Always Happy Hour Read online

  For my exes

  CONTENTS

  Instructions

  The House on Main Street

  Proper Order

  At One Time This Was the Longest Covered Walkway in the World

  Big Bad Love

  Uphill

  Dirty

  He Says I Am a Little Oven

  Where All of the Beautiful People Go

  Love Apples

  Hamilton Pool

  Always Happy Hour

  Little Bear

  First Class

  Charts

  The 37

  Thanks to the editors of the following journals, where earlier versions of these stories first appeared: “The House on Main Street” in The Austin Review; “At One Time This Was the Longest Covered Walkway in the World” in Fiction; “Big Bad Love” in The Good Men Project; “Uphill” in Mississippi Noir Anthology; “Dirty” in Sententia; “He Says I Am a Little Oven” in Mid-American Review; “Love Apples” in Indiana Review; “Hamilton Pool” in Fiction; “Always Happy Hour” as “Always Happy Hour, Always Summer” in American Short Fiction; “Little Bear” in Mississippi Review; “Charts” in Story; “The 37” in Joyland.

  The parking lot after a movie is the broken open world.

  —Mark Leidner,

  “Love in the Time of Whatever Disease This Is”

  INSTRUCTIONS

  He leaves her a series of drawings on a sheet of typing paper. It must have taken him a long time—he probably got off to a late start. She only wanted to know the code to the laundry room, where his mailbox key is.

  She lies in bed with his cats, studying it. At the top, there is a banner like the kind waving behind an airplane, advertising two-for-one drink specials at the beach: In the event of my unlikely death, and underneath it a headstone: Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt. There’s a single flower next to the headstone, a few wisps of grass. There are boxes labeled GATOS, COFFEE, PAR AVION, BASURA, and one with nothing but a question mark. In the box labeled PAR AVION, he tells her that the mail key is hanging next to the brass knuckles. The GATOS section takes up most of the left side. There’s a diagram of a litter box showing how the pee clumps and advising her to scoop at least twice a day so the cats “don’t get weird.” BASURA . . . in the parking lot. Does he think she’s incapable of taking out the trash and feeding some cats?

  She gets out of bed and goes to the kitchen to drink the last of his coffee, which is cold, so she puts ice cubes in it, milk and sugar. She stirs it with a clean spoon and places the spoon in the sink. Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, she thinks, standing there in her socks.

  She opens his cabinets to look at the same things that are always in his cabinets and which are entirely more interesting than the things in her own. There are still plenty of candy bars that his aunt brought back from New Zealand, frogs on the wrappers. There are Tic Tacs and many bottles of olive oil and spices from the Mediterranean grocery. Above his refrigerator, four boxes of cereal. She will eat cereal and candy bars and pick up sandwiches from Little Deli. She’ll ride his stationary bike while watching The Office and Girls. Already, she misses her apartment with all of her books, and her balcony where she can smoke without the old ladies watching her, the cats gazing at her from their perch.

  She finishes her coffee and puts the cup in the sink next to the spoon. Despite the COFFEE box, and the instructions therein (just YouTube CHEMEX, filters above sink), she won’t drink it at his house. He has too many ways of making it, all of which seem unnecessarily difficult and time-consuming.

  She puts her shoes back on and tells the cats goodbye. She likes these cats only because they are his, because their presence makes them more like a family. They creep around the apartment at night searching for something to knock over, wake her up early to eat. When she’s reading in bed, they stick their nails into the pages of her book one at a time and pause to observe her reaction.

  She drives to work thinking about the things she knows that have hurt him: his cousin’s death, broken bones, the time he swallowed a bunch of pills and drank too much vodka because he was young and overseas. She thinks about the things that have hurt her and then she thinks about beauty and how little of it she sees in even beautiful things. She wonders if people who’ve been hurt more see more beauty. She wonders how a few strung-together words can seem so meaningful when she doesn’t believe them at all.

  At lunch, she texts her boyfriend to ask if he wrote it.

  It’s from Slaughterhouse-Five, he texts back.

  Of course it is. It’s the kind of thing hipsters tattoo on their arms—The heart is a lonely hunter, Not all who wander are lost, Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

  She’s disappointed but should have caught the allusion.

  A few hours later, she’s back at his apartment. She accepts a stack of coupons from his next-door neighbor as she unlocks the door.

  “Thank you,” she says. “This is great.”

  The woman seems disappointed; she isn’t as effusive, as excited, as she should be. “Those are free,” the woman says, “the best barbeque sandwich in town.”

  She thanks the woman again and tells her she’ll definitely use them.

  “If you’re not going to use them, just give them back.”

  “I’ll definitely use them,” she repeats, as she closes the door and locks it. She draws the blinds, turns on all the lights.

  She throws the coupons away. She doesn’t like barbeque, how everyone is always talking about the best barbeque in the city. She has never waited in a long line at Franklin’s, surrounded by people in lawn chairs sipping from to-go cups, or driven miles and miles out into the country to go to some obscure shack for something more authentic.

