The Guilty One (19 page)

He pointed to the wall above him, where a large painting of the
Last Supper
hung under a Budweiser clock.

“That reminds me of paint-by-number kits our neighbor used to do back in Kansas,” Maris said, hoping she wasn't slurring her words and trying to hide the illicit thrill it gave her to be talking to a nice-looking man who was apparently interested in her. Or was he? The last hour had been filled with raucous laughter and the five friends—joined occasionally by Pet, when things slowed down behind the bar—talking over each other, competing for her attention.

“That's exactly what it is, doll.”

“Really?” Thinking:
do people really still say
doll
?
—and that she kind of liked it.

“Yup. A few of them were my mom's. I took 'em after she passed. More for . . . I don't know, for the memory of it, if that makes sense, than for the actual paintings. She used to sit at our kitchen table chain smoking and working on her ‘pictures,' is what she called them, while me and my brothers raised hell all over the house. Man, she loved those.”

“Which were hers?”

George didn't answer for a moment. He picked up his beer, staring at her over the top, then set it down again without taking a sip. “Tell you what,” he said. “I'll give you a tour.”

She allowed him to help her up, giggling as he picked up her purse and slid it over her arm. She was a little unsteady, but only a little. The bar had emptied out quite a bit. Maris wondered how late it was, as George paused under a small painting of two kittens batting at a bright orange butterfly.

“No,” Maris said, widening her eyes. “Really? It's exquisite!”

George laughed, and she congratulated herself on amusing him, and then worried that she'd gone too far. This was what she was like when she drank, and the reason that she rarely did—alcohol made her both more loquacious and, later, mortified when she sobered up.

“Yup. That was one of her earlier works. Over here we've got a triptych, what I like to call the
Three Ladies of Spain
.”

And that was, indeed, what hung over the pool tables: two black-haired beauties in swirling flamenco skirts framing a demure young woman peeping over a fan. Maris laughed and sipped her drink, surprised to find it was nearly gone.

Pet had finished up behind the bar and was sitting on a stool, casting them smug glances. George looked at his watch.

“Your ride looks like she's getting impatient. Guess we better wrap up the tour so you can get home at a decent hour, especially since Norris tells me he's putting you to work tomorrow.”

“He told you?” Maris was surprised, then wondered why. It wasn't exactly a secret.

“Yeah, and it's about time too. It's a good thing you're doing for him. He's been trying to work up to going through that shit for the last two years.”

“You mean . . . because of . . .” The liquor was making it hard for Maris to find the euphemistic phrases she usually employed for delicate subjects. Which was strange, because before George even responded, she knew what he was going to say:

“He was really broken up when his mom died.” George put his hand under her elbow and guided Maris toward the bar. Pet was counting out tips, stacking coins and pressing bills flat on the polished wood. “Grief, you know, it can really stay with a person for a long time.”

Maris nodded dumbly. Grief. Yes.
Please
, she thought,
please don't let the conversation go that way, not tonight, not just now
. Tomorrow, yes, she would be ready for its inevitable return, she'd be sober and probably regretting not just the drinking but the gaiety, but for now she just wanted a little bit more, please, God, just a little bit more.

“There you are,” Pet said. “I was starting to wonder if George clubbed you over the head and dragged you off to his lair.”

“I'm wounded,” George protested, pretending to stab himself in the heart with an invisible knife. Then, “Do okay tonight?”

“Pretty good. Eighty-eight bucks. Not bad for a Wednesday.” She folded the bills and jammed them into one pocket of her cut-off shorts, dropped the coins into the other.

“You doing okay otherwise, though, right?” George persisted. “Working on that chemistry project?”

“Yeah.” She grinned and gave him a poke in the shoulder. “Don't worry about me so much. Except it's physics, not chemistry, which I've told you, like, fifty times.”

George shrugged.

“I wonder,” Maris said, suddenly shy. “Would you tell everyone good-bye, please? I hate to interrupt . . . whatever that is they're doing.” A drinking game, she was pretty sure, but one in which Tony and Duchess seemed to be the only participants, and Norris and Bria, their cheering squad.

