Still, it had been a valuable lesson. His father was right: wanting things that weren’t worth wanting or wishing things were different was a waste of time. Women like Cora — all women, probably — could never understand that, even when the evidence was staring them right in the face. Cora had some dumb-ass idea of Roy in her mind that she preferred to Roy himself. No doubt that asshole treated her nice. Told her she was pretty when she could see for herself that she wasn’t. Told her she was a good mom when she probably left the fucking kid alone in his playpen with a full diaper and crying his fucking little eyes out. Dream Roy didn’t stick her with the check. He even shared his meds. Whereas the real Roy? The one sitting with her on the dock? Well, that Roy saw things for true. He knew the steak in the picture wasn’t real, any more than Dream Roy was real. Just as he knew that later this afternoon, after the beer was gone, only one of them would be getting back into Cora’s shit-bucket car.
Though he’d only been twelve, he congratulated himself on not blaming his old man. He hadn’t gone more than half a mile when he heard a horn toot and his father pulled up alongside the curb, motioning for him to get in. “So,” he said, “you learn anything back there?”
Roy nodded.
“All right, then,” his father said. Pulling back into traffic, he seemed satisfied with how everything had worked out. He wasn’t angry anymore, Roy could tell, which meant no belt when they got home.
“She was pretty mad,” Roy said, “that waitress.”
“Maybe next time she’ll mind her own damn business,” his father said. “Think twice before she opens that big, fat mouth of hers.”
They were silent for a while until Roy said, “Everybody stared at me.” In fact, he could still feel their eyes on him as he slid off his stool and moved to the front door and out into the parking lot.
“I bet they did,” his father said. “But here you are. You didn’t die.”
Which was true. There he’d been, and here he still was.
“Pass them Cheetos,” he told Cora. Actually, he kind of liked Cheetos, except they made your fingers all orange.
The bag, he noticed, when she handed it to him, was half empty. She’d gone to town on it when he was in the camp pulling his fucking ear off. He thought about saying something about that, curious to see if he could make her cry one more time, but in the end — again — he decided not to. Instead, he ate a handful of Cheetos. “These aren’t too bad,” he admitted.
She smiled at him, orange lipped.
Gert Gives the Matter Some Thought
SULLY WAS STANDING by the window when Janey came in, her eyes swollen nearly shut from crying. This early in the morning, the waiting room of the emergency unit was empty except for Sully and Tina, Ruth’s granddaughter, who so far as he could tell wasn’t really there herself. He’d never had much luck with the girl. She didn’t respond to teasing, and with girls her age he didn’t have many other rhetorical strategies. He would try to engage her, but she always stared at him vaguely, like you look at a television screen when your mind has wandered elsewhere. This was different, of course. Tina sat perfectly still, staring off into some middle distance. In fact, she was so motionless that he kept glancing over to make sure she was breathing.
Janey made brief eye contact with Sully before going over to her daughter, squatting right in front of her. “Hey, there, Birdbrain,” she said, having apparently decided to attempt good cheer. “You okay?” When the girl’s unfocused gaze didn’t even flicker, Janey grew serious. “Tina, honey. I know you don’t want to, but you have to come back, okay? I know it was real bad, what happened back there, and I know you think you’re safer where you are, but you can’t stay there because it’s not a real place. Remember how we talked about it before? And what the doctor said about how the longer you stay away, the harder it is to come back? There’s nothing to be afraid of anymore. It’s just you and me here. And Sully. You’ve always liked him.”
News to Sully, if true.
“None of this is your fault, sweetpea. You know that, right? I did a real dumb thing. Made your dad get all mad. But he’s gone now, and nobody’s gonna hurt anybody anymore. You understand? As soon as you come back we can all start making things better, you and me. Grandma, too. And Grandpa’ll be here just as soon as we can find out where the hell he is. Grandpa’s your special friend, right?”
Tina blinked slowly at the mention of her grandfather, and it seemed to Sully that her eyes started to focus, but then they quickly went blank again. Sully couldn’t blame her. She had only to look at her mother to know that her cheer was forced, her optimism just wishful thinking. Things weren’t going to be okay again for a long time, maybe never.
Janey gave in. “Okay, sweetpea. You can stay there a little while longer, but after I talk to Sully you’ve got to come back, okay? Then we’re going to start over again, like we do. It always gets better, remember? What comes after down? Up, right? Up’s the only direction left, and that’s where we’re headed, as soon as you come back.”
When Janey rose, her knees cracked audibly, and it occurred to Sully that the woman coming toward him wasn’t young anymore. Could it be that the last hour had plunged her so deeply into middle age? “Thanks,” she said, joining him where he stood at the window overlooking the parking lot below. “I assume it’s you who brought her here.”
Sully nodded. When the cops finally arrived at the restaurant, he’d led them back to the apartment only to discover that Roy Purdy had regained consciousness while they were out front with the EMTs and skedaddled. The regulars were milling around by the entrance by the time Sully finished talking to the cops, but they seemed to get the picture when he shook his head and pointed at the CLOSED sign. It was then that he sensed he wasn’t alone inside and found the girl curled up in the fetal position in the far booth. “People forget all about you, don’t they?” he said, sliding in across from her. When she didn’t respond, he said, “I need to do a few things here. Then we’ll go to the hospital, okay?”
She nodded, but that was all.
The first thing to do was turn off the grill and toss out all the bacon and sausage, now reduced to cinders. Out back he found a cardboard box and tore it down, took a Magic Marker and some tape near the register and made another CLOSED sign for the deliverymen who would come to the back. Under the sign on the front door he taped a second: UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. By now Tina was sitting up in the booth. “Can you think of anything else?” he said, but she gave no indication of having heard him. “Let’s go out this way,” he suggested, pointing. The front door was locked; the back would lock behind them.
In the truck she cocked her head at the brown cyclone Carl had made on the inside of the window. As he drove to the hospital she kept staring at it, and by the time they arrived she’d drifted into the space she now occupied. Unable to rouse her, Sully’d flagged a nurse to help get her out of the truck and into the emergency room. “What’s wrong with her?” the woman wanted to know, and he told her she’d just witnessed an attack on her grandmother. That explanation didn’t seem to satisfy her, and she looked Sully over suspiciously, but he didn’t know what else to say. When she was little Tina had been tested for autism, and Ruth had said that in times of stress — especially when her parents were fighting — she occasionally entered these fugue states, but he’d been under the impression she’d outgrown them. Wrong again.
“Is she going to be okay?” Sully now whispered to Janey, nodding at the girl. He admired how Janey had just talked to her, a side to Ruth’s daughter he’d never witnessed.