There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell - v4 (2 page)

“
Go to dinner
. I promise I’ll pick up the slack,” Charlie said, as he took the box from her hands and ripped a tape gun across the bottom of it.

“I had a dream last night that the movers came and the only thing that was packed were all of my shirts,” she said. “And I had to pack the last thousand of your books in front of them, topless, while you went out and bought them donuts, after which the movers tried to toss them onto me like I was the ring toss at the carnival.”

“Go to dinner,” her husband repeated. “I promise I’ll finish the next fifteen things on your list if you go. That dream proves you need to relax a little and have some downtime. If you don’t go, I’m afraid you’ll start sleepwalking and I’ll wake up tomorrow wrapped in a giant tape cocoon, wiggling like larvae.”

“I just don’t know. I don’t think I can afford the time,” Maye replied.

“You can’t afford not to go,” he insisted. “Kate is one of your best friends. When do you think you’re going to see her again? We’re moving fifteen hundred miles away, you know. It’s not going to be a walk around the corner anymore.”

After thinking for a moment, Maye nodded. “You’re right,” she relented. “I promised I would. I should go. You promise you’ll do fifteen things on the list?”

“I promise,” Charlie said as he held his hand up. “I swear on the tape gun.”

“That doesn’t mean you can pack fifteen pairs of socks and call it a night, you know,” she told him as she shook her finger. “Because if you pack a box of toothpicks and tell me you’ve done a hundred and fifty things, Charlie, I’ll warn you right now: when the movers show up, they’ll be tossing donuts at your shirtless boobs.”

Within the hour before she was due at Kate’s, Maye had finished packing her vase, cleaned out the two top shelves of the fridge, and packed all the books in the bookcase (again). She tore through what remained in her closet and pulled out a light vintage checked cotton shirtdress, perfect for drinking wine on the back patio of her friend’s apartment on a hot summer night. In other words, a good sweating dress. For six long months in Phoenix, even after the sun slides behind the mountains, it’s a wise move to go straight to wash-and-wear. Anything synthetic will not only cling to your wet, leaking skin like a hickey on the neck of a high school senior on picture day but will cost you more than a reckless cocaine habit in dry cleaning. Maye looked down and realized her stubbly legs could use a little updating, but she was running late and it was far too hot for tights. Well, she figured, it was only she and Kate, anyway, and all they were really going to be doing was losing body fluids and getting tipsy. Unless a hungry cat showed up, no one was going to be touching her prickly legs.

“Charlie,” she called grabbing her purse and house keys. “I’m leaving. I’ll see you tonight.”

“Okay,” he shouted from the back of the house. “Have fun!”

Maye started down the three blocks to Kate’s apartment. In her own yard, she noticed how the verbena had finally come into its own, reaching and sprawling on the side of the house where she had planted it in the spring. She hoped her neighbor wouldn’t mind when it reached the chain-link fence that separated their yards and was the reason Maye had planted the verbena in the first place. By next spring, the plant should have a firm hold on the fence, weaving in and out of the wire diamonds in ribbons of tiny purple flowers.

It was then that Maye realized that she wouldn’t be there to see it. In four days, her house, the cute brick 1927 downtown bungalow that she and Charlie had scrimped and saved and struggled to buy when they were barely married, would belong to someone else. The wood floors they had refinished by themselves, the soapstone kitchen counter she had uncovered as she demolished a layer of eroding, mottled tile with a hammer and a flat-head screwdriver one night at 1 A.M. when Charlie was late coming home and she was furious. Those bookcases, and the fireplace they flanked, she had stripped seven layers of lead paint off of, only to discover that the mantel had been devoured by termites decades earlier. It was so far gone she had actually poked her fingers through the wood and decided to rebuild it herself. The jacaranda trees they had planted in the backyard, where a dust storm had threatened to suck them down as she and Charlie struggled, bandannas tied over their mouths, to keep them from toppling over. It was one thing to sell a house, Maye suddenly thought; it was another to understand it wasn’t yours any longer.

