“I bet it evaporates before it hits the ground.”
The weatherman says it’ll be 107 again today and reminds them that the city enters stage 3 water restrictions on August 1st: no pools can be filled, no lawns watered, no cars washed except at commercial facilities or with a bucket of water filled directly from the tap. These things won’t affect them but the rolling blackouts will. So far they’ve only heard rumors of these blackouts. Darcie likes the sound of them. She went to the dollar store and bought batteries and tall Mexican candles: The Sacred Heart of Jesus, Our Lady of Guadalupe. Then the weatherman talks about the fires in surrounding counties. He gives them statistics she finds impossible to grasp—acres and miles—numbers that seem preposterously large.
“Are you comfortable?” he asks, because she keeps moving around, adjusting her pillow.
“Yes, baby. Are you?”
“Yes,” he says.
She presses her body to his so closely that she can only look at one of his eyes at a time. She stares at one of them and then the other.
“I hope our baby has your eyes,” she says. He can hardly see anything without his glasses but his eyes are bright blue, cracked and shining.
“I hope she has your wit,” he says, which is maybe the nicest thing anyone has ever said to her, but then she wonders if he finds her physical attributes lacking—what about her legs, her ass? What about her eyes? And then she’s annoyed but feels bad about it.
“Hold on,” he says, climbing over her again.
She watches him carry a chair over to the wall and stand on it, press a button on the smoke detector. It blinks twice and beeps. He makes some affirmative-sounding noises and puts the chair back where he got it. And then he talks about what they’ll do when the end comes, which body of water they’ll claim for their own. It has become his favorite topic, imagining the two of them together in a world that isn’t like this one. He tells her they’ll take Hamilton Pool, which will provide shelter and plenty of fresh water, that this is their best option. They’ll register the guns in her name.
At three o’clock, Darcie has to go to the doctor.
Since Terry’s van is on empty and they don’t want to spend the last of their money on gas, they decide to catch the bus. As soon as they step outside, they notice the haze and the smell of fire, which are new developments. Darcie is excited about these new developments until she thinks about what would actually happen if a fire came along and burned up all her stuff.
On their street, late-model SUVs are parked between cars with busted-out windows, black garbage bags filling the empty spaces. Some of the houses are in foreclosure and others are freshly painted with new roofs and yards full of flowers. The neighborhood is undergoing gentrification—about half the houses occupied by young white couples who are forever watering their tiny lawns and the other half full of people who would be described using words like habitual and chronic, with skeleton cars and underfed dogs.
Darcie doesn’t know where they fit but she likes it here. It’s like the whole world was thrown up into the air and everything got jumbled and nobody missed a beat, as her mother would say. There are roosters and chickens and dogs and babies and Volvos and former fraternity boys and gutted-out cars and old women in housedresses at three o’clock in the afternoon and it makes her feel like people might still be able to get along. The neighbors don’t get along—it isn’t uncommon to see them yelling at each other in somebody’s front yard—but it makes her feel like it’s possible.
They sit at the bus stop with a homeless guy who’s not going anywhere and a man in a pink shirt. The man in the pink shirt stares in the direction that the bus is expected to arrive. Darcie stares with him. The homeless man’s smoke blows past her face in a thick cloud. Sweat rolls down her back, her arms and legs, and she thinks about the clean white walls of their apartment, the space so small it gets nearly cold. She wishes she never had to go outside, never had to wear anything besides a tank top and panties.
Darcie takes Terry’s hand and sets it on her leg, feels the heat and roughness through her thin dress.
The man in the pink shirt stands before she sees the bus rounding the corner; it pulls up right in front of her, right on time. It’s her favorite driver, the friendly black man who waits when he sees her running and lets her off at red lights. The black women yell a lot and get mad if she asks questions and the old white men don’t even turn to look at her when she gets on.
In the waiting room, Terry reads a magazine while she drinks water and fills out paperwork. Her bladder has to be full. She drank 32 ounces an hour before, just like the instructions said, but she peed. She wasn’t supposed to pee, and now they’re waiting for her bladder to fill back up again.
She takes her insurance card out of her purse, a private policy her parents pay too much money for every month. They used to pay her Chevron bill, too, but they stopped because there’s a Chevron two blocks from their apartment and they were going there three times a day to buy cigarettes and condoms and wine and toilet paper and plastic containers of flavored noodles. It is an exceptional Chevron, filled with locally made sandwich wraps and this fancy chocolate she likes, a gold sticker sealing the box.
She leans over and looks at the magazine Terry’s reading: it’s for men who want to discover the six things they don’t know about women. Terry is a good boyfriend in most ways but he doesn’t ask her questions about herself. He doesn’t seem curious about who she is and this bothers her when she thinks about it, when she wonders if he remembers her sister’s name, or what city her parents live in. When he asks her something, it’s about the immediate future: Does she want to ride bikes? Go to the pool? Yellow Jacket? There’s a barbeque at Boone’s house. Has she met Boone yet? She would like him. He’s good people.
Darcie turns in her paperwork and gets another refill. Then she sits back down and drinks: the water sloshing in her stomach. Terry puts his hand on her thigh and squeezes down it in increments until he gets to her knee. She knocks it off and elbows him as a pissed-off woman approaches the desk. The pissed-off woman tells them she’s late because the place was hard to find and she’s never been here before, and asks why she has to pay to park in the garage. The woman is well dressed, with careful hair and makeup. Darcie thinks she must have been beautiful once, the kind of formerly beautiful woman who had to find a different way of being in the world; she probably imagines she’s standing up for herself when really she’s just making everyone’s day less pleasant.
“What if I always bleed during sex?” Darcie asks, leaning forward to sort through the fan of magazines on the table.