Better With You Here (9781609417819) Read online

  Inspired by Zach’s example, Lucia exits the maze and runs to me, holds out her arms, and makes noises like a baby. I wouldn’t normally carry her, because she’s too old for that now. But I relent, just this once. I lift her onto my hip and call Alex to my side. I say good-bye to my friend.

  “See you soon,” I tell her as we gather our children’s paraphernalia. Even though I know that “soon” probably isn’t the most accurate word.

  Natasha

  My mother is so unreliable.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” she whines into the phone at me. “You never give me any notice.”

  I’m sitting at my desk, trying to look like I’m having a work-related conversation and not an annoying personal one. “I told you two weeks ago,” I say. Two weeks and one day ago, I asked her to baby-sit the kids for Parent-Teacher Conference Night. She said she would, and now she’s forgotten. She’s made other plans. “Can’t you go to AA another night?” I say.

  “Natasha. You know they only have it once a month. If I miss this one, I can’t go until November. And then what about Thanksgiving?”

  Because I’m at work, I’m not going to get into it with her. If I were having this conversation at home, at night, but someplace where the kids couldn’t hear me either—locked in the bathroom, say—then I’d remind my mother that she’d missed the AA meeting in September and also the one in August. I’d inform her that simply from the sound of her voice I can tell she’s halfway through her second glass of white zin. I’d tell her that admitting you have the problem doesn’t count as the first step if you never intend to take another step. Then I’d conclude by pointing out that she doesn’t need the whole month of November to plan a burned turkey and a box of cornbread dressing.

  Instead I say, “So you’re not going to baby-sit for me?”

  She says, “If you’d told me a week ago, I would have. But this Thursday? I just can’t.” And now I can’t go to Parent-Teacher Conference Night.

  She’s still talking. “See, Natasha, this is what I’ve been trying to tell you. This thing with you divorcing Mike—you should’ve thought about how it would end up. You’re making it hard on all of us. Ever since you left him, I’ve been—”

  “Mom, I have to go. Good-bye.”

  The rule is, don’t get emotional on the phone at work. That’s why I hang up on my mother when her voice sounds like cheap white wine. And that’s why I never call Mike from here either.

  And now my phone rings, and it’s a number I don’t recognize.

  Which reminds me that I forgot to call that guy Hector and cancel our lunch date. Our blind date. No, I did meet him once, a long time ago, before he was divorced. So make that our legally blind date.

  Because that’s what my good friend Kate thought my life was missing: one more thing on my plate. One more straw on the stressed camel’s back. Lately it feels like I’m eating stress for breakfast. There were no arguments this morning—if anything, Alex was completely penitent about yesterday’s outburst—but Lucia’s teddy bear’s arm ripped at the seam again, and she bawled all the way out the door. And then, on the way here, the Blazer was acting up again. I need to schedule that oil change. I need to find someone to watch the kids on Thursday. I can’t miss the Parent-Teacher Conference. Alex’s teacher has been such a witch to him lately, and I need to get that straightened out. I need to hurry up and make that appointment with the dentist, before the deductible starts up again…I’m going to tackle that—everything on that list—as soon as I finish this phone conversation.

  “Waterson Price Merman O’Connell. This is Natasha.”

  “Hello. I’m calling for Natasha?” he says.

  Great. Good listening skills, guy. “Speaking.”

  “Natasha, sorry.” He laughs a little. “I didn’t hear your name at first, with all the others. It’s me, Hector.”

  He tells me he’s two minutes away. It’s too late to cancel on him now. There’s nothing to do but grab my purse, tell the others I’m leaving, and get this stupid thing over with.

  Hector is shorter than I remembered. Shorter and a little heavier. He still has black hair, and the same amount of it. Slight mustache. He’s wearing a sport coat, no tie—his uniform for client meetings, he says. He looks like a nice enough guy. Nothing wrong with him.

  Now I’m trying to remember if I was thinner than this back when he first met me. No, don’t think about that. What does it matter?

