“Help me?”
“Something you want from out of here?” he says, smacking the glass case with his rubber-gloved fist.
I look from the men back down to the display of splayed fish. “That one,” I say to him, pointing to it. Bigger than the last one. I smile at the curved teeth in its large open mouth, the gray-white tongue lolling out a little, silvery black scales broken along the sides of its beautifully hideous face.
“What, no four ounces today?”
“That’s it. Thanks.”
As I walk away, I realize that even though I was standing there for so long, not one drop of blood has touched me. Not even a bit of pinky water. When I turn away to go back to the restaurant, I don’t even smell of fish, despite the package in my purse. I smell of apple and the Angel she dabbed in my neck hollows.
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As I approach the table, I reach for my mother’s glass of cava and nearly collapse into the oysters on ice, but he catches me with a firm grip.
“Careful there,” Tom mumbles.
“Where did you disappear to?” my mother asks me.
“I told you. Toilet,” I say, falling back into my chair. Even seated, I’m spinning. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, I feel the tug of the dark water. I stare at the side of his face, hoping he’ll turn toward me, steady me, but he keeps his gaze focused on my mother, the window, some distant point I can’t fathom. I paw through my purse for a lighter, while the floor opens up beside me.
“Thought you’d fallen down it, didn’t we?” my mother says, looking at Tom, who smiles politely. She reaches across the table and holds a tea light up to my unlit tip.
“We did,” Tom says, taking my hand, not looking at me.
Later, he offers to take a picture of us with my mother’s disposable while there’s still some light in the sky.
“Could you?” she says.
“Okay, now lean in. A little closer together so I can get you both in.” But no matter how close together he brings us with his hands, my mother and I still don’t touch.
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“He’s a keeper,” my mother says to me while she watches me pack Sunday morning. All the satiny strappy shoes I’ll never wear again. Clothes that will ring wrong against my skin in terms of texture, in terms of color, the minute she isn’t there to tap her toes and clap for me, like the sight of me is music, is the song she loves best. After we’re done, we go to her balcony and have coffee, sit amid the dead stargazers in their stale green water. Through her sliding glass door that looks into the living room, we stare at his sleeping body curled on her sofa bed like we stared at the chimps at the zoo earlier this week. “Hang on to him,” she says.
“I will,” I say. Last night, after she went to bed, I reached for him and he turned away from me. I lay there awake beside him, watching the silent rise and fall of his body, listening to her gasp for breath in the next room. I thought of me in her ideas of sexy pressed up against a wall full of hooks. Making him destroy all the bits of gauze and lace with his hands and his lips until I’m a thing just peeled and blazing. And he either doesn’t mind or doesn’t see the traces of the girl I was before. Doesn’t mind or doesn’t see the raised skin and the slack skin. He doesn’t see because we’re in the dark of the truck or he doesn’t care. He says the word sexy into the whorl of my ear like it’s a live thing, a freshly shucked pearl. A secret I’ve pulled out of him in spite of himself, like sweet deep water from a well.
“He almost didn’t recognize you, I’ll bet,” my mother says now, fishing.
What are you wearing anyway? That a new dress? he asked me later that night, when we were alone on my mother’s balcony. I was smoking and he was staring out at the lake, keeping me company.
You don’t like it?
I like it. Just I’ve never seen you in anything like it. It’s . . . intense. He smiled. It just doesn’t really look like you, that’s all.
I looked at him looking at the water. I can change, I said.
Don’t change. Why would you change?
I could feel myself start to cry, so I turned away and looked at the lake too. Tom reached over and took my cigarette from me. He inhaled shallowly, like a nonsmoker, coughing a little, holding it wrong.
When I was a kid, he said, my dad would take me to the barber every four weeks and force me to get this buzz cut like he had in the air force. I hated it so much and finally one day, I told him. Dad, I hate this.
What happened?
Tom took another drag of the cigarette. He called me an asshole. Right there in front of the barber and all these old men getting their hair cut.
What? But you were just a kid. I looked at his sandy hair, chin length and unbrushed.
That was my dad. He took one more drag, coughed and handed it back. It’s a nice color on you. It really is.
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