“That’s too bad,” he said, sounding sad and tired. “Because I’ll be thinking about you. You really are just so beautiful, Lay—”
I hung up. Or disconnected or whatever. I ended the goddamn call and I wished I could call him back so I could end it again.
Fuck you, you fucking fuck, I thought, and threw the phone back into the drawer and slammed it shut. But the stupid thing was so cheap—the whole goddamn RV was a piece of shit ready to fall apart in the next high wind—that the drawer slid back open.
So I slammed it again. And again.
And then it broke.
And so did I. I collapsed back down on the bed, in pieces.
When Mom got angry, the whole ranch cowered. I scurried away, trying so hard to anticipate and make right whatever might be the next thing to set her off. It was a useless effort, of course. On those days, the earth didn’t spin right. The wind was all wrong.
Even the cows looked away when she walked by.
Smith stopped coming to the house for chess games.
My mom was tiny. Like five foot nothing. Yet when she was angry like that, she was a giant. Blocking out the sun.
The next day, after Dylan broke up with me…or whatever, whatever that was…I was that way. The ground shook under my feet as I stomped out of my trailer.
“Whoa-ho!” Joan said as I walked past her trailer. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Boyfriend didn’t like your little game last night?”
She was sitting back on her deck in that silky green robe, the ashtray next to her elbow full of cigarettes. Her beauty was different in the early sunlight.
“What’s wrong?” I snapped, in probably the worst effort ever to get a person to open up.
“With me?” Joan asked.
“Yeah, you look like shit.”
“What got you in a snit?” she asked with a smile that indicated my bad mood was entertaining.
“Life, Joan. Life got me in a snit. Now why do you look like—”
The front door of her trailer opened and out walked the guy from weeks ago. The hairy guy with the skeevy wink and smile. This time, though, he wasn’t winking or smiling.
“We’re good,” he said to Joan as if answering a question I didn’t hear her ask.
“Fine,” Joan said. “See you.”
The guy left with barely a backward glance toward me and Joan took a long drag on her cigarette like nothing was the matter.
Fine. We all had to pretend something, didn’t we? Out here in this shitty trailer park. We all had to pretend something so we didn’t look too hard at what a mess our lives were. We were all excellent editors of our own selves.
“I’m going to town,” I told her. “You need anything?”
“You’re not working?”
“It’s fucking Saturday, Joan. I’m taking a day.”
Joan held up her hands like I had a gun but she was still grinning at me. “I’m fine,” she said. “I don’t need a thing.”
I barely nodded at her and I walked over to Ben’s trailer and pounded on the shitty screen door.
It took a few minutes but Ben showed up. He looked better than he did yesterday, largely because he’d changed his shirt. He wore one of his unwrinkled tee shirts today and he’d showered.
“You look better.”
“I feel better.”
I remembered all the reasons why I was supposed to stay away from him. The warnings. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything. My entire life I’d spent caring…soaking up every mood, decoding every silence. So attuned to everyone else around me that I’d practically evaporated.
And I was done with that.
“You need anything?”
He shook his head and I nodded, swallowing back my need to be sure he was all right, to take on his illness like it was my own despite all the shit I thought I knew about him.
“Okay, see you.” I lifted my hand in a wave and jumped down off the small step, but then I turned back around.
“Ben,” I said. “Have you seen a doctor?”
The screen was a shadow over his face. “Yeah. Lots of them,” he said and closed the solid door.
Right, I thought. Not my business.