“She talked about you, you know,” he says.
“Really? She didn’t talk about you.” Which is untrue, of course, but I won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing she had a moniker for him. Anyhow, turns out that he wasn’t the tragic one.
“She told me how at one of your cleaning jobs, some guy tried to grab your ass and you twisted his arm so far behind his back that he yelped and then upped your pay.”
Yeah, that happened to me with Mr. Purdue. A ten-dollar-a-week raise. That’s how much an unwanted cop of my ass is worth.
“She called you Buffy.”
And more than the thing with Mr. Purdue, that’s how I know that Meg did tell him about me. Buffy was her nickname for me when she thought I was being particularly kick-ass, à la Buffy Summers, the Vampire Slayer. She called herself Willow, the magical sidekick, but she had it wrong: she was Buffy and Willow, strength and magic, all folded into one. I was just basking in her glow.
It feels wrong that he knows this about me, like he has seen my embarrassing baby pictures. Details he has no right to. “She told you a lot for a one-night stand,” I say.
He looks pained. What a good faker he is, that Ben McCallister. “We used to be friends.”
“I’m not sure friends is the word for it.”
“No,” he insists. “Before it all shot to shit, we were friends.”
The emails. The banter. The rock talk. The sudden change. “So what happened?” I ask, even though I know what happened.
Still, it’s shocking to hear him say it, the way he says it: “We fucked.”
“You slept together,” I correct. Because I know that much. I know that Meg, after what happened to her that other time, would not have done that with someone unless she was into him. “Meg wouldn’t just fuck someone.”
“Well, I fucked her,” Ben repeats. “And when you fuck a friend, it ruins everything.” He flicks the lighter on and lets it go dark again. “I knew it would, and I still did it.”
Now that’s he’s being honest, it’s both repellent and magnetic, like a terrible car crash you can’t help rubbernecking, even though you know it’ll give you nightmares later. “Why would you do that, if you knew that it would ruin things?”
He sighs and shakes his head. “You know how it is, when it’s in the moment and it’s all happening and you don’t think about the day after.” He looks at me, but the thing is, I don’t know. It would probably shock people to learn, but I’ve never. When you are bred to be white trash, you do what you can to avoid the family trap. Most of the time it seems inevitable anyway. Still, I didn’t need put a nail in the coffin by screwing any of the losers in Shitburg.
I don’t say anything, just stare at the empty playground.
“We only did it the once, but it was enough. Right after, everything went south.”
“When?” I ask.
“I dunno. Around Thanksgiving. Why?”
That makes sense. Her sleeping-with-the-bartender email came before the holidays. But the kittens? Those she found after winter break. And the thing with Mr. Purdue grabbing my ass had happened in February, a few weeks before she died. “But if things went south a while ago, how do you know all this recent stuff, about the cats? About me?”
“I thought you read the emails.”
“Only a couple.”
He grimaces. “So you didn’t see all the stuff she wrote me?”
“No. And a bunch of her mail is missing, between, like, January and the week before she died.”
A puzzled look passes over Ben’s face. “Do you have a computer here?”
“I can use Meg’s. In her room.”
He pauses, as if considering. Then he crumples up our empty food wrappers. “Let’s go.”
x x x
Back in Meg’s room, he launches his webmail program. He does a search for her name and a whole screen of emails pop up. He scoots out of the chair and I sit down in it. Repeat comes bounding through the open door to claw at the cardboard boxes.
I start at the beginning, the flirty banter, all the stuff about Keith Moon and the Rolling Stones. I look at Ben.
“Keep going,” he says.
