down as far as my chest, exposing my midriff. I looked like a total dork, but it was hard to care in that moment, not with the music playing and the energy coursing through me. I felt so alive and sexy as my hips swayed from side to side.
After I had finished and crawled into bed, hugging my stuffed frog named Linus close to my chest for comfort, I thought about the conversations I’d had that day with the boys in the shop and the bar. Sometimes I felt so lame dancing alone in front of a mirror. I wished I had a boy there to dance with me, to watch me, to applaud when I had finished and tell me how much he had liked it. I wondered if there were any boys like that, or if my husband was going to be confused and weirded out on the first night of our marriage when I sprang out of our bed and started belly-dancing.
I hoped not. If I married the right guy, I knew he wouldn’t mind. I knew he would admire and appreciate every thrust of my hips, and when I cried and told him I felt like a child, he would take me in his arms and kiss me on the neck and behind the ears and tell me he loved me just how I was, and that would be all he had to say.
***
I woke up the next morning to find Margo, the nurse, knocking at the door of my room. Throwing on a pair of pants, I ran to open it.
“Hey, what’s wrong?”
“I need help with your dad.” Margo was a black woman in her late thirties with radiant chestnut curls. Today, her blue scrubs looked rumpled, and there were dark bags under her usually bright eyes. “He’s not acting like himself this morning. He’s being stubborn, and he called me a lot of dirty names the moment I walked through the door.”
Panic gripped me around my middle. “That doesn’t sound like him at all.”
“It’s not him; it’s the cancer. But I’m trying to lift him into his chair, and he won’t cooperate. He keeps thrashing and yelling, and at one point he nearly hit me in the face. Normally he’s small enough that I can carry him, but I don’t have the strength when he’s acting like this. I need you to calm him down for me.”
I followed her into the bedroom. Dad was sitting up in bed with a look on his face that was most unlike him. There was none of the warmth that had shone in his eyes when I tucked him in bed the previous night. He looked like a toddler who had just been caught with his hands in a jar full of cookies.
Swallowing my disgust, I decided that the best course of action was to treat him like nothing was wrong. “Good morning, Dad. How did you sleep last night?”
“I’d have slept a lot better if that old bird hadn’t come and woken me up.” He made a rude gesture in the direction of Margo. “I only got about five hours of sleep. I don’t want to get up for another few hours, and you’re mistaken if you think you’re going to make me.”
“We need to get you breakfast,” said Margo in a voice of remarkable calm, “and you can’t eat it in bed. Now the sooner you cooperate, the sooner this will be over with.”
“What if I don’t want to cooperate?” He folded his arms and stuck his tongue out.
“Then you’re just making this harder for all of us. Now we’ve got a treat for you this morning—yogurt and grapes and dried whole-grain cereal.”
There was a tray full of food resting on the night stand beside his bed. Margo pulled the lid off the yogurt and held it in front of him as though hoping to entice him out of bed. To my horror, Dad grabbed the yogurt and threw it at Margo. It splattered all over her scrubs, leaving a sickly yellow-white stain.
“DAD, NO!” I shouted, tears filling my eyes.
“It’s alright,” said Margo in the same voice of studied calm. I knew she must have felt humiliated, but she was doing a masterful job of maintaining control of herself. “You’re just letting me know how you feel, aren’t you? If you don’t want yogurt, then we won’t eat it.”
“I want you to go away and leave me alone,” Dad replied. “You old BITCH!”
Margo stepped back as though she had been hit in the face. But Dad beamed proudly, as if thinking he had just taken a righteous stand for freedom by telling her how he really felt.
In the almost twenty-five years I had known my father, he had never acted like this until very recently. Fighting back my own horror and humiliation, I ran forward and knelt down on the floor beside his bed.
“Dad, please,” I said, taking his hand in mine. “You can’t continue to act like this. This woman hasn’t done anything to you; she’s just trying to help you. If you won’t cooperate for her sake, then at least do it for me. I know you can’t take care of yourself like you used to, and I know how humiliating it must be to let others take care of you, but right now, you don’t have a choice. Please just do what the woman says.”
I’m not even sure he understood why I was crying. I just know that by the time I had finished saying what I had to say, he had leaned his head against mine and was fighting back tears.
Before I left, I took Margo aside and apologized. “I’ve never seen him treat anyone like this. He used to be a schoolteacher and one of the most decent men I’ve ever met.
