Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here (15 page)

“Audi,” Dawn mumbles, preoccupied.

Good choice. Nice, but not obnoxious. (In the past few years of Dawn’s dating life, we’ve both become attuned to car brands the way some people really care about the zodiac signs of their dates. Since middle-aged guys all basically dress the same, it’s the only real snap judgment you can make.)

This guy, though? Well, at least he isn’t bald. His head’s just
shaved, which is a surprisingly good look for him. Square jaw. Weird, wispy blond eyebrows that are barely visible. He’s tall and lanky, and his suit is clearly expensive but not showy about it.

“Not bad,” I say, somewhat begrudgingly.

He looks up, sees me in the window, and jumps a little. Good. Let him think I’m a weird Mexican place mat ghost. Dawn strikes a match to another tea light.

“Oh, good, I didn’t think there were enough tea lights,” I say.

Every time Dawn didn’t know what to do with her hands, she lit another tea light, so now there are approximately 2,523 tea lights glowing in the living room.

I turn away from the window, frowning at her a little. “You know, if you’re still nervous about this guy after this long, I’m not sure that’s a good sign.”

“I’m not nervous about him. I’m nervous
for
him.”

“Why?”

She looks at me like it’s obvious.

“I’m nervous you’ll eat him alive.”

Then we run down to help Brian carry the groceries up from the car.

I am steeling myself for the first interaction, which is always the worst and consistently determines the rest of the evening. I just hope he doesn’t say, “Howdy, girlfriend” or tell me I look “just like [my] mother” while staring at my boobs, like some of Dawn’s greatest hits.

“Hey,” he says. He shakes my hand a little bit like I’m a dude from the office. “I’m Brian.”

All right, that’s passable.

As he and Dawn laugh together, shouldering the Whole Foods totes, it is obvious to me that there’s way more food than is necessary for just one dinner. Clearly, he thinks we’re in need or something.

“There are only three of us,” I point out, bristling. He could at least halfheartedly try to hide the charity.

“Oh, I dunno. I just saw a pretty romantic movie where someone eats more than they need to.” He shrugs, smiling at Dawn. “I guess it got me carried away.”

I roll my eyes.

“Ever seen
Se7en
?” he asks.

I laugh. Like, out loud. Then I think:
Holy shit. This guy might not be the worst.

In fact, the evening is more than a few notches above painless, which makes it about a hundred times better than any other one of these. Finally, this isn’t another asshole with a nice car, another crying jag and sauvignon blanc bender, another time Dawn got her hopes up for nothing. And maybe a couple of times I did too.

I sit on the couch and watch them sear some chicken breasts together, Brian occasionally throwing me a question about school.

“Let me save you time,” I say from the sofa, where I am sprawled channel surfing. “Eleventh grade, two point nine GPA, hate it.”

“Scarlett, turn off the TV and be helpful, please,” says Dawn. I do not listen.

“You ever see
Shawshank Redemption
?” asks Brian.

“Yep.”

“Have you considered tunneling yourself out over a period of twenty years or so?”

“Oh,” I laugh dryly. “I thought you were gonna ask if I’ve considered hanging myself.”

They both stop and look at me. The only noise is sizzling chicken and the dense buzz of awkwardness.

“You know, the guy who gets out? He hangs himself? Never mind.”

“I do remember. And, nah, I’d just stick with tunneling.”

“Noted.”

“Okay, so . . .” Brian pretends to jot something down. “Caustic stepdaughter. I can deal with that.”

Dawn laughs and nudges him playfully with her hip, looking happier than I’ve seen her in a long time. (
Stepdaughter!!!
I know she’s thinking, with multiple exclamation points, in that brain of hers that probably looks like a Buzzfeed list of the best kitten GIFs.)

It’s funny. This whole time I thought I hated Dawn’s boyfriends because she seemed to spend more time dating them than she did with me, but now I realize I just hated them because I never saw them make her look like that.

I FIND RUTH SITTING IN THE DIRTY WHITE LAWN CHAIR ON
her patio, smoking her customary joint, totally engrossed in a book. Even in the nice weather, she’s still in her uniform of a crisp white dress shirt and wool trousers, with the small addition of cat-eye sunglasses. She lowers them down her nose and stares at me.

“You look bummed, lady,” she says.

“I’m a little bummed.”

“You want a beer?”

“I’m okay, thanks.”

“I’m gonna get a beer.”

She goes in, then comes back out with a giant forty-ounce, one of those brands you see being swigged from a brown bag mostly by burnout kids whose social lives revolve around parking lots.

She cracks it open.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. Gideon’s been ignoring me.”

“Yeah.” She pauses thoughtfully and kicks out her thin legs. “He didn’t talk to you at school when other people were around?”

Mildly surprised, I reply, “Yeah.”

She nods and twists her mouth sympathetically, saying nothing.

“Well?” I prompt.

“Well, what?”

“Don’t you have some kind of, like”—I am about to say
wisdom
, but I remember just in time that it’s her least favorite word—“crazy story about how you once slept with Francis Ford Coppola and learned something? I could use some levity.”

“Nope,” she says simply.

“Wow. The one time I actually ask for TMI.”

“A story! Okay. I can give you a story. So. I know this is a pretty big bomb to drop on you, but . . . I was your age once.”

“Really? This whole time I thought you sprang from Zeus’s head as an AARP member.”