  If I did gain weight—if he’s disappointed—he’s too much of a gentleman to show it. He says, “Is the chicken salad good?” He’s worried because neither of us has ever been to this café. He found it online by looking at a map of restaurants near my work.

  “It’s pretty good,” I say. It isn’t. The dressing’s too sweet. And I don’t like the café itself either. The tables are too small and close together. But there’s no need to be rude, so I don’t complain. “How’s the burger?”

  He says, “It’s pretty good.” After a moment he adds, “Maybe a little dry.”

  That’s how the conversation has gone so far: stops and starts of meaningless comments. You can almost hear our thoughts between the words, and we’re both thinking, Why did I agree to do this?

  What the heck…? I say, “Are you wondering why you agreed to do this?”

  He laughs. “No. Are you?”

  I laugh, too, and I hear how nervous it sounds. “Kind of. No offense—you seem like a nice guy. But I’m starting to realize that I’m not ready to start dating again. Since the divorce, I mean.”

  He shrugs. “Let’s not call it a date, then. Maybe we’re just two people who are looking to make new friends.”

  I can’t argue with that. “Sure. I could always use another friend.” It’s a funny thing to say. Is it really true?

  Sometimes, since the divorce, I feel like a rocket. Not one of the space shuttles they use now, but one of those old-fashioned rockets we studied in school, the kind that breaks into pieces as it gets higher in the sky. First I had to break away from Mike. He was too heavy, dragging me down, and I needed to drop him if I wanted to go any higher. Then I lost our house—another section falling away. Slowly, my old friends are dropping away, one by one, whether I like it or not. What’s left? My mother? Maybe I’ll jettison her on purpose. All that’s left, eventually, will be Alex, Lucia, and me, flying alone through space. After everything that’s happened in the past year, they’re the only part of my life that I can’t stand to lose.

  The question is, do I really need new friends right now? I’m kind of busy here, trying to hold my rocket ship together.

  Hector’s staring at his dry burger, thinking about something serious. He looks up at me and says, “You know, when Maribel and I first split up, I kind of lost touch with a lot of people. Friends, family. For a long time, I felt like, if I don’t need her, maybe I don’t need anybody.”

  I nod. Yes, I know exactly what you’re saying, Near Stranger.

  He goes on. “But lately I’ve been thinking that was all wrong, like some trick my mind was playing on me. See, the easy thing to do would be to stay by myself and not worry about anybody new letting me down, the way Maribel did.” He looks at me like he’s asking for my understanding, my compassion. “But it’s not supposed to be easy, right?”

  I drop my fork. My hand loosens up somehow, and the fork just slips out, onto my skirt, then onto the floor. Immediately, Hector swoops down to pick it up. I look down and see the back of his head, all covered with thick black hair, there near my lap. I can smell his cologne. It’s like woods, smoke, crisp air. I feel a jolt in my thighs, like a sudden fear that he’s going to reach out and touch me.

  But it isn’t fear. No, I recognize this feeling now. I want him to reach out and touch me. And I’m only afraid that he’ll look up at me and know.

  Something is wrong with me.

  He does look up—sits up with the fork in his hand, sets it on the edge of the table. Takes his own fork, unused, and offers it to me with a frie
ndly smile. And I wonder, fleetingly, what the expression on my face is conveying to him, because he stops smiling and just stares.

  I reach out and touch him. I put my hand on his and say, “Can we go somewhere else?”

  Something is so very wrong with me. What am I doing?

  He says, “You mean for coffee?”

  I shake my head no.

  He says, “You mean…for…somewhere…alone?”

  I say, “Yes.”

  If he’s shocked, he rallies quickly and says in a discreet tone, “A motel?”

  I nod.

  I know exactly what I’m doing. It’s stupid and crazy, and I don’t care. I just don’t. It’s my turn to do something irresponsible for once. Everyone else gets to do whatever they want—make messes, throw tantrums, move in with women they’ve just met. And I’m the one who’s left cleaning up the results. But now it’s my turn to be bad.

  Before today I was worried that Mike would be the last man I ever had sex with. And when was the very last time with him? In his mother’s house, last Thanksgiving, fast and full of shame.

