“Oh, I can see it.” I take another hit off the flask. “You know Cassidy and her Greenpeace and Habitat for Humanity and Gay Pride parades, and all that. Then you have Marcus, who’s practically a one-man Salvation Army. He’s always up to something—serving Thanksgiving dinners for the homeless, working with the Special Olympics kids, mentoring delinquents. You got to hand it to him. He’s a hard guy to make fun of.”
“Yeah,” says Ricky. “And then there’s that whole enormous dick thing.”
“What?”
“You know, they say black guys have these enormous, elephant-trunk dicks.”
“That’s bullshit. I don’t believe in racial stereotypes like that.”
“Me either,” he says. “But it’s kind of hard not to think about it.”
I look at him and shake my head. “Well, it wasn’t before you brought it up anyway.”
“Sorry, dude.”
I hit the flask a stout one. “That makes a real great picture. It was bad enough I have to go over to my sister’s, now I’m going to have that snapshot in my head all evening.”
“Here,” Ricky says. He pulls a fat blaze out of his jacket pocket. “Take this with you. It’s some hearty shit. It’ll get you through the night.”
Chapter 13
I have to work from three to eight, and for once, I don’t want to leave. I’m completely ready to stay way after closing even. I’ll do inventory till like ten o’clock or something, anything to postpone going over to my sister’s soiree. Unfortunately, around seven, Bob pulls me aside and says he thinks I’d better go ahead and leave early.
I’m like, “No way. It might get busy, and you’ll be stuck here by yourself,” but he’s, “Look, I know you’ve been drinking, and we can’t afford to have a customer call into the front office about something like that again, you know?”
I start to deny the drinking thing, but I can’t really lie to Bob, so I just say something about how I’ll swig some mouthwash and chew some more gum. He’s not buying it.
“I can handle the last hour by myself,” he says. “Just go home and get to bed early. I won’t hold this against you, Sutter. I know you’re a good guy. But I also know you’ve had a rough week, what with the thing between you and Cassidy.”
“Hey,” I tell him, “I’ve forgotten all about her. Believe me, that is no big deal. I’m a free man. A new girl is just around the corner.”
“Sure,” he says. “Okay. But you’re not going to find her at a men’s clothing store. So go on home. I’ll be fine. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Going home is not an option, though. My mom will just tell me to get my ass straight over to Holly’s. No, there’s nothing to do but stop off for a big 7UP and cruise around for a while, then maybe take the long way over to Holly’s so that I don’t have to spend too much one-on-one time with her husband, Kevin, while she’s mixing up the salad or whatever. You know, usually I’m a positive guy—I embrace the weird—but I can’t help getting a little cynical about these two, and maybe I’m feeling a bit more than a little that way tonight.
Holly and Kevin live in that hoity-to-it area just to the north of downtown Oklahoma City on a street full of really big, old homes for upscale professional types. Just for the record, Kevin doesn’t pronounce his name Kevin the way an ordinary person would. He pronounces it Keevin. He’s some kind of muckety-muck exec for an energy company. They do very well, especially considering Holly is only twenty-five. Kevin is like fifteen years older than she is, and has an ex-wife that Holly says should be on a poster for what can go wrong with plastic surgery. Holly used to be an administrative assistant at Kevin’s company, but obviously she worked her way up.
I wouldn’t be surprised if my mom doesn’t actually love Kevin more than Holly does. In fact, Holly had to come up with some lame excuse about how his parents hadn’t been invited to dinner, so she couldn’t invite hers either. I’m sure he told his parents the same thing in reverse. Why they had to go and invite me, I don’t know, but Mom actually seemed jealous about it.
Kevin’s the golden boy where she’s concerned. He can do no wrong. In a way, she probably feels responsible for the fact that Holly spelunked up a fifty-carat rock like him in the first place. After all, Mom did pretty much the same thing with Geech. She started out as his secretary, and I guess the picture of herself in his big, two-story house got the best of her, so the next thing you know, Geech is getting a divorce and Mom’s riding around with him in his green Cadillac.
But even with all his money, Geech is still just a handful of rhinestones next to an upscale northsider with a sixty-dollar haircut like Kevin. You should see Mom sitting out by their pool with her shiny gold sandals. It’s like she thinks she’s royalty. She won’t even stick her perfectly manicured big toe in that little pool Geech had built in our backyard anymore.
Being born eight years apart, Holly and I never were very close. She used to tell me that she was the reason our folks got married and I was the reason they got divorced. She said if they only had one kid, they never would’ve had all those money problems to battle over. Whatever. She was just trying to get back at me for always making fun of her little, walnut-size boobs. That was before the augmentation thing, of course.
So, what I’m saying is I suspect she has some kind of ulterior motive for getting me over tonight. She’s like Mom. They both want me to have connections, see. “It’s all in who you know,” Holly likes to tell me. What she means by “it” she never does say and I don’t ask. You might think she just wants to help me get ahead, but my theory is that she really wants to make me into a sort of accessory to her lifestyle. A golden little brother to show off to her golden friends.