My old lab partner, Gina Ward, got me an interview at Eddie’s. I put on one of two button-downs I owned and pants without rips in them and sat across from her uncle Peter. I thought the interview went well, but didn’t hear back for over a week. I asked Gina at lunch one day if Peter had told her anything and she said, “Dude, you fucked up.”
“What do you mean?”
“Peter said you came in wearing a wrinkled shirt, the look in your eyes made him nervous.”
“What look?”
“Vacant, a little corpsey.”
“Corpsey?”
“As in ‘corpse’ with a ‘y.’ As in, you looked like a dead body.”
“Ah.”
I got the job because Gina begged him to give it to me. The first week I did my best to do everything he taught me perfectly. I mopped floors and wiped counters and drove to every address as quickly as I could without speeding. I sometimes thought about my life after summer, but mostly just mopped and wiped and drove and focused on little details directly in front of me. Finally, I had something to do after the final school bell rang.
The dull shine of clean linoleum counters, the gleam of wet floors, pizza smelled good, the dividing lines of the streets were better to stare at than clouds, there were no pictures to be seen in them, just dashes and lines of yellow and white, all the same, another job I could be good at—crouching low, inhaling asphalt and paint, flicking a brush straight and even, over and over.
* * *
—
I WASN’T RELIGIOUS AND THOUGHT anyone who said “Amen” seriously and not just as a way to blend in at church or to please someone else’s parents before dinner was weird. But every time I stood inside a church, I felt something bend in my chest.
It could’ve been how even small churches felt massive, how, when you stood and looked up at the high ceilings, you felt like you were about to be swallowed up by something bigger and greater than you were and later, when you emerged, blinking, you’d be bigger and greater. The cross was a simple symbol, a weighty one. Whether on the tip-top of a church’s steeple or plastered on the bumper of a pickup truck, you felt its quiet stare of judgment. Stone angels were impossible to make eye contact with.
I think it was the stained glass. Lots of things were massive, judgment was all around, I could walk with my head down, staring only at the rubber toes of my sneakers, but stained glass demanded to be viewed. I liked how the colors were both bright and dark, colors I would’ve happily bathed in. As if the colors weren’t enough, church’s stained-glass windows always had a picture within them. Men, women, children, animals, trees, sometimes just geometric patterns—the stained glass made them holy. I wished stained-glass windows were everywhere, not just churches. How lovely a McDonald’s would be if you could order a Big Mac while being surrounded by stained glass.
I stood on the sidewalk in front of the Holy Name of Jesus Church on the Thursday after I’d seen Jenny again and, for what felt like the million-and-tenth time, dabbed my forehead dry with the front of my shirt. To the left, the hardware store’s windows were dark, the owner and his friends, equally male, middle-aged, hairy everywhere except the tops of their heads, sitting on chairs outside drinking forties, passing a joint and the L.A. Times back and forth, exhaling smoke and yelling about the daily fuck-ups. The doughnut shop was lit, but empty except for the dead-eyed, moppy-haired dude texting behind the counter and the homeless woman sleeping in a booth in the back, near the restroom, clinging to her bulging garbage bag like it was full of precious jewels or cherished memories and not just dirty, dented cans. I dabbed my forehead again. It felt like a mistake to be there.
After my shift ended, I’d asked Darryl to make a call and lie for me on his phone. Together, we called Mom and told her that I’d be coming home late, I was going to Darryl’s house and we were going to eat pizza and watch a documentary about Jackie Kennedy. She liked hearing that I had friends and thought the former first lady was gorgeous and graceful and that Marilyn Monroe was a no-talent whore. We hung up the phone and Darryl frowned at me, but just said, “See you tomorrow?”
“See you tomorrow.”
Inside the church, the air was even warmer than it was outside. I didn’t want to go back outside, though, was worried I might start running toward my car, or even past it—how many miles would it take for my legs to give up and crumple against my will? I sat in one of the pews in the back and pulled my iPod out of my pocket, put the volume so low I had to work to hear it.
I hadn’t been inside the church for over a year, since my last Grief and Loss of a Loved One meeting. Billy and I had been fucking for two weeks at that point and didn’t think there was anything more we could get from the meetings. As I sat in that pew fiddling with my iPod’s volume, I asked myself for the first time if that decision was the wrong one.
What if those meetings were it? What if those meetings would’ve saved me? Maybe if I had kept going to those meetings I would’ve learned all the answers to all the questions I had. Like: Where am I going and how do I get there? What have I done and what will I continue to do? Will I ever wake up and look in the mirror and feel good about the person staring back at me? Another thought entered my mind, and I hated it the minute it did, but once it was conjured it was impossible not to repeat and repeat and repeat—what if going to those meetings would’ve stopped me from getting pregnant?
My favorite stained-glass window in the church was a small one. It was oval and centered right behind the altar. A man kneeling before a sun. His arms outstretched. The man was probably Jesus and he was probably praying, but I chose to ignore those things—you didn’t have to be religious to love the sun and the way it felt against your skin, to have a moment so beautiful and pure that it brought you to your knees.
“You came.”
I turned around and ripped the headphones out of my ears. Jenny was standing there with an armful of roses. She looked like she’d jumped out of a scene of a bad rom-com. This was the third time I’d seen her and, like the previous two times, she looked tired, slightly out of breath, like she’d spent the whole day in constant motion. She was sweating more than even me. I wondered when the last time she sat down was and for how long. I hoped that I’d just seen her on three tough days. I wanted to pat her forehead dry with the front of my shirt.
“Do you have a hot date or something?”
“Huh?”
I pointed to the roses and she looked down at them and laughed. “Oh, right. Well, on my bike ride over here I saw the owner of a corner store throwing heaps of roses into the dumpster. Guess how long a flower lives after the stem has been cut.”
“I don’t know.”
“Ten days. And that’s best-case. Like, ten days even if you’re keeping it in a nice vase and watering properly and often.” She sat down next to me and I was happy to see her off her feet. “Ten fucking days. What a life. Doesn’t that just break your heart a little bit?”