On a Saturday early in May, when the house was nearly empty from bakery people working the crazy weekend-morning shift, Sam awoke to the sound of Rose getting sick in the bathroom on the other side of the wall. The poor girl sounded miserable, and as if by instinct he rolled out of bed and padded over to the other room, pushed open her bathroom door, and gathered up the hair she was trying to hold back from her face.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said at his sudden intrusion, but her voice was weak and she lacked the energy to shove him away. She threw up again, coughing pitifully. Sam rubbed her back with his remaining hand.
“I’m okay,” she claimed, disingenuously, and sat back on her heels. Sam let go of her hair and filled the tumbler beside the sink with water, then handed it to her. She rinsed out her mouth and spat, made a small sound of disgust, and eased herself back against the wall. Her eyelids fell closed in something like exhaustion.
He leaned against the sink cabinet, his hands wrapped around the marble edge, and waited for her color to turn from its current green. She took a small sip of water, then another. Her gaze flicked up to him, her nose and mouth still obscured by the cut glass of the tumbler. She looked embarrassed.
“I don’t have the flu or anything,” she managed to say. “You’re not going to catch anything from me.”
“I’m not worried about it,” he said. He wouldn’t have been, in any case.
“I’m just—”
“I know.”
She lowered the glass. “Who told you?”
“Amy.”
Rose rolled her eyes with a vehemence that was unintentionally revealing. After a moment she said, “Kevin doesn’t want me telling anyone yet.”
“Kevin’s kind of a dick sometimes.”
She smiled. “Well, you’re a gentleman. It takes a real gentleman to hold back a lady’s hair while she’s puking.”
“That’s a nice thing for you to say while I’m standing here in my underwear.”
Her laugh was almost silent, seemingly more for herself than for him. She seemed to ponder her thought before she spoke. “I hear you guys all the time, you know.”
“Hear what?”
“You and Amy. Having sex.” She tapped the dividing wall beside her with a knuckle. “It’s funny. I’ll just be sitting in bed reading, and she’ll be going and going.”
“Sorry. I thought the walls were pretty thick.”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s just . . . it’s funny.” She rested her head against the wall and closed her eyes. Her hair, normally twisted up in that simple bun, was wild around her shoulders. “Oh, Sam. What am I going to do.”
The question, spoken with such resignation, seemed strange. Perhaps she had just said it to fill the silence—but the answer was obvious. Finish the job, at least for the year. Have the baby. Raise it.
“What else do you need?” he asked. It was the only thing he could think of to say.
She opened her eyes and looked at him. He wondered what he was supposed to understand. After a silence, she said, “Crackers.”
“Like, saltines?”
“Yeah, those are good.”
He turned smoothly out the bathroom door and jogged down the stairs to fetch them for her.
~ * ~
“Okay, I’ve given this some thought,” said Isaac. “Have you ordered a license from China yet?”
“No.” Sam wished this call had come at virtually any hour all day other than this one. It was a beautiful evening, and all six of them had gathered in the yard, in high spirits, to make the most of it. Remy was setting up the cast-iron fire pit, and Lola and Kevin were carrying out most of the liquor from the house by double handfuls of bottlenecks. Someone had set up a stereo and cued up “Last Dance with Mary Jane.”
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“Good. Here’s the deal. Susanna and I really just want to make sure you’re okay. Why don’t you come down here for a few days and we’ll make the license while you’re here? And whatever other paperwork you need, Social Security card or whatever, we can put it together at the same time.”
It was an obvious ruse designed to lure him to Nashville for some sort of intervention, but Sam wasn’t sure this was such a bad deal. The first leg of the food tour began in a week, and everyone would be gone then anyway. He could get the time off from Brunson’s. And the part of him that was all incubus, the monster part he wrestled constantly for control, rejoiced at the idea of escape and travel and novelty.
“Maybe so, yeah,” he said. “Let me put in for time off at work. I’ll see which days they give me.”
“Awesome.” Isaac sounded so happy, Sam knew at once that Susanna must have put him up to this. “Text me when you get the dates.”
Sam tucked away his phone and jogged back over to the group. Amy had dragged over a patio table and was setting up a mojito bar on it—white rum, mint, lime wedges, little cans of soda water stacked in a pyramid. This was what he appreciated about her—that she threw herself fully into the experience of whatever fun presented itself, whether it was setting up a Martha Stewart-worthy mojito bar at a spontaneous backyard gathering or using the appearance of picturesque ruins in the woods as an opportunity for a quick semi-public screw. His conversation with Susanna had lifted from his shoulders the weight of his stay in Portland, but not in the way he’d expected. He no longer felt a duty to stay here, but instead a kind of relief that Tabitha wasn’t languishing in a lake just a few miles away while Sam lived it up. Logically, he was doing the right thing by not pursuing her. And he knew she wanted him to survive this, not spend every waking minute pondering just how close he was to sticking a gun in his mouth.
