Fresh Kills (13 page)
Authors: Bill Loehfelm
I spied a coffee stand as I approached the food court. Some cheap imitation of a Starbucks with a pimpled kid in a blue apron behind the counter. He poured my coffee and made my change without a single word. I took the lid off and sipped, burning my tongue. It hurt but the coffee felt great going down. I needed a cigarette and a shot of whiskey to get the maximum benefit, but I felt myself settling down, felt like maybe I could eat. I spotted an empty table next to a plastic tree and sat down to wait for Julia. I was halfway through the coffee when she appeared, shopping bags swinging from her fingers.
“I must look horrible,” she said as she sat. “The way you’re looking at me.” Most of her makeup was gone and her eyes were swollen.
“Not horrible,” I said. “It’s just, I can tell you’ve been crying.”
She looked around, shrugged her shoulders. “Oh well. Like I’ve never been caught crying in public before.”
“I should’ve stayed with you,” I said.
“So you could hand me tissues?” she asked. “I did most of it in the dressing room anyway. Nah. It did me good, just walking around, taking care of some business. It helped, just knowing you’d be waiting for me.” She checked out our choices for lunch. “Whadda you think? Chinese? Pizza? Mickey D’s?”
“Whatever,” I said. Maybe I’d just have another cup of coffee.
“I’m feeling Chinese,” she said.
“Funny, you don’t look Chinese,” I said. Julia smiled at me. “Works for me,” I said. “Surprise me. I trust your judgment.”
She came back with a plate of shrimp lo mein and two egg rolls for me, two tiny spring rolls for her. I knew she’d only eat one, but I didn’t say anything about it. I’d let her eat my fortune cookie.
I had polished off my lo mein and half an egg roll when my sister kicked me under the table. I ignored her. She kicked me again and finally I looked up. The shock on her face made my heart skip. She pointed across the Mall, through the crowd. It took me a minute. I didn’t know what I was looking for. But then I spotted her. Tall, long red hair, black T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Leather pants, right arm sleeved down to the wrist with an elaborate tattoo. She sure held my attention. For all kinds of reasons.
“Is that who I think it is?” Julia finally said.
I stood and watched the redhead walk. There was the right kind of sway to her hips. She stopped to look in a store window, turned to talk to a friend. It was her, all right. I stared, my heart doing flips and my stomach at my knees, hoping she wouldn’t glance over and see me. I sat back down, still staring in the direction she’d disappeared.
“Virginia.” I looked down at my half-eaten egg roll. I’d lost my appetite.
“I thought so,” Julia said, laughing. “Junior, the look on your face was priceless. I wish I had a picture of that face to show all your friends down at the tough-guy club.”
Julia surprised me by biting into her second spring roll. “Talked to her lately?”
“Who?”
“Virginia, duh.”
“I haven’t talked to her in months,” I said. “Haven’t had anything to do with her since we split.” I rolled my egg roll in a puddle of duck sauce. It was almost the truth.
“You’re a liar, Junior.”
“What’re you talking about?” I asked.
“Wasn’t her birthday not long ago?” Julia asked. She was pushing me now and it was about to make me irritable. Which she knew. And she was doing it anyway.
“Yeah. March.”
“What’d you do for it?”
“Nothin’.”
“You’re lying again.”
I started to protest but then it hit me. I remembered. It was probably true that I should call my sister more often. It was definitely true that I had to stop calling her when I was drunk. When I did that, I talked too much. I strained to remember how much I’d given up. Probably everything.
“So I sent her some roses,” I said. “Big deal.”
Julia set her plastic fork down on her plastic plate. I couldn’t tell if she was shocked, pleased, or pissed. Shit. She hadn’t known.
“Not bad,” she said. “To her house?”
“No,” I said. Virginia had never bothered to tell me where she went after she moved out. “I sent them to her shop. I even had them put my name on the card.”
“And she accepted them?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I’m confused,” Julia said. “She didn’t call you? Say thanks?”
“She called when she knew I’d be at work. She mentioned that she didn’t work at the tattoo parlor anymore.”
I took a deep breath and blew it out. It wasn’t big fun explaining it. It was embarrassing, in fact, revealing how Virginia and I had yet again, even apart, turned a simple gesture into a duel of hidden agendas. I guess it didn’t help that I knew damn well she didn’t like roses.
“She never specifically said anything about the flowers,” I said, “but I figured with the timing of the call, she at least heard about them.”
“Where’s she working now?” Julia asked.
“She didn’t say.”
Julia picked apart her spring roll, separating the contents into tiny piles. “You told me she loved that shop, that she was going to buy into it for good.”
“I guess the way she felt didn’t last,” I said, growing irritated with lingering on the subject. “It’s been known to happen with her.”
My sister looked away and then back at me. Christ, I thought she was gonna cry.
“The flowers, it was no big deal,” I said. “Just a spur-of-the-momentthing. It was her thirtieth, only happens once in your life. The phone call was more than I expected. Overall, it was probably a bad idea. It certainly didn’t accomplish anything.”
