I’m drunk off two pints because I haven’t eaten anything today but a piece of cheese and half an avocado.
“Happy hour’s almost over,” David says, and he lets us preorder drinks, like he always does. Richie tips the difference, but that’s not the point.
“I have to use the bathroom,” I say, and I go inside, walk past the mostly empty tables and the bar, the ugly paintings and the elevator nobody uses. I stand in front of the mirror and look closely at my face and teeth to see if there’s been any deterioration since the last time I checked. I put on more eyeliner. My sister says all a girl needs is eyeliner and a good personality, and I try to follow her advice even though I know she’s completely deluded.
When I get back, Richie is talking to a guy named Peter, a guy who’s here every afternoon in his paint-and-mud-spattered clothing. I say hi and then open Richie’s silver cigarette case and take out his second-to-last cigarette. The night we met, I chain-smoked his cigarettes, though I rarely smoke, and he stopped at the gas station and bought me my own pack. The night we met, I was drunk and sucking on a piece of hard candy. I told him I was scared I was going to choke and he’d have to give me the Heimlich and he held out his hand and I spit the candy into it. Then he threw it behind his shoulder and into a bush. And later he came up to my bedroom and got on his knees and lifted my dress and I made him go home because already I loved him, because already I knew it was the kind of love where you’re so afraid they’re going to leave you give them no other choice.
LITTLE BEAR
Laura watches her kid slide down the slide again: three bumps and then dirt. It took her twenty minutes to talk him into it and now he wants to do it over and over. He has gone down the slide now thirteen times. She stands with her hands on her hips. She has lost all of the weight she gained when she had him and is proud of her body, which is mostly the same save for some stretch marks and a vagina that doesn’t appreciate her husband’s girth as much as it once did. After he comes, she finishes herself off with her pink rabbit. Sometimes, even though she’s perfectly satisfied, she does it anyway and makes him kiss her neck and ears, anywhere but her mouth.
She checks her phone. It’s after six o’clock and her husband should be home by now. She doesn’t want to go home, but neither does she want to watch her child, Kevin, named after her husband, slide down the slide again. She imagines herself alone on an island. She would love it there. And yet she knows she would grow tired of this lonesome island after a very short period of time.
“Do it!” her son says as he scurries back up. “Do it to it!” It is his new favorite phrase.
She wishes she had a friend with her but she seems to have fewer and fewer friends, or her friends are busier or maybe she’s recently realized that they like their lives a lot more than she likes hers so it’s harder for her to be around them.
His joy at the bottom of the slide astounds her at number sixteen, and she laughs as she picks him up. He feels heavier than he felt only a few hours before.
“What have I been feeding you?” she asks.
“Hot dogs,” he says, though she rarely gives him hot dogs.
She sees a bird with white wings fly into a tree and points it out to him. The temperature is cooler—fall on its way, her favorite season. But then Kevin kicks and screams to be put down and she feels dulled and slightly disoriented, as if she has no idea how she came to this place, this life.
“Again!” Kevin says. She wishes they had chosen some other name for him. There is no good nickname for Kevin. Mostly, she calls him Little Bear because the books he likes best have bears in them. Last month, they took him out to Yellowstone where they saw a black bear cross the road in front of their car, just gallop across it like a dog. It wasn’t that big or menacing-looking, though her husband reported it to be about 500 pounds. Yellowstone had been disappointing, overall. They were in their car the majority of the time, making a slow loop—first the southern one and then the northern—and traffic would frequently come to a complete halt while people got out of their vehicles to photograph elk or bison and Kevin had had to pee in bottles on two separate occasions, Laura holding his tiny uncircumcised penis. On another, they barely got him to a toilet before he had an accident. Old Faithful had not been particularly impressive, though they’d had to wait for over an hour with a gang of bikers and Japanese tourists jostling for position, and so, by the time it went off, it wouldn’t have been impressive even if it had been.
Kevin took hundreds of pictures—never of the family unless Laura specifically asked, but of the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone and Yellowstone Lake and Hayden Valley and the Grand Prismatic Spring—the best of which he posted to Instagram (hashtag nofilter, hashtag familyvacation, hashtag Yellowstone, hashtag summer). But she’d tried to be a good sport because he’d done all of the planning himself.
Their hotel room had been very nice.
“One more,” she tells him. “One more time and then I’ll make you a hot dog since you like them so much.”
“No,” he says. “Fifteen-sixteen thousand more.”
“One more,” she repeats, as he begins his ascent. She thinks of the bear again, how it trotted on all fours. Her husband hadn’t been quick enough to get that shot.
She touches her stomach, as if she has just remembered that she’s pregnant, though it isn’t possible to forget something like that. It’s always there, like a slight headache or a vaguely sore throat. She hasn’t told anyone but her husband and she only told him because she had to tell someone. She expected him to be excited or disappointed, but he was neutral. Well, he said, well, okay. That’s good, right? And later that evening, he said perhaps the children would have to go to public school now.
What happened last time: bed rest, gestational diabetes, Netflix and Hulu and HBO GO and frozen pizzas and her husband, Kevin, who was at work most of the time, whose arrival she simultaneously anticipated and dreaded. But when he was more than half an hour late, she would text him repeatedly to ask where he was and when he’d be home followed by a series of question marks.
“Okay,” Laura says, “that’s it. That was the last one.” She catches her son and picks him up.
“I don’t like you,” he says.
“Of course you like Mommy,” she says. “You love Mommy.” She smooths back his hair a little too roughly, her hand pulling through a knot. “Mommy is the best mommy in the world.”
“No.”
“You should get me a T-shirt,” she says. “That way everyone will know how good I am.”
“No,” he says again.