Tara Ison - Ball - Stories

But yeah, he’s checked in, as planned. She tells the graveyard-shift teenager behind the counter, a girl with flayed hair and eyelined, won’t-ever-make-it-further-into-California-than-this eyes, that she’s his girlfriend. The girl shrugs, slaps on the counter a second key ringed on a red plastic diamond. It’s after nine at night and there’s still burning air going, still blaze and blistering skin.

The window AC in Room 117 is gasping out chill. No actual Rick, but his backpack is flung on one of the twin beds. On the nightstand, a bucket of soggy ice and a motel tumbler with gathered ocher drops. Beer for the road, bourbon at rest stops. The usual game. She’s known this for twelve years and still begged him out to Iowa at the end of her visiting professor term to help get her moved back home again, or just moved back, just get her moved. He’d listened to the usual conditions, and still promised, agreed. They know the rules printed inside the cardboard lid by heart by now. She fills her little dog’s water bowl from the tap, throws in a few ice cubes, and the dog laps and laps. She’s tempted to cool-shower rinse, grab a patty melt at the Denny’s next door, get into a rough-sheeted twin bed and sleep. But there is still the token move. She gives her little dog yesterday’s sweat-stiff T-shirt to bunk into, and a kiss, a stomach rub, and heads out.

She hunts the four-street grid of Needles, finds the truck parked crooked and blocking a trailer’s driveway on the last gravel road before desert scrub. A loose pyramid of fist-smashed beer cans on the passenger seat, her moving boxes stuffed tight and pressed rhomboid in the bed. There are three bars on this block, and she picks the saddest postcard one, with Xmas lights still looped above the faux-adobe entrance, unlit. The air inside is damp, sour saloon air, and he’s at the far end of the bar, gulping from a tumbler and nodding passionately at an old soaked-and-smoked man with shaky cracked hands, mumbling into an old man’s clutched glass. She gets up close behind him and she knows he knows she’s there without turning around.

Get out of here, he says. I’m busy. I love this guy.

Let’s get some sleep, Rick.

I quit. I’m out. I’m hitting the road. Be in L.A. by morning. You get your stuff later somewhere.

Come on, she says.

You have to listen to him. You have to love this guy. You have to.

I can’t, she says. You know that.

She touches his bare elbow, below his sleeve, but he both jerks away and shoves at her.

I’m not playing anymore, he says. You can’t do this to me, like always, like you do.

If he lurches out, she decides while he rants, if he makes it into the truck, drives off with all her worldly crap in the world onto black lost desert roads, she’s calling the highway patrol. That’s the next move. The new plan. When he begins to cry like he does she gets him off his stool, gets him under an arm and out the door and into her car, glad it’s finally gone dark and moon-glow cool. He’s crying, all shakes and bourbon sweat. She gets him back to the icy Motel 6 room, gets him onto one of the twin beds. She locks the chain lock, flops on the other bed next to her sleep-shivering little dog.

I’m so disgusting, he says. I’m so sorry.

I’m sorry, too, she says. For all of it.

He cries and cries, until she goes to him. She edges onto the cliff of nylon comforter, rubs his arm, gives him a pat on the head like a pet, but not like a dog. He grips her T-shirt hem.

Please lie here with me, he says, his voice cracking. That’s all, I promise. Just lie.

She moves, lies carefully on her side in front of him. He curls behind her, sour mouth gulping at her hair, arm locked around her ribs, like they do.

This is all I ever wanted from you, he cries. All I want, I swear. Why can’t I have just this?

He comes home for dinner three hours late, but at least he’s come home. It’s a good sign, she’s sure. A sign of healing, the first delicate crust of a scab. She’s made a meal of his favorites from long ago, from when she was good and attentive to that kind of thing — a real meal, one that demanded hours of preparation and produced a cruel steam burn on her wrist. A meal of remorse.

Honey, just sometimes? he’d pleaded to her months ago, jabbing at the Styrofoam, You’re a great cook, can’t we have a real dinner, not takeout, just once?

And just once can’t you open a fucking can? she’d bitched back, impatient and frayed.

Now she wishes she’d chewed off her tongue, met him halfway. Now, all ready for him: veal roast carved into limp petals, lobster risotto with saffron, asparagus with hollandaise, all served on the wedding crystal and china and silverware they’ve rarely ever used. A pear tart with fresh pears, and a from-scratch graham cracker crust. A meal made with much care.

Forgive me , all the food says.

She’s tried to keep the tart warm without drying it out. She’s tried to keep the sauces fresh with hourly infusions of butter and Marsala wine, tried to keep tamped down the impatience and fray. By the time he comes home, late, but at least he’s come home, it’s a good sign, she’s put Esther and Justin to bed over protests; it will be just the two of them at this dinner, him and her at the dining room table with vanilla votives lit, the first time in a long time. He’s come back, he’s home, so what if he’s late? This special, shared, intimate meal: Now they’ll be able to move on, heal. But instead of eating her dinner when he arrives, he just stands there a moment, not meeting her eyes and dumping his duffel bag on the freshly waxed entryway floor, and she can see pressed into his face the memory of the last time he came home, six days ago, came home early from work, three or four hours earlier than usual, earlier than he was supposed to, when he stood in the entryway hearing, first, the silence of the house, then, hearing. My house, in my house! he’d wailed, like wronged husbands in noir or camp, and he was right, she knew, although It’s my house, too! she’d wanted to assert back, even then, but didn’t. The kids at school and daycare, and she, his wife, supposed to be at work, and yet there was something to hear. He glowers now, he walks down the hall and away from her, she hears him pause at what would be the door to their bedroom, then he passes it, goes straight into the kids’ room, wakes them up to say hello, to let them know he’s come home. She hears crying, all of them wracked. He’s three hours late because he’s shattered, crippled, rent, all her fault, truly, and her heart goes out to him now, literally; she can see her heart cracking through her chest and hurtling toward him in dripping, contrite offering. Her sauces have congealed, but it’s all her fault, really, and at least he’s home. He has spent six days and five nights at his cousin Don’s, whom he cannot stand but was better than her, until the phone calls from Esther brought him back. Their little girl getting hysterical on the phone, pleading with him to come home, not understanding. I know you did something bad, Mommy, she said to her mother every day he was gone. She looked at her mother with an accusatory scowl, with his face, she’s such his child, but was too scared to really let her have it; she sensed, primally, her mother might be all she had left. You did something bad and that’s why Daddy isn’t here.

She knows he will stay with the kids until they fall back into reassured, open-mouthed, hiccupping sleep. Presents for them in his pockets, probably, candy or stickers or temporary tattoos, he’ll tease them and soothe. But his return won’t absolve her, in their eyes; he has come home a weeping open wound. He wants them to see him bleed. Now, he’ll turn them against her. She cleans up the kitchen, the offered and unaccepted food, and imagines with guilt the baby calf, force-fattened and cramped into a box, the live lobster thrust in boiling water, both of them dying for this showy display of contrition she’d tried to make, all for nothing.