Save Yourself (33 page)

That night, after close, Caro was surprised and unhappy to see Mike’s truck pull up in front of the restaurant. She was standing at the window, looking out at the street; he saw her, tapped his horn twice, and she lifted a hand in greeting. Darcy, emerging from the back, said, “Guess you don’t need a ride after all. Hey, are you ever going to give his brother my number?”

“Trust me,” Caro said, “you don’t want to get involved with his brother.”

The cab of Mike’s truck reeked of beer. “Hey,” he said, as she climbed in.

She forced a smile. “Hey, yourself.”

“You look pretty.”

“I look like ass,” she said. “Hey, don’t take this the wrong way, but it kind of smells like a kegger in here. Are you cool driving?”

“Of course I am. Me and Patrick went to Jack’s, that’s all.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s kind of why I was asking.”

“I’m not drunk. You think I can’t have a beer or two without getting drunk?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Because I can. I totally can.”

Caro didn’t want to fight. “How was Jack’s?”

“Good.” He hesitated for a moment. “Lots of people.”

A quiet warning bell rang in Caro’s head. “Yeah, well. Thursday night, huh?”

“We met on a Thursday. You remember?”

“Sure.”

“You know what else I remember? I remember how pretty the stars were.”

The warning bell got louder. Mike Cusimano, in his natural state, did not notice stars. Also, he was wrong. Her memories of having sex with him in the back of the truck were blissfully dim but she remembered the soft cotton of his shirt under her hands, the cool of the metal truck bed seeping up through the jacket he’d laid down for her—and the gray clouds hanging over them like a downy blanket. “There weren’t any stars.”

“Sure there were.”

“No. It rained that whole week.” She would know. She’d listened to the rain drumming on the roof of her car like impatient fingers as she tried to sleep, cramped and awkward in the backseat.

“No way. Because you and me, we were talking about them, you said—” He stopped. Probably remembering which girl that had actually been. When he spoke again, his tone was sheepish. “I guess maybe that was another time.”

“I guess so.”

Then his words came out all in a rush. “But that’s how it is for me, you know. I barely remember any other girl I’ve ever dated, but you. Caro—”

“What?”

“You know things have been kind of rough lately, with us.”

“I know,” she said. Wary.

“Well, I wanted to tell you—there was this girl, tonight, at Jack’s. And I was drunker than I am now.” He glanced at her. “And I sort of fooled around with her a little bit.”

Great!
an illogical part of Caro wanted to cry.
Because I’ve been sleeping with your brother, and now we’re even. Let’s get a pizza!
She bit her lip hard to keep from laughing—although what she felt inside, she didn’t know what it was but it wasn’t laughter—and said, “What does that mean, fooled around with her a little bit?”

“I kissed her. You know. Fooled around.” Another sidelong glance. Was he checking to see if she was upset? Was she upset? “I didn’t have sex with her, if that’s what you’re worried about. Here’s the thing, though—I wanted to. I mean, part of me wanted to. But mostly I think that was because things have been so weird with us, and— Look on the floor, there, under the seat, will you?”

She bent down, looked, and picked it up. An unused condom, although the package was torn across the top as if someone had opened it, and then changed their mind. She could feel the hard ring of it inside the package, slipping around in its envelope of lubricant. An empty, harmless sort of thing, like the empty mussel shells Gary threw away at the end of the night.

“I think I left it there on purpose so you’d find it, but now I’m just telling you,” Mike said. “Because that’s how close I came.”

Sitting there with the condom in her hand—and feeling unaccountably angry, given the circumstances; screw the girl or don’t, she thought, but don’t make me play this stupid game—she said, “Exactly what reaction are you looking for, here?”

“No reaction. I just want you to listen to me. Because I could have done it, but I didn’t, because I love you. And I don’t care what’s been happening, or going on, or what I don’t know about, or what. Because I still love you and I always will.”

His words were coming too fast again, and too sincere, as if he’d
rehearsed them. Caro realized what this was: it was a declaration of love, the Mike Cusimano version. She couldn’t help it. She laughed.

“Why are you laughing?” Mike sounded hurt. Justifiably so, maybe. “What are you laughing about?”

