Lee called me the next day.
I figured it was a sign, my chance to tell her all about Tommy reappearing and everything that meant or might mean. But Lee didn’t ask about my job or my day or anything about my life. She started right out with, “Hey, I need your advice.”
“Okay. About what?”
“I can’t talk now; my mom is lurking around here somewhere. When do you have to be at work? Can we get together?”
We made plans to meet at Picasso’s an hour before my shift. I should have told her right then about Tommy working there, but the words didn’t come out. What if when she saw him in the flesh she thought different about what had gone on? Maybe she pictured him in her head as some studly bad boy or something, and when she saw the skinny white-trash reality she’d change her mind about things, change her mind about me.
When I got off the phone, I went into the kitchen for a root beer. Mom had just gotten home from work, and she and Dad were in the backyard. I could see and hear them through the open window.
“When was she planning to tell me?” Dad asked. He was cleaning his car tools. “When do
I
get to know what’s going on around here?”
“It’s a job, Ray. It’s a
good
thing.”
“Hanging around a strip mall at night? A good way to get in trouble, maybe.”
See, he talked about me that way even when he thought I couldn’t hear. It wasn’t just something he did when I was around so that he could make me feel like crap, punish me, or whatever. If I needed proof about what he really thought, here it was.
“I’m sure she was planning to mention it.”
“
Mention
it?” He threw a wrench onto the grass, where it clinked against another tool. “Like you
mentioned
that Stacy was pregnant three weeks after Darren told you? Don’t I have a right to know what’s going on in my own house?”
Don’t worry, Dad. We’ll all be out of your life soon enough.
“Maybe you should ask more questions, talk to them more, and they would tell you things.” Mom talked fast, biting her nails. I wanted to leave the kitchen, didn’t want to hear whatever else my dad was going to say about me. But I stood in my spot, motionless.
“I ask questions,” Dad said.
Mom sighed. “You interrogate.”
Dad threw another tool onto the pile. “You would too if you’d seen what I did.”
“Ray, it was so long ago.”
“Doesn’t feel that way to me.” Dad headed toward the house. I moved quickly into the hall so that he wouldn’t see me. As he came in the back, I heard him say, “Could have been yesterday, the way it feels.”
Sometimes this would happen:
I’d start reliving everything and I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking what if. What if I hadn’t met Tommy, or I’d been smart enough to tell him to leave me alone, or my dad hadn’t followed us to Montara that night? Or if he had, what if he was the kind of dad who gave me a hug and smoothed my hair back and said, “Are you okay?”
And I’d start thinking what if all these things and I could sit there for hours, spinning it over and over in my head until tears felt like they were coming on, and I’d make myself stop.
I hate to cry. One of the last times I cried was when Tommy and I had sex for the first time, months before that night my dad found us. It hurt so much and Tommy was stoned and not even paying attention to how I tried to slow him down and there was some stupid commercial for a diet pill on the car radio. I could feel the tears sliding down the side of my face and dripping a little into my ears. But the worst part was when Tommy saw that I was crying and he got all nice and
Hey Dee Dee, don’t cry, it will get better, you look so pretty . . . come on now, Dee Dee, come on.
It was like he had something on me, like he’d seen deep into somewhere he didn’t belong.
But anyway, Tommy was only part of the what ifs.
What if National Paper had never laid my dad off? Would that have made it easier for him to be the other kind of father?
What if Mom didn’t have to work at a department store, with people complaining all day about stuff they’d bought, or leaving piles of clothes on dressing room floors for her to pick up? Would she look so gray and tired? Would she have noticed when I stopped coming home right after school, climbing instead into Tommy’s Buick and driving off for hours?
What if Darren and Stacy got married, in a regular wedding, maybe even in a church, before April was born?
What if I had more than two friends?
What if Jason had chosen me instead of Lee?
What if everyone got another chance after making a big mistake?
Lee was waiting for me in front of Picasso’s like we’d planned, wearing her favorite blue pullover instead of Jason’s Metallica sweatshirt. A mean part of me liked to imagine Jason saying something like,
Look, can I have my sweatshirt back once in a while?
We went inside, enveloped by the perpetual darkness that was Picasso’s. I saw the outline of Tommy, leaning on the counter, chewing a plastic straw. Other than one family in a front booth, there were no customers.
