Authors: Paul Griffin

Stay with Me (12 page)

BOOK: Stay with Me

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He’s quiet.

“Tuesday night. My mother’s going down to the shore to get trashed with her friend, this other Bud Light bride from high school. Julie has this popup camper for the overnight. Carmella won’t be home till late Wednesday afternoon.”

“Céce, sneaking behind your mom’s back like that—”

“Mack? I’m sick of dry humping in the graveyard, you know? Of bringing ants home. I want to be
indoors
with you. To
be
with you, indoors.”

He stops rubbing my neck. He gets up. He crosses toward the far side of the roof, and Boo follows. “Wait,” Mack says as he keeps walking away.

But she won’t. She only stops when he stops, and she leans against his leg. He can’t get her to quit following him.

“You’re up in the country and she’s off leash,” he says. “She sees a jackrabbit on the other side of the road with a truck hauling down it. You’ve got to be able to stop her in her tracks before you can call her back to you.” He studies Boo. “It’s the last thing she needs to learn, and then she’s perfect.”

“Instead of
wait,
try
stay
.”

“You can use whatever word you want, so long as you use the same word every time.”

“
Stay
is better.”

“Try it.” He heads across the roof. Boo follows.

“Boo, stay,” I say.

The dog stops and sits and looks back at me.

“Boo, come,” I say.

She comes to me for a belly scratch.

Mack jogs across the roof and chucks his arm over my shoulder and kisses my forehead.

“Before she found you, she must have been trained with that word,” I say.

“Nope. You’re magic.”

Boo wiggles between us and slashes our legs with her tail and play-barks at us to stop glomming.

Pounding beneath our feet gets me jumping. “What is that?”

Mack frowns. “Larry. He’s banging on his ceiling with a ball bat.”

Some dude shrieks up the breezeway, “Make that dog stop barking, dirtbag. Hey, you hear me up there?”

Mack yells down the breezeway, “It was just for a second, all right? It’s over now.” He’s so calm and strong with the dog, but now he’s off-kilter. He’s pinching the inside of his wrist again. “You won’t ever hear her again, all right?”

“Motherless liar,” Larry yells up.

“What’d you say about my moms, old man?”

“Mack,” I say, but he doesn’t hear me.

“I hear that dog bark again, it’s dead,” Larry says.

“What’d you say about my
moms
?”

“I’ll tell her you said hello,” Larry yells up. He’s snickering.

Mack’s eyes are spacey, the way they were that night with those two dudes on the motorcycles. He’s pinching his wrist so hard. I stop him. I hold his hand.

“Just keep holding my hand,” he says. “Don’t let go.”

“I won’t.”

He’s trembling. I lead him into the hutch. He slumps against the wall. I crack him a Sprite and sit next to him, and he rests his head in my lap. I trace arcs across his forehead with my fingertips, until the fret lines soften.

“You’re the only one,” he says.

“The only one?”

Boo’s upset because he’s upset. She wiggles next to him and nudges his hand with her snout, but he won’t pet her. I reach out to Boo.

“Don’t,” Mack says. “Wait till she’s not scared. If you pet her when she’s scared, you’re rewarding her fear. My mom taught me that. Sorry. I keep telling you the same stories. About my mother, I mean. Hell, I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“What doesn’t?”

“You were gonna find out sooner or later. You might not want to be with me after I tell you this. But you need to know it, the truth about me.”

Now I’m afraid. This is it: He’s going to tell me he killed somebody. Please, don’t let this be over. Don’t let us be over. “Tell me.”

“I’m afraid that someday, I’m gonna do something really bad.”

“Like . . .”

“Like something you can’t fix. I get so
mad
sometimes.”

“Everybody gets mad.”

“Not like this. Not like me.” His eyes shimmer. They’re brown, but for some reason they seem dark blue now. “You’re the only one who can keep me from doing it.”

“Doing what?”

“Losing it.” He looks away. “I had this counselor once who tried to teach me a trick. She said when I got mad, I should put myself in a favorite dream and live there until the anger left me. But it never worked. Because my dreams all seemed so far away. But now with you, when I’m near you, holding your hand . . . If I fly off and wreck somebody, they won’t let us be together anymore. As long as you’re with me, it’ll be okay.” He strokes Boo’s neck. Her tail slaps the floor at his touch. She rolls onto her stomach for a belly rub. He gives her a quick scratch and squeezes my hand. “Tuesday night. I’ll stay over your house, Céce.” He checks the moon. “It’s getting late. I better get you home.”

He gets up and tries to help me to my feet, but I say, “Wait. I need a minute to think about this before I do it.”

“Before you do what?”

“Shh, just gimme a sec.” What does that mean,
something you can’t fix
? I have no doubt he can cause some serious damage—he’s all muscle. He’s all heart, though. All mine. He needs me.

He’s right: As long as I’m with him, it’ll be okay. “Okay,” I say.

“Okay what?”

I pen the dog and grab the sleeping bag and go to the back of the hutch and spread it out under the open ceiling hatchway.

He looks at the sleeping bag. He looks at me. “This can’t be a one-shot deal,” he says. “One of those, you know, you try this out to see what it’s like, and then you move on.”

“Never leave you. I promise.”

His fingertips trace the lines of my ribs. I can feel his heart beating through me. The tip of his thumb rides a soft slow circle around my belly, winding into the button. I feel myself breathing faster as his thumb arcs down, and his fingertips are at the band of my underwear. Under the band now . . .

