The Hole We're In

  “Mom and Dad wanted to come, but—”

  “No, they didn’t.”

  “Well, maybe not Roger, but Mom really did want to see you. And the Prodigal”—that’s what Helen occasionally called their brother, though Patsy felt more deserving of the title than him—“was even planning to fly in from New York, but he had to work. He sent you those flowers, though.” Helen indicated a box of tulips that were busily dying on the sofa.

  At that moment, Patsy’s sister-in-law, Lacey, arrived. Both Magnum and his sister had been named for 1980s television shows. Patsy supposed it could have been worse; she could have ended up married to the Fonz. “Hey, Patsy honey, welcome home! Sorry I’m so late. Had to stay at the Slick for the November push.” Lacey was still wearing her orange Slickmart smock, which put Patsy in mind of the latest styles from Gitmo. “Someone ought to put those flowers in water before they completely expire. Hi, Helen! How you been? You’re glowing, honey.” Patsy admired her sister-in-law’s efficiency—she had managed to kiss Patsy on the cheek, remove the flowers from the couch, and alienate Helen in under half a minute.

  “I would have arranged them for you,” Helen said, “but I wanted you to see what an expensive box they came in. Besides, it’s rude to mess with people’s flowers before they’ve even seen them.”

  At some point, Patsy became aware of the Pharm, formerly Marcus, still Magnum’s best friend. Pharm had acquired the nickname because he was the number one drug dealer in Buckstop—he mainly sold marijuana, but he was willing to fill prescriptions, too. Pharm had also been responsible for introducing Patsy to her husband at Christian Soldiers Bible Camp. Eight years later, she had mostly forgiven him for that.

  Pharm emerged from wherever he’d been hiding himself and whispered in Patsy’s ear, “I got a little something for you after Helen drives Minnie home. A modest celebration now that you’re out for good, you know?” Minnie, short for Minerva, was Pharm’s little sister.

  “Minnie’s here?” Patsy asked.

  “Turn around,” the Pharm said.

  The last time Patsy had been home, Minnie had still been more girl than woman, but in the intervening eleven months, that ratio had reversed itself. “Man,” Patsy said to her, “you’ve grown up.”

  The girl laughed and said, “Well, I’m a junior now, Patsy. It happens.”

  During the first year or two of her marriage, Patsy had spent many an evening babysitting Minnie when Magnum and the Pharm were out being boys. Minnie’s parents had died, leaving Pharm as the girl’s primary caregiver. Though she had never wanted children of her own, Patsy felt almost maternal toward Minnie and assumed the girl was the closest she’d ever get to having a hand in raising someone.

  She pulled Minnie over to the blue velour couch and said, “Tell me everything. Don’t leave out the dirty parts, either.”

  Minnie giggled, which, in the manner of girls her age, was a perfectly suitable response to most anything. “I’m real sorry, Patsy, but it’s a school night ... And with your plane being so late ...”

  “Sure, I get it. Some other time.”

  Then the girl threw Patsy a bone. “I’m Mary in this Christmas thingy at the church. I know you’re not much for the whole church-going business anymore, but you could come if you wanted. It’s the Saturday after Thanksgiving.”

  “She’s good,” the Pharm added.

  “He’s just saying that ’cause he’s my brother and he’s being nice.”

  “Patsy knows I’m not nice, little sister,” Pharm said. “I saw Minnie rehearsing.”

  Patsy promised the girl she’d attend. “I’m mostly nice,” said Patsy, “and I’ll tell you you’re good whether you are or not.”

  Lacey returned with the arranged flowers. “Your brother must be doing well for himself,” she said. “These are real pretty, Patsy.”

  “I told her that, too,” Helen said.

  “Yeah,” Patsy said, “best thing that ever happened to him, being disowned.”

  “Oh hey, honey, I been meaning to mention. I could hook you up with a job at the Slickmart if you were interested. There’re several different departments hiring right now.”

