“I have my dinner break in twenty minutes,” Jamie said, pony-riding the mop handle until he was back behind the counter. “You want I should fix you a supernacho?”
“No, I’m fine,” I said. I waited for him on the wooden bench of an empty booth with my beach towel wrapped over my legs because it was way too cold in there to immediately follow the nine hours I’d just spent in the sun. There was ballpoint pen and marker graffiti all over the cream-and-brown-striped wallpaper next to the booth. Minuscule graffiti, most lines punctuated with at least one exclamation point:
I love Tori! yer mom luvs tori! Go Cowboys!!!tori who? Tori Spelling? 90210 sucks dick!!!
I thought about asking the guys for a pen and adding my own, but I wasn’t sure what to write: I love Coley Taylor. I’m pissed at Coley Taylor. I fucked Coley Taylor. Coley Taylor fucked with my head.
I didn’t ask for a pen. A couple of truckers came in and took me in, my towel-wrap, my swimsuit top. I waited some more while Jamie made them enchilada platters and then nodded at me from behind the counter that it was break time, that he could meet me outside.
He had already lit up by the time I got to the concrete pad at the back of the building. The bright-orange Taco John’s Dumpster had wasps swirling all around it, and there was a giant plastic bucket filled with brown grease slop just outside the workers’ entrance, but the night was calm and the sky was starting to turn that summertime purple it turned every once in a while, and the painted cinder block wall of the restaurant felt warm and smooth against the bare skin of my arms and shoulders as I leaned against it and accepted the joint from Jamie’s thin fingers.
“Where’s Coley at?” he asked.
He had to wait until I had released the sweet smoke in my lungs before I answered. “Fuck if I know,” I said, trying to sound cool and mean and not hurt.
“My poor lass.” Jamie gripped my shoulder and made a big, fake, pained face. “Has the young suitor Brett returneth to claim his bride?”
“Tomorrow,” I said, taking the joint from him even though he hadn’t yet offered it back, hadn’t even had the opportunity to hit again himself.
“So don’t you want to try any last-chance moves on your woman on this, your final night of alone time?”
“It’s all really messed up,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, smacking a wasp to the ground with his work visor and then smearing it on the concrete with his sneaker. “I told you it was fucked up from the start.”
“Well, it’s even worse now, Captain Foresight,” I said, afraid that I might cry and not even sure quite where it was coming from and mad about it, about always, always crying in front of Jamie.
“How come?” he asked, getting the last of the wasp off the sole of his shoe, one thin wing still twitching. He took the joint back from me.
“It just is. And there isn’t any going back from it, either. There’s no undoing or whatever.”
“Did you ladies actually consummate your nonrelationship?” Jamie had tried for his usual smart-ass tone, but I could tell he meant his question.
I didn’t answer him. The joint—it was small to begin with—was mostly caked, but there was enough left for one solid hit. “You wanna shotgun this?” I asked.
He knew how to read my nonanswer. “Niiiiice, JJK,” he said, doing a man punch to my upper arm. “This is fucked up. You’re now like officially the other woman. You’re a lesbian home wrecker.”
I took in as much smoke as I could and flicked the butt out into the alley, and after a few seconds Jamie leaned over and opened wide and I sealed my lips to his dry mouth as best I could and exhaled, waited, and then pulled away. And then I did start crying like a giant, beach towel–wrapped baby, and Jamie put one arm around me and then both arms around me and we stood in a hug out there on that hot cement stoop and didn’t let go until a truck crammed with high schoolers, kids in the cab and bed, pulled into the drive-through lane and Brian opened the heavy door to the workers’ entrance and hollered for backup.
“It’s gonna be cool,” Jamie said while I pulled off my towel wrap and draped it over my shoulders, used one end to wipe at my face. “It’ll be better with Brett back, anyway. Now the pressure’s off. We just gotta find you a slutty Glendive girl. Somebody out of the city limits.”
