“See?” she says, churning the water more forcefully. “We all steal something.”
“Okay, so here’s what you’re going to do—you’re going to keep all of the furniture and everything else and not feel bad about it. And then you’re going to cut the cards up. If you start returning stuff it might look suspicious.”
“I didn’t think about that,” she says, “but you’re right. I better not return anything.”
“Now stop thinking about it. I give you permission to stop thinking about it.”
Her arms go still but the waves keep coming.
Aggie gives me pills; this is why I’m friends with her. Otherwise, I wouldn’t drive all the way to Round Rock to swim in her pool. My apartment complex has its own pool where I swim laps back and forth and help the maintenance man with small jobs. “Will you take the hose out in half an hour?” he might ask, and I am happy to be given such a reasonable and achievable task. For the most part, I hoard the pills because I like having them, same as I like having extra toilet paper and a pantry full of nonperishable food items. I collect pill cases and put them in there all blue and white and yellow and they’re so pretty. She passes them across the table to me in restaurants—The Cheesecake Factory, Chili’s, cavernous Mexican places with half-price margaritas—like they’re Tylenol or loose change. Sometimes she gives me an entire bottle and I just stick it in my purse and try not to look around, but then I do. I can’t help it. I look around and people look at me because I’m looking at them and one time I dropped the bottle and it rolled into someone’s foot.
My boyfriend would break up with me if he knew, if he found them hidden in the suitcase where I keep my illicit things. He doesn’t do drugs or smoke cigarettes and only drinks in moderation. This morning he got angry with me about the way I squeeze my toothpaste. I don’t squeeze it right, from the bottom up. He isn’t the first one to mention it but it seems to bother him more than the others and I wonder why it’s so important. It’s just toothpaste. Luckily he lives out of town and I don’t see him that often. Ten minutes after he left, I was on my way to Round Rock, stopping at the grocery store to pee and pick up cookies before getting lost in Aggie’s neighborhood, which looks like all of the surrounding neighborhoods, and then parking in front of her house that looks like all of the other houses, everything beige and neat and treeless. The curtains closed. This is the place you move if you really want to disappear.
I climb back onto the raft—it is getting to be a desperate situation. I need another beer but I don’t want to get out and dry myself off and make my way into the kitchen, encountering Aggie’s husband on the couch, which seems perfectly nice enough, just like a couch. I imagine standing before the enormous TV, baseball or golf, and watching with him for a moment to be polite. But a few minutes later he comes out and asks if the ladies need anything.
“Will you get me another? Do you mind that I’m drinking all your beer?”
He doesn’t mind. I smile and row myself over, set my empty down and wait.
“It’s Coors,” George says, as if I can’t see that it’s Coors. He removes my huggie from the empty can and puts it on the fresh one. “We’re out of Heineken.”
“This is great. Perfect.”
“Holler if you need another.”
I thank him and push off. George doesn’t know about the credit cards. He would kill her, she says, or beat her to a pulp. But where does he think the money’s coming from? Perhaps she told him her mother had cashed in a policy or had an emergency savings account they didn’t know about. Perhaps he trusts her.
George is older than Aggie by ten years, his hair gray and bushy, and Aggie is older than me by another ten, or twelve. He must wonder why I’m friends with his wife. I can’t look at him without thinking about the things I know that he doesn’t know—that she steals—not just this credit card scam but from stores, too. She gets away with it, she says, because she doesn’t look the type; frequently, she’s with her children. And she contacts men over the internet and goes over to their houses or meets them in motel rooms because George can’t get it up anymore. I’ve told her that this is insanely dangerous and irresponsible, but I like hearing about these men.
Aggie is a storyteller, describing the situations in great detail: how they feel the need to explain themselves, how she goes through their things when they’re in the bathroom or taking a shower. They leave their wallets on the counter, along with their keys. She could take anything, and she does, though she carefully considers whether it is something that might be noticed. She shows me these tokens—voter ID cards and movie stubs and matches—spread out on her bed when we lock the door from George and the children. They remind me of the souvenirs of serial killers.
Mostly I’m surprised that they go through with it, every time. Never has a man taken a look at her and backed out. Never has Aggie driven somewhere, parked, and decided against it, opting instead for a cheeseburger and a milkshake.
There was an accident years ago. I know the basics: a car crash; someone died. She was in a coma for a long time and they didn’t think she’d come out of it and then she did. I didn’t know her before the accident but it’s clear she’s not the person she would have been. There are her eyes, for one, which aren’t like regular eyes. And there is the way her brain works, which is not like a regular brain, and there are all of the pills, which she began taking in order to cope.
I had a friend once who was divorcing her husband because she despised him and then she had a seizure and forgot that she despised him and called the divorce off. Her husband was still the same guy he’d always been but her brain had been reset to the time she’d met him, back when he was her one and only, when she couldn’t remember all of the things that had happened in between falling love and filing for divorce.
When I think of the Aggie I know and the Aggie I might have known, I think of this friend I’m no longer friends with and whether I would still be friends with her if she hadn’t had the seizure.
Alexander screams because he sees a salamander. He loves the baby salamander. He gets down on all fours to look at it and then Nathan scrambles out of the pool and kneels beside him and they give us updates about its movement. They wonder where his family is and if he’s lost, if he’s sad. Alexander asks if they should kill him, if they should put him out of his misery, and this makes me reconsider Alexander and my blanket dismissal of him.
Aggie takes hold of my raft, pushing me back and forth in a lulling, pleasant motion.
“Want me to blow it back up for you?” she asks.