The Nakeds (32 page)

“See you made yourselves at home,” Rebecca said, smiling. She looked around the yard. “We need music. Want to help me with the speakers, Pab?”

Pab—what was with the
Pab
?
Hannah wondered.

She watched and waited, dipping an egg roll into sweet sauce and lifting it to her mouth. Inside the house, Rebecca and Pablo worked together, hauling the three-foot speakers across the living room. Halfway to the screen, Rebecca lifted her speaker in the air, struggled the rest of the way. It was a ridiculous dance, Hannah thought, Rebecca’s torso, shoulders, and face disappearing behind the speaker, and she was, for those few seconds, two red flip-flops, two perfect tan legs.

Pablo positioned the speakers at an angle so that they were pointing toward the backyard.

They sat outside until nearly midnight, drinking what was left of the vodka. The cherry punch stained their lips red. They listened to the Beach Boys until Pablo couldn’t take it anymore and insisted Rebecca take those dicks off the turntable and put on a blues station.

Rebecca told them that it was fun talking to Mustafa on the phone. She told them he hadn’t mentioned his seizure and that she hadn’t really expected him to—they weren’t that kind of close, she said.

The three of them talked about kids at school, kids they were looking forward to seeing when summer ended and school started, and kids they’d planned to avoid.

“I better get my own locker this year,” Rebecca said. “Last year I had to share with Amy Owen. She pasted pictures of her stupid cat all over the door.”

“All tenth graders get their own,” Pablo said. He pulled a cigarette and book of matches from his pocket. When he popped the cigarette in his mouth and lit up, the flame illuminated the marks on his hand. They were worse than Hannah thought.

Rebecca shot up in her chair. “What happened to you?” she shrieked.

“Her cast,” he said, looking down at it accusingly.

“Sorry,” Hannah said.

“What did it do?” Rebecca wanted to know.

“It fucked me up.”

“It’s not a person,” Hannah said, feeling drunk. “It didn’t beat you up, Pablo. You’re both acting like it’s alive.”

“What?” he said. “You’re not making any sense.”

“I am too,” she protested, not at all sure.

But no one was listening to her. It was as if she’d disappeared.

“That looks painful, Pab,” Rebecca cooed, leaning over and holding his wrist.

Hannah looked at Pablo’s hand and felt embarrassed that something on her body had hurt him. “I’m sorry.
It’s
sorry,” she said.

“We’ve got a first-aid kit somewhere,” Rebecca said, and then she was gone, rushing out of the backyard and bolting up the stairs.

Alone again, the two of them turned quiet. Hannah knew things were all wrong. She didn’t like Pablo enough, and worse, he didn’t like her enough, despite what they’d done in the den. “You drive like a little old lady,” she said.

He was silent, picking at his scratches.

Then, Rebecca was rushing down the stairs, breasts bouncing in her T-shirt. By the time she got to him with the bottle of iodine and a handful of cotton balls, his hand looked even worse and he’d started to bleed.

Rebecca held the cotton ball to the bottle’s mouth, and then she was leaning forward, dabbing at the tiny red dots, saying, “Here, let me help you, let me clean this up. He’s hurt, Hannah,” she said. “Can’t you see Pab’s hurt?”

MARTIN MADE
the third restaurant his own and left the other two restaurants to Sandy and her husband, who were happy to take control of them. Kettle’s served mostly Italian food and the first thing Martin did was add some menu choices. He made use of what he’d learned in cooking school. He added the Thai-spiced fish, even though his mom insisted it didn’t fit with the rest of the menu. He added a flourless chocolate cake and a lemon meringue pie.

And he was drinking again, but was sure he had it under control. One beer a night—who would it kill? It was the only time he talked to people other than Tony or his mom or the men and women in the kitchen. He liked sitting after work with the waitresses and his one beer. He liked to keep the lights low and the red candles burning on the tables. Mostly he stayed quiet while letting the girls talk. They rolled up their sleeves. They unsnapped their barrettes and shook their hair free over their shoulders. They loosened the belts from their uniforms or took them off completely, draping them over chairs.

