“See you at nine,” Lisa said, and kissed him before getting out of the truck. They’d had a good afternoon, having not fought since they were at the clinic.
After she left, he had to get to work too. He’d promised Vivian and Bender he’d do the day’s deliveries that evening, just as he had the evening before. He’d taken yesterday off too, so he could drive to Minneapolis and help Claire move out of her apartment and into a house where she’d rented a room. When he’d gotten back to Midden he needed to make only a few deliveries, Sunday being his slowest night. As he drove out of the Red Owl parking lot, he clicked his cell phone on and listened to his messages. He had fourteen. Aside from one from Mardell, inviting him and Lisa to dinner, and another from Claire, thanking him for helping her the day before, they were all from Vivian or from people who had somehow gotten his cell phone number and had taken to calling him directly to get their drugs.
He dialed Claire’s number and got her recorded voice. It struck him for the first time how much she sounded like their mother, not in person, but the way she had sounded on her radio show, smooth and cheerful. He missed her more than he guessed he would, now that she stayed in Minneapolis on the weekends. Since Bruce married Kathy, she’d come up to Midden only once, for the annual Fourth of July bash at Len’s Lookout. Bruce and Kathy had been there too, though he and Claire had escaped them as soon as they could. One after the other, they’d shaken Kathy’s hand, as if they were meeting her for the very first time, and in some way they were—they had not seen her since she had become Bruce’s wife. With Bruce, they each exchanged a stiff hug and discussed how the animals were. They sauntered apart then, Bruce and Kathy going inside the bar, and Claire and Joshua heading to the tent, where there was a band and a keg, a shadow of grief settling over them. The rest of the afternoon he and Claire sat together on the bench behind the bar where they used to sit to watch the bears when they were kids, talking in the kind of open, lucid, sentimental way that they did when they were both slightly drunk—Joshua, being underage, had snuck sips of beer from Claire’s cup. Together they remembered things that no one else would remember. The way, for a time, they’d had only one bicycle between them, and how, instead of taking turns with it, they would pile on together, one of them inevitably balanced painfully on the metal bar that ran between the seat and the handlebars. Or how they used to play Madam Bettina Von So and So with their mother. Or the time when they couldn’t any longer resist the urge to see what would happen if they pulled the pin on the little fire extinguisher that hung near their wood stove.
“Hey. It’s me. Just calling to say hi,” Joshua said, after her machine beeped, and then he clicked his phone off and drove to Vivian and Bender’s and picked up what he needed for his deliveries.
He did not so much think of himself as a drug dealer as a mailman who brought only good mail. Most people were happy to see him and aside from the few who were paranoid or tweaking on meth, they were nice to him, offering him coffee and cake, or on occasion an entire meal. He came to know their houses, their gardens, their dogs and kids. And then other times, a different, darker reality would come crashing in and he hated his job and the ugliness in which he had become an active participant. He resented Vivian and Bender for sucking him in, for behaving like they owned him, for calling him night and day to order him around. Incrementally, over the months, he’d begun to put his foot down about whom he would sell to and whom he wouldn’t, especially if the drug of choice was meth. It wasn’t selling to the kids at the high school that bothered him. He did not think of them as kids, and even in the case of those he did—the ninth and tenth graders—he did not feel responsible for them. They were self-contained and powerless, incapable of truly ruining anyone’s life but their own. It was the mothers and the fathers that disturbed him. His refusal to sell meth to certain people began with Marcy from the café. The last time he’d seen her she’d looked haggard and grossly thin. Her husband had left her by then and she didn’t work at the café anymore—to everyone’s astonishment, her own mother had fired her. She sat and made clove oranges at her kitchen table while her children ranged freely through the house, getting into things. He’d had to suggest that one be given a bath; he’d had to keep the youngest, a three-year-old, from eating Marcy’s tube of lipstick, prying it from the tiny wet clench of her hand. In response, Marcy had laughed hysterically, cackling so hard she practically fell off her chair. From Marcy, he branched out, refusing to sell meth to anyone with kids under the age of fourteen, a decision that enraged Vivian, but about which she could do nothing. Joshua knew that his decision meant little in the end: everyone who wanted meth still got it. They came to Vivian and Bender, or Vivian and Bender went to them, or some of them stopped buying it and learned how to make it at home themselves. But it meant something to Joshua, to his idea of the world and what a mother should do and what a father should do: prevent, at the very least, their children from consuming cosmetics.
