She makes an effort to sound confident. “Not really,” she says. “It’s just Wayne.”
She can’t remember why she and Spencer went into Missy Crenshaw’s old bedroom in the first place, or how long they’ve been in Missy’s bed together.
“Pictures,” Jo says. There used to be pictures on the wall, photos of her and Missy together as kids, at an apple orchard, at a soccer game, on their eighth-grade double date with the Fagelson twins. All gone, replaced by Missy’s diplomas, three of them, smartly mounted and framed. By moving her head, Jo can make the moon reflect off the glass of each of them in turn.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing,” she says.
She hears a series of plastic clicks. Spencer, setting the alarm. Responsible.
“Give me another,” she says.
“Another what?”
“Pill.”
“No,” he says. “I don’t want you to die on me.”
“I can handle it,” she says.
“You’ve had enough.”
She crawls under the covers and goes to work on him. When she’s done, Spencer, red-faced and sheepish, drops two pills into her hand. She takes one and feeds him the other, then closes her eyes and rests her head on his chest, feels his fingers trace the back of her neck. “Happy,” she says. “Happy.” She says this word again and again. She doesn’t know if she means that she is happy, or was, or will be — if it is a statement, a lament, or a hope — but the sound of the word comforts her, lulls her as she falls away.
At seven-fifteen Jo is jolted awake by the clock radio, tuned to a jazz station. Loud. A squealing, sick-cat saxophone. Spencer doesn’t stir. For a moment, Jo is worried, but she feels breath when she puts her finger under his nose. He’s not dead, just wasted and sleeping with his good ear down.
As soon as she sits up, she feels ice picks behind her eyes and a burn in her stomach. She makes her way to the bathroom and pops four aspirin. In the shower, she tries to shake the heavy fog in her head, running through the checklist of inspection procedures, but she keeps missing steps, easy ones. She can feel herself start to sweat — stinky, cold flop sweat — even as she’s drying herself off. She almost decides to blow off the test, just bail on everything, crawl back into bed, hide, but she takes another look into the medicine cabinet and sees a prescription bottle labeled MARY CRENSHAW — KLONOPIN — AS NEEDED FOR ANXIETY. She shakes a few into her hand. They’re small, so she swallows two. After she dresses, she puts three more tablets in the pocket of her cutoffs, just in case.
She walks softly into the laundry room, where Shane is sleeping on a fluffy tartan dog bed, and she sits down next to him, watches him breathe, in and out, in and out. His ears twitch when she scratches his head. “Shane,” she says quietly. “Wake up, Shane.” He opens his dark eyes halfway, looks at her dreamily. “You want to tell me good luck, baby?” she says. Shane sneezes and falls back asleep.
In the kitchen she makes coffee and pours it into a travel mug. The unrinsed blender sits on the counter in a dried margarita puddle. Broken glass in the sink, pizza scraps on the table, sticky dog tracks across the floor. The phone rings but she just takes a deep breath and walks out the front door into the sun and the dew and the mist of the tick-tick-ticking sprinklers she left on all night. The lawn gleams and there are puddles all along the blacktop. Water, water, water.
She climbs into her car, the blue Fiesta she’s been driving since high school. She’ll have to back out of the U-shaped driveway because Spencer parked his Beetle facing her car, with only a foot or so of space separating them. There’s resistance when she tries to shift into reverse, so she forces it. More resistance, and she hears a grinding noise, then a metallic whine. Still not in gear. She tries again: up off the clutch, then down, shift, grind, whine. Again. Again, until she pulls back on the stick shift so hard, she feels a twinge in her shoulder. She curses the car. No fourth gear, no reverse, but it better get her to Gilroy. Now.
She shifts into first and tries to steer around his car. When the bumpers meet she gives it a little more gas, trying to nudge it out of the way. Fortunately Spencer left it out of gear, so it slowly rolls backward, and a few feet later Jo is free. In her rearview mirror she watches the Beetle ease forward again, settling comfortably back where it had been. She is so focused on the gentle motion of Spencer’s car, though, that she’s slow to realize she has gone off the driveway and is leaving a deep muddy track in the Crenshaws’ sculpted lawn. Fuck me, she thinks. Can’t worry about it now, though. Got to drive.
When she gets to the freeway, she turns on her hazard lights because the Fiesta can only do forty these days. The transmission slips whenever she tries to accelerate hard. Somewhere south of San Jose, in one of those moments before the gears catch, with nervous heat running up her spine and that goddamned sweat dripping down her sides, she dry-swallows another one of Mrs. Crenshaw’s pills and prays to no one in particular: Please, just let me get there. I need this.
The Sunbeam receptionist sits behind an old wooden desk that looks like it was scavenged from a school. Around the edges of the blotter, Jo can see memorials of crushes hacked into the wood: KD + CS. WT AND AB FOREVER.
“I’m here to take the test,” Jo says. “Bud’s expecting me.”
“Oh,” the receptionist says, looking up. “You’re back.” She calls Bud on the intercom, then looks at Jo and says, “Have a seat. There’s coffee if you want it.”
Jo fills a paper cup with coffee, black, and sits in a green vinyl chair pocked with cigarette burns. She picks up a newsmagazine from a box on the floor and tries to read an article, but her vision blurs around the edges and she finds herself locking onto one or two words at a time, not absorbing them but not able to move on. She leafs through, looking at the pictures, and stops on a two-page spread in tropical colors. On the left is a toucan sitting in a tree, its beak open so that it seems to be smiling; on the right is a Happy Couple in bright bathing suits frolicking on a deserted beach. In neon red letters across the bottom it says, Lose yourself in Belize. Which, honestly, sounds like a pretty good idea. But as she stares at the man and woman in the magazine she starts to feel that there’s something important she has forgotten to do, something else she’s fucked up. She can’t figure out what it is, but that thought is there, bubbling around in the tar pit of her brain. What?
There’s a touch on her shoulder and she jumps, dumping her coffee into the box of magazines. She looks up and sees a lanky man with a red goatee and a baseball cap that says YOU PISS ME OFF in block letters. He smells like Right Guard and cigarettes.
“I’m Jim,” he says. “Bud’s busy, so I’m going to give you the test.”
“Sorry about the coffee,” she says. Her tongue feels wrong. Swollen.
“Brenda will clean it up.”
“Clean it up yourself, Jim,” Brenda says from behind the desk.
Jim looks at Jo. He has greedy eyes, she thinks. “You ready?” he asks, and she nods.
He leads her out the back door, onto the paved lot they use for the driving course. As they walk toward the tractor-trailer, he says to her, “We don’t get many girls wanting to drive. Not many good-looking ones, anyway.”
She says nothing.
“Be nice to have a pretty face around here,” he goes on.
“Brenda looks like a horse. You got a boyfriend?” He moves closer to her, their arms almost rubbing, his smoke-and-deodorant cloud closing in on her.