“Yeah.”
She’s excited, he knows by the way she’s chewing, the sparkle in her eyes. This is exactly what she wanted from him, all she’s ever wanted from him. But nothing in life is free. There’s gray hamburger meat stuck in her teeth, her lipstick is smeared all over the bottom half of her face from eating, so she looks a mess.
She looks almost like a clown.
“I have a question for you,” he says.
“What is it?”
“Did you really have sex with Seever?”
She looks down, at the half-finished burger sitting in front of her, in the middle of the yellow wrapper with half a pickle sticking out of it, and puts her hand out, as if to pick it up and take a bite. But at the last minute she seems to think better of it, and drops her hand back on her lap.
“Yes,” she says, softly.
“Did you enjoy it?” he asks, leaning toward her, until the edge of the table is pressed into his chest, cutting a line into his skin. He doesn’t know why he’s doing this, why he suddenly wants to hurt her, but he can’t seem to stop himself. “What was it like, fucking him?”
Sammie looks away from the hamburger, turns her gaze up to him. She has beautiful eyes, she always has: wide, innocent eyes, like you’d see on a girl. She looks like she might cry, but he doubts it, because Sammie’s tough, she takes shit and puts it right back out. No, she doesn’t cry, but Hoskins is surprised when Sammie leans over the side of the table and makes a belching noise, it sounds like a bullfrog, and then vomits, all the dinner she’d inhaled coming right back up, all that chewed hamburger and foaming soda, spreading over the clean tile floor.
GLORIA
When Gloria was young, strangers would stop her mother on the street, call to her from their car windows. I think you might be the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, they’d say, and her mother would nod and move on, her purse looped over one arm and her lips pressed tightly together. And even if no one said anything to her mother, they’d still look, sometimes throwing glances from under lowered lashes, but most times it was open staring, and every so often there were whistles and catcalls, lewd suggestions. Her mother never talked about it, never repeated the things that were said to her. It was as if none of it had ever happened at all, like it didn’t matter. Gloria couldn’t understand it, didn’t know how someone could shrug off a compliment. Maybe it was because she was so young, or because she was so ugly.
“A man said Mama was pretty today,” Gloria once said. This was at the dinner table, when she was eight years old. They’d just sat down, the three of them at the table and the old dog curled up at their feet, snout on his paws, waiting for crumbs to drop.
“And what did your mother say to that?” Her father put his fork down so carefully it didn’t make a sound when it touched his plate. Her mother, sitting on the other side of the table, didn’t move. Didn’t look up from her plate, even though they were both staring at her, waiting for her to say something.
“She didn’t say nothing,” Gloria said.
Her father was a tall man. Thin and wiry. When he came into a room it felt like he sucked all the air out of it, all the life. He wasn’t at all handsome, with the dark hairs sprouting from his ears and the smattering of blackheads on his nose, he wasn’t even handsome in the wedding photo that hung in the dining room, but anyone would look plain standing beside her mother, who was spectacularly gorgeous in her white gown, although she wasn’t smiling. Gloria had always wondered how her parents had found each other, how her mother had ended up cooking in the kitchen of her husband’s restaurant and cleaning the dreary little brick house on Ninth Street when she looked like a queen, but she never asked, not until years later, and her mother didn’t have an answer, said she couldn’t remember how it’d all happened. Her father could be mean as a snake, but he had his moments, he could be kind, and there were times she’d see her parents happy together, laughing and holding hands, kissing each other, her father bringing his wife coffee in bed and rubbing her feet, but things could turn fast, oh, her father’s temper was quick, and unexpected.
“‘She didn’t say anything,’” her mother said, correcting Gloria, her eyes not moving any higher than the mound of buttered peas on her plate. “That’s how you should say it.”
“That man was right, you know,” her father said. He was staring at his wife, and there seemed to be heat in his gaze, hot and stifling. “Your mama’s so pretty, I might have to kill her before some other man steals her away.”
And then he laughed.
*