Everything I Left Unsaid

by M. O'Keefe

  He made a low, rumbling sound of dissent. Like he had some problem with that, of my making a point of not knowing.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing, baby. It’s late, and hangovers have a way of bringing out all the garbage. Go to sleep. Things will be better in the morning.”

  I had my doubts that anything would be better in the morning.

  The next morning the tractor was fixed and parked just outside the shed. Ben had changed the oil, too. And at the end of the day, Kevin shuffled out to the field to pay me for my third week of work.

  “I didn’t see you yesterday,” he said, giving me the envelope with the small amount of cash tucked inside. The rest paid the rent on my trailer.

  “I wasn’t feeling very well.”

  “Yeah, I heard about your little party. Next time—”

  “Keep it down. We will.” If there was a next time. The one-two punch of Bebe and the kids being gone seemed like a pretty rare event. And frankly, I wasn’t entirely sure I could survive another night like that.

  The hangover had nearly swallowed me whole.

  “No. Invite me. I love a good girls’ night.”

  Once again I had no idea if he was joking or not.

  “You seen Ben around today?” he asked.

  “No, why?”

  “Nothing. Just haven’t seen him. He usually comes up to the office to get a paper. Didn’t get one yesterday, either.”

  “Maybe he’s sick,” I said, thinking about that cough he had. How he hadn’t looked all that good yesterday on the bridge.

  “Yeah. You’re right,” Kevin said, and lumbered off in his Adidas shower sandals toward the ice-cave office.

  Christ, I thought, is that it? Really? Kevin was just going to turn around and not check on Ben? Who might be sick?

  We keep to our own, he’d said when I first met him. And he wasn’t joking.

  I put my cash in my pocket and headed back over to the laundry building to grab my things from the dryer. I’d had to rewash everything because it spent that night I’d been so drunk in the washing machine, getting stinky.

  Tiffany was out in front of her trailer, emptying a bucket of water in the bushes.

  “Hey,” I said with a happy leap in my chest at the sight of her.

  She turned and gave me a wan smile.

  “Still feeling rough?” I asked.

  “So rough. Oh my God, Bucket-o-Colada was a bad idea. But your hair looks fucking awesome.”

  “It’s really dry,” I said, feeling the brittle edges.

  “Yeah. You gotta condition the shit out of it.”

  “I’ll have to get some next time I go to town.”

  “Wait.” Tiffany went back inside her trailer and came out with a few foil sample packs. “Take these—”

  “I can’t,” I said, thinking about Phil and her kids and how she’d said they were late on all their payments.

  “Take them,” she said. “Please. It’s…it’s nice to give someone something for a change, you know?”

  I nodded and took the packets, shoving them in my pocket with the money.

  I was so rich all of a sudden.

  “Your kids must be coming home soon.”

  Her pale face lightened at the mention of her kids. “Yeah. Mom’s gonna drop them off in an hour.”

  “How was the bad television marathon?” I asked.

  She smiled. “I slept through it. And Bebe had to leave at two, so it was kind of anticlimactic.”

  “Your sister was pretty awesome.”

  “She is. She’s going to college at night and works full time, so she doesn’t get a whole lot of time to take off like that. Bebe is the best. I wouldn’t—” She stopped and shook her head, and I remembered her finger against my neck, that grief in her eyes. And I knew that place so well. Not that I ever had friends, or encouragement or help, but I remembered feeling like an open wound to the world.

  “Would she help you get away from Phil?” I asked, taking a leap off the bridge right into her problems.

  Her eyes narrowed at me. “It’s none of your goddamn business, but I don’t need to get away from Phil. I need him to hold down a job.”

  I blinked at her tone, surprised. That night at the sink, she’d looked so broken. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Put your nose in? God, what is it with you and Joan? We’re married, we’re working shit out, and I don’t need you guys.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Whatever,” she said, and went back inside with her mop and bucket.

  After a moment I turned away and got my clothes, ratty and holey. But clean.

