sometimes i write fiction

It’s Sal’s turn to spring for coffee, so he swings past the 24-hour Dunkin’ Donuts in Andrew Square and runs in for two large regulars.  By the time he gets back to the sedan Renee is snapping her phone shut like she’s trying to punish it, hurling it into the deep canyon of her purse. She looks really, really pissed.

“What?” He hands over one of the enormous Styrofoam cups, careful. Back when they were first partnered he spilled thirty-two ounces of hazelnut all over her lap. The light from inside the shop catches the badge on her uniform, the tiny gold cross she always wears around her neck. “Hey. What?”

“Nothing.” Renee shakes her head. “Don’t.”

So he doesn’t. Dorchester’s the main street of a ghost town at this hour, stores shuttered, pavement slick with an icy sheen of water and neon. Sal pulls out into traffic. The radio hums.

*

His first day back on active duty after the thing and she dropped a sack of French crullers in the center of the chaos on his desk.

“Is that, like, a cop joke?” he asked, squinting up at her. Eight-thirty in the morning and her hair was already falling out of its braid, a dark corona around her face. The elastic at the end was screaming purple, one of her daughter’s. Renee always smelled faintly of pears.

“It’s a congratulations, dumbass,” she said, and just barely bumped the side of his ankle with the toe of her boot.  “Welcome back.”

Still, she wouldn’t look him in the eye.

*

Active duty was maybe an overstatement: they’re sitting on a side street next to a desiccated playground  in the Cathedral Projects, a meetup point for a dope ring that caught a seven-year-old in the crossfire over the weekend. It’s eleven degrees Fahrenheit, too cold even for the bangers. The coffee went tepid right away.

Renee is quiet, staring out the window at a discount store Santa listing on somebody’s lawn. “You all right?” he finally asks.

Renee smiles at the glass, the faintest reflection. “I’m great,” she replies, and she’s full of shit but Sal lets it go. They’ve been partners four years; he’s used to her silences.

They’ve been partners four years and he’s loved her just about that long.

*

Three weeks ago they caught a domestic on the west side of Southie, all cheap beer and epithets, TV bleating in the background. Sal pulled the squalling wife into the kitchen, her nails raking livid tributaries up and down his arms,  and when he turned around the husband was aiming a nine at Renee with one shaking hand.

Sal thinks he said, “Put the gun down.”

He thinks he said, “Put the gun down now or I will shoot you.”

He’s pretty sure that’s what he said.

*

”I was supposed to sew tinsel on a bathrobe for Kaylee’s play before I came in,” she tells him, out of nowhere. It’s quarter of one and she slips her hands between her thighs to warm them, leans her head back against the seat.

Sal blinks. “Tinsel on…?”

“She’s the angel Gabriel.” Renee shakes her head. “ Anyway, of course I forgot, because I’m a terrible mother, so I had to call Damien and get him to do it before he went to bed. That’s…you know. With the phone.”

“Oh.” Damien is Renee’s ex-husband, though they’re still living in the same triple decker in Revere, so. Sal isn’t really sure how much ex that actually is. “Can Damien sew?”

“I don’t know. No. He’ll staple it on there. That’s not really the point, Sal.”

“No,” Sal says, and listens. A block or two over there’s shouting, but from this far away it’s only noise. “I guess it’s not.”

*

The night of the shooting she showed up at his place in Charlestown and muscled past him into the living room, sharp elbows and ready for a fight. “The hell were you doing?” she demanded, so close their ribs were almost touching. Her cheeks were raw and reddish from the cold. “Quite seriously, what in the hell did you think you were doing?”

Sal blinked. “What?”

“I was handling it!”

“You were handling it.” He tried to remember the last time he’d been so completely, shatteringly angry, and couldn’t. He’d killed a man this afternoon. “Guy’s got a bottle in one hand and a gun to your fucking head, but I should mind my own business because you were handling it.”

“You can’t do this,” she said, shaking her head like she was panicking, like it was about more than just today, and he almost interrupted but she was right on the edge of something so he didn’t.  “We can’t–just because we–Jesus Christ, Sal, can this please just be the one area of my life that I am not perpetually fucking up beyond all recognition? Please?” She looked around then, like she’d never been to his apartment before. For a second she was quiet.  “Do you have a date here?” she asked.

“No.”

“I thought you might have a date here.”

“Yeah, well.” His lips twitched; he felt his fingers flex once at his sides. “Never stopped you before.”

*

“You’re not a terrible mother,” he says eventually. It’s sleeting again, ice on the wide gray expanse of the sedan. The wind rattles the swings on the playground, a shrill worrying sound. “And you’re not fucking everything up.”

