Things We Didn't Say

Chapter 34

Casey



Yes! Exactly!” Mallory slaps her hand on the kitchen table so hard I jump. “He’s so nitpicky. Like it matters how you load a dishwasher, especially when he’s not the one unloading it.”

Lucinda Williams sings from the CD player, “It’s a real love, a real love . . .” We have moved on to potato chips and dip in the kitchen, under a circle of yellow light from the hanging fixture.

I should feel bad about this. Unloading to his ex-wife, of all people. But it feels like I’ve been straining under the pressure of holding stuff in, and now I finally let it go and the relief is so powerful I could weep. I don’t have any girlfriends anymore, not since I left JinxCorp. No one I know from school will talk to me since I dumped Pete. I don’t even have Billy, who I think would have understood, despite not being a wife.

The dishwasher thing almost made me start throwing plates on the floor. I’d had a horrid day. Jewel was home sick with an earache, and I was trying to program a database for a grouchy, demanding client, and then I had to arrange a new ride home for Angel when her carpool canceled, and Michael was working late and came in just as I was loading the dishwasher.

I didn’t get a “Hi honey” or “How was your day?” or anything. He hung up his coat, looked at me, and said, “Those pans will never get clean in there, you have to scrub them in the sink.”

I told him I’d use the pots and pans setting.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, sighing. “And all the bits of food will get caked on there and it will be twice as hard to scrub, later.”

I tell Mallory now, “I used to think I was lucky that he’s so domestic, but it’s like, everything has to be done exactly his way. He gets after me about the way I fold the socks, too.”

“It’s like living with your parents, isn’t it?”

“I went on strike for a couple days. I figured if he was going to nitpick how I did stuff, he could do it himself. But he was working so hard it just didn’t get done, and I felt bad for the kids not having clean laundry. It’s not their fault.”

“Yeah, kids. They mess up all the best revenge plans.” Mallory winks at me.

“The bitch of it is? He was right about the dishwasher. I had to spend twenty minutes scrubbing the stupid pans the next day.”

Mallory flops her head down on her arms. “Oh, the rightness!” she says, her voice muffled by the table. Then she pops up again. “My God, he’s right all the time. I wish he were a f*ck-up, you know? So then I could be relieved at not being awful in comparison.”

I nod, knowing what she means. It’s hard enough for me, and I’m a pretty stable person. These days, anyway. As far as Michael knows.

She goes on, “I used to try to lighten him up, but whenever he relaxes, he always assumes the world is going to crash down on him. And look what happens? Dylan ran away anyway. You can’t control this kind of thing, no matter what kind of grip you have.” Mallory shakes her head suddenly. “Enough. Tired of thinking about it now. Want something to drink? I’m thirsty.”

“Sure.”

She roots around in a paper bag on the counter I hadn’t noticed before. She must have ducked out when I was napping.

She smacks a bottle of Jack on the counter. The sound is like a gunshot.

“No thanks.” My voice comes out funny. Overly high, fake-casual.

“Aw, what’ll it hurt? The girls are asleep, the guys won’t be back for hours. Just a nightcap to shake off this day.”

“I thought you gave it up?”

“Not entirely, one hundred percent. Just . . . mostly. But today,” she says as she twists off the cap, “is an exceptional day.”

There’s nothing I want more than to call Tony right now. Or to see Michael, to hear him tell me that we’re going to get married and pick a date and have a baby.

A baby. I can hold on to that. I close my eyes for a moment and imagine a pink receiving blanket, tiny fists pinwheeling in the air. Toes like little round peas. Can’t have that while drunk. I can’t.

“You okay?” asks Mallory, and because I can’t tell her, I say, “Yep, just really tired.”

But I can’t go to bed, either. I can imagine crawling into bed, and Mallory going to sleep, and then it’s just me and a bottle of Jack in a dark, quiet house.

Mallory pours herself some. “Oh, I’m going to get some Coke.” She turns to the fridge.

Despite the agony it will be to watch her drink and not have some, I’m relieved to see things slipping back into their normal pattern. She was acting so normal and regular I was beginning to think I’d gone through the looking glass.

“So, why don’t you drink, anyway?”

I shrug. “No reason.”

“Yeah, right, come on. There’s always a reason. I don’t care, Casey. I’m just asking.”

She’s not going to let this go. I have to give her something, something plausible, something that won’t indict me.

“Well, my brother. He died, and it involved drinking, so . . . It’s just not the same anymore.”

This is sort of true.

