Aftertaste Page 7

  He goes still now, on what’ll someday be the middle of some nice family’s living room. He allows himself, if this makes sense, into himself. He becomes a body-fist and hears “The Wind Cries Mary” even though nowhere in this empty neighborhood, as far as he can tell, is it actually currently playing. A garage door hums and rattles nearby, retracting. An engine cranks up, revs, and blue-white cuts across him, searing eyes he cannot close.

  Susanne appears in the flare of light as it passes over him. Every freckle in place. She bends, smiles, and touches his cheek with the back of her fingers, gentle. Though her hand smells like his hand—blood and swamp water and mud—he closes his eyes to savor the touch.

  “I’m sorry,” he tells her, touching his own cheek as the nowhere music plays on.

  Blue-white headlights penetrate the double-wide’s curtains, throwing twisty shadows across her. Galavance goes to the window, seeing Jolby’s Accord pull up into the driveway behind her Cavalier. She watches him struggle out of his car and pause, again, to survey the damage of her vehicle. He’s a particularly perspiration-prone guy, but he looks especially damp, his skin shiny-wet. She watches him notice the button, and try to dislodge it. He can’t get it to break free either, the kingdom not meant for either of them. Galavance creaks the screen door aside and steps out onto the porch’s Astroturf, still in bare feet, trying to keep how drunk she is concealed from him. She concentrates and plans her greeting so when she says hey from the top step she doesn’t slur.

  “When the house sells, I’ll be able to fix all that,” he says, coming up the steps. He’s changed clothes, she notices. Linkin Park instead of a Metallica T now. He says nothing about the button hammered into the hood.

  “Do you guys have any sort of timeframe on that?” she asks.

  “On what?”

  She stares down at him, refusing to step aside to allow him in the trailer. Once inside, with a video game going or his headphones on, he might as well be down a well. “On selling the house, Jolby.”

  “Don’t use my name like that.” He plays with his phone, thumbing through his empty text message inbox idly. “Don’t talk to me like I’m some little kid. That house is my job, not homework.”

  She doesn’t want to, but … “It’s not a job. A job pays. And how the hell else am I supposed to talk to you? Tell me. You act like a little kid, you do stupid little kid things just like you did in high school. I mean, getting busted with dime bags? Seriously? Did you even get paid by that guy whose roof you were fixing? And how’d you have money for a dime bag in the first place?”

  Jolby says nothing. His thumb has stopped moving, so she can tell he’s just staring at his phone’s screen just so he doesn’t have to look her in the eye. Galavance glares at him until apparently he can feel it and he puts his phone away.

  In the fluorescent light coming out through the kitchen window, the look he gives her is easy to see. Like an animal with its leg in a trap. She’s good at cornering him in arguments, he’s easy to outmaneuver. Especially when he’s on a pot hangover, as he is now.

  Do not start crying again, she silently warns him, chewing the inside of her cheek. Do not do that. You know what that does to me.

  He doesn’t. Instead, more talk about responsibility takes place. How this will pay off, eventually. She fires back about how she’s the only one living in the present. “And what if that fucking house never sells? What then?”

  They’ve been together long enough to get each other’s goats without difficulty. They bicker and fight and when it gets loud, they temporarily put it on pause to go inside, then continue right where they left off behind closed doors, even if the walls are too thin to make much of a difference to the neighbors.

  “What are you doing to your car?” he blasts. He slaps aside the curtains over the kitchen sink and points out the window at the damage, as if she needed help finding it. “Did you hit a fucking rhino with that thing?”

  “I told you it was just a deer,” she says. I saw him see the button. But it’s like he forgot. Well, I’m sure as shit not going to bring it up. She wants to shove the argument off this track, before he chooses to go there. Now is the time to turn the tables. If there is one benefit to Jolby dragging his ass in the making-money department, it’s that she can win any argument. She can pull that over on him any time she likes and he can never win from that point on. She knows it’s low and unfair, but in a case like this when she’s already had a super-shitty day, this will cut things short.

