Sweet Nothing (16 page)

“How's your daughter?” I ask.

Her response gets caught in her throat. She swallows hard, and a tiny, perfect tear slides down her cheek.

“Aww, hey, I'm sorry,” I say.

I duck under the counter and pop up beside her, but then I'm at a loss, not sure what I was planning to do. I can't just stand there, so I pick up her coffee and guide her to a booth.

“Thank you,” she says as she sinks into the seat.

I hustle back to the counter and grab some napkins. She takes one and dabs her eyes with it.

“Sit,” she says, “please,” so I do. There's a long silence while she pulls herself together. I look down at my knuckles, up at the buzzing fluorescent light on the ceiling. It's uncomfortable being so close to someone else's pain.

“My name is Zalika,” she finally says.

“Dennis,” I reply. “Nice to meet you.”

“Thank you for asking about my daughter.”

I was flirting when I did, trying to show that I remembered her, hoping for a smile.

“Unfortunately, she's not doing well,” Zalika continues. “She was hit by a car and hurt very badly. She's been in a coma for a week now.”

They were jaywalking across Vermont, Zalika and her twelve-year-old daughter, Amisi. Zalika made it to the curb first and reached into her purse for her ringing phone. A car came barreling out of the setting sun, out of nowhere. The driver slammed on his brakes, but it was too late. Zalika heard the first thud, as the car hit Amisi and sent her flying through the air, and the second, when Amisi crashed back to earth.

She turned and called for her daughter, her heart refusing to acknowledge what her brain already knew. Amisi! Where had she gotten to? That couldn't be her, that tiny thing lying twisted and bloody in the gutter, arms and legs all at strange angles. Amisi!

“Don't touch her,” someone yelled.

Two strong men held Zalika back, and she wanted to kill them. A woman tried to soothe her, knelt in front of her and spoke to her like a child. Zalika spit in her face.

Amisi has been in the hospital ever since, tethered to our world by tubes that feed her, fill her lungs with air, and filter the poison from her blood. Zalika is at her bedside constantly, except for when she steps out for these early-morning coffee breaks.

“The doctors don't say it's hopeless, but I can hear it in their voices,” Zalika says. “They're giving me time to say good-bye, but soon they'll lose patience.”

She raises her cup to her lips and takes a drink to stop herself from talking, as if by not voicing the future, she can escape it. And what can I do but say what everyone says in a moment like this? “Don't give up hope. Anything can happen.”

Zalika doesn't smile, but something softens in her expression.

“You don't really believe that, do you?” she says.

“No,” I reply.

“Good.”

The door buzzes, and two Filipino girls in pink scrubs enter. I return to the counter to help them. Zalika leaves while I'm filling their order.

TROY SHOWS ME
a bag of lettuce.

“Should I get an extra for you?” he asks.

I came to the supermarket with him because I didn't have anything better to do.

“Sure,” I say. “I'll grab some dressing.”

All Troy eats now is soup, salad, and Cheerios. A diet he found online. I mostly live off sandwiches from work, one at the beginning of my shift and one at the end.

“You need to watch what you put in your body too,” Troy says as he pushes the cart toward the tomatoes. “Just because you're not a fat pig like me doesn't mean you're not fucking yourself up. You've got to plan your meals.”

“I'm more of a one-day-at-a-time guy,” I say.

“Come on, man,” Troy scoffs. “Don't let that AA bullshit bleed over into your real life. You know what's wrong with most drunks? They're all
about
taking it one day at a time. They don't think ahead. If they did, they'd say, ‘I'm not gonna get loaded tonight because I have to go to work tomorrow.' It's not one day at a time, it's a hundred days at a time. You have to take control of your life.”

Troy is one of those people who get on track for a week and suddenly have the answers for everybody. I'll remember to ask him about his amazing self-control when he's back to making a meal out of a bag of chocolate chip cookies.

And I do have a plan. Step one: Save money. That's why I eat at work. That's why I sleep on a futon. I've got about a grand squirreled away already. Step two: Get a better job. My applications are in at Best Buy and Fry's. I'm ready to jump back into it. Put me on the floor and watch me go. Step three: See my kids, show them I'm doing better.