That was the truth. My intentions hadn’t been entirely honor-able when I sent the flowers. I did care about her birthday, but I had sent the flowers, at least in part, to prove I missed her so little I could do such things casually, with utter disregard for any implications. In return, she’d let me know she’d gotten them, just to make sure I knew she didn’t care, either. And to remind me she could find me, but that I couldn’t find her. The whole dumb exchange was Virginia and me in a nutshell. We’d gotten so close we could lie to each other without even speaking.
“None of it’s a big deal,” I said. “The flowers, the breakup, none of it. I’m over it, all of it.”
“I’ll never understand you,” Julia said. “You don’t make any sense.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but you love me anyway.”
Julia stood and gathered her packages. “That I do.”
I searched my jacket pockets for my cigarettes. “Wish you could’ve taught that to Virginia.”
“I always liked her,” she said.
“Of course you did. She was gorgeous, and she was a switch-hitter.”
Julia punched my shoulder. Hard. I shoulda let her carry her own goddamn bags.
“That had nothing to do with it,” Julia said, “and you know it.”
“I know. I liked her, too.”
I threw Julia’s bags in the backseat and started the car.
“You were together for what? Three years?” she asked.
Two years, eight months, and three weeks. “Something like that. Give or take.” I backed the car out of the space.
Julia turned in her seat to face me, bending a long leg up on the seat. “I thought she was gonna be the one.”
I glared at her. “Can we drop this?”
Julia dropped her leg with a thump. “I really thought you two would make it.” She sat quiet for a long time, picking at her fingernails. “How did you two do it?” she finally asked. “How do you write someone out of your life like that? Just go on like nothing ever happened.”
I changed lanes. I didn’t have an answer and I wasn’t much interested in coming up with one then and there. It was just the way it turned out. Some women I’ve dated, I’m still on good terms with them. It’s no big deal if we bump into each other. A couple still buy me drinks. I’ve got one coming home with me on a semi-regular basis. Virginia was just different. In the six months since we’d split, I’d tried not to think too much about why.
Anything I found of hers in the first week after we broke up— old T-shirts she slept in, CDs, pictures of us—I boxed up and dropped off at the tattoo parlor. Whatever else of hers I found after that went in the trash. She never called looking for anything. Nothing of mine came back to me. I’m sure she threw it all out. I knew there were things I’d lost, but I couldn’t recall anything I missed.
“Seems to me it would shrink you,” Julia said. “Letting someone disappear with big parts of you in their heart.”
“She didn’t disappear, she left,” I said. It came out harder than I’d wanted.
Julia stared straight ahead through the windshield, thinking her own thoughts. I got a little peeved. Suddenly, I wanted her to be listening to me.
“Look, it’s better this way,” I said. “All we were doing at the end was brawling or screwing. Most of the whole last year was like that. She got sick of it first and I don’t blame her. And I don’t hate her, either. Anything but. But we’re best out of each other’s way.” I stole a glance at Julia. “What about you and Cindy? You two gonna be old pals?”
“Not anytime soon,” Julia said from a distance. “But the facts are I loved her and she loved me. I can’t see us being out of each other’s lives forever. We shared too much, taught each other too much. Someday we’ll be friends.”
“Yeah, she taught you how to get hurt and come back for more,” I said. “Why even give her the slightest chance at hurting you again, letting you down again?”
Julia frowned at me, knowing I was at that very moment wishing I could take that back. I rolled my shoulders, squinting with the sun in my eyes.
“See, to me,” I said, “what you’re talking about? That’s settling.” I paused, stuck for the next thing to say. Against my better judgment, my sister had me thinking. My head started to hurt. I struggled on.
“Like, for example, Virginia and I should have lunch once a month because we used to be a couple? So we could stare at each other like idiots and talk bullshit? What’s the point?
“You know, I see exes together at work all the time. It’s painful. Both of them look like they’re gonna fucking die. I wanna walk over and shoot the both of them, just to end the misery. The woman never eats and the guy always drinks too much. It’s play-acting, some junior-high slow dance based on denial of what’s really there.”
“I don’t think of it that way at all,” Julia said. “Yeah, things are never what they once were, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still be good, and valuable. There are limitations. It’s tough to readjust, it hurts, but love changes colors; it’s flexible. You keep what works and live on that.”
I shook my head, but didn’t have an argument. Honestly, I was sick of the subject. What point was there in not letting go? People came and went and there was nothing for it. Even I knew life had some rules you just didn’t argue with. Someone at that table would always be left longing for something—another chance, another night in the dark, an admission of guilt or fault or love or regret that would never come, to remember something, or to forget something else. Virginia and I had been smart enough to see all that, to avoid it. We’d already said everything we’d ever have to say to each other. Yelled it. Screamed it. At least, in the end, we’d been able to agree on that. That’s what I told myself, anyway.
SIX
A COP CAR WAS PARKED IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE WHEN WE GOT home. Purvis waited for us on the front porch. It was strange, and disturbing, having him around the house again. I didn’t like it. It reminded me of our dying days as friends, when he would loiter on the porch, trying to talk to my sister while waiting for me to get home from swimming practice. He’d see me walking up the street and just stand there, watching me, until I got to the house. Then he’d make some stupid joke, and I’d give him some lame excuse about why I couldn’t hang out. I could never figure out why he never took the hint, why he hung on so long. I didn’t know what he had to prove.
“Whadda ya want?” I asked, climbing out of the car.
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