Authors: Paul Griffin

Stay with Me (24 page)

BOOK: Stay with Me

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“Don’t, Vic. Seriously.”

“I know what I know.”

“Promise me you’ll leave him alone?”

“Go check in on Marcy. She’s been in the bathroom for a while. I knocked twice. The first time she said she was fine she sounded like she was sobbing. Second time I believe you could say she was
keening
.”

“Keening.”

“I’d send your mother, but she’s keening at the bar.”

I head into the bathroom. Marcy is keening all right, staring at herself in the mirror.

“Marce?”

“They call me Lefty. They posted it on my page, Céce. That dick Brendan? He flippin’
tweeted
it.
Knew
I shouldn’t have gotten naked with him.” She rolls up her sleeves and holds out her arms. The left doesn’t extend the whole way. The shoulder is rolled forward and her hand hangs at an odd angle. After all those childhood surgeries, it’s not quite right. And the scars. “Does it really look that bad, Céce? Does it?”

Now I’m keening.

THE SIXTY-FOURTH DAY . . .

(Friday, August 14, afternoon)

MACK:

I’m on the floor. Boo is conked on top of me. I trained him from sunrise—or tried to. He just thinks this is some big old party, being locked up. He won’t do a thing I tell him.
Sit
means tackle and kiss.

When Céce left yesterday, I barely made it out of the room. I slumped in the hallway, sure the fat man was standing on my chest. They got me into a chair and wheeled me to sickbay. Nothing was wrong with me, the medic said.

She won’t come anymore. Not after that. I don’t know how I made myself shove her like that.

I hope she gets another dog.

Boo wakes and slobbers me, and I shove him off. He starts sniffing around in circles. I drag his fat butt outside. The rain makes a mess of the papers I laid out on the caged rooftop in a ten-foot by ten-foot square, just like Thompkins’s manual said. Let it be a hundred by a hundred, Boo isn’t setting a paw on it.

“Boo, we don’t housebreak you, you know we’re both dead, right?”

He knocks me flat to kiss me. I claw him off and wrestle him. He spins his big old butt up in my face, his little tail stump wiggling, and sprays me with a serious wet fart. I let go of him to wave off the stink, and he breaks for the tabletop. Ten seconds later there’s pee all over it.

After I clean up the mess, I get back to where I left off in the training manual, page two. I thumb the rest of it. Garbage. I pitch it and call for the guard.

“What’s up?” he says.

“You won’t be seeing Boo or me for the next little while or so.”

“Yeah, huh? Where y’all headed?”

“The can.”

“Course you are.”

“Once we go in, we ain’t—aren’t coming out till Boo does his business.”

“I see.” He doesn’t. “How long you expect that will be?”

“I bet about an hour.”

“I never heard of housebreaking a dog in that way,” he says.

“You got dogs?”

“Cats.”

“There you go then.”

Guard shrugs. “Well, Wash told me you know what you’re doing. Just the same, I am going to have to write this down in my report.”

“You do what you have to do.”

“You just remember, we have an overhead camera in there,” he says. “It’s blurred to give you privacy, but we can tell if you get to thinking about hanging up.”

“Appreciate the warning.”

Guard twitches a little smile. Nervous type, dot your
t
’s, cross your
i
’s, but he’s all right. Boo jumps up and licks the guard through the bars, and the guard jumps back. “I don’t know why they picked this dog,” he says. “My opinion, they stuck you with a lemon. He seems plumb loco to me.”

“He’s a little creampuff.”

“That head,” the guard says. “I don’t know if it has a bit of brains in it. Look at it. It’s a boulder all right.”

Boo tackles me to lick me.

Guard nods. “Good luck with that little creampuff.”

I stock up on dog biscuits, extra-salty peanut butter, Cheerios and boloney, and march my Boo into the bathroom and shut us in.

Two hours later I’m sitting on the bathroom floor with this giant Boo curled in my lap. He whimpers.

“Sooner you pee, sooner we get out of here.”

He drops his monster head into my hands and looks at me with those huge brown eyes. His tail stump whirls.

I’m training him to spot pee in the shower, a big old crumbly tile step-in stall. I put newspapers around the drain. I use the Money section because rich folks can stand some pissing on for once.

I trained many a dog to pee in the rain drain up in the hutch. When they were sick and injured, they didn’t have the strength to make it down to the street. Winter too. Gets subzero out there, a dog will burn his paws on the sidewalk. Road salt isn’t good for them either. Dog needs a fallback plan. All else fails, he has the drain.

I dip a dog biscuit into extra-salty peanut butter.

Boo tries to snatch the cookie. I make him sit and give paw and push back on his forehead to make him take the cookie real polite. He inhales it, laps at his nose to get at the salty peanut butter covering it. Now I set down his water bowl. He drains it dry, whimpers, and digs at the door to be let out to pee on his tabletop.

I get on all fours and sniff the floor like a dog looking for a choice spot to pee. When I get to the drain, I wag my butt like,
Hey, this here’s the
perfect
spot to pee
. I circle the drain, unzip my fly, and pee into the drain.

Boo cocks his head and sinks to the floor and groans.

Comes a knocking.

Boo just wags his tail and cocks his head at the door. Pits make rotten watchdogs. They love people too much.

Guard says through the door, “I see you on the camera. Like I said, it’s blurry, but . . . I know this sounds batty, but from a top view, it looks like you are acting like a dog, making water over that shower drain.”

“That would be correct.”

Stretch of quiet, then: “You all right?”

“I’m just fine,” I say.

