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I roll off of our mattress and stumble my way into the bathroom, heaving into the toilet. I’m not typically a person who throws up. I hate throwing up almost more than anything. I feel immediately better, though, and rinse my mouth and go back to the bed, suddenly realizing Warren isn’t there. I make my way down the hall and find him sitting at the little metal table in the kitchen. He is staring out the window into the alley, at the bricks of the building across. I run my hand over his shoulder and up into his hair. He pulls down his headphones and turns the music off.
“Hey.” He draws my hand to his lips and kisses my fingers, “Did I wake you?”
“No. I just woke up.” I pour some water from the faucet into a plastic cup and sit down across from him. He looks tired. “You okay?”
He nods, drawing his lip into his mouth, biting and dragging it back. He make my knees weak. He still takes my breath away. He says, “Maybe it’s time to move on.”
“What do you mean?” The shadows under his eyes aren’t just fatigue, I realize, but worry, too. His fingernails are chewed to the quick.
“You know. Just head west. The music scene out there is just better. Happening, you know?” He says it like it is the “thing,” but his eyes slide off of me and back to the bricks across the alley.
The gnawing in my stomach says, “Liar.”
No, I don’t know, but I almost don’t have the heart to tell him. I don’t want to move on. I’ve just started to feel comfortable here. I’ve just started feeling like I could belong here. “But I’m pretty happy here.” My voice is small, plaintive.
“I’m not. I’m just spinning my wheels here. Wasting time.” He isn’t talking about me. I have to remind myself of that. It’s not me he’s trying to get away from. He wants to take me with him.
“I thought we had something good here.” If biting my own tongue off would drag those words back to me, I would do it. I would bring them back, those pathetic words.
“Yeah, we do,” he says and the muscles of his jaws flex and release, then flex again, letting his eyes draw across my face, almost like he wants to memorize me. "I just screwed everything up, Al.” He swallows hard and looks back to the window. His expression shifts, and I see anger there, and fear . . . and a coldness that I’ve not seen before. “I just have to go.”
“Why?” He doesn't look at me, and I reach out, cupping his face in my hand. He jerks away, like I’ve burned him, and I see the small red bruise, low, along his collarbone. I draw my hand back.
“I can’t tell you,” he says, and he doesn’t need to explain. I understand. I get it.
“You mean it’s time for you to move on, not for us to move on,” I say. My back is getting up, ready to fight. He’s not all I thought he would be either, but I’m not up and walking away. But he is. He is planning to go it alone, without me. I feel the blood rising up my neck and my cheeks. I am on fire when he finally speaks.
“No, no. Baby.” He draws his brows together, squeezing my hand in his. “It’s not you, Al. You’re great. It’s just me. There are things you don’t know.”
“Then tell me. I'm not a kid anymore, Warren.”
“I can’t. I’m just not ready.”
“For what?” My own cold is drawing up my spine, and the flames in my cheek are doused. I lean back, away from him, folding my arm across my chest. My own eyes narrowing.
“Dammit, Al. Don’t look at me like that. I’ve been good to you.”
“Oh. All right.” But I keep looking at him like that, cold and aloof. He is not going to hurt me. “So what are you not ready for?” I put air quotes around “not ready” and feel my sarcasm rising.
He drops his head into his hands, and when he looks up again, his hair stands in spikes from his head. “I can’t tell you,” he insists through gritted teeth, a snarl.
“So, you’re just going to leave. That’s fine. Just go.” My voice is so low and casual that we could be talking about whether to have eggs with bacon or without for breakfast.
“It's not like that.”
“Whatever,” I say, dismissing him and turning to look out the window at the bricks.
“I mean, I love you, Al, but I’m just not ready to be all tied down and shit.” It sounds like an excuse; it sounds like something he planned to say, part of a script.
“You asked me to move here,” I say, steel edging the back of my words.
“Yeah, well . . .” He looks away from me, and I don’t understand. It’s not like I ask anything of him. “It’s just cramping my style.” He shifts his shoulders, and I see it again, the bite mark on his neck, his player self slipping like a jacket across his shoulders.
“Liar,” I hiss and then snap my mouth closed with a click, glaring at the brick wall outside our window.
I replay the conversations over the course of the last few weeks, stories of bar chicks—“This chick threw her bra up on stage last night.”—and the several times when I have found phone numbers stuffed in his jeans when I went to wash them. Has he mentioned a name? No. No names . . . except Sylvie who works the bar. I reframe the conversations in my head and now see the sliding of his eyes off of me when he mentions her name, the odd giddy shift in his stance, moving away.
