He took the paper from her and didn’t look at it. Bless you, she thought. Bless you for not looking. The people in the stationery store in town had gotten used to her by now; the pity in their eyes was no longer fresh but had congealed over the years into something familiar, automatic, as if Denise were a stray mutt that wandered in every now and then for a crust of bread or a pat.
But Denise didn’t need a pat, or any rewarmed pity. She needed her two hundred copies.
“Would you like that in different colors, ma’am? Or on white paper?”
“The face will be legible in different colors?”
“Sure. We can do that.”
“Then maybe different colors, this time.”
“All right. Which colors would you like?”
“You choose.”
“I’ll do yellow and green and red. How’s that?”
“Great.”
She smiled at him. She stood behind the counter, feeling its hard, sharp edge with her fingers. The feel of the pill gliding through her system. The staple gun heavy in her other hand. Henry had gotten rid of the other one. Twenty-nine dollars it had cost her and he’d thrown it right in the trash.
You’ve got to stop with the flyers, he had said.
The words flowed through her mind as coolly as the frigid air, as if they were words she was overhearing, spoken between strangers.
What right do you have to show up here and tell me what to do?
Charlie told me. That’s what. Our son. He says you aren’t even there for dinner half the time.
The boy eats. Look at him. He’s not starving.
That’s not the point. You are wearing yourself down and Charlie, too. And me, too.
What do you care?
You have to stop. Please.
I can’t. What if—
Call the doctor then. Get some help.
What if it makes a difference, Henry? What if someone sees one of them and—
For god’s sakes, Denise—
The boy was back. “Actually, the red’s a little dark for a face. How about blue? The blue’s real light.”
“That’d be fine.”
She waited. She had only to wait, her hands fingering the sharp edge of the countertop, Tommy’s face multiplying in green and blue and yellow. She let her mind linger on each of the faces as they poured out of the machine, thinking, maybe this one. Maybe this will be the one that makes all the difference.
Twenty-Three
Charlie Crawford rode his bike home slowly from Harrison Johnson’s house, his head percolating with riffs, his whole body pulsating with the thrill of victory and the first-class weed Harrison always had on hand from his brother’s friend who worked at the pizza place.
Ba DA DA ba DA DA DA DA. The way he’d extended that last beat, rolling it and then holding it so it had resonated around the garage, he’d known right away: he hadn’t fucked it up. He could see it in the way Harrison and Carson really stopped and listened for fucking once, in the grudging nods they aimed in his direction as he headed out the door at the end of rehearsal. He knew they’d been wanting to ditch him for that Mike kid at the community college, they never thought he was good enough, he’d always been the kid with a drum kit who lived nearby and could kinda sorta hold a beat. But today: he’d shown them but good. He’d killed that fucker, left it lying DEAD in the road.
Okay, okay, so maybe it wasn’t the best drum solo ever of all time, maybe he wasn’t, like, Lars Ulrich, but in his life this is what amounted to a major fucking victory and he was going to take that baby and ride it all the way home, the AMAZE-ing Harrison’s brother’s friend’s weed flowing through him making everything all right, making everything so very, very all right that he did an extra loop around the block, down past the neighbor’s vicious dog to the edge of the cornfields and back again, and didn’t even particularly dread sailing back into his own driveway, where Thanks be to God his mother’s car was out. Could it get any better? He could grab a carton of ice cream and go upstairs to his room and text Gretchen. Or—even better—think about Gretchen without having the stress of actually texting her, lying there on his bed while the high was still in him, thinking about Gretchen’s breasts jiggling to the beat of his killing drum solo, her knees swaying open and shut in that jeans miniskirt she’d worn to school day before yesterday—or wait—even better—skip Gretchen entirely, too much work, and get right to it on the Internet, ready set go! Now that was a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.