It was nearly eight when he finished his deliveries—too late to drive out to Lisa’s only to turn around and be back in town by nine and too early to pick her up from work. He drove past the Midden Café and the bowling alley, past the closed-down bakery and the motel, past the Red Owl, where he could see Lisa sitting on a high stool behind her register in the fluorescent glow of lights. She didn’t see him. He considered stopping and going in. He could stand in the magazine section, reading magazines he’d never dream of buying, until she got off work. He did that sometimes in the late afternoons, after he’d finished his deliveries, waiting for Lisa to finish her shift.
He drove to the Dairy Queen and parked. He’d started coming here lately on the nights that Lisa was so tired that she fell asleep immediately after dinner. He would have a slush and talk to the girls who worked there. He knew them all from school: Emily and Heidi and Caitlyn and Tara, any two of them, depending on the night.
He watched Heidi sweeping the floor, and then she walked into the back and the big red and white DQ sign outside went dark. She appeared again to lock the glass door, a thick ring of keys in her hand. When she saw Joshua sitting in his truck, she waved and he got out.
“Hey,” she called. She held the door open for him and then locked it behind him.
He looked toward the back to see who would be there, making Dilly bars or stocking the flavorings.
“It’s just me,” Heidi explained. “Caitlyn went home early because we were so slow.”
He sat on the counter and pushed a button on the cash register so it sprang open with a ring.
“Don’t!” yelled Heidi, though she was smiling. She slammed the money drawer shut and punched his arm.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” she asked.
“I don’t got one,” he said. It had become a familiar refrain between him and the girls at the Dairy Queen. They teased him about Lisa, and he would deny his love for her so adamantly that, at least in those moments, it felt true. He became giddy and uncharacteristically boisterous while at the DQ, flirting and joking with these girls he only half knew. It was as if he’d been cut loose entirely and set free from the people and things that composed his actual life.
“Make me a slush,” he ordered, tapping the top of Heidi’s head. She was a year younger than him, just out of eleventh grade, short and blond.
“Go make yourself a slush,” she said, but then she got a cup and asked what kind.
“Suicide,” he said, and watched her as she put a bit of each flavor into the cup. She gave it to him without making him pay. Seldom did they ask him to pay. A rich guy from Duluth owned the Dairy Queen. He owned several, all across the state.
“So, how’s Brad?” he asked in a mockingly sweet tone, as she mopped the floor. Brad was Heidi’s boyfriend who lived in Montana. Joshua poked fun of the two of them the same way Heidi teased him about Lisa.
“We broke up,” she answered. She stopped mopping and looked at him earnestly, hurt flashing across her face. Her eyes were brown and lined with black eyeliner that
had melted and smudged.
“You’ll get back together,” said Joshua dismissively, not wanting to encourage her to confide in him. He leapt from the counter and walked into the back, where he’d never been before. There was an enormous freezer and a walk-in cooler and an industrial-sized sink and shelves piled high with boxes of DQ cones and napkins and toppings and giant unopened cans of liquid fudge.
“What are you doing?” Heidi asked, dragging the mop and bucket behind her.
“Checking things out.”
She took off her brown DQ shirt and tossed it on top of the freezer. Underneath, she wore a white tank top, through which Joshua could see the whiter outline of her bra.
He leaned toward her urgently and kissed her with an open mouth. She pressed her tongue against his in an unpleasant, pulsing pattern.
