Instant Love: Fiction Page 4

  OK, that was exhausting, she thought. She pulled her head back, balanced it precariously on her neck, then rested it on the top of her chair and let the last of the setting sun hit her forehead. It made her smile. She thought about taking a nap but decided against it. There should be places where you can nap at bars, she thought. A little nook. A nap nook.

  “Well, I was late for work this morning,” he said. Robert was practically yelling. It was noisy on the patio, he forgot how loud it could get. If he was trying for romance he had failed, he thought.

  “I was getting coffee at this new place over by the convention center—I got a coupon for it in the mail—and when I was walking out…”

  Maggie watched a waitress serve a woman at the next table a frozen purple drink with a straw shaped like a man’s penis, complete with a tiny set of testicles. She had seen the sign for them when she entered. They were called “Purple Pricks,” and they were reportedly ideal for bachelorette parties. I would have made the drink blue and called it “Blue Balls,” she thought. I should put that in the suggestion box on the way out.

  “…A truck pulls up right next to mine. It’s a beater, rusted out, chipped paint, the right front fender was down, you know, a real piece of shit. And this guy gets out. He’s only a little younger than me but the way he’s dressed—there was something written on his T-shirt, and his hair, like, was so long it hung down in the front?—it makes me think he’s a kid.”

  He sounds kind of sexy, thought Maggie. She missed the scruffy New York boys she used to study at her local bar before she was banished to the suburbs by her employer. (Why didn’t it feel more like a promotion? she often wondered.) Those boys wouldn’t have dated her—she had always been too clean-cut (Boring, she thought. I know what I am) for boys like that—but it made her feel sexier just knowing she was near them. And then she remembered she was on a date. Focus.

  “I can see your point,” she said. “Bad car, bad hair. Go on.”

  “So I notice he’s pulling stuff out of the trunk. I’m not sticking my nose in his business, but he’s just doing it while I’m standing right there, getting my keys out, you know, I had to put the coffee on top of my car, fold up the paper, it takes a while, especially if I”—and with this, he jerked his head back and gave Maggie a playful wink—“haven’t had my coffee yet.”

  “Of course,” she said. Robert’s fine when he’s not being twitchy, she thought. Why does he have to twitch? One minute he’s this handsome, normal man with really nice teeth and a lot of money, and the next he’s this spazzy kid. Less jerking and whirring and face-making, and more silence. Yes. That would be nice.

  “OK, he’s pulling out boxes, a couple of boxes of books, it looked like; there were photo albums in there, too, I could see; and then there’s two suitcases, old-fashioned ones with leather straps around them, and they’re kind of worn. He takes everything out and walks them over to the sidewalk, stacks them up, one by one, next to a bench outside of the 7-Eleven. By now I’m in my car, buckled in, ready to go. You wear your seat belt, don’t you? You should always wear your seat belt. I had a cousin who got rear-ended once, and he wasn’t wearing his seat belt. Went through the windshield, and now he can’t see out of his right eye. He sued the guy, though, and now he never has to work again. I think I’d rather be able to see out of both eyes, though, you know?”

  Maggie nodded somberly. She looked to the side and made eye contact with the waitress, motioned for another. “You, too?” she said to Robert, then held up two fingers for the waitress.

  “Sure. Why not? It’s Friday night and it feels all right, right?” He raised his eyebrows. “Now where was I?”

  “7-Eleven.”

  “Right. So he walks back to the truck, opens the passenger side. There’s someone sitting in it; I can’t see, I’m too far back, but now I’ve got to wait and see, right? Turns out it’s an old lady. He helps her down, walks her over to the bench, then walks away, no kiss, no wave good-bye, no nothing, just hops back into the truck and pulls away, leaves her right there in front of the 7-Eleven. I watch all the other people walk by, and nobody says a thing.”

  “Isn’t that interesting,” said Maggie. What’s interesting? Something was. She didn’t know what yet.