Troy drops some tomatoes into the cart, and we roll over to the soup aisle. He needs ten cans of chicken noodle, ten cans of vegetable beef. My head hurts when I tap my temple. I stand there tapping, hurting myself, while Troy counts out his Campbell's.

On his way to the checkstand he brushes against a spaghetti-sauce display. The thing topples over, jars exploding wetly when they hit the floor, sauce splashing everywhere. Troy is mortified. His face flushes bright red as a kid in an apron rushes over.

“Are you okay, sir?” the kid asks.

“I'm fine,” Troy says. His pajama bottoms are spattered with sauce.

I tell the kid that was a dumb spot to stack breakables, right in the aisle. What if it had been a toddler who knocked them over? I know he has no say in where the displays go, but I'm doing it for Troy, so everybody doesn't assume the accident happened because he's fat.

Troy's quiet in the car on the way back to the apartment. I notice he's limping as we climb the stairs. I'm drinking beer and reading Stephen King when he calls me into the bathroom, where he's sitting on the toilet in his underwear. A shard of glass is sticking out of his massive calf above a trickle of blood. It's a piece of one of the jars.

“Pull this out for me,” he says.

I kneel beside him and grip the glass with my thumb and forefinger. A quick yank is all it takes. More blood starts to flow. Troy doesn't want to see a doctor. He asks me to patch him up as best I can. I rinse the cut, spread Neosporin on it, and wrap his leg in gauze.

A few minutes later he comes into the living room and asks if I want to go for a walk.

“Maybe you should skip today,” I say.

“Nah, dude, I'm good,” he says. “Let's do it.”

I'm suddenly tired as hell, like I've taken a pill.

“I'm burnt,” I say. “Sorry.”

I lie on the futon, and I'm dreaming before Troy makes it down the stairs.

WHAT WENT WRONG?
That's another question I ask myself.

My parents? They were distant but kind. Both worked at the same insurance company, and when they asked my sister and me how we were doing each evening at dinner, the answer they wanted and got was “Fine.” We held up our end of the bargain; they held up theirs. A little bloodless, but better than the messes I've made.

My wife? Okay, we married too young and hung on too long. We were casually cruel to each other, and torment became a game for us. But that's nothing unusual. You see it on TV every day. I can't blame the kids either, although when they came along I had to divide what love I had in me into smaller portions, and it sounds selfish, but you know who got shorted? Me.

As for work, I've only met two people, a dope dealer and a marine, who truly enjoyed what they did for a living and wouldn't walk away from it if they had the opportunity. A job is what you do to pay the bills. Some are better than others, but they're all painful in a way. It's a pain you learn to live with, however, not the kind that breaks you.

So what, then, spun me out, sent me sliding across the track and into the wall? Maybe I'm not meant to know. Maybe if all of us were suddenly able to peer into our hearts and see all the wildness there, the wanting, the fire and black smoke, we'd forget how to fake it, and the whole rotten world would jerk to a halt. There's something to be said for the truth, sure, but the truth is, it's lies that keep us going.

I STOP AT
Goodwill to buy a sport coat and tie on my way to my interview. They cost me fifteen dollars. Best Buy called yesterday and said to come in at one and ask for Harry. The store is on Santa Monica and La Brea, so if I get the job, I can take the same bus I do now.

The chick at the customer-service desk has blond hair and black eyebrows. She's a big girl, and her clothes are too tight. She looks me over with a smirk when I say I'm there to see Harry, wondering why a man my age would want a college student's job.

Harry's just a kid too, but he's already going bald. His handshake is an embarrassment. I will eat him alive.

He leads me through the store toward his office. A hip-hop song is booming out of the car-stereo department as we pass by. Every other word is
motherfucker
. Two employees in blue polos are staring at the speakers mounted on the wall and bobbing their heads in time to the music.

“Hey!” Harry yells at them, his voice a frustrated squeak. “What did I tell you guys?”

“Sorry, man,” one of the employees says while reaching out to lower the volume. We move on, and I turn back to see the guy and his buddy bumping fists and laughing up their sleeves.

