Sunburn: A Novel Read online

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  She doesn’t come out again until the sun goes down, which means it’s almost 8:30 before she emerges. Maybe some people would go crazy, sitting in a motel room, nothing to eat but a pack of peanut butter and cheese crackers she found in her purse. Mom food. Gregg is going to have to learn tricks like that now. Jani’s an easy kid until she gets hungry, then all bets are off. She enjoys the silence, the novelty of no one needing her, no voices calling, nothing to be cleaned or cooked or washed. She doesn’t even put the television on, just lies back on the bed, steeping herself in silence.

  When she crosses the street, the sun huge and red as it sinks over the cornfields, she has a hunch he’ll be there, Mr. Pear. He is. She makes sure there’s a stool between them.

  “What are you having?” he asks.

  “How much money do you have?”

  He laughs. They always think she’s joking. Gregg did, that’s for sure. She wishes she could say, Pay attention. I haven’t even told you my name yet, but I’m telling you who I am, what I care about.

  As if privy to her thoughts, he asks, “What’s your name, Pink Lady? Not that you’ll be pink for long. There’s a nice shade of brown under that burn. I didn’t know redheads could tan like that.”

  What is her name? Which one should she use?

  “Polly Costello,” she says.

  3

  Jani wakes up crying for her mother. She’s only three years old. She can’t understand what’s happening. Gregg barely understands. She asks Gregg to read the note again, as if it might change since he read it last night and yesterday at lunch and yesterday morning and the night before that. The note does change. He adds a little to it with each reading. An additional, “I love you, Jani.” Then, the next time: “I love you more than anything, Jani.” Later, he thinks it might be a good idea to include: “Be good to Daddy. This is going to be even harder on him.”

  Pauline’s been gone only two days, and the note is already creased and worn. Jani holds it against her face, pressed between her cheek and her stuffed cat, when she goes to sleep. She goes to sleep crying, she wakes up crying. In between, she has nightmares that make her cry and mutter and moan, yet don’t wake her. They wake Gregg, though.

  What kind of woman walks out on her family? Gregg knows. The kind of woman he picked up in a bar four years ago precisely because she had that kind of wildcat energy. Pauline was supposed to be a good time, nothing more. She scratched, she bit, she was up for anything, anywhere, anytime.

  Then, in the middle of their summer fling, she peed on a stick and a plus sign formed in the circle, but it might as well have been a cross and he was up on it. Because it turned out she was a good girl all along. Good enough that she wouldn’t think of having an abortion. Did not see that one coming. Plus, she was thirty-one and she figured this might be her last chance to have a kid. Maybe it was a sign? A destiny thing?

  They got married fast. It wasn’t so bad at first. So much was happening. She said she didn’t want a wedding because she had no people, it would just make her sad, her side of the church empty, so they got married at the courthouse and used the money that would have gone to a wedding to honeymoon in Jamaica, one of those resorts where everything was included. It was cheap because it was the last week of October, the tail end of hurricane season.

  They had to find a house big enough for what was going to be the three of them and they lucked out on a bargain up near Herring Run Park, a snug little brick place, very respectable, all the old woodwork and leaded windows still intact. Jani arrived. A first for both of them, but Pauline was calm while he was a mess. Now that he thinks about it, maybe that was the first sign that she wasn’t right. Should any woman be that calm, taking care of her first baby? At the time, he thought it meant she was a natural mom, but maybe this was proof that she was the opposite. She is detached, removed, a caretaker, not a parent.

  The sex slowed after Jani was born and it was still good enough that it made him angry that they didn’t have more of it. She said that if he wanted more attention from her, he needed to help around the house. He wasn’t raised to be that way. Gregg had grown up without a father, and his mother had worked overtime, in and out of the house, to make sure he knew what was his due as a man. Pauline didn’t even have a job. Why was she so tired?