It’s all the same shit I saw in Mitch, my mom’s then boyfriend, back when he first started seeing Theresa, the woman he left mom for. I blow out a puff of air. “Is it Sylvie?” I let my eyes draw back to him, just in time to see his innocent-man face snap to place.
“No.”
“Then who is it?” I ask, my voice controlled and quiet.
“It’s just me,” he says with none of the innocent-man-caught-up-in-a-lie pretense that I would know a mile away. He just sounds tired, worn out, exhausted. “I screwed up.”
Is that an admission? Is he saying he screwed up and slept with somebody, fell in love with somebody? Is that what he means? What does that mean to me? Do I want him if he doesn't want me?
“So who gave you the bite?” I ask, trying to keep my voice level.
“It’s not a bite. Dammit. I told you. There’s nobody.”
“It looks like a bite.”
He explodes up and out of the chair, throws it back against the wall, and I flinch away from him, a reflex.
“I fucking told you it’s not a bite!” He storms down the hall and the front door slams. His feet pound down the steps, and he is gone. Less than a minute later, I hear his car rocket through the alley.
“Elvis has left the building,” I murmur. Just like that, just with the opening and closing of the door, with the refusal to talk, the inability to communicate when the topic is tough, I have become my mother. Pathetic, left behind, not enough. Fatally ill-equipped to manage my own life. If I were my mother, I would go and find a drink. Maybe there is something to that. If I were a drinker, maybe I wouldn’t feel so empty all of the time. But I am not my mother, and Warren is not Mitch, and I don’t care what he says—that was a bite on his neck. I am not weak. I refuse to blame myself for his choice. I am enough, dammit. I am good and I am kind and I loved him with everything I had. If that isn’t enough, then he is broken, not me. He needs more from a lover and partner than I have to offer.
Once I have come solidly to terms with the fact that, even though the idea of having a drink and numbing out the hollow in my soul sounds tempting, I am not my mother. I must take a shower and go downstairs and start my day at Lola’s. That’s what you do. You go do your job. You be an adult.
Warren doesn’t come back that night, or the next morning. I spend a restless night thinking about all the things that could have happened, but then I notice there are things missing. His clothes. His shoes. His damn razor. He came back while I was at Lola’s and carried his shit out. The bastard left me, high and dry.
That night, I make a white-knuckled drive to Cheaters. I follow a group of college-aged kids in and hover around the back, feeling out of place and uncomfortable. The music is loud and the lights are low, with occasional strobes passing over the dancefloor. A DJ is cranking out the music tonight, although the stage is set with the Hellions’ instruments. When my eyes adjust, I see that I’m no different than anybody else. I push my shoulders back and hold my head up, trying to project confidence that I don’t feel. I get to the bar, and a tall, blond man is serving up drinks. I wait to get to the front of the counter, and he leans low to hear me.
“I’m looking for Sylvie,” I yell into his ear, and he glances at his watch.
“Fifteen minutes. She’s in at seven.”
I nod and step out of the way of the people jostling me. I find a dark corner and wait, trying to figure out what I’m doing here. What am I going to say to her when I see her?
When I think twenty minutes has passed, I force my way back into the crowd and up to the bar. A girl turns from the counter, her eyes still on the handsome bartender, and steps into me. Her drink spills all over my shirt and arms. I jump back, but the damage is done. She looks at me with large, startled eyes, spidery legs of mascara spreading out from them.
“Shit!” she squeals and looks at me like I did something to her. Which I didn’t. I was the one standing still when she ran into me.
“Yeah, shit,” I say, drawing myself up to my highest point, matching her belligerent stare with my own. I’ve dealt with drunk people all my life, and confrontation is never the best course of action, but for some reason I can’t make myself retreat from her.
“You should watch where you’re going,” she whines, looking at the small amount of liquid still in her glass.
“I was standing still.” I say it in a calm, logical voice. You should stop flirting with pretty boy there and watch where you are going, I think, but don’t dare say. I hold my ground, not wanting to fight, but damn sure not going to apologize to some drunk chick for her dumping a drink on me.
I glance up and see pretty boy watching, and I raise my hands, shaking the remains of her drink from my fingers. He smiles and hands me a towel. In his other hand is a replacement drink for the girl. “Look,” I say to the girl with every bit of sarcasm I can muster. “Pretty Boy is taking care of you.” I nod at the drink he is holding as I wipe myself off. She turns slowly with my nod, and her demeanor completely changes.
“Aw,” she purrs, “thank you, Tommy.” She takes a gulp of what is left of the drink she dumped on me and sets the empty glass on the bar, exchanging it for the other.