  She scoops out the litter box and feeds the cats, studies the drawings again—if she’s reading it correctly, her boyfriend feeds them four times a day, a steady stream of food in their shared bowl. Tomorrow she’ll do better. At the bottom of the paper there are hearts—six of them—and three Love You’s . . . She considers the difference between Love you and I love you. Love you is what she tells her friends when she has to get off the phone abruptly or cancel plans. In this case, she feels he used Love you because it looked better, which is something her boyfriend is always conscious of—everything carefully considered and thought out. She decided a long time ago she didn’t want to be a careful person, that she didn’t want to live her life constantly worrying about what other people thought of her. Of course she does worry, she does nothing but worry, and all her lack of care amounts to is that she offends people constantly and tests them with her inappropriateness and expects them to love her for it.

  She drags around a feather on a stick, turns to look at the cats: they stare at her without blinking or averting their gaze. She puts the feather in the male’s face, drops it to his nose, and he paws at it a few times before giving up. She kneels and crooks her finger at them like her boyfriend does. They come forward to bump her with their foreheads and she gets into bed, feels the small hairs tickling her face. They climb around her purring, louder and louder, and she wonders if she could put them in her car and take them to her apartment. Cats don’t travel well, she recalls her boyfriend saying. They scream and shit everywhere.

  She has no pets, has never had a pet, and her boyfriend was sorry for her when she told him. She didn’t tell him that her family was poor, that she’d collected frogs and snakes and turtles from her backyard, which she’d let die in jars and shoeboxes. She’d once put half a dozen frogs in a dollhouse her mother had bought at a garage sale, closed it up and watched them through the windows. Of course he knows she grew up poor. When you grow up poor, even if you do everything thereafter to be not-poor, there’s no way to shake it com
pletely. She likes to read about lottery winners, how desperately they go about losing everything so they can get back to the state at which they are familiar.

  She looks at her open suitcase on the floor, her purse and backpack and tennis shoes. Her MacBook Pro, only a few months old. The other times she’s been at his apartment without him, she was waiting for him to come home—he was going to show up at any minute and they would have sex and watch movies and scratch each other’s backs. They would talk and laugh.

  She walks over to his closet and takes out the leather coat that cost him seven hundred dollars, tries it on. It barely zips. Her boyfriend is small. She puts her hands in the pockets: empty. She’s always asking him how much things cost, how much he paid, and he hates this about her. She knows he hates this about her but it only makes her do it more.

  In the event of my untimely death, she thinks—no, not untimely—unlikely.

  She picks up the male, also smaller than his female counterpart, the one she has decided she likes least. The cat struggles and then allows her to carry him into the kitchen. She sets him down and takes the packet of treats off the counter, shakes it. It’s full of dried bits that look just like their regular food. The female comes slinking into the kitchen as she pours the bits onto the floor saying, treat, treat.

  When they have finished the bits and sauntered off, she opens the refrigerator, checks the expiration date on a container of cream cheese. It expired more than four months ago but the milk is good, as are the eggs. She makes herself a drink with his Uncle Val’s, carries it into the bathroom and sets it on the counter while she pees, the female watching her from just outside the door. Though she and her boyfriend spend nearly every night together, she has never come upon any evidence that he does anything in the bathroom other than take a piss. The whole thing is very curious. She has begun to listen carefully, turn down the volume on the TV. She goes in there right after him to see if she can smell anything. Nothing—there is never anything.

  The cat approaches her, warily, and knocks her razor off the edge of the bathtub. The blade pops off and she yells and the cat hightails it under the bed. She searches but can’t find it; she is certain that the cat has swallowed it and this makes her feel miserable because her boyfriend knew she would need instructions; he knew she would fuck it up somehow.

  She tries to lure the cat out from under the bed. She lifts one corner of the mattress and the cat moves to a safe area while the other watches. She moves from one corner to another, lifting the mattress as she looks for the blade, but it is nowhere. She gets back into bed and sips at her drink. When her boyfriend makes himself a cocktail at home, it always goes unfinished. He forgets about it until it’s too watered down to drink and then pours it out. She wants to see if she can do this: a test. If she doesn’t finish this drink, she will win. Other than the cats, the only other thing under the bed is a gun. Her boyfriend said it was loaded and the safety was off, that she shouldn’t touch it unless she was prepared to use it. He showed her how to open the barrel and take the bullets out, but she forgot as soon as he put it away. It’s like CPR class, no matter how many times she’s certified, she wouldn’t be able to save anyone’s life.

  Her boyfriend calls, says he is one hundred miles from lovely beautiful San Francisco.

  Do you want to live with me in California one day? she asks.

  We’re going to crush California, kid, he says. We’ll have the breeziest house with the biggest windows that face the sea. I’ll bring you fresh-baked bread every morning and then get out of your hair.

  When are you going to get your tattoo? she asks.

  Tomorrow, he says.

  Before he left, he went over each of his tattoos with her, telling her what they meant and why he’d gotten them. One of them says CARPET inside a human heart. It didn’t always say CARPET—it was a girl’s initials and his choices were limited. There are a lot of literary allusions. When he was young, he had a Gertrude Stein poem tattooed on his back but now it’s covered up with a bull and bear fighting: the bull appears to be winning but he said that neither ever wins; they are perpetually locked in battle. There are references to Proust and Nabokov and L. Frank Baum. And then there are all of the small ones that remind her of her high school notebooks, the margins filled with stars and four-leaf clovers.

