show. Judge Judy’s a bitch.” Now Brandi is up, prancing across the living room to get a drink. Jason’s eyes follow her like the family dog watching the hot dog platter.
“Don’t you have to work today?” Penny asks.
“Nope. I got moved to opening shift, so I’m off every other. Oh! Jerry Springer’s next! ‘My boyfriend cheated on me with my sister.’ I love this show.”
Penny often wondered, watching Maury and Jerry and the other daytime goons with their cheating shows, how these things got started. Was the boyfriend just walking in and “Hey, I bang your sister, want me to roll you too?” How did it all happen? It seemed impossible. But Penny let herself be sucked into today’s circus show anyway, the bouncers running onstage like strongmen, Jerry the ringmaster, her mind still humming from their conversation about Buddy, when Jason grips her shoulders with his hands and moves her off his lap as he gets up.
“Here,” he says, shaking his coffee cup to show that there is still a little liquid in it, for her. Then he crosses the room and sits next to Brandi on the couch, his ridiculous boots still wet from the walk to McDonald’s up on the coffee table as he lights up a smoke, offers the pack to little Flaky. Goddammit if he didn’t light her smoke too, and before the show is halfway through, they’re already play-wrestling over the remote, and Penny has the answer to her question. Just like this, late morning on a weekday, nowhere to go, bellies full and smokes smoked, TV suggesting it, and if she weren’t across the room trying to get up the energy to go take a shower, the wrestling and Brandi’s giggly “Get offa me” might have turned into something else.
Penny stands up. “I’m going to get dressed.” Surprise, Jason follows her into the bedroom and shuts the door. She can still hear the booing of the TV audience.
“Can I watch?” He sits on the bed, big hands between his knees. Her clothes fall off, a puddle on the floor, and it doesn’t take much, lying down with her knees up, he’s as predictable as Oregon rain, insistent as hunger. She’s thinking, while he’s ramming in and out, that she’s not doing this to keep him from Brandi. Penny doesn’t particularly care what he does with the thing between his legs, he can stick it wherever, but she knows that floating between his ears is a series of numbers and letters. She’ll wait, until afterward, to ask again.
Then, because after all these years with him, she knows exactly when, she raises her hands, idle beside her on the bedspread like corpse claws coming out of the dirt, to shove Jason off her.
“What?” Jason’s voice hovers above her, shaking.
“It’s not right, not yet,” Penny hisses. It’s like opening a gallon of milk before you finished the last one. Buddy is still unfinished business.
One slamming thrust of his hips, and he comes, shuddering inside her. His face right next to hers, he says in her ear, “Hundreds of babies.”
She turns her face to the wall. “Buddy first. Where and when?”
“Christ!” He shoves off her, and she can feel him leaving her, and then again as he slams the door.
Penny gets out of bed and studies her face in the mirror over the dresser. She doesn’t even see the scars anymore, a crescent shape up at her temple, the other along her right jaw where the skin split from the swelling after the fact. It’s just her face, the front part of her head, now, and she could have been almost pretty, even after what they did to her in Denver, but not anymore. Twenty-four years old, and she looks half dead, her hair growing in a nothing color from where those bitches on her cell block shaved it, her skin sallow and wrecked from the baby—wasn’t it a girl who was supposed to steal your beauty? There is a new painful welt of a pimple straining under the surface on her jawbone, desperate to get through. Penny flicks on the overhead light and pushes with the pads of her two index fingers, trying to free the pus, but there isn’t an opening, a hole. Penny finds a safety pin, licks it to clean it before she jabs it through the center, picking, digging, until it oozes blood. She lets it run down her chin, drip-drip-drip to the carpet.
She wanted things: wanted boys to want her, and