“That’s the answer,” I said. “When in doubt, it’s always a slutty Glendive girl.”
“It’s always a slutty girl,” Jamie said situating his wasp-killing visor on his head at the jaunty angle he favored. “But there’s no rule says she has to be from Glendive.”
After he went in, I thought about riding my bike to the Montana Theatre, just to see if maybe Coley would be up in the last row, just to see if maybe. But even though I went a couple blocks past my house in that direction, I turned around well before I got there and rode home. Grandma was on the front porch, sitting in the half dark, eating a thick wedge of sugar-free banana pudding pie with graham cracker crust.
“No picture show tonight, huh?”
“Not tonight,” I said. “Did anybody call for me?”
“Anybody who?”
“Just anybody, Grandma,” I said.
“No anybodies I know, cranky,” she said. “Sounds to me like you have a somebody in mind, though.”
Ruth and Ray were on the couch watching something on TV that I didn’t even pause long enough at the doorway to distinguish.
“I put a couple of catalogs in your room for you, honey,” Ruth called after me as I started up the stairs. “I circled the ones I like best. You only have two months to pick—two months!”
I showered with the cordless phone on the sink so I could hear it. It didn’t ring. I played this game where I convinced myself that if I stayed in the shower Coley would call and if I got out she wouldn’t and so I just let the hot water run and run and run until it was cold and that was fine too because it was so hot in the bathroom anyway, and I stayed in even with the water growing colder and colder and she still didn’t call.
In my room I didn’t put on a movie. I didn’t work on the dollhouse, either. Ruth had left the bridal-wear catalogs on my desk. I flipped through them, Ruth’s blue marker circles on page after page. The maid of honor dresses she’d picked all looked nice, and surprisingly plain, like she was really trying to think of me and what I’d want to wear, but I still couldn’t imagine myself in any of them. Coley had said she’d help me find something in Billings for the wedding, that we’d make a weekend of it.
I tried to turn off my lamp and sleep, on top of the covers, my shirt and hair wet, the fan on, the phone lying on the bed next to me, but it was still early and I wasn’t tired. I played one of the new mixes from Lindsey, a bunch of bands and singers I’d not yet heard of, but it felt like too much work to try to really listen to new songs sung by new voices, too much thinking, somehow, so I changed to Tom Petty and felt sorry for myself and then mad at myself for feeling like that and then sorry for myself again. And Coley didn’t ever call.
Mona Harris and I had a rotation in the bathhouse together the next afternoon. I’d been a shitty lifeguard for the past several hours, looking at the lake but not actively scanning the water at all, instead imagining Coley and Brett’s reunion night in the greatest possible detail, playing out one scenario after another just to torture myself. I came up with a lot of scenarios that did the trick.
“Will you slather me up?” Mona asked as I walked in from the beach, removing my sunglasses, letting my eyes adjust to the cool dark.
She already had her swimsuit straps peeled off and hanging at the sides of her arms, a white bottle of Coppertone SPF 30 in one of her hands.
I nodded. She handed it to me.
“It’s the end of summer and yet watch me burn,” she said as I squirted a little pool of the thick, white cream into the center of my palm. “If I forget to lotion even once, I’m a lobster.”
I coated her warm back, the skin pinky white and freckled all over, but definitely not tan like the rest of us lifegu
ards.
I finished and Mona pulled her straps back and I set the lotion on this shelf that was like a community graveyard of half-used bottles of every sun lotion or oil or stick ever invented.
We sat at the check-in table without talking, the crappy, scratchy radio on behind us. Mona was flipping through a water-wrinkled People magazine that had been in the bathhouse since June, and I was using the metal handle of the fly swatter to work on a skull and crossbones that someone else had already started carving into the tabletop. Then a couple of lake rats ran in from the boys’ locker room and told us that some of the other lake rats had tossed their clothing and towels up onto the roof of the bathhouse, which happened at least a dozen times a summer because the locker rooms were open air with just cement partitions for stalls and kids would stand on the wooden benches and hoist stuff up onto the bathhouse roof just to be assholes.
