Sleepovers Read online

  But the man doesn’t take the paperwork from Dale’s hand.

  The man looks at Dale and mouths the word, “Sorry,” and then ushers Mrs. Creech out of the store.

  Dale watches them leave.

  At the door he hears Mrs. Creech ask her son, “Are you sure, now? Are you sure he don’t need it?”

  For the seafood pizza, Hope will need to drive to Roanoke Rapids. That’s where the Super Walmart is and they’ve got the good seafood and to get there you pass the sex store and she’s never been but she always looks when she drives by. And the walls inside are bubblegum pink, the lights are neon yellow.

  She’s never had an orgasm but she’s read about them, of course. She’s Google-searching strap-on images. There are rubber penises and even glass. How would glass feel inside a warm body? Cool and then warmer, warmer?

  She needs to know from Dale: SHRIMP or SALMON.

  But this is what he texts her: WHICH WOULD YOU RATHER HAVE, BABY?

  Hope knew it, Dale can never assert himself. She wants him to assert himself. Insert himself into her, plunging, thrusting hard. Cosmo says strap-ons allow you to show your man how you want it. SHOW YOUR MAN HOW YOU WANT IT.

  She sighs. She doesn’t even want seafood pizza anymore.

  Hope’s daddy walks in the office and she closes her search window. The desktop background is an aerial shot of Alaska. The sun is coming up over the mountains of snow.

  Dale wants to see where he would have delivered the BeautyRest ReCharge Extra Firm mattress to Mrs. Creech’s son. He drives out to the end of Highway 258 and sees Mrs. Creech’s house just as she described it. The white house is big and glows amidst the dark fields around it. And the tin roof looks like a mirror under the moon. Only one light shines from the first floor. Maybe Mrs. Creech is watching TV.

  Dale looks across the road for the trailer, but the yard is thick with pines and overgrown bushes. He pulls down the dirt path and makes his way to the back of the thicket. The grasses get taller and swish against his side windows. He keeps the headlights shining and even walks out into the grass and bushes, pulling back branches to see if anything’s there.

  Earth to Amy

  Rami got killed the other night. He got shot down there at the stop sign at Aunt Nan’s. He’d just closed his corner store in Aulander and was driving through. Three boys were down there waiting for him in the ditch. And they jumped up when he stopped at the stop sign and shot him to death right there. He didn’t even have time to get to his gun. My cousin Craig’s the one who found him. He heard the shots and went to see what was going on. Craig said Rami still had his seatbelt on, his foot on the brake pedal. His headlights were shining out into the corn. Those boys didn’t get but two hundred dollars and his watch. They won’t but eighteen.

  Seymour’s sweeping in front of my register saying that people from where Rami’s from don’t believe in embalming the body. He’s looking at me like he wants me to make a face. But I pretend I don’t hear him.

  The night Rami died folks came out from all over to leave him flowers and candles and signs outside his corner store. They held prayer circles out in the parking lot into the night.

  Yesterday, one of the mamas of one of them boys was in here crying in the canned food aisle. She was talking to a woman she went to church with. She was saying she didn’t raise her baby boy like that. She said the police came out to her house in the middle of the night and dragged him outta her arms like he was a criminal.

  Last time I saw Rami, I bought a hotdog from him and he asked me how Russ was doing. And that meant a lot to me because nobody around here ever asks me about him because he’s a married man. And a young girl like me shouldn’t be wasting my time on him that’s what my Aunt Nan said. You can just tell that’s what people are thinking when I check them out in my line.

  But Rami was different, seemed like he always saw the good in people. If you didn’t have the money to pay him that day, he’d let you have it. And he was always taking care of stray cats at his store. From the time Russ moved down here he’d been trying to give him one. Rami told me that Russ needed a cat since he lived alone.

  Russ moved down at the start of spring to work at that new coal ash pond they put in the county. He came from Ohio. That’s where his wife and two little girls are. He never talks about them much but one time he told me that the baby girl cries when they gotta run the vacuum.