Please don’t judge him by what he’s become.”
“It’s alright,” said Margo coolly. “I know how cancer can mess with the brain, warping the personality.” Even so, I could tell she hated him, and I knew I couldn’t blame her much. I could never have been a nurse for that very reason, because I’d have spent the whole day crying.
It was a relief when Nic came out of her room carrying her purse under one arm.
“You ready to go?” she asked. “I was thinking instead of making breakfast this morning we could stop by Waffle House. I’ve been craving some of their greasy onions and hash browns.”
“I think I might just order a glass of orange juice,” I replied, clutching my stomach miserably. Seeing the way my dad had treated Margo had completely ruined my appetite.
Nic reached over and pulled a strand of hair out of my face? “You okay, hon?”
I nodded. I wondered if she had had heard the yelling coming from the other side of the wall.
But at least the worst part of the day was already over. Things started to improve a bit once we reached work. Nobody came into the store for the first hour, so I turned on the radio and did my morning workout: crunches, lunges, planks, pull-ups. Nic walked through the back room watering the aloe vera plants; once or twice she came into the front room and saw me lunging, then left again with a smirk and a shake of her head.
“I love how committed you are to staying fit,” she told me after I had finished. I was sitting in the tall swivel chair clutching my aching sides and struggling to catch my breath. “You never take a day off.”
“Well, staying fit is important,” I replied. “I want to stay in shape for my future husband. I don’t want to be some wuss who can’t beat him at arm-wrestling.”
“Pen, you can’t even beat me at arm-wrestling,” Nic said with a laugh.
“No, but I’m working on it. One day I’ll break your arm like a toothpick, and I won’t even mean to.”
Customers began slowly trickling in at around lunchtime. A guy in his mid-twenties wearing a red sleeveless t-shirt with grease stains on his arms and forehead came up to the counter and asked for Nic. She was upstairs in the office ordering new air compressors; I waved and signaled for her to come down.
“What I’ve been wondering,” he said, leaning his elbows on the counter and speaking in a serious tone, “is whether you prefer the Aerosmith version of ‘Come Together’ or the Beatles version?”
“Do you need something,” asked Nic, surveying his broad chest and lean but muscular arms, “or are you just going to waste my time?”
“Must a man do only one?”
“And for the record,” she added, “I question the judgment of anyone who prefers Aerosmith over the Beatles. That’s like preferring a spicy chicken sandwich from Chik-fil-a over a savory boneless ribeye.”
“Or preferring a can of tuna over an actual tuna steak,” I said.
“Right. Or preferring boiled hot dogs over smoked wurst and sauerkraut.”
“Eww!” I waved a hand in front of my nose. “Oh, and for the record, the best version of ‘Come Together’ is the Joe Cocker version.”
“I don’t know about that. I think Lennon is hard to beat. Plus, Ringo does some of his finest work on that song. Are you sure you’re not thinking of ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’?”
“Oh, maybe I am. Which one was used on The Wonder Years?”
We went on arguing over the merits of different versions while our hunky customer stood there forgotten. Eventually, he crept away to the front of the store, and was browsing through the windshield wipers when the door opened again, and Darren entered.
My heart gave a flutter as he stood there glancing shyly around. The confident swagger he had shown on the previous day was gone, replaced by a trepidation that was adorable to watch. Slowly, he made his way over to the counter.
“Hey, Darren, I’ve got a question for you,” said Nic. “Who do you prefer: Aerosmith or the Beatles?”
Darren scoffed as if he couldn’t believe what he was being asked. “A better question would be which Beatle do I prefer. John and Paul—hell, Ringo by himself had more talent than everyone in Aerosmith together. What I don’t understand is why they get their own roller coaster at Disney World when they’re like the… twelve-hundredth best band of all time.”
Drawn by our discussion, the ripped guy came walking out from among the heater hoses. “Okay, but you have to admit Steve Tyler demonstrated some phenomenal talent on their early ‘70s LPs. The fact that he then went and blew it all on drugs and shitty Michael Bay soundtracks shouldn’t obscure the raw power of that early work.”
“I don’t care, man,” said Darren with a roll of his eyes. “The Beatles and the Beach Boys are the only two bands from that era I even care to talk about. You can take your weak-ass, tea-sipping Herman’s Hermits and your string-haired neo-confederate Lynyrd Skynyrd or whatever and get out of here.”