He liked them all, the brunette, the married redhead, and the one whose hair was a different color every other week: Cindy, Suzanne, and Suzy. It was hard to keep their names straight, but the redhead, Suzanne, her voice, the way she moved her hands when she spoke, the way she wiped off her lipstick with a napkin and her lips stayed pink, remained with him long after their little party of four had broken up. Images of her talking or laughing or even one night crying followed him as he walked home. The images followed him into bed and into his dreams.

He nursed one beer.

Another night he nursed two.

At first the girls asked him questions about his life.

Do you have a girlfriend?

Where do you live?

Is your friend Tony, the doctor, married to that woman he brought in on Saturday?

How is your mother getting on without your father?

Why did you move away?

And why Las Vegas?

He gave short answers. Sometimes he shook his head, saying, “I don’t want to talk about me.” After repeated attempts, they stopped asking. He liked that they didn’t insist and that they let him sit with them while they talked and drank. The more they drank, the more intense their conversations became. Their laughter grew louder, they cussed and gossiped.

He listened to their stories of an unfaithful boyfriend, a husband who slept too much and ate too little, a miscarriage. He just sat and listened and stared at them or stared at the candle’s flame, and sometimes he thought they almost forgot he was there, and that suited him just fine. He liked looking at them and he liked hearing their voices and he liked putting his fingertip in the hot wax, letting it dry, and peeling it off, letting the wax collect on the little napkin in front of him.

The girls talked about cheap tippers, the grapefruit diet, and birth control methods. Cindy or Suzy talked about church. Someone mentioned a shoe sale at the mall. Suzanne talked about the husband who was always asleep on the couch when her shift was over. She said that his breath had grown sour over the years and that lately he’d been refusing to eat what she cooked for him.

One night, after the restaurant had bustled with big spenders and generous tippers whom the girls were still talking about, Martin splurged and drank beers without counting. He used a key to open the bar and pulled a bottle of whiskey from a shelf. They drank and drank. He told the girls about his life in Vegas, cooking school, and his friendship with Tony. He ran a hand along the back of his chair and asked them if it was possible to tell the difference between expensive vinyl and cheap leather.

“Vinyl’s never expensive, is it?” Suzy said, looking at Suzanne and Cindy for confirmation.

Both women shrugged and all of them started laughing, even Martin, who suddenly didn’t give a shit what his chairs were made of. What mattered was that he had a place to sit.

When the laughter stopped, though, Suzanne wiped off her lipstick and started to cry. She told them about her husband again, how he was losing weight, becoming skinny. His face was gaunt and cruel, she told them. And he didn’t say good-bye when he left the house for work. She missed those first few years of marriage when he wouldn’t leave a room without kissing her, when he hungrily and appreciatively ate what she’d cooked for him.

It was after three a.m. when Martin found himself in the back of the restaurant with Suzanne. The other two kept up their chatter and he could hear their voices while he was kissing Suzanne and she was kissing him back, while he was unbuttoning the top of her uniform and slipping his hand inside.

“I’m married,” she said, but she continued kissing him and let her hand fall to his crotch.

•  •  •

The four of them staying after work became the three of them—Suzanne always running home to her thin, sleeping husband.

It stung every time she said good-bye. When she rushed off or waved or when he heard the door click shut, he felt rejected.

Once, while he was setting a plate of pasta primavera under the hot lamps, she approached the counter and he tried to apologize for what had happened between them, when really it was a mutual thing and she’d seemed pretty happy while it was happening. He remembered how they’d moved to the cot in the back and how she’d wrapped her long legs around him and told him she’d been waiting for him for a long time, such a long time, she had said.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” he said, leaning forward, feeling the heat from the lamps on his arms. “I mean, I’m sorry if you’re sorry, which you seem to be. I’m not sorry myself.”

Suzanne looked at him blankly like it hadn’t been her that night and he hadn’t been him and she didn’t know what the hell he was even talking about. “Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much,” she said.

