Grime (2 page)

“If you guys don’t pick up the pace we’re
gonna be here for a week,” Val says.

“You wanna trade? What’ve you got over there,
anyway? Cat shit? Is it cat shit? Because over here we have cat
shit.”

She ignores me and looks at Jamie. “Mitch
says he hasn’t been here since 1992.”

Jamie nods. “That’s probably about right.
Sophomore year.”

“You really never came back?”

“Did you?”

“Not much. But every now and then. Last time
I was here was a few years ago, just before Billy and I moved to
Muskogee.”

“That’s more than a few, isn’t it?” Jamie
asked. “More like five?”

Val glances up at the ceiling while she does
the math in her head. “Nearly seven. Jesus, you’re right. I didn’t
think it’d been that long. What about you, James?”

“I think it was our twenty-fifth
birthday.”

Our. It weirds me out a little that she said
our, without hesitation. Like to her, it’s always been ours, even
all those times it went by without either of us acknowledging the
other’s existence with so much as a card or phone call. I don’t
remember how long it’s been since I’ve thought of it as anybody’s
but mine.

“No wonder he let it get so bad,” Val
said.

There she goes again. Mentioning him. I feel
a flash of anger in that cage deep inside me, the one where I lock
everything down. I never can bring myself to say anything when I’m
pissed. I just shove it in that cage and wish I had the courage to
let it out.

Jamie’s never had that problem. “What’s that
supposed to mean, Val?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing, my ass.”

“Jamie, stop,” I say, shooting a pointed look
her way. She returns it with a glare, but keeps her mouth shut.
Good lord. We’ve barely started and already there’s fighting.

“I didn’t mean anything, I was just saying,”
Val mutters as she ties off her trash bag and hefts it outside.

Jamie picks up the shovel again and angrily
scrapes at the spilled litter granules and shit from the carpet. I
check the desk drawers. A few file folders filled with official
looking documents. I set them aside to look through them later.
“Jamie, help me get this thing out of here.”

She steps around to the other side of the
desk and together we lift it. It takes some navigating, but
eventually we make it to the doorway and waddle outside with the
desk between us. Val's down by her car, smoking.

"So how's Ben?" Jamie asks.

"Good. He's good. We're good. Are you still
with that guy? What's his name, the..." I hope that if I trail off
she'll take up the reigns and I can pretend it was on the tip of my
tongue all along.

"The dentist? Greg? Not at the moment," she
grins, "but ask again tomorrow."

"He can't pin you down, huh?"

"Try as he might. Which isn't all that hard,
to be honest. One, two, three."

We heave the desk into the trailer where it
lands precariously on top of some overstuffed trash bags. I look
across the yard at the mess we're making. "Our charity pile is
pretty small."

"Nobody wants this shit, Mitchell. Charity
shops don't even give it to people who need it, they just sell it
to fucking hipsters whose lives are so mundane they have to pretend
repurposing cheap junk is some kind of meaningful hobby. No
offense."

"I'm not a hipster."

"Oh, so the beard isn’t supposed to be
ironic?"

I grab her in a halfhearted headlock but she
ducks away easily, laughing. She looks over her shoulder at me and
like a flash I see her, and she's fourteen, maybe fifteen, and
she's standing in this same spot in this same yard, her curly hair
framed by that same window behind her, only she's not laughing.
She's just staring at me with dark cold eyes. Then the memory’s
gone, and we’re back in the present.

Jesus. I think this may be the first time
I’ve ever seen her smile at this house.

I have no idea what my face must look like,
but I can see what it's doing to hers. The laughter stops, her lips
draw thin. For a moment I just want to put my arm around her. But I
don’t. Instead I just walk past her and go back inside.

From the amount of shit in the trailer and
the yard you’d think it would look a lot better, but the living
room is still a mess. The wall Val was working her way across is
okay, but we’ve hardly put a dent in the rest.

“Where the hell is Gwen?” Jamie asks from
behind me.

“She texted me -” I check my phone “- about
an hour ago. Said she’s on her way.”

