Nancy
Bill O’Neill knows how to rave. It’s his specialty.
He raves as I help him into his apartment, a messy place with dirty plates piled in the sink and clothes strewn across the floor, beer cans stacked like pebbles in some areas of the room and takeout containers with flies buzzing around them in others. It’s a pitiful place which I clean for him every so often, and which inevitably gets dirty again. It’s two thirty and summer sun slants through the window, but not even that can make this place appealing. It’s a sty.
“You think that was a fair fight?” he groans as I bring an icepack to his face, which is already ballooning up. “Is that what you think, Nancy? If so, you’ve never seen a fair fight before. In a fair fight, men act like men, not like little boys with sneaky little punches like that. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a fair fight . . .”
“Hold this.” I push the icepack into his face, a little harder than necessary, if I’m being honest.
He winces, and holds it. “A fair fight . . .”
I go into the kitchen and return with some sleeping pills. “Take these.”
“Why?”
“Because you need to sleep. You haven’t slept all night. You’re still drunk.”
“Still drunk,” he repeats, and then coughs out a laugh. “Still drunk! Let me tell you something around drinking—”
“I’d rather you didn’t. I’d rather you just took these pills.”
“I saved you,” he says, snatching the pills. “And you talk to me like dirt.”
“One, I didn’t need saving. Two, I’m not talking to you like dirt.”
“You didn’t need saving?” He squints at me. “That means you were really going to kiss that asshole.”
“And what if I was?” I pace into the kitchen and pour myself a glass of water. A band of tension stretches across my forehead, tight and difficult to ignore. It feels like my brain is pressing against my skull. I take two aspirin and return to the living room.
“What did you mean by that?” Dad asks. “What if I was . . . that’s a problem, Nancy.”
“I’m twenty-three years old,” I say. “I’m not a child anymore.”
“You have no idea who that man is, do you?” Dad places the pills on the table and folds him arms. “You think he’s just some boyband pretty boy—what, why are you laughing?”
It’s true. I can’t stop myself. “He wasn’t a boyband pretty boy. I don’t even know what you mean by that.”
“With his dyed hair . . . How’s that not a pretty boy thing to do?”
“He wasn’t a pretty boy,” I say. “But whatever. Think what you want.”
“You don’t even know who he is! I do. I was the sheriff. I know you like to forget that. I know your mother likes to forget that, too. But I was the sheriff for a long time and I know what goes on in Salem. That man was a member of the Sons of Wolves, a biker club. A nasty biker club. A violent biker club. Ah! You didn’t know that, did you? I can’t tell you the number of times we had to bust this bar, The Mermaid, where these assholes hung out. They’re criminals, Nancy. You, a lawyer, a sheriff’s daughter—you were going to kiss a criminal! I’d laugh if it wasn’t so pathetic.”
“Don’t call me pathetic.” I rub my forehead, trying to get rid of some of the tension. “I mean it. I’m not in the mood.”
“But kissing some stranger who just happens to be a criminal is perfectly okay?”
“Why do you hate me so much?” I ask, my voice breaking a little but not completely. “I’m really curious. What did I do to make you hate me so much? Was it something that happened when I was a baby? Did I crap my diapers too much, Dad? What is it? Because sometimes it seems like you wish I was dead.”
“I don’t wish you were dead,” Dad scoffs, mouth hanging open as though he hasn’t been berating me for hours.
He’ll always do this: berate me and then act surprised when I get upset. Somehow it’s my fault for getting upset. I’m oversensitive and can’t take a joke. I need to lighten up. It’s never that Dad should try and be a better person. No, that’s never the issue. Dad’s an excellent person and he’ll prove that by screaming and shouting about it.
“Nancy?”
“What?”
“I asked you a question.”
“I wasn’t listening.” I go into the kitchen and pour myself a glass of water.
“I know you weren’t listening.” He follows me, leaning over the kitchen partition, knocking over the plastic container of sugar. Sugar spills everywhere, white snow cascading onto the counter and trickling onto the floor. Dad glances at it, shrugs, and then looks up. “I asked you if you think contacting your mother is a good idea when she fled to California—”
“Stop,” I say, voice ice-cold. “Stop right there, okay? That’s enough. I won’t listen to this.”
“What? Because you know I’m right!”
“You aren’t seriously going to stand there and tell me I’m a bad person for contacting my own mother. I know that’s not seriously what you’re going to do. Is it? Really? Come on, Dad. Really?”
He folds his arms and grins at me sideways. “Why? Have I made a good point? Has the old drunk finally stumbled onto something?”
I drink down the glass of water. The glass knocks against my teeth; I’m shaking. “I won’t listen to this,” I say, placing the glass on the side, afraid if I don’t I’ll shatter it in anger.
“Your mother left us,” he says. “She just up and left because she didn’t think decades of marriage was worth a damn. She fled to California with a goddamn yoga instructor and you’re telling me—what? What are you telling me? That that’s perfectly acceptable, fine and dandy? She can go around fucking all the yoga instructors she wants and I’m not supposed to say anything about it? And what—when she runs off to California, that’s supposed to just be okay?”
“I’m leaving,” I say. “Take the pills. Get some sleep.”
“You’re leaving?”
“Believe it or, I have things to do. My life doesn’t revolve around you.”
“I never said it did!” Dad snaps. “I didn’t ask you to come down to the garage.”
“Actually, you did. You’re just too drunk to remember.”
“I loved her,” he says when I’m at the door. “I really loved that woman. Maybe my work made me angry sometimes, but I never hit you, or her, did I? I never went that far. I was angry, but . . . policing makes men angry, Nancy. That’s what it does.”
