She sat for a long time, staring at the dying plant and nursing several pangs of failure that all bled together, until Shane jingled into the room like a wind-chime breeze and blew his dog breath into her face.
Spencer’s reedy voice, calling her name. She sleepily calls back to him, then remembers she’s not wearing anything. She rolls off the floating chair into the safe embrace of the eighty-degree water.
He walks down the stone steps to the pool, carrying a twelve-pack. He looks a little like John Lennon in his Imagine phase: long and stringy brown hair; little round glasses; thin, sad face. He’s short and slight — Wayne could put him out with one punch. She probably should’ve called someone bigger and tougher, just in case, but Spencer’s the best friend she has these days. She watches him closely as he negotiates the steps; he has a problem with one of his ears and his balance often deserts him. Afraid of distracting him, she waits until he is safely seated and swirling his feet in the pool before she says anything.
“Close your eyes a second,” she says, breaststroking to the ladder. “I’m nude.”
“They’re closed,” he says.
Jo climbs out of the pool, her back to him. She knows he’s peeking but she doesn’t care. She’s grateful that he’s here keeping her company, and it’s not like they haven’t ended up in bed together before. A glimpse of ass isn’t such a big deal — maybe it’s even a small way for her to say thank you. As she wraps herself in a towel, though, she finds herself smiling ruefully, because really, it was her ass that started everything going so wrong with Wayne: they’re at a bowling alley in Lodi on fifty-cent longneck night — Wayne’s already in a bad mood, he couldn’t find his keys earlier, and she really rode him about it (hypocrite!) — Jo does a happy butt-wiggling dance back to the seats after she picks up the eight and ten, some button-down jerk-off in the next lane says something rude, Wayne shouts back as the pins reset, there’s glaring across the plastic seats while Jo laughs to herself and swigs her beer, and then there’s a volley of fists that ends with a bottle cracked over the scoring desk and a spray of red over the varnished wood. Assault with a deadly weapon. No prior record? Nine months. Bang.
Jo wraps the towel tighter. She’s going to have a hard time sleeping tonight, that’s for sure.
She walks across the deck to Spencer, kneels and hugs him hello, the smell of roasted coffee still in his hair, in his JavaPlenty T-shirt. He opens a beer and hands it to her.
“You burned,” Spencer says.
She shrugs.
“Feeling a little better?”
“Not feeling much.” She takes a long, slow sip. “Thanks for coming,” she says.
“No big deal,” he says. “I like you.” It sounds rehearsed, like he was practicing on the drive over. He’s totally into her but is afraid of pushing too hard and scaring her off; she pretends she doesn’t know. It’s simpler that way, for both of them.
She walks to the glass-topped table on the deck and sits, rocking back on two legs of the metal chair. “That prick Rafael didn’t give me any shifts this week,” she says. “Or next.”
“Why do you care?”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t need him anymore. You’re the goddamn Queen of the Road.”
She hesitates. “I failed the driving test,” she tells him. It’s the first time she has said it aloud.
“Oh,” he says. “Sorry.”
I’m not stupid, she wants to tell him. She’s not, she’s got the inspection procedures down cold, knows S-cam air brakes inside and out, can double-clutch with drumbeat precision. It’s just backing up that’s the problem. “You ever drive a tractor-trailer in reverse?” she says, trying to make the words sound casual, fluid, not defensive. “They make you go between all these cones. It’s hard.”
He shakes his head, raises his beer in sympathy. “At least you tried.”
“I get one more chance,” she says. “Tomorrow. If I fuck it up again, they might still let me be a dispatcher.” But she doesn’t want to be a dispatcher, she doesn’t want to live down in the Sunbeam Tomato Freight dormitory and wake up every morning just to go sit in an office. She wants to be out on the road on her own, hauling tomatoes through the western states, doing speed to stay awake, making the thirty-five thousand dollars per season that the brochure promised. She wants to live her life like that Little Feat song, driving her rig from Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah. She wants to drive. She finishes her beer, throws the empty in the pool. “But I’ll probably fuck it up again,” she says.
“Hey,” he says. It’s supposed to reassure her. He stands up quickly and takes a step toward her, but he wavers, arms circling almost comically as he tries to gain his balance. She calmly realizes she won’t be able to catch him if he topples over, so she doesn’t move, just watches, hopes for the best.
He rights himself, then turns away from her and stares into the water. “Tell the Crenshaws to have the pool cleaned,” he says after a few seconds of silence. “It’s growing cans.”
“What?”
“Forget it. Dumb joke. I suck.”
Can’t you please just relax, she wants to say. The last thing she needs is anyone else to worry about.
The phone rings while Jo is changing. She yells from the bedroom for Spencer not to pick it up. She is surprised by how loud her voice is.
She walks into the hallway half-dressed and stands in front of the machine as Wayne leaves a nightmare of a message, careening from anger to calm to weepiness to anger again: he can’t believe she didn’t come see him this afternoon, but maybe she’s not answering because she’s already on her way, and he really doesn’t like to get so fucking mad but she doesn’t understand how bad things have gotten for him, and what’s wrong with her that she can’t or won’t understand, and she owes him, she owes him, she has to at least understand that she owes him the simple fucking courtesy of talking to him and it’d better happen soon.
She walks into the kitchen, where Spencer is dropping ice cubes into the blender. He nods toward the phone. “Crazy,” he says. She nods and sits at the kitchen table, watches him make the margaritas. Happy drinks, he calls them.
“Do you want something extra? To take the edge off?” he asks.
“Like what?”
He holds up a small baggie full of yellow pills. “Percodan,” he says. “I bought them off my brother.”
“Do it,” she says.
He drops some of them into the blender. How many, she can’t say.
Spencer pours the drinks and Jo thinks about the first time the two of them slept together. It was a Tuesday night, she remembers — evening visiting hours at the jail — and she’d really meant to go because she hadn’t for the last three weeks. She never missed the visits intentionally, but it was an hour and a half through traffic, and it was hard to see Wayne in there in those orange coveralls, and she hated having to wait in the lounge with all those people coming to visit the real criminals, and she especially hated the security pat-down and the way the guards eyed you so suspiciously that you’d begin to wonder if you really were up to something. So, instead, that night after work she’d gone for a quick drink with Spencer and the rest of the JavaPlenty crew, and whoops, look at the time, oh well, make the next one a double. She knew Wayne had nothing else to look forward to, no one else to think about, no one but her, but he didn’t understand what a burden that was. She couldn’t live up to that. No one could.
The blender rumbles and grinds, drowning out something that Spencer’s trying to say, and the sound makes Jo think of cracking teeth. Finally, Spencer sets the two salt-rimmed glasses on the table. He moves a chair so he can have her talking to his good side. “Do you think he’s dangerous?” he asks.