  I put my things away and caught sight through my bedroom window of Ben’s trailer. Dark. Quiet. I went into the kitchen and looked out the window at his garden. Dark. Quiet.

  Shit.

  What if he was really sick in there? Or worse? What if he was dying—right now—and Kevin couldn’t be bothered to check up on him?

  And I was too chicken.

  Gah.

  I slammed my way out of my trailer and stomped past Joan’s. Inside I could hear the bass line of some heavy rock song. The closer I got to Ben’s, though, the quieter it seemed. The darker.

  As I knocked on the door, I could feel my heartbeat in the palms of my hands.

  I really didn’t want to have to break in there and find him sick in bed or dead on the floor or anything, really, in between.

  “Ben?” I said when initially there wasn’t an answer.

  I knocked again and from inside the trailer I heard a thump.

  “What!” he said, wrenching open the screen door. He looked awful. Up to this moment, I’d only ever seen him in neatly pressed tee shirts, his hair tidy, his pants clean. But now, he wore dirty sweatpant cutoffs and a white tee shirt stained with dark red and black spots down the front.

  “Ben!” I cried. “Are you all right?”

  “Peachy. Fucking peachy. What do you—” He coughed hard into his hand, where he held a red bandana. He coughed for like a minute and then when he was done, he spit into the bandana, wadded it up in a ball, and tossed it into the sink. “What do you want, Annie?” he sighed, sounding utterly worn.

  “I just…I wanted to check on you. Kevin said he hadn’t seen you today.”

  “I’m under the weather.”

  “I can see that…Do you need anything?”

  Ben’s eyes were dark. Very dark, nearly black it seemed, and utterly unreadable. Whether he was grieving or angry or sad or scared, I couldn’t tell. They were blacked-out windows, through which I could see nothing.

  “I’m fine,” he sighed. “Thank you for asking. It’s just…just a cold—” Then, right in front of my eyes, he blanched and his eyes rolled back. I jerked open the door and grabbed his shoulder with one hand and his arm with the other, and held him up as best I could.

  “Ben!” Was he fainting?

  “Christ, girl, I’m right here,” he whispered, pulling away from me.

  “Come on.” I wouldn’t let him pull away. I put my arm around his shoulders and half-led, half-shoved him toward his settee. Once he was sitting, I started opening up cupboards, looking for water glasses.

  “Where are your cups?”

  “In the sink,” he said. “I’ve got one in the sink.”

  I filled the cup with water and set it down in front of him. With both hands shaking, he picked it up and managed to dribble half of it down his chest. “Fuck,” he breathed, setting it down. “I feel like shit.”

  “It’s just a cold?”

  “Flu maybe? Who the hell knows?”

  “You got anything to eat?”

  He pointed over to the stove, where he’d been pouring chicken noodle soup from a Tupperware container into a saucepan.

  “You want this?”

  “Yeah.” I put the rest of it in the pan and then turned on a burner.

  “You made homemade chicken noodle soup?”

  “No. I got a lady-fr
iend that made it.”

  From outside, a woman shouted, “Hey, you old fart, I got you some meds!”

  You could have knocked me over with a pin when Joan walked into the trailer like she owned it.

  I turned and lifted an eyebrow at Ben. Was Joan his lady-friend?

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he muttered.

  “Well, well, you guys are cozy. Is his hacking all night keeping you up too?” Joan asked, stepping over to the table. She tipped a plastic bag out, dumping all kinds of cold medicine onto the table. Daytime formulas, nighttime formulas, sinus stuff, pain reliever. There was about a hundred dollars’ worth of over-the-counter medicine on that table.

  “Something here should fix you,” Joan said, and then she turned to me and crossed her arms over her chest. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Making sure he’s not dead.” I stirred the soup when it started to bubble on the stove.

  “Yeah, we can’t have Ben die, can we?”

  “I’m alive,” he muttered. “Now both of you go away.”

  “Later!” Joan said, lifting her hands up. “And you’re welcome. For the medicine.”

  “Fuck your medicine.”

