He left me there on the ground. Went to be with his friends. Maybe he said to take a little nap. I don’t remember. But I felt like I didn’t have a choice, that my body would take the nap for me, and it must have done so, because when I woke up I was alone there between the trucks and the music was still raging like not a second had passed, but this time Stringy was nowhere, and fear ran through me. My head ached but I could see again. What had I done? I was supposed to make him want me. The whole point of seeing him at all was to make him my husband, and I was failing. I got up and looked around. My small purse with the cell phone was there beside me and I clutched it.
I walked the circle of trucks over and over in a loop looking for him. Finally he came out of one of them, eyes bloodshot, and gripped my arm like we’d both been lost for days without food or water or sense. He sniffed and wiped at his nose. It felt like we were the lone survivors of something.
We got into his lawn-painting truck and he turned up the radio, some kind of punk band whining. He peeled away from Tent City and he tried to get the truck to go one hundred down Old Canal Road, but the wheel got shaky at ninety. I wondered if he was mad at me and was just taking me home. We approached the Pac N’ Save. “Turn in there,” I said. He pulled into the deserted parking lot and stopped the truck at the outer edge of it. “I’m all jazzed up,” he said, sniffing, jerking his head around.
“Do you like me?” I asked. It was now or never.
“The lawn painting’s getting big,” he said. “I can afford you a steak dinner once a month if you want.”
“Sounds like you’ve got things figured out.”
He let out a big sigh and clicked the radio off. “I’ve been wanting me a new girlfriend,” he said. “But I had to get rid of the old one first. I’m a gentleman and those things take time, if you need to know what was taking so long.”
“You broke up with her for me?” I asked.
“She was heading off to some school to teach her how to tattoo eyebrows on chicks. I was sick of hearing her talk about it.”
I worked my eyes up his body in the light of the streetlamps. He was tattooed most everywhere. Skulls, winding smoke, a mermaid. A raised and fresh outline of the state of California, a star in the valley over a woman with her hands between her legs, breasts bare, head tilted back. The tattoos continued up his arms and under the sleeves, a collage coming up his neck. Only God Can Judge Me necklaced his chest. I imagined Vern scoffing at that one.
My mother might admire something in Stringy, his sure large hands on the wheel of the car, the way he smelled like cinnamon more than cigarettes and his clean small teeth. I liked the way he looked at me like he’d known me well for a very long time. She would comment on the tattoos. Run her finger lightly across one to flatter.
“You’ve got to have a clear view on your hopes and dreams to make it in life,” he told me.
“To make it where? To the big dirt nap?” I asked. Some of the alcohol was still swimming in my blood.
“To, you know. Your goals. To feel good about the life you’ve lived.”
“My goal was heaven, but now I’m not so sure I’ll ever make it.”
“My mama went through a religious stint,” he said. “She took me to a Buddhist temple, and a Catholic mass, and a hippie convention in the desert where she walked around topless with paint all over her and ate acid.”
“Which did she choose?”
“None,” he said. “She died in a car crash when I was twelve before she ever really got right with any of them. She was on her way, in fact, to a Mormon church when she was taken. I stayed home sick that day.”
“Wait, she’s dead?” I asked. The Fresno girls hadn’t mentioned that.
It was as if the smoke cleared out for just that moment, the stars blinked a blinding silver. It was my own wound before me.