“Sam!”
He held up a hand to catch the beer Remy was throwing to him.
There were s’mores. The burned marshmallows tasted especially good to him, and the girls squealed with revulsion when he happily ate the ones they had inadvertently set on fire. There was music, and there were Amy’s mojitos, and there was Lola demonstrating, with Remy spotting her, the acrobatic feats that had won her competitions when she was a teenager. Rose wasn’t drinking, but when Remy handed Sam his guitar, she cheerfully sang a Barenaked Ladies song that he managed to strum out, while he joined in with the harmony. Amy hadn’t realized that he could play at all, and she seemed dazzled by this particular skill of his. It made him feel good.
He handed the guitar back to Remy and got up to grab another beer and light a smoke, turning away from the group so he could light it the way he did when nobody was looking, with a touch against his palm, and not have to bother with his Zippo. When he stopped at the cooler to pick up the beer, Kevin grinned. “Jesus, how many is that for you?”
“Five. I think.”
“Man, you’re going to be piss-drunk.”
Sam didn’t get drunk—on the contrary, drinking was literally throwing fuel on the fire, and it energized him—but the phrasing made him realize now was an excellent opportunity to play human for the observant eyes around him. He couldn’t drink liquid unless there was alcohol in it to counter the quenching effect of the water, and the way he processed it, he never actually needed to pee. But with enough beers working their way through his system, he could make it happen. It was a surprisingly important thing, living alongside humans. People’s entire days revolved around the proximity of a bathroom, and if you didn’t need it, they noticed.
“Now that you mention it,” he said, and staggered off to a nearby tree. Repulsed and scandalized shrieks went up, but he gamely opened his fly and peed anyway. It was oddly soothing, the old ritual of assuming the stance and pulling back his foreskin and shaking himself off when he was done. He felt uncannily human.
He picked up his beer again on the way back. Lola said, “Sam, the first step is admitting you’re powerless over your addiction.”
He popped off the cap with a twist inside his elbow. “Are you calling me an alcoholic?”
“I’m just saying, when do we ever see Sam drink anything that isn’t alcohol.”
He cocked his head toward his girlfriend. “Amy’s the alcoholic. You can sobriety-test me anytime you want.”
“Hey, I’m fine,” returned Amy.
“I think you’re both shitfaced.”
“You’re dead wrong,” Sam informed her good-naturedly. “I’m steady as a rock. We could do the goddamn lift scene from Dirty Dancing if we had to.”
Lola burst out in inebriated laughter. “You lose man-points just for knowing Dirty Dancing that well.”
“You can’t take man-points away from Sam.” Amy, though not actually shitfaced, was definitely drunk. “You ought to see how this guy is hung. He’s got like Vegas jackpot man-points.”
“It’s all in how you use it,” said Kevin.
Sam smiled at him. “I also know how to use it.”
Amy giggled. Sam held out a hand in a magnanimous gesture. “What do you say, baby? You want to prove we’re still sober enough to dance?”
“Fucking yes.”
She walked backwards across the yard, arms out slightly for balance, and Sam crouched a bit to brace himself for her run. “You’re going to set her on fire,” called Lola, but they were well back from the fire. She began running toward him, laughing, and hit his hands with a little too much speed, but he was prepared for that. Her position was good, and she was light. He managed to lift her into the air for a moment, almost fully above his head, his hands firm around her waist as she stretched out in an airplane posture, shrieking with delight. Their friends erupted in applause and hoots of approval, and he staggered backward with the momentum before catching her in his arms. She laughed exuberantly, clutched against his chest.
“I love you,” he whispered into her ear.
She looked up at him with a radiant smile. Before she could say it back—and he could tell she was about to—he closed his mouth over hers and kissed her as if they were alone in their room, with no other eyes watching. In that sublime hour, all he had felt was so simple, so comprehensible—the taste of food and the warmth of friendship, the exhilaration of a little risk, the joy of a strong and healthy body, and desire only for her. Only for her, as if his mind held no space for any other. He knew it wouldn’t last, but it was blissful to feel it. In that hour, in the eye of that hurricane, what he felt was love.