Alix Ohlin - Signs and Wonders

She caught the bartender’s eye and ordered a vodka tonic.

Dilrod said, “Mama’s stepping out.”

“Everybody needs a break once in a while,” she said with careful neutrality.

Dilrod smiled mirthlessly. “I’m sure Phoebe will understand.”

“There’s frozen breast milk as a backup at home,” she said, and immediately knew she’d said the wrong thing; upright and defensive was the wrong tone. Then she added, “So how was it?”

“How was what?”

“Last night. With the girls.”

“Oh, my God. I’m going to need another drink. Did you come here to attack me too? Pussy-whipping your husband isn’t enough?”

She thought of Stefan at home, bent over the baby in his lap. He liked to sing her the ABC song. He read her Goodnight Moon every single evening. “That’s not it,” she said steadily. “I’m just … curious.” And into the pause left after this remark she said, “Don’t tell Stefan.” She was a fake too, but Dilrod didn’t know it.

He lifted an eyebrow and turned toward her on his stool. “I don’t believe you,” he said, though she knew he wanted to. It was more interesting, more fun, to be drunk with his old friend’s wife in the bar of the Sheraton, and she’d come out after him because he represented something different and more exciting than what she had at home. This, she thought, was a story he’d live off for years.

“Fine,” she said, carefully matching her tone to his. “Don’t believe me.”

They finished their drinks and ordered seconds, or whatever number Dilrod was on. She felt wasted, and her cheeks were flaming; this was more alcohol than she’d had in ages. Dilrod was telling her about one of the girls from last night, her huge ass and her nipple rings — trying to shock her, as if she’d never heard of nipple rings before.

“I just wanted to grab her ass, you know?” Dilrod was saying. “It’s like a primal thing that comes over a man. You see it, you want to touch it, and then you gotta pay for it. People who run those places are fucking geniuses. And the women — don’t ever let anybody tell you otherwise, they’re in charge. The men are like little children, begging and pleading. The women have everything. ”

He went on like this, but she stopped listening. She was just staring at him and wondering how much longer she could stay. She loved Stefan, and Stefan — for whatever reason, it didn’t matter — loved Dilrod. Useless to explain these choices, their dark and permanent importance, the way they could rule you forever. You are what you like, she thought, and put her hand on his knee.

Dilrod’s response was both sloppy and mechanical. He leaned over and kissed her, wetly, his lips grabbing at hers like some separate animal. She held the kiss long enough to confirm its reality. As they sat there, mouths attached, her breasts began to leak. At home, she knew, her baby was crying.

She persuaded him to come back with her to make up with Stefan. It wasn’t hard. He was glad to have kissed her, but also guilty about it — the guilt inextricable from the gladness. He would never tell Stefan; not telling was his thing.

She held his hand as she drew him through the doorway. Stefan stood up to greet them, and she saw him take it all in, everything she presented to him, as if on a tray: her smeared lipstick, her blouse stained with milk, Dilrod drunk and sloppy, with a secret smile.

“Look who I found,” she said, her voice a little breathless.

From the other room Phoebe, perhaps hearing her, let loose a demon wail. As she went to tend to the baby she could feel her husband’s eyes on her, following her every move.

There were three of them in the car that night: Lauren, Samantha, and that boy he’d never liked, the one he’d pegged as a bad influence. The first time the kid showed up at the house, his eyes were bloodshot, his hair wet; clearly he was fresh from the shower, deodorant and shaving cream wafting off of him, and this made Mike wonder what smells he’d had to wash away. He was good-looking enough, square-jawed and blond, and Lauren sprinted out to him like a stone from a slingshot. Mike sauntered over, leaning heavily over the driver-side window, partly to get a look at him and partly to remind him that the pretty girl in his car had a father — not just any father, but a former college football player, a man who could cast a shadow, someone who’d come looking if anything went wrong.

“I’ll have her home by eleven, sir,” the kid said, so polite that Mike wanted to reach in and shake him. Do you think I’m an idiot? That I was never seventeen? But Lauren had her seat belt on, her green eyes glowing with please-don’t-embarrass-me fury. So he patted the roof of the car and let them go. And he did have her back by eleven, Lauren smiling at him where he was watching TV, yawning as she headed safely up to bed.

These were the scenes he replayed in his mind at night. The dentist had given him a mouth guard because he was grinding his teeth. He lay on his back with a mouth full of plastic, sweating into the sheets. The dentist said it would help with his headaches, and he supposed it did. But it also made a clacking noise that Diana couldn’t stand. She was sleeping in the spare room now.

Sunday morning he woke and showered, the house quiet, Diana at church. He’d never gone with her except at Christmas, and once Lauren turned thirteen they didn’t make her go, either. Heading to the hospital he stopped, as had become his habit these past months, at Samantha’s house. She and Lauren had been friends since the second grade. They’d played on the same soccer team, slept at each other’s houses, spent hours on the phone talking through teenage melodramas. He’d taught them both in his middle-school science class, relieved they were good students. Eighteen, and starting at Drexel in the fall, Sam was a stocky blond girl with bright blue eyes obscured by too-long bangs. She slid in beside him, wearing a tank top and jean shorts, and buckled her seat belt without saying anything. Her nose and shoulders were sunburned. As usual, they didn’t talk.

Lauren’s room was down a dim hallway that smelled musty no matter what the weather was like. The nurses nodded at them. Lauren’s skin was pale, her dark hair in a ponytail, her green eyes cloudy. Taking a seat, he read her a chapter of Harry Potter as Sam sat outside. After a while she came in, and he went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. When he came back, he saw that she’d fitted her iPod headphones over Lauren’s ears and was staring at her intently.

Lauren had always liked music. Her favorite song was “Here Comes the Sun,” and every time he heard it his eyes filled with tears.

If she liked what Sam played for her, she didn’t show it. The nurses nodded at them when they left.

On the drive home, they chatted a little. Curiously, when he parked in front of Sam’s house, they sometimes talked for five minutes or more, the girl suddenly bubbly, as if the fact that she’d soon be getting out of the car, or that their errand was over, relaxed her.

“So a couple summers ago Mr. Harad was giving out free passes to soccer teams?” she said today. “Like for ice cream cones or whatever? And these kids just started bringing in these old passes, saying they’d forgotten about them. So we had to give them all this free ice cream, tons and tons of it. But then he figured out the passes were fake.”

“He must’ve been mad,” Mike said.

“Steam was literally coming out of his ears,” Sam said. “He was screaming at these ten-year-olds, ‘You use computers to cheat! Computers are to learn!’ ”