him. He couldn’t take it, Melissa. The fact that he left you proves he loved you. It was too much for him. If he didn’t love you, he would have stuck around and just duped you. You see? He had to leave. Put a barrier between your love. It’s so romantic, really.”
“Yeah, tragic.”
“Yeah. Tragic. Anyway, he’ll probably come back,” Jess speculates. “He’s probably just confused. You guys were really in love.”
I want to believe what she says, because of all my friends, Jess knows the most about love. She has a good boyfriend. She and Devon have been together for eight months and they’ve never had a fight. But that’s because he’s so dull he could never bring his heart rate up high enough to get upset about anything.
I call Ally next. Big mistake.
“You need to forget about him,” she blurts out, and then puts me on hold to answer the other line. She was always jealous of Michael and me. I know she’s tired of me talking about him all the time. Even I am getting sick of me. “He’s a loser. It’s his loss,” she adds when she comes back.
“You can’t stop loving someone just like that, you know. You can’t just turn it off.”
“Well, he did.”
“Shut up.”
“Well, he did.”
“He was good to me,” I persist.
I can hear Ally’s eyes rolling. “Whatever.”
I make up a reason to get off the phone. I don’t need to hear that. I know he loved me. What we had here was real. And even if it wasn’t, I’m still grateful for it all, because my heart isn’t dead like before. Sure, it’s a pathetic, wheezing, oozing open wound, but it’s not dead. And I’d rather it be whimpering than numb.
Sixteen
I come home after the day program and my mother’s bedroom door is closed. I see our superindendent Giovanni’s grimy shoes in the front hall, and his dumb-ass waist pouch on the couch.
I grab a Coke and chips and go back out. I don’t want to be in there when they’re together. I don’t want to see Giovanni come out of the room, his hairy fat belly hanging over his ugly tighty-whiteys, shuffling off to the bathroom.
Giovanni and my mother have been screwing for years, almost ever since we moved in. I don’t know what to make of it. I used to not have a clue, but now that I’m older, they don’t hide it. It’s like he’s the man around the house without being the man in the house. He fixes our toilet. He bleeds our rads each fall. He hooked up our cable TV to the new satellite dish. And when my mom’s car got smashed up in the parking lot, Giovanni had the guy in a headlock until he coughed up his ID and insurance papers.
“He’s a nice person,” my mom explained one night. “We have a good time together. But it is what it is. It’ll never be more, and we’re both happy with that. There are some men who just can’t be in a relationship.”
“So why are you with him?”
She pauses, fluttering her long, overly mascaraed eyelashes, which means she’s thinking hard about this one. “Because it’s easy, I suppose.” She takes a long, pensive drag on her cigarette.
What I don’t ask is if she tells her boyfriends about him. Or if she’s getting a reduction in rent. Or if she’s fucking him because she’s using him. But I don’t think it’s as clear as that. I don’t think they even spend much time worrying about it. It’s just this unspoken thing that happens. And I suppose that’s what sex is sometimes.
“Sometimes sex is just sex,” my mom said one time. “Sometimes it’s love. Sometimes it’s a physical need. Sometimes it’s a barter.”
“Barter?”
“You know. Like a currency. That happens even in marriages. You know, the wife wants a new kitchen, so she puts out. It’s sort of weird.”
“Weird,” Echo repeats, pretending not to know what she’s talking about. But truthfully, I get it.
It’s like me having sex with Sid, the boy in my building whom I’ve known for a thousand years. He likes me. He always has. So every once in a while, before I met Michael, we’d screw around. Why? Because there’s some kind of obligation, some kind of guilt, I suppose. He’s always giving me alcohol or weed, whenever I want it, so it’s sort of just understood. I try to find other sources, but it’s hard to give up something that’s free. I suppose, if