  “Well, maybe I wouldn’t be falling asleep at the fucking wheel if I didn’t have to go in at the ass-crack of dawn just to get a fucking paycheck,” she roars at him, her voice getting reedy. “And then I probably wouldn’t end up hitting any fucking deer!”

  “Don’t drag all that into it, Gal,” he yells back. “Don’t. Do not.”

  “Why not? It’s what we’re dealing with here.”

  “You can’t drive for shit,” he says. “That’s the real point.”

  She lets that one sail past. Too easy. “So if I fall asleep at the wheel to get a job to provide for my lazy-ass man, then that has nothing to do with it? Really?”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t expect you to. You, Jolby, own up to something? Pssht. When pigs fly.”

  “Come on, I thought we just got through with all this bullshit. We’re going in circles.”

  “What are you going to do, Jolby?” she snaps. “What are you going to do? I mean, I bust my ass day and night and I go off the road one fucking time and you get to cuss me out like this? Do you think this is how I wanna be? I hate saying this shit to you. I really do. Please, let me stop being a bitch. Because you know if I say these things to you, it’s you making me say them.”

  Ding-ding. KO.

  His posture has changed, his shoulders slumping and his head bending forward. He’s letting his hair fall in his face and Galavance knows that this is how Jolby is putting up his shield, when he lets that greasy mop hang in front of his eyes like a blackjack dealer’s visor. Next he’ll try to hug her. He’s already cried, so he’s burned that one already. Now it’ll be his Hail Mary, his Jolby the Cuddle Bear routine. Just watch.

  He stretches out his arms. “Come on, babe. We’re both tired, it’s late, let’s just dial it back a notch.”

  See?

  She keeps her arms crossed. “When, Jolby? When it’s going to change? Huh? When?” Her throat hurts and she can’t scream any more. It comes out hoarse and low.

  He hugs her around her crossed arms. She doesn’t soften. He smells like pot. Pot and that cologne-in-a-can he uses—he really doused himself good with it this time. She turns her head aside and he rests his chin on her shoulder. He kisses her neck, soft.

  “Stop. I’m mad.”

  His hands move over her hips, around her waist to her front. He feels his greasy thumb attempting to work at the button of her shorts blindly. Guilt hits her for having spent time with Zilch, and she doesn’t know why. I was helping him. The guy needed a ride. And maybe he’s a bit squirrelly, maybe he works for some afterlife Quantum Leap set-things-right committee, maybe he’s just nuts. But I didn’t do anything with him, not even any flirting took place. I never gave him a number, nor took his. Why the guilt?

  She brushes his hands away from her zipper, but he just goes right back to it. He’s looking down, having stopped kissing her neck to stare at her crotch and concentrate.

  “Is this thing stuck?” he asks.

  “Here,” she yanks the zipper and he slips her jorts to her knees, her panties, and without even so much as a hello, buries his tongue. The sudden warmth of his mouth is alarming and she has to brace herself by latching a hand onto the kitchen doorjamb—but it’s not a pleasurable alarm that’s striking her. She’s mad and she doesn’t want to allow herself to react, to let anything occur down there that would be indicative she’s enjoying this. She focuses on all of the awfulness of the world to try avoid becoming wet.

  There, t
hat’s working—go with it, think about dead stuff. But try as she might, Jolby’s tongue is nimble and is hitting all the right places.

  Dead stuff, dead stuff, dead stuff—come on. Don’t succumb.

  She touches his hair, remembers it’s damp. “You’re soaked.”

  “I showered at the house. Question is, why aren’t you?” he says, muffled, chuckling at his own easy wit.

  She’s trying to think of more dead stuff, but at the same time something really fun is happening downstairs. And there it is, something’s tripped and like a gate cracking off its hinges, splintering, and then fully giving way—she thinks of Zilch and below, a muffled, appreciative humming.