“What?” he said, surprised.

“You heard me,” she said, grabbing the plate and spinning around, walking back to the dining room.

“Maybe
you
shouldn’t,” he called after her.

The next day Suzanne called in sick.

And the next.

And the one after that.

She had a cold that wouldn’t let go, maybe it was the flu, she said, sniffling dramatically, coughing in between words. And then finally she just stopped coming in and didn’t bother to call. He’d heard from one of the busboys that she’d been waiting tables at a French restaurant in Huntington Beach. And then Cindy told him that Suzanne and her husband were happy again and moving to San Francisco or San Diego, she couldn’t remember which.

And then none of the girls stayed after work, each night with a different excuse.
I’m tired
or
I’ve got visitors from out of town
or
I think I’m coming down with something.

He stayed after work alone, sitting in the corner in the near dark with only one candle burning, drinking beer after beer. He didn’t keep track anymore and he didn’t care. He didn’t need those waitresses—they needed
him,
their jobs, he told himself. They were just waitresses and he was the boss. He was in charge of things. If he wanted to, he could fire them all and hire some new girls and ruin things all over again.

He drank until the bottles lined up in front of him, until he knocked one over and it crashed to the floor. He might have had six and he might have had seven. He might have had eight or nine.

He stepped over the broken glass and stumbled to the kitchen where he devoured what was left of the lemon meringue pie. He ate right from the tin with a spoon that still tasted like rice pilaf. He ignored the crust and scooped up the creamy yellow middle.

He woke up in his bed the next morning but didn’t remember the walk home. The front door to the apartment was open and his keys hung from the doorknob. He found one shoe by the bed. When he opened the fridge, he found the other shoe on a shelf between the milk and eggs.

Still, he wasn’t like Tony, he didn’t need those AA people, those prying losers. He’d stopped drinking before and he could stop again. Cutting down was even easier. He thought about those first nights after work, sitting with Cindy, Suzy, and Suzanne for hours, nursing his single beer of the night. He could do that again. No more shoes in the fridge for me, he told himself. He didn’t need to go to a fucking meeting, didn’t need to stand up and identify himself as powerless, to confess his secrets to a bunch of nosy assholes.

HANNAH WATCHED
the saw’s spinning blade. She looked at the doctor’s big hand holding the saw. She looked at his hairy knuckles and the thick veins shooting up his arms, and thought about all the doctors who had come before him, their many sets of hands and how they differed, how they were the same. She thought about the way her leg had been handled and touched and twisted by those hands, the casts they had made and removed, and how each time her leg popped free, it looked less familiar, less
hers,
thinner and more traumatized.

She thought about the time a particularly frustrated doctor had let go of her leg, dropping it like it was hot to the touch, how she wasn’t ready, how she’d trusted and given him the weight of it. She thought about his repeated apologies after her leg had hit the examination table with a hard thud. She remembered her mom driving too fast, speeding toward the yellow lights, and cursing him all the way home.

She thought about the doctor who looked insane, who smiled continually, a big, exaggerated grin reminding her of a carved pumpkin, and the one who was always in a rush and liked to say
Let’s make this happen
.
Let’s get going. Let’s get on our way,
as if the two of them were taking a vacation together.

She thought about the one who smelled like pastrami, who slid up to the examination table on his stool, too close to her face with his spicy, meaty breath. She remembered how he’d looked directly into her eyes, explaining each and every thing he was about to do to her leg in exhausting medical jargon.

She thought of their names, their nurses, and tried to remember their faces. She thought of the white powder that shot from their saws like snow when they lifted them from this cast or that cast or this one, supposedly, hopefully, the last one, the very last cast that Dr. Russo was preparing to remove now.

His bald spot, the size of a coaster, sat directly on top of his head and was surrounded by two white puffs of hair. His neck was thick with small red bumps traveling from his Adam’s apple to his chin. Dr. Russo wore a blue coat instead of a white coat and it reminded her of the coats the guys wore who worked at the car wash by her house.