The Year of Second Chances, page 5
Levi nodded, remembering. We were both silent, watching an old receipt catch in the wind and flutter up into the darkening sky.
“I don’t know if I ever thanked you for that.” I had a sudden memory of Levi picking Gabe up in his linebacker arms and carrying him to the bathroom, like a baby. Gabe was having trouble laughing without losing his breath. “So thank you.”
“You did. You thanked me a million times.”
“Oh. Good.”
Levi rubbed his face with his hand. “Listen, if this is going to be too much—”
“No!” I took a breath. “No. I haven’t really been out and about, so . . . Maybe it’s good to get back to doing something for others.”
“Good. Because a legacy of some kind . . . Something that helps people. That is peak Gabe, right?”
“I’m in, okay? I said I’m in.”
“Great!” Levi said, looking genuinely relieved.
I finally glanced at my phone. Five minutes until I was supposed to meet Colin Q. Barely enough time to apply emergency deodorant. “Now I really have to go.”
At this, Levi got a curious expression on his face. He took a step back, looking me up and down. “You’re kind of fancy.”
“Yeah.” Considering we had almost made each other cry in a checkout line, there was no way I could tell him I was gussied up to meet Joe Random from the internet.
Levi pulled his eyes from me and cleared his throat, suddenly very formal. “Um, okay, then. Bye.”
I watched him walk away. “Sorry I yelled at you in a Target, by the way,” I called.
He paused in his path but didn’t turn. Over his shoulder, he gave me a thumbs-up. “Super fun,” he called back. “Let’s do it again sometime.”
5
At a wedding you’ll find me . . .
Dancing to pop songs, scowling at all the other music selections, eating other people’s desserts.
The sounds of Lake Street traffic and the burning smell rising from smokers along the sidewalk made me feel momentarily young, windswept by memories from my early twenties, going out on a Friday night during my first job. When I reached the address, I ignored my reflection in the tinted glass and yanked open the door to darkness and heavy objects crashing, rolling across wood in a dull thunder. Bowl, I remembered from Colin’s message. So it was that kind of bowl.
A man rose at one of the tables, bulky, sweet-looking, hand up in a wave. My eyes adjusted. Beyond the dim front room scattered with tables, a series of lanes were bathed in blue and lavender light. Flashing animations of pins falling on the wall. Pitchers of beer. Cheering groups of friends. I returned the wave. There was no backing out now.
“Robin?” Colin grinned. He had very straight white teeth that didn’t seem to fit with the scruff on his chin, the hiking-style tennis shoes, the wrinkled T-shirt under a button-down.
I looked down at my navy wool blend and wished I had some sort of cool jacket to tone down the nine-to-five look. “That’s me,” I said. I held my hand out.
He didn’t notice the hand. “So you’re an accountant?”
“Ten years and counting.”
Colin laughed. I laughed because he did, then realized I had just made a joke. We sat.
I kept my hands under my thighs and ordered an IPA, hoping its bitterness would keep me from gulping it down. Colin ordered tots for the table and asked me how I was finding the app. Infuriating, I thought. Humiliating. “There are some nice guys,” I said.
He straightened in his chair and took on an exaggerated, debonair tone. “Well, I’m absolutely thrilled to be counted among them.” He dropped the act, adding. “Your profile is super funny.”
Wherever Gabe was, he would be smug. I smiled, swallowed beer.
For him, Colin told me, it was so hard to find a woman who wasn’t embittered or immediately defensive. “They talk to you as if you’re some guy in a dark alley who’s about to violate them. I’m like, Hey, how was your day? and she’s like, Fuck you!” He shrugged. “Cue Curb Your Enthusiasm music.” Now I was the one offering polite laughter. Colin brightened. “You like Curb?”
“I, uh . . .” I cleared my throat. “I know it, I just haven’t seen it.”
“Aw, man.” He shook his head, his Crest-white smile fading. He looked somewhere in the middle distance. I was beginning to wonder if my lack of HBO had offended him in some way, but then he began to recount some of his favorite episodes of the show, which sounded to me like stories someone’s grandmother would tell over the phone about her husband. I ate tots and offered occasional grunts of agreement.