  SINCE THE AGE of five, Maggie had been a sleepwalker. It was possible she had been doing it longer than that, but it was a few days after Maggie’s fifth birthday—two slices of pink-frosted birthday cake still left in the refrigerator—that her mother first recalled finding her out of bed, late at night, eyes wide open, standing in the doorway of her parents’ bedroom, tiny hands slapping on the already open door as if she were banging some tribal drum. Once they uncovered her disorder, everything changed at once.

  “Let’s make a list of everything we need to do,” said her mother. “To help Maggie.” Diane was tiny and seemingly battery-powered; she never stopped running. Her husband, Bill, called her his “secret weapon” sometimes and his “ballbuster” other times.

  “You just let me know what I need to do,” said Bill. “What I can fit in between classes and writing. Because I will be there. I will do it.”

  “Bill—”

  “You know my schedule,” he said. “Work with me here.”

  So first Diane took Maggie to the doctor, then a specialist, then a sleep-disorder institute; there were tests and pills, and then she sent her to a therapist to see if there was anything traumatic going on there deep underneath, you know, in the subconscious, like some secret that she didn’t know about. Diane didn’t even want to think about the worst that could have happened. (This was when they first started putting the faces of missing children on the sides of milk cartons, and Diane would study them carefully over breakfast each morning, then keep an eye out wherever she went. This obsession carried on throughout her life; she was proud to have started the first neighborhood watch in their community. When she retired she bought a police radio on the Internet and would happily listen to the local force’s regular banter well into the night.)

  No, said the first doctor, and the second, and the next and the next. There’s nothing wrong with your little Maggie that we can see. She’s happy, she’s healthy. In fact, what a delight! It’s probably just a glitch in the system.

  Meanwhile Maggie was an unstoppable night cruiser, and her family’s house was her terrain. She found her way into every crevice of the home, from the laundry room to the dank crawl space she wouldn’t go near when she was awake, up and down the stairs, into both bathrooms (including in the shower, where her parents once found her sitting in an inch of cold water), her big sister Holly’s room quite frequently, and of course her parents’ room, where she would sometimes hover over them as they lay hugging opposite sides of the bed, Maggie squeezing and opening her fists and gently counting to ten. She often expressed an affinity for tapping and thumping and pounding, and that’s how her parents usually found her: they followed the noise. It was as if the house was haunted, that’s how they felt sometimes, only there was no ghost, just a little girl who couldn’t sleep through the night.

  And while they tried to prevent her mobility with baby guards and locked doors for rooms they considered danger zones, they knew that eventually they would have to find another solution, that she would get taller and stronger and smarter and would be able to take down anything they threw her way. There was also the fear that she would start falling more, down steps, or down anywhere really, and break a limb or hurt her young, fragile head. She already had bruises up and down her knees, so much so that her parents were called into Maggie’s school, where they were forced to provide documentation of her illness to an uncomfortable-looking principal and a fiery teacher who had the audacity to imply that they were incompetent parents.

  “It’s about keeping your eyes open,” she said. “Eyes and ears, Mr. and Mrs. Stoner. It’s not that hard.”

  “We’re going to move, that’ll help,” explained Diane to the school principal. “We’re going to move to a ranch house—no s
tairs. And carpeting in every room. It’s not because we’re not trying, we are. It’s just hard.” Her eyes filled up with gentle tears. The principal looked at her husband, but Diane didn’t bother. She knew he was looking at the bookshelf behind the principal’s desk, or at the view of the empty playground through the window, or anywhere at all, really, that took him somewhere else.

  AS THE WAITRESS arrived with their next round, Maggie and Robert both drained their drinks, making a sucking sound as the last of the gin-soaked cocktails flew up their straws. Maggie rattled her straw around the ice. The waitress, who was wearing a skimpy terrycloth tank top and shorts and a pin that said, “Ask me about our appetizers!” dipped and swiveled gracefully as she served their drinks. Robert smiled at her and said, “What about ’em?”

  “What about what?” said the waitress.

  Robert pointed to her chest. “Your appetizers.”