“Do you have to work tomorrow?” Heidi whispered, pulling back from him.
“Yeah.” For the benefit of Claire and Bruce and whoever else bothered to inquire, Joshua had concocted a part-time job logging with Jim Swanson—which in truth he’d done for three days last spring.
“Well, I have the day off, in case you want to hang out.”
He didn’t want to hang out. The idea that he would see Heidi tomorrow was preposterous to him, but he didn’t have to pretend otherwise because his phone rang. He pulled it out of his pocket and saw that it was Vivian and pressed a button so it went silent.
“Was that your girlfriend?” Heidi asked, and laughed. She hopped up to sit on the freezer and swung her feet out to him and hooked his thigh between her sneakers. Desire rippled instantly through him and he allowed himself to be dragged in between her legs. He rested his hands on top of her thighs noncommittally, then moved them to her hips and held on. He could feel the points of her hipbones jutting through the brown pants of her uniform under his thumbs. She smelled like the DQ, like grease and slightly sour, slightly inviting milk.
“What are you doing?” he asked, though now he was the one doing the doing, running his hands up under her little shirt.
“What are you doing?” She smiled.
“What I’m not supposed to be doing,” he replied, kissing her throat.
“I thought you didn’t have a girlfriend.” She giggled.
He took her face and brought it to his, brought her mouth to his mouth without a moment’s hesitation, plunging in.
“Did you eat?” Lisa asked when she got into his truck. She’d been standing outside the Red Owl near the pop machines when he pulled up.
“What time is it?” he asked. “Were you waiting long?”
“Only a few minutes,” she said agreeably. “Actually Deb just pulled away when you came up.” She seemed more relaxed, more stable than she’d been in weeks. “It smells like weed in here,” she said, waving her hands in front of her face, though the windows were already rolled down.
He’d gotten high after he said goodbye to Heidi at the DQ, sitting in his parked truck, gathering himself to face Lisa. He kept a personal stash of marijuana in a little tackle box under the seat, pinching a good bit for himself each day from Vivian and Bender.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Okay,” she said, sliding in close to him, her legs straddling the clutch. “I did what Sarah said and ate every couple of hours so my stomach never got empty.”
He set his hand on her thigh and she reached over and did the same. His leg trembled slightly, and he tried to will it to go still, his heart racing. He took a deep breath and let it out. Only minutes before he’d been fucking Heidi, her legs wrapped around him, her rump pressed up against the freezer, and then he’d pulled away from her for a moment and turned her around. A bolt of lust and disgust quaked through him remembering it, and then a thought: he would never do it again.
“Were you busy tonight?” she asked. She put a hand in his sweaty hair.
“I had to drive all the way up to Norway and back and then I had to go all the way down to Sylvia Thorne’s place.”
“Sylvia Thorne?”
“Don’t you know her? She lives in Gunn.” He turned to her, loving her desperately, more than he’d ever loved her before, feeling crushed, almost panicked by the weight of his love. He wanted to take her home and make love to her without taking any pleasure for himself, to touch her with his fingers and mouth, to make her come the way he could from time to time, when he put all of his attention to the task and she was in the right state of mind.
“I know her,” she said. “I just don’t think of her as someone who’d be into drugs.” She sighed. “It seems like meth is taking over the whole town.”
“I wouldn’t say the whole town,” he said as evenly as he could. He squeezed her thigh. Sometimes they argued about what he did and why. They’d agreed that once the baby was born he would get what they called a “real job.”
“I can think of, like, ten people right now who are totally becoming tweakers.”
“Well, ten people isn’t the whole town,” he countered, though in truth he could think of dozens more. At times, he wished he’d never told Lisa about what he did for a living.
“What’s Claire’s middle name?” Lisa asked.
He had to think for a moment. “Rae. Why?”
“I’m thinking of names for the baby.”