Harry's office is a windowless box off the stockroom, barely big enough for a desk and two chairs. We sit so close together, I can see the sweat beading on his greasy forehead.

“So, uh”—he picks up my application and looks down at my name—“Dennis,” he says. “Why do you want to work at Best Buy?” He barely listens as I give my spiel about how my divorce threw me for a loop, but now I'm back on my feet and eager to use my sales experience at a leading chain like this one.

When I say, “Put me out on that floor, and I don't care if it's batteries, I'll be the best battery salesman you ever had,” Harry just nods and starts telling me about benefits. I notice that his hands are shaking and he's breathing funny. The guy is falling apart, and I'm pretty sure I know why.

When we get to the part where he asks, “Do you have any questions for me?” I say, “How long have you been manager?”

Harry fiddles with the name tag on his vest, the one that reads
Harry Sarkissian, Manager
. “Almost two months,” he says.

“It gets easier,” I say. “I know. I used to be a manager myself.”

Harry's eyes fill with tears. “I bought a book from Amazon,” he says. “
First,
Break All the Rules
. But it's like for offices and stuff, not stores.”

“You want a tip?” I say. “Something that worked for me?”

“Okay,” Harry says.

“Blame everything on your bosses, the people higher up than you. Those guys out there, that music. Tell them the district manager got a complaint and said you had to do something about it. Act like you couldn't care less, but the boss is on your ass, so you've got to get on theirs. Everyone understands shit rolls downhill. They can't be mad at you, because you're just following orders.”

“That might work,” Harry says.

“I guarantee it will,” I say. “You want another tip?”

“Sure.”

“Hire me. You won't be sorry.”

I laugh to let him know he can take that as a joke, and he laughs too. We shake hands again, and he walks me to the front of the store and says he'll call when he makes his decision, either way.

I'm feeling fine for once, even though it's hot out on the street and the smog leaves a chemical taste on my tongue. I pulled what could have been a disastrous interview out of the fire and did my good deed for the day all at the same time. Baby steps toward something better.

I buy a fruit cup from a pushcart parked on the sidewalk in front of the store. The kid selling them sprinkles chili powder over the chunks of pineapple, melon, and mango, and I eat it sitting on a cinder-block wall in the thin strip of shade cast by a palm tree. My bus arrives just as I reach the stop. If I believed in luck, I might think mine had turned.

THE ONE-EYED COWBOY
lingers at the counter after paying for his coffee and jabbers on and on about how he got bitten by a Great Dane when he was eight years old. I pull on plastic gloves and go back to refilling the ham and turkey bins, but he doesn't get the hint.

“To this day I get the shakes around a big dog,” he says. “With little ones, I won't pet 'em, but they don't scare me.”

“Huh,” I say. I cut open a bag of Swiss cheese slices. “Wow.”

The guy's wearing a black cowboy hat, scuffed snakeskin boots, and a bolo tie with a silver scorpion slide. His empty eye socket is a raw, red hole that made my stomach flip when I first saw it. What he's doing on Sunset Boulevard at three in the morning, I couldn't tell you.

“Now this”—he reaches up to tug the eyelid hanging loosely over the hole—“happened in a fight in Kansas City. Motherfucker got me with a broken bottle.”

He's still telling stories fifteen minutes later as the door swings shut behind him and he swaggers off down the sidewalk. I wonder what it's like when the dam finally breaks and everything comes spilling out. Maybe you feel better or maybe you drown.

They're talking about UFOs on
After Midnight
. Are we being watched? Zalika shows up at four. It's been a week since I last saw her, and I'm more excited than I should be. My plan is to tell her something about my life in order to break the ice between us, about Troy wanting to lose weight and me trying to help him. The look on her face stops me cold, though. She barely glances at me when she orders her coffee and keeps dabbing at her nose with a Kleenex.

“Rough night?” I say.

She nods, tears glittering in her beautiful eyes. I want to reach out and smooth away the worry lines on her forehead, the creases at the corners of her mouth. Instead, I watch her walk alone to the booth in front of the window, where she slumps over her coffee.