  “Oh,” she said, as if he were the first person to ever respond to that particular call to action, but Maggie knew that couldn’t be true, that people probably asked about her appetizers all the time. She’s probably drunk, like we are. Maggie had decided, as the noise on the patio heightened with the bellows and cackles of local young singles, that everyone around them was drunk, and that life was comprised solely of periods of sobriety and inebriation, and when you were young and single and, especially, alone in a new town as she was, there were bound to be more periods of inebriation. So she was only abiding by the rules.

  “…Jalapeño poppers, mozzarella sticks, spicy mozzarella sticks, fried cheese bread, and nachos. You can get those nachos with beef, chicken, or vegetarian style. It has a name. Um, Macho Nachos. All of the appetizers have names. You don’t need the names, though, do you?”

  “How about nachos? With chicken. That’ll hit the spot, huh?” said Robert. He leaned back in his chair, crooked his arm over the top of his head, and then slapped his lean belly with the palm of his hand. “We need a little something to take the edge off.” He leaned into Maggie as the waitress walked away, and said, voice lowered, “I hope you don’t mind me ordering for you. You look like you could use some food. No offense.”

  “None taken.” Maggie looked down at her drink. She didn’t want it anymore, but you shouldn’t waste a drink, should you? She burped quietly and tasted gin mixed with an acidic flavor.

  “Should I…? Yes? All right, well, I couldn’t just leave her there without checking on her, could I? The poor woman looked so sad when the truck took off. She pulled all of her boxes close around her. I thought she was going to cry. Hoo boy, that would have been a mess. Grandma’s crying out in front of the 7-Eleven again. Anyway I went up to her and asked her if she was doing OK, and she looked up at me with such soft, I don’t know, grateful eyes, I damn near melted inside.”

  A busboy stopped by with place settings for their table. He looked at Maggie, and she gave him a shaky smile. Then she rested her hand on her heart, as if she were about to do the pledge of allegiance. “Thank you,” she said to him, with complete sincerity. She ran her fingers over the knife, which was spotted with small bubbles of dishwashing liquid. She stuck her thumb in her mouth, wet it, and then rubbed it on the knife.

  Robert watched her. “You all right there, kiddo?”

  “I’m fine. I’m just drunk.” She looked down at the knife. She rubbed it some more. “I want you to shut up and keep talking.”

  Robert put his hand on hers and she let him keep it there.

  “Turns out she’s got a place nearby. She was going to call a cab to help her get the rest of the stuff home, but she was taking a little rest first. She doesn’t say who the kid was, where she was coming from, why he didn’t just take her home, nothing. I don’t know if it was pride or maybe she had a touch of the crazy and it just didn’t seem weird to her at all. I got the feeling, though, that if I left her there she might forget to call that cab and just keep on sitting there through the day and night. This little old lady and her boxes.”

  Boxes, she thought. She remembered something, then—a box from her childhood, and a flash of her mother’s voice, panicked. (Her mother was usually either panicked or angry.) And her chest tightened, as if someone had taken a hold of her insides with their hand, finger by finger, until there was a clench of a fist.

  THE RANCH HOUSE was grim, and not nearly as spacious as their last home, or at least it felt that way because there was less light. But it was only a few blocks away from their last house, which made it ideal because the girls could stay in the same school, and her parents could use the same sitter, plus it was only fifteen minutes away from the university. They still had three bedrooms, and a living room and a dining room and two baths, but the new study didn’t have the towering twin set of built-in bookshelves like the last house, and there wasn’t a crawl space, either, which was fine by Diane—those things could be death traps, but that meant less storage space and more clutter. So before they moved, Diane started throwing things away without asking her husband, and when he put up a fight (They spent hours talking about it. Hours. Like she didn’t have a thousand other things to do with her time. And he wanted to talk), together they decided he should rent a storage unit for all his books, the ones that wouldn’t fit in whatever new bookshelves they bought, or in his office at school.