Mallory’s face goes soft. She reaches out and puts her hand on my arm. Her fingernails are all ragged, but her touch is gentle. For a moment I wonder how I will explain to Michael that I acknowledged my brother first to his ex-wife, before ever telling him. For a long time I assumed he’d dump me, and I’d never have to talk about Billy. Then he proposed. After that, I could never find a moment when the words would come. How could I tell him that story without telling him what I really was?

Too late now, anyway. Mallory leans forward on her elbows, staring at me. Waiting.

So I start my story, and in doing so it’s like Billy is right there with me in the kitchen, nodding his head along, tipping the chair back on its rear legs, which drove our mom insane. I can even smell that stupid Polo cologne he wore, trying to cover up the cigarette smoke.

It was one of those random, accidental parties, where people just started drifting toward a particular house in town. There was a game on TV. People were playing cards in the kitchen, but mostly everyone was just lying around, draped on each other like housecats.

This was Lisa’s place, and we could still smoke there. A haze hung in the room. The doors and windows were open to the summer outside. It was one of those delicious nights when the evening air is a pleasant kind of cool.

Someone started a bonfire outside. I, myself, was at that stage of drunk where I felt so relaxed I was made of liquid, and walked around smiling at everyone. I wandered from the house out to the bonfire and plopped myself in Pete’s lap, tipping us both over in the aluminum lawn chair he’d been sitting in. We all found this hysterical. We detangled, and I picked leaves out of my hair. This time I sat down with exaggerated care, which we all found hysterical once more.

I’m telling Mallory about the poker game that started it all, but my memory is working on another level, going over scenes I much prefer to linger on, scenes that are too private to share. Pete’s strong arm behind my back as I perched sideways on his lap, curled up. His callused fingers stroking my waist inside my T-shirt. The smell of his cigarettes mixed with aftershave, which was not lovely but comforting.

It was just after my college graduation, and that may have been the last moment I was purely happy.

We all heard a ruckus after that. As the noise from the house increased, our talk around the bonfire died away, and Pete removed me carefully from his lap. He exchanged looks with several other men, and they strode off in a pack. The women followed, also swapping looks.

Inside, my brother was wrestling with someone on the kitchen floor, the rest of the party in a circle around him. It was mostly women in the circle, who were ineffectually yelling at Billy and the other guy, someone I didn’t recognize.

Pete and the others strode up and with much tussling and struggle, pulled the two apart. In the melee, someone knocked over the kitchen table. Poker money and cards scattered.

“What the f*ck is the problem!” yelled my cousin Rick.

Billy angled forward at his foe. I could see the bulging veins in his arms from all the way across the room. “You take it back,” he said to the man.

“You’re psycho,” the guy replied. “I was just jokin’ around.”

Billy lunged again, and that’s when I recognized him, the other guy. He’d grabbed my ass at the bar the previous week.

“Okay,” the guy said. “Fine, fine. I take it back. Sorry. Jesus.”

The hands holding Billy back relaxed. There was some dusting off among all the men, Billy and the ass-grabber, and the men who pried them apart. Someone righted the table.

Lisa finally appeared from a back room where she’d been screwing her boyfriend, hollering about her kitchen being a mess and how she didn’t want any fighting in her place. “I’ve got valuable things in here!” she shrieked, and lots of us giggled at that. Yeah, her shot glass collection. So precious.

“No problem, Lisa,” said the ass-grabber. “I was just telling Billy what a good f*ck his sister is.”

Billy was across the room before anyone could blink, and then it was more prying-off and tussling.

Lisa yelled at them to get out, get the hell out.

I scrunch my eyes before I tell this next part to Mallory. She leans forward and squeezes my wrist. I look at her, and she bites her lip a little, shakes her head.

So Billy took off. He didn’t have a car, having smashed his up over the winter. He used to get everywhere on his bike, an old racing-style ten-speed you had to ride all bent over, only he’d perfected the art of riding it without holding on.

I assumed he’d just go outside, maybe head a few doors down to his friend Larry’s house, cool off.

Pete returned to the bonfire, bringing me along with him, his arm around my waist.

When we heard the sirens a few minutes later, no one even looked up.

Then Larry burst through the door, screaming, “Billy’s been hit by a car!”

I was drunker by then, so I tripped three times running down the road.

The cops wouldn’t let me near him.

It was dark, the road was narrow. The driver—a second-shifter coming home from work—was sober as a stone and just plain never saw him. The next day’s paper said, “Cyclist Killed in Laingsburg,” and police said that according to witnesses, he’d decided to go out for a refreshing nighttime ride.

