Always Happy Hour: Stories
Mary Miller
The parking lot after a movie is the broken open world.
—Mark Leidner,
“Love in the Time of Whatever Disease This Is”
INSTRUCTIONS
He leaves her a series of drawings on a sheet of typing paper. It must have taken him a long time—he probably got off to a late start. She only wanted to know the code to the laundry room, where his mailbox key is.
She lies in bed with his cats, studying it. At the top, there is a banner like the kind waving behind an airplane, advertising two-for-one drink specials at the beach: In the event of my unlikely death, and underneath it a headstone: Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt. There’s a single flower next to the headstone, a few wisps of grass. There are boxes labeled GATOS, COFFEE, PAR AVION, BASURA, and one with nothing but a question mark. In the box labeled PAR AVION, he tells her that the mail key is hanging next to the brass knuckles. The GATOS section takes up most of the left side. There’s a diagram of a litter box showing how the pee clumps and advising her to scoop at least twice a day so the cats “don’t get weird.” BASURA . . . in the parking lot. Does he think she’s incapable of taking out the trash and feeding some cats?
She gets out of bed and goes to the kitchen to drink the last of his coffee, which is cold, so she puts ice cubes in it, milk and sugar. She stirs it with a clean spoon and places the spoon in the sink. Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, she thinks, standing there in her socks.
She opens his cabinets to look at the same things that are always in his cabinets and which are entirely more interesting than the things in her own. There are still plenty of candy bars that his aunt brought back from New Zealand, frogs on the wrappers. There are Tic Tacs and many bottles of olive oil and spices from the Mediterranean grocery. Above his refrigerator, four boxes of cereal. She will eat cereal and candy bars and pick up sandwiches from Little Deli. She’ll ride his stationary bike while watching The Office and Girls. Already, she misses her apartment with all of her books, and her balcony where she can smoke without the old ladies watching her, the cats gazing at her from their perch.
She finishes her coffee and puts the cup in the sink next to the spoon. Despite the COFFEE box, and the instructions therein (just YouTube CHEMEX, filters above sink), she won’t drink it at his house. He has too many ways of making it, all of which seem unnecessarily difficult and time-consuming.
She puts her shoes back on and tells the cats goodbye. She likes these cats only because they are his, because their presence makes them more like a family. They creep around the apartment at night searching for something to knock over, wake her up early to eat. When she’s reading in bed, they stick their nails into the pages of her book one at a time and pause to observe her reaction.
She drives to work thinking about the things she knows that have hurt him: his cousin’s death, broken bones, the time he swallowed a bunch of pills and drank too much vodka because he was young and overseas. She thinks about the things that have hurt her and then she thinks about beauty and how little of it she sees in even beautiful things. She wonders if people who’ve been hurt more see more beauty. She wonders how a few strung-together words can seem so meaningful when she doesn’t believe them at all.
At lunch, she texts her boyfriend to ask if he wrote it.
It’s from Slaughterhouse-Five, he texts back.
Of course it is. It’s the kind of thing hipsters tattoo on their arms—The heart is a lonely hunter, Not all who wander are lost, Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.
She’s disappointed but should have caught the allusion.
A few hours later, she’s back at his apartment. She accepts a stack of coupons from his next-door neighbor as she unlocks the door.
“Thank you,” she says. “This is great.”
The woman seems disappointed; she isn’t as effusive, as excited, as she should be. “Those are free,” the woman says, “the best barbeque sandwich in town.”
She thanks the woman again and tells her she’ll definitely use them.
“If you’re not going to use them, just give them back.”
“I’ll definitely use them,” she repeats, as she closes the door and locks it. She draws the blinds, turns on all the lights.
She throws the coupons away. She doesn’t like barbeque, how everyone is always talking about the best barbeque in the city. She has never waited in a long line at Franklin’s, surrounded by people in lawn chairs sipping from to-go cups, or driven miles and miles out into the country to go to some obscure shack for something more authentic.
She scoops out the litter box and feeds the cats, studies the drawings again—if she’s reading it correctly, her boyfriend feeds them four times a day, a steady stream of food in their shared bowl. Tomorrow she’ll do better. At the bottom of the paper there are hearts—six of them—and three Love You’s . . . She considers the difference between Love you and I love you. Love you is what she tells her friends when she has to get off the phone abruptly or cancel plans. In this case, she feels he used Love you because it looked better, which is something her boyfriend is always conscious of—everything carefully considered and thought out. She decided a long time ago she didn’t want to be a careful person, that she didn’t want to live her life constantly worrying about what other people thought of her. Of course she does worry, she does nothing but worry, and all her lack of care amounts to is that she offends people constantly and tests them with her inappropriateness and expects them to love her for it.
She drags around a feather on a stick, turns to look at the cats: they stare at her without blinking or averting their gaze. She puts the feather in the male’s face, drops it to his nose, and he paws at it a few times before giving up. She kneels and crooks her finger at them like her boyfriend does. They come forward to bump her with their foreheads and she gets into bed, feels the small hairs tickling her face. They climb around her purring, louder and louder, and she wonders if she could put them in her car and take them to her apartment. Cats don’t travel well, she recalls her boyfriend saying. They scream and shit everywhere.