  Slickmart Superstore was the greater Buckstop region’s answer to Wal-Mart. The store was a fifteen-minute drive from Buckstop, and it was where everyone from the town bought most everything. Need an inflatable dragon for the pool? Go to the Slickmart. Need a gun to shoot yourself in the head? Slickmart! They all called it the Suckmart because that’s what it looked like in all caps with the L and I jammed up like a U on the sign:

  SLICKMART

  SUCKMART

  They also called the Slickmart the Suckmart because popular opinion held that the store sucked. Yeah, Patsy thought, I’d eff’n kill myself before I worked at the Suck. Besides, she was planning to go back to college in the summer with the help of Uncle Sam and the GI bill, and she was reasonably sure that the last chunk of her re-up bonus plus what she’d managed to save would carry her until then.

  Lacey hugged Patsy again and then she sniffed her. “You smell like something sweet.” Lacey sniffed Patsy more deeply and then her nose wrinkled. “Like barf, honey.”

  “I guess I had a little motion sickness on the way in,” Patsy said.

  “You guess?” Lacey’s eyes wandered the length of Patsy’s body. She paused rather too long in the midsection for Patsy’s liking, and Patsy reflexively placed a hand on her abdomen.

  It’s too early for me to be showing, Patsy thought.

  She knows, Patsy thought.

  She wondered if Lacey would tell Magnum, then decided she didn’t much care. Go ahead, she thought. Save me the trouble.

  “Well, let me know about the Slickmart,” Lacey said, her voice consciously light. “They’ll be hiring extras through the Christmas season, all right?”

  “Will do.”

  Lacey yawned. “I’ve been stocking since five AM, so reckon I’ll head out now, if you don’t mind. Magnum says you’re real tired, too.” She pulled Patsy into an embrace. “Take care of yourself, honey.”

  Not long after that, Helen and Minnie left, too. “Will I see you again?” Patsy asked Helen. No. Her sister was flying back to Texas the next day.

  The only people left were Pharm and her husband. It occurred to Patsy that it was basically like her senior year of high school all over again. She was down a toe, but other than that, nothing had changed. Even the blue velour La-Z-Boy sofa was the same one from high school—it had formerly belonged to Magnum’s father. She thought it might have been given to them as a wedding present and wondered if she still owed the man a thank-you note.

  Pharm took the marijuana out of his fanny pack and started rolling a joint. “I got this special for you. It’s government engineered, which is an irony I thought you’d appreciate, Patsy my dear.”

  “We thank you kindly, Uncle Sam,” Magnum said.

  “Guaranteed to give you a sweet high without any annoying paranoia. I’m gonna say a prayer, if you don’t mind,” Pharm said. He’d spent a semester or two in divinity school before having to come home to take care of Minnie and deciding to “pursue other opportunities.” It was during that brief academic stint that he had acquired the habit of praying before getting baked. He set the joint on the table and bowed his head. “Dear Lord, we humbly thank you for the sweet sweetness of this high we are about to receive. We also thank you for the safe return of Patsy from Iraq.

  We thank thee, Lord, for happy hearts,

  For rain and sunny weather.

  We thank thee, Lord, for this pot,

  And that today we are together.

  “Amen,” said her husband. “Now, let’s get stoned!”

  Pharm lit the cigarette and, ever the gentleman, offered it to Patsy first. She shook her head.

  “That ain’t like you,” Magnum commented. “I thought you’d be gagging for it.”

  She told him that she might have to take one last military medical exam, so she wanted to keep her system clean.
>
  The Pharm looked at her. “Real sorry, Patsy. I thought you were through with all that now you’re discharged and all.”

  “We can go smoke out back, if you want,” Magnum offered.

  “Nah, it’s fine.” While watching the boys pass the cigarette back and forth, she considered her options. She was two and a half months pregnant—not showing yet—but she knew she’d have to make a move soon, one way or the other. She only saw two alternatives: (1) seduce her husband and lie a whole lot or (2) become “one of them baby murderers,” as her Grandma Fran used to say. In her father’s church, the second was the worse sin by far. In her head, the first seemed harder to live with.

  “Hey Magnum?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’s Scout?” Scout was her dog. He was part Jack Russell terrier, part Saint Bernard, and mostly of indeterminate origin. He had short legs and a thick muscular torso and had always seemed to her more donkey than dog. With all the homecoming business, it had just occurred to her that her dog hadn’t yet put in an appearance.