  But this thing with Rami has really tore Russ all to pieces. He was worried it had something to do with him being Muslim, but really it just came down to the money. It’s sad. He’s been staying up all night reading anything he can find on the internet. We’re supposed to go over tonight and bring Rami’s wife and daughter some pizzas. But I haven’t heard from Russ all day and this happens sometimes when he gets in his mind that he’s ashamed of what me and him are doing.

  I’m nineteen and I’ve got the young people arthritis in my fingers. I don’t have a car and I live at home with my sister and Daddy. Our house is right down the road. Daddy used to be the postman before he got Alzheimer’s and then he had to quit. He used to do taxidermy on the side too. He’d bring home the dead animals he’d pick up on his mail route and throw them in the freezer. We grew up in a home filled with taxidermy animals on the floors and walls and shelves. We had a rattlesnake behind the rocking chair, a beaver beside the TV, and a bobcat Daddy mounted above the couch. But we had to sell them as things got worse ’cause we needed the money. Everybody called Daddy “Pipeman.”

  When Daddy got sick, me and Sister had to find full time work best we could. She works the night shift at Pine Forest nursing home and stays with Daddy during the day. I watch him at night. Sister says we’re gonna have to put him in a home soon. And I hate it but I know it’s true. He can’t hardly put a sentence together now. He goes through a lot of diapers.

  Everybody around here knows Daddy because he used to deliver their mail and after he first got sick, folks would come by and see him. But no one comes around anymore.

  Seymour lets me leave early for my lunch break because it’s so slow. “Tell Pipeman I said hello,” he says. Like my Daddy knows who Seymour is more than a man on the moon.

  I take the highway home, walk on the side of the road. It takes about six minutes. The heat makes my hair sweaty so I throw it up into a ponytail and convince myself that Russ is going to break up with me. I make a list in my head of my talents and what I have to offer and all I can come up with is I’m young and I don’t have a fat belly like most girls around here and when I was little Daddy said I was his girl.

  Before Daddy got sick, I worked with him out in his taxidermy shed. I’d sit up underneath him like a little puppy. I’d do whatever he told me. And one day he thought it would be cute if I’d make little outfits for this set of squirrels he had. I made a Cinderella and Snow White. I made an Amelia Earhart too. I took them and hid them in the back of the shed when Daddy was sick and we were selling all the other animals.

  Russ ain’t never seen them.

  When I get in the house, my sister’s on the couch, half-sleeping with bills on her chest. And Daddy’s in the corner recliner, where he was when I left this morning. He’s staring empty at the stories on TV. He don’t look at me when I come in. He grits his teeth together like he’s eating, it’s a new thing he’s started doing. He keeps doing this and staring at the TV when I bend over and give him a kiss.

  I wake Sister up and tell her to go on and get in the shower if she wants to. She gets up and hands me the bills.

  “We’re behind by one-fifty on the electric,” she says, yawning.

  “What’s new,” I say.

  She goes down the hall to the bathroom, I go to the kitchen and open the cabinet, grab a Cup O’ Noodles for me and Daddy’s lunch.

  “We’ll figure it out,” I yell to her.

  Daddy used to grow his own herbs out back and now I just bring the shakey kind home from work because me and Sister let the garden die. But Daddy don’t know the difference. Like r
ight now I’m cutting his noodles so he can eat them better. And I’m shaking some dried basil on top. And no matter what I do to these shit noodles, he’s still gonna smack on them just the same after he gets them.

  I wake him up and check to see if I need to change him. And he does need a changing but dammit I don’t want to do it. Thank God it ain’t shit. Sister’s the one who knows how to do it right. I might hurt him. I’m scared I’ll hurt him just pulling on him to get him to sit up straight in his recliner. But after I’ve been tugging on him a while, he finally looks at me and I smile at him. I bring him his bowl of noodles and feed him a couple of bites to get him going on his own.

  I go to the kitchen to get my Cup O’ Noodles when I hear him trying to say “Old, old” at the TV. The Young and the Restless is on and when I come back to the living room with my lunch I see Victor Newman up there.

