The Heart Does Not Grow Back: A Novel (16 page)

“That was for the neighbors to see,” she said. “Meet me behind the Wal-Mart in thirty minutes.”

*   *   *

Raeanna was there, as promised. She was edgy and nervous, pacing by the recycling dumpster. She got into my car.

“Drive,” she said. “West, on the country roads. I can’t be gone forever. He’ll be home soon and…” She stopped midsentence, squinting as she looked at me. “He said he smashed your face into a stair.”

“I don’t bruise easily,” I said.

I thought we’d talk about her escape from Grayson, how we’d leave together, where we would go. I left my hand on my right thigh as we drove, hoping she would hold it. She was married. I barely knew her. Hell, I barely knew Regina and took a blind dive into that one. I could have bailed on the whole rotten situation. I could have said,
Dale, you learned your lesson. Quit that stupid job and move out of your mother’s house. Go somewhere and do something. Meet someone. Get to know them. Ask them out. Then, when it’s a date, and only then, hold hands. Maybe kiss at the end of the night.
But this wasn’t courtship—this was heroism. I left my hand on my thigh and continued to hope.

“Harold is involved with drugs,” she said, tilting the conversation in an unexpected direction.

Harold used to run meth—cheap and dirty, toxic and destructive, made from farm chemicals and over-the-counter medicine. Southern Illinois’s drug of choice. One dose could start a brushfire of human rot and addiction, turning skin and teeth and hair black and green, building a zombie stench in addicts one could smell from a mile away if the wind was right. But he was smart enough to never sample the stuff himself, which Rae told me with palpable relief. Harold was rotten enough to begin with, so I could only imagine his violent impulses magnified by the paranoia of being a tweaker. Meth addicts are among the most paranoid, dangerous, desperate, and reckless motherfuckers you’re ever apt to come across. Crack heads were mild by comparison—they would sell their mom’s DVD player to get a fix, but a meth head would blow up a church with their mom in it just to pick the loose change from the collection tray out of the ashes.

We were on an old road in Grayson, Jasper Bridge Road, which felt safe and secluded because the corn was high and unharvested and the potholes made it clear that only a few people ever drove this road on purpose.

So I stopped the car. She kept breathlessly getting me up to speed on Harold. She was afraid he would call in some old connections, tried-and-true tweakers who would do anything for a fix.

“If you stay, he’ll keep after you,” she said. “All he has to do is dangle a bag of crank and you’ll be in a ditch somewhere.”

“I don’t care about any of that. Forget it. I’ll manage. I need to tell you something.” She was breathing hard. Nervous. She looked up at me. “Rae, I wasn’t in love with Regina,” I said. “Christ, I was a kid.”

“And he works in insurance and he just got promoted, so he can look things up and know—”

“Rae, dammit, listen to me. I wanted her but I didn’t love her. I give myself too much credit, as if she cared for me more than she did. Time has made this into a great tragedy in my own head because I don’t have anything else.”

“It never feels like you’re really talking to me,” she said.

“I don’t know what that means,” I said. “But we could just pick up stakes and get out of here. Leave Harold behind to punch walls and sell crystal.”

“If I wanted that, I would tell you to keep driving,” she said. “I wouldn’t even bother to pack or call anyone.”

“Right now, then,” I said. “I don’t have to go home. I’m ready to punch the gas and get us both the hell out of here.”

“It’s a nice thought, isn’t it?” she said. The wind rustled in the high corn. The heat battered us through the windshield. I had the air conditioner turned down low so we could hear each other, and sweat was bursting out of her forehead. I saw it gather at the base of her neck and felt it crawling down my own cheeks in fat drops.

She looked at me and I could tell she was about to say no. I leaned in to kiss her and she recoiled, pulling her head out of range.

“Dale, please,” she said, and there was that hand again, on my face this time, gently pushing me back into the driver’s seat.

I turned around without saying another word. We got back to the dumpster, the drive back spent in total silence. I kept the car idling as she walked to Wal-Mart’s service-entrance doors. She stopped and doubled back to the car. I rolled down the window to accommodate her.