I can practically hear Jamie’s eyes rolling.
She steps around me and surveys the room. “I think it’ll help if we
get all the big furniture out. It will at least make it easier to
get around in here.”

Another hour later and the furniture is all
cleared away. I’ve managed to convince Jamie and Val to put a
bookcase and a couple of chairs on the charity pile, but I have to
admit they’re right about the rest. The sofa is stained and lumpy,
and the frame has come loose in one arm. The coffee table is coated
with a quarter inch of gummy sludge, hundreds or maybe thousands of
spilled glasses of rotgut that were never wiped up. Nobody in their
right mind would want this shit.

The room does look a bit better. There’s
still stuff everywhere - books and magazines and old plastic food
containers, shoeboxes full of dead batteries, piles and piles of
papers.

Jamie produces some bungee ties from the
truck, and we strap the towering load of trash bags and junk
furniture in the trailer down as best we can to make the first trip
to the dump.

“You two go,” Val says. “I’ll stay here and
keep working.” She lights another Newport and sucks it in with her
eyes closed while we climb into the cab and pull away. Jamie
drives.

We’re not in the car ten seconds before she
asks, “So how bad is it?”

“How bad is what?”

“You and Ben.”

“I told you, it’s good.”

“Yeah. You told me. Three times. You said
‘good’ three times in the first two seconds after I asked you.”

“Because things are triple good.”

“You’re a terrible liar.”

I know I am. But I don’t want to get into it.
I glance over my shoulder to make sure our load is still secure.
Jamie’s GPS helpfully suggests she turn right in 200 feet. “You
still working at that ad agency?”

“It was never an ad agency, it was in-house
marketing for an architecture firm. And yes, I’m still there. But I
don’t want to talk about work.”

“What do you want to talk about then?”

“Mom.”

“Jesus fuck, Jamie. Why?”

“Because it beats talking about Dad. And I
don’t see how much longer we can avoid talking about either of
them, considering the only reason we’re even seeing each other is
because we’re cleaning out his house.”

I groan. “What, so we’ve gotta stretch out on
the couch and air our grievances? They’re both dead. Fine. It’s
over. It’s not like either one of them have been a part of our
lives for a long time.”

“Oh, that’s healthy.”

“Well, what exactly is it you want me to
say?”

“I don’t know. Anything.” We hit a red light
and she looks over at me. “You never say anything. Even when we
were kids. You just talk and talk and don’t say anything.”

“Okay, so what is it you want to say? You
want to talk about Mom, you say something.”

The light turns green. She hits the gas a
little too hard, and the big diesel engine snorts. “Sometimes I
think I’m turning into her.”

“You’re not.”

“How would you know? You barely know me.”

She’s right, of course, but I lie to her
anyway. “I know you well enough to know you’re not Mom.”

“Greg’s fucking around.”

“I thought you weren’t with him anymore.”

“We’ve been off and on for four years, and
he’s been fucking around for all of it.”

“So stay off this time.”

“I know.” Her voice has gone flat. “I should,
but I won’t. Because I’m just like Mom.”

“You’re not like Mom.”

“It’s easier to have somebody there, even a
shitbag like Greg, then to be alone. She could never figure out how
to be alone. I envy people who know how to be alone. Who just say
fuck it, you know? This is me. I am me. I am not a piece of anybody
else’s anything. If I meet somebody that gets me, awesome. If I
don’t, fuck it. Who cares? I always used to look at Mom and wish
she could be like that, and now I look at me and I wish I could be
like that. But really, part of me just looks at people who are like
that and I just think, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“You’re so full of shit.”

“I know.” She glances over, a twisted grin
pulling at one corner of her mouth. “Now it’s your turn. You say
something.”

“You think that rambling turn of nonsense you
just did counts as saying something?”

“I think it’s your turn.”

I think for a minute. I can feel the thing I
want to say banging against that cage inside. It wants out. “I
don’t think you’re like Mom because you think you’re like Mom.”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean, Mom never actually thought about
herself.”

