Mary Miller - The Last Days of California

“I can drink half if I want to,” I said.

“You can,” he said, “but that’s not how it works.”

He had me practice until he was satisfied I’d gotten it right. Then he took out his wallet and went back to the bar. I wanted to know a man well enough to go through his wallet. I imagined faded, unused, and expired things, a stack of warm bills. Everything mine for the taking.

The fat one started telling me about Yelapa, Mexico, a place he’d lived after he graduated high school. He’d made a lot of money crabbing and spent his free time surfing. He’d go back there one day, he said. He’d live on a boat and sail somewhere when he got bored and eat fish right out of the ocean. I tried to make eye contact with Elise but she was talking to Jake, laughing and touching her hair. It was getting so long, like Amish hair. Like Mennonite hair. He told me about a particular tree where he’d always find coconuts that had sprouted, the inside like a marshmallow you could eat with a spoon. But sometimes they’d sprouted and were bad.

“How could you tell if they were bad?” I asked.

“The smell,” he said, shaking his head. “The smell was awful.”

I didn’t care about him or his dreams, but it didn’t stop me from imagining the two of us on a boat, scooping the marshmallows out of coconuts before they turned.

“So Jess called our pastor earlier,” Elise said, and everyone stopped talking and looked at me.

“Elise,” I said.

“And he wanted to know about her masturbation techniques.”

“He wanted to know what?” they said. “Wait up, hold on a second.”

“Tell them,” she said.

I told them the story: the phone call, the ugly baby, ice clinking in his glass. As I talked, I realized how infrequently I told stories to a group. I didn’t like feeling that I had to hold their attention, like at any second I could lose it. This was a good story, though, and they sat with their elbows on the table, leaning in. When I was finished, I had the same conversation with them that I’d had with Elise, about what I was going to do. I didn’t like this talk about what I was going to do. I would tell Shannon and my mother, maybe, and she could tell my father if she thought it was necessary. But there was something else that made me want to keep quiet—I didn’t want anyone to say I was lying. I’d only told the story twice, and was sure it had happened, but already it felt like something I’d made up.

“That’s some fucked-up shit,” Brad said after everyone had returned to their separate conversations. I took a sip of my drink. He said he was sorry that that had happened to me. There was an awkward pause and then he tapped the window. “I’m in asphalt,” he said, still tapping, as if I didn’t know what asphalt was.

“It must be boring being a grown-up,” I said.

“There are perks.”

“Like what?”

“Like I can walk into any bar and have a drink.”

“I’m having a drink at a bar right now and I’m fifteen.”

“You’re having to be careful, though,” he said.

“I like being careful,” I said, which wasn’t true. I was tired of being careful. Kids weren’t supposed to be careful all the time. I wanted to be like my sister, who made friends and mistakes easily. It was like she’d been born knowing how to live.

Half an hour later, the boys left to go to a different bar and Elise and I walked over to the coffee shop. I bought a brownie and we sat at the bar facing the casino floor. I looked around for my father.

“Do you want some?” I asked. The brownie was huge, like a giant piece of birthday cake.

“No,” she said.

“It’s terrible, like a grocery-store brownie. Really waxy.” I squashed a corner into the doily, getting chocolate in my nails. This made me happy and I smiled and then looked around to see if anyone had seen me. I didn’t like to be caught entertaining myself in public; there was something humiliating about it, though I couldn’t say what it was.

The woman on the other side of me had a mug of tea. She held it up to her lips and blew. Tea looked so relaxing. I thought I should start drinking tea.

“Hello,” she said. She was in her mid-twenties, with a boy haircut and long dangly earrings. She asked where we were from.

“Alabama,” I said.

“Alabama the beautiful,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“Is it beautiful there?”

“It’s okay.”

“Is it green?”

“It’s pretty green,” I said, “but not like some places, not like North Georgia or anything. It’s just regular green.”

“I miss green,” she said.

Elise jumped off her stool and said she’d be back, and the woman and I were quiet, watching people move around the floor. There were a lot of old and disabled people, but there were plenty of young people, too—girls in dresses and sandals, boys in khaki shorts and collared shirts. They looked so easy, relaxed. I wondered how many of them felt that way.

“Why are you here?” the woman asked, moving her head so her earrings swung back and forth.

“We’re staying at the hotel,” I said, “me and my parents and sister. My dad likes to gamble.”

She waited for me to say more, but I didn’t. Then she said, “I’m with my family, too. Last summer we stayed at a cabin at Slide Rock and this summer . . .” She waved her hands around. “I guess I don’t always get to pick.”

“How many nights are you here for?” I asked.

“Just two. I told them I couldn’t stay any longer than that.” She took a sip of tea. “I brought along some projects to occupy myself, but I don’t see myself doing any work. This isn’t exactly a work-conducive environment.”

“No,” I said, my eyes following a long-haired boy in smiley-face pajama pants. I folded the doily around the rest of the brownie and squeezed until oil soaked through. “What do you do?”

“I’m a caregiver,” she said. “I sit with elderly people.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

“I guess. It leaves me a lot of energy to make my art.”

“What kind of art?”

“All kinds—photography, murals. I work a lot with found objects.”

“Oh wow,” I said.

“And sometimes I write things.”

“What do you write about?”

“Last week I wrote a twenty-word poem about honor killings,” she said. “Do you know what honor killings are?”

“Like when a woman in the Middle East cheats on her husband and her family has to get their honor back?”

She nodded. “It was titled ‘Field’s Last Bloom.’” She continued nodding and I wondered if she nodded so much when she wasn’t wearing dangly earrings. She must have liked to feel them move. “After I finished writing it, I felt compelled to do something so I found an empty field and dug up the words by hand.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow,” I said. “That’s really neat. Whose land was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

She shook her head, took another sip of tea.

“How’d you get the letters to look the same?” I asked.

“I didn’t bother too much with that,” she said.

“Was it hard?”

“The hardest part was remembering which letter I was on. I kept having to go back and check.”

“That’s really neat,” I said again.

She shrugged and drank her tea. I wanted to know why she’d done it, what the point of it had been, but I didn’t want to offend her. It seemed unbelievable that someone would spend so much time and effort doing something so purposeless. It would have been better to donate money, or write a blog post about it. I imagined her standing in front of the poem after it was complete and seeing nothing but a bunch of holes. Like a pack of moles had dug up the ground.