Where You Live

by Andrew Roe

  Table of Contents

  Half Title Page

  Also by the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Information

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Contents

  Close

  The Gift

  America's Finest City

  Are You Okay?

  Renters

  Job History

  Solo Act

  Why We Came to Target at 9:58 on a Monday Night

  Not the LA in My Mind

  The Big Empty

  My Status

  Where Shall We Meet?

  Where You Live

  The Boyfriend

  Mexico

  Burn

  The Riot and Rage That Love Brings

  A Matter of Twenty Four Hours

  Stalling

  Rough

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Where

  You

  Live

  stories

  Also by Andrew Roe

  The Miracle Girl

  Where

  You

  Live

  stories

  Andrew Roe

  Engine Books

  Indianapolis

  Engine Books

  PO Box 44167

  Indianapolis, IN 46244

  enginebooks.org

  Copyright © 2017 by Andrew Roe

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are

  either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Also available in eBook formats from Engine Books.

  Some of the stories included here have appeared, sometimes in slightly different form, in the following publications: “Close” in PANK; “The Gift” in The Cincinnati Review; “America’s Finest City” in One Story; “Are You Okay?” in Tin House; “Renters” (published as “Please Don’t Tell Me That”), “A Matter of Twenty-Four Hours,” and “Rough” in Glimmer Train (“Rough” also appeared in the anthology Where Love Is Found: 24 Tales of Connection); “Job History” in The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review; “Solo Act” in Opium; “Why We Came to Target at 9:58 on a Monday Night” in Freight Stories; “The Big Empty” in Sententia; “My Status” in Slice; “Where Shall We Meet?” in Used Furniture Review; “Where You Live” in The Good Men Project; “The Boyfriend” in Storyglossia; “Mexico” in Failbetter; “Burn” in Avery Anthology; “The Riot and Rage That Love Brings” in Kenyon Review Online; and “Stalling” in SmokeLong Quarterly.

  ISBN: 978-1-938126-43-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938070

  to Maria

  Never tell them where it hurts.

  —Richard Buckner

  CONTENTS

  Close 11

  The Gift 15

  America’s Finest City 35

  Are You Okay? 53

  Renters 61

  Job History 75

  Solo Act 79

  Why We Came to Target at 9:58 on a Monday Night 89

  Not the L.A. in My Mind 95

  The Big Empty 113

  My Status 119

  Where Shall We Meet? 135

  Where You Live 139

  The Boyfriend 159

  Mexico 165

  Burn 175

  The Riot and Rage That Love Brings 191

  A Matter of Twenty-Four Hours 199

  Stalling 217

  Rough 221

  Acknowledgments 233

  About the Author 235

  CLOSE

  An older man and a younger man, the latter mentioning a woman with a kid and prescriptions for multiple medications, the former then offering relationship advice, saying, “Don’t get too close,” the latter then nodding and agreeing and saying, “I know, I know. I’ll try. I won’t.”

  THE GIFT

  The premonitions started not long after Shell took one of those home pregnancy tests—plus you are, minus you’re not—and sure enough, it was plus. But instead of the bright and shiny happy couples that inhabit the TV commercials for such products, we were in the mildewed bathroom, confronted with our sagging, shrugging selves in the mirror, yelling at each other and calling for a redo.

  “Don’t we have another test somewhere?” Shell demanded to know. Her eyes were as wide and as open as I’d ever seen them, and once again she held up the little tube thing to the light. One of the bathroom bulbs had burned out and hadn’t been replaced.

  “No, we don’t,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  I didn’t answer right away. Because I wasn’t sure. That’s a good solid rule of thumb, especially for men, but also women, too, I guess: never answer right away if you’re not sure of something. You might get in trouble later.

  “No,” I admitted at some point.

  “Then check, why don’t you.”

  I checked. Nothing in the medicine cabinet but floss and tweezers and rust.

  “Okay then,” said Shell, who had already gnawed away part of one fingernail and was diligently working on a second. “Let’s do this. Let’s go to the store and get another one. Best two out of three. We drive to the store—no, you drive to the store and I stay here and work on another pee sample.”

  She hiked up her skirt, began to squat.

  “Look,” I started, then stopped. I was on the verge of going off on Shell, how she can’t handle the dramatic, make-or-break moments of life, but I ceased. I desisted. Now wasn’t the time.

  “Let’s be calm and try and look at this rationally,” I advised, aiming for the reassuring tone of a sedate, lab-coated scientist; I would have stroked my beard if I’d had one.

  “Take a step back,” I thoughtfully continued. “Deep breath. Get some perspective. I mean really, think about it—how scientific can it be if you can buy the goddamn thing at Thrifty’s?”

  Shell, however, was not swayed.

  “Ninety-seven percent,” she countered. “Ninety-seven percent accuracy rate. Those are pretty good, like, odds.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says Johnson & Johnson, says so right here on the box.” Shell retrieved the soothingly colored package from the trash can and flattened it against my chest, evidence. “What are we going to do, Rick?” she raged.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do,” I said. “I’m thinking. We need to think about this.”

