Save Yourself (17 page)

He put an arm around her and pulled her down into his lap. “Don’t worry about Patrick. If that girl gets him thrown in jail, he’ll have nobody to blame but himself. Who knows? Maybe she’ll even be good for him. Like you were for me.” His nose rubbed against her jaw, the oil on his face making his skin slick against hers. The tickle of his stubble was friendly. “You saved me, you know.”

“The only thing I saved you from was your laundry,” Caro said, mollified.

It was a nice thing for him to say, the sort of thing that always got to her. Caro needed to be important. It was boring and typical and transparent as hell, even to her, but she couldn’t turn it off any more than she could quit having arms. That night, she and Mike ended up doing it right there in the living room. She wished he’d shaved first. That friendly stubble felt like sharkskin against her face before too long, and she couldn’t help worrying that Patrick might somehow come through the door at any minute, even though she knew he worked until dawn. As Mike’s breathing reached a ragged pitch in her ear, she closed her eyes. For a second—just a second—she let herself remember a room with silver light, that night, the Great Apocalyptic Mistake. Patrick’s hair was softer and there was less of it on his body. His mouth tasted different. His hands—

Caro pushed the thoughts away. The first time you had sex with somebody was always the best, anyway.

The next morning, Mike jumped Caro’s car and drove it to work so Patrick could use his truck to cart away trash from the garage. Caro
caught a ride with Darcy for the lunch shift, which turned out to be a wasteland. Nobody came in except a woman filling out a job application. Caro was wiping the dust off the liquor bottles when Mike came back at two, his dirty jeans and old T-shirt out of place among the restaurant’s white tablecloths and fresh flowers. The warehouse hadn’t been any busier than the restaurant and he’d been sent home. Gary happened to be up front right then checking the reservation book, and he told Caro that she might as well leave, too. “I kind of need the money,” she said, and Gary said, “And I’d kind of love to give it to you, but it doesn’t grow on trees. See you tomorrow.”

“That guy’s an asshole,” Mike said, when they were in the car.

“No, he’s okay.” Back when she’d just started working for Gary, one night they’d found themselves alone after close. The sky was full of pretty summer stars and they’d had a few glasses of wine. She hadn’t met Mike yet then and there’d been a moment—hardly even a moment, really—when she’d maybe looked a little too long at Gary, thinking only that he was nice and she was lonely. He was twice her age but that didn’t matter, that had never mattered. He caught her look, smiled sort of sadly, and said, “Caro, you’re a pretty girl but I’d no sooner fuck a good waitress than I’d key my own car.” For the briefest of instants the rejection had stung, but then the sting had swelled into something like pride. She was a good waitress. She
was
.

Mike called Patrick from the bar to see if he wanted them to pick him up a cheeseburger on the way home. Mike had a mobile phone, like everyone else in the universe, but minutes cost money. Cheeseburgers cost money, too, along with gasoline, cable television, water service, sewage service, garbage pickup, electricity, and beer. Sometimes she thought, guiltily, that she should press the boys to cancel the cable, but the truth was that she didn’t want to give it up. Sometimes, after a long shift, all she wanted to do was sit in one place and listen to somebody tell her about humpback whales or black holes or the interior life of the hippopotamus. It made her feel like there was a world out there beyond stupid people and their stupid problems. So
she let Mike have his cheeseburgers and beer, and kept her cable. Fast food was cheaper than cooking, anyway.

When they got to the house, Patrick was standing in the garage, waiting for them. He’d actually made some progress; several full black garbage bags sat in the back of the truck, glistening in the sun like the giant eggs of some slimy alien monster from one of his movies. Caro could smell them even from where she stood. “Nice,” Mike said, sounding impressed, as they sat down on the retaining wall to eat their cheeseburgers.

“Yeah, well.” Patrick’s face was flushed and the long hair at the back of his neck was damp and sticky-looking. He seemed agitated, like a tweaker trying to act straight: he stretched, he ran his hands through his hair, he cracked his knuckles. He wouldn’t look at her.

“Hey, Patrick,” she said, mildly. “You got lipstick on your neck, champ.” He did: two perfect pink crescents, like a kiss on a cheesy greeting card. “And here we thought you’d just bagged the garbage.”

She was pleased by how playful she sounded. Mike laughed. Patrick’s hand went straight to the kiss—he knew exactly where it was—and rubbed at the spot, his cheeks flushing even deeper. “I didn’t invite her,” he mumbled. “She just came.”

“I bet she did,” Mike said.