Rae was his mother’s middle name too, he almost added. An image of her face came into his mind then, bony and stark and startled and lonely, the way it had been when he’d walked into her hospital room and seen her dead.
“What names do you like?” Lisa asked, turning to him, and then, abruptly, she turned all the way around, to see the lights of a police car blazing behind them.
Joshua saw it in the rearview mirror in the same instant and banged on the steering wheel.
“Do you have anything on you?” Lisa whispered as he slowed the truck.
“Quiet,” he said.
“Josh!”
“I said shut the fuck up,” he snapped. They stopped on the side of the road and waited for Greg Price to get out of his car and come to them.
“We meet again, Mr. Wood,” Greg said a few moments later. The beam of his flashlight hit their faces through the open window, a dagger of light, slicing them in two.
14
TWO NIGHTS AFTER Claire moved out, she drove past the apartment where she used to live with David. She’d left a candle there, propped in the window of what was once their bedroom, and as she passed by she could see it sat there still, precisely as she’d left it, a beeswax taper in a bottle, unlit and unmoved.
Her new house was a dilapidated mansion that was owned by a punk rocker and trust-fund baby named Andre Tisdale. He’d inherited the house from his grandmother. All the houses on the street were the same as Andre’s: grand old wrecked beauties that used to belong to the Minneapolis aristocracy back when the rich still wanted to live in this section of town. A few of the houses were in worse shape than Andre’s, their windows and doors boarded up with warning signs plastered over them; a few were in better shape, painted in surprising period colors to show off the intricacies of their architecture. One was hardly even a house anymore at all, since it had caught fire a few months before, though its charred remains hulked like a ship caught on a sand bar, presiding over the street.
From the outside, Claire’s room hung like an ear that had been attached to the third story of the house as an afterthought. Inside, it was cut off from the rest of the rooms that made up the third floor. Eons ago, it had been occupied by the maid, Andre had explained when he had shown her the place. To a series of maids, Claire thought at the time, but didn’t correct him. Even to her, from the distance of time, they all seemed to be one person: maid after maid after maid. The floor was warped and there was no door on the closet, but the room had its own bathroom and its own stairway that snaked through the hidden interior of the house like a laundry chute, leading to all the places that the maid would most often have needed to go: to the kitchen and the basement; to the back door, where the garbage bi
n was kept. The stairway served now as something of a secret passageway and Claire was at a time in her life when a secret passageway was what she believed she needed more than anything. A place private and anonymous that made it possible for her to live the transient, borderless, wild animal life she believed she had to live now that her mother was dead and David was no longer her boyfriend and Bruce made only feeble attempts at being her father. She still had Joshua, and to him she clung even though she seldom saw him.
He came to Minneapolis to help her move. He’d never been to see her in Minneapolis before and she prepared for his visit the way she would an honored guest, though he would be there only for the afternoon and only to haul boxes from an empty apartment to an empty room. She bought Mountain Dew and pretzel rods and a tin of chocolate-covered caramels to send home with him as a thank you.
“Hello,” she called when he pulled up and parked on the street. She’d been waiting for him on the porch. It was the middle of August and they hadn’t seen each other since the Fourth of July, since before she bleached her hair the whitest possible shade of blond. As he approached, she watched the mild shock register on his face.
“What do you think?” she asked, reaching for her hair as he ascended the porch stairs.
“It kind of makes you look like a hooker,” Joshua said.
She punched his arm and a look of indignation spread over her face.
“And the rest of the getup doesn’t help.” He gestured to what she was wearing: a little beige top and a tiny pair of cut-off jean shorts slung low and wooden thongs that had a fake daisy between each toe. She’d kept out a T-shirt and sneakers that she would change into once they started to load the truck.
“I think it looks good,” she said archly.
“To go around in just a bra?” asked Joshua.
Claire glanced down at her chest. “It’s not a bra, so fuck off. It’s a shirt, for your information.”
“Well, it looks like a bra to me.”