and holds her face in his hands. He reassures her it’s more than just sex. He says he’s not a player. He fills her ears with these wonderful words. It’s their first real adult conversation. He’s not drunk. He is speaking! Her aches and pains disappear again, as they did at the hotel. For the first time since then, she will tell her friend, I quit hurting so bad.
God how she missed and needed this sort of touch and affection. She missed big dicks! She’d never really had that many. She grew up Catholic and is still Catholic and is not the kind of person who jokes about being a recovering Catholic, but she’s also in touch with these needs she has.
He tells her that he works all the damn time. That he does it for his girls, one is a year old and the other’s four.
Lina has a hard time finding the words to say back to him. He’s usually so quiet, but he’s talking now, and when quiet people open their mouths the whole world listens.
Eventually he says, Mrs. Parrish, we gotta stop meetin’ and makin’ out like this.
Now she wants to kill him. She wants to gut him. For calling her Mrs. Parrish, her married name. For making her feel like nothing, or just something to somebody else who is not him.
Aidan, I’d hardly call what we’ve been doing makin’ out.
He smiles. Guess you’re right, Kid.
Aidan?
Yeah, Kid? Look, listen. I don’t want to hurt you.
Lina knows the literal translation of I don’t want to hurt you is I want to have sex with you but I don’t love you. Lina understands this on some level, but she can’t completely believe it. She was dead for so many years, or slowly dying, and now she has come back to life.
He finds her clonazepam in her purse when he’s going through it for the cigarettes he smokes but she really doesn’t. What’s this, he says, holding up the bottle like someone who drinks but doesn’t take pills.
It’s my little chill pill, she says sheepishly.
I take it, she doesn’t say, because of you.
Later she will tell the other women what she knows she has to do, to keep him.
I miss him so much, she says. But I will always continue to act as if I am all right, as if I am fine whether I see him or not. He questioned me so much at the gas station that night, about what I want and why I want to be with him. When I opened up to him, he told me several times, I don’t want to hurt you so we should probably stop. So now I’ve learned to act, to pretend I won’t be hurt whether we stop or not, because it’s one of the things that keep him seeing me. The idea that I don’t need to see him. Even if he knows I’m lying. And the real truth is I could never bear not seeing him again. If I see him on a Sunday I am in heaven and on Monday I am still feeling pretty good. But by Wednesday it hurts. By Thursday, a part of me has died.
That night in the car Lina shakes her head furiously. No, she says. No, you’re not hurting me. She smiles bravely. How could you hurt me, you silly man!
But—
Shh, buddy, she says. Shh, putting her finger to his lips, which is something she’s been wanting to do for a very long time.
One night Aidan is in St. Louis for work. Lina is in the living room with Ed. She’d had a good day with Della and Danny and the neighbor kids and she wants to think about sex in a positive way so she goes to a seminar called Catholics Love Sex, at a nearby church. It is in the basement, which smells of Communion wafers and old water. Among the group of college kids, Lina is the only adult woman. There is a priest who is younger than her and a teenage female moderator. One tall girl in the corner says the devil tempts humans with sex every day. The moderator asks, How do we learn about sex today? and Lina raises her hand and says, Family. All the college kids sort of shuffle their feet like that is totally not the right answer and the moderator says, Okay, good one, anybody else? And almost everybody else says, Media. We learn from the media.
Lina bristles. She feels