  He likes her skin clean and white.

  It’s lonely here without you, she says. I brought The Road but I need you to read it to me. For weeks he has been reading The Road to her. As much as she likes it, she can’t seem to read more than a page at a time because it is lulling and repetitive and so beautiful that it puts her in a kind of trance. Only when he reads it to her is she able to translate the words into images and the images into meaning. She opens the book to their place: Crossing the grass he felt faint and he had to stop. He wondered if it was from smelling the gasoline. She wants to figure out how sentences this simple add up to something she can’t comprehend.

  They talk for ten more minutes, all the while she is wondering whether to tell him that his cat has probably swallowed a razor blade and is going die. When she hears his voice change—he’s ready to get off the phone—she tells him. The blade popped off, she says, and I can’t find it. I think she may have swallowed it.

  A cat wouldn’t swallow a razor blade, he says, but she’s not so sure. She is confused about what cats will and won’t do. They don’t get out of the way when she swings his kettlebells, for example, and one time she knocked the male in the head with a crack her boyfriend heard from the other room.

  They say I love you and goodbye—I love you I love you goodbye—and it’s quiet again. She’s afraid her boyfriend will die in a car accident or will drunkenly fall down the stairs and break his neck. That she will never see him again. She turns on the TV and tries to find something to watch, thinking about the dream he had recently, how he woke her in the middle of the night to tell her about it: we were in a boat and there was a great storm, he said. And I lost my oars so I paddled with my arms. And the piranhas ate my arms, chewed them down to nothing but I kept paddling. I kept paddling and paddling, trying to get us to shore. And that was the end: her boyfriend paddling madly with his nubby arms in an attempt to save them. It was a dream about worry, she knows, as nearly all dreams are. He worries his love will run out. He loves her so much and it scares him because maybe their love isn’t sustainable—perhaps they should each find someone they could love less. Or maybe she simply isn’t the girl he thought she was, the one he wanted her to be. She has disappointed him. She has disappointed herself by disappointing him and she can’t stop disappointing him because she’s disappointed that he’s disappointed and so on. Everything is fine, she told him, smoothing back his hair and taking hold of his arm. We’re happy, she assured him. There are no great storms here.

  THE HOUSE ON MAIN STREET

  On Wednesdays there’s a farmers’ market downtown. My roommate Melinda bikes the three blocks to Town Square Park and returns with a bag of deer sausage or a whole chicken. She’s a small girl, about five feet tall with the tiniest shoes and panties I have ever seen, but she eats a lot. Other times, she brings home goat or dove or squirrel. She’s also here to get her PhD, but she’s from New York City and hates everything about this place except its strange meat and the proximity to New Orleans. I told her that my brothers used to hunt raccoons but they didn’t eat them—they gave them away to black people. She said that was racist, but it’s just the truth, that’s what they did, and I don’t really see how it’s racist. Perhaps just something I shouldn’t have mentioned.

  I frequently feel compelled to confirm her worst suspicions of us because she’s always saying it’s too humid here and there are no dateable men, that people holler at her when she’s jogging or riding her bike, all of which are things I hate as well, but she makes me feel like it’s my fault. And where the fuck are the sidewalks? she asks me, as if I have personally decided that this town would be better off without them.

  Today Melin
da has brought home a chicken. She likes chicken best, boils the entire thing in a pot. I stand in the kitchen and look at it. The pot is full, the fat bird bobbing on the surface. I rarely eat meat now because I hate the bloody bags she carries up the stairs, leaking all over the place, and the flesh-colored bodies plucked clean. While her chicken boils, she has sex with a third-year PhD student, a guy who’s struggling with his religious convictions. He is blond and tall, which is my type, but he’s also Baptist and clean-cut and gets along well with everyone, which is not.

  The water bubbles over, chicken fat getting everywhere. Melinda never cleans the stove. She’s opposed to cleaning entirely, so far as I can tell, and because I didn’t make the mess, I won’t clean it either.

  I’m tense whenever she’s in the house, and the only way to ease this tension is by talking to her. She tells me how many pull-ups she can do, how the training is going for her next marathon. I ask about her poems, which are about apples and trees and never become more than apples and trees. I guess my main problem with her is that she doesn’t seem to be afraid of anything.

  I take a beer from the refrigerator and sit on the counter, look out the window that she leaves propped open with a wine bottle. There’s a stray bottle out there on our flat roof, and I could easily climb out and pick it up, but it’s been there so long it has become part of the scenery. My previous apartment had the best counter sitting, a recessed window that made me feel like I was tucked away where no one could see me. I lived there alone and everything was mine, but my divorce money has run out and my ex-husband doesn’t think it’s funny anymore when I call him up and ask him to send me a check. I am no longer his responsibility, which is a great relief to him. It’s a great relief to me too. I don’t want his money. It’s like I was calling him up to ask for something he could never give me, was never able to give me, and was only doing it to offer him the opportunity to say no.