Once they got the incredible news that Charlie had been chosen to join the faculty at Spaulding University, things had to happen as quickly as the ceremony for a Catholic girl who needs to get married. A city-beat reporter for the local daily newspaper, Maye had highlighted the number of days she had remaining covering meth-lab busts, informed her editor that she’d be leaving by the summer’s end, and jumped into action like a superhero. They had two months to sell their house, pack their belongings, and find a new home before the fall term began, which wasn’t much time to move an entire life, especially one with a wife whose eBay feedback score was in excess of 550. Both Maye and Charlie had grown up in Phoenix, and they were excited to begin to build a new life in a charming college town in the mountains of Washington. They couldn’t wait to enjoy tall pines, cool breezes, and nice people away from the traffic, the heat, the crime, the pollution, and even, Maye now realized, their little house with the burglar alarm and wrought-iron bars over every window and door. They were tired of the grind of a hot, crowded city, and when, during their first trip to Spaulding, they passed a vivacious vegetable garden and smelled an onion that caught the breeze, there wasn’t a doubt in their minds. You would never smell an onion in Phoenix under any circumstances unless it was on someone’s breath and he was asking for a spare dollar. During that trip, they hadn’t heard one gunshot, they’d forgotten to lock the rental-car door on one occasion and
nothing was stolen;
and home invasions simply meant a neighbor drunk on microbrew had outstayed his welcome at a barbecue in the delightful little hamlet. They rushed back home, told their friends and families, and Maye began prowling the Dumpsters with her lucky stick. She had been so immersed in the details of relocating—including flying to Spaulding every other weekend to find a new home—that some things kind of slipped her attention.

Like the fact that she was not just going to Spaulding, but that she was leaving Phoenix.

By the time she got to Kate’s, she was sweating more than a chubby man in a backyard cage fight testing out his moves from a $19.98
Fast ’N Furious Head Bustin’ Street Smarts
DVD recently purchased from Wal-Mart and she wanted nothing more than to have a little face time with a glacier. She knocked on the door and heard Kate yell from the back of the apartment. “Come on in, I’m just opening the wine!”

“You are crazy,” Maye replied as she opened the door and stepped into the living room. “How do you know I’m not one of the fourteen sex offenders that live within a six-block radius of here?”

“Because your husband just told me it was you,” Kate said, laughing.

“What?” she asked, turning the corner into the kitchen.

And there, in fact, was Charlie, smiling. And Kate.

And Sara. And Brian. And Patrick. And Sandra, Curtis, Laura. Chrissy, Krysti, Nikki, Kim, Adrienne, Susan. Mark, Steven, Jeff.

Everybody.

Everybody was there. All of her friends. The friends who had let her crash on their couches when it wasn’t wise to drive home in more reckless times, friends who had loaned her money when the electricity was about to be shut off in leaner days, friends who had been there when she broke up with boyfriends, friends who had been her bridesmaids. Friends who had gasped in horror the first time she brought them to the little bungalow she’d just mortgaged, then helped scrape off layers of linoleum on the kitchen floor to get to the honey-colored fir buried below. Friends who had listened to her, friends she had listened to. Friends that she needed. Friends she had spent her life making.

Maye was stunned.

She had never been so glad to see all of them in her life. She gasped with happiness, and although she was grotesquely sweaty and had the legs of a lazy drag queen, she was incredibly happy. And she was also suddenly and horribly ashamed of herself.
These were her friends
. So what if she wasn’t at home, packing? These were her friends. How could she even think that it was more important to fill a couple of boxes? This was worth it, she decided—so worth it, even if she had to pack Charlie’s books topless in front of the movers. Hands down.

All of these people, she thought as she smiled—they know me. Charlie poured wine into a glass and gave it to her, and she lifted it up with everyone else as Kate made a toast.

“To Maye and Charlie,” she said. “May you be happy, prosper, and sweat less in Washington—but you’ll never find friends as good as us!”

“Here, here!” they all agreed as they burst out laughing.

“Look at you, skipping town when you still owe me twenty bucks from your bar tab the night you fought tequila and tequila won,” Nikki said. “I will continue to hold as collateral the ashtrays you pried out of the back of the cab with a butter knife you pocketed from IHOP when you insisted on having breakfast at four A.M. after the bar closed.”

