“So what happened to you?” Betsy asked, undeterred.
“Nothing happened to me. Nothing I didn’t want to happen to me. Now will you just fuck off?”
“Well, something happened to me. And we might be more alike than you think,” Betsy said. She thought if someone were making a bad movie about this moment, she would offer to buy the junkie coffee. And maybe they would sit in a charming diner and share their stories until she sobered up. The woman leaned against a building and examined her forearm, which she had scratched raw with her own fingernails.
“Me and you? We’ve got nothing in common.”
Then, Betsy thought, maybe she’d reach out and touch her arm and say something like, It’s not your fault. Betsy went on, despite the fact that she was being ignored, as the woman inched further away from her, and she raised her voice to project to this mess of a passing stranger.
“If this were a movie, now is the time I’m supposed to say ‘It’s not your fault,’” said Betsy. “But I have a question for you. What if it is? What if it is your fault? Or my fault? What then?”
BETSY WENT TO the diner anyway, just by herself. She took a seat at the far end of the counter at Joe Jr.’s and ordered hash browns, coffee, and a small orange juice and, newly fortified, made the trek the rest of the way home in the bright sunlight. She was grateful to be alone in their apartment. After a couple of years on the Bowery, they’d upgraded to a slightly larger one-bedroom in an elevator building on East 10th. The galley kitchen was an improvement, and the light streaming in the windows from the sixth floor was cheery enough, even midwinter. It was also close to McSorley’s, which made Gavin absurdly happy. The summers, however, were rough. There was a single window air-conditioning unit in the bedroom that was on its last legs and no match for late August.
Ever predictable, Gavin had left a message for her the night before, but he would be deep into the Atlantic on a boat off of Montauk by the time she got it, so she decided to sleep it off first and call him back later. When she woke at around 2:00 with a splitting headache, the apartment was an oven. The windows were open and the traffic noises indicated a busy Saturday five floors below. She shuffled into the bathroom in search of Tylenol, but only after she checked her bag and the pockets of her favorite jeans to make sure she was completely out of anything stronger. She threw on one of Gavin’s old T-shirts and some cutoffs she’d had since college, then she ventured out to the corner deli for a Diet Coke and a turkey sandwich. Afterward, for lack of anything better to do, she rearranged their sagging, homemade cinder block bookshelves, organizing the books alphabetically by title, and debated doing some laundry. She scanned the paper for movie showtimes and decided on The Brothers McMullen at the Angelika. But first, she thought, at about 4:45, she would page the kid.
Even after years as a loyal customer, she did not know his name, and he claimed not to know hers, though he must have scanned a pile of mail on his way out of their apartment at least once, or noticed their last names (Young/Davis) on the buzzer.
At 5:10, the buzzer rang.
“That was impressive,” said Betsy, when she greeted him at the door.
“You know.” He shrugged, swinging a heavy black backpack off of his shoulder. In a backward Yankees cap, a plain white oversized T-shirt, baggy khaki shorts that fell just below the knee, and a hormonal constellation of acne across his scruffy chin, this entrepreneur looked twenty, tops. “I was in the neighborhood.”
He wandered over to the small table with two ladder-back chairs pushed against the living room wall, where she and Gavin ate when they weren’t “dining” on the couch. He unzipped the bag and pulled out a well-used tackle box. Betsy propped herself on the arm of the sofa, trying to look nonchalant. At first, she’d page Ian only when Gavin was home. Now, it was something she did almost exclusively when he was out, and more frequently than she wanted to admit.
“I’m running low on the Vics, but I’ve got this killer new stuff called Oxy,” he said, unfastening the latch of the box and peeling open its hinged drawers and dividing it into sections with his thumbs like he was separating orange slices. “I think you would be into it. Wanna try? I’ve also got this crazy good bud from Hawaii. Smells like Christmas.”
“It better not be as strong as that other stuff,” said Betsy, who lost two or three unaccounted hours last time Ian had something new to share.
“Aw, come on, old lady. What are you, twenty-nine? Thirty, tops.”
Betsy clenched her teeth. She hated when people thought she looked older than she was. It was her eyes. The hollows aged her. She watched as he plucked a few large, white pills from one of the middle drawers and slid them into a small Ziploc.
“Ziploc!” announced Betsy. “Aiding and abetting criminal behavior since 1968.”