“You going up or me?” Mona asked, but I was already out of the metal folding chair and on my way to get the ladder so I could retrieve the T-shirts and the sneakers and the stretched-out, grimy tube socks with a couple of dollar bills shoved down into the toe.
The boys waited on the ground as I tossed things down to them and told them to put their shit in baskets next time, but once the roof was clear, a part of me wanted to stay up there, hide out. It was just a flat, square expanse of hot tar, sort of like the Holy Rosary roof only much, much smaller and much, much closer to the ground. Granola Eric waved at me from left chair, obviously not doing a particularly good job of keeping his eyes on the water either. I waved back. I caught the glint of the sun off the lake and everything in front of me, beneath me, glowed white and hot; and as my vision readjusted, the beach and the street and the Conoco across the way went from ghost outlines to fuzzy color to finally their normal, solid selves. Then I climbed down.
I slammed the side of the ladder against the doorway trying to bring it back into the bathhouse and I jammed my thumb behind it and it hurt and I swore a bunch before I actually got it put away, Mona watching me the whole time, laughing some.
“You having a rough go of it?” she asked as I sat down.
“Whatever,” I said.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Mona said, and then she reached over and flicked my arm with her thumb and pointer finger, hard, just above my wrist.
“Fuck!” I said. “That hurt.” It did.
“No it didn’t,” she said, smiling.
“Yes it did,” I said, but it made me smile too, for some reason. “That’s workplace abuse and I don’t have to stand for it.”
“Write me up,” she said. “I’ll find you the necessary form.”
“Too much effort.” I tried to flick her back but I only managed a weak one near her elbow because she kept moving her arms all around.
Then whatever it was we were doing ended, the moment all used up in the way that sometimes happens and the mood just shifts, and you’re both aware of it, and that’s all there is to it. I went back to working on the skull, Mona the magazine.
But not very many minutes later she said, “She’s gorgeous, right?” She turned the magazine toward me so I could see this two-page spread of Michelle Pfeiffer photos: Michelle Pfeiffer on the beach and walking her dog and cutting veggies for what looked to be an enormous, all-color salad in her fancy, big-windowed kitchen.
“Yeah, she’s pretty,” I said.
“She’s at her hottest in Grease 2,” Mona said, sliding the magazine back.
“That movie sucks.”
“I didn’t say the movie was good. I said she’s hot in it.”
“I don’t think I noticed her looks because the movie she was showcasing them in sucked so badly,” I said.
Mona smiled a slow smile at me. “So you just didn’t notice her at all? It was like she was invisible in every scene?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Exactly like that.”
“Wow,” Mona said, taking her whistle from the table, putting it back around her neck. “That’s an incredible talent you have.”
I waited. Then I said, “She’s hotter in Scarface, anyway.”
“Hmmmm,” she said. “I’ll have to think about that.”
I looked at the clock. We had to rotate out in a couple of minutes. I stood up, got my bottle of Gatorade from the big community cooler that Hazel brought ice for every morning.
“Can I have a drink?” Mona asked, already standing behind me, assuming my yes.
I passed her the bottle. She drank a lot before handing it back.
“You’re kind of shy, huh?” she said, getting her towel from the hook. “Like little-kid shy.”
“No,” I said. “Not at all.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s not an insult.”
“But it’s not true.”
“See, you sound like a little kid right now, even,” she said, laughing, leaving the bathhouse to relieve the right rover.
It wasn’t that I didn’t still think about Coley, and Coley and Brett, and Coley and me, for my next several hours outside; it was just that I punctuated all those thoughts with new thoughts about Mona, and Mona’s possible motivations, and a couple of times I even just plain stared at her while pretending to scan my area, a whole lake between us and my sunglasses covering the exact direction of my gaze.
Of course Coley didn’t show up after work, not with Brett newly back in town. A few of the other highway department guys did though, and they had a case of beer with them.