“Dee Dee,” Tommy said as we got closer, “who’s your friend?”
I ignored him, but Lee said, “I’m Lee,” as if Tommy was some friend of her parents who actually deserved an introduction. I wondered if I could get by without telling her that he was Tommy;
the
Tommy. I went over to the fountain and scooped two cups of ice, filling them with root beer. Tommy watched.
“Why don’t you make us a pizza instead of standing there looking like an asshole,” I said.
Michael came out from the back, carrying a bucket of lettuce for the salad bar. “You’re here early,” he said to me. “It’s not busy enough for me to put you on yet.”
“I know. We’re just here for pizza.”
“Wow, a paying customer. Where have you been all my life?” He dumped the lettuce into the big bowl in the middle of the salad bar and mixed it around with the older brown lettuce that was already in there. Like no one was going to notice.
“I have to pay?”
“Well, half price when you’re not working. It’s better than nothing.” He stirred up the other salad bar stuff to make it look more fresh, then turned to the counter. “Tommy? A half-priced pizza for the ladies.”
Tommy grinned at Michael. “Oh, you’re eating, too?”
“Har-de-har.”
I ordered a Hawaiian special for us and we took a booth.
“This seems like a fun place to work,” Lee said.
“The key word is ‘seems’.”
There was a loud clatter from the family up front; a kid started to cry.
“That’s
it,
” the mom said, “no more soda.”
“I didn’t spill it on
purpose,
” the kid wailed. “I didn’t
mean
to spill it!”
I gestured toward the family. “Case in point. Now they’ll use about eight-hundred napkins to clean up what’s on the table while the rest soaks into the floor. Later, I’ll run a dirty mop over it, only of course I won’t be able to see what the hell I’m doing because Michael doesn’t believe in lightbulbs. Good times.”
“Still,” Lee said, “at least you have, like, a rapport with your coworkers and everything.”
“Is that what you call it?”
She studied me. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I sucked soda up the straw then let it slide back down into the glass, the way I’d done when I was a kid. “You wanted my advice?”
“Ye-es,” she said slowly, “but first, are you sure you’re okay? You seem . . . kinda sketchy. Not totally you. Is it about moving out this summer? Did you tell your parents? Did they freak?”
“No. They don’t know about that. Like I said, it’s not really a plan. Just an idea.”
I should have told her then about Tommy, but he walked over with a pitcher of root beer and another chance slipped by.
“Refill?” he asked, winking at Lee.
“We
just
sat down,” I said, instead of “You make me sick,” which is what I really wanted to say. When he walked away, I said, “I’m fine. Bring it on. I’m here to advise you.”
I watched Tommy walk over to the jukebox and slip in a few quarters. He punched up his numbers, and the first of what I knew would be a string of bad ’80s rock songs blared from the machine.
Lee looked over her shoulder and laughed. “Is it always that loud?”
“Don’t worry. In a second, Michael will come out and turn it down. It’s a sacred ritual.”
“Before I forget: We’re leaving tomorrow on a family camping thing. Burt wants to start a tradition. Seems a little late for that since Peter is already in college, but . . .”
“You’re leaving
tomorrow
?” She always had all this
stuff
going on in her life: church stuff and family stuff and couple stuff. “How long will you be gone?”
“Ten days, I think. If I survive that long.”
I jabbed my straw into my root beer and played with the ice. “Sounds like fun.”
She rolled her eyes. “I know.”
“No,” I said, “really, it sounds like fun. Like, a whole family going off together and doing something that’s not work. Fun.”
“You want me to find out if you can come?” Then she gave me one of those Lee’s Special Looks, the kind that made me feel lower than low for imagining
myself
with Jason in her place. It was the look that meant you had all her attention, that she’d drop everything to hear what was on your mind and then do anything she could to make it better. On a good day, I’d take that look and start talking. On a bad day, all I could think was that I didn’t deserve it.
“I’m kidding,” I said, doing my best imitation of Stacy’s move. The head toss, anyway. “Advice!”
As I predicted, Michael came out of the back room and turned the jukebox down just as Tommy brought our pizza over, eyeing Lee. “Dee Dee doesn’t love me anymore,” he said, “but you’re kind of cute. Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Shut up,” I said. “She’s too old for you.”