“I’m fucking this up,” she says, and it’s the closest they’ve come to talking about it. “Am I not?”

Sal doesn’t have an answer for that.

*

It started right when she and Damien were splitting, back when she first found out about the waitress in town and Sal was pretty sure they were going to get divorced like normal people. For a couple of weeks she worked a ton of overtime, an extra set of clothes in her locker and Kaylee at her grandma’s in Methuen, so Sal worked a lot of overtime, too.

“Look,” she said that first time, in the car, and her mouth was on his neck and his jaw and the hard line of his cheekbone. Her coat was in a heap on the floor mat. The armrest dug into his back.  “I’m not–I don’t want you to think I was planning on–I’m wearing mom underwear right now, Sal, so just–.”

“Renee,” he said quietly, and he wanted to remember this in case it never happened again. His heart was slamming away inside his rib cage. “I swear to Christ I could not care less about your lame underwear right now.”

Renee threw her head back and laughed.

*

“They’re not going to show, are they,” she says.  It’s close to four in the morning, and the sleet has turned to snow. Fucking Massachusetts, Sal swears to God.

“Would you?” he asks. “They’re laying low. They’re just,” and he shrugs here, his voice doing a weird thing he doesn’t entirely appreciate. “They’re laying low.”

Renee gives him this look like she’s trying to see the tissue under his skin. A plastic bag blows across the street. “Yeah,” she says finally. “I know that.”

They sit in the car and wait for something to happen. Her cold hand slips into his.

People who wander in and order shots at last call on a Wednesday tend to be the kind of people who a) don’t tip or b) puke all over the hardwood, so when the messy-haired guy in the denim jacket slides onto a stool and orders a Jameson, Georgia can’t hold back her grimace.  She’s on her own tonight–Connor knocked off early to meet the hipster girl he’s dating way the hell out in Far Rockaway–and it wouldn’t be the first time she’s had to dodge a drunken game of grab-ass courtesy of the clientele. “We’re closing up, cowboy,” she says in what Mal used to call her don’t screw with me voice, sliding the heavy-bottomed glass down the end of the bar. “So you gotta drink fast.”

“Will do,” he says, and smiles–fast and fleeting and gone. The Christmas lights strung up above the bar flicker pink and green across his pretty face. Georgia’s surprised—first because last-call whiskey-drinkers are not, as a general rule, big smilers, and second because she’s sure as shit seen this particular expression before.

Georgia blinks. For a second she thinks she might know him from home in New Jersey, or the year and a half she spent at college upstate: she slept with a lot of faceless boys right after the accident, all Abercrombie and unwashed sheets. It’s even possible–oh, God—that he’s some old friend of Mallory’s, and she’s wondering how in the hell she’s going to break the news after all this time, when he shifts his weight on the barstool, heartbreaking and familiar, and Georgia realizes she recognizes him from the posters that used to plaster the walls of her bedroom.

“Holy crap,” she blurts, then barks out an idiotic-sounding laugh and claps a hand over her mouth. Somewhere in the universe, her thirteen-year-old self is having a fit. Georgia gapes. He’s got his curly dark head cocked to the side, patient, like he’s waiting to see what she’s going to do next. “Uh,” Georgia says finally. Her heart does a weird thing inside her chest, like something is alive and burrowing in there. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he says, smiling again which is what started it to begin with, her ridiculous middle-school love affair with Micah St. John’s smile: his smile and his pop songs and the way he pronounced the letter L. This was before his band broke up and she dropped out of college, before Georgia found herself behind the taps at a dive on First Avenue and Micah, according to an article she came across in People last year while she waited on line at Gristedes, landed in jail.

“Um. Yeah.” She nods and attempts a recovery, going about her late-night routine: settling up with the couple making moon eyes at each other over cheap red wine, nudging a regular who’s fallen asleep in the corner. She puts the caps on the bottles and counts the money in her till and when she looks up he’s just watching her, like he’s curious. He still looks sort of like a girl. “What?” Georgia asks, and it comes out a lot shriller than she means.

“Nothing,” he says, all innocence. “You’re very efficient.”

“I’m closing,” she tells him, but she can feel a grin spreading across her face. Micah St. John, Jesus Christ. There is no one in the world she wants to tell this to more than Mal.

“I see that.”

“Do you?”

“Should I leave?”

“No.” The door wheezes shut behind the others. Micah St. John stays right where he is. There’s frost on the big plate-glass windows, crystals tiny and intricate and sharp. “God,” Georgia says, and it spills right out of her like an overturned glass. “My sister would be apoplectic right now.”