“Oh, Maye, you owe me so much more than that for making me wear burgundy taffeta in public at your wedding,” Sara interjected. “And for never sending that picture of you peeing in the woods to that newspaper you worked for. Or…the tape.”

Maye laughed. “Why did I think we could get through one night without mentioning the tape? Yeah, well, I learned on that road trip that it’s never a good idea to get bombed with someone who is more than willing to let a video camera roll for forty minutes on a twenty-four-year-old drunk girl in a tent delivering an impromptu soliloquy on why any man would be lucky to get her,” she said.

“My favorite part was the ten minutes you spent proving your case that you had a better rack than any slut with implants,” Sara dutifully reminded her. “Complete with a multifaceted demonstration and the pronouncement that you could easily sell your pair to a flat-chested blond girl and pay off your credit card debt.”

“Don’t forget what she said about her ass,” Nikki reminded them.

“No!” Maye protested as she laughed and covered her face with her hands. “Please don’t!”

“‘With these pearly globes and a thousand more Marlboro miles, I could get me a triple-wide!’” Kate, Sara, and Nikki recited en chorus.

“I’m filing divorce papers tomorrow,” Charlie interjected, smiling.

“That video alone is enough to dissuade anyone from stealing my identity,” Maye added as she shuddered and turned a molten shade of red. “A copy of it should be attached to my credit report. Not even a meth addict would want to take on that variety of humiliation to simply assault the credit limit on my Master-Card. No weight-training set is worth that level of cringe, and the fact that you didn’t perform a mercy killing that night to spare me from a decade’s worth of third-degree embarrassment thus far just speaks to your own selfishness, you revolting hags. The cringe alone was potent enough to kill most ordinary humans.”

“Not Super Boob Globe Girl, apparently,” Sara added blithely. “She lives on. And on. Even if she is deserting us.”

You can move your furniture, you can move your books, you can move your underwear, but you can’t move your whole life, Maye really understood as they all laughed at old stories, the humiliating ones, the funny ones, and the ones only one another knew.

Some things, even things that took a lifetime to make, have to stay behind.

Spaulding, Washington, was indeed a charming place.

Nestled at the base of the North Cascade mountain range, the façade and landscape of the town hadn’t changed much in almost a century, since Malcolm Spaulding, visionary and ambassador of indoor plumbing, decided to find the prettiest spot in the country to call his home and build himself a sewer-pipe factory.

He found his utopia in a rainforest of towering pines, feathery, sweeping ferns, and, as he would repeatedly remark, a soil so rich you could grow love in it. An insufferable romantic despite the fact that his livelihood was shit, Malcolm Spaulding swore that from the base of the mountains, he had a view that stretched almost all the way to the Pacific Ocean on a brilliant day. In the summer it was sunny and warm enough to keep tomatoes ripening until fall; in the winter, a misty rain would swirl in and replenish the forest with the most essential ingredient it required to remain enchanted.

Everything in Spaulding grew, particularly the sewer-pipe factory. Spaulding, Washington, was not only a beautiful place, but its sole export was one of the main reasons that people didn’t need to keep poop buckets under their beds anymore. The town spread its beauty every time a toilet gurgled and flushed.

Spaulding had a definite sense of pride in having introduced civilization to the entire, thankful nation.

The town had grown with Spaulding Sewer Pipe’s prosperity, and in addition to the general store and streets of little houses came a school. Enamored as he was with the transportation of human waste, Malcolm Spaulding knew a town couldn’t survive on that gold mine alone. When he saw just exactly how the school had improved the already lovely town—the spelling bees the whole town attended, the Christmas pageant, and the school dances—he simply couldn’t help himself and decided to build a good, solid but small college, which was named, naturally, Spaulding Polytechnic Institute of Sewer Pipe Husbandry.

The residents of Spaulding liked the fact that their town was small enough that they could drive seven minutes to get anywhere and big enough that they could reach outside immediate family for romantic and reproductive purposes. The residents loved their town. To them, the world of Spaulding was perfect. Each street had two lanes, one for coming and one for going. The air stayed fresh and infused with the scent of rising bread dough from numerous bakeries and the hint of growing onions could be carried by a breeze on a warm, but not too hot, summer day.