  And on and on. With each passing minute, the tiny bathroom seemed to get tinier and tinier. Stuff was accumulating in there. Eventually it got to the point where the two of us couldn’t breathe or speak. At last Shell stormed out and cracked open a bottle of peppermint schnapps that I hadn’t even known we had, and then proceeded to pour it down the kitchen sink when she remembered that she was ninety-seven percent sure she was pregnant. All in all, then, not exactly a glossy Kodak moment suitable for framing, I admit. Not exactly a scene you’d want to share when your kid asks about the first time you became aware of the miracle that it is/was his/her existence. And so you see: how the lying, the revising of the past, begins.

  At the time we’d been living together off and on (and off) for close to a year (a year!), with the usual ups and downs and periods of unremarkable in-betweens. Hardly a stable situation, though, what with our tempers and suspicions and precarious employment, not to mention Shell’s semi-seeing this other guy, Ramón Something, a
nd me still spending way too much time at El Torito’s happy hour. But finally, late one night after the home pregnancy test standoff and after one of our famous reconciliatory lays and while passing a soggy post-coital pint of Ben and Jerry’s back and forth, Shell and I vetoed an abortion and agreed to try to really make it work this time. Really. We were both pushing thirty and vaguely wondering what would become of ourselves if we stayed single for much longer. Friends were either married or heavily coupled, or in the process of getting heavily coupled. Birth announcements and shower invitations arrived in the mail with an alarming regularity. Life was happening. It seemed like it was time—or that time would soon pass us by if we didn’t take some kind of appropriate action.

  Our lives jumped into warp speed after that. We made promises, consolidated our CDs and books, ordered return address stickers with both our names. No longer did we close the door when doing our respective business in the bathroom. We even got married. For the kid. For the future—our future. That’s the way it was now. A whole new way of thinking would be required. As for the wedding itself, well, it was a quickie affair, there’s no other way to put it. Shell broke one of her heels and had to go down the aisle barefoot. Her mother cried. Shell cried. Most everyone got too drunk, including the sunglasses-wearing D.J., “Funk Master Doug,” which led to grumbling and complaints about everything, most notably the anorexic food portions and the lack of air conditioning. Marlon, my best man, a friend from high school who still lived at home and sold historical Time-Life videos on the phone, gave a speech that sounded like it was in Russian. After ten minutes someone told him to shut up. Then Marlon cried. One of the flower girls found a dead bug in her scalloped potatoes.

  For the honeymoon we drove seven hours to the Grand Canyon, stepped out of the car, looked at it, unimpressed, it’s a giant hole in the ground. On the way out we stopped in a gift shop, figuring we should probably buy a key chain or something to commemorate the occasion, and Shell found this one book called Death on the Rim, which was all about how people fall into it, the canyon, or are pushed, murdered, usually by a husband or a wife. Apparently the Grand Canyon was a good spot to get rid of an unwanted spouse. Happened all the time. Shell rattled off the grim statistics as we climbed into the car, having settled on a shot glass as our one and only purchase. Then it was seven more hours of desert and numbing flatness and we were back in our apartment in San Diego. That was when Shell had the first major premonition, on the drive home, somewhere near Barstow: my sister’s kid Nathan was a fish. More specifically, he was a fish out of water who couldn’t breathe and was struggling for life.

  When we got home there was a message on the answering machine. Shell’s cat Hiccup had pissed all over the sofa again, and as I picked him up to show him the error of his free-form urinating ways, Shell hit the button and we heard my sister frantically rambling like she used to do back when she was more or less permanently coked out and dating this ex-pro football player no one had ever heard of. She ranted about Nathan and how he almost died and he was having this fit and he couldn’t breathe and it was fucking horrible and she was freaking out but had enough sense to call 9-1-1 and the ambulance came and he was okay now, he was in the hospital, he was okay, but he was an epileptic, did we know what that meant? And if we didn’t just for our own information it had to do with the nervous system, and she’d never thought of herself as religious but now she was wondering if she was, and maybe I should get checked out or something because she was pretty sure it was hereditary—epilepsy, that is, not religion.

  “So he was squirming like a fish,” Shell said, pretending that the familiar cloud of cat piss hanging in the air wasn’t really there. “It was a seizure. That’s what it was. That’s what I saw.”

  Hiccup bolted out of my hands and disappeared down the dark hallway, defiant in that universal defiant-cat way. On the kitchen table there was mail, bills, newspapers—obligations I didn’t want to deal with yet. It was our honeymoon, after all.

  “What’s this?”

  The landlady, Mrs. Tokuda, had slipped an envelope under the door. I recognized her handwriting immediately, the kind of pristine schoolgirl penmanship that doesn’t seem humanly possible. We’re too flawed, too damaged of a species for such perfection.

  “What’s it say?” asked Shell.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “I’m predicting bad news.”

