Save Yourself (16 page)

His hands, scrubbing at fried-on egg, stopped. His lips moved slightly as he read. Then he scowled. “Assholes.”

“What,” Patrick said, and Caro held the note out to him wordlessly. There were heavy circles under his eyes. He’d been out late the night before. She could guess who with. He scanned the note quickly and shrugged. “Let ’em tow it. I don’t want the damn thing anymore.”

“We could put it in the garage,” Caro said.

Mike’s brow furrowed. “The garage is kind of full.”

So it was; Caro had helped him fill it, the day she’d moved in, with boxes of the old man’s belongings that the two of them packed, haphazardly, and stacked just inside the door. They hadn’t taken much time or care over it. John Cusimano’s room had smelled bad and Caro had been desperate to have at it with some good strong carpet deodorizer. When she was done the Summer Berry smell was strong enough to make your eyes water but she preferred that to vomit and old beer.

She’d said, why don’t we just clean out
your
room, but Mike had been weirdly determined that they move into the big one. His room was just as he’d left it, with a blanket tacked over the window and the closet door falling off its hinges. They put stuff they didn’t want in there now.

“Well, let me know what you two decide,” she said. “If I can help or anything.” Then she went upstairs to get ready for work. She’d never liked involving herself in any situation having to do with their father, not even before the Great Apocalyptic Mistake had napalmed her friendship with Patrick. You couldn’t talk about the way things should be in somebody else’s family. Families were like oceans. You never knew what was under the surface, in the parts you hadn’t seen.

Caro’s car had a bad battery. She kept meaning to get a new one but there were always other places to put that hundred bucks. That morning, when she turned the key—nothing. As Mike drove her to work, he said, “Maybe we should only have one car, anyway. Save money.”

“Great idea. Except when you work swing and I get off in the middle of your shift.”

“Darcy could drive you. Or Patrick.”

Right, because what Caro wanted more than anything else in the world was to be alone in a car with Patrick, to watch him pull up at a stoplight and turn toward her the way Mike was doing right now.
They had good eyelashes, both of them, but Mike’s eyes were brown and Patrick’s a warm hazel. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Patrick’s not driving much these days.”

“His car’s broke.”

“So he claims.” Her voice held an edge she didn’t expect—that happened too often, these days—and she looked quickly out the window, down at the car waiting in the next lane. Mike’s truck was jacked up high and she couldn’t see anything of the driver except one arm, a floral rayon lap, and a manicured finger tapping the steering wheel.

“You think he’s lying?”

She turned back. “He hasn’t asked to borrow my car. Has he asked to borrow yours?”

Of course he hadn’t. Mike took off the Steelers cap he wore and ran his hands through his hair, which was thick and copper-colored. (Patrick’s was the color of coffee, black coffee.) It stood straight up as a result and he jammed the hat back down. “He’s so fucking weird these days. Ever since he quit the warehouse, it’s been Earth to planet Patrick.” The light turned green and Mike sighed. “So what do you think, want to give up your car payment?”

“My car’s paid off. If we’re going to give up a car, it ought to be this big gas-guzzling penis monster of yours.”

“I love it when you talk dirty.” They pulled up in front of the restaurant. Leaning over, he kissed her, and she heard him inhale deeply. “I love the way you smell, too.”

“Enjoy it now. The next time you see me I’m going to smell like high tide in a butter factory.”

He smiled. “Tease,” he said, and then kissed her again, and she got out.

Inside, Darcy said, “For crying out loud. The guy drives you to work and kisses you good-bye and even waits to make sure you get in okay. Tell me he’s got a brother.”

Caro grabbed her apron from behind the bar. “He’s got a brother.”

Darcy’s face burned with sudden interest. “Seriously? Is he single? Is he cute?”

There was a bin of silverware and another of napkins on a table by the window. Caro sat down and began to roll: knife, fork, roll, flip, tuck. “Yeah, he’s single.”

“But not cute.”

This flip and tuck, she’d learned it at a burger bar in Columbus. First restaurant she’d ever worked with cloth napkins. She’d dated the bartender, which was how she’d found the job, but after a while he’d dumped her for one of the hostesses. Caro had left Columbus not long afterward. It was not unlike what had happened in Athens, or Zanesville, or Wheeling, West Virginia. So many towns, so many boys. And now Ratchetsburg, Pennsylvania, which she’d never even heard of before getting off the turnpike here. “I guess he’s cute. But he’s a mess.”

