Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,37

husband or her best girlfriend. There was an easy kind of comfort between them, and when she came home and sat beside him on the couch and kicked off her flats and began to rub her own tired feet with mint-scented lotion, it was only his fear of upsetting something that kept him from reaching out to do it for her.

When Lanae came home the day he’d taken Esther to the mall, he wanted to tell her about the girl, the way she’d smiled at him, and scan her face for a flicker of jealousy. Then he remembered he’d earned the smile by lying. So instead he unfolded the Mindy flier from his pocket and passed it to her.

“Can you believe this shit?” he asked. “Five hundred dollars a pop for a kids’ show? When we were kids, we were happy if we got five dollars for the movies and a dollar for some candy to sneak in.”

“Hey.” Lanae grinned. “I wanted two dollars, for candy and a soda. You were cheap.” She held the flier at arm’s length, then turned it sideways, like Mindy would make more sense that way.

“Esther wants to go to this?”

“The lady at Glitter Girl said all the girls do. She said in most cities the tickets already sold out.”

“That whole store is creepy, anyway. And even if it was free, Esther don’t need to be at a show where some nine-year-old in a belly shirt is singing at people to Come pop my bubble. Fucking perverts,” Lanae said.

“Who’s a pervert?” asked Kenny. Georgie hadn’t heard him come in, but Lanae didn’t look surprised to see him standing in the doorway. He was carrying a steaming, grease-spotted bag that was meant to be dinner, which was usually Georgie’s cue to leave. As Kenny walked toward them, Georgie slid away from Lanae on the couch, not because they’d been especially close to begin with, but because he wanted to maintain the illusion that they might have been. But Lanae stood up anyway, to kiss Kenny on the cheek as she handed him the flier.

“These people,” said Lanae, “are perverts.”

Kenny shook his head at the flier. Georgie silently reminded himself of the sophomore Kenny had dated their senior year of high school, a girl not much bigger than Mindy, and how Kenny used to joke about how easy it was to pick her up and throw her around the room during sex.

“Esther ain’t going to this shit,” Kenny said. “This is nonsense.”

“She can’t,” said Georgie. “You can’t afford it.”

Kenny stepped toward him, then back again just as quickly.

“Fuck you, man,” said Kenny. “Fuck you and the two dollars an hour we pay you.”

He pounded a fist at the wall beside him, and then walked toward the hallway. A second later Georgie heard the bedroom door slam.

“Georgie,” said Lanae, already walking after Kenny, “you don’t have to be an asshole. He’s not the way you remember him. He’s trying. You need to try harder. And this Mindy shit? Esther will forget about it. Kids don’t know. Next week she’ll be just as worked up about wanting fifty cents for bubble gum.”

But Esther couldn’t have forgotten about it. Mindy was on the side of the bus they took to the zoo. Mindy was on the nightly news, and every other commercial between kids’ TV shows. Mindy was on the radio, lisping, Pop my bub-ble, pop pop my bub-ble. What he felt for Mindy was barely short of violence. He restrained himself from shouting back at the posters, and the radio, and the television: Mindy, what is your position on civilians in combat zones? Mindy, what’s your position on waterboarding? Mindy, do you think Iraq was a mistake? He got letters, occasionally, from people who were still there: one from Jones, one from Ramirez, three from guys he didn’t know that well and figured must have been lonely enough that they’d write to anyone. He hadn’t read them.

He went back to the mall alone on the Saturday after he’d pissed Kenny off. He told himself he was there to talk to the manicure girl, pick up a little present for Esther, and meanwhile maybe get something going on in his life besides wet dreams about Lanae, who’d been curt with him ever since the thing he said to Kenny. But when he got to the store, the redhead was leaning across the counter, giving a closed-mouth kiss on the lips to a kid in a UVA sweatshirt. He looked like