  Magnum inhaled deeply from the joint before he spoke. “He’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “He died about six months ago. I didn’t want to tell you over the e-mail, babe.”

  “What?”

  “He run out in traffic. He—”

  “You let him run out in traffic, didn’t you? You know he needed to be supervised.”

  “That’s not what went down, I swear.”

  “Calm down, Patsy,” the Pharm said.

  “Were YOU here?” She turned toward the Pharm. “Were you two shit-bird losers sitting on this very sofa getting stoned while Scout run out in traffic?”

  The Pharm shook his head.

  “Jesus H. Christ! The only thing I fucking ask of you is to watch my fucking dog!”

  She put her head between her legs and started whispering the military alphabet to herself, which was something she found herself doing during times of stress. “Alpha. Bravo. Charlie ...”

  “Don’t cry, Patsy,” Magnum said. “He weren’t young, and he lived a good life.”

  “I’m not crying! I’m reciting the goddamn NATO phonetic alphabet!” she yelled. “And I’m just trying not to kill you is all. Delta. Echo. Foxtrot.”

  After a while, the Pharm put his hands on her shoulders. “We honored him, Patsy. We knew that’d be important to you. He’s out back, if you want to go see.”

  “Golf. Hotel. India. Juliet ... Juliet ... Juliet ...”

  “Kilo,” the Pharm added helpfully.

  “I know what it is. I was just deciding if I wanted to go out back and pay my respects to Scout.”

  She decided that she did. Both boys offered to accompany her, but she wanted to be alone.

  “He’s under the apple tree. There’s a little wooden cross,” the Pharm called out. “You better take a flashlight.”

  She went out back to the apple tree. She turned on the flashlight and directed it toward the homemade cross that Magnum had fashioned out of two rulers. Patsy assumed he had stolen the rulers from the school where he worked. On a strip of tape, her husband had paid tribute to her cur in Sharpie: “Here lies Scout. He was a good dog.”

  He had been a good dog. Had she the ability to cry, she could imagine having done so then. She turned away from the grave and started heading back to the house. That’s when she noticed the backyard.

  What was left of it.

  The hole was epic. More properly called a quarry, she supposed. So much sand and dirt and rocks everywhere that for one awful second she almost thought she was back in the shit.

  “MAGNUM!” she yelled.

  He came running. “Jesus, Patsy, what is it? It’s after midnight. You’re gonna wake all the neighbors!”

  “Explain this.” She gestured toward the hole.

  “It was a surprise.”

  It had been that. “Explain why our backyard looks like goddamned Fallujah.”

  Her husband had been planning to build her a pool as a coming-home present, but the contractor had bailed in the middle of operations. Until all this was resolved, they were stuck with a big hole and a pile of rocks. He smiled at her bashfully and said, “I know how you love the water, babe.”

  She didn’t bother pointing out the obvious: that there wasn’t any water there, only rocks.

  Patsy in Bed

  SHE WAS SICK, sick of smelling herself—puke, stale air, marijuana, dirt, swass and swalls—so even though it was almost two in the morning, she took a shower, and after that was done, she took a bath, too.

  If she could have chosen any job barring qualifications or the irritating impositions of reality, she would have chosen mermaid. While in Iraq, she had often reflected that she would have much preferred to have been in World War II. Then she would have been at Normandy and that was an “eff’n beach.” In an e-mail to her husband, she had joked that she was so dry Over There, she worried she would turn into Lot’s wife.

  As she ran her bath, she thought what a miracle it was to just be able to turn a tap and have water come out of it. She almost felt Christlike. She was thinking of all the places in the world where one couldn’t just flip a tap or pump a well, places where there wasn’t any water at all. She hated to think of those dry, dry folks.

  She sat in the bath, probably for an hour, but it might have been longer, and as her skin became increasingly wrinkled, she decided that if she could choose a way to die, she’d definitely want to drown.

