Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,70
Alan has his hand on the small of Tank Top Girl’s back and is leaning in to her ear. I watch Chrissie walk to us. I can tell her heels have started to hurt her, because she’s scooting her feet across the floor instead of picking them up all the way. As she gets closer, I slide away from Brian. Chrissie stops halfway between the bar and our table and looks over her shoulder to see if Alan’s even noticed she’s gone. She’s smart enough to look only a little disappointed when she sees he’s still thoroughly engrossed in Tank Top Girl’s earlobe. When she sits back down at the table, I slide her half-full drink away from her.
“Hey,” she says, “I’m thirsty.”
“You should’ve thought about that before you asked Alan to put rum in your drink.”
“You should have thought about that before you brought me to a bar.”
“Touché,” I say. “We’re leaving soon.”
Chrissie looks curiously at Brian, then glances back at me, and I try to relax my face into blank nonchalance, as if she’s the only one immature enough to imagine this night ending differently.
It’s barely after midnight when I finish my cigarette and Chrissie’s drink, and Chrissie pretends she wants to stay through the end of the folksinger. It’s the worst pretext ever: the folksinger is singing a song that’s about either a blow job or her psych medication, and she keeps wailing, You cannot make me swallow, and no one wants to listen to that. I’m hugging Brian good-bye and apologizing again when the phone rings. It’s Tia. I step outside because I can’t hear her over the background noise.
“Where the fuck are you?” she says.
“I’m in North Carolina,” I say, “with Chrissie. I told you we were going.”
“Did you?” she says. “Well, look, get back here. Uncle Bobby died. Everyone’s at the hospital.”
“OK,” I say, and I take a minute to go get Chrissie, not because I’m broken up, but because I feel like I’m supposed to be and I can’t walk back in there too composed.
When I tell Chrissie, she doesn’t lose it at first. We’re standing outside the bar, and then she sits on the toadstool bench outside the place with her arms folded across her chest and the overhead light washing out her makeup. She looks like such a little kid then that I’m sorry I brought her here to begin with. For a minute she doesn’t say anything, and then the floodgates open. It’s the first time I’ve actually seen her cry in years, and it’s so much that crying isn’t even the right word for it. Brian comes out to check on us but when he sees her he walks to the corner of the parking lot.
“He doesn’t even fucking talk to me,” Chrissie says, when she can talk again. “All summer I’ve been there, and he doesn’t even fucking talk to me. I would have sat there with him. I would have sat in that hospital with him all fucking summer long.”
“He’s trying to be a good dad,” I say. “He’s trying to protect you. He’s trying to be a man about things.”
“Yeah, well. He’s being an asshole,” she says.
“They don’t really know the difference,” I say. “You’ll go home. He’ll feel better. He won’t say it, but he will.”
The best thing about the two years I spent with Jay is that splitting the rent let me pay off my credit cards, so I’m able to put Chrissie on a last-minute red-eye flight to Baltimore. Tia promises to pick her up there when the flight lands. I don’t go back with her because of the car and because there’s nothing for me to do there yet. The next few days will be comfort and shifting obligations, but no one will miss me or need me the way Chrissie’s father needs her right now. My own will take a few days to fly back from India, and his current girlfriend, someone he met on a cruise to London, will be with him to comfort him in the meantime. Aunt Edie will have Tia. I am, for a moment, absurdly jealous of Chrissie, because there is not a single person in the world my mere presence will comfort right now, not a single place I need to be more than this one.
Brian’s waiting in my car outside the airport. He drives without asking