Texts from Bennett (19 page)

“Chad. Chad. Chad? Of all people? Chad. Jerk off, turtleneck Chad. Organic soy beer Chad. Vegan Chad. Wow. You fucking idiot wwwwwwhore. Thanks.”

“I was just . . . just mad . . . at you.”

“Mad at me?”

“Yes, over them”—she pointed at the floor toward where Lillian slept in the living room—“staying here. I was . . . frustrated.”

“So you
fucked another guy?
”

“Yes . . . wait.
No.
No, I didn’t . . . I didn’t f—”

“You fucked him, didn’t you—didn’t you? Stop lying!”

She rolled her suddenly dry eyes and slapped her hands against her thighs, as if the whole conversation was a huge inconvenience to her. “Aw, geez. You know? This is getting stupid,” she said with an irritated tone.

“Don’t even try to act like this is some burden on you. You cheated on me—in my front yard. I thought you were a loyal person. I thought you’d never cheated on someone.”

Silence until: “I don’t usually cheat.”

“No, you told me you
never
cheat!”

“Hehe, well . . . I never
usually
cheat,” Harper said, trying to lighten up the situation, as she put her hand on my back.

“Harper, get your fuuuucking hand off me. If you think I’m going to have a sense of humor about this, you’re wrong.”

“I’m sorry. God, I’m just trying to lighten up the mood. What do you want me to say?”

“Say something honest. I won’t break up with you if you’re honest. If you’re honest, I at . . . I at least know how to try to work on things with you. Where to rebuild things from.”

I crouched down and looked her in the eyes. “Now,” I said. “Please be honest. Okay? Did you sleep with him?”

She looked away, covering her mouth with her hand.

“What’s your answer?”

“My answer is . . . I’ve just been . . . unhappy.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

“But yes, it is, baby! That’s the answer!”

“Okay. So you fucked him?”

“Stop. . . . It’s just . . . I just . . . I don’t understand you sometimes.”

“How so?”

“You’re not like I am. And I want to understand you. I want to love you. But you grew up without money. You grew up uneducated.”

“So the fuck what?!”

“I just . . . I need time to understand your level of people.”

“My level? My level? The fuck does that mean? My
level
of . . . people?”

“That’s
not
how I meant it!”

“Hang on. Stop changing the subject. Did you fuck him?”

Silent again.

“Have you had sex? With Chad? Since we’ve been together?”

“Mac . . .”

“No. Let me rephrase: have you had sex, with Chad, a guy you met because you moved here to be with me, a Kansas guy, since we’ve been together?”

“Forget about that. Let’s focus on the real issue. We’ve moved very fast into this relationship and need to establish a common ground. I just don’t understand you. The way you grew u—”

“Okay, just stop.” I cut her off. “Why did we even do this? Who the fuck moves in with someone after seven months?”

I stood up and entered her side of our walk-in closet. I then bear-hugged all the clothes of hers I could grab and pulled as much of them off the hanger pole as I could, then threw them on the bed.

“Why are you doing that? Why are you throwing my clothes—?”

“You know why.” I went back and grabbed another load. “Because, you’re an asshole. You’re a closet racist, an elitist, a bitch. Okay? I mean— Jesus! My family may not be wealthy and politically influential. But they at least have loyalty. They at least understand pain and hardship.”

“Please, honey. I—”

“Stop calling me honey. You’re a
bad
person.”

“No. Baby. I’m not a bad person; I’m just very confused right now.”

I threw more clothes on the bed. I began emptying her sock and underwear drawers.

“Yes, you are.”

“No! I’m not! I’m a good person!”

“Okay, then you’re a bad person for me.”

“We can fix this.”

“No, we definitely can’t fix this.”

“What are you trying to say? Are you ending things with me?” She sat and covered her face with her hands. “Mac? You’re going to give up this soon?”

“Yeah. I am.”

“No, I want to hear you say you’re ending things with me. I don’t think you can. I think you know we can fix this and want me to beg for you to take me back. If you really think I’m a bad person, then ask me. Ask me to leave.”

