Cary thought about hightailing it to Mr. Haynes’s little office in the back and telling him. But then he pictured the awful scene that might follow: the girl denying it and then screaming, acting belligerent, crying and begging them not to call the cops, she’d give it back, please don’t have her arrested. The awkwardness of it all. Cary didn’t want that kind of drama; he hated shouting and all of that attention-drawing humiliation. All for a tube of lipstick.
Still, he stood on the verge of doing something, of telling someone, but then decided to let it go, the moment passing as quickly as it formed. He turned back to hanging the pretty, fragile fingernails, in shades of red, purple, even gold and silver, long and short, ridiculous things he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to go to the trouble of using. But he couldn’t focus now, and he turned and saw the girl rounding the aisle, moving deeper into the store. He wondered how she could walk so calmly with that lipstick tube firm and cold against her slight breast.
• • •
Cary had been working at Harco for about five weeks. The store was one of many locally owned branches in town, and so far it had withstood competition from the larger, national chains. This particular branch was only a mile from his mother’s condo, where he was now living. He considered it a temporary job, a way to keep busy and make some money until he was ready to go back to the university and continue his degree. It was the perfect job for him, he thought, because it offered a variety of unstressful duties: stocking shelves, unloading boxes, serving as a cashier, taking film development orders, occasional mopping, a little creative product display designing.
But what he liked best about the job was that sometimes he got to assist the pharmacist, Mr. Laskin. Laskin was pasty and quiet and always donned a scowl. He wore thick-lensed glasses and slicked back his thin brown hair with water and petroleum jelly. Cary suspected that Laskin was a drunk, because he often came in smelling of vodka and Scope. From Laskin, Cary learned which pills accomplished what—Niacin for blood circulation, Claritin to help with allergies, Ritalin to calm the hyper kids, Tetracycline for acne, and countless other pills whose names all started to blend in one big medicinal lexicon of healing. Usually, while Laskin took his lunch, Cary was able to sneak pain pills—Vicodin, Lortab, Lorcet, Darrocet, and mostly Valium. He was careful in his stealing—never too many at once, never the same pill too many times in a row. The pills gave him a soothing high, made him less anxious about things he wanted to forget about—kind of like being drunk, but less sloppy, more in control, numb and peaceful. Pretty white pills that were petite but potent.
Before he took the job, and before he took a sabbatical from school, he had been sidetracked by what his mother had called a “slight nervous breakdown.” But he wasn’t so sure that’s what it was at all. To Cary, a nervous breakdown was when people went completely nuts and had to be committed someplace until they got their head screwed on tight again. A nervous breakdown was romantic—it meant sitting in some hospital or New Age resort, listening to classical music, wearing white gowns, and being carted in a wheelchair through lush gardens while sipping pink lemonade. Cary didn’t feel as if he had gone off the deep end or anything like that—he was as sane as anyone else was. No, what happened to Cary was that he just refused to leave his apartment for almost two weeks, until his mother had her boyfriend, Wes, kick in his door and drag him out. When asked why he had done it, he couldn’t explain it to them, to anyone—why he had holed up for a week, closed off from the world, eating just cereal and crackers, sipping from lukewarm soda bottles. Something had made him want to stay put, to just lie still and not move—some unnamable, misty feeling of fatigue. If he had tried to explain it, they wouldn’t have understood. His mother said his little breakdown was just stress-related, and Wes said it was because of his lack of exercise and his poor diet. The shrink—whom his mother had made him see, but only once—accused him, in a subtle and uncombative way, of doing it for attention. If they needed explanations, then Cary was happy to just let them think what they wanted to think.