  “Yeah Daddy, he is old ain’t he,” I say and then the pain comes real fast in my fingers and I drop my Cup O’Noodles, looks like tapeworms digging into the carpet.

  I clean it up but Daddy don’t seem to notice. And I know it’s bad but all I can think about then is what I’m gonna say at his funeral, how we’re gonna pay for it.

  When Daddy sees me on the floor in front of him he says just as clear as a bell, “You’re my pretty girl.”

  It’s a lot. Everything is a lot.

  My phone dings. It’s a text from Seymour: EARTH TO AMY. WHERE U AT?

  Before I head back to work I go out in the shed and grab my old squirrels; Cinderella, Snow White, and Amelia Earhart. I carry them under my arms and start back on the side of the highway. It’s still hot out but a car goes by and blows a breeze. I think about Rami’s wife and daughter. The daughter’s about my age. She goes to the community college. Bet they never thought they’d wake up one morning without a husband and a daddy. I bet Rami loved them more than anything in this world. When Daddy would tuck me and sister in at night he’d say, “I love y’all more than anything in this world.”

  My phone rings Russ’s special ringer and I stand there on the side of the road and put my squirrels down gentle to see what he’s got to say.

  “I miss your mouth.” That’s the first thing he says.

  I want to tell him I miss him. I want to tell him I love him. I want to tell him when he touches me he takes me out of here. But I don’t say any of it.

  I watch the dress I made Cinderella all those years ago sparkle in the sun. I made it out of my frilly blue baby socks.

  And Russ goes on a rant about the boys who killed Rami. He says he hopes they get the death penalty, says he wants to blow their brains out. He asks me what kind of pizza we should get Rami’s family.

  And I tell him I don’t know if there’s certain things Muslims can’t eat.

  “Yeah, that’s smart,” he says.

  We agree on cheese.

  He says he’ll place an order for them from the place in Potecasi and swing by and get me after work. And then he says after we visit Rami’s family maybe we can go to Bull Hill. That’s where he took my virginity. “Maybe we can play around in the truck bed,” he says.

  I’m looking at Snow White now and I’d forgotten until now, but I even made her a little apple out of an eraserhead.

  “I’ve got to go,” I say.

  After we hang up, I pick up my squirrels again and brush the grass out their tails. I pass the house where the new puppy’s always squealing, sounds like it’s getting its ears pulled apart.

  I walk in the store and tell Seymour that I need to sell my squirrels in here. I sit my squirrels behind my register and grab my stool. I tell him I can clear that shelf above the candy racks where he displays his Wild Turkey bottles. “They ain’t nothing but decoration,” I say.

  He’s smacking on a Fudge Round, leaning over my register, “I don’t know what all goes on in that brain of yours Amy, but I like it.”

  I stand on the stool and start throwing him his Wild Turkey bottles.

  And then I set up my squirrel girls while he stands underneath me, his mouth open. “Is that one that woman who crashed her plane in the ocean?” he’s pointing at Amelia.

  “No,” I turn around and look down at him. “She’s the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic ocean.” I hop down off my stool, “And see that airplane behind her?”

  Seymour nods and tucks his shirt under his belly flap.

  “I cut that out from the National Geographic at school.”

  The rest of the day, the regulars come in and Seymour hollers at them to look at my squirrels. “She thinks she’s gonna make some money off of them,” he laughs.

  And everybody around here knows who I am and remembers my Daddy and when Seymour says this they glance up at my squirrels and turn to me with a half-smile, like they feel sorry for me. And that’s not what I want. But Daddy always said, “You can’t control other people.”

  Don’t nobody really stop to look at them except Miss Janet and she’s got her granddaughter with her and her granddaughter is pointing at Cinderella’s crown. I remember making that with leftover Christmas tinsel. I made a mess of silver shreds on the floor but it made Daddy so happy to see me working so hard in the middle of it.