Darcy laughed. “Who isn’t? Bring him in sometime. I’ll buy him a drink.”

“Maybe.” Caro liked Darcy, who was a little worn-down but smart enough, all things considered. On average, Caro would rather Patrick sleep with her than some angst-ridden piece of jailbait. The pile of setups grew steadily on the table in front of her, her hands moving as if they belonged to someone else. Knife, fork, roll, flip, tuck.

That night was only medium bad. Some old guy, a big spender wearing too much cologne and a big onyx ring on one finger, put an arm around her hips as he placed his order and patted her ass when he was done, like she was a horse he was sending out to pasture. Caro clenched her teeth and put up with it. The bitch at table seven, whose shoes probably cost more than Caro made in a week, wanted “halibut, and I know halibut when I taste it so don’t try pawning off some lousy piece of turbot on me. Lightly seared with real butter and sea salt, not table. Just a few grains.” Where did the woman think she was, the Upper East Side? But Caro took the order anyway, and told Gary in
back that they had yet another order for Ridiculously Specific Special Request Fish.

He made a jerk-off motion. “We ought to put that on the menu. Sells like hotcakes.”

“If you put it on the menu, nobody will want it,” Caro said, and the truth was that the cow at table seven didn’t want it, either. A perfectly good, perfectly expensive piece of halibut, picked at for an hour and then scraped into the garbage. Sorry, fishie. You died in vain.

Halfway through the night she met Darcy at the register. “So how old is Mike’s brother?” Darcy asked.

“Twenty-six.”

“Young and uncorrupted. Just how I like ’em.”

Caro tried to remember the drink order for table four. Was it two diet Cokes and one rum and Coke, or two rum and Cokes and one diet? “He has a shitty job, a car that doesn’t run, and a different Led Zeppelin shirt for every day of the week.”

“He’s into Zeppelin?” Darcy’s eyes widened as if at a divine revelation. “I love Zeppelin!”

Wow, you guys should, like, totally get married
, Caro almost said, but didn’t. Diet-diet-rum, rum-rum-diet?

“What’s his name?”

Two diets and a rum. Because rum and Coke was the sort of thing you drank at a field party, not a medium-nice fish place. “Patrick,” she said. “I’ve got an order up.”

In the front, by the bar, there were two aquariums: the decorative one, where fish like gaily colored party favors swam in clear, cool-looking water, and the lobster tank. In the latter, brown lobsters piled on top of one another like old, discarded shoes. Caro didn’t know anything about lobsters. Would they pile up like that in nature? Was it a stress response? Had the lobsters just given up? Because that was how they seemed to her. Like they’d lost all hope, like they knew that this murky holding cell was the last stop; barely even able to muster the energy to wave their claws, moving like dying soldiers pulling
themselves across the battlefield. In theory, restaurant patrons could choose the lobsters that they wanted to eat for dinner. Caro would rather eat dog shit from the backyard of 149 Div than one of those sad, lifeless things. But people ordered the choose-your-own-lobster; they watched as she fished the poor thing out with a rake and grabbed it by its clammy exoskeleton, they cringed and laughed as she carried it into the kitchen for Gary to kill, they stuffed themselves on bread and clams casino while in the back of the restaurant, their dinner was dying. The people to whom this method of dining appealed were inevitably the same sort of people who felt the need to make macabre jokes about it. Naming their lobsters. Saying, “It won’t hurt much.” Like they knew.

Tonight that group was a bachelorette party, who giggled and squealed as Caro chased the bachelorette’s chosen victim around the tank, then squealed some more as she carried it past them, holding it high and away from her body, its legs wiggling and twitching in futile struggle. The silly twit who’d ordered it didn’t even know how to eat it. They were campers, taking up the table for almost three hours; no big deal, since it was only a Tuesday, but who scheduled their bachelorette party for a Tuesday, anyway? When they finally left, most of the lobster remained in its carapace. The bachelorette, proclaiming herself both bored and icked out by the lobster-eating process, had ordered two desserts instead. Caro was almost used to scraping nearly full plates of food into the garbage—like table seven, the halibut nibbler—but it was worse when you’d seen the thing die, when it had been alive and then killed and then thrown away.