“Refreshing nighttime ride,” I say to Mallory. “I laughed at that. Who rides for refreshment that time of night, I ask you?”

I imagine Billy next to me, laughing, too.

Mallory says, “But honey, if the other driver was sober, why does that mean you don’t drink?”

“My brother got in a fight because he was drunk, got thrown out because he was drunk, went on a frickin’ bike ride at midnight in the dark on a two-lane rural road with a gravel shoulder because he was drunk. He probably swerved in front of the car, too. Alcohol was not a factor, it was everything. Alcohol killed him.”

In the version of the story I’m telling Mallory, this is when I quit drinking. This is when I realize just how much I’ve been swilling, not just me but everyone around me, and how normal it all got to seem but how unhealthy it must be. I turn my back on it all and move on.

This is where I would be very brave and smart. If only that were true.

Instead, I drank more, and so did everyone else. We managed to hold off during the church service and the graveside ceremony, but back at the house, aside from the dark suits and dresses, the wake would have been indistinguishable from a Super Bowl party.

Pete had been distant since the accident. Girl crying had always freaked him out, and every sober minute, I was crying and sick with blame. Pete was inadequate to the task of convincing me otherwise.

Billy had gotten in a fight defending my honor, and then thrown out of the house over that fight and died.

Lisa felt no guilt, and for this I hated her.

I sat at the wake, sipping a Miller, watching her talking to her boyfriend and smiling. If she hadn’t made him leave, he wouldn’t be dead.

It was ill-advised of me to tell her this, I realize now. And “tell” isn’t the right word. “Scream semicoherently” is closer to the truth.

But it was not one of Pete’s more sensitive moments when he got between us and took Lisa’s side, telling me in front of everyone—at my brother’s funeral—that I was being a crazy bitch.

Lisa started crying then, clung to Pete’s arm, and turned in to his chest. He wrapped his arm around her and left me, his grieving girlfriend, to stand alone in a circle of gaping mourners.

My mother missed all this. She was in the kitchen, having thrown herself into cooking and hostessing. My dad was out back with the older men, talking baseball and trying not to think about why he was wearing a tie.

On Monday I took a bus to Grand Rapids, renting the first apartment I could manage with my savings, temping as an office worker until I found my job at JinxCorp.

Pete and I reconciled more or less, supposedly. He sent a dozen roses with an apology note, which I assume his sister scripted for him. To say it was out of character doesn’t even come close.

I broke up with him by e-mail a few months later, already screwing other people on my own nights out. He took up with Lisa eventually, after loudly complaining to anyone who would listen how “cold” I’d been.

In the story of our couplehood back home, I became the villain, the one who took off for the big city and cruelly disposed of my hick boyfriend, the one that I was expected to marry. Not to mention I abandoned my grieving parents.

My mother reminds me occasionally that Pete is single again, and asks about me all the time. Pete has no children, she likes to say. Pete is your own age. Pete has a good job working on campus at Michigan State. Being a custodian is honorable work, she tells me, as if I’d ever said otherwise.

In the version I’m telling Mallory, I just say we had a fight at the funeral and broke up.

Mallory stands up and gestures for me to do the same. I stand as well, and she wraps her arms around me.

This is surreal.

But it’s kind of sweet, too, and maybe it’s the exhaustion, or the aftershock from spilling this story, but a few tears spill out before I can stop them.

She sets me back and makes as if to wipe off my face, but I flinch away and do it myself.

She turns from me to refill her glass at the counter. “You know, hon,” she says, getting another glass down from the cupboard, “you don’t have to punish yourself. You were both young, just kids, really, you and Billy. You didn’t do anything wrong. Billy didn’t either, did he? You are way too hard on yourself, and I don’t know if that’s your personality, or if Michael did that to you with his expectations, which believe me, I know are impossible. But we’ve been through hell today. The girls are fine. It’s late. Have a drink to unwind so you can sleep.” She turns to face me, one hand on her hip, head tipped at a sympathetic angle. “Because, sweetie, you look awful.”

I laugh, feeling a little dizzy. I settle back into my chair. The lack of sleep crashes on me then, like the ceiling falling in. But mentally I’m sharply alert, my mind skipping from one thing to another: Billy, Michael, Pete, Dylan, all the men who have complicated my life.

Mallory pushes a glass of Jack and Coke across the table. “Go on. After what you’ve been through? You deserve it.”

I reach out my hand and stroke the cool side of the glass. The sharp tang of the smell takes me right back to that velvety, unwound feeling after a drink or two. I feel Billy next to me, raising his own drink as always, nodding his encouragement. Live a little, Sprite.