But this job at Harco, it was good for him—a definite step in the right direction. It got him up out of bed, gave him some kind of purpose, made the time go quicker. Plus, he had people to talk to, to exchange views on the world with—things he missed after he had left school, especially since he had lost touch with most of his college friends. And he had access to the pills, of course. He had never taken drugs before this, had never really even drunk much in college, but he had heard one of the girls at work talk about how great the Valiums were when she had dislocated her shoulder. How the pain just vanished, how it made her float a few feet above the world. It got Cary thinking, and there they were, the Valiums and others like it, all sitting about in large jars, so many of them, and this was a local store, the ship wasn’t run so tightly—he could get away with it. A few pills, no big deal. They wouldn’t be missed—just like the tube of lipstick the girl had stolen. Petty theft.
• • •
When he got off work around five, Cary went straight home. His mother’s condo was in a gated community named Wellington Estates, a community filled with divorced middle-aged men and women, a few widows and widowers, and some of the wealthier and quiet-seeking young upstarts in town. His mother liked it there—the tennis courts, the clubhouse where she could go for drinks and bridge games, the roving security personnel in their black shirts and black shorts.
Cary, however, still missed the house he had grown up in. After the divorce, his father moved to Texas and left him and his mother alone in the big house. His father was in the oil business, a petroleum engineer, and the divorce settlement was cushy, leaving Cary and his mother nicely cared for. But his mother didn’t like the house and its mammoth size, mainly because there were so many floors to mop, surfaces to dust, light bulbs to replace. The thick, bright-as-a-golf-putting-green lawn was maintained by a team of three gardeners who came each Monday, and she hated having to supervise them. The house and everything connected with it, she decided, was too much.
When Cary came in from work that day, his mother was doing abdominal exercises in front of the television in the living room. She wore black Spandex shorts and a tight hot pink Lycra tank top. He still found it funny seeing his mother wearing such tight, youngish garb, but she had a nice figure for a woman her age, and at least she didn’t wear such things out in public like some less shapely mothers he had seen.
“Hey, honey, want to join me?” she asked. “I have this great fifteen-minute routine, really gets the abs tight and burning.”
“No thanks.” Just after the divorce his mother had turned to weightlifting and exercise; she told Cary that she was going to “fight flab,” that her new goal in life was to remain firm without the aid of plastic surgery. “I’m not going to be like those other women,” she said. So she joined the Muscle Planet Gym, and this is where she met Wes, who was a trainer there. Cary held Wes in awe: His arm muscles were as sculpted and hard as plastic, his shoulders broad and solid as a podium, and his face was as chiseled as that of a comic book superhero’s. After weeks of workout flirtations, Wes and Cary’s mother started dating, and Wes eventually moved into the condo.
His mother, crunching away, letting out quiet squeaky grunts, started to ask him something, but he dodged her by charging up the stairs. He wanted a pill, deserved one after his day. His room, before he moved in, had been the guest room, and it had been done up in whites and ivories, fluffy pillows all over the bed, heavy drapes over the window, and not a personal memento anywhere. But he had altered it a bit since then. He stacked the pillows in the closet, and he covered the floors with his books and magazines, which he only really looked at or skimmed, never read. He had put his small TV on the nightstand, but he usually only watched it with the sound on mute. And his clothes—the select few he wore now, like his khakis, his worn gray T-shirt, his Harco uniform shirts—hung next to his mother’s off-season outfits. The rest of his belongings were in storage, hidden away in cardboard boxes.
br /> He opened the nightstand and pulled out a brown-tinted vitamin-C bottle. This is where he kept his stash of pills, and he was running low, just a few tablets rattling around inside. He shook one of the pills into his hand and walked downstairs to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water, and swallowed it.
“We’re having shrimp kabobs tonight,” his mother shouted from the living room. Cary joined her there, awaiting the calm that was soon to set in. “Wes is outside grilling,” she said between crunches.
Cary plopped down on the couch, watched her, watched the local news, which only seemed to report awful things—today a baby had been scalded by hot soup, the baby-sitter arrested.
“How was work?” she asked.
“Fine. The same.”
Wes came in through the French door that led out back to the small brick porch and the tiny backyard with a lawn the size of a picnic blanket. “Howdy, Cary. Dinner’s almost ready.” He was wearing walking shorts that couldn’t help but hug his hips and butt tightly, a wrinkly Polo shirt, sandals. He carried a tray of the grill-pinkened shrimp, charred green peppers, shiny slivers of onion, all impaled artfully on the little kabob skewers.
