When afternoon rolls around, I go to my car and hide. Everyone knows about my meeting with Rob, so it’s easier to stay low and keep to myself. My morning’s been a marathon of veiled small talk with people trying to get the pulse of things, but nobody’s concerned about me. They’re all looking out for themselves, as people do when there’s a whiff of change, and I’m either an alliance worth having or a waste of time.
Mark used to make fun of me for not knowing anything about cars. One morning, during our senior year of high school, I called him and asked him to pick me up since I had a flat tire. He asked me why I didn’t change it, and when I told him I didn’t know how, the drubbing began. Nothing too harsh, but I spent the next few years being asked if I knew how to fill up my gas tank (yes), change a headlight (no), change my oil (no), and all other sorts of repairs (probably no).
My phone rings. I check the name to make sure it’s not Brian, hoping to avoid the when-will-you-be-here? talk, then grab it off the passenger seat and pick up.
“Hey, hon,” Lauren says.
“What’s up?” I lean into my seat and stare at the concrete wall and the D3 location marker painted on it. I park here because of the Mighty Ducks movies, even though the third one sucks.
“Not much,” she says. “I took the afternoon off. Thought you might want to grab lunch or something.”
I tap my finger on the steering wheel and wait for the follow-up. Lauren doesn’t take off work for anything, so after a few seconds of silence, I cave. “Really?”
“Yeah,” she says. “When’s your lunch?”
“I’m on it. I’m in my car.”
She pauses, and I can picture her biting her lower lip, thinking over how to best respond. I consider telling her about the promotion, picture her lighting up and throwing her arms around me, but decide to wait.
“How about The Lodge?” she says.
The Lodge is a New York-style pizza place that opened a few months back. Next to my house, it’s probably my favorite place to be. The pizza’s cheap, the beer’s cheaper, and the service is no-frills.
“That sounds awesome.”
“Great,” she says, and I can almost hear her smile. She’s trying to be nice here, supporting me even though she’d rather be at work. “See you soon.”
I get to The Lodge in just under ten minutes. When I turn into the lot, Lauren’s leaning against her Jeep, dark hair whipping across her face as she stares down at her cell phone.
I park next to her and step out of my car. She slides her phone into her pocket, then gives me a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek. “You seemed bummed this morning. Thought a pizza date might do the trick.”
“Thanks,” I say. “What’s the slice of the day?”
“Bacon and banana pepper.”
I grab her hand, and we start walking toward the door. “That sounds awesome.”
She walks through the door as I open it and leads me to a table near the bar. The Lodge is an old VFW joint brought back to life with a fresh set of white and dark red walls, a polished bar, and a handful of dart boards, TVs, and more. They’ve sprinkled the place with a collection of drawings—things people have scribbled on napkins, the backs of receipts, and anything else, really—that make it almost seem like a curated display. A kid’s drawing of a pizza here, a picture of King Kong climbing a giant breadstick there. No rhyme or reason. Just character.
The place is mostly empty, though. There’s nothing on TV at this point except for a pre-season look at Louisville’s football team and some baseball highlights, which a few older men huddle around.
“How’d work go?” Lauren asks.
“All right,” I tell her. “They offered me a promotion.”
Her eyes pop open. “What?”
“Don’t act too surprised.”
Her head moves back and forth like some sort of creepy, dying toy. “I’m not,” she says. “It’s just that you—well, after last time, you’ve been kind of, I don’t know. Disengaged. What’s the promotion?”
I look down at the table and run my thumb across the grain of the wood. I guess there will be no lighting up, no jumping hugs into my arms or anything of the sort. Just surprise.
“Director of Strategic Initiatives,” I tell her. I puff my chest some, sit up a little straighter. You know, sit how a director should.
“You take it?”
The bartender’s voice echoes between us before I can respond. “You want any beers?”
“Two,” Lauren says. “A PBR and a Bell’s Two Hearted.”
I smile. “Thanks. And, yeah.”
“You excited?”
Over Lauren’s shoulder, I notice a drawing of Spider-Man eating a slice of pizza. The ’90s Spider-Man, with the giant white eyes, big spider on the chest, muscles so big he almost looks scary. The Spider-Man Mark and I grew up on.
“Yeah,” I tell her, coming to. “It’s a good opportunity to start over. Get a new set of legs now that I’m not under Amanda.”
The bartender brings our beers. Lauren takes a drink from hers, holding the neck of the bottle between her fingers so casually that I half-worry it’s going to fall out and shatter. Things like that don’t happen to Lauren, though.
“That’s fantastic, hon.” She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. “You really deserve this.”