  By the time Jani turned two, Pauline was still tired and the newness had worn off everything—marriage, house, baby, her. There was nothing left to distract them from the fact that they just didn’t like each other that much. Yet the sex was still good. Looking back, he thinks she treated the sex like that was her job, a job she enjoyed. Listening to his friends at work, he felt smug at first because it wasn’t that way with them. But now he knew, that was another sign that she was unnatural. Once a woman became a mother, she wasn’t supposed to be like that. Pauline was a dirty, dirty girl. She wasn’t cut out to be a mother, a wife. How had he missed it?

  Then, Pauline had—it was hard to admit, even to himself—Pauline had started hitting him. During. It had started with him spanking her a little, not hard, just for fun, a way to spice things up. She had howled all out of proportion to the pain, tried to scratch him with her nails.

  But when she calmed down, she asked if he wanted to see what it felt like. He didn’t, but he didn’t want to look as if he wasn’t as bold as she was. She slapped his cheek. It hurt, but he didn’t want to say how much because he couldn’t let her be tougher than he was. Of course, he had reined himself in, didn’t use his full strength because that would be wrong, whereas she wasn’t holding anything back. It stung. It was painful. It was exciting.

  Then, somehow, about two months ago, the acrid fights of their day-to-day life spilled over into the sex and even sex wasn’t fun anymore. He had a coworker, Mandy, who went to lunch with him, listened and sympathized. He started staying out late, claiming he was working overtime. They were doing a lot of refi’s at work, so it was credible. Then he went home to Pauline, overflowing with this mysterious anger.

  He started dropping by the bar where he met Pauline and, yes, sometimes, he took another girl out to the parking lot. The sex was never quite as good as what he had with Pauline, in their early days, but it was better than what he had now, which was pretty much nothing.

  He had proposed this beach vacation as one last family get-together, to see if they could find their way back. He spun the one-room studio rental as a part of the plan—real togetherness, one big happy. But, in the back of his mind, he was already thinking about moving out. His mom would take him in, he could always count on his mom.

  Now she’s moved out, leaving him with the kid. There had been a separate note just to him, one that he had hidden from Jani. This note was cool and businesslike. A typed note at that, which means she had written it before they ever got here. Probably pecked it out at the library, where they had word processors.

  I will let you know of my plans as soon as possible. I know you want a divorce, so let’s make it quick and painless. For now, it’s best if Jani remains with you, in the house and routine she knows. I will call after I’m settled.

  And now it’s Tuesday, their last day of “vacation.” He has trudged through the past forty-eight hours as if the end of this getaway was some sort of finish line. He cannot believe how hard it is to care for a child 24/7, although he told himself that’s because they’re not at their house, with all their stuff. Now, packing up to return home, he sees that life is just going to keep going, that he will have even more problems once he gets home. What will he do for child care? He loves Jani, but, Christ, he cannot be a single dad.

  There’s a $125 penalty if you stay one minute past 11 a.m. on the last day of your rental, even on a Tuesday. Jani wanted one more morning at the beach, but Gregg can’t get them packed up and have the place clean enough to get his deposit back if they do that. Jani whines every second of the morning and shows a real talent for creating a mess wherever he has just cleaned—stepping in dust piles, leaving sticky prints on appl
iances, tables, walls. They get away with only minutes to spare, 10:57 on the dashboard clock.

  When he turns to check his sights as he backs the car out of the driveway, he sees Jani in her car seat, clutching that damn note to her cheek. Those dark curls, olive skin, light eyes—she looks nothing like her mother. If he hadn’t been at the hospital when Jani was born, if he hadn’t been there for the pregnancy, he’d wonder if a woman could somehow fake having a kid. Jani has looked exactly like him since Day One. “That’s evolution at work,” Pauline told him. “If babies didn’t look like their fathers, they’d reject them. She’ll look more like both of us as time goes on.” Well, it’s three years later and the little girl in the car seat still looks like a female version of him. Put their childhood photos next to each other and you’d think they were fraternal twins. There’s not a trace of her mother in her face.

  Pauline’s not going to dump this kid on him. He’ll find her, make her do right. He’s the one who’s supposed to be moving out, moving on.

