Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

“Hey, Boss,” they’d say, like it had always been my nickname.

“Maria,” I’d correct them.

“Right,” they’d say. “Cool.” Or, in a singsong voice, “Maria, Maria, how do you solve a problem like Maria,” before closing the front door.

I was always worried about becoming a problem.

I’d spoken to my father a few times. “You’re doing great,” he assured me. My mother got on the phone, tearful sounding sometimes, but mostly relegated to curt sentences with her voice all choked up, like the sadness was lodged in her throat. I thought their voices sounded different, higher pitched somehow, or smaller. I wondered if my mother knew about the bet, but I couldn’t tell her; I couldn’t sell out my father. Regardless, she never told me to come home, just asked if I was happy. “Are you?” “Yes,” I’d say, “I’m pretty sure I am.”

After a few months, James started writing me emails. He was thirteen now, and had become suddenly articulate. When we were living together I hadn’t realized it, or else, he had kept it from me. Maybe he was just better on paper. I started to rethink his and my mother’s relationship—maybe they were true confidants, as young as he was, and as mom-like as she was.

The boys I lived with all loved horror films, and I would write James long movie reviews about whatever we’d just watched. He seemed to like it. I was getting to know the boys better—though they still usually called me Boss—and I would write to James about them, too.

“How are Mom and Dad,” I’d write. “How’s school?”

“I’m writing poetry,” James wrote, “and I no longer care much for math.”

“And Mom and Dad? What about them?”

“I’m thinking of going to boarding school,” he said. “In fact, I’m sure I’ll go.” Sometimes he’d only respond with poetry: “I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough… I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea,” and so on.

“What is that?” I wrote back. “Some kind of prayer? That’s not an answer! How are Mom and Dad?!?”

“Walt Whitman,” he wrote, “and you really should read more.”

The seasons changed. I moved into a small studio apartment by myself, and I did laundry remarkably often at a Laundromat down the street. Charlie said he was sad to see me go. I’d gotten a job as a waitress and I took classes at Santa Monica College in accounting and studio art. Eventually, I even managed to buy myself a used Jetta. “Wow,” my father said when I told him about it over the phone, “that all sounds amazing.” He kept telling me I was bohemian, that I was following my own path. He said it in a weird, far-off voice like he must have been sitting on the porch again, looking into the distance, at the purplish foothills.

Often, customers at the restaurant asked if I was an actress. All the waitresses in LA were actresses, and I had straight teeth and too-long legs, so sometimes I said yes. That was very meta, I thought—acting if only by telling people I was an actress. Meta was a new word I’d learned in community college, in the accounting class, of all things. Still, sometimes, at night, I’d rub my eyes and the tips of my fingers would be wet. I’d been crying and hadn’t known it. I was quick to cry, but I wasn’t sure if it was connected to any particular emotion. Like my mother said, sometimes I misread my own body. That hadn’t changed.

After a while, I got a promotion at the restaurant, and suddenly I was a manager, telling the other actress-waitresses which territory of tables to serve. Sometimes, in the kitchen, they’d talk about their auditions—how often they were told to say, “Hi, welcome to Applebee’s!” over and over—but more cheerful this time; no, more intense. “A waitress playing a waitress,” I’d say. “Very meta!”

I started seeing Charlie every weekend. There was something about him I liked, a familiarity. We’d run errands—the grocery store, the comic book shop—so that the time we spent together passed easily. Being with him felt similar to being alone, only better, heightened. That’s the best way I can describe it—we glided right alongside each other.

I started asking my father when he would come visit. “I’m no longer adjusting to my new life!” I said. “I’m adjusted. I’m an adult. I’m living an adult life, as an adult person.” He started piling up excuses and handing them over one by one. Even over the phone, I knew they were stacked up, like plates—I can’t explain it. I felt angry and gypped. “You’re not holding up your end of the bargain,” I said. “You told me we’d see each other!”

“It’s complicated,” my dad said, “but I love you and miss you. We all do. It’s not what you think.” After a while, I started wondering why I shouldn’t just go home. What did I even stand to lose?

“You can’t,” my father would say when I asked about it, and something about the weight of his words held me in place.

Still, I became resentful. I started noticing all of the things I’d inherited from my father that I didn’t like. My mother, too! She was not exempt. I listed these things in my emails to James: passive-aggressiveness, knobby knees, indecision, weak ankles that made ice-skating difficult, an allergy to shrimp… the list went on. “Dad chose to be a real estate agent,” I wrote in one email, “what sort of job is that?!”

“You’re saying that out of anger,” my brother wrote. Then, he’d include another poem. He’d moved on to a life I couldn’t begin to imagine, in which he made his own lattes and collected vintage typewriters. “Mom’s into poetry now,” he wrote. Of course she is, I thought. “But you still want to go to boarding school?” I asked. “I’m already packing,” he wrote.

Charlie loved movies, and there was a line he liked to quote whenever I complained about not understanding my family: “The awful thing about life is this: everybody has their reasons.” “I’m paraphrasing,” he’d say. Meanwhile, I’d built my own kind of life for myself. Whatever it was, I knew it was distinctly mine. One week I ate every meal at the Russian deli across from my apartment. The next week, I called in sick to work and went out for a lobster dinner. The week after that, I spent the day in Venice Beach, watching the musclemen and skateboarders greet each other on the boardwalk. Still, my freedom made me restless. I saw Charlie almost every day now, usually after long shifts at the restaurant that made my clothes smell smoky like barbecue. He said my freedom made me brave. I never told him the truth about my parents, that they weren’t awful, only strange. Actually, they had always been kind.

“I’m tied down,” Charlie said, “by my parents’ expectations. You just get to do whatever you want.” Charlie worked at a law firm. He was rarely able to do what he wanted. “With you,” he said, “I feel the rope around me slacken.” By now, I knew he was subtly trying to sleep with me, and maybe always had been. We’d watch movies on the couch, and we’d start on opposite ends, and when the movie finished, he’d be right up against me, like we were two blocks getting ready to build.

“You’re so brave,” he said one night, after we’d eaten SpaghettiOs from a can. We were sitting at my small Formica kitchen table, and he kept dipping his head toward me, like he was trying to close the gap between our mouths. It’s not that I didn’t want to. The shape of his lips told me it would be good, and though I hadn’t kissed that many people, I’d kissed enough to know shape mattered. It was the lie that kept me from pressing my lips to his.

“I haven’t been honest about my parents,” I said.

“Oh?” he said. “You can tell me anything. Anything they did to you—”