I wasn’t gonna stay, but as I was hanging my whistle on my designated hook, Mona came into the bathhouse and grabbed my towel where it was wrapped around my waist, her fingers sliding between towel fold and swimsuit at my hip. She held on while she said, “You’re staying, right?” And then I was.
While she covered me from the curiosity of the last departing lake rats, I poured a can and a half of Coors into my empty Gatorade bottle. We hid as many additional cans as possible in towels and sand pails, locked the main doors, and joined the highway guys in the trek down the beach toward the docks and the deep end.
One of those guys, Randy, said to me, after snapping my left suit strap, “We figured you’d have played hooky today, too.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Coley called in sick this morning,” he said. He did air quotes with his fingers around sick.
“Nah, Ty did it for her,” one of the other guys said, coming up alongside us.
“Same dif,” Randy said. “We all guessed that you two gals had made for Billings or somewheres. Maybe she’s actually sick.”
We stopped at right guard stand to unload our bundles. I could feel Mona looking at me.
“Her boyfriend just got back into town,” I said. “That’s the kind of sick she is.”
“Ohhhhh,” Randy said, doing a slapstick kind of elbow jab in my direction. “Lovesick, huh? That’s the good kind.”
“That’s what they tell me,” I said, taking a big drink from my bottle and then twisting on the cap and chucking it into the lake and following its trajectory with the arc of my own racing dive.
We chicken fought for a while, me and Mona on broad, slippery shoulders, wrenching and pulling at one another, laughing when we toppled into the water’s dark surface, again and again. We later rated each other’s jackknives and cannonballs, but only Mona and I managed flips off the high dive. When the two of us wound up together beneath center dock, it felt inevitable and not weighty at all. The highway crew was tooling around in the shallow end, chasing a mud puppy, and even though Mona said something like “I can’t believe I’m one of those college girls who go after high schoolers” three or four times, that didn’t stop us from making out down there in the slits of light that colored the water around us chartreuse. And that’s all it was. Maybe ten minutes of making out. Mona and her thick lips, her nearly translucent eyelashes. But I rode my bike home with a buzz from both the beer and the kissing, an older woman, a college woman, and Take that, Coley Taylor, take that, and I felt good for twelve bl
ocks before I felt bad. Really bad. All of it thunking on me at once, feeling like I’d cheated on her, or weirdly, on us.
On the last streets before my house I decided that I would write Coley a letter. I would write her a really long letter and tell her that even if this thing between us was big and scary, we could figure it out because we had to, because it was love and that’s what you do when you’re in love. Even in my head it sounded like the lyrics to a Whitesnake song, but that didn’t matter. I would write it all down. All of it. All the stuff that made me feel weird and mushy and stupid and scared when I went to say it, and sometimes even when I thought about it.
Pastor Crawford’s car was in the driveway and I didn’t consider that fact for a second. He was over all the time, Ruth and her committees. I put my bike in the garage, grabbed the newspaper from the porch, didn’t really wonder why nobody else had yet done so, opened the door, threw the paper on the entryway table, and was already three stairs up toward my room when Ruth said, “We need you to come in here please, Cameron.”
It was her saying Cameron and not Cammie that made the first little knot twist right at the base of my throat. And then when I was at the doorway to the living room, Ruth and Crawford on the couch, Ray in the big club chair, and Grandma nowhere, the knot got bigger, twisted harder, and it was my parents all over again but this time with Grandma. I was sure of it.
“Why don’t you go ahead and sit here?” Pastor Crawford said, standing, motioning to the spot on the couch he had vacated for me.
“What happened to Grandma?” I stayed in the doorway.
“She’s downstairs, resting,” Ruth said. She wasn’t really looking at me. Or at least she wasn’t holding her eyes on me for very long.
“Because she’s sick?” I asked.
“This isn’t about your grandma, Cameron,” Pastor Crawford said. He took the couple of steps over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “We’d like you to have a seat so we can chat with you about some things.”