I take those words in, let them marinate in my consciousness. Even if it wasn’t the response I wanted, after finding out about Mark, it’s nice to have something to look forward to.
I point to the chalkboard menu on the wall. “Slice of the day?”
“God no,” Lauren says. “Slice of pep.”
I turn toward the bartender. “Slice of the day and a slice of pep?”
He nods and repeats my order to the kitchen.
Lauren leans forward and rests her elbows on the table. “So you’re not going to Lafayette then, right?”
“What?”
Lauren opens her mouth, then closes it. She pushes herself up in her seat, shoulders square, before resting her hands in her lap. “This isn’t an entry-level job you’re working anymore,” she says. “You can’t just take a promotion and run.”
My eyes narrow, and I can feel the grimace spreading across my face. Lauren has a knack for comments like this. She means well in her attempt to nudge me toward how she’d behave, but she doesn’t always realize that, despite a few hiccups, I’ve accomplished a thing or two on my own.
“I already talked to Rob about it.”
Lauren pulls her lips in tight, forming a thin line across her face. At one point, she was on some love language kick, and she told me that in moments like these, she’s trying to gather her thoughts, and that I need to respect the way she processes things. “I mean, that was nice of him and all, but are you sure it’s the best look after what happened last time?”
I pull the tab off the top of my PBR and set it on the table. She could be right, of course. Last time this happened, I was all but offered the position when the company reorganized and it disappeared. This time, though, I had actually been offered it. At least I think I was, right?
Lauren grabs the tab and flips it between her thumb and forefinger. She stares at it as it moves between her fingers, top to bottom, bottom to top. After about twenty of these, she sets it down. “What are you really going to accomplish if you go home?”
My mouth drops. “What?”
The bartender brings our pizza to the table, sliding our plates to each of us before turning away. Lauren grabs for the Parmesan and starts sprinkling some on her slice. “All you’ve ever told me is that everything fell apart. What are you really trying to accomplish?”
I stumble over thoughts, trying to figure out how we got from my promotion to here. “Are you saying I’m wasting my time?”
Lauren folds her slice in half and takes a bite. “I didn’t say that,” she says. “I just think it would be good for you to focus on what you have here. It’s not like things have come easily for you at work. Maybe things are finally turning around.”
I look down at my slice spilling over the plate, grease shimmering in the little light the place offers up.
“You’re not mad, are you?”
I take a swig from my PBR. “No,” I tell her. Sometimes, when she goes on like this, it’s easier to go along with it. “I understand where you’re coming from,” I add, even though I don’t, knowing now more than ever that I could use some support.
She reaches across the table, grabbing my hand again and squeezing it gently. “Thanks. Now, eat your pizza. This is the slice of the day, you know. Last chance.”
I force a smile against the disappointment. “Yeah. Thanks.”
“You really okay?”
I stop mid-bite and set my pizza back down on the plate. “I mean, not really. No. Not at all.”
“What?”
“What do you expect me to say? My friend is dead, and all I want to do is go home and help my friends take care of some of his stuff. It’s good enough for my boss, but not good enough for you?”
Lauren’s frozen right before taking a bite, her slice resting on both hands, mouth open, eyes wide. Spider-Man’s still behind her, making just about the same face. I don’t know what Spider-Man’s feeling, but Lauren’s somewhere between confusion and anger—the raised eyebrows, the way she sets her slice back down without taking a bite—and I know she wants to snap back but won’t. She’s trying to be a good listener.
“I understand it’s not an easy decision, but I think you need to—”
“Not easy? That’s what you can come up with? It was easy. It was easy for me and Rob and anyone else who actually has a say until you stormed in and decided it wasn’t good enough for you.”
We sit in silence for a couple minutes. Lauren picks at her pizza, grabbing slices of pepperoni between her thumb and forefinger and popping them into her mouth, and I stare over her shoulder at the drawing of Spider-Man, wondering what Mark would have thought about this place if I ever would have invited him down here.
“Are you going to eat?” Lauren asks.
I push the plate toward the center of the table. “I’m good.”
“Okay,” she says. “I think I’m just going to work, then.”
“Of course you are.”
Lauren kisses me on the cheek on her way out the door, leaving me fuming. I can’t see him, but the bartender’s staring at me. That’s what happens in situations like this—she fucks up, I get mad, and everyone thinks it’s my fault. I want to say something to him, but truth is, he’d kick my ass. It’d be middle school all over again, a pummeling for no reason other than opening my mouth, and Mark wouldn’t even be here to help me.