  Still, despite her best efforts, the day before they moved, their house was filled with boxes. There were the girls’ boxes, full of dolls (the new ones and the old favorites she couldn’t get them to part with, no matter how much she begged) and board games, their clothes and favorite beach towels, bedtime books, daytime books, records they liked to sing along with while they helped Mommy fold laundry (she usually just had them pair socks, made it into a game to keep them quiet), toiletries and medicine (allergy medicine for Holly and an array of vitamins for Maggie, each one more expensive and useless than the next), and every single art project they’d made since they’d been old enough to pick up paste, glitter, and childproof scissors. And then there were Diane’s boxes, which had everything else for the home, from the kitchen and the bathroom and all of the bedrooms, things to cook with and to make you feel comfortable and to keep you healthy. Basically everything you needed to furnish a home she had covered, in her boxes.

  Finally there were her husband’s boxes; he had insisted on packing his separately ever since he found his collection of Rolling Stones records at the curb in front of their driveway on garbage day. “It’s the Stones, for God’s sake, Diane! The Stones!” he had moaned. He told her to stay away from his boxes.

  To tell the truth, she didn’t even want to know what he had packed in them. She was only going to have to contend with them when she unpacked them at the other end. He had done it haphazardly, of course—she noticed when she woke up early the next morning—hadn’t even bothered to tape them shut. Diane cursed him silently. The movers were coming at 8:00 AM, and here she was at 6:00 AM, walking around in her bare feet and nightgown, taping boxes shut when he’s the one who should be taking care of things like this. A little help, she said to herself. All I am asking for is a little help.

  MAGGIE NEEDED a glass of water. Now. She looked desperately around the patio. Their waitress was busy, balancing a pitcher of beer in one hand, a tray full of plates in the other. A busboy helped a band of long-haired musicians carry their equipment to a small stage area on the far side of the patio. She turned to Robert, who was plowing through an obscenely large pile of nachos. Maybe he can help me, thought Maggie. Maybe that’s what he’s there for.

  “I really need some water,” she said slowly.

  Robert’s head shot up. “Of course you do. I’m sorry. Hold on.” He got up and walked over to the busboy. She watched him motion to the table and then thank the busboy.

  “He’ll be just a second, honey,” he said.

  I really don’t think he should be calling me “honey,” she thought, but instead she said, “Tell me the end of your story. I hope it’s a happy ending.”

  “I don’t know if
I would call it happy. It’s not sad, either. It’s more…”

  “Bittersweet?” said Maggie.

  “Something like that,” said Robert. “So. I said I’d take her wherever she needed to go, took all of her boxes, put them in the trunk of the ol’ Saturn, put the suitcases in the backseat, put the little old lady in the front seat—”

  “What was her name?”

  “Ann. That’s my mom’s middle name, actually. Huh. I should have told her that.” Robert looked off thoughtfully in the distance for a second.

  “What?” said Maggie. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Oh, I was just wondering if that band is the same one I’ve heard here before. They do a lot of Jimmy Buffett covers. Good stuff.”

  I hate Jimmy Buffett, she thought. She squeezed his hand. More story.

  “Anyway, it turns out she lived kind of far away, pretty close to the city, actually, but at this point I’m already going to be late, and I don’t know, seize the day, right? It’s been so nice out and I’ve been working so much lately, I just wanted a little time for me. Even if I was helping her, this lady, it sort of also seemed like it would be for me, too. Do you think that’s wrong?”

  “No, I think that’s very, very right,” said Maggie. A busboy appeared with two glasses of water. Maggie took a hearty swig from hers.

  “Good. So we’re in the car, and she’s not talking. She tells me her name, where she lives, but doesn’t really offer anything else up. It’s OK, I didn’t need to know, you know? I was just going to get her home, that’s all I cared about at that point. After about a half hour, she tells me to turn off, and it’s this neighborhood, I’ve seen it a lot on newscasts. It’s not the safest place in the world for an older person, I’ll tell you that. She lived in this smallish building, no elevator, and the lobby smelled like piss.”