The Next Time You See Me (18 page)

But he also had Sarah—and her presence in the days following was a surprise, a comfort, a wonder. She would come to him, even when she wasn’t working, on official pretense: checking his chart; looking at fluid levels; asking him, as though she didn’t trust her colleagues, if he were being attended to properly. Then, the ceremony complete, she’d take a seat beside his bed, grasp his hand, and smile her pretty smile. Its beauty, Wyatt thought, was in its layers of contradiction, for it was both brash and shy, confident and insecure, her straight white teeth so often flecked with a spot of her too-pink, waxy lipstick.

“I’m going to take you dancing someday,” he said to her on Friday, so bold he shocked himself.

“I don’t know if I’ve got another night at Nancy’s in me,” she said, but he could tell she was pleased.

“Not Nancy’s. Somewhere good. We’ll go to Nashville.”

“Well,” she said, “you better work on getting better quick.”

He made a loose fist, mimed knocking on his heart. “I’m bionic now.”

“Bionic, my ass,” she snorted.

Her left hand was in his; he lifted it to kiss it. “You are keeping me alive,” he said, and she said something smart-aleck in response, about drugs and orneriness keeping him alive—she could talk wise better than anyone Wyatt had ever met—but he knew what he said
was true, and he could tell she believed him in the way she pressed her bright lips to his cheek. Wyatt touched the place her mouth had brushed.

“Nashville,” she agreed finally, no longer chiding him. “I’ll find something pretty to wear.”

And Wyatt’s old betrayer heart started thumping along joyfully as he imagined it. He was nearly delirious with excitement, with hope, and then he thought of how different everything would be if he’d just gone home with her that night at Nancy’s. Sarah must have seen the look on his face change. She pulled away her hand.

“You okay?” she said, already steeling herself against him.

He nodded roughly, throat dry. “Just a pain.”

Her expression shifted from wariness to alarm in a microsecond. “Wait, should I—” She was already leaning to hit the call button, but he put a hand out to block her, shaking his head.

“No,” he said emphatically. “I’m fine.”

She looked at the monitor, lay her palm against his cheeks and forehead. She checked his eyes, forefinger and thumb pressed efficiently against his brow and cheekbone. “You’re warm,” she said.

“I’m fine,” he repeated. “It wasn’t even a chest pain. Just a—” He waved helplessly.

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

She relaxed back in the seat. “Well, it’s the damnedest thing,” Sarah said.

“What?” Her hand was grasping his again.

“I seem to give a shit,” she said.

2.

He had been about to fall out of his stool when he felt the pressure of strong hands against his shoulders, one shoving him upright, one steadying him from the other side, so that his head, bleary already,
wagged back and forth on his neck like a puppet’s. The light at the bar was whiskey colored. Wyatt rubbed his eyes, belched. He had been singing “Wichita Lineman” again but he’d lost his place. “
And I need you more than want you,
” he started again, because that was his favorite part, but then he lost himself, kneaded his crumb catcher against a flare of heartburn, and hesitated.

“And you want me for all time,” a woman said from beside him, dryly. “Keep it up, you drunk dummy. I can’t resist Glen Campbell.”

“I’m gonna be sick,” Wyatt muttered, and he felt a sharp jab in his side.

“Nuh-uh. I’m not watching that. Drink some water.”

He shook his head like a child would, and a straw was pressed against his bottom lip.

“Drink this water or I’m calling the manager over here.”

He felt the coolness spilling across his tongue before he’d even decided to pucker his lips. He had reached that state of drunkenness balanced wobblingly between despair and hilarity, nausea and manic energy. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to crawl out to Sam’s truck and go to sleep or pull this woman beside him onto the dance floor. He imagined twirling her to some kind of rockabilly song so that her skirt flared up, dipping her, letting his hand linger on the swell of her bottom.

“More. You can finish the glass.”

He kept swallowing. He tasted the edge of lemon. His sinuses hurt.

“Better?”

He shrugged, stealing a look at her. She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a denim jacket with a different color of wash than the pants. No skirt.

“What about coffee? Could you hold that down?”

He frowned, a drunkard’s frown: chin pulled in, mouth slightly ajar, eyebrows lowered in boorish affront. He swung his head to his left, blinked against a wave of seasickness, and peered into the crowd. He tried the other direction. Then, nearly falling again, he looked behind him.

“They’re gone,” she said sharply. “They split fifteen or twenty minutes ago. I think they left you with the tab.”

“No,” he said, trying to sober. “They wouldn’t do that.”