“It’s just so funny,” he finally finished, waving his hand dismissively. “It’s hard to explain.”
“I’m sure it is.”
Work was normal, I told him when he asked.
He hated his landscaping job, too, he told me. When I responded that I didn’t exactly hate my job, Colin laughed as if I was being sarcastic and continued his diatribe against his profession, the backbreaking labor, the snobby people who on a whim made him dig up weeks of work and start over, mulch of all kinds. “I constantly have dirt under my fingernails,” he told me, shaking his head. “But hey, not tonight,” he said, clicking his tongue with a finger gun.
I finger-gunned back at him. He blushed.
“My real passion is improv,” Colin was saying, leaning forward over his Michelob Ultra, eyebrows raised as if I should have some sort of reaction.
I was busy being self-conscious about the amount of grease-soaked napkins that had piled up in front of me. I tried to summon some knowledge. “Oh, like Whose Line Is It Anyway?”
Colin scoffed. “That’s kind of a commercial bastardization of the form, but sure. We do long-form scenes. Someone in the audience suggests something, and then we build a whole world out of whatever they say. We basically write a play in real time.”
“Sounds interesting.” I sipped my half-drunk IPA and eyed the last tot.
“I don’t know how interesting it is for the audience, but fuck them, right?”
“Um. Okay, sure.”
“My group is kind of edgy,” he explained. “We’re called The Manly Men. It’s a joke because we’re totally the opposite. Look at me. I’m a blob.” He forced a laugh.
As I laughed with him, he did the James Bond–style cocked-eyebrow thing, and my stomach turned, remembering the washed-out, smarmy look of the photo he’d recently posted. I guessed by blob he was referring to his general softness, which was fine with me, and probably would be fine with anyone. As long as he didn’t do the eyebrow thing anymore, he would be cute. He sipped his beer. I sipped my own.
“I like Storage Wars,” I said. And movies where ancient demons possess women named Cheryl, but I didn’t mention that.
“Do you want to see some improv?” Colin asked.
The question didn’t register right away. “Right now?” I finally said.
“Right meow.” He pointed to an unseen corner, beyond the bowling alley. “They have a black box theater back there. There’s a show that starts in a bit.” He leaned across the table, doing the eyebrow-cock thing again. “That’s secretly why I chose this place.”
“Oh.” My heart sank a tiny bit. “We’re not bowling?” As we’d talked, I was slowly getting used to the idea. My dress was stiff but long enough to get a few good rolls.
Colin sighed. “Meh. I don’t know. It’s just hit the pins, over and over.”
“True,” I conceded. “That is how you bowl.”
“I just get so bored . . . so.” He finger-gunned again. “Improv?”
“Um, I may have to—” I pointed at my purse, which held my phone. “Let me see.”
He stood, stretched. “You check, I pee.”
“Sounds good.”
He paused before he turned. “Hey.”
“Yeah?”
He smiled down at me. “I’m having fun.” His voice had dropped its jaunty quality, sounding lower, more genuine.
My heart began to beat. “Good,” was all I could say.
While Colin was in the bathroom, I poked at my phone, though there was nothing there to check. It had been about forty-five minutes. For the dozenth time that evening, I had an urge to talk to my husband about the very thing I was supposed to be doing to move on from him, to excuse myself and call him and make this into a story we’d tell together, an inside joke about the time Robin had worn a horny secretary outfit to a bowling alley. Use it! Gabe had said. If I left now, that meant I couldn’t even last an hour into my first experience of the app. And there were pleasant sensations to temper the weirdness—the sensations of being out and about, which I’d forgotten, the buzz of chatter, the smell of seasoned fried food. The IPA had left my head with a sparkly, cloudy feeling.
When Colin returned from the bathroom, I stood and held up my glass. “Are we allowed to bring our drinks into the theater?”
He lifted his fists, giving me a triumphant megawatt smile. “Yes! Huzzah!”
“Huzzah,” I repeated.