  “You like that, huh?”

  A Step by Step rerun she hasn’t seen before is on. Galavance watches, from bed, hating herself. Their bedroom TV is small, and only one speaker works. She kills it and refocuses on the book in her lap. A thousand-page riff on love and tragedy in Soviet Russia that she wants to get through before the movie hits DVD, but every character’s last name confusingly ends with -ski. She snaps to the next page. So far the entire thing could be summed up with: it’s cold in Russia. And everyone is sad.

  Jolby is in the bathroom—the walls are thin and she hears him peel off the condom like he’s poorly making balloon animals in there—and he steps into the bedroom with his hair actually combed. He’s overweight, but has stamina. She wonders how much, secretly, this contributes to her keeping him around. She’s changed into her T-shirt nightgown and the same set of glasses she’s worn since high school. She gives him a raspberry over the top of her Dostoevsky.

  “Oh come on, Gal. You always used to like it when I slicked my hair back like this.”

  “Yeah, but then it became a thing and every time you did it you may as well have been announcing: I’m horny.”

  He flops down on the bed and takes the book from her hands and tosses it across the room. She’s still holding the bookmark in her hand and looks at the where the ten-pound tome landed halfway to Mount Dirty Drawers. She was somewhere in those thousand pages, but where exactly she isn’t quite sure. “Hey, asshole.”

  He kisses her neck. “What?”

  His lips and tongue are taking a tour of her neck’s nape, moving down into the notch between her collarbone and shoulder. They know how to get each other’s goats, but they know each other’s special spots too.

  “Again? Already?” she says, unable to help but squeak her words, ticklish.

  “Yeah, why not?” Between flicks of his tongue, “You’re not into it?”

  “I’m still mad at you.”

  “And I’m mad at you. This is called makeup sex.”

  “We already did that, didn’t we?” she says.

  “You got to have fun first, so now it’s my turn.”

  “Is this because you’re not going to spend the weekend in jail? You suddenly feel like you need to have sex because you’re not”—she shoves him back a little—“going to have to be someone’s bottom?”

  His face hardens. He still gets weird when anything about anyone being gay is suggested around him, more so when suggesting some of it involving him. He isn’t, Galavance knows, but also knows that if Jolby ever actually met a gay person he didn’t realize it.

  “Fine.” Galavance rolls over to reach into the top drawer of the nightstand. “Here.”

  “Two? I thought you were taking, you know, pills.”

  “I am.” She peels off her T-shirt nightgown. “But you can’t be too careful.”

  Another grunty six minutes and it’s over. Five after that, she’s asleep and having some very bizarre dreams. Patty’s there and she’s wearing her Coleman cooler like homeless people wore barrels in those old-timey cartoons and screaming about the end times.

  Relieved when it’s over, Galavance opens her eyes and can see, through her blurry vision without contacts in or glasses on, that the far paneled wall of the bedroom is illuminated. Jolby’s shadow shuffles about. Out in the kitchen, he’s clunking and slamming around. She listens to him cough, three times, each hack harder than the one before. She listens to him cough more and more, and she wonders if it’s some kind of stoner timer going off inside him: ring-a-ding, let’s get stoned!

  She waits and when she hears the jingle of him pick up his keys, she knows he’s going to go and hang out with Chev.

  Despite being as quiet as he can manage, Jolby is still stifling coughs and even when he’s out in the yard, she can still hear him through the wall of the double-wide. She listens to his car start. He lets it idle for a moment, probably trying to decide on what music to listen to. She feels the bass in her pillow of the track he’s selected, some thrash-punk hip-hop garbage he incessantly deafens himself with. This isn’t too out of the norm for them—usually he’s out of the house at sun-up under the guise that he has to meet Chev somewhere early to pick up building materials when they’re on sale, as the stores open. But this is very early. Like still-dark early.

