untitled (robert)

I can't swim. I tell people I can, but I can't. Just thought you should know before we begin.

I work a register at a grocery store, which I’ll spare you the bulk of. It’s a belt and a beeping and an apron and a name tag with my name spelled wrong on it that I never got fixed because by now it feels like it belongs to a different girl, a girl I’m fond of, and I came to this town a few years ago after my dad passed. I’m only mentioning that so you’ll understand I didn’t have anybody here yet when this happened to me. That’s the only reason. I’m not going to get into it. And everybody comes through a register sooner or later, the whole entire town, and you forget every one of them the second the doors slide shut.

One night this guy came through my line late with hardly a thing in his basket and said something about the weather. I said something back, and glanced at the name on his debit card, Robert, and I want to tell you about him because I have a good feeling about Robert. I really do. He started coming in regularly after that, Tuesdays and Fridays mostly, and he never bought much, a few of the frozen dinners and a half gallon of milk and the one lemon, and I think that’s sort of beautiful when you really look at it, isn’t it? A man who doesn’t need much. You don’t meet many of those.

We’d talk while I rang him through and then it moved out to the back lot where I smoked cigarettes by the carts. You smoke out here too, I said the first time. I smoke wherever they’ll let me. And a couple places they won’t, he said, and I laughed, and that was the hook. Robert says things like that, every sentence out of him sounds like the line right before the credits roll. He drove trucks eighteen years, long haul, and he told me he dreams about engines. A man who dreams in engines. I told him I can hear the scanner beeping in my sleep and he laughed with his hand on the dumpster to stay up, and I thought, there, that’s a real one, you cannot fake a laugh like that.

So we ran like that a good while, and I started timing my fifteen to when he shops, and I know how that sounds, I do, but when you know, you know. And one night it was raining and neither one of us wanted to be the one to put the cigarette out, and I just asked him, I said, what’s your place like, and he said, small, and I said, I want to see it, because life is short and I am done waiting around for men to get to things in their own time, and he looked at me a second and said, well come on then, and I clocked out on the spot and we went. And I want it on the record that that was me. I did that. I’m proud of it, honestly.

His place was the top half of a house on a street I’d driven past a hundred times, small and clean, and the second we were through the door this old dog lifted her head off the floor, gave the both of us a long look, and put it right back down. That’s Sadie, she used to like people, he said. What happened, I said, and he said, life, same as the rest of us, and we both got to drinking and that was pretty much the whole night. The two of us and a dog who’d thrown in the towel. He had whiskey, the cheap kind that’s just good enough, and we got into it on the couch, and then he dug a joint out of an old coffee can like a man in a movie, and we got high on top of everything else.

The high was the best part, I’m telling you. We got into this whole thing about Sadie, about what she was thinking. He did her voice, this low sad put-upon old-lady voice and said, I have seen it all and I want no part of any of it. And as I was crying laughing, it hit me that he probably does that alone, that voice, every single night, and it broke my heart. It made me want to be the one he does it for. He told me about a man named Pete he ran with who ate exclusively at gas stations and died at fifty-one of, take a guess, gas station food. And I laughed so hard and felt just awful and started to say so and he waved it off, no, no, Petey would have loved it, and right then he wasn’t laughing, and I wanted to put my arms around him.

There was a guitar in the corner with dust on it and I said you play and he said I used to, and there was a picture on the shelf turned around to face the wall, and when I reached to turn it he said leave it, soft, not mean, just leave it, and and I didn’t push, because everybody’s got one locked room and I figured I’d get the key in time. These things take time. He’s got a daughter out in New York he sees at Christmas if he’s lucky. One year he wasn’t lucky and I thought damn, I mean, you don’t just tell a thing like that to just anybody. And somewhere down in the whiskey and the smoke and all of it I leaned over and kissed him, because I was sure, I was so sure, and he kissed me back

We went down the little hall to the bedroom where the only light was a lamp set on the floor because there was no table to put it on, which I found unbearably sad and unbearably sweet at once. Like he’d just been waiting around for somebody to come help him pick out a table. He was older than me and heavier through the middle and there was an old white scar low on his side. I put my mouth on it before I’d decided to, and he was warm, and slow, and kind, that is the thing I keep coming back around to, the kindness, you cannot fake a kindness like that, and it was good, it was the kind of good where you lose track of yourself entirely.

The lamp on the floor threw the two of us up huge and shaking on the wall, and I thought, this is it, this is the exact thing I’ve been driving to work hoping for, and it’s real, and it’s right here, and it has Robert’s face on it. Afterward I laid my head on his chest and I told him the truest thing I had in me, I said, I could do this, you know. This. Just like this, and he was quiet for a second, and then he put his hand in my hair and he said, you’re a good kid. You’re a good kid, and I have held onto that, I turned it over the whole drive home, you’re a good kid, because of the way he said it. Twice. Soft like that, like it was the front edge of him saying something more.

He fell asleep pretty quick after, which I took for a good sign. He was comfortable. He trusted me, I don’t know. I dressed in the lamplight, and Sadie came and stood in the doorway watching me. I crouched down and tried the voice on her, his voice, low so he wouldn’t hear, I have seen it all and I want no part of it, and she didn’t do anything. She just looked at me, sad, these long eyes. I don’t know what that was. Robert walked me out in his shorts and kissed the side of my head and told me drive safe, see you, and I said I would. He didn’t ask for my number, which I figured he might, but then he doesn’t need it, he knows where I am, Monday to Friday, same as him, and that’s almost better, isn’t it? We’ve already got a place.

So I went down into the not-quite rain and got in my car. It turned over on the second try the way it always does, and I sat a second with my hands on the cold wheel. I was happy. I think I was happy. Happier than I’d ever been. I thought about Tuesday, about what I’d wear under my apron. Play it cool when he comes in. Somehow, I didn’t finish the thought. I was already parked outside my building, the engine still going, the windshield fogging soft at the corners. I sat there with my teeth pressed into my bottom lip, the wheel cold under my hands. I sat there a while with it running. Eventually I went upstairs and laid down on top of the covers with my coat still on and fell asleep.