Loneliness creeps over me, covering me like a long shadow I can’t get away from, and I fold my slice in half and take a bite, letting the greasiness envelope me like a sickness. I force another bite and slouch into my seat, and it hits me that I couldn’t care less about whoever might walk in and what their opinion might be.
Five hours later, I’ve called into work, eaten three slices, drunk two pitchers of PBR, bought the now-full bar a round of shots, and watched two ESPN 30 for 30s (one on the XFL, and one on Reggie Miller). I’m right at that point where I think I’ll get kicked out if I do anything stupid, so I’ve kept my mouth shut and stared at the Spider-Man on the wall instead. Comics are something living, with each panel relying on the next, and I can’t help but feel sorry for this ’90s-era Spider-Man stuck forever in an attempt to eat a goddamn slice of pizza.
I wonder if Mark has his old comics. I got him hooked on them. He was always a reader, so he wanted to know the backstories, the alternate universes, the whole shebang. He had longboxes of them in his house—Beth hated them, but she’d never take them away—and he’d read them all backwards and forwards until he knew everything about them.
Mark can’t have them, though. He can’t have anything because he’s not present to have anything. He had them and he’s dead, and the comics are probably sitting where he left them, waiting for someone to do something with them.
I imagine picking up my phone, sliding my thumb across the screen, and calling Beth. Is her number even the same? In my head it is, and the phone gets to only half a ring before she picks up. Her voice is electric, bright as she tells me how long it’s been, how much she’s missed me and how sorry she is that we were never able to talk about what happened. She hints that she knows I’m drunk, and she asks where I am before I tell her that I’m at this cool little pizza place in Louisville, a place I think she’d love. I picture her holding her hand to her chest, like people in movies do when they’re flattered, and I try to imagine what she’s wearing. In my head, she’s wearing the blue blink-182 T-shirt I made fun of her for once, and the only reason I know this is because she’s told me because of course I’d call her on the day she’s wearing it. I imagine asking her if I should come home, and, in my head, there’s a pause. Then, an “of course” as she tells me that I’m being stupid, that everything’s fine and that she can’t wait to see me.
I imagine us talking for hours about what we’ve been up to and what we’re going to do when I get to town. When I come to, though, it’s been five minutes, and my phone’s black. I look down at the table and run my finger around a ring of condensation, smearing the water in an ugly circle. Each wet lap my thumb makes around it muddles my thoughts a little further until Beth isn’t happy to see me at all, until she’s thrown away the blink-182 shirt and changed her number because I screwed everything up by sleeping with her and being a shitty friend and running away.
It’s going to be okay, though, I tell myself. This is my chance to fix things.
I get home at a quarter past ten. Lauren’s on the couch when I walk in, reading a book in her sweatpants while her glasses rest on the middle of her nose. Jabba’s on the other end of the couch, curled up in a white-and-brown ball, ears flopped over his eyes. The whole scene reminds me of when I’d sneak out late in high school and my dad would stay up waiting for me.
I take in a breath, then let it out slowly. “Hey.”
Lauren closes her book, pages rattling off the tips of her thumbs as they meet in between the covers. She sets her glasses on the coffee table, then looks up at me. “Hi.”
“I’m leaving in the morning.”
She nods, and a strand of her hair falls in front of her face. She leaves it there. “You know I can’t go with you, right?”
I should have figured.
“I’m sorry.” She looks down at Jabba, then at a bowl of fruit, then down at her book. “I might be able to come up for the funeral, but I can’t make it up for everything else. Eric just has me too busy at work right now.”
“It’s fine,” I tell her. I don’t know if I believe myself, but there’s not much else to say. Our relationship counselor would be proud of me.
“I’m sorry about earlier too. That was pretty shitty of me. What you’ve done, what you’ve put up with at work and gone through the last couple days, it’s pretty remarkable.”
I look over her shoulder at a shelf on the wall behind her. It holds three plants, big and leafy and flowery, that Lauren’s kept alive as long as we’ve lived here. Next to one of them sits a small Power Rangers action figure I snuck up there when we moved. Despite Lauren checking on those plants every day, it took her three months to notice it. As a reward, she said, I could keep it up there.
“Jack?”
I shake my head, coming to. “Sorry. Thanks,” I tell her. “That means a lot.”
Talking through this and trying to sort this mess of a situation out, all I can think about is that she might be right. That maybe I shouldn’t take time off work, that I should stay here instead. Take care of myself. I can’t shake the feeling, though, that I can do it. I can take some time off work, get back to Lafayette for a few days, sort things out with everyone there, then come back, get started on this new job, and live my life with Lauren. I look up at the Power Ranger next to her plants, though, frozen forever in a battle pose, and see everything I could lose if I screw this up.