It happens fast: We’re naked. He’s kissing me everywhere. “You got any—”

“Yes,” I say. The ones they give you in school. To carry with you, just in case.

His hands are shaking as he gets ready and my hands are shaking as I help him and then it happens and I take in the biggest breath and then another one and I can’t let the air out of my lungs. Hot tears coast over my cheeks into my ears. I’m holding his face and touching his open lips, and still I can’t breathe, and he’s looking at me. Looking into my eyes. And he isn’t turning away. And finally I let the air out, but right away my lungs pull in another huge breath, and I can’t breathe, don’t want to breathe, just want to stay like this.

“You done this before?” he says.

I shake no, and somehow I whisper, “You?”

“Not like this.” And he’s shivering and I’m shivering and I swear the sky is shivering. Through the hatchway the stars are falling and drifting down on us like that first soft snow, the kind that comes at the end of the fall.

(Sunday, July 19, late night)

MACK:

I can’t stop looking at her. She’s all goose bumps. She’s curled into me and shivering, but the room smells like heat. I got my arms around her. She’s looking up through the roof hatch. Boo snores on the other side of the wall. “I’ll introduce you to my old man,” I say. “You’re going to be coming over here all the time, and you’ll run into him sooner or later.”

We just stare into each other and smile for a bit, me and this beautiful girl, her long bangs half covering her face. I brush back her hair to see her eyes better. “Céce, I’m not like him, okay? I have my mother in me, not him.”

A squirrel peeks in through the hatch.

She yelps and digs her nails into me. “They’re everywhere. You can’t even hang your laundry anymore without one crawling into your bra and making a hammock of it.”

“I’m not real familiar with that situation.”

She wrinkles her nose and nose-to-noses me. “Hey?” “Hey back.”

“I’m gonna be coming over here all the time?”

I kiss her full and hold her and tell her, “I wanna do it again so bad. To be with you. Can we?”

“Make the squirrel stop watching us.”

“Tsst!” I say, and the squirrel jumps away.

“This is Céce.”

“
Chee
-chee?” the old man says all slurry. He’s flopped back in front of the TV with a box of doughnuts, crumbs all through the hair of his chest, too bombed to stand up.

“Hello,” Céce says. She shakes his hand, and the old man won’t let go. She doesn’t like the way he’s looking at her.

I don’t either. I didn’t think he was going to be this bad. He’s eyeing her head to toe, and slow. “Reckon we better be going,” I say.

“Nice to meet you, Mister Morse,” she says.

“Nigha meea.”

I have to get in there to pull his hand from hers.

He winks at me, gives me a thumbs-up. “Attaboy, Cario. Thaw you wuzza.” He burps. “Faggot.” A loud commercial comes on and his eyes drift to the TV.

We’re outside. “He called you Cario,” she says.

“My name. Macario.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Blessed.”

We’re quiet on the walk home. My arm’s over her shoulders. Her arm’s slung low on my back, her thumb hooked into my belt loop. She’s walking Boo. Boo listens to Céce perfect. My legs are weak. I love her so bad. I want to say it to her. I better wait.

“He’s not like that when he’s sober, though, right?” she says.

“He’s like that, just sober.”

“Yesterday I woke up with Carmella in my bed. She was holding my hand. The lightning, she said.”

“Lightning?”

“The thunderstorm. The woman sleeps with a Snoopy night-light.”

“I like your mom a ton.”

“If Anthony dies, she’ll go from beer to liquor. After that, it won’t be long. I’ll wake up one morning, and she’ll be dead on the couch with some DVD menu music on perma-loop.
Pretty Woman
. You ever see that one?”

“Hey?” I pull her close. “Tony’s not gonna die.”

She studies my eyes. “I believe you.”

“I been wanting to send him a letter. To thank him for the medal. Can you help me write it?”

She hugs me. “We’ll do it right now. C’mon.” We’re just a couple houses down from her house.

“I need a little time to figure out what I want to say.”

“My mother made Christmas cornbread.”

“In July?”

“I know,” she says. “Red and green icing.” She pulls me toward the house.

I hold up. “I’ll come in Tuesday night.”

“Promise me.”

“We’ll make dinner and sit at the table and make out, but not when we have food in our mouth, of course.”

“Of course,” she says.

“After that, we’ll write the letter to Tony.”

“And after that?”

“Man, you’re cute when you’re pouty, and I think you know it too.” I walk her to her door and kiss her good night. She watches me back down the porch steps with Boo. “Don’t know how I’m gonna look your mom in the eye at work tomorrow.”

“Anthony was dating this girl for two years, and he was a junior in high school when Ma finally sat him down to talk birds and bees. Ant told me he chewed a hole in his cheek to keep from laughing. Slutty as she was in her youth, Carmella apparently assumes everybody’s a virgin now. The last twenty-five years of soaking her brain in Bud Light must’ve eaten away the part of her brain cerebrum that’s supposed to initiate reasonable suspicion.”

“Say that last part in English. Sure, the cerebrum.”

“Or is it the cerebellum?”

“Your pick.”

“
Hate
bio. Don’t worry about my mother, baby. The woman is out to lunch when it comes to this stuff.”

“Yeah huh? Good luck.”

“Good luck?”

“The kitchen light just went on. I better git.”

(Sunday, July 19, late night)

CÉCE:

Ma’s sipping in the kitchen. I walk by fast for the stairway. “Night.”

“Cheech babe, can you c’mere for a second?”

“Yeah, babe?”