Staring down at the semibroken lobster in the garbage, Caro was hit by a wave of sadness that stabbed the core of her, a place where she would have thought she couldn’t be hurt. For a moment, she was overwhelmed. For a moment, she almost cried. But then she didn’t. The choose-your-own-lobster dinner was expensive. The drunk bachelorettes had been good tippers. You did what you had to do to survive. That was all.

·   ·   ·

Mike picked her up just after eleven. When they walked through the door, Patrick had already left for work and the television was off. The unnatural quiet reminded her of the first morning she’d woken up there, standing in the kitchen making breakfast before anyone else was awake, her feet bare, mist lingering in the overgrown backyard; the smell of French toast and bacon, a cup of coffee warming her hand. She had just met Mike the night before and hadn’t met Patrick yet at all, although she’d noticed his coat thrown over the back of a kitchen chair and wondered about him, this brother. At the time, the house had felt peaceful, like a sanctuary—not to mention a hell of a lot more comfortable than the backseat of her car, which was where she’d woken up for the fourteen previous mornings, ever since arriving in Ratchetsburg—but now she knew that feeling had been a fluke. The house was almost never that quiet. Almost never
this
quiet.

And even as she thought that, Mike was in the kitchen, wasn’t he, filling up the red cooler that lived next to the armchair in the living room with beer. She could hear the clatter of ice, the muted clink of beer cans. Caro hated that cooler. The uncleanable (she’d tried) pebbled surface of the thing, the old man’s name written in huge Magic Marker letters on the side; the way that Mike sometimes came home with a bag of ice and a case of beer and she would instantly know that once again they were going nowhere, once again they were staying exactly where they were. Mike wrote letters to his father—one, anyway, after she’d moved in,
Her name is Carolyn but she is called Caro not Carrie, you’d like her since she is real nice and makes good chili
—but Patrick didn’t, and Caro thought she understood why. The too-smooth repaired spots on the drywall, the smell of that bedroom before she’d cleaned it, the fact that Mike and Patrick had never moved out or found their own lives but instead lay piled on each other like dying lobsters. She didn’t have to meet John Cusimano to know she didn’t like him, and they’d never be free of him as long as that
cooler sat next to the armchair, leaching a steady, constant trickle of despair.

She’d asked Mike once, early on, if they could get rid of it, trying as gently as she could to explain that his father’s habits had not necessarily been good ones, but Mike had just looked blank. “Get rid of the cooler?” he’d said. “We’d have to go all the way to the kitchen every time we wanted a beer.”

And Caro, whose mother was a paranoid-type schizophrenic and who had grown up as steeped in that woman’s fear and despair as Mike had his father’s, who still flinched every time a hinge squeaked and had to resist pulling her sleeve down over her hand every time she used a can opener or turned a doorknob (“Why do you do that?” Patrick had asked one night, back in the days before the Great Apocalyptic Mistake, when they were still friends; “Do what,” she’d said, and, sharp enough, he’d said, “Nothing”), did not bother trying to tell Mike that there were worse things than walking ten feet for a beer. Like stewing in an ancient soup of somebody else’s poison, for instance. Mike was strong and good-looking and he made her feel safe, but that wasn’t the kind of thing he thought about. Patrick might have understood, but Caro thought Patrick had grown acclimated to misery, and even as he knew the cooler was poison he wouldn’t have been able to get rid of it.

She took a shower, scrubbed the day off her body. When she came out of the bathroom, the television was back on; she could hear cheering and rock music, which meant sports highlights. She put on a T-shirt and sweats and went downstairs.

“Hey, gorgeous. Just waiting for the score on the Pirates game,” Mike said. He didn’t even watch baseball, he just didn’t want Pittsburgh to lose. Next to him, ice and silver beer cans sparkled in the open cooler. “You want a beer?”

She shook her head. “Darcy wants me to fix her up with Patrick.”

“What about the girl with the car?” Mike’s eyes were fixed on the screen, watching the crawl at the bottom.

“She’s in high school. She’s a kid. He shouldn’t be dating a kid.”

“Dating?” Mike laughed. “What, you think he’s taking her to the movies? The Eat’n Park buffet?”

“I don’t care what they’re doing. A twenty-six-year-old guy has no business with a seventeen-year-old girl.” She heard the heat in her own voice and made herself speak more calmly. “At least Darcy is an adult.”