At the house, I put my swimsuit back on and go into his mother’s room to use the bathroom—she’s in Tupelo this weekend, at a beauty pageant with Richie’s sister and her two girls. The toilet across the hall from the guest room doesn’t flush right and sometimes I have to fill the bucket with water and pour it into the tank and I don’t like to stay in the bathroom that long. If I don’t shit, if I’m pretty and don’t ask too many questions, he’ll love me. He’ll tell me things—his thoughts and ideas, where his money comes from, what he does when I’m not around. Now he just tells me the worst things that have happened to him, same as he tells everyone, like the story of his father’s race car going round and round the track and then crashing into a wall in a burst of flames as his entire family watched. He gets angry when people touch his arm, or look at him a certain way, and it makes everyone fall in love with him.
I peel the avocados with my fingers while he marinates fish, cuts the steak into strips. I dice onions and tomatoes and mash it together with a fork, add garlic salt and lime. Richie uses a separate bowl for everything: one for the sour cream, one for the chopped tomatoes, one for the shredded cheese, one for the salsa.
The boy dips an edge of a tortilla chip into the salsa, careful not to get any chunks.
“You don’t like tomatoes?” I ask. He doesn’t respond. “Tomatoes are the most amazing food ever.” He’s watching Wolverine versus the Incredible Hulk on the small television.
“Try the guacamole,” Richie says. “Alice made it for you.”
“Noooo,” he says. He looks at me and then looks back at the TV: the Incredible Hulk smashes Wolverine with a boulder, and after the Hulk walks away, Wolverine—fully recuperated, not a scratch on him—surprises him from behind. Then they switch off.
“Which one is the good guy?” I ask, and I think about this guy I used to like, a former coworker I’d hung out with on breaks, and how I thought he was going to be my boyfriend but then he started dating a twenty-two-year-old—schooling her in his various interests: scotch and acupuncture and Tai Chi, things I might have actually liked to know something about. I think of the time I straddled him at a party, how I hadn’t felt anything.
“Wolverine,” the boy says.
“I thought the Incredible Hulk was a regular person, like a researcher or something.”
“They’re both government experiments gone wrong,” Richie says.
“Wolverine versus Thor is next,” the boy tells me, and Richie takes the fish outside to the grill. I watch him from the window, look at the sky: it looks like rain. I wonder what we’ll do then, how we will entertain each other.
That night, the three of us watch a show on the Discovery Channel about a prehistoric creature that lived in the water. From above, they show a ship and then a humongous black thing swimming into the picture; it could tump it easily if it bothered: everybody dead. They tell us how the creature lived, how it might have died: diseases, sharks. Then they move on to a bird that was shaped like a flamingo but much larger, that could run fast and crush an animal’s skull with one crack of its beak, but it hunted alone and every time it laid its eggs, wolves would eat them. The scientist-people recreate the bird in steel and show its beak coming down on a honeydew melon. They tell us that the honeydew melon has the same consistency as the gray matter in our brains, which impresses the boy, but Richie and I get bored with the repetition, the same few scenes that stretch the show into an hour-long time slot. He reads Time magazine, a winding line of laid-off people on the cover, and I pick up one of his mother’s watercolor books. It’s an old lady book with step-by-step instructions and boring still-lifes. His mother probably paints fruit bowls and pastoral scenes—she is probably happy painting fruit bowls and pastoral scenes. I wonder what it would be like in her head—occasionally there’d be a thought like I am nearly out of detergent and then she’d write it on a list and it would go away. And then maybe an hour later, another thought would come along, something like I wonder what comes on television tonight and she’d get out the TV Guide. I wonder if she ever closes her eyes and sees the car going around the track, slamming into the wall.
When the show is over, Richie takes the boy to use the bathroom. Lately the boy has been peeing in the bed and they wake up with their legs wet. Every time he tells me about the boy peeing on him, I recall a drunken night in high school when a friend and I slept in my twin bed and I peed and blamed it on her. I told the same girl that the Ouija board said she was going to die in an accident nearly a year into the future and gave her the date. Only in retrospect is it possible to see I was a bully. I never thought of myself that way at all.
I pick up the remote control and flip stations, check out the reality TV shows I’ve been missing. At home, I don’t have cable; I only have a small stack of DVDs I’ve seen so many times I have them memorized: The Virgin Suicides, The Big Lebowski, American Beauty, Thank You for Smoking. Sometimes I consider how The Dude would react, how he’d adhere to a strict drug regimen and go bowling.
They come back into the den and I look up at them and smile.
“Tell Alice good night,” Richie says.
“Good night,” the boy says. He puts his arms around me and I smell his soapy-clean hair and skin, then they go back to their bedroom where Richie reads to him from the book the boy gave him for Father’s Day. On the cover, a father bear squeezes his cub, a pink heart above their heads.
I watch the dogs at the door, Richie’s dumb friendly one and his mother’s old deaf one that can’t hear itself whine, and tiptoe into the kitchen to get a beer, open the drawer to look for a bottle opener. I’m trying to be quiet because I want the boy to go to sleep but I’m making a racket. Finally I find one and open the bottle, leave the top on the counter. Then I go back into the den and read about the laid-off people, everyday people who probably did their jobs as well as all of the other fuckups out there, but I can’t concentrate because I start thinking about Richie and how I told him I loved him again—an accident—and how he held my face so I’d have to look him in the eyes and said, “And you know how I feel about you.”
When I’m sure they’re both asleep, I creep over to the doorway and find them facing away from me, Richie’s arm around the boy. I touch my boyfriend and he opens his eyes. He follows me into the den, puts his arms around my waist and rests his head on my shoulder.
“Walk me out?” I say.
“You can stay here,” he says.
“I know, but I need to go home.” I don’t like sleeping in his mother’s guest room, waking up alone in a bed decorated with seashells, paintings of boats and empty beach chairs on the walls.
We stand in the driveway and kiss. Then I get in my car and roll down the window.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he says.
I wonder if leaving will make him love me more. Maybe he’ll feel like I’m slipping away, that I’ll find someone else to watch television with and wander through the aisles of Winn-Dixie. I back out of the driveway, my windshield so foggy I can barely see. I try wiping it with my hand and then put the defrost on full blast and still nothing.
A policeman turns out of the gas station and follows me slowly across the bridge before turning off. He stays in his town, which is a nicer town separated from mine by a bridge.