“Ha! ‘Ask’ you to leave? You aren’t understanding me. There’s no ‘asking’ going on here. Your daddy’s name isn’t on this mortgage.
My
name is on the mortgage. This isn’t a request. This is an order:
Get your things and get the fuck out of my house!
”

She collapsed onto the ground screaming.

And I? I just walked out.

I drove around for hours by myself, listening to Mexican polka on the radio. For some reason, the accordions and Spanish language that I couldn’t understand a word of helped lessen the sting of finding out that Harper cheated on me with turtleneck-wearing vegan Chad. I pulled over to the liquor store and bought a six-pack of Founders Red’s Rye PA. I didn’t have a bottle opener in the car, so I had to bite off the bottle caps with my rear molars—a practice I had been using since ninth grade.

My phone was on the passenger seat. I had no idea if anyone was calling or texting. I didn’t care. I was stewing in my own self-pity. After a beer was finished, I’d throw its empty bottle onto the street, hoping a person who had recently cheated on their spouse would trip and fall on it. Then I’d open another one. They were getting progressively warmer.

I hadn’t felt this type of sadness—the gambler’s uncertainty, the feeling that I was doomed to be forever alone—since I was a little fifth-grade lad and Katie Stanford (a seventh grader!) dumped me at Skateland South. She said I “wore dorky shoes” and was “too shy,” and she broke up with me just like that.

Wait, no. Scratch that. Beer memory. She didn’t actually say anything. She had her friend Lynn come over and break up with me
for
her. I remember trying to instantly heal the abrasions Katie left on
my heart by rebounding with the first girl in sight. Which was Lynn, by default. I had such a cheesy, skewed, Disney-movie grasp on attraction and love that when Lynn asked me, “Are you going to be okay?” I read the flickering light from the Coke machine that was reflecting in Lynn’s eye as a supernatural twinkle, so I responded with, “Your eyes are glowing. I can sense your love so deeply. Go steady with me, Lynn. Go steady with me.” And I took her hand.

With perhaps outsize pity, Lynn patted me on the head and declined. It was devastating. But I soldiered on . . . and ended up being spurned by three other girls that same night. To extrapolate on that, I literally skated up to a group of three
other
girls who were playing pinball, and one by one, in order of cutest to least cute, asked them all to go steady with me. They all said no.

After another particularly otherworldly polka rendition by Los Banditos Milagros of all things, and a few more crushed bottles, I realized that, indeed, my phone had been vibrating.

HARPER:
Baby, please.

HARPER:
Baby? Lover?

HARPER:
Honey?

HARPER:
You are my life. My dream man.

ME:
Shut up, bitch.

HARPER:
It kills me to see you say that. Baby, no.

ME:
Go back to Vermont, you racist.

ME:
I’m coming home soon and if your stuff is there I’m going to let Mercedes have it.

HARPER:
[Very long text about how she’s sorry, and how I’m her everything, and she will regret this till the day she dies, and all this other drivel that you don’t want to read, because it’s a bunch of bullshit.]

ME:
Yeah, that’s nice. You should have thought of that before fucking Chad.

ME:
This is the last text I’m going to send you. I vow to you if you aren’t gone by the time I get home in 2 hrs I’m going to let Bennett
and Mercedes have your stuff. You don’t have that much shit at my house. Take all you can. The rest I’ll get to you soon. Good-bye and fuck you.

HARPER:
I love you, David McCleary Sheldon.

ME:
1 hour 59 minutes and counting. Try me.

•

I ended up an hour away in Topeka, which is Kansas’s state capital. (Most people get that wrong.) I parked my car at a high school that had a twilight baseball game going on under the school’s fluorescent stadium lights. I remained in my car and studied every single player who stepped up to take bat at home plate, evaluating their physical characteristics and trying to imagine if he would end up getting cheated on or not.

After a half hour, the game ended, the parking lot emptied, car by car, and the stadium lights shut off. I remained where I was, the windows rolled down, breathing in the khamsin of the pitch-black Topeka summer. Famished mosquitoes feasted on my arms, and I didn’t bother to swat them away. I was rotting in my car, seeping out gusts of rancid fumes and mare’s tail clouds of black smoke, as I felt Harper incinerating the deepest dimensions of my existence.

I made it home three hours later.

