15
After I decided I wouldn’t be going to UW but would be staying at home and attending the local community college, Tricia demanded I get a job. The Dairy Queen was hiring, so I asked for an application. I handed it in to the manager, who turned out to be Tammy Henthoff.
“You’re friends with that Garcia girl?” she asked, squinting at my application.
“Meg? Yeah. She’s my best friend,” I said. “She’s in college in Tacoma now, on a full scholarship,” I added. I was so proud of her.
“Uh-huh.” Tammy was not impressed. Or maybe she was just defensive. Since she’d run off with Matt Parner, people around here hadn’t been all that nice to her. She’d lost her job at the car dealership where her husband had worked, and I’d heard that Matt’s soon-to-be-ex-wife, Melissa, and all her friends had taken to driving by the DQ and shouting nasty things. Not that Tammy didn’t deserve it. But Matt still had his job at the Jiffy Lube and no one drove by there yelling whore.
While Tammy was interviewing me, a bunch of high school students came by. The DQ had always been the local hangout, and it was then that I realized that if I got the job, I’d be serving burgers to people I’d spent the last four years not exactly snubbing, but sort of. Meg knew everyone here and she had her admirers for sure, but she wasn’t close with that many people. She had her family, the people she met online, and me. In middle school, teachers started calling us the Pod and it took, and then all sorts of people referred to us as that. We were known as a twosome. Even Tammy Henthoff, seven years out of high school, knew about us. Working here, it would be a daily barrage: Aren’t you Meg’s friend? And the piggyback question to that: If so, why are you still here?
Right about the same time, the night manager at the restaurant where Tricia works inquired if she knew anyone trustworthy who could clean her house, Tricia asked me—almost on a dare, it seemed; she knew how much I hated cleaning. But you can be good at things you hate. Pretty soon that one job turned into two and four and now six.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I got a call about a job as an attendant at Pioneer Park. Sue knew the woman who ran the parks department, and somehow, in the midst of everything, she put a word in for me and I got called in for an interview.
It was a good job, decent pay, benefits even. On the day of the interview with the superintendent, I walked to the park. And then I saw the rocket ship.
Pioneer Park was where Meg and I learned to ride our bikes. Where we’d run through the sprinklers and dreamed of the swimming pool the town sometimes talked about putting in there (it never happened; nothing here ever does). It was a place that wasn’t her house or my house or school or the DQ, where we could be alone and talk.
The capsule at the top of the rocket ship was like our magical private clubhouse. Anytime we climbed the rickety stairs and ladder up to the nose cone, we were the only people there, though it was obvious from all the ever-changing graffiti that we weren’t the only people to come up here.
Reading the graffiti out loud was one of our favorite things to do. There were hearts of couples long since broken up, and lyrics nobody remembered anymore. New stuff was always being scrawled over the old, though one line, Meg’s favorite, remained gouged into the metal: I Was Here. She loved that. “What more can you say, right?” she’d ask. She’d written the phrase on her own graffiti wall and kept threatening to get a tattoo of it one day, if she ever got over her fear of needles.
The whole deathtrap probably should’ve been condemned years ago, but it wasn’t. It was the highest point in town, and on clear days you could see for miles. Meg used to say you could see all the way to the future.
I turned around. I never even called the superintendent to cancel.
So I still clean houses. Maybe it’s for the best. Toilets are anonymous. They have no stories to tell, no recriminations to fling. They just take crap and flush.
Since coming back from this last trip to Tacoma, I actually find myself looking forward to work. The scrubbing, the endless repetition, the arriving at a manky sink, attacking it with bleach and steel wool and after a time, leaving it gleaming . . . befores/afters in life are never quite so stark.
Today I clean two houses in a row, hauling laundry and ironing pillowcases, and cleaning the squared kitchen tile with a squeegee. The tile isn’t really tile; it’s linoleum. But that’s how Mrs. Chandler likes it done, and who I am to argue?
Over the next few days, when I’m not working, I carry my cleaning zeal over to Tricia’s and my tiny house, taking bleach and an old toothbrush and going at the shower grout, which has gone black with mildew. Tricia is so shocked when she sees the tiles go from gray to their previous white-and-blue state, she doesn’t even say anything sarcastic.
I keep myself busy in a frenzy until I don’t have a gig, and our house is as clean as it’s been since we moved in. I sit on my bed and organize my earnings by bill denominations: I’ve made two hundred and forty bucks this week alone. I have to give Tricia one hundred dollars for my share of bills, but that leaves me with quite a surplus, and nothing to spend it on. Theoretically, I am saving for the move to Seattle. Theoretically, I learned in physics that the universe is expanding at a rate of, like, forty-five miles a second, but it sure as shit doesn’t feel that way when you’re standing still.
I shove the money into my metal box under the bed. Tricia has been known to pilfer cash if it’s lying around. The house is quiet and stuffy, more claustrophobic than normal. I slide on my flip-flops and walk into town. Outside the Dairy Queen, I see a bunch of people I went to school with clustered on the benches under the cottonwood trees, including Troy Boggins. They wave and I wave back but they don’t invite me to sit down with them and I don’t pretend I want to.
I go to the library instead. Now that Meg is gone and her house is no longer my second home, this is my sanctuary. Plus, it has air-conditioning.
Mrs. Banks is sitting behind the reference desk, and when she sees me, she waves me over. “Cody, where have you been? I was about to send these back.” She pulls out a rubber-banded stack of books, more of the Central Europeans. Karel Capek’s War with the Newts, Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, a collection of Kafka short stories.
“Thanks,” I say. I am out of books, but as soon as I enter the cool of the library, I understand that’s not why I’m here.
I make my way to the computer terminals. I type Final Solution and suicide into the search box. It brings up mostly Hitler and neo-Nazi stuff, though there is one page that seems promising, but when I click on it, it won’t load. I try the other sites from the search, and they won’t either.
“Is there something wrong with the computers?” I ask Mrs. Banks.
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“I can’t get pages to load.”
“Cody,” she asks, “are you looking at naughty sites?”
She’s teasing, but I flush red anyway. “I’m doing a research project.”
“On what?”
“Neo-Nazi groups.” Another lie. It just pops right out.
“Ahh, that’ll do it. I can lift the filters for you if you like,” she says.
“No,” I say quickly. Nobody can know about this. And that’s when I remember I have my own computer now. And the library has free Wi-Fi. “I mean, I have to leave now. But tomorrow?”
“Anytime, Cody,” she says. “I trust you.”
x x x
The next day, I bring Meg’s laptop to the library, and before I get started, Mrs. Banks shows me how to get around the filters. Then I get to work. The Final Solution website isn’t so much a website as an entry portal. You have to click on a button claiming that you’re over eighteen. When I do, I’m redirected to an index with different topic headings. I open a few messages. A lot of them are spam. A lot more are ranting. I scroll through a few pages and it seems like a waste of time. And then I see a subject heading: What about My Wife?
The post is from some guy who claims he wants to kill himself but wonders what it would be like for his wife, whom he loves. Will it ruin her life? he writes.
There’s a string of replies below. The majority opinion is that his wife will probably be relieved, that she’s probably miserable too, and by offing himself he’ll put them both out of their misery. Women are way better at bouncing back from this kind of thing, one person writes. She’ll probably remarry within a few years and be much better off.
Who are these people? Is this who Meg was talking to?
I read the responses again, so casual that you’d think they’re offering advice on how to fix a broken carburetor, and as I do, my neck grows hot and something churns in my stomach. I don’t know if these people had anything to do with Meg. I don’t know if this guy really intended to kill himself, or if he actually did. But I know one thing: You don’t just bounce back.