by Tim Tharp
“I don’t know,” I say. “There’s more kinds of pain than just physical pain, you know.”
“I guess. He doesn’t have any self-restraint. He eats too much, drinks too much, farts too much. He takes too much OxyContin and goes stumbling around the house mumbling things you can’t understand and trying to hug and kiss you.”
“You mean really trying to kiss you, like with tongue and all?”
She makes a disgusted face. “Yuck, no. It’s more like he thinks I’m still nine and he’s trying to kiss me on the cheek and wrestle around with me like we used to do.”
“Maybe he loves you.”
“Please. He’s just a mess. Can’t hold on to a job. Passes out in the bathroom doorway. On my mom’s birthday he got up and tried to cook breakfast for her and almost burned down the house. That was pretty much the last straw.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Nothing lasts,” she says, and there’s a little crack in her voice. “You think it’s going to. You think, ‘Here’s something I can hold on to,’ but it always slips away.”
Obviously, she’s not as happy about this split-up as she was pretending to be. She may not want to admit it, but I can tell she has a soft spot for the old farter.
“That’s why I’m never getting married,” she says. “What’s the use?”
A fat tear squeezes out of the corner of her eye. I didn’t think she’d drunk enough to get to the crying stage, but maybe it doesn’t take as many when your emotions are a little raw in the first place.
I want to comfort her. I want to say, “Sure things last. You’ll find a great guy—someone who doesn’t fart so much—and you’ll get married and it’ll last forever,” but even I don’t believe that fairy tale.
So I go, “You’re right. Nothing does last. And there’s nothing you can hold on to. Not one thing. But that’s all right. It’s actually good. It’s like old people dying. They have to die so there’s room for babies. You wouldn’t want the world overflowing with old folks, would you? Think about how clogged up traffic would get—all these ancient, shriveled drivers with their enormous dark shades on, cruising around in their twenty-year-old, four-door Buick LeSabres at about three miles an hour, accidentally stepping on the gas instead of the brake and busting through the plate-glass window at the pharmacy.”
She laughs at that, but it’s a laugh with a sad crack in it.
“Really,” I say, “you don’t want things to last forever. Look at my parents. If they were still married, my dad—my real dad—would still be trapped in that little two-bedroom cracker box we lived in. He’d still be sweating away every day nailing houses together. Instead, he’s like beyond successful. See the Chase building over there, the tallest one?”
She nods and takes a drink.
“My dad’s office is near the top. See that one lit window up there right in the middle? That’s him, burning the old midnight oil.”
“Wow,” she says. “Do you ever go up there?”
“Sure I go up there. All the time. You can see all the way to Norman from up there.”
“Maybe we should go right now.”
“No, not now. He’s too busy. I have to make appointments to see him myself.”
“What does he do?”
“High finance. One deal after the other.”
We both sit and stare at that light on the top floor of the highest building in Oklahoma City. The night’s getting colder, and something makes a sound out in the dark. Tara grabs on to my arm. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” I tell her. But for some reason I’m feeling vulnerable now, like maybe something evil could really be creeping up on us, a horde of slobbering zombie panhandlers or maybe even something worse, something I don’t have a name for.
“Maybe we ought to go back,” she says.
“Yeah, it’s probably about time.”
Chapter 8
We’re a bit late getting back to the canal, but Ricky’s not pissed at all. He and Bethany are sitting shoulder to shoulder on a bench overlooking the water, grinning like a couple of grade school kids at a puppet show, and neither of them could care less if we ever came back.
On the drive home, Bethany talks more than I’ve ever heard her talk before. Really animated. She’s going on and on about how Ricky did his own hilarious narration of the boat ride as if it were an attraction at Disneyland and how he made up stories for all the people passing by. It made her laugh so hard she thought she was going to throw up. Of course, making up stories for people is a regular routine for me and Ricky—and some of the stuff he told Bethany he stole from me—but that’s all right. My plan’s working to perfection. The Sutterman has done it again. I’m so proud of myself, at first I don’t bother to pay much attention to the pair of headlights tailing us down Twelfth Street.
By the time we get back to Tara’s car, Ricky and Bethany already feel like a couple. But it’s not like Ricky’s going to grab her and lay a big, wet kiss on her right there in the parking lot. He doesn’t blow it, though. “That was fun,” he says, “let’s do it again sometime.”
“That’d be great,” she says, all sparkly.
“Next Friday would be a splendiferous time to do it,” I add. The boy still needs a little help in sealing the deal.
“Friday would be perfect,” she says. “I guess I’ll talk to you at school.”
“Oh, he’ll call you before then,” I say, and this time he’s pretty quick on the uptake—“Yeah, I’ll call you.”
She gives him a sweet little shy smile and says, “Okay, good,” and ducks into Tara’s Camry.
A car’s idling about fifteen yards behind us, the same one that was behind us coming down Twelfth, but I’m still not paying much attention to it. Instead, I plant a friendly hug around Tara’s shoulder and tell her I hope everything works out all right for her mom. Next thing I know, she’s wrapping both arms around me, squeezing me like a tube of toothpaste and pressing her cheek against my chest. “I’m glad we ran into each other tonight,” she says. “Thanks for the beers and listening to me and my stupid problems and, you know, giving me advice and everything.”
