Girl in Pieces (31 page)

I ferried his drugs. I fucked him in his sister's office. I let him see all of me, every bit, and now I'm sitting here on the grungy floor, a dog at his feet. Like a
dog
I wait for him at night. Like a dog, now, stupidly, I only want him to pet me, love me, not leave, and that makes me suddenly, blazingly angry and sad all at once, which feels like fire inside me.

I pound and claw at his legs. He jumps in surprise, his bottle falling, smashing inside the sink. He catches my arms, swearing when I struggle, and for a minute, a flicker of something dark crosses his face, his lip curls; the tension increases in his wrists. His fingers tighten like metal on my skin. He's shouting now, like my mother,
What is wrong with you?
And then one of his hands is in the air, fingers together, palm flat.

My mother and her raised fist flashes in front of my eyes. I shrink away from Riley, shutting myself off, bracing myself.

There is the person people see on the outside and then there is the person on the inside and then, even farther down, is that other, buried person, a naked and silent creature, not used to light. I have it and now, here, I see it: Riley's hidden person.

There's a crackling in my head. My wrists ache.

“Stop making that noise,” he says roughly.

I look up; he's dunking a cigarette under the tap. The hot paper sizzles and then silences.

“You were going to hit me.” My voice sounds flat, far away.

“Jesus, this is fucked. You're still such a fucking kid. I'm fucking twenty-seven years old. What am I doing? I don't know what the fuck I'm doing.” His face is papery with exhaustion as he walks to the door.

When the door closes, I turn off all the lights and curl up in the bathtub in a very tight ball. I imagine myself inside an egg, a metal egg, impenetrable, locked on the outside, anything to keep myself from crawling to my kit, from crawling outside to my bicycle, to wait at the stop sign down his street, to say
I'm sorry,
but for what, for what, for what.

The next afternoon, before my first night shift, he's waiting inside the employee entrance of the coffeehouse, folded into a green plastic chair, reading the
Tucson Weekly.
He stands up, blocking me from walking any farther.

“You okay? We okay?” The last two words he whispers in my ear and I turn my head from his husky breath. “Come on now,” he says as if talking to a petulant child.

“You almost hit me,” I hiss, sidestepping him. From the doorway, I can see the mounds of dishes stacked in the sinks.

“I'm sorry,” he says. “Please, I'm sorry. I would never do that, I promise, I promise, Charlie. Things got a little out of control. I mean, come
on.
Did you think I'd jump for joy when I saw your little box?” He shoves the newspaper into the pocket of his jacket.

He takes my hand, but I yank it away. The Go players look up at us curiously, coffee cups in midair.

“Please, Charlie, I'm sorry.” His voice gets softer, worming its way through me. I feel myself giving in. He wasn't expecting to find my kit. Anyone would be upset, I guess. To see something like that. But—

Linus pokes her head out the screen door. “Charlie, Julie's waiting for you in her office, kiddo.”

I drop Riley's hand, relieved, and step away from the dangerous warmth of his body. My heart flip-flops the entire time as I walk down the hallway to the office.

Julie looks up at me from her swivel chair, sighing heavily. “This is hard, okay? I don't want you to think I'm going to like any of this one bit, okay, Charlie?”

She rubs her temples. “Don't think I don't like you, because I do. I just know my brother better than you, you know? Can you understand? I'm not going to…” She stops talking and looks away as if she's thinking.

“Hand me to him on a platter?” I finish, looking directly at her. I feel bare today, as though something has been shed from my body. I spent all night in the tub, not sleeping, thinking about the dark that spread across Riley's face, the fight that appeared there just behind his eyes. I looked at my charcoals and papers in the morning and ignored them, going to the library instead. I checked my messages (No Casper; Mikey's in Seattle; Blue says the doctors are rethinking her release); I stole twenty dollars from a woman's purse in the bathroom. The bill was tucked awkwardly in a front pocket. I was washing my hands, wondering about the stupidity of leaving a purse on the shelf above the sink with money hanging out. I didn't really have to think much about it all. Stealing it was a delicious thrill.