Bennett found me standing silently in the kitchen. He was shirtless, eating a dry, syrupless waffle with his bare hands. His Freddy Krueger tattoo looked somehow sadder than usual. His pants hung off his ass, and his
South Park
boxer shorts puffed out of them. His facial expression was that of someone who just punted his puppy over a fence. It was guilty and burdened with hurting someone he loved. He had a huge welt under his eyeball.

“Bennett, what happened to your eye?”

“I broke up with Mercedes, and she punched me.”

“Jesus.”

“Nigga. I got really bad news.”

“What?”

“Uh . . . Cuz. I was jus’ tryin’ to be a good cousin by tellin’ you what she did, and shit. And . . . it sucks dat I gots to tell you dis shit too. But uh . . . man. Harper took her stuff and left.”

Hearing her name, I’ll admit I was tempted to call her and tell her to come back. But I couldn’t. Too much pride. Too much fear of enabling it to happen again. I’d been cheated on once before, years ago, and infidelity always has been, and always will be, the one unforgivable offense for me. Other than eating in our bed. Gross.

“I know she did, man. I told her to. I broke up with her and kicked her out.”

“Yeah, I heard. But uh . . . I thought y’all would do like me and Mercedes do.”

“Dude. She cheated on me. What do you, or would you do, if Mercedes cheated on you?”

“Uh . . . yeah, mane, like, Mercedes cheats on me all the time, homie.”

“How do you live with that?”

“I cheat on her back.”

“Geez. So . . . you guys constantly one-up each other, trying to out-cheat the other person?”

“Uh . . . well. Mercedes cheats on me ’cause I cheat on her.”

“Why don’t you stop cheating on her?”

“Because she’s fuckin’ crazy!”

He removed his navy-blue bandana and unfolded it on the kitchen counter. He flattened it with his hands and began to refold it with fresh creases.

“Uh, also, mane,” Bennett said.

“Yeah?”

“Nigga, Tim took his luggage and moved out too.”

“Huh? He did?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I think because you broke the Xbox.”

Well, at least something positive was coming out of this. I seldom played video games and hated Tim. Small price to pay.

“Well, fuck,” I said.

“Yup.”

“Wait, is your mom mad that Tim left?”

“Hahahaha. What?”

“Is that funny? Sorry. I just, wasn’t sure if she was mad that Tim left.”

“Doo, my mom hate that mothafucka. Nigga always fussin’ about somethin’. She just use him for his nice van.”

“Ah. Yeah, a twenty-year-old Astro is a great vehicle.”

“Fuck yeah it is. But that ain’t the point, G. Is we good?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well like . . . I know a nigga got mad at yo’ girl earlier and shit. But, like, you was sayin’ we had to leave earlier and shit. And . . .”

“Oh. Do you guys have to leave still?”

“Yeah.”

“No, Bennett. You guys have to
stay
now. I’m gonna need help with these bills.”

I didn’t need help with the bills. I just had an urgent level of paranoia burgeoning in my stomach and wanted someone to sit there next to me while I sorted this all out inside.

“Word? For real?”

“Yeah, now you guys can’t leave. I had it all set up with Harper to work a certain way, and well . . . yeah. Now it won’t work. I need as much money as you can bring in.”

“But how? What should I do?”

“Get another job.”

“
Another
job?”

“Yeah,
another
job. Get
a few
jobs. Bring in some dough, man. I got a lot of shows coming up this week. That will bring in some good money. I need you to stay busy working too. Every dollar you make comes to me, okay? I’ll get us tons of groceries, pay the bills, get you cigarettes. All that.”

“Okay. I think I can do dat.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I don’t wanna get all, like . . . bitch made on you and shit . . . but, like . . .”

Bennett was having trouble articulating his thoughts. He was biting his lips and trying to find the right words to say.

“I dunno, my nigga, I jus’, like . . . I don’t want you to think I’m just this, like . . . thug nigga. I wanna be like . . . a good nigga. Dat
don’t always get in trouble and shit. Like . . . I want you to see me and be like, ‘Dat’s my cousin Bennett. He’d never go to jail. He gonna start his own business mowin’ lawns and shit. . . . He like . . . like a business . . . professional nigga . . . nigga.”