“Listen, Mike,” I said, “it would be nice if you didn’t mention Gilia in your report to Skip. Her family might not understand.”
“Shit bricks are the words,” Gilia said.
Mike smiled, showing slick teeth. We were playing on a field he understood. “I think that can be arranged.”
“In fact, how would it be if I pay the same fee Skip is paying, then, instead of wasting your time following me, you could stay home and watch television, and every evening I’ll telephone a report of my day?”
He rubbed his chin, as if he’d once had a beard. “You’ll report everything? Not hold back the dirt Mr. Prescott wants to hear?”
I gave him the innocent face, which works a lot better on strangers than daughters. “Why would I hide anything?”
“Except me,” Gilia said.
“This way you collect from Skip, you collect from me, and your time is free to take on more clients.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Mike said.
“Quite reasonable,” Gilia said.
“How much do you want for the down payment?”
“Drink like a fish” is one of those expressions that won’t stand up to close scrutiny, along the lines of “work like a dog” or “sweat like a pig.” Obvious questions come to mind. A more exact wording might be “Wanda’s psyche is immersed in fluid, much like a fish is immersed in water.”
Drinking like a fish wasn’t a habit Wanda picked up after leaving the manor. She specialized in sticky liqueurs—flavored schnapps, Grand Marnier, that sort of thing. When we first met she used to drink herself comatose and pass out with my penis clutched tightly in her fists—or fist if I wasn’t hard. If I tried to roll over or, God forbid, get up to take a leak, she would squeeze like vise grips on a hose. At the time, I took this as a sign of love, but five hundred miles of pedaling the Exercycle 6000 brought me an insight: Wanda is afraid of being alone. The sticky liqueur and tight penis hold combine to give the illusion of beating back the void.
Maurey Pierce drank like a fish throughout college and that farcical marriage to Dothan Talbot. After her dad was killed by her horse she wallowed in the bottle until social services took her other child, Auburn, away from her and she reached that crossroads where you either lose everything that matters and die or you go to meetings in church basements the rest of your life. Maurey chose meetings.
At Auburn’s custody hearing Maurey and Dothan each paraded out a Goddamn plethora of witnesses to show the other was an immoral, unethical, unfit sleazeball. Maurey flashed her clear blue eyes at the judge and convinced him she was a cleaned-up sleazeball, or recovering sleazeball, as she put it, so she won custody of Auburn, and in the parking lot outside the courthouse Dothan slapped her in the ear and Lydia decked him with a Sage Graphite II fly rod case. A baseball bat couldn’t have knocked him any flatter.
Except for a month-long backslide when her mother died, she’s kept to the clean liver program ever since. The bender at Annabel’s death surprised me some because Maurey and her mother never got along that well, even more so than the average parents and children who don’t get along. Basically, the thing came down to they were both in love with the same man, Maurey’s father, and they never worked out the jive you’re supposed to work out about that.
The summer Maurey was pregnant by me, Annabel fell off the deep end, mental hygienically speaking, and she never quite came back. She lived a foggy, scattered existence more or less held together by pharmaceuticals and Maurey’s little brother, Pete. Six years ago Annabel buffed her Thorazine with too much Halcion and tried to fly off the Snake River bridge. Maurey got drunk and disappeared, then a few days later Pud Talbot disappeared, and before I made the connection, they reappeared together.
I turned jealous jerk and gave her grief over noodling another Talbot and we went eight months without speaking before we had an emotional best-friends-in-spite-of-you-being-an-idiot reunion where we hugged and cried and pledged eternal trust. Eternal trust or not, Maurey still hasn’t told me what happened during the missing month. Sometimes I daydream that I was the one who went after her instead of Pud.
Trolling town looking for someone to talk to. Manic-depressives have all the luck; they soar between crashes. The best us regular depressives can do is battle our way up to normal every now and then. Talking about Alice had left me bummed and flat, and while you’d think the new friendship with Gilia would pep me up, I was in one of those states where even when something good happens you dwell on the fact that it can’t last. After bitter experience, I’d found the black states can be lightened somewhat by massive exercise, being around cheerful strangers, or seeing I Was a Male War Bride, starring Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan.
Which is why I trolled Battleground to the Baskin-Robbins corner in search of the happy, pregnant girls. My hope was they went for ice cream about the same time every day and their giggles would improve my outlook.
Fat chance.
Babs sat alone on the bench, tears dripping from her pink chin onto a rocky road sugar cone. She whimpered, “I’m never telling my baby his father’s name.”
I wished she’d said that earlier. “Why?”
Babs made an effort to smile, but failed, which only made me sadder. “Guess what?” she said. “Lynette run off with Rory Paseneaux.”
“Your husband?”
“I’m gonna get him annulled. He took my best friend and my grandmother’s afghan and run off to Charlotte. Says he’s gonna drive stock cars.”
“Let me get you a napkin.”
I went inside to find a napkin and collect myself. I hate it when people other than me get hurt. Somehow, pain is worse for happy people and puppies because they don’t expect it; they’re not mentally prepared.
Back outside, I asked, “When did this happen?”
“Last night Rory ordered pizza and him and Lynette went to pick it up on account of my feet being swollen. They knew my feet would be swollen, they planned it all out.”
“They leave a note?”
Babs cried with one hand on her belly and the other holding the cone. Her eye makeup left a single black trail down her face. She nodded to my question. “In the refrigerator, but I knew before that they’d snuck off. Lynette’s overnight case was gone. She don’t need a toothbrush to pick up a pizza.”
When Wanda left me she didn’t sneak off at all. She announced her plans during The Yellow Rose, when I was in the midst of a tremendous Cybill Shepherd fantasy involving an electric piano and yards of Saran Wrap.
Wanda stepped between me and the TV and said, “You have driven away the only good thing that will ever happen in your life.”
I said, “What’s that?”
She had me carry her baggage out to the 240Z, where Manny the pool boy sat with the engine running. Knowing Wanda’s convoluted sense of honor, sneaking off would have been dishonest. Sleeping with the neighborhood was allowed, but sneaking away wasn’t.
Babs sniffled. “Me and Lynette have been best friends since second grade. If we have girls, we was going to name them Babs and Lynette, after each other.”
Even though friendship is more important than romance, there’s no depths to what friends can do to each other in the name of romantic love. “Maybe she’ll come back,” I said.
“I wouldn’t speak to her if she did. She stole my Rory.” Babs dropped the ice cream; her chest shook like she was hyperventilating. I put my arm over her shoulders and rocked her gently while she pressed her wet face against my shirt.
“What am I gonna do now?” she asked.