Julie turns her mouth down. Her face becomes a little lost. “Riley gets things and he hasn't done the work to get them. He's an addict. He's a liar. He's charming. He's not charming.”

She looks right at me. “In the big picture, he's not
old,
but he's had a life and you've had none.”

I kind of choke-laugh. “No offense, but you don't know anything about me. Like, at all. You have
no idea
what I've been through and seen.”

“Oh, Charlie.” Julie puts her chin in her hands and gazes at me for so long, I become uncomfortable. Her sad tone grates at me. I feel for the lapis stone in my pocket, fret a finger over it.

“Never in a million years will a relationship between an alcoholic junkie and a scared young girl work out.”

Before I can say anything, she stands up, briskly ponytailing her hair. “We had a terribly violent father, growing up. My brother got the brunt of it. To my dying day, I will protect him, no matter how much money he steals from me and how much he siphons off my soul. But I won't be responsible for collateral damage, do you understand? That, I can control.

“Don't ever have sex in my office with my brother, or
anyone,
ever again. And if you two happen to overlap with schedules and you are here while he is here, I don't want to see anything,
anything,
that even hints at affection between the two of you. Because I will
fire
you.
”

We stare at each other. I look away first, because, of course, she has me. I need this job, and I need her brother. I nod at the floor.

“Now, go find Temple,” she says.

Temple Dancer is a tall girl wrapped in a batik skirt with bells dangling from the waist-tie, a Metallica T-shirt, and dyed blond dreads bundled into a bun on each side of her head. She crosses her arms. “Really? A girl dish? At night?”

“Do you have a problem with that?” I'm angry, Julie's words still stinging my ears.

Temple Dancer's face loosens and she laughs, a deep sound, like owls fluttering from her throat. “Just testing. It's awesome. I'm totally sick of dudes.”

Julie appears, changed into drapey pants and a tank top to go to her yoga class. “Girls, play nice. Linus!”

Linus emerges from behind the grill,
Riley's
grill, her face sweaty. “Welcome to nights, Charlie. And I know, I know, I work too much, it's true, even nights. I never leave!”

“Let's try to keep it together tonight, okay, girls? Kibosh on the drinking?” Julie pleads.

“No problem, J.” Linus spins a dish towel with her forefinger.

As soon as Julie's gone, two waitgirls burst through the doors to the front, planting themselves right in front of me. Temple Dancer joins them. I've never been in the coffeehouse at night, so I've never met them.

“You're the one that fucked Riley in Julie's office? Oh my God.”

“Jesus! You totally fucked Riley in Julie's office. How was it?”

“I thought he was fucking that Darla girl from Swoon? Does she know? Because she will die. She's such a pussy.”

“I thought you were with Mike Gustafson. Did you guys break up? You were a totally cute couple. I saw you guys eating fries at Gentle Ben's once.”

The comment about Mikey cuts me a little. The comments about Riley horrify me. Darla from Swoon? Did that really happen?

Linus waves the dish towel in the air. “Enough. Officially over, no more questions asked or answered. Temple, do your bit: train Charlie.”

One of the other girls says, “I'm Frances. Nights are hell here.” She tucks her orange bob behind her ears. “But in a good way,” she finishes before taking off to the café floor with her green order pad.

Temple says ominously, “The best and worst thing about nights is when we have live music. It can sucketh or it can giveth. Tonight, our pleasure is…” She fishes a sheet of paper from under the counter.

“Modern Wolf. Tonight will sucketh.” She jams a finger into her mouth, gagging.

The other girl says, “I'm Randy.” She does a little two-step shimmy. She's dressed in a black miniskirt and white T-shirt with a spray-painted red target. Her saddle shoes scuffle against the hardwood floor.

Randy rolls her eyes. Her blond, feathered hair swings against her cheeks. “Modern Wolf sucks ass. This means we'll get mostly bangers and some art types thinking this is prog rock, which it is
not.
It'll be loud and awful and hell getting rid of them at closing.”

Temple is spearing receipts on a spindle. “Sucks for you, since you have to clean both shitters and the main floor at the end of the night.”

Randy nods. “And we'll all be waiting for you, and stuff, to finish because Julie says we all have to leave at the same time? But we can't help you.”

