“Fine, then,” I told her.
I walked across the room and worked my socked feet into my tennis shoes on the skewed welcome mat. Then I spun the handle on the front door, opening it up to the harsh bright rectangle of summer. Looked back once at Patra, in her wrinkled T-shirt by the counter. She was soundlessly twisting her lips—slowly, weirdly—mouthing thank you in a way that made me want to turn back and force her to speak out loud. But then I was gone. Outside on the driveway it was hot already. I took a few steps into the woods, as if on my way home, and then, abruptly, squatted down and lifted the granite stone on the edge of the trail. Worms waved blindly up. Tiny, translucent beetles moved in stupid circles. Everything was squirming and pulsing piteously, but there were the bills Patra had left, weeks ago. They were sodden and damp, but they were real money. I stuffed them in my pocket and took off at a sprint.
15
FOR THREE YEARS AFTER HIGH SCHOOL I TOOK CLASSES AT ITASCA COMMUNITY COLLEGE IN GRAND RAPIDS. I worked at a pizzeria-bar called The Binge that had brown vinyl booths and wine-bottle vases plugged with plastic carnations. The only requirements for the job were to wear black shorts, even in winter, and to keep the salad bar stocked with chopped lettuce and shaved carrots. During that time I saved money for a down payment on an ‘88 Chevy Corsica, and in the years after I bought that car I lived in Duluth, where I worked retail and cleaned houses on the side. Sometimes on my days off, I’d walk down to the water and wait for the lift bridge to go up, for ore ships and sailboats to slink out of the harbor. I didn’t stand on the grassy knoll with tourists but crossed the bridge and sat in stiff baymouth sand. The fourth spring I was there my dad died. After the funeral in Loose River, after I crashed my Corsica in the trees and sold the car for parts, I found a job at a temp service in the Cities. The temp service placed me at ManiCo Barge, where I answered calls from hoarse-voiced men hauling scrap steel and corn down the Mississippi. My job was to arrange their schedules, give the anticipated arrival and departure times of their trips, sometimes take calls from their wives and make their excuses. I ate packed lunches in the break room with the other temps, and at the end of each day, I walked to the bus stop downtown on salt-strewn streets. Through the scratched windows of the bus I watched snow fall in fat orbs under lights, all across the river.
The mechanic’s apartment was a basement walk-out in a once-grand Victorian. Students lived in the turrets. Bare poplar seedlings sprouted in all the gutters. “Hey there,” I’d say to Rom when he opened his rickety back door—still in his mechanic’s clothes, still in his greasy blue coveralls, his blue eyes watering at the cold I let in. I’d hold up a frozen pizza and a six-pack of Buds.
“Oh, man,” he’d say. “Oh, really, a Tombstone? You shouldn’t have.”
If he was unimpressed it didn’t stop him from drinking his three beers in the thirty minutes it took for the oven to heat up and cook the pizza. I kept him from my beers by whacking his hand every time he reached for one more. “Fair is fair,” I’d say, so one night Rom went into the bedroom and brought back a fifth of whiskey. As he swigged from his bottle, he whipped up his standard salad from bulgur, mint, and a cucumber. He made me drink a glass of milk as we waited for the pizza to cook. He made me eat a few bites of the salad and half an orange, before allowing me one little sip of his ratty booze.
“Fair is fair,” he mocked.
The pizza cheese burned the roofs of our mouths. When I went for another swig of whiskey, he pulled the bottle out of reach. “Eat your salad,” he commanded.
That first winter I was in the Cities, Rom was big on vitamins. He thought I ate like shit and had an unresolved past and should go to the dentist. He wanted us to eat at his table, so he set out plates and squares of paper towels folded in half. He’d started pressing for a pet, a Labrador retriever, because he thought a dog would lead to a more regular schedule, a shared apartment, more exercise. Weekend trips to the North Shore, a fucking campfire. I don’t know what. When I rolled my eyes at all that, he said, “If you’re not going anywhere, Girl Scout, just shut up. Okay? Just shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything,” I protested.