  I opened it. The letter said that due to rising maintenance costs our rent would be increased the following month. And P.S.: Congratulations! Have a happy marriage and wonderful life together! Mrs. Tokuda added several more exclamation points for emphasis. She was a sweet, tiny, almost miniature woman who as a child had been put in one of those Japanese internment camps during World War II. Somewhere in Wyoming, I think. Whenever she raised the rent or took a long time to fix the toilet it was always hard to get mad or make a fuss.

  “Right again,” I confirmed.

  “Maybe I should go on TV,” Shell said.

  “Maybe.”

  “I got the tits.”

  “You sure do. We could make money off those tits. They’re professional, you know.”

  Then Shell stared at the empty living room wall, that prominent space where we’d always meant to hang something, uh, prominent. It was one of our greatest failures as a couple, that space, and we’d stopped talking about it. What she was thinking now, I didn’t know. She looked a little lost, like she might have walked into the wrong apartment by mistake. But also maybe almost happy, staring like that. The slightest, smallest hint of a smile. The world in repose, awaiting her next move. I didn’t want to say anything to break the spell or whatever it was.

  “Let’s call Lydia tomorrow,” she said. “It sounds like Nathan’s all right. It’s late. I’m exhausted. I’m not even going to shower. I smell like Taco Bell.”

  The wedding, the marathon drive, the fast food—it had all caught up to us. Like an old married couple, we helped each other into the bedroom, kicked Hiccup off the bed, and laid down, too tired for sex, too tired to talk or even acknowledge this momentous event: our first night at home as husband and wife. We slept in until noon, swearing that we’d stay in bed all day, talking about room service and what we’d order if we could: poached eggs, sourdough toast, bacon, coffee, lots of coffee, mimosas. But by two o’clock or so we were up and about. Let’s face it: Life doesn’t stop like you sometimes wish it would. Not for us, not for anybody. Anyway, Shell jumped in the shower. I searched the fridge and cabinets for food, found nothing remotely edible except creamed corn and frozen taquitos, then admitted defeat as the hunter-gatherer of the household. I called for a pizza. Shell started doing her nails and a crossword, her hair still wet and smelling of that expensive herbal shampoo she uses even though she keeps saying we can’t afford it. I got the money ready for the pizza, plus the coupon. The TV was on, too. We were married. There was paperwork, documentation. And yet nothing much seemed to have changed.

  In the beginning it was mostly simple things: weather, football games, movie endings, celebrity breakups, when the phone was about to ring, who would stop by unexpectedly. Apparently being pregnant led to some sort of superior form of Zen consciousness. That was Shell’s theory. She was on a higher frequency now. Mother frequency. But then, when she began throwing up and getting depressed and all grumped out, she’d have her doubts. This was hell. This was torture and fuck you all. That meant me.

  Still the premonitions continued. She predicted that Hiccup would get sick. Two days later he was practically unconscious. We rushed him to the vet. After four hundred dollars of tests, we learned that he had advanced diabetes (which explained all the pissing) and would require insulin shots for the rest of his life. No more than a week later, Shell was boiling spaghetti, humming some doo-wop song about being true to your guy no matter what, and she said our neighbor Phil was in pain. The next day we saw Phil weeping by the swamp-like swimming pool (which everyone in the building was afraid to use, for pretty obvious reasons)
, saying that the frozen yogurt company he worked for had gone belly-up, Chapter 11. “No one eats frozen yogurt anymore,” he wailed in a street preacher’s urgent rasp. His breath smelled of beer and bad nachos. It was probably ninety degrees, noon, and he sat sprawled out in a neglected chaise lounge fully clothed, sweating like Shaquille O’Neal in the final minutes of the fourth quarter. Redness bloomed around his cheeks and forehead. “Remember frozen yogurt? Remember how it almost tasted as good as ice cream? It was revolutionary, man. But people don’t remember. They just don’t remember a goddamned thing.” We consoled Phil as best we could, convincing him to go inside before he became too sunburned.

  Back in the apartment, Shell said, “I think I’m onto something here.”

  Those first months of the pregnancy we settled into what I guess was our new routine. Every day we checked Shell’s stomach for signs of the baby, searching like archaeologists for any evidence of the mysterious life growing below, and yes, we did all that stupid stuff like talking to the baby and playing classical music to make it a genius. Winter came, which in San Diego isn’t winter at all. It’s just a name change—November, December, January. We endured the holidays, rented obscene amounts of movies and basically stayed in, arguing about names and methods of child rearing. I was more stern, spare the rod and all that, whereas Shell thought spanking was a form of child abuse. She favored time-outs and other enlightened modern practices.

  “Were you ever spanked?” she asked me one morning as I was chipping away at the latest glacier that had formed in our freezer, which was supposed to defrost automatically but did not. Another of the apartment’s many faults that we didn’t complain to Mrs. Tokuda about.

  “Hell yes,” I said, sounding almost proud, which wasn’t what I’d intended. I gave the frozen block another good whack with the ice pick. “Spanked, whipped, hit, slapped, knuckle rapped, you name it.”