“There’s nothing to wait for if you stay,” she said. My head felt suddenly heavy. I let it drop and stared at the Chevy bow tie in the center of my steering wheel. “I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. If you don’t leave, the only thing you’re waiting on is him.” I didn’t answer her. Her fingers rested on my car door and I waited for her to move so I could roll up my window and bottle myself up in air-conditioning and white noise.

“Look at me!” she said. It took me two long breaths, but I looked at her, looked into the blueness of her eyes and they made me regret every one of my wasted days. “You need to leave,” she said at last, and she was right.

*   *   *

I pulled into my driveway and found Mack Tucker seated on my porch, a backpack slung on his shoulder and a weak smile on his face.

I got out of the car and just stared at him. I felt ready for the .38, almost excited on the way home, hungry for the relief it would offer me, but now it seemed I’d be living a little while longer, at least until Mack was gone.

“Well, Sampsonite, you were right, man. The producers had us all set up in a piano bar for a nice, romantic date. My only job was to get her there at a certain time on a certain night without tipping her off. She asked about the cameras, and the waiter just said a famous piano player was performing. I knew it was Ben McCann. I met the guy when we taped the first segment of the show.”

I knew how
Dedications
usually went. Mack and Ben would go over all the ways Mack loved Lori, all their special times together. The second segment would be Ben torturing himself artistically, coming up with an original song dedicated to Lori that incorporated all of Mack’s bullshit.

“Anyway, when I met him, the entire time I’m thinking, Who the fuck is this guy, he isn’t any famous musician. So we’re at dinner and the fucker comes out onstage and the place erupts. I’m, like, the only guy there who doesn’t know who this fool is, and he starts tinkering on that piano, says it’s an original song, says Lori’s name, says my name, the cameras come in tight, and I about puked up my steak, I swear to God, because I saw it in her face right that second. I saw the ‘yes’ in her throat just waiting to come screaming out of there.”

“So she said yes?” I said.

“Just like you said she would. I’m engaged.” He dropped his backpack and kicked it.

“Tell the producers you don’t love her,” I said.

“I can’t. They like the episode. They like me. Hell, they even want to tape the wedding. They think the song’s going to be a hit: “My Life for You.” Nothing huge like those other reality shows, just a small thing in a small church to show that we’re so in love we couldn’t wait for a bigger production.”

“So you’re going to get married to a woman you don’t love to stay on TV? I mean, not even to get on TV, but just to stay?”

“I won’t be on TV if I break it off. They won’t air the episode if they don’t have the wedding to go with it. That’s all I got, man. I wish I could tell them to eat a dick, but I can’t. You got your regeneration thing, right? We should use that instead.”

I didn’t budge from my spot in the driveway.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “Like,
use
you. But you should use the talent you’ve got. I’ve been thinking though, if it really works, it could be like a makeover show. You could help people, like that blond prick who builds poor people houses every week.”

I just laughed. “You’re insane. And I’m still pissed at you.”

“I admit it, our conversation shouldn’t have gone down the way it did last time. What do you say about dinner, huh? A night out? Shit, it’s my bachelor party, man. You know, you can be my best man at the taping. You should come with. California’s the shit, just like we always thought it would be.”

He smiled, for real this time—that Mack Tucker grin that melted hearts long before he broke them.

*   *   *

We went to a joint called the Rio Grande Steakhouse the next evening, just another McSteakhouse, a clone of all the others, complete with the heart-stopping fried-onion appetizer. He wore jeans and a tight-fitting compression shirt—worn mostly by professional athletes and even then it’s under their uniforms. A shirt so tight it looked painted on, which would get most men laughed at, even the chiseled ones who filled it out with cuts and bulges. Not Mack. He looked like a man striding around in a five-thousand-dollar suit. We sat down and drank Coronas, then ordered massive steaks.

“So, what’s new in your world?” he asked. I was shocked. Mack hardly ever started conversations by asking about someone else. Maybe a little humility did the body good.

“I got curb-stomped by a former drug kingpin. I healed fast.”

He laughed. “I’m sure you did. So am I whipping this drug lord’s ass?”

“It’s complicated.”

“What? He’s got a whole army of henchmen?”

“Sort of, but that’s not the issue.”

“Don’t beat around the bush, then.”

