Things We Didn't Say - By Kristina Riggle Page 0,30
anymore. At least, that’s how I imagined it.
I consider a call or a text to Tony. I’d like to tell him about my close call just now. He’d be proud, and I’ll admit it, I need the praise, I need someone to tell me I done good because today I’m finding it harder and harder to remember why I ever gave it up.
I close my eyes to try and conjure up my rock-bottom moment. But it seems hazy, like something you only wished were true.
What does come clearly to mind is happy hour.
Chuck led the parade out the door. “Come one, come all!” he shouted. Our productivity had tailed off through the afternoon. It was a sunny spring day, and had been a helluva week. We were coding a major project for a client and had finally made some headway. When Chuck, even as our boss, started an improvised game of charades in the meeting room at two o’clock, we’d all started to wrap up anything serious.
We’d been shouting bar names all afternoon, trying to come up with a consensus. The patio at the Black Rose won the day, and at four o’clock when Chuck grabbed his bag and his jacket, we all filed out behind him like rats behind the pied piper. He bought the first pitcher.
Pitchers were wonderful. Our glasses just kept filling with so little effort. Our laughter got more raucous. We looked out to the sidewalk with pity on the drones trudging to their cars to drive home on packed highways to things like Little League games and excruciating kiddie band concerts whereas we, all of us, were free as eagles.
There were seven of us at JinxCorp, back before I had to quit, when I threw away my old life to stay home and do contract work. Alone.
We were all single, or at the most coupled. Not a child among the bunch. This was probably by Chuck’s design because no one squawked too loud about overtime, especially when he’d sometimes spring us at four o’clock and buy rounds at the Black Rose.
The sun dropped a little lower and the Michigan April was cool, so we stepped inside to listen to the band belting out classic rock. I danced with my hands in the air, belting out with the band: “Ride, Sally, ride!” And when I came back to the table one of the seats had disappeared, so I sat on Kevin’s lap, and he put his hand on the small of my back, then wrapped it over my hipbone, and I didn’t mind a damn bit.
He drove me home—I’d taken the bus to work—and crushed up against me in the apartment building stairwell, kissing and biting my neck and cupping my breasts until I decided, Oh what the hell, I’m on the Pill, and let him in.
It worked out pretty well, because then I had a ride into work the next day.
Everyone smirked over their computer screens as we walked in at the exact same time, Kevin showered but wearing clothes that stank of the bar.
As with many mornings there, I popped an Advil, drank about a gallon of water alternated with mugs of strong bitter coffee, and by 10:00 A.M. I was right as rain.
Kevin and I never dated. It was a mutually pleasurable arrangement. No one ever frowned at me over it, made me feel guilty, or in any way cared about what I did.
At the time this felt like a good thing.
My cigarette is down to a nub. I grind it out on my shoe and keep the butt in my hand since there’s no can out here and I’m too tired to walk over and flick it into the street.
Now, with the three kids watching every move, and Mallory waiting for me to screw up, and Michael’s disapproving gaze when I so much as smoke a half-pack in a day . . .
“Chuck says fuck it!” was my boss’s favorite saying when he wanted to dismiss something as irrelevant.
If only I could feel that cavalier again. Was being numb really so bad?
My phone rings, and my heart leaps with the hope it might be Dylan before I realize at the same instant I see her number I haven’t talked to my mother in hours.
“Hi, Mom.”
“What’s wrong? You never called back.”
“It’s been crazy here.”
“Are those kids giving you a hard time again?”
If she only knew. “No, Mom. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You know it makes me nervous when you don’t check