“You want me to sign something for her?” he asks; then, seeing her face: “What, is that lame?” He laughs a little. “Look at you. You think that’s so lame.”

“No, no, it’s just,” and here Georgia freezes: the first moment after a car wreck, silence after the skid. She squeezes her eyes shut and opens them again, and there he is. “She’s dead. My sister.”

It hangs there, a physical thing, suspended like a shot of Bailey’s in a pint of Guinness. She shouldn’t have said it. She doesn’t know why she did. Even Connor, who’s the closest thing she has to a friend here, doesn’t know. She wills him not to say he’s sorry.

“I’m sorry,” Micah says.

Well. Georgia shrugs. “She liked the drummer best, anyway.”

“Girls usually did.”

“Do you still hear from him? Paul?” Paul came from Haverhill, Massachusetts, and ten years ago his favorite soda was Tab. Georgia wonders what kinds of things she could have learned ten years ago if she hadn’t been crammed into a single bed with Mal’s enormous feet freezing cold against her calves, their heads bent over a dog-eared, waterlogged copy of Bop. Georgia’s memory is a scattershot affair and her whole life she repeated the important things out loud so her sister could be sure and remember them; twenty-three years old and all she’s left with is trivia from decade-old teen magazines.

“Nah.” Micah shakes his head with a finality that makes her wonder what happened there. His voice sounds different than it did. “What was her name?” he asks.

“Her name?”

“Your sister.”

Georgia looks him over: a certifiable has-been, but still the room seems to orbit around him, like he’s got a perpetual spotlight on him everywhere he goes. He’s never stood on a ticket line or in the audience or next to a casket in a borrowed black dress and Georgia feels, bizarrely, like she’s given him too many things already. It’s been a long time since she said Mal’s name out loud. “So,” she says, a little meanly. “I read about the jail thing.”

His eyebrows arc up, a guarded amusement. “Did you.”

“Sorry,” she says immediately. “That was awful.”

Micah laughs. “Kind of.”

“I’m nervous. I’m blurting.”

“You don’t have to be nervous.”

“I’m not, usually.”

“It wasn’t jail,” he tells her. “It was mandatory drug abuse rehabilitation.”

“Aren’t you not supposed to drink once you get out of mandatory drug abuse rehabilitation?”

Micah shrugs. “I’m not an alcoholic.”

“So then what are you?”

“That,” he says eventually, “is a really good question.”

“No kidding.”

He sits there. She breathes. On the bar a white votive candle sputters; some half-forgotten lyric surfaces and sinks at the back of her head. She’s always been useless at learning the words, so it’s practicality as much as anything else that makes her tell him. “Mallory,” she says, so he’ll know and remember. “My sister’s name was Mallory.”

“Mallory,” he repeats, thoughtful. “That’s nice.”

“Yeah.” Georgia swallows, then:  “So do you want another drink, or what?”

“I thought you were closed.”

“I am.”

“Are you gonna have one with me?”

“A drink?”

“A drink.”

Georgia hedges, or pretends to. There’s an ache behind her ribs. “I…could be persuaded.”

“Well.” He smiles again, the slightest quirk at the edges of his mouth. “Good.”

She turns around and reaches for the bottle. She hums a song under her breath.

Some poor slob pukes corn dogs all over the giant swing ride, so Trevor’s got some time to kill while the maintenance guys hose it down. He shoves his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans and wanders the bright crowded length of the midway to the trailer where Rue is selling candy apples, looking bored. Rue always, always smells like candy apples. “What are you doing here?” she asks, leaning out the window and peering down at him, raising her voice so he can hear her over the cheerful electronic racket of the water gun game. She’s got a couple of sprinkles stuck to her arm. “Did somebody yak?”

“Yeah.”  Next to the Gravitron, the swings are pretty much tops when it comes to average rate of gastric upset per rider. It’s bad luck Trevor got stuck running it this year, but he’s fifteen and the youngest and he has to pay his dues. “Not even a kid, either. An old guy.”

Rue shakes her head in contempt. “People should know their limits. Hey Ma,” she calls over her shoulder, toward the back of the trailer where Leanne is working the fryer for funnel cake, her capable hands speckled with burns. “Trevor’s got a barf break. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

“Take twenty dollars out of the box and see if you can’t find me some singles, will you?” he hears Leanne say; then:  “Hi, Trev.”

“Hey.”

After a minute the door screeches open and Rue hops down, shoving the money into the back pocket of her fraying denim shorts. “Where we going?” she asks. Trevor shrugs.

They weave through the crowd toward the edge of the fairgrounds, past the bandstand and the trucks and the huge humming genny, cables snaking out every which way . It’s August in Oklahoma, and hot. Trevor stops to smile at some pretty girls who are checking him out, cutoffs and flip-flops, one of them holding a puffy blue cloud of cotton candy. Rue rolls her eyes.