“You,” she said. “You just gave me a half-open condom that you almost used to fuck another girl. What am I supposed to be, touched?”

“I’m being honest, aren’t I? Most guys wouldn’t be. Most guys would have just done it and then lied to you afterward. Especially since—”

He stopped. An ominous silence filled the car.

“Especially since what?” Caro said, no longer laughing.

“You know.”

“No. I don’t know.”

“Don’t make me say it.”

“No,” she said again. “If you’ve got something to say, say it.” Feeling like a tide risen as high as it can, a wave about to break.

They were at the house now. He pulled into the driveway too fast—she lurched against the door—turned the key, and then sat in the sudden silence. She could see his jaw working, his fists clenching on the steering wheel.

“Caro,” he finally said, in a voice gone tuneless with deliberate calm, “the point is, I still love you, despite all the shit you’re putting me through. So don’t be a bitch.”

A broken shard of guilt pierced her. Right then, she knew, if she reached out and touched him—a shoulder, a knee—if she spoke to him gently and lovingly, even if only to say his name—that would be all it would take. He’d forgive her everything. Like he had forgiven Patrick everything, she thought; and then remembered what Patrick had told her earlier that night, that Mike had threatened to punch him in the face, and she knew that Mike had never forgiven Patrick for a single thing.

“Well,” she said, “thank you for not fucking the drunk chick you met at a bar. I guess.”

His fists on the wheel clenched again, and this time they didn’t let go. “Yeah, well, you know why else I didn’t fuck her? Because the last girl I fucked at a bar turned out to be a slut.”

“You’re an asshole,” she said.

“I’m an asshole who’s faithful to you. Which is more than you can say.”

Then he got out of the car, slammed the door behind him, and went into the house. He slammed that door, too.

How much longer can we do this
, Patrick asked her, later, after his stupid little goth twit with her silly boots and overwrought makeup finally left, and Caro didn’t answer because they both knew the answer.

The answer was: not very long.

Mike slept on the couch that night. As she fell asleep Caro thought that if they hadn’t passed the moment of no return before, they might well have passed it now, and with that thought came an odd feeling of calm, and stillness, and pause. Like the wind had died down but the current had yet to pick up. She wondered if other people felt like this, if every life change was an exercise in drift. Somehow she didn’t think so.

When she woke up, Mike was there. Sitting next to her, holding a cup of coffee. The room smelled of it, bitter and burned.

“Peace offering,” he said, “and I’m working really, really hard not to puke right now, so take it, okay?”

She sat up and took it. The sky outside the window was gray and early-looking. The coffee tasted as bad as it smelled.

Mike looked forlorn. “I wanted to take you out to breakfast. Do this right.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s too early for food.”

His neck drooped and his forehead came to rest on the mattress. When he spoke, his words were muffled. “I’m a bastard.”

She felt a sudden, sad burst of kindness toward him. He had been right, after all. She was cheating on him. “You’re just hungover.”

“No. I mean last night. I’m sorry for last night.” His head swiveled so he could look up at her. “If I heard some other guy saying those things to you, I’d kick his ass. I’d put him in the hospital.”

“That’s very sweet.”

“Seriously,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

His eyelids were pink and puffy-looking, the lines at the sides of his mouth deep and unhappy. She shouldn’t be snide, she thought. Mike wasn’t a word person. He wasn’t like Patrick, he didn’t need seventeen ways to describe
miserable
. When Mike was sad or sorry or pissed off he said so; when he was attacked he fought back. He wasn’t sophisticated or subtle but you mostly knew where you stood with Mike.

“I know,” she said, softly. Her hand reached out to stroke his hair. The thumbnail was broken and jagged. She watched it move through his hair and wondered when she’d done that, and how.

Mike sat up. His face was hopeful. “Look, I’ll tell you what. This weekend, let’s go out. Anywhere you want. I’ll even drive into Pittsburgh. We’ll start over.”

She didn’t think so. She didn’t think they would. But there was no way to say that to him, not now, not at five thirty in the morning. He turned greenish and groaned and his head dropped back down to the mattress.

“I think I’m dying,” he said.