  “Whore,” he mutters.

  “What, Daddy?”

  “Nothing.”

  Two miles up the highway, he takes the left turn onto State Highway 26 too fast and the boogie board he roped to the roof goes sliding off. Horns honk around him, as if he planned this fiasco. He’d leave the board on the roadside if he could, but that would make him no better than her. He pulls over and puts everything to rights, then fights for his way back into the westbound traffic, surprisingly thick for a Tuesday in June. Oh God, there’s a funeral, apparently for the most popular guy in Bethany Beach, the line of cars twenty, thirty deep. He adds this mishap to the growing list of everything that’s her fault. She has ruined his life. Or tried to. He’ll find her, make her fulfill her obligations, make her pay.

  He remembers the first slap, after he gave her permission, so hard it almost brought tears to his eyes. It was as if she had been waiting to hit him for a very long time.

  4

  Early in her first marriage—the less said about that, the better—Polly would get so upset at her husband that she would throw herself out of the car. At first, only at stop signs or traffic lights. Eventually she started jumping out during a slow roll. Never more than 5 or 10 mph, usually in a parking lot, but there was a heady danger to it, especially if one chose, as she did, to leap and try to land two-footed on the pavement. She never tucked and rolled, never scraped her hands. She wanted him to see her leap, turn, and head in the other direction, knowing he couldn’t follow as nimbly.

  Then again, they both knew she had to come home eventually.

  Why couldn’t she leave that marriage as easily as she jumped from his car? Part of it was money, of course. Walking home cost her nothing, except a beating. To leave, she would have needed money. Leaving required planning. The jump from the car was the opposite of a plan. It was a moment of possibility. I’m not trapped. I come back to you voluntarily. A lie, one she told only to herself, but an essential one in those days. A lie that she finally made true, but it took a long time. Time and money. Everything worth having requires time and money.

  Speaking of—she crosses the highway, and enters the High-Ho slightly after four. Early enough so it’s quiet, not so early that she seems unreliable. A lot of drunks like to work in bars. A man she once knew, a guy who fancied himself a real sage, liked to say, If you have a thing for elephants, you work in the circus. If you like little kids, you get jobs that give you access to them. Teaching, Cub Scouts, day care. Drunks like to work in bars. Polly has been chatting up the barmaid three nights running now, getting a rapport going, all the while ignoring the guy who’s staying at the motel same as her. Mr. #3, as she thinks of him, despite knowing his name. She overheard him telling the barmaid that his truck threw a rod, but he’ll be gone once they find the part.

  “Any chance you can use someone else here?” Polly asks the barmaid.

  “Maybe part-time,” she says. “On weekends and evenings, we need a waitress to help with the kitchen orders. But if you want work, you’ll do better going east to the beaches. No matter how much they load up on staff down the ocean in summertime, it’s never enough, and there’s always someone who can’t deal with the pace, the tourists. You’ll make better money, too.”

  “Why don’t you work down there, then?” Polly takes out her pack of cigarettes, pushes it toward the woman, who helps herself to one. The barmaid has an apple-cheek prettiness, but she always smells of cigarettes, takes frequent breaks in the parking lot. Whereas Polly is that odd person who can take them or leave them.

  “That hour drive is just that much too far. If I lived in Seaford or Dagsboro, maybe—but not from here. I hate driving these two-lane roads at night. Kids going too fast on the curves, old people going too slow, speed traps. Rather make just enough every week of the year, stay away from the tourists. They don’t tip well, anyway. Everyone’s passing through.”

  Polly decides not to point out that she just said the money was better down the ocean.

  “What would I make here, part-time?”

  “Four nights a week, including one of the big weekend nights? Maybe two hundred dollars, mostly cash. But that’s if you’re good. Are you good?”

  “I think so.”

  “I wouldn’t mind having a deeper bench, that’s for sure. I’d like to take a weeknight off here and there. But it’s the boss’s decision.”

  “What if I need to work off the books?”

  The barmaid’s eyes narrow. “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Not a matter of want. Need.”