“He’s Raeanna’s husband,” I said. He almost spit out his beer. “She lives in Grayson now. Works at the Wal-Mart. He hits her.”

“So,” he said, “me and you getting a chance to save at least one of them twins. That about it? You in love with this one too?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t understand this, man.”

“You will never understand,” I said. Mack felt like an artifact of the self I was supposed to be, that supposed-to-be Dale who sits at a bar with his best friend, drinking a beer, lusting after promiscuous women as we closed out our college days. That Dale spends his entire paycheck on shots, beers, and greasy food. Mack matches him, wearing a suit with the tie loosened after a day of abusing the rubes as part of some hotshot investment firm. That Dale probably works in something financial, but something solitary—accounting, probably. By the time the night ends, he pukes in the toilet and keeps drinking to wash the acid out of his mouth and nostrils, then ends up finishing the evening suffocating while a girl of questionable age sits on his face in the basement of Mack’s three-bedroom house, of which only one bedroom has an actual bed; the other two are converted into a guest room with a shitty futon and a workout room. That Dale wakes up with the young, nameless girl beside him and a hangover thudding in his head and his dick stuck to his inner thigh, and he and Mack laugh about it, and take all day Sunday to soak themselves in Gatorade and aspirin to get ready for Monday, the workweek, the grind, but when Friday comes they do it all over again.

“I don’t think you understand what I’ve been going through, motherfucker,” Mack said. “It’s not all about you, so let’s not be slinging guilt and pity just yet.”

The next day, that supposed-to-exist Dale and Mack would eat greasy McDonald’s breakfast food, knowing full well it’s deadly, and they tell stories about what happened in the basement, what happened in Mack’s bedroom, and they laugh and high-five. On the way home regret settles in the same way a cold comes on, stealthy, not knowing if it’s there until it’s there for good, and the regret moves supposed-to-be Dale further into manhood and responsibility, not by the example of his parents or role models but through the mistakes introduced by the element of Mack Tucker.

“Then tell me,” I said. “Explain to me just why in the hell you distanced yourself from me so much after high school.”

And the element of Mack Tucker would mellow with age. And soon the regret filters out and we just have those stories that we tell late at night, after our wives and kids have gone to bed.

“I can’t really explain it,” he said. “No huge things, just a bunch of little things. Throw enough pebbles in a bucket and soon you can’t carry that fucker anymore. I needed to clean out my bucket. By myself.”

“Fair enough.”

We finished our dinner. He stared at the dinner check. Things felt awkward. This must be how a date feels, I thought.

“You’re still my best friend, man,” he said. He gave our waitress his credit card. “I think she’s got big enough tits for a twenty-percent tip.” On the Mack Tucker gratuity scale, that was the top tier.

“So I’m not sure what to do,” I said. “Well, maybe I know what to do, but it’s one of those things—if I do it, there’s no going back from it. So I have to be sure.”

“That’s a lot of vague shit you’re saying,” he said. “But this is a bachelor party, man. Let’s hit a bar, have a mojito or two or three or four, and talk this shit over. Among other things. Maybe even drag some chicks back to your pad. Sound like fun?”

It sounded like a something on a Saturday night where there had once been only nothings. His proposal was actually petrifying, but he had just bought me dinner and he was still my best friend, and I now know that had I not gone with him, I would have died that night one way or another—either by my own hand or Harold’s—so all things considered, I made a damn good choice.

*   *   *

We drank and talked until the bar closed. The bartender—a brunette named Kyla, with a lot of freckles and bright lipstick, invited us to an after-party. Correction: invited
Mack
to an after-party. By then I was swimming in booze and the last thing on my mind was suicide. The world seemed muddy and small and completely harmless.

I woke up in the backseat of Mack’s Jeep Grand Cherokee, squeaking against the synthetic leather, yellow streetlights turned gray by the tinted windows. Too late to be night, too early to be morning. Gray time, when anything that happens feels like a dream. I stumbled out the door and vomited hard on the curb.

“He’s alive!” Mack proclaimed. I walked toward the dark blur of people on some random front lawn. Someone handed me a Bud Light. I popped the top and drew a deep swig to blot out the acid taste of vomit to the sound of light applause.