“I don’t know,” I say. “I think I kind of like him.”
“You wouldn’t if you had to live with him.” She takes a drink.
“My stepdad’s a f**king robot.”
“Kerwin wasn’t bad at first. I guess I did like him then. They got married when I was like nine so I thought it was fun that he was sloppy. My mom and him and my little sister would lie in bed and he’d tell us stories and then he’d go, ‘Put your head under the covers. I’m going to spit in the air.’ And when we’d stick our heads under the covers, he’d fart. It grossed my mom out, but my sister and I would just giggle like it was the funniest thing in the world. I guess when I was little I thought he was kind of a great guy. Other than the farting, he made my mom laugh. We were pretty happy.”
There’s a little amphitheater right next to the Crystal Bridge that looks down onto a stage in the middle of the pond. We walk down a few rows and sit there with our beers. “So what happened?” I ask. “One fart too many?”
She laughs. “More than one too many.” She pauses and looks at the empty stage. “But it’s really the painkillers.”
“Painkillers? Like what, Vicodin or something?”
“Worse than that. OxyContin.”
“Dude, that’s hardcore.”
“Tell me about it. At first, he just started out with Loritab. His neck used to kill him after he was in a car wreck. Now, he has this sock full of OxyContin in his dresser—like me and Mom don’t know about it. It’s not even about pain anymore.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “There’s more kinds of pain than just physical pain, you know.”
“I guess. He doesn’t have any self-restraint. He eats too much, drinks too much, farts too much. He takes too much OxyContin and goes stumbling around the house mumbling things you can’t understand and trying to hug and kiss you.”
“You mean really trying to kiss you, like with tongue and all?”
She makes a disgusted face. “Yuck, no. It’s more like he thinks I’m still nine and he’s trying to kiss me on the cheek and wrestle around with me like we used to do.”
“Maybe he loves you.”
“Please. He’s just a mess. Can’t hold on to a job. Passes out in the bathroom doorway. On my mom’s birthday he got up and tried to cook breakfast for her and almost burned down the house. That was pretty much the last straw.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Nothing lasts,” she says, and there’s a little crack in her voice. “You think it’s going to. You think, ‘Here’s something I can hold on to,’ but it always slips away.”
Obviously, she’s not as happy about this split-up as she was pretending to be. She may not want to admit it, but I can tell she has a soft spot for the old farter.
“That’s why I’m never getting married,” she says. “What’s the use?”
A fat tear squeezes out of the corner of her eye. I didn’t think she’d drunk enough to get to the crying stage, but maybe it doesn’t take as many when your emotions are a little raw in the first place.
I want to comfort her. I want to say, “Sure things last. You’ll find a great guy—someone who doesn’t fart so much—and you’ll get married and it’ll last forever,” but even I don’t believe that fairy tale.
So I go, “You’re right. Nothing does last. And there’s nothing you can hold on to. Not one thing. But that’s all right. It’s actually good. It’s like old people dying. They have to die so there’s room for babies. You wouldn’t want the world overflowing with old folks, would you? Think about how clogged up traffic would get—all these ancient, shriveled drivers with their enormous dark shades on, cruising around in their twenty-year-old, four-door Buick LeSabres at about three miles an hour, accidentally stepping on the gas instead of the brake and busting through the plate-glass window at the pharmacy.”
She laughs at that, but it’s a laugh with a sad crack in it.
“Really,” I say, “you don’t want things to last forever. Look at my parents. If they were still married, my dad—my real dad—would still be trapped in that little two-bedroom cracker box we lived in. He’d still be sweating away every day nailing houses together. Instead, he’s like beyond successful. See the Chase building over there, the tallest one?”
She nods and takes a drink.
“My dad’s office is near the top. See that one lit window up there right in the middle? That’s him, burning the old midnight oil.”
“Wow,” she says. “Do you ever go up there?”
“Sure I go up there. All the time. You can see all the way to Norman from up there.”
“Maybe we should go right now.”
“No, not now. He’s too busy. I have to make appointments to see him myself.”
“What does he do?”
“High finance. One deal after the other.”
We both sit and stare at that light on the top floor of the highest building in Oklahoma City. The night’s getting colder, and something makes a sound out in the dark. Tara grabs on to my arm. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” I tell her. But for some reason I’m feeling vulnerable now, like maybe something evil could really be creeping up on us, a horde of slobbering zombie panhandlers or maybe even something worse, something I don’t have a name for.
“Maybe we ought to go back,” she says.