“Well. I grew up in a really small town in rural Pennsylvania. My father died when I was six. He had a heart attack in bed one night, and my mother woke up and found him next to her cold. Did I ever tell you this?”

I shake my head. She sighs.

“Anyway. After that, my mom got real religious, thought God had punished her for not being a better Christian. I stopped
going to church around fifteen. She would get royally pissed at me, take out her belt, the whole thing.”

I wince.

“Around this time, a new family moved to town. They were the first, and the only, black family in our neighborhood. They became the subject of a lot of gossip, especially in my momma’s church. The funny thing was, they were Christians too—they were Baptists and went to a church that seemed much more fun. And if you’re having fun, Catholics pretty much assume you’re a bad Christian.

“Anyway, they had a son my age, and unfortunately for him he got sent to my high school, which was religious Catholic. So he got a lot of shit from the other kids, obviously, about looking different, and cracks about how much the tax was on his folks, dumb stuff like that. I was getting some shit too at the time from kids at school, mostly for showing up drunk and running with what they thought was a bad crowd. I was considered . . . you know. I don’t know what they’d call it.”

“A bad influence?” I ask, and sigh quietly.

She nods.

“But I noticed him and started watching him. He wasn’t like anybody else and not just because he wasn’t white. He was thoughtful and quiet, and he’d read all the time, not for school but for fun. Mostly books about philosophy, or huge fantasy novels like
The
Lord of the Rings
. So one day I went up to him when he was sitting on the bleachers reading during a pep rally, and we started talking.

“His name was Leon. He hated school like I did, but his method was more to just put his head down and get through it so he could make his parents proud. I really admired him. We couldn’t spend time together in school, because people would talk—but we started taking long walks, hanging out whenever we could. He encouraged me to pay more attention. He said I was smart and I could have an amazing life if I stopped trying to waste it. I think part of him was mad at me, probably—he had to work twice as hard to get to where he wanted to go, and here was this white girl, not even using her instant pass.

“People had said that to me ever since I started cutting class and skipping church, but I’d never listened because they were . . . well, horrible people.” Ruth chuckled. “But Leon didn’t mean it in a preachy way. He said it very matter-of-factly. And I thought about it. I started doing better in school. We fit together, in some odd way, after growing up not fitting anywhere else. His family had me over for dinner, and they were really sweet, totally accepted me at their dinner table with no questions or judgment. He mentioned once that he could marry whomever he chose. They just wanted him to be happy. Which, again, considering I’d had my mother buzzing in my ear this whole time about what God approved of and what He didn’t, seemed a whole lot more Christian to me than what I’d been raised to think like. So I really, really liked his parents, probably I was even a little jealous.

“One afternoon, some nosy woman from church saw us walking back from school and told my mother. When I got home,
she screamed that if I wasn’t going to hell anyway for being disobedient and doubting the Lord’s way, I certainly would if I was splitting a chocolate malt with some black boy right under her and God’s nose. I said the Bible preaches tolerance, and quoted Ephesians 4:32: ‘Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.’ After that, she really went nuts. Beat the shit out of me.”

Ruth swigs her beer as I wait, spellbound. She has never told me a story this way, staring out at the lawn and speaking in a low, flat voice, like more of her energy is required to pull it out of her memory than to deliver it in an engaging way. I register distantly that my phone’s vibrating, but I don’t pick it up.

“But nobody could keep Leon and me apart, no matter how hard my mother beat me or how many rocks the kids at school threw at us when we’d leave together, him carrying my schoolbooks. We were inseparable. We graduated—him with honors, me just barely—and left town together. We never went back.”

She stops talking. My phone buzzes again. I don’t even look at it; I’m too enthralled. It sounds like a Nicholas Sparks movie, for God’s sake.

“And?” I urge her.

“What do you mean,
and
?”

“Like . . . did you fall in love? Get married? What happened?”

Ruth snorts. “Nothing!”

I must look incredibly confused because then she nearly doubles over, her thin frame shaking with laughter.

“Scarlett, I’m
gay
.”

I almost fall off the bench.

“What?!”

“Gosh, I thought it’s been obvious all these years. Did you not know?”

“No! I mean, it’s not a big deal, obviously. I’m just surprised because—I mean, that is an epic story! What’s the point of it all, then?!”

“The point is, the outcome’s
not
the point. We got out of our shitty town and went to New York together. We did everything we planned to do.”

I nod, feeling my eyes get embarrassingly misty.

She sighs, as if she thinks everything she’s about to say is something that’s going in one of my ears and out the other, and says, “The best parts of life aren’t clear-cut or obvious—they don’t have neat endings. I know it’s your inclination to skip to the end, but you can’t just focus on how it’s all gonna turn out.”

I nod.

“Anyway, he married a really amazing, funny woman he met in New York, and we stayed in touch until he passed away. I’m still in touch with his widow, although we’re both getting up there, and it’s harder to travel.” She glances upward for a second, and I wonder if she’s about to cry. Instead, she lets out a sharp little laugh and admits, “To be honest, I’m pretty tired of saying goodbye to people.”

I’m not sure how to respond. Finally, I ask, “How come you’re telling me all this now?”

“Because I’m baked,” she says. I laugh, relieved she’s given me an excuse to.

It’s hard to feel like I have nothing to offer, when usually I can joke about something and make it all better. I don’t wish she hadn’t told me, because I feel closer to her than I ever have, but it’s left me feeling heavy, like I have an emotional hangover that no greasy breakfast sandwich can cure.