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

It’s the end of the summer, getting dark a little earlier now, the sun going down pink and purple over the flashing neon spokes of the ferris wheel.  Soon they’ll head south to Texas and Florida for the winter: Thanksgiving in Pensacola, Christmas in Spur. They’ve been fair kids their whole lives, him and Rue. There’s a rhythm.  “So,” he says, dropping down in the grass near the tree line, digging a cigarette out of his jeans.  “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” she replies, sitting beside him and nodding at the lighter. “Did you steal that from your dad?”

Trevor doesn’t answer. “Tell me again where this place is?”

Rue eyes him, patient. “Massachusetts,” she says, which he already knows. “Boston.”

“And tell me again what exactly you’re going to do there?”

“Trevor,” she says, flopping backwards onto the dry, weedy grass, her sneaker-clad feet flying briefly in the air. He’s acting stupider than he is on purpose, and they both know it. “Come on.”

“What?”

“Cut it out. You know what.”

“I really don’t.”

“Uh-huh.” Her hair’s spread all around her, a curly blond halo around her heart-shaped face. When they were younger, folks around the fair all used to call her Shirley Temple, until she got old enough to tell them to go screw. “It’s a good school, you know.”

“Do you hear me saying it’s not a good school?”

“It’s a real school, not my mom in a trailer trying to teach us plane geometry before we get to Euclid and have to unload for the week.”

“Your mom’s a good teacher.”

“My mom never graduated high school!” Rue huffs out a short, noisy breath. “Do you really want to do this your whole life?”

Trevor considers that. “Well, no,” he says eventually, blowing smoke rings up into the air. He’s been practicing all summer–Joel, who works the carousel, taught him how. “At some point I’d like to run the scrambler. That’s where the real money is.”

“Be serious.”

“I am.”

“Trev,” Rue says softly, and she just looks so sad for a minute, eyes dark and cloudy, like she’s already a million miles gone. And whatever, maybe most of the places he’s been to he’s only seen in passing, always on the outskirts of town, but Trevor knows how the world happens and he knows that if she gets on the train tomorrow then that’s just–that’s it. Show’s over; carnival’s gone. So he does the first thing that pops into his head: he leans over and kisses her, just for a second, soft. She tastes like caramel and wax.

Rue blinks. “What, exactly, was that?” she asks.

“I mean–”

She throws her head back and laughs–not mean at all, that’s not what she’s actually like, not really–but like she is so on to him. She always has been, he guesses; they’ve known each other since they were three. “Did you just kiss me?” she asks, like she can hardly believe it. “Did you think that would make me stay?”

“I don’t–shut up,” he says, shaking his head. Jesus Christ, she really is a pain in the ass.

Rue takes the cigarette out of his hand, inhales. “Creative,” she says thoughtfully.  “Would have worked when I was thirteen, maybe.”

Trevor looks at her with some interest. “You had a crush on me when we were thirteen?”

“I said maybe.”

They lie there for awhile, side by side in the grass. The sound from the midway drifts palely back, shouts and music. “What about your mom?” he asks. He feels like a piece of shit for saying it because that’s her Kryptonite, that’s what’s going to make her feel two inches tall, and he knows it and he says it anyway. “What’s she going to do without you?”

“Oh, okay. We can be done now.”  Rue shakes her head a little and gets to her feet, brushing dirt off the back of her shorts. “That’s mean, Trevor.”

“I know,” he says immediately. What an asshole he is. “I’m sorry.”

“No, seriously, that sucked.”

“I know.”

He grabs her hand, tugs. “Don’t–I didn’t–Rue.”

Rue sighs again, but she doesn’t let go, which is something. Her grip is warm and damp. And God, he doesn’t know why he’s being such a loser about this–why he can’t just throw her a high-five and say see you when I see you. He guesses he’s used to going, is all. He guesses he’s not used to being left.

Rue hesitates for a moment. She’s still holding onto his hand. “You could kiss me again if you wanted,” she tells him finally. “You could, you know. Kiss me goodbye.”

Trevor blinks. ”Goodbye,” he repeats, like it’s a word he’s never heard before, like it’s regional slang. “So you’re seriously–this is it. You’re actually going.”

Rue laughs a little, quiet, like she almost can’t believe it herself.  “Yeah, Trev,” she says, and her fingers lace between his like a promise. “I actually am.”

So he climbs to his feet and he does it, two hands on her tan, smooth face. The cigarette smolders on the dusty ground. The carnival flares in the distance.