In the black box, we sat in among a dozen rows of church-basement-style chairs. People stirred behind red velvet curtains dividing the room, and beyond the curtains the muffled crashes of bowling. I sipped on my recently replenished beer as Colin went around, greeting people in the audience he apparently knew. Sometimes he would point at me as he spoke to them, and I’d pretend not to notice, studying the uneven white polish on my nails as if it was a particularly interesting plaque at a museum. Soon, the lights dimmed and a hip-hop song from the ’90s blared.
People in black T-shirts and jeans jogged up the outer aisles toward the curtain, whooping and clapping. Colin reclaimed his seat next to me.
“What’s up, what’s up, what’s up?” a middle-aged man in Converse hollered at the crowd. He was flanked by two Colin-looking men, a skinny dude with glasses, and a woman with bottle-red hair. “We are Little Bang Theory, and welcome to the Bryant Lake Bowl & Theater!”
We cheered. The host began to explain the rules of the show, and the guy with glasses asked the audience for a word that would inspire their scenes.
“Telephone!” someone shouted from the back.
“Potato!” called someone else.
The actors began to mime the act of digging, speaking in Eastern European accents, performing a choppy, silly story about a journey to a witch to undo the curse over their potato harvest. More digging, more bad accents, a lot of rolling on the floor or climbing on prop chairs. I was starting to enjoy the small pause between lines where everyone’s expectations were floating, watching the actors’ faces when a line did not go where they thought it would, fumbling to catch hold of the twists and turns. I began to laugh out loud. The series of scenes ended with two peasants being slowly crushed by a giant potato, declaring their love for each other as they died. When the audience clapped and whooped, I joined.
“Okay, okay!” The bottle-red woman rubbed her hands together as she stepped forward. “It’s going to get cold out there, right? And we’re all looking for that special someone to keep us warm. It’s almost cuffing season, y’all.”
The audience tittered. I leaned over to Colin. “What’s cuffing season?” I whispered.
“Cuff, like handcuff.” He circled his hand on my wrist for a moment, then circled his own wrist. “Cuffed together.” He gave me a joking, sickly-sweet smile, fluttering his eyelashes.
“Ah.” Sensation lingered on the spot where he had touched me. I rubbed at it for a moment, as if trying to erase something.
The redhead shielded her eyes from the stage lights and surveyed the audience. “Raise your hand if you’re married.”
A few hands went up. Without thinking, I raised my own. Colin turned to look at me, surprise discernible in his expression even in the dark. I lowered my hand. “Oh, um . . .” Before I could gather an explanation, the woman onstage pointed toward the audience. Straight at me.
“Lady in the dress!” she called. “I saw that hand. Come on up here.”
My heart leaped to my throat. I looked at Colin, then back toward the stage. “No, thank you.”
The rest of the audience began to cheer encouragement. Under their shouts, I muttered to Colin. “I’m not actually married.”
His brow scrunched. “Then, why did you raise your hand?”
I had forgotten. It was as simple as that, I supposed. “It’s complicated,” I said.
“Come on, lady in the blue dress!” The redhead was closer to us now, beckoning.
“Just do it for the show,” Colin said, with an apologetic smile toward the actor. He put his hands on my arm, shoving slightly. “Go, go, go.”
I stood and gulped the rest of my bitter beer, shaking off a slight, starry dizziness as the crowd applauded. They pulled a church-basement chair to center stage and guided me to sit. The hanging lights made me squint, warming my skin, transforming the audience into dark outlines.
“We call this Scenes from a Marriage,” the redheaded woman told the crowd. A few people chuckled at the reference. “Here’s how this is going to work. I’m going to ask—What’s your name?”
“Robin,” I said in a normal voice.
“Loud, so everyone can hear!”
“Robin!” I yelled.
The volume startled the woman, and she mimed covering her ears. The audience laughed. “Okay, Robin. Somewhere in the middle.”
“How’s this?” I called. The redhead gave me a thumbs-up. The heat of nerves briefly became a spark of pleasure. I was playing along correctly.
“So,” the woman continued, “I’m going to ask Robin a few questions about her marriage, and we’ll form a story based on what she says. Sound good?”