And I do. The flirtation grows. The emails get longer. And then they sleep together. It’s like a black line drawn in space. Because after, Ben’s emails become distant, and Meg’s kind of desperate. And then they just get weird. Maybe if they were written to me they wouldn’t seem so weird. Except they were to Ben, a guy she slept with once. She wrote him pages and pages of stuff, everything about her life, the cats, me; it reads like very detailed journal entries. The more he tried to push her away, the more she wrote. She wasn’t totally clueless. It’s clear she knew what she was doing was odd because she ended several notes, some of which were eight or ten pages long, with a need for reassurance: We’re still friends, right? Like she’s asking for permission to keep telling him all this stuff. I’m embarrassed to be reading this, embarrassed on her behalf, too. Is this why she deleted her sent mail?
The emails to Ben go on like this, every few days, for several weeks, and it’s impossible to read them all, not just because they’re long but because they’re giving me a horrible twist in my gut. Within the emails are references to texts and phone calls she made to him. When I ask Ben how often, he doesn’t answer. And then I see one of his last emails to her: Find someone else to talk to, he told her. Shortly after that email, You have to leave me alone. And then I think of her last email to him: You don’t have to worry about me anymore.
I have to stop. Ben is now looking at me with an expression I don’t like. I prefer the cocky strutting asshole from a few nights ago. Because I want to hate Ben McCallister. I don’t want him looking at me with soft eyes. I don’t want him looking vulnerable, almost needy, like he wants reassurance. And I certainly don’t want him doing something generous, like offering to take the kittens off my hands, which is what he does.
I just stare at him. Like, Who are you?
“I’ll leave them with my mom next time I go to Bend. It’s pretty much a zoo at her place anyway, so she won’t give a shit about two more strays.”
“What about until then?” I ask.
“I share a house in Seattle. It’s got a backyard, and my housemates are all vegans, big into animal rights, so they can’t say no or they’ll risk looking like hypocrites.”
“Why would you do that?” I ask. I don’t know why I’m challenging him. I need to find a home for the cats; Ben’s the only taker. I should shut up.
“I thought I just explained why,” he says. The growl back in his voice is a relief.
But by the way he’s looking at everything in the room but me, I think he knows that he didn’t really explain why. And by the way I’m looking at everything in the room but him, I know that I don’t really need him to.
x x x
The next morning, Ben comes by the house for the cats as I’m finishing taping up the last of the boxes. I put Pete and Repeat into their carrier, collect all their toys, and hand them over.
“Where are you headed?” he asks me.
“UPS depot and bus station.”
“I can give you a lift.”
“That’s okay. I’ll call a cab.”
One of the cats yowls from the carrier. “Don’t be stupid,” Ben says. “You’ll have to pay for two cabs.”
I’m half afraid Ben will rescind his offer to take the cats, and that’s why he’s offering the ride, but he’s already loading the duffel bags into the trunk and putting the cats in the back. The car is filthy, full of empty Red Bull cans, smelling of cigarettes. There’s a beaded cardigan balled up in the backseat.
The mysterious roommate Harry Kang helps us haul the boxes to the car, and though we have not exchanged two words during my entire stay, he grasps my hand and says, “Please tell Meg’s family that my family has been praying for them every day.” He looks at me a moment longer. “I’m going to tell them to pray for you, too.” And though people have been saying this crap to me all the time since Meg died, Harry’s unexpected words bring a lump to my throat.
Pete and Repeat yowl all the way to the UPS place, and Ben waits with them in the car while I ship the boxes. Then Ben drives me to the bus station in time for the one p.m. bus. I’ll be home for dinner. Not that there’ll be dinner.
The cats continue to screech the whole time, and by the time we get to the bus station, it smells like one of them has peed. By this point I’m convinced he’s going to say he changed his mind, that the offer to take them was basically his revenge for my T-shirt email.
But he doesn’t. When I open the door in front of the bus station, he says, “Take care, Cody,” in a quiet voice.
I suddenly wish I were taking the cats. The thought of returning home alone makes me desolate. As much as I want to put miles between me and Ben McCallister, now that I’m doing just that, I understand what a relief it’s been to share this weight with someone.
“Yeah. You too,” I tell him. “Have a good life.”
It’s not what I meant to say. It sounds too flippant. But maybe it’s the most you can hope for someone.