He frowned. “But if I leave I’ll lose the contest.”
“Willie, the contest isn’t actually a real contest,” Darryl snapped. “Like, we don’t get anything if we win.”
Willie walked out of the kitchen, head bowed.
“After work, I need you to come with me to a liquor store and buy me a couple cases of beer.”
Darryl stopped folding too and stared at me. “I can’t do that for you.”
“Oh, okay.”
Willie ran back in and practically threw a full cup of Diet Coke at me. A little sloshed out and spilled onto my shoes. We didn’t say anything to each other for the rest of the competition. It was silent until Willie yelled, “One hundred! Done!” and Darryl yelled back, “Shut the fuck up, Willie! No one cares!”
* * *
—
WILLIE’S CAR wouldn’t start. Darryl and I played Rock, Paper, Scissors to decide who would stay and help him jump-start it.
Best two of three, he beat my paper with scissors, I rocked his scissors, but on the third round we kept picking the same thing—paper-paper, scissors-scissors, rock-rock, scissors-scissors. Willie stood in front of us, doing his best not to look completely pissed. After we tied for the fifth time, we sighed, shrugged, and both went to help Willie hook his Malibu up to my Festiva.
We got Willie’s car to start and waved until his taillights turned the corner. We burst out laughing.
“He’s right to hate us.”
Darryl abruptly stopped laughing and put his hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” I shrugged a little, hoping he’d take the hint and move his hand away. It stayed. “Why are you asking me that?”
I expected an immediate answer—Darryl was so smooth, always had words on his tongue that he was ready to spit out, no matter what situation—but he just stood there, hand on my shoulder, opening his mouth and closing it. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I’m just worried about you.”
“You don’t have to worry about me. That beer thing—I was just kidding.”
“No. You weren’t.” Darryl moved his hand from my shoulder, shoved it into his pants pocket. “And it’s not only the beer thing. You just seem like you haven’t really been here lately.”
“I’m here all the time. I’ve never missed a shift.”
“I’m not talking about attendance. I’m just saying that even when you’re here, even when you’re doing something or talking, I feel like you’re somewhere else. I can always hear you thinking. Not like your actual thoughts, but I can hear the strain of it. I don’t even know what you do when you’re not here. Like you didn’t even tell me when you were pregnant, you just came back from lunch one day with an armful of pregnancy tests, and then, another day, you’re asking me to cover your shift so you can go to the doctor. I guess I figure you must be lonely, and all I’m trying to say is, if you need someone to talk to, you can talk to me.”
Darryl was staring down at the asphalt and leaning his weight from foot to foot, both his hands in his pants pockets. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him so uncomfortable, and as I watched him rocking back and forth on his feet, sweating in his ugly Eddie’s polo, I felt strongly that he was a good person. I knew so many good people. “Darryl,” I said, “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me, worry about you. Carl’s going to call you again and you’re going to answer, so you better prepare for that. Find a real friend to talk to about it, not just some girl you work with.”
He tried not to look hurt, but I saw it, even if it was only for a second. I tried to communicate to him silently that it was better this way, he didn’t want to sit across from me and hear everything that was swirling around in my head—even if he could hear the strain of me thinking, it didn’t compare to the sound of my actual thoughts spoken, hanging in the air.
“Okay,” Darryl said. “I’ll see you whenever our next shift is.”
I got into my car and he got into his. I waved as he pulled out. He didn’t see.
* * *
—
RITA AND LOUIE BOOKER’S place was empty. I knocked on the door until my fist started to hurt and a guy in a pink robe poked his head out of the apartment next door and asked me to please fucking stop.
“Marv?”
“Dale. Now please go away.”
I got back into my car and was headed home when I remembered it was Thursday. It was weird to go to Jenny’s house. It wasn’t weird to go to an open-to-the-public Current and Expecting Mothers meeting held at the local church.
She wasn’t at the meeting. I tried to walk back up the basement stairs when I scanned all the heads and didn’t see her ponytail among them. A very pregnant woman in a cutoff T-shirt that ended just above the swell of her belly smiled at me, her teeth yellow and crooked, the front one cracked; she put her hand on my shoulder and said, “Stay.”
“Each chicken nugget has about fifty-nine calories in it. Seventy-two calories per mozzarella stick. A whole PB and J has approximately three hundred and eight-five calories in it. I haven’t done the math to see what a single bite is. I have to stop eating what my kids are eating.”
“I’m having sex dreams about everyone, and I mean everyone. The other night I woke up sweaty and throbbing after dreaming the bagger at the grocery store had his head between my legs. I gotta tell my husband, right?”
“There’s this bird that sits outside my window every morning and it won’t stop chirping. I’m slowly going insane.”
“Maybe you could put one of those bird feeders outside your window,” I said.
Every head in the room swiveled to me. The woman who’d been talking was frowning, her nose wrinkled. “What?”
“Maybe the bird is chirping so much because it’s hungry. I just thought maybe if you got a feeder it might help the noise.”
The woman gave me a tight-lipped smile, then quickly turned away from me. “So this goddamn bird is waking me up at four a.m. every goddamn day. My shift at the diner ends at two a.m., it takes me twenty minutes to get home, then I have to slip my mom a twenty and some home fries for watching the kids, I have to brush my teeth and put lotion all over my body—trying not to look like a leather handbag one day—and my mattress is hard as a rock, it takes me at least another twenty to get to sleep. You all do the math—how much sleep am I getting each night?”
I didn’t speak again for the rest of the meeting. Outside the church, the night actually felt cool for once. No dark heat, a breeze too. A hand gripped my arm and I turned to see a young pregnant girl, the one I was almost 80 percent certain I’d gone to high school with.