  No, it was in our bedroom, while the kids slept. Fast and dry and resentful.

  No. It was a couple of weeks after I moved out, in a last-ditch effort to save our marriage. And it was slow and desperate and sad. So I don’t want to remember it now. It never happened.

  I’m only thirty-two and probably—knock on wood—won’t die anytime soon. But still, I worried that Mike would be my last. Until right now, because here I am in the Blazer, following a Chrysler to a motel. A silver Chrysler Sebring, driven by a man I barely know.

  I used to be so proud that Mike was only the third guy I’d ever slept with. Third and a half, if I count that guy Federico, which I don’t, because that only happened once, and then he didn’t even come, and then he cried and confessed that he was gay…So embarrassing. I would never tell that story to anyone. But back when I was first married to Mike, eight years—no, almost nine years ago now—my relative inexperience was something he valued in me, and therefore I valued it, too. The way brides in Third World countries must feel when they bring their new husbands a goat or a cow.

  And now I look back on the twenty-three-year-old pregnant bride I was and feel sorry for her, for being such a dummy. What a sad waste. What was the point of giving myself—​my young, chubby but still-firm body—to one man for what I thought was supposed to be the rest of our lives? At the time I had no idea that our marriage would eventually become years of once-a-month sex between two people who shared a mutual dislike and slept together only because they had no other options. Although I still think Mike tried to seduce that coworker of his and would have cheated on me if he’d found someone willing to help him.

  Why didn’t I know better, though? Look at my parents—they lasted longer than Mike and me, had two kids like we did, but hated each other. They would’ve gone on forever, making each other miserable—Dad turning into more of a bitter hermit and Mom more of a screeching nag—if my brother and I hadn’t sat them down and begged them, emotionally blackmailed them, into getting the divorce. Twenty-five years of needless hell there. Why did I think my own marriage would magically end up better, with an example like that?

  I remember Dad’s jokes that one day, if I kept making chicken and rice as well as I did, a rich man would be happy to marry me. Maybe I’d even score the quarterback for the Houston Oilers if I kept on frying pork chops like that. Presumably, in Dad’s mind, these millionaires wouldn’t mind that I’d never finished community college, that I worked in the grocery-store deli. They’d appreciate my cooking more than he appreciated my mother’s, more than he appreciated that she managed to stay thin after two pregnancies and all that chicken and rice.

  Then there was Mom, the devil on my shoulder across from Dad’s angel. She had no qualms about telling me that I was lucky to land someone like Mike. In her mind his full-time job and half-white good looks made him eligible for something much better than my diet-resistant body and “god-awful” frizzy hair. Who knows what kind of man she thought I deserved, with my smart mouth and thunder thighs. Maybe none at all, since I was already twenty-three and didn’t have any kids, and her sister’s daughters—all petite beauties with long, stick-straight hair—each had several kids with several men by the time they were twenty-two.

  Mom should have divorced Dad earlier and married Mike herself. That would’ve been a better match, because they both have that need to suck the happiness out of everyone around them. So if they got together, they’d deplete happiness until it created a disturbance in the space-time continuum, just like in one of Dad’s sci-fi books. And then maybe that would’ve fixed them both. Or at least kept them too busy to suck on the rest of us.

  I spent so many years trying to fix my parents’ problems, then trying to fix my own marriage, before I finally stopped caring and gave up. Bailed on it. Put the oxygen mask on my own face before assisting the kids with theirs, then pulling up on our flotation devices and getting the hell off the burning plane.

  Now that I’m free and clear of my delusions, I wonder why anyone gets married.

  Why is this crap streaming through my head like a sad movie right now, of all times? Stop thinking about it. Get back to the mood that made me fire up the Blazer and follow this man. The impulse I’m already second-guessing.

  Why am I doing this? Is it a pheromone thing? A chicken-salad roofie, maybe.

  It’s not because Mike’s already dating again and I’m trying to compete. Is it? No. Say it: He’s been dating Missy for six months. From what the kids say, they’ll be moving in together any day now. And Mike and I have barely been divorced a year. Jesus, is that why?