Cary liked Wes. At first he tried to dislike him, as if it was his duty to hate him—the new, other man. But he was so likable, always smiling, goofy enough to seem pleasantly stupid, and even though he sometimes pressured Cary to pump iron or hit the treadmill with him, Cary could tell it was out of concern and not because he was one of those obnoxious spread-the-glory exercisers. Besides, Wes was good for his mother. She looked younger now (her eyes less bloodshot, her hair kept youthfully long), woke up earlier in the day, and though she had no job, she seemed more productive. Wes’s energy was now his mother’s energy.
His mother pulled herself off the floor. She looked at Cary. “What’s wrong—you seem weird.”
“Nothing’s wrong. I feel fine.”
“You can always quit the job, you know, if it gets to be too much for you,” she said.
“It’s not too much for me, for Christ’s sake.”
She half-smiled back at him and nodded.
“Well, I’ll make the salad and then we’re ready,” Wes said, pinching his mother on the ass, hustling her into the kitchen. Cary just sat on the couch, didn’t feel like moving. He closed his eyes and could see the girl from the store at her home, putting on that lipstick, licking her lips, smiling, kissing the mirror, feeling charged because she had gotten away with it.
“Dinner’s ready, Cary!” his mother shouted a few minutes later.
But he wasn’t hungry.
• • •
When the girl came in the next day, Cary was at the front cash register with Dale, one of his coworkers, who was always telling him about his girlfriend who had gone away to college and how he missed her but did she really expect him to never look at or maybe even date another girl? Dale had receding red-brown hair and his face was scarred with long-gone acne, but he had nice gray eyes and a bulging Adam’s apple and Cary could see how a girl might want him. Dale was probably his best friend in the store, but they had never done anything socially—they hadn’t crossed that boundary yet, and Cary doubted they ever would.
When he saw the girl glide in—hands in her pockets, eyes off in their own world, still wearing those jeans with the suggestive, jaggedly ripped holes, and a shirt that was unevenly buttoned—he was glad she had shown up. She ducked down the Easter candy aisle.
“Can you cover this register for me for a minute?” Cary asked, interrupting Dale.
“Well, I mean—”
“Only for a few seconds. I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”
Before Dale could respond Cary walked off, ducking down the same aisle, past the yellow-boxed chocolate bunnies and the purple and pink bags of cream eggs and jelly beans. He found the girl in the cosmetics section, a shimmering lane of plastic compacts and brushes, a rainbow of rouges, and pictures of shiny, happy-faced beauties on the boxes, enticing the women customers to buy this or that. He hid behind a stand of tanning products and watched her. What today? Perhaps some nail-polish remover, or some skin-toned zit cream? She seemed more cautious, maybe aware that someone was watching her. It took her about five minutes before she edged—easily, because her pants were so loose fitting—a package of peach-colored blush down the front of her jeans. She didn’t even look around.
Cary stepped out from behind the stand and approached her, as if he had just happened to round the corner. She had her eyes focused on sparkly nail polish when he asked her, “Finding what you need, ma’am?”
“Yes,” she said. She didn’t act nervous or surprised, just sounded annoyed.
Cary looked at her, at her jeans where she hid the blush.
“What are you looking at?” she said. She looked angry, her eyes scrunched up and her mouth stretched tightly, but then she smiled a fake beauty pageant smile and stuck out her tongue, then curled it back in slowly like a carpet being rolled up. She turned back to the shelves, glanced back at Cary, who stood and watched her as if in a trance. “Jesus. What is your deal? I’m leaving,” she said. “This is harassment.”
He almost said something to her—“Give it back,” “I saw you,” “I know what you did”—but she had walked away by the time he’d summoned the courage.