“Mind-wise, I’m saying. How you doing?”

“Real real great, thank you. How
you
doing?”

More silence, then: “Why you getting all dog-like and making water over the shower when you got a perfectly fine toilet right there?”

“Nothing at all to worry about. This is just part of the normal training.”

“Well, all right then,” the guard says, but I can tell by his voice he thinks I’m some flavor of mental.

(Friday, August 14, dinner shift)

CÉCE:

This new guy is refilling the bar ice. “Hey, Céce.”

“Oh, yeah, hey Bobby.” He goes to my school, year ahead of me. I don’t know him except from Marcy. They’re in marching band together. Marcy’s like second cymbals, and I think he plays the tuba or whatever. “Didn’t recognize you with the buzz cut.”

“My mother left.”

“Huh?”

“She joined an ashram out in Washington State. She forced us to wear our hair long. The minute she left, my brother pulled out the clipper.”

“No, hey, it looks good.”

He shrugs. “It’s a lot better for the summer anyway.”

“Marcy get you the job?”

“Saw the sign in the window. I feel really bad. After Mister Apruzese hired me, Marcy quit.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Right before lunch started. Your mother was pulling double duty. I don’t know what I did to make Marcy so mad.”

“I’m sure you didn’t do anything. I better call her. Sorry about your mom.”

He shrugs. “What are you gonna do? You gotta keep going, right?”

Somebody just punched me in the throat. He’s shorter and nowhere near as nicely shaped, but for a moment there he looked just like him, sad and strong at the same time.

There’s a hurricane in the background.
“What! Talk louder! I’m in the shower!”

The girl showers with her phone? “I said, why did you quit!”

“I can’t look him in the eye! Bobby! He was one of my FB #1’s! He saw the post! The Lefty thing!”

“So, what, you’re never leaving your house again?”

“I’m gonna go to the east side, move in with my sister! Start over, you know?”

“Regina’s gonna let you live with her after the epoxy on her Maxi episode?”

“Not Regina! Nancy said I could sleep in her craft room!”

“Marce, you can
not
live with Nancy! Nancy tweets more than you do! I see two anorexic Napolitano girls on their phones, billions of largely untouched, festering take-out Chinese cartons all over the house! Death by Twitter! This is not good, Marcy! Come live with me and the Mella! You’ll have the whole basement apartment to yourself ! You can smoke all the pot you want down there, and Ma will never know!”

“It’s really tempting, but I gotta get away from, like, here! Céce, I gotta go! Maybe I’ll see you around the mall or something, okay?” Click.

Everybody’s disappearing.

I swing the dough to the pizza refrigerator. I stop midway, look over Vic’s shoulder, at his computer. He’s frowning as he reads to himself. The war. It’s intensifying again. The U.S. is in the middle of launching a major offensive.

My mother comes in with rainbow-colored hair. “Howyas doin’?”

Vic taps his mouse pad, and the crossword comes up to cover the news. “Good, Carmella. Good. I love your hair, sweetheart.”

Work is slamming with a waiting line going out the door. Bobby tries to help, but he’s kind of klutzy and drops a lot of stuff. Ma’s tables are calling me over. “Where’s our food?”

Ma’s back in the kitchen. She’s chewing gum like a cow on crack. The kitchen stinks of Bubblicious Savage Sour Apple. She keeps picking up the wrong plates.

Vic works the stoves. “Carmella, howya doin’, hon?” “Awesome,” she says. “What’s up?”

Serving Ma’s tables and mine, I look like I walked in from a rainstorm, just what you want from your waitress, sweat rolling off her beak into your eggplant parmigiana.

Then it hits me. The gum. I check the dining room. She’s not there, not in the bar, not in the kitchen. I catch her coming out of the walk-in with some grated. Behind the cheese wheel, there it is, the glass, Ma’s bright pink lipstick on the rim. I dip my finger and lick it.

You have to get really right up in someone’s face to smell vodka on them, especially when they’re chewing Savage Sour. I get right up into her face. She’s adding a bill—trying to. I grab her arm and whisper, “Ma, go home.”

Bobby and Vic are looking at us. Bobby’s confused. Vic just looks sad. “Céce, that’s enough now,” he says.

“What’s your problem, Céce?” Her face is red.

I hiss through clamped teeth, “You think we’re idiots, Ma?”

“Back off, sister. I’m serious. You want me to call you out on your stuff in front of everybody? How many times you disappear a shift? You think Vic can’t count how many slices he sells, how many he buys?”

“I’m entitled to one free meal.”

“Half a cheesecake isn’t a meal.”

“Ma, you’re sneaking vodka in the middle of your
shift
.”

“How many times did you try to see Mack? Huh? Even after you knew he was blowing you off, you still went back. We all have our little things we need to do to get through, okay?”

“Just
go,
you stupid selfish drunk!”

The table chatter dies like when you turn off the TV in the middle of
America’s Best Dance Crew
. I hear the ceiling fans shimmying, nothing else.

My mother gulps. Shakes her head. Her face turns red, then gray. “The cornbread,” she whispers.

“The cornbread?”

“They don’t like it.” She holds up a breadbasket. The Parmesan sticks and white rolls are gone, but the slightly burned loaf of Carmella’s Crazy Confection remains untouched. No, one piece has a nibble missing. I warned her that folks might not be too jacked up to munch on cornbread whose second main ingredient is sourballs. Decorative icing in the shape of snowmen that are often mistaken for goblins? What does she expect?

She pulls her checks out of her apron, gives them to me.

“Where you going now?” I say.

BOOK: Stay with Me

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