Right now I’m out celebrating finals being over with my friend Stacy, I tell him.
Yeah?
I can stay out pretty late.
Yeah, listen. . I actually better get going soon. No dessert, even.
What do you mean?
I’m sorry. But now that I have to stop at the store and everything. . and she’s in bad shape this time, I probably need to get back. .
Oh.
He lets go of his grip on my stomach to scoop up the last of his pasta.
Come on, no big deal. You look like you’re going to cry. I need to take care of her, all right? Don’t be so fucking selfish. She’s really hurting. You want to be a big girl about this, or what?
I DECIDE I might as well stop at the copy place tonight, maybe he’ll be able to slip out for breakfast tomorrow and wouldn’t it be a good idea if I had copies ready for him then. The treatment for his new script is twelve pages long, and the original has been cut up into pieces and scotch-taped and paperclipped back together — I don’t want to trust the counter guys to do it right, so I grab a key for the self-service machines and stand in line with my manila folder. Although it’s almost midnight, there’s a long wait. The whole mall is busy. It looks like half of Los Angeles is out strolling in couples or having coffee at the coffee place, ice cream at the ice cream place, or in here copying their screenplays and treatments. I glance at the pages of his treatment as the copied pages collate, wondering how he’s changed his story, but I’m thinking about the girlfriend, how she keeps coming back and back and back for more work. How much more of herself she can replace, shore up, wire together? I marvel at what she’s putting herself through, how she can keep standing all the pain, how worth it it all must be.
I finish at the copy machine and go to the central table for stapling. I staple and staple, still thinking about the girlfriend at his home in his bed right now, with all that pain, and those icepacks and punctures and clipped-shut swollen seams, and I glance up, outside, to see strolling past the coffee place what looks like my boyfriend, I’m sure it is, I think, holding hands with someone, both of them slipping their tongues around ice cream cones in perfect and blithe sync. I can’t tell if it’s a grown-up-looking little girl or a girlish, well-held-together mature woman. I can’t tell if it’s a mother or a daughter, or either, and does it even matter, I realize I don’t know which story to believe, which is more real or more made up. Maybe no one was ever in pain or thrall. I just see the hand-holding, and the stroll, and my insides are all going to spill, like I’ve been gutted, split open, then left alone on a hook to hang.
I look down and see I’ve stapled a finger, clean through the very tip, where it’s all nerve and just a very little flesh, no blood, really. Driven through and punched tight, and it feels like absolutely nothing at all. Surprising, that it feels like nothing. I would have thought it would feel completely like something else.
DADDY?
It’s late and my father’s bedroom light is out. But I knock, anyway. I was thinking that just maybe he’d be waiting up, that he’d grill me about where I was or who I was with. I can’t remember the last time he did that. I can’t remember the last time he questioned me as he used to, the last time he was worried or strict, the last time he braided my hair or bathed me, told me I was pretty or wonderful or smart, dressed me, came into my room at night, sweet, undressed me, punished me, cared. The special kind of father things.
There’s no answer, but I open the door and go in, anyway.
NEEDLES
They’re in Needles for the night. At least, that was the plan. But Rick had shut his phone off against her early in the day’s white glare and she’d lost sight of the weaving truck after his angry, game-play cutoff on the westbound I-40, just past the Arizona border. Day’s end she spotted the heat-rippled Needles off-ramp and the Motel 6 sign. Worth a try. She has her panting, paw-sweat little dog with her, and all Motel 6’s take little dogs — it’s been their chain of choice the last three nights since leaving Des Moines. Her driving her car in front, hands clenched at 10 and 2, Rick coasting along back of her in the rental truck, with a diminishing cooler of beer and a year’s worth of her accumulated thrift store crap she just couldn’t bring herself to leave behind this time, homeward bound, heading west, convoy ho. She’s sick of baking macadam, and pink-furred roadkill bounced to the shoulder, and Christian radio static. She’s sick of strategy and bluff. No truck in the Motel 6 parking lot, but she doesn’t care, she’s stopping for the night.
But yeah, he’s checked in, as planned. She tells the graveyard-shift teenager behind the counter, a girl with flayed hair and eyelined, won’t-ever-make-it-further-into-California-than-this eyes, that she’s his girlfriend. The girl shrugs, slaps on the counter a second key ringed on a red plastic diamond. It’s after nine at night and there’s still burning air going, still blaze and blistering skin.
The window AC in Room 117 is gasping out chill. No actual Rick, but his backpack is flung on one of the twin beds. On the nightstand, a bucket of soggy ice and a motel tumbler with gathered ocher drops. Beer for the road, bourbon at rest stops. The usual game. She’s known this for twelve years and still begged him out to Iowa at the end of her visiting professor term to help get her moved back home again, or just moved back, just get her moved. He’d listened to the usual conditions, and still promised, agreed. They know the rules printed inside the cardboard lid by heart by now. She fills her little dog’s water bowl from the tap, throws in a few ice cubes, and the dog laps and laps. She’s tempted to cool-shower rinse, grab a patty melt at the Denny’s next door, get into a rough-sheeted twin bed and sleep. But there is still the token move. She gives her little dog yesterday’s sweat-stiff T-shirt to bunk into, and a kiss, a stomach rub, and heads out.
She hunts the four-street grid of Needles, finds the truck parked crooked and blocking a trailer’s driveway on the last gravel road before desert scrub. A loose pyramid of fist-smashed beer cans on the passenger seat, her moving boxes stuffed tight and pressed rhomboid in the bed. There are three bars on this block, and she picks the saddest postcard one, with Xmas lights still looped above the faux-adobe entrance, unlit. The air inside is damp, sour saloon air, and he’s at the far end of the bar, gulping from a tumbler and nodding passionately at an old soaked-and-smoked man with shaky cracked hands, mumbling into an old man’s clutched glass. She gets up close behind him and she knows he knows she’s there without turning around.
Get out of here, he says. I’m busy. I love this guy.
Let’s get some sleep, Rick.
I quit. I’m out. I’m hitting the road. Be in L.A. by morning. You get your stuff later somewhere.
Come on, she says.
You have to listen to him. You have to love this guy. You have to.
I can’t, she says. You know that.
She touches his bare elbow, below his sleeve, but he both jerks away and shoves at her.
I’m not playing anymore, he says. You can’t do this to me, like always, like you do.
If he lurches out, she decides while he rants, if he makes it into the truck, drives off with all her worldly crap in the world onto black lost desert roads, she’s calling the highway patrol. That’s the next move. The new plan. When he begins to cry like he does she gets him off his stool, gets him under an arm and out the door and into her car, glad it’s finally gone dark and moon-glow cool. He’s crying, all shakes and bourbon sweat. She gets him back to the icy Motel 6 room, gets him onto one of the twin beds. She locks the chain lock, flops on the other bed next to her sleep-shivering little dog.