“Yeah, that’s funny. That’s hilarious.” Patrick rubbed at the mark again. By now it was nothing but a vague pinkish smudge. “By all means, bust my ass. I’ve got an eight-hour shift tonight and instead of sleeping I’ve been spending all day digging through the old man’s crap.”

Still managing to sound playful, Caro said, “Not quite all day.”

Why did she say these things? Why? Patrick glared at her, his eyes full of something. Mercifully, he kept it to himself. “You know what?” he said, instead. “Fuck both of you. I’m going to go get some sleep.” Then he turned and went back into the house, letting the door slam shut behind him.

“What’s with him?” Mike said.

Caro shrugged. “I guess that girl is just really good for him. Should we go through some of this stuff?”

Mike said sure. It quickly became clear, though, that he had no interest in getting rid of his dad’s stuff. He wanted to look at it, and touch it, and talk about it, but he didn’t actually want to make any of it go away. He’d pick up an ancient, half-empty pack of gum, shake his head, and say, “The old man always chewed Doublemint.” Or, about a T-shirt from the 1989 Teamsters picnic: “My dad wore this shirt all the time.” By the time they found the old man’s porn stash, tattered copies of
Hustler
and
Playboy
from the eighties that were full of soft-focus girls with fluffy hair and blue eye shadow, Caro had had enough. When Mike laughed and said, “Oh, we used to sneak into his closet to look at these, these are awesome,” she threw down the stack of utility bills she was flipping through and said, “No. No, they’re not. They’re twenty years old and at least three different men have jerked off on them. Throw the damn things away.”

“Oh, relax.” Mike flipped to the letters section and started to read: “Dear Advice Lady, My new boyfriend makes me come like crazy.”

Meanwhile, a car pulled into the driveway of 149 Div; the engine turned off and a heavy-hipped woman got out, carrying two plastic Wal-Mart bags and a big bag of dog food. Open space hadn’t been a priority when Division Street was laid out, and the two sunken driveways were separated only by a scant patch of grass, browned and crisp from the summer heat. The woman was close enough for Caro to see the cartoon dogs printed on her scrubs, right down to the colorful flotilla of balloons each one held in its paw. She was definitely close enough to hear Mike reading.

Mike didn’t notice her, or if he did notice, he didn’t care. He kept going. The woman paused as if listening, and then turned purple. “Mike,” Caro said. “Lower the volume, babe.”

“I’m just getting to the good part,” Mike said, but Caro couldn’t stand it. First Patrick and that simpering Valentine kiss, now this unpleasant bitch in her balloon-puppy scrubs—
Leave me alone
,
she wanted to scream,
quit looking at me, go away
. She reached out, grabbed the magazine from Mike’s hands, and stuffed it into the trash bag.

He stared at her. “What the hell?”

“Turn around, asshole.”

Mike did; just in time to see the woman’s balloon-puppied backside disappear through her front door. “Oh.” He reached into the trash bag and pulled the magazine back out. “Whatever. Those people are the assholes.”

She was trying to be patient and cool but the air felt like mustard gas in her lungs. “Yeah, sure, but maybe we could not openly antagonize the neighbors who already hate us, huh?”

“Who cares?” Mike said. Not angry or confrontational, just genuinely puzzled. But Caro cared, that’s who cared, because she’d lived with Margot and Mike hadn’t. Margot, who occasionally woke her daughter up in the middle of the night to help her tie inflated plastic bags to the branches of the trees. All of the trees. Theirs. Everyone else’s. Having the neighbors wake up to a nightgown-clad woman chanting and tying plastic bags to their sugar maples was not a great way to fly under the radar, and not flying under the radar was a great way to get official-looking people knocking on your door asking if they could please see the kitchen and how old is your daughter and where does she sleep.

The door of 149 Div slammed open and a man came out. He wore a work shirt from the local gas company and a pissed-off expression. According to the shirt, his name was Herb.

“Hey,” Herb called, taking the browned strip of lawn in two huge strides, not bothering with the front walk. “You talking dirty to my wife? You think that’s funny, talking dirty to a woman who’s just bringing in the groceries?”

Mike stood up, the magazine dangling limp from his hand. “We’re having a private conversation on our private property. You got a problem with that?”

“Yeah. I got a big problem with that. I got a big problem with all you lowlifes.”

“Mike,” Caro touched his arm. “Let’s go inside.”

“Up all hours, drinking and yelling, with the TV blasting, playing god knows what. And you two pigs, never closing your goddamned shades—now you’re talking dirty to my wife?” He pointed a finger at Mike. “I know about you. You and your scumbag brother. You ought to be in jail just like your old man.”