  “Lovely,” Joan said. “You coming?” she asked me.

  “Yeah, just…” I tested the temperature of the soup and then poured it into a bowl, turned off the stove, and put the bowl down in front of Ben. “Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked him. He really looked sick, and what was the deal with the weird dried blood on his shirt?

  Not my business was what it was.

  “Fine,” he said with a wan smile. “And thank you.”

  “Right,” Joan muttered, “her he thanks. Let’s go, Florence Nightingale,” she said, nearly dragging me away.

  Once we were outside and on the other side of her trailer, she turned.

  “What the hell did I say to you?” she asked. “Stay away from the old man, Annie!”

  “What were you doing bringing him a hundred dollars in cold medicine?” I asked.

  “A hundred and fifty—that sinus stuff is expensive. He wakes up at six in the morning hacking away like he’s going to cough up a lung. I get home at three, I can’t fucking take it.”

  “Right. Kevin asked me to look in on him,” I lied.

  Joan heaved a big sigh. “Fine…just, honestly, Annie. Don’t get friendly.”

  I wondered if Joan knew about the fire. The girl asleep upstairs. Probably, I decided. Joan seemed to know plenty.

  “I gotta get to work,” Joan said, checking her watch. “I’ll see you later.”

  Oh God, she would. She would see me later at The Velvet Touch. Or rather, maybe I would see her.

  A lot of her.

  —

  What does one wear to a strip club?

  It wasn’t like I had a whole lot of choices. In the end I picked my nicest shorts—which meant they didn’t have any holes. They were black and shorter than my other ones, which I thought made them sort of sexy. And I wore my maroon tank-top camisole, which I usually slept in.

  I used two of the conditioner packets on my hair and it was actually soft and lying at least a little bit flat against my head, instead of sticking up like a haystack.

  With my tan and a little lip gloss and mascara…it wasn’t half bad, I thought.

  I spent the evening re-reading my favorite parts of Fifty Shades of Grey and I didn’t touch myself once, so I would be too worked up to chicken out. And truthfully, it would have been nice to have a bucket-o-something to get my courage up.

  But at eleven o’clock I put down the book, grabbed my keys, and crossed the point of no return.

  The Velvet Touch was three exits back on the highway. It was a dark, cement-bunker-type building sitting in a vast sea of parking, with a billboard so big and so pink it could probably be seen in space.

  The parking lot was half full of pickup trucks and big rigs, and there were a half dozen motorcycles lined up near the entrance. The chrome reflected the lights and the black silhouettes of naked women on the billboard.

  My courage was flagging, so I pulled out my phone and called Dylan.

  “Hey, baby,” he said. “You okay?”

  “I’m sitting in the parking lot of the strip club.”

  The sound he made low in his throat was sexy. “Having second thoughts?”

  “No. I mean…I’m nervous.”

  “Nervous is okay. Nervous is exciting. This is naughty, baby. And you like naughty.”

  “Yeah, but…what do I do?”

  “You’re going to walk in those doors, order a drink, find a dark corner, and you and me, we’re going to talk about what you’re seeing. How it makes you feel.”

  “What if it doesn’t make me feel anything?”

  “Slip your fingers down your pants, baby.”

  “Dylan…”

  “Do it.”

  Rolling my eyes despite the fact he couldn’t see, I sucked in my belly and shoved my fingers down my pants past the thin elastic of my underwear.

  I gasped when my fingers brushed my clit and then again when I felt how wet I was. In my nerves I hadn’t noticed.

  “What did you find?” he asked, like he knew. But of course he knew. Somehow he knew everything about this.

  “I’m wet,” I whispered.

  “Tell me.”

  “I’m so slippery,” I moaned low in my throat, giving in to the feeling.

  “Don’t come,” he said, his voice sharp, like he knew what I was doing.

  “I’m so close,” I protested.

  “Go inside. Call me when you get there.”

  He hung up, and reluctantly I pulled my hand out of my pants.

  I didn’t give myself a second to doubt what I was doing. It was just like getting out of my car in front of the grocery store.