I pat her hair and say, “No problem.”
That’s when the car door slams behind me. I turn around, and wouldn’t you know it but there’s Cassidy. It was her friend Kendra’s car behind us the whole time.
“Hi, Sutter,” says Cassidy, and not in a friendly way.
“Hey,” I say, prying myself out of Tara’s arms. “Cassidy. Did you all have a good time at the movie?”
She stands there with her arms crossed. “Obviously not as good a time as you had.”
“Uh, yeah. We just kind of lent the girls some beers.” There’s no way to explain my plan for hooking up Ricky and Bethany right now, not with Bethany sitting in the car right behind me.
Cassidy has THE LOOK on her face. “Uh-huh, right. I saw you crawling all over each other.”
“No, really. Tara’s mom’s kicking her stepdad out of the house and they were celebrating and…”
Cassidy holds up a hand to stop me. “I don’t want to hear it. All I asked you to do was one simple thing—to just consider my feelings when you’re doing something. Just for once, put someone else’s feelings before your own. That’s all I asked, just that one thing. But you couldn’t even come close.”
Aha. So that’s what she wanted me to do.
“Sure I can,” I say. “I can do that.” Really, I’m not so sure I can, but now that I actually know what it is she wants, I’m ready to give it a serious try.
She’s not buying it, though. “It’s too late, Sutter.” She flings the car door open. “You’re a lost cause.”
“No, I’m not,” I say. “I’m really not.”
But she just climbs back into the car, slams the door, and rolls up the window.
“What’s her problem?” Tara asks from behind me.
“High expectations,” I say. “Misplaced high expectations.”
Chapter 9
But the lack of customers isn’t what I hate about the job. In fact, I dread hearing the bell above the door ring. Yes, we still have one of those bells above the door. Mr. Leon’s gets two types of customers—old guys who want stuff that went out of style ten years ago and the young twenty-one-or twenty-two-year-old sales guys. Funny, it’s the young guys that give me the creepy-crawlies the most.
Once I saw this documentary about some primitive tribe in the South American rain forest, and they were, like, so cool. They didn’t wear anything but these little flaps that barely covered their downstairs business—the women included—and they walked around in the forest, free and wild, weaving baskets, shooting toucans with blowguns, and all sorts of cool stuff. Then civilization starts creeping in and the next thing you know, they’re wearing these limp T-shirts and long-collared polyester shirts and looking like little winos. It was enough to break your heart.
Well, that’s what these young dudes remind me of. You know, just a tick of the clock ago they were teenagers, free and wild, stunt-riding their bikes, slashing down sidewalks on skate-boards, plunging from rocky cliffs into Lake Tenkiller. Now they come into Mr. Leon’s wearing their salesman outfits and their bodies still haven’t filled out enough to look right in them—the pants cuffs bunch up on top of their clunky shoes and their shirt collars hike about three inches away from their necks in the back. They have the hair mousse working, zits congregating around their noses and mouths from the stress of working their first real jobs and paying their own bills.
And you know what? It’s even more heartbreaking than the rain-forest dudes because I know that’s the world that’s waiting for me out there too. I already have to put on the slacks, the stiff shirts, and the ties just to work at Mr. Leon’s. The real world is coming, chugging straight at me like a bulldozer into the rain forest.
I can sell, though. If I wanted to, I could talk nine out of ten of these young dudes into buying one of those pastel-colored leisure suits from the seventies. They’re coming back in style, I’d say. You look like Burt Reynolds. All you need is a mustache.
But that’s not what I want to do. I don’t want to spend my days nagging people to buy things they don’t need. Maybe if I could find something to believe in—some radical new product that would save the ozone layer or something—I’d be a helluva salesman then.
But Mr. Leon’s is what I have for right now. My stepfather, Geech, got the job for me. I wanted to work in a nuthouse, but those jobs are hard to come by, and Geech was so proud of himself for having connections in the business world that he couldn’t hear anything I was saying. “I got into sales when I was fourteen,” he boasts. “And I owned my own plumbing supply business before I was thirty-five.”
Plumbing supplies. Big deal.
Anyway, folding shirts provides me with enough cash to make car payments and hold on to a decent chunk of partying funds in the process. Besides, the job’s not all bad. You just have to look for the positive side, that’s what I always say.
For example, my manager, Bob Lewis, is a great guy. I mean, I love this dude. He has dreams. He’s always talking about how he’s going to strike it rich. Depending on what day it is, he’s all about starting up his own motivational seminars for babies or writing a screenplay about space dinosaurs or inventing a diet involving walnut ice cream and fish sticks.
He has all sorts of theme-restaurant ideas like places that revolve around the foods of different states—Alaskan Al’s, Wisconsin Willie’s, Idaho Ida’s. I guess the Idaho one would serve nothing but potatoes. My favorite restaurant, though, had to be the miniature golf place. There’d be some different dish to sample at each hole and the price would depend on your score. I could see customers getting pretty full by the time they finished eighteen holes.
