I swim breaststroke, counting to ten laps before letting myself rest. I know Richie thinks I should be playing with the kids or throwing the half-deflated ball to his dog instead of swimming back and forth. I try to keep the count straight in my head, but then I lose track and start estimating and then the boy pushes a board at my head and I stand in two feet of water. It feels strange for so much of my body to be exposed.
I hold the board steady while he kneels on it and then I let go and he attempts to stand while he’s still wobbly and falls off.
“Get your balance first,” I say. He tries again and again, doing the same thing each time, and then gives up. I look over at the girl.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
“Keeton,” Richie’s mother says, and I watch her happily admiring her legs as they chop the water. If she were mine, we’d go everywhere together; we would never be lonely and she would renew my faith in humanity.
The boy hasn’t done this for Richie.
“I hear you were in a pageant,” I say, and she says something I can’t make out and Richie says, “Tell her about your trophy, Keeton.” She uses her hands to show me—round as a globe and tall as a skyscraper. I get out and lay a towel by the side of the pool, lie on my side and watch her drown the boy’s dinosaurs while the water dries on my skin.
The next afternoon, Richie picks me up in his Bug and we drive out to the country. We pass convenience stores with handwritten signs advertising meat and cigarettes and God.
“I have anxiety,” I say. My hair blowing everywhere doesn’t help. I gather it to one side and hold it.
“Why?” he asks.
“I don’t know why.” Because we drink all the time, I think. Because I’ve been having panic attacks for years but you wouldn’t know anything about that because you don’t know anything about me. Lately I’ve been buying books about it: The Worry Cure, The Chemistry of Calm. The books say I have distorted thoughts, that these distorted thoughts create feelings, and these feelings result in my body’s responses—shortness of breath, shaky hands, upset stomach, rapid heartbeat.
“Do you want my hat?”
“I’m fine.” I twist my hair into a knot and tuck it into my shirt but it keeps blowing and I keep fooling with it and finally he takes off his hat and hands it to me. It’s an old-man hat that has come back into style, a button on top and a mesh back. I saw Brad Pitt wearing one in a picture; he was on a child’s bicycle, playing with his son in a lush green yard.
“Is my camera in the backseat?” he asks, as we pass another dilapidated barn. I try to breathe and look out the window at the wide flat yards and skinny pines, the houses set back from the road; three grubby children play on a stack of mattresses beside a mailbox. Other than the children, the country is eerily empty.
“Fuck it,” he says, turning around in someone’s driveway.
He drives up and down the main drag, my town laid out flat and ugly as a strip mall.
The patio at the Hog is mostly empty. We talk about a young lawyer-type in a suit, how pretentious it is to be wealthy and employed. Richie buys expensive shirts and then turns them inside out or cuts the labels off so he can pretend he doesn’t care about money. When the waitress comes over, we order two-for-one screwdrivers and two dozen raw oysters.
“How’d the game go?” I ask. I light one of his cigarettes and look at the guy in the suit. He really does look like a dick. His sunglasses probably cost three hundred dollars.
“We lost.”
“I thought y’all didn’t keep score.”
“There was a giant on the other team. There’s no way that kid was five—I should have asked to see his birth certificate.” The boy got discouraged and went and sat with his mother and when Richie tried to make him go back in, he cried and she took him to Pizza Hut.
Before, Richie says, the boy was handling it better than any of them, but now he wets the bed and cries about things four-year-olds shouldn’t cry about. I don’t know what’s normal for a four-year-old to cry about.
“Do you think it has anything to do with me?”
“No,” he says. “I think it has to do with him losing his home and his family and his friends.”
To stop myself from touching him, I light another cigarette; hold onto my drink.
Richie calls the principal at the school for fucked-up kids but she’s never available and she won’t call him back. I don’t know if he goes and gets fingerprinted. I don’t think he does because he doesn’t say anything about it and his fingertips look normal.
We meet for coffee before I have to teach composition to eighteen-year-olds, eighteen-year-olds who text during class and correct my grammar, who are nothing like I imagine I was at eighteen. Two weeks ago, Richie left a shiny red apple on my stoop to commemorate my first day, under an index card that said Para Tu. It’s still on my desk, but eventually I’ll have to throw the apple away and all I’ll have is a card that says For You.
I usually get there before he does but I get stopped by a train so he calls and asks what I want and I tell him an iced coffee with soy and vanilla and then I get stuck behind a truck carrying chickens. I can see him from where I’m stopped at a light, at one of the little outside tables with his coffee, his book, and his cigarette. He’s probably reading something I gave him, Jesus’ Son or The Dead Fish Museum. I think about how I never call and ask what he wants but I should because he orders his coffee hot and has to wait a long time for it to cool.
I check my face in the mirror and then walk over to him and he explains that my coffee has vanilla soy milk and vanilla syrup and it may be too vanilla-y. He got me a large. I can’t drink a large, but I like that he got me one. I open my eighteenth-century literature textbook to The Country Wife and close it again, my finger holding the place. I hate all the rhymed couplets, and I hate that whenever I point out the misogyny, the professor asks if it’s a rhetorical device—was the author really a misogynist, or was he an egalitarian trying to call attention to misogyny?
“What do you have to do today?” I ask.
“Clean the pool, go to Home Depot,” he says.
“What are you going to get at Home Depot?”
“I’m going to fix that toilet.”
I think about the classes I’m taking and the ones I’m teaching, how far behind I’m getting even though school has just begun. I check the time on my phone and then go inside to use the bathroom. The pregnant girl is working. I dated her roommate, briefly, several months ago, but she wasn’t pregnant then. I pretend I don’t know her because I screwed her roommate over, because the whole thing is something I don’t want to think about and now she works at the coffee shop closest to my house.