“Let’s talk about it sometime when you’re not,” she said.

“Tonight? When you get home from work?”

He would forgive her. He would never forgive Patrick, but he would forgive her. “Sure.”

He smiled, wanly. “It’s a date.”

Then he left, and she dumped out the horrible burned coffee and went back to sleep. She was surprised at how easily it happened, as if even the most animal parts of her brain knew she couldn’t deal with this. Not right now. At some point during the long morning, she woke to the sound of the door opening gently, knew it was Patrick—who else could it be—and pretended she hadn’t heard. She needed more sleep, more time; she needed to be able to figure out what she was going to do.

But when she woke up she had nothing. Patrick was asleep on the couch, wearing his candy-striped Zoney’s shirt. He looked ragged, unwashed. If she was his girlfriend, she thought, she would make him get a haircut and shave, she would make him buy some T-shirts from bands that still recorded music once in a while, she would make him find a job that didn’t require a stupid uniform. Or maybe she wouldn’t, because Patrick would hate all of those things, and she would hate herself for doing it again, for taking her shitty life and tossing some ugly throw pillows across it and pretending it was more than it was. Pretending
she
was more than she was. But she had nothing else for him. She couldn’t even break up with his goddamned brother for him. And so she dressed for work and did her hair quietly, and he was so deeply asleep that he didn’t wake up at all, and she crept out of the house, and let him sleep.

Her last table that night was a bunch of jerks from some computer company, all wearing khaki pants with mobile phones clipped to their belts and celebrating somebody’s last day at work. She knew it was a computer company because one of them spent half the meal standing by the kitchen door shouting into his phone about rollouts and debugging, and she knew it was somebody’s last day at work because they wouldn’t shut up about it. They wouldn’t shut up at all, in fact. Was there chicken on the menu tonight because one of them was really hungry for a couple of breasts and a thigh, what kind of
tomatoes were in the salad because another only liked his tomatoes cherry, and so forth. Caro, who was nervy in a way she hadn’t been since leaving her mother, bore it patiently until the end, when one of them—she thought it was the guy who was leaving, and she hoped he was leaving the country—said, “You’ve been a good sport, Carolyn. How about a cocktail?”

She smiled her automatic waitress smile and started to say she couldn’t drink on the job, but he cut her off. “I’ll bring the cock, you bring the tail.”

“Eat shit,” she said. Pleasantly enough, she thought; but the guy turned purple, snatched the black leather check presenter out of her hand, and scribbled out her tip on the credit card receipt inside it.

“I want to speak to your goddamned manager,” he said.

Gary bawled her out about it later. “A five-hundred-dollar tab, Caro. Five hundred dollars, and nobody from that company is ever going to come back here again.”

“Well, that leaves me in tears.”

“I’m serious, Caro. You get a customer who’s treating you badly, you come tell me about it. You tell me about it and I’ll kick them out on their ass, never let them back through the door.” He pointed a callused, knife-scarred finger at her. “But you can
not
tell them to eat shit. You can’t let other customers
hear
you telling them to eat shit.” They were in the kitchen. Darcy was outside, wiping down tables. Gary slammed a cupboard door. “Come on, Caro. What’s wrong with you? Why would you just take that garbage all night?”

Caro gritted her teeth. “Because it’s a five-hundred-dollar tab.” Knowing, even as she said it, that it was a lame reason, that she’d just put a price tag on her own pride.

For a long moment, Gary looked at Caro, his face grim. “Next time, just tell me about it, okay?” he finally said, and her face burned.

She was still fuming when she got home. The way she felt—impatient, angry—she didn’t want to talk to Mike. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. So she came in through the back again, hearing the
television blaring the late late show in the living room. Which meant it was midnight, or close to it. She crept upstairs, closed the door behind her, took off her shoes and her hose, lay down and closed her eyes. She wished she had somewhere else to go. Anywhere.

Somebody was moving around downstairs. The fridge door opened, a cupboard slammed. Then she heard feet on the stairs. There was a light knock on the door. It opened.

She squeezed her eyes tighter.

“Babe?” Mike said. “You okay?”

“Yeah, sure.” She was surprised at how normal her voice sounded. “Come in.”