I never get tired of his stories. I egg him on to tell them. But I know he’ll never do any of those things. You know why? Because he doesn’t really care about getting rich. He just likes to dream. What he really, really cares about is his family—his lumpy little wife and two lumpy little children. That’s where his commitment is. That’s where all of his energy goes.
His wife isn’t attractive in any official way, but she is beautiful. It’s awesome when she shows up at the store—her face beams, his face beams, and I’m sure my face beams just from watching the two of them. Same thing with his kids, Kelsey and Jake. They’re five and seven years old and can’t wait for their dad to hoist them up in the air and toss them around. He calls Kelsey “butterbean” and Jake “spud.” Every time they leave the store, I go, “Bob, why don’t you adopt me?”
Anyway, since Bob’s the world’s greatest husband and family man, I figure he might have some decent advice to put forth on the whole Cassidy fiasco. It’s late in the afternoon, and a customer hasn’t walked through the door in two hours, so we’re sitting around with our pop-machine pop, shooting the breeze. Bob’s wearing his usual starched blue shirt that shows off his sweat stains royally about this time of day. He’s got the look of a guy who probably had a pretty athletic build at one time—back before he started putting away his wife’s chicken-fried steaks.
Of course, I’ve dosed my can of 7UP with just a dash of whisky but Bob doesn’t know anything about that. Used to, he didn’t mind if I doctored my drinks every once in a while, as long as it was late in the day. But I guess some old-man customer smelled it on my breath and complained. Now I go covert with it just to avoid putting Bob in an awkward position.
“I guess there’s not a whole lot I can do about it now,” I tell him about the Cassidy situation. “She’s made up her mind—c’est la vie.”
“Don’t give up so easy,” he says.
“Why not? There’s other girls out there. I’ve kind of got my eye on Whitney Stowe. Light brown hair, blue eyes, long porcelain legs. She’s a little bit of an ice queen, drama-department diva, but that just means no one else ever asks her out—they’re too intimidated. Not me, though. I’ll just move on in that direction and never look back.”
Bob shakes his head. “That’s what you say, but I’ll bet a hundred bucks that’s not how you feel. Just admit it. You want Cassidy back. She’s special. To tell you the truth, I thought she might be the one to yank your shifter out of neutral.”
“What are you talking about? I’m not stuck in neutral. I’m in overdrive.”
“Yeah, right. Did you at least try to talk to her?”
“Sure, I explained the whole thing. I mean, she didn’t answer the phone or anything, but I left a long message that very night—completely detailed—and on top of that I e-mailed her. I got nothing back. Zero. The big platypus egg. I mean, at school she walks right past me like I’m the original invisible man.”
“Did you follow after her?”
“No, I’m not a puppy dog.”
“Did you apologize?”
“Not really. I just explained how I was only doing Ricky a favor—which has worked out splendidly, by the way, since he’s going out with Bethany on Friday. The way I see it I don’t really have anything to apologize for. It’s just a misunderstanding.”
Bob waggles his hand at me. “Doesn’t matter. It never hurts to apologize. I don’t care if she’s the one who did something you didn’t like—go ahead and apologize. It’s the sacrifice of it. That’s what shows you love her.”
“Yeah,” I say, “but then she’s going to have a leash around my neck.”
&nbs
p; “You have to stop thinking that way. Don’t worry about who has the power in the relationship all the time. If you make her happy, then that’s the biggest power you can have.”
“Hmm,” I say. “I never thought of it that way.”
Bob really does make a lot of good points. I don’t know how effective he’d be at motivating babies, but he’d do a tremendous job with an advice-to-the-lovelorn column for teenagers.
“My advice,” he says, “is to go over this evening. Don’t call or text her. Don’t e-mail. Just go over there in person. What’s her favorite kind of flower?”
“I don’t know.”
He gives me the tsk-tsk headshake. “Just bring some roses, then. Tell her you were wrong. But don’t go into all sorts of promises about how you’ll never do it again. Instead, tell her you’ve been thinking about how she must have felt when she saw that other girl hugging you. That way you can start her talking about her feelings. Then you’ve got to listen, hard. Let her know that her feelings are important to you. That’s all she wanted from you in the first place.”
“Damn, Bob,” I say. “That is good. That is really good. You ought to be on Oprah. I’m not kidding.”
“I’ve thought about writing a book about this kind of stuff,” he says. “I might have to get a doctorate in human relations first.”
Chapter 10
Good old Bob. For a guy with hair growing out of his ears, he sure seems to be in touch with how women feel. Too bad I can’t get him to come along and do the Cyrano de Bergerac thing for me.
See, this is my problem with following Cassidy’s rule about putting her feelings first. It’s not that I don’t want to do it, but I don’t have the least grasp on what’s going on inside a girl once she becomes my girlfriend. Just plain girls, now, I can read like a toaster-oven manual, but let me start dating one and it’s like they reach up and slam that manual shut right in front of my nose. No more toast for me.