“I’m telling you it’s already been done.”

The bartender placed a mug of coffee in front of him. The voice of the woman beside him softened. “How do you like it?”

It took him a moment to understand her, but then he did, and he muttered, “A sugar and cream, if there’s any,” and then he was slurping from the mug like it was soup. The coffee was sour, even with the milk in it, but he felt his head clear a little.

“Something tells me that this isn’t you,” the woman said. “You have kind eyes. You don’t look like you belong with guys like that.”

“I work with them.”

“Don’t mean you have to play with them.”

He leaned on the bar, lifted his hip, pulled out his wallet. He unfolded it carefully (
Look how sober I am
) and checked its contents: two twenties, a single. He didn’t carry credit cards or ATM cards. He didn’t believe in them.

“Ma’am?” he said to the bartender. “What am I owing?”

She checked a notepad, punched numbers into an adding machine. Wyatt watched it burp paper.

“Seventy-five,” she said.

“Bullshit,” the woman beside him said. “You know those guys walked out on him.”

The bartender put her hands on her thin hips. “Somebody’s paying this tab,” she said. “If you want to chase down his friends and get them back here, go right to it.”

“Bull. It’s bull. What if they’d picked his pocket? Would you have stood by watching that, too?”

“I’ll call the cops on you both,” the bartender said. “He’s drunk as a skunk and I’ve already heard about you.” She put her hand on a cordless phone.

“You bitch,” the woman said, then pulled out her own wallet—she carried a wallet, Wyatt noted with dull surprise—and threw down two
twenties. She plucked Wyatt’s forty dollars and added it to her own. “I want that five back.”

The bartender thumbed the phone’s “on” button. Wyatt could hear the faint
beep!
“I’m calling.”

“Goddamn it,” the woman said. “Come on.” She started pulling Wyatt off of the stool. “Do you even remember where you live?”

“Roma,” he said. He tried his feet, found them steady enough to hold him upright.

“Me too. It’s your lucky night.”

3.

In his dreams, it happened differently. It was worse than remembering the night as it had been. Worse, somehow, that his subconscious kept showing him different fates, all illogical, some downright silly: the version, for instance, in which he and Sarah decided to get married right there in Nancy’s, on the dance floor, and Sam Austen agreed to be his best man. Or the other where he’d start to worry about the young, pretty woman, to wonder what had happened to her, and then she’d appear, laughing again, and in his sleep he’d feel a relief so profound that the heart-rate monitor beside his bed would record the slowing, and Wyatt would drift to deeper sleep on dark, gentle waves.

The previous recurring dream of Wyatt’s adulthood had been one of violence. He would be beating a man, bludgeoning him, acting out of a vague notion of self-defense, and then there would always come a point when Wyatt realized, horrified, that he was beating not a person but Boss, that the dog was cowering under the blows, and it seemed to him in his waking hours that the dog was a kind of angel, the angel of his soul, saving him from any darkness within him, reminding him that it wasn’t even right to kill in a dream. He’d thought, in the daylight hours, that he must truly be a good person. That only a good person would have a conscience, too, in his sleep, when no one was watching but God, and maybe not even Him.

The agony of these new dreams was in the waking, in discovering that there’d been no saving grace, no angel, that his life was exactly as he’d left it and the blessing of Sarah impossible, painful, too late, too late.

Chapter Twelve

1.

She wasn’t a kid anymore. She’d known this fact for years, of course, had believed it true before it was (
Stop treating me like a child!
she’d screamed at her mother, fifteen and full of hot blood), had registered it more deeply on her thirtieth birthday, though the day itself didn’t upset her, didn’t seem like a milestone excepting the fact that her friends told her, darkly joking, that it was. Her back and feet were strong, even after eight years at the sewing factory. She hardly ever got hangovers. She could throw back beers and rum-and-colas until the bars and dance halls she frequented closed, then sober on the return trip, taking the back roads between Tennessee and Roma too fast, singing along in her raspy but pleasant voice to Mary Chapin Carpenter and Bonnie Raitt and Loretta Lynn and veering when her headlights picked up the flash of a white deer belly. She had the kind of life that people like her sister frowned upon, but it was a good life—she believed this. She was always seeing the sunrise, always dancing and laughing. She could usually find a warm body when she needed one, and she had the confidence to enjoy it when she did, to not give much thought to the pucker of belly fat she’d never successfully worked off or to the cellulite marbling her thighs, which were otherwise muscular from regular step aerobics.