The ripped guy winced as though he had just been hit in the jaw. Nic and I exchanged covert glances with mouths agape; I had never witnessed an actual fist fight, but now one seemed imminent.
“Okay,” said Nic, “but if you had to pick just one band to have their own roller coaster at Disney World, which one would you pick?”
“Fleetwood Mac!” shouted Darren, while at the same moment his companion yelled, “Pearl Jam!” They both turned to glare at each other with bemused expressions.
“Anyway,” said Darren, drumming his fingers on the counter, “this wasn’t what I came in here for.” Like most guys in rural Texas he pronounced “wasn’t” with a d instead of an s.
“If you came to get your spark plug, I’m afraid you showed up about two hours too early,” I told him. “I just checked and it’s en route, but it probably won’t be here until this afternoon.”
“Ah, dang,” Darren said with a grimace. “Well, at least I got to see a couple pretty faces.”
“Yeah, and it gives you an excuse to come back later and see us again,” added Nic.
“Any time you have the chance to look at a couple of beautiful women,” I said in a very serious tone, “you must take it. Although Nic is way cuter, and you’re probably better off just looking at her.”
“You’re cute!” Nic exclaimed, although she grinned in a pleased sort of way.
“If I could come back and spend the rest of the afternoon checking you girls out, I would, believe me,” said Darren. “Unfortunately, I gotta be back at the shop getting ready for the big race. I may have to send someone down here to get it for me.”
“I think I heard about this big race,” said Nic. “Is it like an underground street racing sort of thing?” She shimmied her shoulders slightly.
“See, that’s why I thought they were called street cars!” I pointed an emphatic finger in Nic’s direction. “Because they compete in street races!”
“Oh, honey,” Nic said again. “If we get there tomorrow and there’s a trolley gliding down the strip, I’ll buy you dinner.”
“Y’all gonna come?” asked Darren, a keen look of excitement in his eyes.
“Technically I guess all cars are street cars,” I went on, even though by this point no one was listening. “Because they all drive on the street.”
“Yeah, we’d love to come,” said Nic. “I was actually thinking about going just to scare that kid we met last night.”
Darren drummed on the counter a final time and left looking pleased with himself. The moment he was gone, Nic turned to me and said in a burst of excitement, “Did you see that? He was totally flirting with us!”
“With you, maybe,” I replied. “Boys don’t flirt with me, and even if they did, I would never know because I’m not completely sure what flirting looks like.”
“Okay, well, we can deal with that later, but for now, did you see the way he was looking at us? And he admitted to it. He wasn’t even shy about it!”
“Y’all are out of luck,” said the ripped guy, whose name I still didn’t know. Nic and
I both leaped back, startled; we’d gotten so consumed in our conversation, we hadn’t even known he was there.
“Why? Is he married?” she asked.
“Naw, but he’s got a girlfriend, and she’s not the kind of woman who’d be interested in sharing.”
I felt my heart sink into my stomach with a wholly irrational feeling of disappointment. No way could I have been interested in Darren; I had only known him for about a day, Nic seemed to like him, and he had questionable taste in music. So where was this feeling coming from? Why was I suddenly so upset at the fact that we would probably never go out?
“Well, anyway,” said Nic, “we’re definitely going to that race tomorrow. You’re coming, too, Pen; I’m not planning on going alone.”
“I like how you just assume I didn’t already have plans for tomorrow.”
“Do you?”
“No,” I said in a quiet voice. “But what’s the point if he’s already dating someone?”
Nic shrugged and tossed her hair back. “Doesn’t stop us from looking, does it?”
“Just as long as she doesn’t catch us,” I said under my breath and went back to ordering parts.
Chapter Seven
Darren
I woke up the next morning to a knock on my front door. It was Carlotta.
“Hey, I brought you these.” She shoved a box of donuts into my arms. “I was thinking it might be nice if we had breakfast together. I know it’s not much, but it’s all I could afford.”
She walked into the house without waiting to be invited, and I followed her into the living room with a growing sense of frustration. It was hard to shake the feeling that she had only come over because she wanted something.
She sat herself down on the couch with her knees brushing up against the glass coffee table. She looked strangely out of place in her blue silk blouse and pencil skirt from Nordstrom, like a supermodel hanging out at a yard sale.