Cary chased after her, slowly, and saw her walk out the door. He went to the door and watched her walk, self-consciously yet very gracefully, across the parking lot. She sat on the hood of her cherryred Honda and took out the blush and opened it and spread it all over her face with the brush, as if she were carefully painting a ceramic egg. Even from a distance he could see her face—freakishly orange around the cheeks. It made her look like she had suffered second-degree burns.
He stood there for some time and watched, until Dale came up to him, his breath on his neck. He smelled of cinnamon Tic-Tacs. “You want her, don’t you?” he said, giving a little chuckle.
“No, not at all. It’s just—”
But he couldn’t tell Dale. He couldn’t rat on her. He looked back and saw her take out a cigarette and struggle lighting it.
“That’s what I need,” Dale said. “A young thing like that.”
Cary almost protested again—that he wasn’t sex-crazed or anything—but instead went back to the counter. Dale, still at the door, said, “She’s staring over here. I think she wants me.”
“I’m sure,” Cary said.
• • •
The next time the girl came in the store she was with her mother, a woman Cary not only recognized but knew. And when he saw the two of them together, he realized that he had seen the girl before he had ever worked in Harco. The girl’s mother was Jackie Higgins, a woman his mother used to play tennis with, before the divorce, when she still had her club membership. Jackie Higgins and her family also went to the same Episcopal church, though Cary and his mother had stopped going there months ago, too. The club, church—these were just some of the many things that fell away from their life after his father left, like little pebbles following a boulder in an avalanche.
The Higgins girl. No wonder he hadn’t recognized her on her visits to Harco. At church she had looked completely different: She always wore her hair in a ponytail, had on little makeup, and her clothes were pastel in color, schoolgirlishly cute. Today, a Sunday, she looked very much the same way, but Cary was still able to recognize her, her moody eyes. Her hair was done up in these ridiculous braids—it looked like an elaborate pastry was glued to the back of her head. She wore a baby blue dress, so it was obvious they had come to the store straight from church. Cary had just finished setting out an Easter display in the small front window of the store, filling it with plastic grass, hollowed-out sugar eggs with tiny, blissful scenes inside, and plush bunny rabbits with oddly evil grins on their faces. But he stopped what he was doing, climbed out of the window, and walked up to Mrs. Higgins and the girl, who avoided looking at him. “Mrs. Higgins?”
“Oh, hi. How are you today?
” she said. She picked up a blue plastic shopping basket. He could tell by her blank face that she didn’t know him.
“I’m Cary Dinsmore, Loraine Dinsmore’s son? From St. Luke’s Episcopal?”
“Oh, yes, good to see you. . . . Yes,” she said. “Loraine, of course.” She looked at his shirt uniform and his acrylic name tag. “How is she? Is she still dating that bodybuilder?”
“Yes. She’s fine.” He was surprised she knew about Wes.
She nodded. “So, you work here?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered, though they both knew it was a dumb question meant to fill conversation.
“Well, that’s great.”
Cary had often seen his mother’s old friends in the store, and when they were confronted with the knowledge of his employment there, they usually acted overenthusiastic about it or were at a loss for words. It never bothered Cary, really. He was not ashamed of his job. Mrs. Higgins sounded much the same way as those women did.
The girl, standing off to the side, scratched her shoulders, which were buried under the stiff dress that seemed too big for her. Cary thought she looked ridiculous in it, unstylish and awkward, like a baby doll in human clothing.
“Listen, where are your tennis balls?” Mrs. Higgins asked. “I think y’all have moved things around on me.”
Cary led her to the proper aisle and out of the corner of his eye he saw the girl veer toward the cosmetics aisle, her usual haunt. Mrs. Higgins squeezed the airtight cans of tennis balls.
“Where did Louise run off to?” Mrs. Higgins said, not shifting her eyes from the plastic cans.
So, her name was Louise. Louise Higgins.
Mrs. Higgins rolled her eyes. “I bet she’s in the makeup section. That girl and her makeup. Her father and I limit the amount she can wear.” She picked up another can and squeezed. “But I know she buys it and puts it on at school.”