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While the two of us sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the guy to deliver the order, Raymond rolled and smoked a joint. I picked up a couple of the half-completed insurance forms I'd seen earlier. Time to make myself useful, I thought. I looked from the first form to the second. "What's this?" I said, a laugh bubbling up again. I can't help it – some spelling errors tickle me. "Suffering from a bad case of 'bruces'?" As I reached for a third form, Raymond snatched the papers away from me.
"Raymond, come on. What's the matter with you? You can't send that to an insurance company. Both of those claims say exactly the same thing." I went ahead and pulled a third claim form from the pile. "Here's another one. Same date, same time. Don't you think they check this stuff? They're going to pick up on that. Here, look. If you want to have those guys fill out the forms, at least use a little imagination. Set up a few different stories…"
"I was going to do that," he said with irritation.
"Let me have a turn. It'd be fun," I said.
At first, I didn't think he'd do it, but his gaze had settled on my face and I could see I'd piqued his interest. Reluctantly, he relinquished the form we'd been wrestling over. I picked up a pencil stub and began to print out the narrative for an auto accident.
"Don't make it sound too smart," Raymond said.
"Trust me."
I proceeded to invent, off the top of my head, several variations of the accidents I'd participated in that afternoon. I had to pat myself on the back. I was really good at this. I'd make a fortune if I ever turned my hand to crime in earnest. Raymond apparently thought so, too. "How you know all this stuff?"
"I'm a person of many talents," I said, licking my pencil point. "Quit peeking. You make me nervous."
Raymond got us both a cold beer and we chatted while I wrote up fictional fender-benders and minor wrecks. Raymond hadn't managed to graduate from high school, whereas I attended three whole semesters of junior college before I lost heart.
"Why'd you quit, though? You're smart."
"I never liked school," I said. "High school, I was smokin' too much dope to do well. College just seemed to be made up of all this stuff I didn't like. I was too rebellious back then. And it's not like I had a 'career' goal in mind. I couldn't see the point in learning things I didn't want to know. Poly sci and biology. Who needs it? I don't give a damn about xylem and phloem."
"Me neither. Especially phloem, right?"
"Yeah, right," I said, laughing on the assumption he was making a joke.
He smiled at me, rather sweetly. "I wish Bibia
"Forget it. I'm a mess. Divorced twice. I'm not any better at relationships than she is."
He cleared his throat. "You know, in my experience? Women are no fuckin' good. The average woman will take you for everything you got. Then, you know what they do? They leave your ass and walk off. I don't get it. What'd I ever do?"
"I don't know what to tell you, Raymond. Guys have left me and that doesn't make ' em bad. That's just the way life goes."
"They break your heart?"
"One or two."
"Well, now see… that's the difference. You get your heart broke like I do, it's hard to trust, you know that?" He stared at his beer bottle, peeling a strip of the label with his thumbnail.
I felt myself go still and I chose my words with care. "I'll tell you what somebody told me once. 'You can't make anyone love you and you can't keep anyone from dying.'
He stared at me, his dark eyes nearly luminous. There was a silence while he digested that. He shook his head. "Here's what I say. Somebody don't love me? They die."
At eight forty-five, our di
I settled down for the night on my lumpy couch. I longed to be at home in the safety of my own bed. I could feel anxiety whisper at the base of my spine. There was an ancient, familiar physical sensation I couldn't at first identify – some piece of my childhood being stirred up by circumstance. I felt a squeezing in my stomach – not an ache, but some process that was almost like grief. I closed my eyes, longing for sleep, longing for something else, though I couldn't think what. My eyes came open and in a flash, I knew. I was homesick.
My aunt had sent me off to summer camp when I was eight, claiming that it would be good for me to "get away." I see now maybe she was the one who needed the relief. She told me I'd have a wonderful time and meet lots of girls my own age. She said we'd swim and ride horses and go on nature walks and sing songs around the campfire at night. In dizzying detail, memories passed across my mental screen. It was true about the girls and all the activities. What was also true was that after half a day, I didn't want to be there. The horses were big and covered with flies, hot straw baseballs coming out their butts at intervals. Their muzzles were as soft and silky as suede with little prickles embedded in it, but when you least expected it, they would whip their heads up quick and try to bite you with teeth the size of piano keys. Nature turned out to be straight uphill, dusty and hot and itchy. The part that wasn't dry and tiresome was even worse. We were supposed to swim in a lake with an Indian name, but the bottom was vile and squishy. Half the time I worried there'd be broken bottles buried in the ooze. One false step and I knew my tender instep would be slashed to the bone. When I wasn't worried about slime and sharp rocks, I worried about the creatures gliding through the murky depths, tentacles trailing languidly toward my pale ski