Jamie turns and looks straight at me for
longer than I’d like her to, considering she’s behind the wheel.
“She killed herself when she had four kids, Mitchell. If you ask me
that’s pretty selfish.”

“That’s not what I mean. I just mean, I don’t
think she ever sat down and considered what she was doing with her
life. She was never the introspective sort.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because if she had been, she would have
changed it. She wouldn’t have stayed in a life that made her
miserable.”

“God, you’re a fucking idiot.” Jamie shakes
her head. “Have you ever, I don’t know, been a real person? Talked
to one? People don’t change their life when they realize how shitty
it is. They just bitch about it.”

“I changed mine,” I say.

“Did you really? Or did you just change the
zip code?”

I don’t have a response to that. I turn up
the radio and she takes the hint. We don’t talk for a while. The
GPS tells us to turn left. Without it we probably would have gone
right past the small wooden sign for the Madison Prairie Landfill.
I wonder if they did that on purpose.

We pay the fee and I guide Jamie while she
backs up the trailer. Unloading occupies us enough that we don’t
feel the need to talk, but before long we’re back in the truck and
headed back for the house. We just listen to the radio.

When we pull up there’s a red sports car
parked on the curb. Not a new one. Not a nice one. I don’t know
much about cars, but it looks kind of 80s, like the kind of car
somebody would desperately hold onto in the hopes that one day it
will be considered a classic.

There’s a huge pile of trash bags waiting
beside the driveway. Jamie starts loading them into the trailer
right away, but I go inside first.

The front room is empty, except for a couple
of boxes. “Val?”

“In the kitchen.”

I start to walk back and Gwen appears from
the hallway. “Hey, Mitch.”

“Well, look who finally showed up.”

“Go fuck yourself. Hug me.”

She looks exactly the same as she did all
those years ago, those six months when she came and lived with me
after she graduated high school because she had the same delusions
every other kid in a flyover state has about California. She’s even
dressed the same, like fashion had reached its apex in the mid-90s.
Or maybe it just gave up and died.

As long as it’s been since I’ve seen her,
hugging her is easy and familiar. I can’t deny Gwen was always my
favorite. Just a year younger than Jamie and me, and about as
different from me as you can get, but maybe that’s why she always
felt more like my other half than my twin did. She could always
make me laugh. Why the hell aren’t I better at keeping in touch?
Seeing her now I realize how much I’ve actually missed the little
turd.

“You smell awful,” she says into my
shoulder.

“That would be the cat shit.” I point around
the room. “Nice of you to join us after the hard part’s done. At
least you helped finish up the living room.”

“We just got here a second ago. Didn’t do a
fucking thing. This was all Val.”

“We?”

“I brought reinforcements.”

We go into the kitchen, where a tall guy with
a stained t-shirt is twisting the refrigerator away from the wall,
swiveling it back and forth, grunting.

“Mitch, Ethan. Yadda yadda.”

“Nice to meet you,” he grins with teeth the
color of nicotine. I can hear bottles clinking around inside the
fridge as he wiggles it across the floor.

“Might be easier to do that if we empty it
first.”

“Trust us,” Val’s voice drifts up from the
cupboards behind the counter, where she’s squatting and pulling out
pans. “You don’t want to open that door. It’s toxic in there.”

“We decided it was better to just write the
whole fucking thing off and tip it all in the dump.” Gwen pushes
her hair back from her forehead and watches Ethan wrestle with the
fridge.

“Well, let me go see if we have a handtruck
or something.” I head back through the living room where Jamie is
looking through one of the boxes on the floor. “Gwen’s here.”

“Mitchell, did you see these?” She holds up
one of the file folders I’d pulled out of the desk.

“I set them aside because they looked
important, but I didn’t really look at them. Why, what are
they?”

“His release papers.”

“He kept them?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh. Is that weird?”

“I don’t know. Kind of. But maybe not. I
don’t know.” She puts the file folder back in the box. “I mean,
look around. He wasn’t exactly the type to throw anything out.
Should one of us keep these? Or give them to somebody?”

“Who?”

“Hell if I know. I’m just always paranoid
about throwing out official documents.”