  Smartie had once said that there was a word for people like her: hygrophilous. At first, she had thought he meant something offensive relating to either her sexual preference or general butchness, but then she had looked the word up in her pocket travel dictionary. (The Buckstop SDAs had given her a gift set that included a dictionary and a Bible before she’d left for basic training. It turned out that hygrophilous meant moisture-loving or a plant that grows best in the damp. Yes, that was her.

  “Patsy, you fall in?” her husband called from the other room.

  “I’m just taking a bath,” she said. She stuck her head under the water and tried to calculate how long she could hold her breath.

  Ninety-three seconds later she got out of the tub.

  She put on what she thought was the least provocative outfit possible: an XL black T-shirt she’d had since the seventh grade, with the words JUST SAY NO splashed in a come-hither fashion across the front, and rainbow-striped woolen toe socks. It amused her how one of the toe shafts just hung there like a discarded condom, and she speculated how long it would take Magnum to notice that a part of her was absent without leave.

  He was already under the covers when she got into bed, but he didn’t start talking until she’d turned off the light. Patsy’s lengthy ablutions had left him time to reflect and anticipate.

  “Sorry about the yard,” he whispered. “I’m gonna get it fixed ASAP.”

  “Great,” she said.

  “And the dog, too.”

  “OK, Mags. Let’s just talk about it in the morning.”

  “You smell nice, Patsy. Real sweet.” He spooned her and stuck his hand up her JUST SAY NO T-shirt.

  “Hey,” she said, “I’m tired.

  “You don’t have to do nothing ’cept lay there, Patsy.”

  She might have just let him have his way with her, but then he started running his foot up and down her leg.

  “You’re gonna get hot in those socks, babe,” he said. With his foot, he pushed her sock down to her ankle.

  “Get the hell off,” she said. She would not be forced to take off her socks for the second time in twenty-four hours.

  She flipped him onto his back, straddled him, and pointed her fore-and middle fingers at his eyes. “Make one more move and I’ll blind you.”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” he laughed.

  “Try me.”

  “You on top. Actually kind of sexy.”

  “I am not kidding, Magnum French.”

  He blinked, and his eye
lashes grazed the tips of her fingers. “Fine,” he said.

  She rolled off of him and over to her own side of the bed.

  “I just haven’t seen my wife in a real long time is all.”

  She flicked on the bedside lamp. “Are we talking or sleeping?”

  “Both, I reckon.”

  “Well, that ain’t physically possible.” She grabbed her pillow and told him she would sleep on the sofa.

  She stalked out to the living room. The couch still reeked of pot, but she didn’t care.

  She had mostly fallen asleep when she was awoken by her husband. “You can’t blame me for wanting to be with my wife.”

  “I’m asleep!”

  “It’s just... It’s not right. You can’t make me out to be some asshole for wanting to sleep with my wife!”

  “OK,” she said. “Your desire to fornicate is perfectly natural and understandable. Now, can’t I please just go to sleep?” She was starting to feel desperate with tiredness.

  “But why don’t you want to? We always sleep together the night you come back.”

  “Because I been traveling all day. Because there’s a big eff’n hole in my backyard. Because I just found out my dog is dead. Because we almost hit a deer with the car. Because I ain’t used to sleeping with people no more. Because it’s two in the morning, Magnum. It’s two in the eff’n morning!”

  He nodded. “So, it’s definitely not ’cause of that thing you said before about me eating too many Betsy Rosses?”

  She threw her pillow at him. “Oh, for God’s sake, let me rest, will you?”

  Like the deer of earlier, he stared at her in the darkness without moving. “Well, you have a good night, then, Miss Patsy,” he said before returning to the bedroom.

  She had to get back up to retrieve her pillow from across the room, and in so doing, she woke herself up.

  She turned on the television. It had been a while since she’d been in command of a remote.

  After circling through the channels, she settled on E! True Hollywood Story, “Britney Spears.” The girl was everywhere.

  Patsy hadn’t realized that things had gotten so bad for Brit that the pop star merited an E! True Hollywood Story. One minute into the program, Brit was a Mouseketeer, the next minute she had a snake around her neck, the next minute she was kissing Madonna, and only one little commercial break later, she was barefoot and pregnant at a gas station. And neither of us twenty-five yet, Patsy thought, just before drifting off.