“Because nobody helps the dish.” Temple makes a sad-clown face.

“So we'll be getting angrier, while we wait for you,” Randy says.

“And angrier,” Temple concurs. She frowns. “Jesus, you're going to burn up in that shirt.”

Randy cocks her head at me. “We know about you. Julie told us. I have a T-shirt with short sleeves in my bag, if you want it.”

Desperately, because their machine-gun conversation has made my head spin, I say, “Do you guys ever shut up?” Behind the grill, Linus laughs.

Temple grins. “Never.”

“It's cool with me, you know,” Randy tells me, leaning in closer, so that I can see the shine of the piercing in her nose. “Julie hardly ever comes in at night, anyway. My cousin, she was a cutter. She's in law school now. Stuff happens, you just keep on truckin', am I right?”

Move forward. Keep on truckin'. I'm getting tired of everyone thinking it's so easy to live. Because it's not. At all.

Randy gives me a friendly little nudge with her elbow and I try to smile, just to be nice,
Don't be a cold fish,
but I'm starting to feel sick, and heavy inside. I look out the front window at the dark sky. Working at night is going to be a lot different.

Around eight-thirty, Modern Wolf come in drunk and take a long, noisy time setting up; one of them falls off the riser and passes out. Temple empties a pitcher of water over his head. The band has a core of friends who fling themselves into the battered wooden chairs and smoke inside even though they shouldn't and drink enormous amounts of beer they smuggled in stuffed in paper bags. They stomp booted feet on the floor so hard that Linus shakes her head at me and says, “You stupid, stupid children. Why do you think that's music?”

The band reminds me of the ragged kids Mikey and DannyBoy used to take me to see in St. Paul: skinny, loose-jeaned kids, girls and boys, with bad skin and crunchy hair who whaled on instruments in the moldy basements of houses, popping strings and bashing on drums. It was exciting to me, that you could throw yourself into something so much simply because you loved it and it consumed you. It didn't seem to matter if you were good or not. It only mattered that you did it.

Modern Wolf sings,
My heart is a political nightmare / Guantánamo Bay every day / You've searched and seized and strung me up / I'm left with nothing to say / I ain't got nothing to say!

A girl in a mesh top and hot pants lurches through the doors to the kitchen area, takes a look at Linus and me, spews fries and beer from her mouth, the dregs caking instantly to her chin, and whispers, “My bad,” before Randy shoves her out. I sop up the chunks, holding my breath. They were right, nights are way worse than days. No one ever vomits during the day, except for that time with Riley. I'm exhausted and my head hurts from all the noisy music and there are still two hours until closing, and longer after that to clean. My heart sinks farther and farther.

At closing, Temple brings out a large bottle of Maker's Mark and pours cups for everyone except Linus, who grimaces. Temple raises her cup and shouts,
“Salud!”
I just leave mine by the dishwasher. Even though I've had some drinks at Riley's, mostly when he's sleeping, and that half bottle of wine, I haven't had anything else.

Someone has menstruated in an ugly way on the women's toilet seat and that takes me some time. The men's room is all graffitied walls, piss on the floor, paper towels stuck to the tiled backdrop above the sink. I drop stream after stream of cleanser in the toilet, but it remains a defiantly burnished yellow. My hands burn from the chemicals when I'm done.

While the other girls bustle and laugh behind the counter and in back, I tackle the tables: wiping them down and heaving the chairs on top of them so I can mop. It's a lot more work at night. My face is red from the effort and I'm breaking out in sweat. Modern Wolf is still straggling out, the last of them bleary and unsure of the direction of the doorway. It's Friday; Fourth Avenue will be packed with people going to hear music along the street, to Plush, O'Malley's, the Hut with its enormous, glowering tiki head, all the way down to Hotel Congress with its pretty, old-fashioned awnings. Mikey's probably calling Bunny every night. Maybe buying things for her in truck stops, stupid stuff, like pencils with fuzzy tops.

I wonder what Riley's doing, because we'd be together now, on a good night, maybe listening to records in his living room, something quiet like that that I like. I wonder if he's thinking about me at all.