A look passed between George and Pet. “Sure,” George said, while Pet smirked.

“Well, it was very nice to meet you,” Maris said, and put out her hand. George took it, and then didn't seem to know what to do with it.

“Aw,” Pet said quietly, turning away from them, toward the door.

Duchess came running up in a clattering of high-heeled sandals on the wooden floor. “George! Did you invite her to the barbecue?”

George looked from one woman to the other. “Uh . . .”

“You're impossible! Mary, will you come over for the Fourth? We're barbecuing in the backyard. You can kind of see the fireworks if you get up on the roof. Norris can give you a ride. Or . . .” She looked significantly at George.

“Yes,” Maris said, mostly to end the awkward insinuation. “I'd love to.”

“Well, good. Pet's got the details. Don't bring a thing, just your pretty self.”

She clattered back to the table, where Bria was sweeping the piles of gnawed bones into one of the paper bags. The evening was coming to an end for all of them.

“Like I said—” Pet hooked her arm through Maris's and led her to the door. “Not bad for a Wednesday.”

IT HAD SOMEHOW
been agreed: Pet would drive them home in Norris's car, as Norris—reading between the lines, anyway—would be going home with Duchess. Maris got the idea this wasn't the first time for such an arrangement. She was happy for the ride, since she'd had three of Pet's signature cocktails and each seemed stronger than the last. She wasn't drunk, exactly . . . okay, she was a little drunk.

Maris knew the dangers of alcohol, and they weren't limited to addiction. Drinking could easily loosen the screws of the social structure just a little too much. Those evenings with her friends at Adrian's had been one thing—confessions of crushes, fears about their children, husbands' annoying habits and suspicious late evenings, it was all talk that went nowhere and stayed well within the cozy bounds of friendship. But outside that inner circle, at dinner parties and holiday open houses and summer barbecues, wives drank a bit too much and grew strident, catty, mean. Husbands leaned in close to murmur to women they weren't married to. And those, like Maris, who were cautious—who drank a seltzer between glasses of wine—gathered bits and hoarded them away, ammunition for some future day.

But Maris didn't need that sort of currency anymore. All the social armor in the world was useless in the face of what she had become. So she drank, and it felt good. It felt right and fine, and George and his friends were funny and kind, and Pet was amusing to watch, and if Maris felt something dangerously close to maternal when she looked over to the bar and saw the girl making conversation and trading barbs and expertly working the taps and bottles . . . well, she had earned it. The past day and a half had been daunting, but she'd come through.

“See you tomorrow!” the other bartender, a young man with reddish stubble and huge round grommeted holes in his ears, called as they left. Maris gave a small wave, searching for George, but he'd disappeared back into the back room. In the street, Pet paused to light a cigarette.

“Which way?”

“Just a block and a half this way.” After a moment Maris added, “He keeps that car so nice, I'm surprised he'd let someone else drive it.”

“The power of pussy,” Pet shrugged, laughing. “We've all been there.”

“. . . Oh.”

“Kidding!” She pretended to slug Maris in the arm. “Sorry, Mary, I shouldn't talk that way around you.”

“No, it's okay,” Mary said, a laugh bubbling up. It
was
okay. She didn't have to be polite—at least, not the old kind of polite, not here. “Your friends . . . how did they all, you know, get so close?”

“Right, it's like the old TV show, but in Oakland, right?”

Maris couldn't tell if Pet was making fun of her or not. They arrived at the car, and Maris got in the passenger side.

“But Norris and George were in the army together,” she persisted.

“Air force, actually, is what George told me. Only I don't think they saw any action. I think they were mostly working as mechanics or something. Then they moved back to the Bay Area, only Norris was going through a bad time with his wife—he used to be married—anyway she kicked him out and Norris stayed with George for a while. George had a little construction business and they flipped houses together, or so the story goes, but they also claim they made a fortune and you couldn't prove it to me now. Tall tales get taller as the evening goes on, you know?”

“Mmm.”