  No. I don’t care about that. I don’t care about anything right now. Specifically, I don’t care about what’s going to happen when I undress and undo all the straps and the elastics and then…Expose the lumps. The pouches. The dimples, the stretch marks, the flaps. There’s no hiding them in the daytime. But who cares? I barely know this guy. If he doesn’t like it, he never has to see me again. But I have the feeling he won’t mind. He’s been around the block a few times, this Hector. From what I remember, his ex was no closer to a supermodel than I am.

  It’s so strange, not to care. Strange and exhilarating.

  Now we’re here. Now I’m out of the Blazer and walking next to him.

  He’s talking to the front desk, and I can’t hear. I don’t care what they’re saying. His white work shirt is stretching across his chest a little, across his stomach, and I’m having this hallucination that I can smell his shirt and his chest and his stomach, and it smells like salt and that one cologne I dislike and something else. But the smell doesn’t bother me.

  Now we’re in the room. The yellowed walls and the scratchy-looking flowered bedspread should fill me with disgust but don’t. All I see is what’s about to happen, as if it’s a haze surrounding us. We’re not talking at all, and that’s fine, too. He locks us in, and I lay my purse down; he does something with the room key, car keys, wallet…And now we’re standing next to the bed, stripping as fast as we can. We’re in a movie, and someone has hit fast-forward.

  I didn’t notice until right this second how strangely sexy Hector is. His body is short and kind of blunt. His chest is covered with wiry black hairs, just like the ones he needs to trim from his sideburns, but on the whiter chest skin with the blue veins. They’re swirling around his brown nipples that face slightly downward, like two eyes that are shy, and that’s a turn-on, too, for some reason. His little beer belly—I can see it now. It’s round and smooth, and I want to reach out and touch it, put my hand over the black hairs that look like an ant trail coming out of his belly button and heading down, down to what I see now is a patch of blacker hair hiding under his pleated pants, which he’s pulling down now, uncovering the blackest hairs that lead the way into faded blue boxer briefs. Which also come down. And then there it is. Shorter than I expected, but thicker, too. With that nice lighter color—not
the red, thank gosh—and even bluer veins than the ones on his chest. And it’s curved.

  It’s cute. I reach for it.

  He must be looking at me in the same way as I reveal my body bit by bit, blouse by skirt, and he must like what he sees, or not mind it, because he only gets thicker. He tries to get longer, too, I think, but it’s as if the curve won’t let it. So I help him by pulling. I pull it in the right direction.

  I’m going crazy, and I’m going to hell, but right now I don’t care.

  I must be hallucinating, because I don’t feel my body anymore. If I did, I’d certainly feel my stomach, and I’d be trying to curl myself in a way that would hide it. I’d be trying to create some optical illusion on my stomach, my thighs, certain angles of my butt, maybe the insides of my upper arms…but I’m not doing any of that. I can only feel my hands as I use them to pull him toward me. I feel them stroking, then sort of pinching and scratching. It’s like they don’t belong to me anymore.

  And then I can only feel my mouth, so I kiss whatever’s near it.

  And then I feel another part of myself, stronger than anything else, and I reach out to pull him into it. We’re lying on the bed, kind of, somehow, and I grab him and manage to pull him on top, between my thighs, and into me at the exact right angle.

  And then I feel my voice. It says, “Fuck the hell out of me, Hector.”

  And Hector listens.

  Alex

  I’m a superhero, and my superpowers are flying, super strength, and mind control.

  Whenever Devonique opens her mouth to tattle on me, I can use my mind rays to make her be quiet. Or I can fly in the air and kick her in the head.

  Whenever Ms. Hubacek gets mad at me, I can use my mind rays to make her forget. Or I can fly away from school. Or I could go back in time, because I also have time-travel powers. Like when Melinda kept talking to me and I told her to shut up. I’d go back in time and make it so I whispered “Shut up” instead of saying it too loud. Then Ms. Hubacek wouldn’t hear me saying it, and she couldn’t get mad and tell my mom that I always speak out in class and then argue with her about it.