  “Someone looking for you?”

  “Not for anything I did wrong. But—if I were to be found, yeah, it could be bad.” She smiles. “I’m not the first woman to make a mistake, you know?”

  Don’t say too much and people will fill in the gaps, usually to your advantage. Polly has shown up out of nowhere, lives in a motel that rents by the week. She has a fading bruise on her jaw. That was actually from Jani’s head jerking up, head-butting her by accident, but all anyone knows is that there is a purple-green shadow on the right side of her face. She touches it now, absentmindedly, then snatches her hand away as if she doesn’t want to draw attention to it. Funny, touching the bruise is almost like touching Jani, smelling all those toddler smells. This is for the best, she reminds herself. Jani’s going to be better off in the long run.

  “Let me talk to the boss. His name is Cosimo, but we call him Casper behind his back, Mr. C to his face.”

  “Casper?”

  “He’s white as a ghost. I’m Cath, by the way.”

  “Nice to meet you, Cath.”

  Cath goes into the kitchen, doesn’t come back. Time passes. Five minutes, ten. Two men come in, older guys. Polly’s seen them here before, drinking the cheapest draft beers. She walks behind the counter, pulls their drafts, writes down the transaction on a napkin. These guys always run a tab, she’s pretty sure.

  When the barmaid returns with the boss, they find Polly still behind the bar. They don’t like her presumption, but they don’t mind it as much as they might. She has shown initiative.

  “So you’re ready to start?” Cosimo/Casper asks. Mr. C. He is really white, blue white; his skin almost glows, although he’s not an albino. Maybe the closest thing you can be to one without being one. “Like right now?”

  “I was just trying to help out. I know these guys don’t like to wait.”

  “Yeah? What else you know about them?” That’s Cath.

  “He’s Max and he’s Ernest.” Polly indicates which is which with her chin. “On weekends, they came in about five, but on weekdays they like to get started before the five o’clock news. They drink Natty Boh. They talk a lot about politics. And Agent Orange and DDT. They say food tasted better when they were allowed to use DDT, so I think one of them might be a retired crop duster, although maybe he just worked at DuPont. They also warned me that there’s a gun in your desk drawer, so I better not think of lifting so much as a dollar out of t
he till, Mr. C.”

  The barflies cackle, nod, and Mr. C seems charmed by the use of his nickname. Men always like her, when she can be bothered to try. Cath seems less friendly now. Polly will need to watch for that. She has no use for women, which is why she has to make sure to befriend them. Women never like her. They feel threatened by her, which is silly. She’d never take another woman’s man, doesn’t even want that much attention from men. The problem is, when a man wants her, he usually won’t stop trying to get her. They wear her down, men. She starts off by taking pity on them, ends up feeling sorry for herself.

  “When can you start?” Mr. C asks.

  “When do you need me?”

  “Let’s try you out now, see how it goes.”

  When Mr. #3 comes in, there’s now more space between them than before, the breadth of the bar instead of a couple of stools. He wasn’t counting on that, she can tell. But now she has to talk to him, indulge his quiet, not-quite flirtation, because it’s going to make the difference in where she sleeps, what she eats. Tips. You have to swallow a lot to make good tips. She’s already started reading the PennySaver, looking for a cheap place to live. Today, she checked out a big apartment over the empty Ben Franklin store on Main. Walking distance from here, although it’s not a great walk, a lot of highway with narrow shoulders, few sidewalks. The apartment’s not anything special, but it’s huge, and only $300 a month. She likes the idea of those two big empty rooms, only for her. She wouldn’t fill it with furniture even if she could.

  She leans over the bar. Max and Ernest have already made the inevitable top shelf jokes, snicker, snicker. It was strange, how she got skinny but her breasts stayed the same size. But just because her breasts don’t look as if they belong on her body, it doesn’t mean they belong to the world, either. Every time she waitresses, she swears it’s the last time. But she’s good at it, and she loves taking home cash at night’s end. There’s nothing like cash.