“Anyway, once the economy tanked, Norris got a job with PG&E. He'd had some training in the service, I don't know, maybe that helped him land the job. George had a few rental properties by then that he couldn't unload, plus the bar, which I don't think he ever meant to actually run, but here we are. He's in four or five nights a week, comes and goes as he pleases, more or less, though he's usually here on the weekends unless an extra one of the part-timers comes in. Norris inherited the house from his mom; she'd been renting out the apartments, but she was old and she couldn't stay on top of it and it had gotten bad, you know? I get the impression they didn't get along, either. Norris can be . . .”

She paused, searching for the right word, then moving on without finishing her thought. “So, he rented me that place while they were fixing up the upstairs for him to live in. George and him, on weekends, they gutted the kitchen and bath, fixed the floors and walls, put in new windows. I guess she hadn't really kept up with repairs and it was floor-to-ceiling full of just crap that had to be cleared out. The plan is, they're going to rehab the downstairs units after they replace the roof and paint the outside, but with rents what they are now, there's no hurry, you know? Not when Norris can get twelve hundred bucks a month for a shithole like yours. Sorry.”

“You pay twelve hundred dollars?” Maris gasped, thinking of her first apartment, the musty brown-sided duplex she'd shared with three other girls at St. Mary's. Her share of the rent had been $225.

“Nah . . . Norris cut me a break, I pay nine hundred. He's kind of a softie, plus not a lot of people are dying to live in our neighborhood, you know? Give it a few years, though . . . it'll be fuckin' San Francisco out here.”

“Gentrification,” Maris said, and Pet snorted.

“Anyway, I got the apartment because after George hired me he called Norris up and put in a good word for me. I was staying on my friend's couch in Hayward at the time, so I was really glad to get it. I've got loans to cover tuition, for now anyway, and I work a few hours a week at the library on campus, and you know, tips . . . I don't exactly report them. So I'm getting by.”

Maris marveled at Pet's resourcefulness, her determination. Would Calla have been capable of something like this? Calla had never even had a part-time job, unless you counted her summer camp counselor positions. Maris and Jeff had talked about the allowance they would give her at Santa Barbara; Maris had dreamed of driving down on fall weekends to take Calla shopping for outfits for sorority rush, to brunches at restaurants overlooking the water.

Where was Pet's mother, she wanted to know. How did she feel about Pet working in a bar? How did she feel about her haircut, for that matter, or her tattoo? Her men's clothes and the bar in her ear?

“Do you have friends at Merritt?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure, except it's a commuter school, everybody goes home at the end of the day, so it's not like we hang out or anything. Bria takes a few classes there, but she's switching to a physical therapy program in the fall.”

There was an opening for something Maris had wondered about. “She seems nice.”

“She's cool.”

“And Duchess . . . is that weird? I mean, with Tony and . . .”

Pet laughed. “Come to the barbecue, you'll see. She's the
quiet
one in her family, if you can believe it. Hey, you mind if I stop? I'm out of cigarettes. And before you say it, I know, it's filthy and awful, but I'm down to a few a day. And I'm quitting by Christmas. I promise.”

Maris laughed. She was still feeling light, almost weightless. “Sure.”

Pet parked in front of a little stucco-sided grocery store stuck to a street corner like a moth pinned to a board. Neon signs advertised Lotto, beer, Spanish spoken here.

“I'll come in,” Maris said impulsively. She'd driven past these places a thousand times—there was one a couple of blocks from Morgandale—but never gone in one.

The place was cramped, stacked floor to ceiling with shelves and refrigerator cases. A bored-looking man stood behind the counter with his finger marking the place in a book with a title in an unfamiliar language. As Pet was paying for her cigarettes, a skinny girl of nine or ten came around the corner, holding a two-liter bottle of 7-Up.

“Miz Vacanti?”

Maris looked more closely. It was a girl from Morgandale. Not one of hers, but one of Lita's friends, from the group that sat together at the after-school program. She was a sassy one, disruptive and loud, a spirited cyclone in the classroom.