Thirty came and went, meaningless, and then one day she noticed in the mirror that lines etched her mouth even when she wasn’t laughing, and the soft skin on her neck, when she caught her reflection in a certain angle of daylight, had the slightest silky looseness. She could see a faint outline of the little runway she’d traced on her granny’s neck as a very small girl, that plane of flesh from chin to collarbone, the one that had made her jaw seem hinged-on, puppetlike.

Ronnie had never been vain about her looks. She had kept her hair short since her teens, when she started sneaking out to meet friends and boys. She’d not understood the girls she ran around with who had their hair feathered and long, a style that required an hour of daily preparation; Ronnie’s heart was always racing with impatience, her hands not steady enough for curlers and sprays, and she couldn’t stand those moments spent getting ready with friends, the careful application of eyeliner and shadow, the piles of discarded outfits. She and men, she had discovered, wanted the same thing from life: fun. She’d been just as successful at finding it in jeans and sneakers as other girls were in skirts and clumsy wedge sandals, so why bother? Why waste life on anything but living?

But she was not, it seemed, immune to these new changes in herself. She tried not to dwell on it, but she could see how her face had lost its freshness—the alcohol didn’t help there, probably, and the coke in her mid- and late twenties certainly hadn’t—and there had been a moment in Nancy’s not too long ago, when she’d caught the reflection of a good-looking, blond-haired young guy in the mirror behind the bar and smiled flirtatiously, and it wasn’t that he’d rejected her or insulted her; she’d been insulted plenty of times in her life, and the guy who broke her nose five years ago had called her a troll, a
dyke
troll. It was that this young guy had not seen her. Or rather, he’d seen her, he’d registered the fact of her, but he’d dismissed her. It was instant and impersonal, and Ronnie had realized, with the kind of eerily accurate insight that occasionally dawns upon the drunken, that she seemed old to him. She could have been one of the middle-aged waitresses with tops cut to reveal their papery, overtanned chests and
crinkled cleavage. She could have been his mother. She wasn’t old enough to be his mother, not by a long shot, but she’d passed for this guy into the realm of irrelevance, and to him it was all the same.

That was when she had started spraying her hair, putting on eye shadow, glossing her lips, running powder over her face to hide her pores and dull the shine between her eyebrows, where her face, always so full of expression, had worn itself into grooves. But something had changed, not just in her face but in her heart, and her nights at the Tobacco Patch weren’t as fun as they once were, and the only man she’d brought to her bed in the last six months was Sonny, her friend from way back, a forty-year-old career military man who drove in from Fort Campbell every few weekends. She’d met him before he did his first tour to the Middle East with the 101st Airborne Division, written to him throughout his deployment, asked nothing of him, expected nothing. They enjoyed going to bed together, they enjoyed drinking, they enjoyed violent action movies. He wasn’t a talker. They’d never joked about marrying. Ronnie had thought of the subject only to note, with interest, that she hadn’t thought about it. She assumed she’d never be a wife or a mother. And that was OK, too, except for the fact that sometimes she looked at her sister’s kid, Abby, and she could see those elfin Eastman features that were as much Ronnie’s as Susanna’s—the drawn chin; the large, wide-set eyes—and in another universe perhaps Abby would have been hers.

She had begun the evening of October 23 at the Salamander with shamefaced hope; the crowd there was old enough, usually, to make Ronnie feel like the belle of the ball, and she had plenty of friends among the regular set that she could count on for some good-natured flirtation. She was setting herself up for happiness. She arrived just after nine o’clock, when she knew the early drinkers would have settled already into an easy groove of big laughs and steel guitars on the juke. The bar, built in the sixties originally as a hunting cabin, had an old-fashioned tang of wood smoke and mold; lichen grew on the damp stones of the fireplace, which had been sealed since before Ronnie started frequenting the joint. There wasn’t a dance floor; folks
looking to dance went down the road. There were only a half dozen tables and a smattering of stools whose vinyl seats had been worn into scabs, unpleasant against the backs of the thighs if you wore a short enough skirt. On the busiest nights there were sometimes fifty people crammed into the building’s one room, burnishing the wood floors with their work boots, their sweat and beer breath and pheromones creating a kind of bar smog, rich enough by the
A.M
. to get you lightheaded. The Salamander was Ronnie’s kind of place: loose, low-key, intimate. She felt more like herself there than she did at Nancy’s, or at her sister’s, or even in her own rental house, where she could feel not just alone but lonely, the lace curtains on the windows and the few knickknacks on the end tables like the punch line to a joke she’d missed the setup for.