The performer looked at me. At the prospect of shouting about Gabe to all these people—Colin Q among them—my sweat glands made their presence known. I pictured Gabe in the audience, watching me with that smirk, his shoulders shaking with silent laughter. I tried to wet my dry mouth and nodded, giving a thumbs-up.
“How long have you been married?”
“I was married nine years,” I recited.
“Was? You’re not currently?”
“No.”
The woman squinted toward the lights, trying to find Colin, and looked back at me, puzzled. “So that guy you were with is not your husband.”
A couple folks in the audience gave a scandalized, escalating Oooh! One of the disheveled guys in the group stepped toward my chair and jerked his thumb in the crowd’s direction. “That’s frickin’ Colin. I know that dude.”
I tried to sound casual as I felt a nervous smile spread across my face. “Yeah, so Colin is not my husband, but yes, I came here with him.”
The woman gasped, leaned close, and asked in a stage whisper, “Did Colin know you were married?”
I let out a choked laugh. “Nope. Sorry, Colin.” I offered an exaggerated shrug toward his seat, prompting more sounds of delight and shock from the audience. “Ouch!” I heard Colin exclaim theatrically. “You go, girl!” someone shouted.
The redheaded woman wiggled her eyebrows. “So how does your husband feel about Colin, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Yeah, I’d certainly like to know.” Colin had chimed in again.
“Shut up,” someone called from the back corner. More laughter.
“Ha, well, he would probably think this was hilarious.” I’d used the conditional, would. Could they tell? My pulse began to sound in my ears. I felt the performance fall from my face, a heaviness taking its place. I knew this feeling, but I didn’t know what to call it. A specific kind of dread for people who had bad news to share. “I don’t know, though,” I said in my normal voice.
“None of his business, right?” The woman smiled, lifting her hands, soliciting the audience’s agreement. Her voice came from far away.
Deep inhale, a wind tunnel of my ears. Hands lifting off my knees, voice projecting toward the mountain range of anonymous heads. “He’s dead.”
A rush of air, which I realized was my own breath. The scale of the room shrunk back to its original state. The redheaded woman blinked mascara-caked lashes. “Your husband is . . .”
“He passed away.” I had done it. I’d said it, and it felt . . . surprisingly good. Like I was setting down something heavy.
The redhead’s eyes widened in horror. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you. But really, it’s okay.” For whatever reason, I felt like sharing tonight. Maybe it was because no one knew me here. No one knew Mayor Gabe. I would finally get to talk about my marriage without a whole town’s worth of people’s expectations on top of it. I adjusted in my seat, trying to sit a little taller and made my smile reassuring. I was ready to keep playing.
“Uh, I don’t think this works for the game, right?” The woman looked back at her stage companions, all of whom seemed as wide-eyed as her. She looked back at me and touched my shoulder for a moment, drawing her hand away. “Ergh.” She looked out at the crowd, shielding her eyes again. “Sorry, folks! Just trying to be sensitive here.”
“Let her leave,” someone called out from the audience.
The redhead turned back to me. “How long has he—how long has it been?”
“A year. So, it’s fine. You can ask me about . . . whatever.”
“After a year it’s allowed, I think,” the guy with glasses said.
“What’s allowed?” the redheaded woman asked.
The glasses guy looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know. Stuff?”
“No! Hello!” The same audience member as before piped up again. “Just let the poor woman get off the stage.”
“Oh, my god, come on. I’m not a poor woman,” I said in the direction of the voice.
By the redheaded woman’s expression, it was clear she didn’t believe me, but she adopted a shaky smile and proceeded. “What is the most annoying thing about your husband?”
That was easy. “He took superlong showers.”
“Long showers,” the woman repeated. “Cool, cool, cool.”
In the silence that followed, I thought I could hear one of the performers mutter behind me. “This is so fucking awkward, bro.”
The woman pressed on. “What else?”
“Uh, let’s see . . .” I thought for a moment. “Oh, here’s another one. Every outing took three hours because Gabe had to stop and talk to everyone. You could never run a simple errand . . .”