  She leans over to click on the oscillating fan, for the noise. She remains in bed, staring up at the water stains on the ceiling. She listens to the crickets outside. Loneliness creeps in quickly but it’s such a familiar feeling to her, she would feel even more lonely without it.

  The alarm buzzes, but Galavance is already awake and has been for hours. There were no answers found on the ceiling of the double-wide, but it didn’t stop her from looking. She gets up, showers, and dresses for work. Outside, she sees her Cavalier and realizes she’d forgot about the damage from the day before. The hood is slick with dew. Something bites her as she runs her hand across it. There’s a small cut on her palm, bleeding, and the button is gone—now just a ragged coin slot punched into the pink metal. Maybe it fell out overnight, or some bird plucked it out—they’re attracted to shiny things, right? But then she wonders if Jolby removed it this morning before he left. She was glad he didn’t bring it up last night, though he probably, really, should’ve asked. He can forget he saw things, omit truths from himself, like the best of them. Maybe, Galavance realizes, she can too.

  When she arrives at Frenchy’s, she realizes she’s the first one there, other than Patty, whose rental four-door is covered in dried mud that’s splashed up to the windows on the sides. Was her boss doing some off-roading last night? Not many dirt roads between here and the Hilton up the road.

  Patty meets her at the back door before Galavance can reach for the handle.

  “Well, good mornin’, Miss Petersen. I see you’re not only on time today, but early.”

  I want to kill you, my boyfriend, then myself. “Sure am,” Galavance says, chipper. She isn’t sure why she gets this way around Patty, this superfake smiley way. Same way she acts around cops, even when innocent.

  Patty leads them into the kitchen. Everything’s off except for a few lights. The walk-in cooler as well as the reach-ins hum, and every bit of floor and counter space is spotless. Their night porter is thorough.

  On the counter, Patty has some review sheets spread out. “These were faxed over to me late last night, from our other locations,” Patty says. “Everyone hates the peppers.”

  Galavance watches Patty, down in the mouth, studying the words ‘awful’ and ‘disgusting’ and ‘rubbery’ as they appear over the multiple sheets again and again. Why Patty is taking this to heart, Galavance doesn’t know. She leaves her work at work, but Patty looks like she was up half the night, much like Galavance, but for different reasons: haunted by stuffed peppers instead of her loveless, dead-end life.

  “We really need to do something about this,” Patty says. The kitchen lights shine on Patty’s glasses, hiding her eyes behind the gleam, but the desperate frown on her wide, doughy face speak volumes.

  “Well,” Galavance says, backing away, “good luck with it, I’m gonna go get the vacuuming started.”

  Patty looks positively heartbroken. “Actually, I was thinking …”

  “Oh, we as in: you and me do something about it, like actually you and me?” Ga
lavance says.

  Patty nods. “I was gonna have Cheryl”—the head weekend cook, with her toque and clogs fresh from Le Cordon Bleu—“take a look and see, but since you’re here …”

  “What about the Culinary Inspiration Team?” Galavance asks. “Isn’t it their job to, you know, make things taste good?”

  “They’re all in California, appearing as judges for some reality show.” She shakes her head, and her hair doesn’t move. “It’s really a shame; I thought the peppers were quite good.” She looks to Galavance, eyes huge behind rimless lenses, expectant, desperate. It was the first time Galavance had ever seen Patty look vulnerable. “What did you think? Someone from this location did a review sheet yesterday, said some pretty childish things.”

  “I thought they were yummy.” Lying always made Galavance’s neck feel hot. Please don’t make eat any more of that.

  “Guess it wasn’t you then,” Patty says, with a tone. She so knows. Galavance is suddenly very aware that it’s just the two of them, alone. “Anyway, would you want to help?”

  “Uh, okay. I mean, I can burn Froot Loops …” She knows it’s not really up to her: either she pretends to actually give a shit or she’s fired. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Wash your hands first,” Patty says, firm, “then we’ll channel our inner Martha. By God, we’ll make this recipe item perfect! Doesn’t that sound like fun?”