“Yep,” Tommy says.
The girl turns back to me, her smile still in place. “I'm sorry about your shirt,” she says. “It’s so crowded in here.”
I give her a small smile. “It’s cool,” I say, and we pass each other. I wait for Tommy to come back to me from where he has moved down to the other end of the bar. There are two other bartenders behind the bar, and they work their way around each other. I notice that most of the women watch Tommy, trying to catch his eye to get their drinks. I wonder if that is because he is good looking or because he is good at mixing drinks. I hand him the towel he gave me, and he stashes it somewhere under the bar. “Sylvie made it in yet?” I ask, and he nods.
“Yeah. She should be downstairs.” He points toward the wall, and I see a door with an arrow pointing downward, the words “The Hole” printed in blocky letters on the arrow. I thank Tommy and jostle and force my way through the crowd to the door leading downstairs.
The stairs are narrow, and I begin to feel a little panicky in the darkness—except for the glow of lights at the base of the stairs—but I keep going. The door above me falls shut, and the music from above drops to a pulse. I end up in a basement, and the crowds that overwhelm the world above are greatly diminished. There are pool tables and a few booths around the edges. I make my way to the bar and climb up on a stool. There are two women working, and both look to be in their mid-twenties. I wonder which one is Sylvie. I wonder which one has been sleeping with Warren.
The one with the blond hair turns to me, her eyeliner dark and too thick around her close-set eyes, making them look even closer, and for a small second, I have the vision of her as a cyclops before her eyes separate again into two. “Hiya,” she says. “What can I get for you?”
A man down the way is eating a burger and fries, and I order the same, suddenly hungry and needing to kill some time. I’m not sure that coming here was a good idea. She brings me the food, and I ask when the Hellions will be back.
“They ain’t up there?” she asks, tilting her head.
“No. Just a DJ.”
She furrows her brow. “I didn’t notice. This is Friday?” I nod. “I don’t know then, I thought they were here Fridays; they usually are.”
“Do you know Sylvie?”
“I’m Sylvie. Who are you?”
“Nobody. Just a friend told me Sylvie worked here and she’d know about the band.” She seems to accept this, and I start to eat on the fries.
“So what do you want to know about the band?”
“I think the drummer is cute. What’s his name?” I ask, not looking at her, feeling like my deceit will be visible.
“Warren?” she asks. “Yeah, he’s a cutey all right.”
“I was hoping to meet him. Could you get me in touch with him?” I ask, watching her closely for the sign of possession. I wait for her to tell me that he is her man and I better back off. I wait for her to confirm my suspicions, so I can think the worst of him, that he is just like Mitch, or worse yet, Cal.
“You looking to hook up with him, or what?” she asks, wiping the counter with a rag, not looking like a woman who cares one way or the other.
“Well, you know.” I say, trying to keep my voice from shaking, but feeling a blush creep up my cheeks all the same.
“Well,” she says, blowing out a long breath, “good luck with that.” My eyes narrow, and I look down at my food, my appetite disappearing. There it is, confirmation.
“What’s that mean?” I ask, knowing that she is about to tell me the truth.
“Warren doesn’t mess around. He’s got a girl.”
“Oh.” That’s not what I expected to hear. “She work here?” I ask.
“Naw. I’ve never met her. He’s crazy about her though.” She smiles, “They moved here together.”
“Well, that sucks.” I say, because if he didn’t leave me because there was somebody else, then he left me just because of me. He's not as crazy about me as he may have let on.
***
I know I am not my mother, but after the hour-long drive home, I make my way into the kitchen and climb up on the counter, reaching deep into the highest cabinet, where I've seen Warren tuck his booze, as if he’s afraid I'll become my mother yet. My fingers close around the glass, and I draw it forward, shifting and hopping down off of the counter.
Vodka. Of course it’s vodka. I pour a healthy slug into glass and slam it before I can change my mind. The fire builds in my stomach and rushes out through my veins. The swirling in my head slows and calms, just like when I cut. Oh, yes. I close my eyes, leaning against the sink. This one time, I think, I will be my mother. I crawl into bed, leaving the vodka bottle on the counter. I cry into my pillow because he left me, and he left me because of me. Nobody stole him from me; I was just not enough.
I have a restless night, and in the morning, I pour another glass of the vodka and down it, letting the little fire roar in my stomach, letting my mind go a little numb. I shower and dress for work. For once, I am grateful for the heavy scent of the perchloroethylene we use for the dry-cleaning. No chance in hell Lola will smell my vodka. Besides, vodka doesn’t have a scent, right?