When he walked away, Lee whispered, “How come you’re so mean to him? He’s not bad.”
I tried to see him through her eyes: tall and reasonably cute, with slept-on dark hair and his easy way of flirting. Just another harmless, going-nowhere Pacifica slacker.
“It’s
rapport,
like you said. Anyway, you don’t know him like I do.” I pulled off a piece of pizza, breaking the strings of cheese with a plastic knife. “He used to hang with Darren.” Hint, hint.
She didn’t get it, busy instead with getting her own piece of pizza. “Ham and pineapple. Pure genius.” She took a deep breath. “Okay. It’s about Jay.”
The hot cheese burned my tongue. I sucked down some root beer, but it didn’t taste good anymore, sticky and too sweet. I knew from her face, the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes and the way she looked like she could either burst into tears or giggles, what kind of advice she wanted.
“It’s about sex, right?”
She nodded, covering her face with her small hands. Her nails were never dirty. “You don’t have to say it so loud.”
I looked around. The family had left, Tommy was taking a phone order, and Michael was in the back. “He wants to have it and you don’t, right?”
She nodded again, but wouldn’t take her hands off of her face. It made me mad somehow; I wanted to shake her and tell her to stop acting like a baby. Instead, I picked at a piece of vinyl coming loose from my booth seat. “If you don’t want to, then don’t,” I said. “It’s not like Jason is going to date-rape you or something.”
“I
know
. God, Deanna.” She dropped her hands to the table.
“So what’s the problem?” I tried to keep my feelings out of my voice, tried to act the part of the helpful best friend. “I mean, I know he didn’t say he’d break up with you if you didn’t. That’s just not Jason.”
“No, he didn’t say that.” She nibbled at her pizza crust; Tommy approached. “But, I don’t know. Maybe I do want to.”
“Want to what?” Tommy said, spinning his bar towel. “Go out with me?”
“As if I’d let her ruin her life,” I said.
“You’re just jealous.”
“Would you please leave us the hell alone?”
“Hey, I can take a hint.” Tommy bent down to look Lee in the eyes. I tore off a tiny piece of the vinyl I’d been picking at. “Come back and see me sometime.”
Lee giggled. She actually
giggled
. As soon as Tommy was out of earshot, I leaned forward and said quietly but clearly, slowly: “If you can’t see through a guy like Tommy, you shouldn’t even be
thinking
about having sex.”
She looked confused. “I’m talking about Jason, not Tommy.” Her eyes got big and she glanced over her shoulder and back at me. “That’s Tommy? I mean,
Tommy
Tommy?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you
tell
me he worked here?”
“I don’t know,” I said, shoving the pizza pan aside, the smell of hot pineapple making me sick. “But like you said, we’re not talking about Tommy. We’re talking about Jason.” I worked my finger into the hole I’d made in the seat and found the crumbling foam beneath.
She looked over at Tommy again. He waved and grinned from behind the counter. “So
that’s
Tommy.” She nodded a little. “Yeah. I can see that. How can you work here? Doesn’t being around him make you feel weird? Does Darren know? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”
I don’t know. Yes. No. “I was going to.”
“He’s not like I pictured,” she said, “but I think I get it. He has, like, an
energy.
”
I didn’t want to talk about it, not now, when it felt better to be mad at Lee than to have her care about my life, or worse, act like she understood it. I tore at the vinyl some more, making the hole bigger.
“Back to Jason,” I said, “because I have to start my shift soon. Isn’t it, like, against your religion to have sex? Before marriage, I mean?”
“Yeah, well, sort of. I don’t know.” She sighed. “It’s
Jason
.”
Hearing his name like that, her saying it with so much affection like maybe she actually loved him, I don’t know, but I wanted to knock the pizza and root beer off the table and run out of Picasso’s. It wasn’t fair, Lee getting to think about losing her virginity with a nice guy like Jason, someone who spent his last two bucks on her favorite cookie, someone who didn’t get her stoned so he could feel her up, someone who didn’t drive her to deserted parking lots without at least taking her out to a movie first. Someone who made a declaration
for
her, and not just in the backseat of a car.