  I tell Miss Janet I can take Cinderella down if her granddaughter wants a closer look. I come out from behind my register and ask the little girl if she wants to see her. But Miss Janet takes her granddaughter’s hand and pulls her close to her. “It’s alright, honey,” she says to me. She looks me up and down. Her granddaughter is pointing up at my squirrel Cinderella, she’s excited and trying to get out of her grandmama’s hold. “I know your Daddy sure is proud of you,” Miss Janet says with that half-smile again. Her granddaughter is yanking at her arm now. “How is he doing anyways,” she asks me. And I tell her, “About the same,” like always. “Well I’m thinking about y’all,” she says. This is what they all say. This is what they always say. Don’t reach out to hug me or nothing.

  Buttercup

  Joanie had a cousin with braces and a cousin that was slow and those two cousins were sisters. And one time when I was at Joanie’s house, those cousins came over because the one with the braces was going to prom and she wanted to show Joanie’s family her dress. While the braces one twirled in the living room the slow one kept putting her arms into her shirt so she looked dismembered. But nobody seemed to pay attention to what she was doing except me. Her name was Tina.

  Tina sometimes sat around and tried to see how long she could hold her breath, her cheeks puffed out like the marshmallow challenge. Her sister with braces was named Bri and she was going to the prom with the preacher’s son who got paralyzed in a drunk driving accident. He was really handsome and it was really sad. All the daddies got together and built him a ramp so he could get into the high school building at school.

  Joanie kept a picture of Bri and him from the prom in her bedroom. It was on the wall above her lava lamp and at nighttime when she turned it on and it got going, it would goo goo and reflect up on Bri sitting pretty on that preacher boy’s lap, her braces shining. And her pretty pink prom dress glittering like a princess.

  Joanie’s favorite color was lime green and her mama let her paint her walls whatever she wanted. So they were lime green and then lime green with a hot pink accent wall. And then lime green with a hot pink accent wall with black stripes.

  Joanie had a computer in her bedroom too and we’d play The Sims into the morning, taking turns updating our families. Her goal was to always make her husbands and wives have affairs. And she liked getting the ones with low cooking skills in the kitchen without a fire alarm so they’d catch on fire and die. Or put them in the pool and then take out the ladder so they’d swim to death. She thought it was funny.

  My goal was to always have as many children as possible. My husband was Brandon Flowers of The Killers. When me and Mama went to CVS, I saw them in the Rolling Stone magazine and I read in there that he was Mormon so it all made sense to me to have as many children as possible w
ith him on the Sims. Joanie didn’t like the Killers, she liked 50 Cent. She didn’t like to read like me either. But she was really good at basketball. She always scored when she shot. And the boys loved her and were sending her notes all the time.

  Joanie only saw her real daddy on special occasions. He lived far away with his new family. I never saw him myself. Joanie lived with her mama and stepdaddy and half brother. He was a baby and it was fun to play with him and tote him around and give him piggyback rides. His breath always smelled like pickles.

  Joanie’s cousin who was a little slow named Tina had this blankie she carried around with her that was full of holes like she’d worn it slam out. And one time when her and her sister, Bri, came over, Joanie’s mama got all of us girls out in the front yard to take some pictures in front of her azaleas because they were blooming so big and she was so proud of them. So it was me and Joanie and Bri and Tina and I was next to Tina and she kept stroking my arm up and down with that blankie while we were standing there trying to take that picture. “She likes you,” Joanie said.

  Nobody knows this but I sucked my thumb until I was in the third grade and that was something I was embarrassed about. I was also really bad at math and had to stay in and write my multiplication tables with the boys writing sentences for misbehaving, while everyone else was outside going down the big slide.

  When we were out by the azaleas then I picked a buttercup from the yard and held it up under Tina’s chin and when it reflected yellow on her skin, I told her she liked butter. She called me Buttercup after that. Yellow has always been my favorite color.

  Joanie ended up having a baby and moving to Greenville to be a waitress. Bri did good and got her dental hygiene degree. She works in Dr. Outland’s office, married a big farmer and don’t want for nothing anymore. Only time I see Tina now is when Bri and her mama bring her into the café to eat on Sundays. She hugs my neck when she sees me and they put a bib on her like a baby. She’s a full grown woman like me now.