  Here goes nothing, I thought and started to pull open the big outer door, but just as I pulled, someone pushed and I nearly fell back on my ass.

  “Whoa there,” a man said, reaching out to grab me before I fell. He was big, with a round belly and a long beard.

  “Knocking women over again?” asked another guy coming out behind him. They both wore black leather vests over their shirts. A third man came out, younger than the other two, and taller. Bigger seeming, though he was actually kind of thin. He had dark hair and his eyes, when they ran over me, made me wish I had on a bunch more clothes. Like a snowsuit.

  Bad news. That’s what my gut said. That man was the worst kind of news.

  “Let’s go,” he said, dismissing me the moment after he saw me.

  “You all right?” the bearded guy asked and I nodded, and the men got on three of the bikes and roared away.

  Shit, I thought. This was ridiculous. I would tell Dylan that he had to come up with something else. Something less…extreme. I could go skinny-dipping again. Or watch some porn—I’m not sure where, the library? Could I do that at the library?

  Anything would be easier than this.

  But you want this, I thought. And you like that it’s hard.

  “You coming in?” a giant black man standing on the other side of the open door asked me. “It’s Ladies’ Night.”

  “Ladies’ Night?” I stammered.

  “You get in free and drinks are half off.”

  “Are there…other women in there?”

  The man’s face broke into a smile. “Yeah. You ain’t alone, you little perv.”

  He said it with such easygoing affection that I laughed.

  Oh Lord, I thought, stepping into the club. If my mother could see me now.

  —

  The music was loud.

  So loud that it actually kind of emptied my head of some of the noise I was producing. Some of the fear. The rug under my feet was threadbare and shabby and the lights were low. Some of them fluorescent.

  Nice big chairs were gathered around small round tables and most of them were full. The stage was lined with men watching the act and girls walked in and around the t
ables, flirting and smiling, selling drinks. Selling sex.

  I don’t know what I expected. Something shabby, and yes, it was shabby. Lewd, too.

  I totally expected something degrading. I expected women with soul-dead eyes to be pawed at by men with cigars clamped between their teeth and a kind of awful shaming lust in their eyes.

  And maybe the women dancing and walking around in G-strings and sitting on men’s laps and leading them into dark and shadowy corners, maybe they felt degraded, but they were hiding it really well. Lying about it.

  And the whole place was in on the lie.

  I was in on the lie. I needed to believe these women were all right. So…I just did.

  One thing was for sure: they had amazing bodies. Like truly…lush and feminine, but strong, too. The woman onstage did some kind of crazy maneuver where she grabbed the pole and somehow turned herself upside down and then, from the top of the pole, using only her legs, slid down in slow circles.

  Her breasts—they had to be fake—didn’t even twitch.

  And I wondered what I would do if I had a body like that. If I could do that. Would I choose to shovel disgusting torn-up dirty diapers out of a bed of garbage and weeds, gagging the whole time, making far less than minimum wage? Or would I do something like this?

  A man in the front row, a young man in a backwards cap sitting with some of his friends, held out a twenty-dollar bill, and the girl crawled over on her hands and knees and took it from him with her teeth.

  Her eyes and her smile were inviting and flirty. Sexy.

  Layla would have done something like this. For sure.

  The thought of Layla, the persona of her, slipped over me, and the screaming of my raw nerves and terrible misgivings became muted. There, but in the background. Something I would worry about tomorrow, maybe.

  I stepped to the left of the entryway and took it all in.

  The women were putting on a show. And again, I bought it. I don’t know what that said about me. But I bought it and the carnality of it all, the sheer sexual suggestiveness of it, seeped into my skin and turned me on.

  Like holy hell it turned me on.

  “You want a drink?” A woman came up to my elbow, wearing a sheer black tank top that had been torn in half, the ragged hem of it just barely covering the bottoms of her nipples. She wore neon-yellow underwear and thigh-high fishnets that had been ripped in places. She looked like the sexy survivor of an apocalypse. “Hon’?”