I pause, fighting the urge to look back at him. If I look back I’ll see the tears in his eyes, and then the absurd guilt will grip me. “I’m leaving,” I say, and then open the door.
I climb into my car and push the seat back, laying my head on the rest and staring up at the mid-afternoon sun. I drum my fingers on the steering wheel and try to clear my mind. I have the after-argument blues, which I often have when it comes to Dad. Now that I’m out of the argument, I can think of a dozen things I should’ve said to him. I’m stewing over these when my cell rings.
I take it out, expecting it to be Dad. But it’s not. It’s Mom.
“Hi,” I say, keeping my voice as carefree as possible. The last thing I need right now is a Mom-Dad civil war.
“Hey, sweetie,” Mom chirps. In the background, lobby music plays. She’s at the reception at her boyfriend’s health clinic, I know. “Just thought I’d check in. How’re things?”
“I met a man named Fink today who might be the most attractive man I ever met. Oh, and we almost kissed.”
“Nancy? Is that you? Nancy?”
“Ha, ha, ha. Your jokes never get old, Mother.”
“I wish that was the same for the rest of me,” Mom says. “So what happened with this man?”
I tell the half-truth, omitting Dad and claiming we were interrupted by Sal.
“Oh, spicy. Did you get his number, or give him yours?”
“Nope.”
“Oh, that’s . . . But I can tell you like him, dear. Your voice has that funny high-pitched sound. It was exactly the same in second grade when you had a crush on that little boy. What was his name?”
“I don’t sound like a third-grader, Mom. I work in a law office.”
“Ooh, excuse me, Ms. Fancy Pants.”
I roll my eyes. “Did you want something in particular?”
“Only to beg you to move to California—”
“As usual.”
“As usual,” she agrees. “I’m sure you could find work up here. And then you’d be away from that man—if you can even call him a man.”
“Mom, I don’t like listening to Dad bad-mouth you, and I don’t like listening to you bad-mouth him. Please don’t.”
“I’m just making a comment, dear,” Mom says. “That’s all. Why stay in Salem with a drunken, bitter has-been when you can live in the land of sun with tanned bodybuilders?”
“I have to go,” I say. “I’m late for work.”
“To see your man, you mean. You sound smitten.”
“Smitten. Jesus, Mom.”
“Bye, then! I’ll call you when you’re less smitten.”
I hang up and look up at the sky again. I should go back to work, but I used a half-day of vacation to meet Dad at the garage, which means there isn’t much point unless I want to reclaim two hours of holiday time. And the idea of returning to work now is like the idea of returning to school halfway through the summer holidays; my internal clock has already adjusted. It’s more than that, too. My mind keeps straying to Fink, to that brief instance when our lips touched. I have kissed a few men in my life, deep kisses, supposedly passionate kisses, stolen kisses and shy kisses, but I’ve never felt that kind of electricity, as though the kiss was a prelude to true passion, as though I could sink forward, secure in the knowledge that he would catch me.
I laugh at myself. “Melodramatic,” I mutter. “Looking too deeply into it.”
And now I’m talking to myself! That’s how I know I’m too full of energy. I once read three chapters of a book aloud without realizing it, only becoming aware when my neighbor knocked on the wall since it was four in the morning.
“See him,” I whisper, wondering. “But how?”
I know I need to do something. I can’t sit here muttering to myself like a crazy person.
I turn on the GPS and search for The Mermaid, the bar Dad mentioned when talking about the Sons of Wolves. The GPS finds it. It’s only a few miles away, a ten-minute drive. I chew my lip, wondering if this makes me crazy, wondering if this crosses a line. He was muscular and sweat- and oil-flecked and sexy and my lips still hunger for his, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I can hound him to his favorite bar. But apparently it does, because before I consciously make the decision, the GPS is speaking to me in its oddly seductive feminine voice: “Turn left.” But she might as well be saying, “Oh, yes.”
The bar is a mid-scale place with a neon mermaid lying atop the sign, the sign flashing dimly in the sunlight. I expected a more dive-bar-type place, but it’s more commercial than that. Families sit in the booths and frat boys sit at the bar. The waitresses and waiters walk around with mermaid and merman lower halves, wrapped around their waists like towels, their “tails” sometimes splitting open to reveal human legs.
It’s busy. I wonder why, but then I notice that it’s happy hour. I look around the room. It stretches far back, down a set of stairs to a basement area with more seats and an arcade and a few pool tables. I head to the bar, needing to steel myself with alcohol. I’ve never been the strut-into-a-bar-ultra-confident kind of woman before. I need courage, preferably of the Dutch variety.
I order a vodka and coke and watch the TV over the bar, though I’m not really watching it. I’m just staring at it, hoping the businessman next to me gets the hint. He doesn’t.
“Hey there.” He slides up the bar. Nice enough, perhaps, with his clipped brown hair and brown eyes and gray suit with a silver watch displayed purposefully, his sleeves rolled up. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” I say. “But I’m actually meeting somebody.”
“I’m just saying hi.” The man gives me his winning smile. He whitens his teeth. “Can’t a man just say hi these days?”
“Of course he can,” I say. “I’m not saying you can’t say hi. I’m just saying that this will almost certainly not end where you want it to end, and that’s fine. We’re at a bar. I don’t blame you for hitting on me. I just think you should know where I stand.”
He narrows his eyes. “That’s easily the most polite way I’ve ever been told to go fuck myself. Fair enough.”
He leaves, and I sip my vodka and coke. But then a frat boy slides up next to me. “Whoa. Hey, baby. Whoa.”
Kill me.