Mike’s jaw went hard and his fists clenched and Caro had to stop herself from taking a step back. “Don’t talk about my dad,” he said. “You didn’t know my dad.”

“I know he was a lowlife drunk, just like you.” The sneering contempt in the man’s face and voice was almost cartoonish. “And I know those poor people whose kid he killed are going to sue that house right out from under you, and I know the day you get evicted I’m going to be standing on my front porch singing ‘God Bless America.’ ”

When you got kicked or punched, there was always a moment before the pain signals made it up to your brain when all you felt was the impact. And in the numbness of this particular impact, a numbness she knew as well as she knew her own face in the mirror, Caro thought: of course. Of course the house was in John Cusimano’s name, and of course nobody had ever thought, the first or second or even third time he’d been arrested for drunk driving, that it might be a good idea to transfer it to somebody else. Because that wasn’t the way the Cusimanos operated. If they’d lived in a floodplain they just would have let the house flood and flood, moved the TV upstairs, tacked plastic sheeting over the parts of the wall that rotted away.

Then the pain: she’d just painted the bedroom. Put new curtains up in the kitchen. In the distance she could hear the roar of the highway, somebody’s music somewhere, a dog barking—maybe even 149 Div’s own dog, locked away next door. She should have known. Nothing would ever be hers. Nowhere would ever be safe.

Mike dropped the magazine and it fluttered to the cracked concrete
with a soft whispering sound. “Why don’t you come on over?” His voice was calm and somehow that was scarier than rage would have been. “Come over here and we’ll talk about it.”

149 Div curled his lip, spat in the grass. But Caro saw a flicker in the man’s eyes and knew he was afraid. “I got better things to do with my time than teach you a lesson,” he said. “I’m a grown-assed man.” Then he turned around, stomped back into his house, and slammed the door, leaving Mike and Caro standing together in the suddenly airless afternoon, surrounded by the litter of old clothes and magazines. After a long time—or maybe it just seemed like a long time—he turned to her. But he didn’t have to say anything, because Caro knew.

Mike had gotten the letter the week before. He didn’t have it anymore. He’d thrown it away as soon as he read it. “Look, drop it, there’s nothing we can do,” he said, then loaded up the ice chest and turned on the television.

While he worked his way through the cooler and flipped restlessly from channel to channel, Caro sat on the couch, chewing her nails, the smell of onions and ketchup from the burger she’d eaten drifting up from her fingers. The numbness had come and gone, the pain had come and gone, and now the race was on. When she’d lived with her mother the starting flag had always been pink eviction notices instead of lawyer letters but after that it was the same: be faster than the landlord, faster than the sheriff, faster than the nosy neighbor who tried to see past you when you opened the door. Panic and defeat nipping at her heels, worry riding high on her shoulders, grind, grind, grind and don’t stop moving, because a half a step ahead, a quarter, a fraction of a sliver of a hair—whatever lead they’d had, she and Margot, it was never enough, they were always about to lose it.

But they’d never stopped. They’d never just sat and drank beer and let doom overtake them. Caro had run this race a thousand times,
she’d been running it all her life. What was needed now was a plan. She was an adult and Mike was an adult and that was an advantage she hadn’t always had; both of them were employed, however unsatisfactorily, and that was another. Mike’s credit was a disaster (that truck, that goddamned truck, if she’d known him when he bought it she would have dragged him out of that dealership by his hair if she’d had to) but hers wasn’t too bad, she had no assets but she didn’t have much debt, either. They could get a new place, maybe. An apartment, a little house. Somewhere nicer than Division Street. No beer cooler in the living room, no dead woman’s thirty-year-old pots and pans in the kitchen. No worn dish towels covered in decades of stains. When she was a kid—during one of the last good phases, when Margot could still drive a car to pick her up and keep track of reality long enough to remember that she had to do it—Caro had once been invited for dinner at a friend’s house. The friend’s face was hazy, but the kitchen where they’d eaten was crystal clear. White counters and white cupboards with red knobs that looked like candy, the dish towels printed with bright red cherries, the floor a clean black and white check. They’d eaten real macaroni and cheese from white ceramic plates with red edges. At Caro’s house mac and cheese came from a box, and they rarely had milk or butter, even in the good phases, so they mixed the powder with water. She remembered the rubbery, cooling pasta swimming in runny orange water, the way the sauce soaked through the paper plates that were all they ever used, and resisted a shudder.