As for Michael, it doesn’t really matter what she says about him; Dori is spinning the story that ends in happily ever after for everyone, the one where two years from now Rena and Michael are telling their meet-cute story at their own wedding. But Rena can see already everything wrong with that future. As a teenager, she prized her ability to see clearly the way things would end. She thought that if she saw things plainly enough, she could skip deception and disappointment, could love men not for their illusions but for their flaws and be loved for hers in return. She did not understand how to pretend. In her early twenties a series of men one by one held her to their chests and kissed the top of her head if they were gentlemen and palmed her ass if they were not and told her that she deserved better than they could give her. But what did it matter what she deserved, faced with the hilarity of one more person telling her glibly that better was out there when she was begging for mediocrity and couldn’t have that?
Rena pressed herself against the emptiness, flirted with cliché: nights fucking strangers against alleyway walls, waking to bruises in places she didn’t remember being grabbed. Though it had been almost a year of this by the time her sister was shot, her friends were happy to make retroactive excuses, to save themselves the trouble of an intervention that might only have been an intervention against a person being herself. So, more rough strangers, years she let make her mean. If she was not good enough for the thing other people had, who could be; if she did not deserve love, who should have it; if she could not find in a mirror what was so bad and unlovable in her, she would have to create it. She learned how to press the blade of her heart into the center of someone else’s life, to palm a man’s crotch under the table while smiling sweetly at his wife, to think, sometimes, concretely and deliberately, of her sister, punished for a thing she hadn’t done, while raising an eyebrow in a bar and accepting a drink from a man who didn’t bother hiding his ring. All the things she was getting away with! All the people who couldn’t see beauty or danger when it was looking right at them, when it had adjusted itself and walked out of their upstairs bathroom after tucking their husband’s penis back into his boxers, when it was under the hotel bedcovers while their boyfriend checked in on video chat. It was, if she is honest with herself, only because the circumstances were so strange that she didn’t sleep with JT, that she didn’t, one of those nights they woke up together, look him in the eyes and part her lips and trail her fingers down his bare chest and wait for what came next. It hadn’t been knowing Dori existed that kept her from it.
Rena thought for years that the meanness in her would be hers forever, except first, the hard, mean thing about her started to sparkle; she began to advertise trouble in a way that made her the kind of woman friends did not leave alone with their boyfriends. Then the rage she’d spent a decade fucking to a point softened into a kind of compassion. Men seemed more fragile to her now, and because it was impossible to entirely hate something for being broken, she forgave even those men who’d left her teary eyed and begging for their damage. No wonder they had sent her off—who wants to be loved for the hole in their chest when there is a woman somewhere willing to lie and say she can fix it, another prepared to spend decades pretending it isn’t there? She was, she wanted to tell everybody, so full of forgiveness lately, for herself and for everyone else. Her heart, these days, was a mewling kitten, apt to run off after anyone who would feed it, but try telling that to anyone who had known her the last decade, to anyone who had lived through all of her tiger years and wouldn’t hold a palm out to her without wanting the chance to be destroyed. It was a lovely daydream Dori was having for her, but if Rena went to Michael’s door speaking of her kitten heart, he would only hear kitten, he would only think pussy.
* * *
• • •
The awkward conversation fades into the comfort of nineties pop—God bless XM radio, the mercy of Dori changing the station before Billie broke open what was left of their hearts. Songs they have forgotten but now remember loving keep them company as they press through the landscape of rest stops and coffee shops and chain restaurants, slightly above the speed limit, so that things look even more alike than they might otherwise. By a little after ten they are at the edge of Indiana and Dori needs to pee, so they pull over at a rest stop off the turnpike. Rena follows her into the travel plaza to buy a bottled water and a packet of ibuprofen, her mouth still dry and her head faintly pulsing. The warm smell of grease activates her hangover, and by the time Dori exits the ladies’ room, Rena is grabbing breakfast at the McDonald’s counter.
There must be some law that any chain in an airport or rest stop is required to be just slightly off brand: Rena’s hash browns taste congealed and suspiciously like grape soda, and her breakfast sandwich is dry and slightly oblong. Dori has a Coke and a sad parfait, which is so sad that she has downed the Coke before making it more than a few spoonfuls into breakfast. When she gets up to refill the soda, she walks by a man a few tables away, hunched over his own pitiful breakfast, the bottom of his gray beard dotted with a drip of coffee he doesn’t seem to have noticed. His face breaks into a full smile as Dori walks by, and on her way back he calls, “Who’s the lucky man?”
Dori freezes. For a moment her grip on the soda is so shaky it seems clear that she will drop it, that she will stain the offending bride T-shirt beyond wearability, which will at least solve the problem of future commentary. But she keeps the soda in hand and composes herself as she turns back to the man with the beard, who has dabbed off the coffee with a napkin while waiting for her reply.
“All of Toledo,” she says with a smile.
“Huh?”
“Bride’s our band name. I’m the drummer. Show tonight.”
“Yeah?” he says. His smile is still just as affable and natural; it is not the wedding that excited him but the chance to congratulate a stranger’s happiness, and this endears him to Rena. She walks over to join the conversation Dori and the stranger have started regarding the imaginary band. He was in a band in college. The band was called Cold Supper. His name, fittingly, is Ernest.
“We never made it so far as the tour part,” Ernest says. “Got out of the garage at least, played a few local shows. But never the road.”
“Believe me, the glamour of the road life doesn’t stop,” says Rena, holding up the soggy second half of her sandwich.
Ernest smiles and pulls out a phone to show them a picture one of his old bandmates posted a few months earlier. A younger, skinny, and long-haired version of himself plays the guitar. He has not played in years, ten or fifteen, but he has a lucky pick in his wallet, which he shows them too. It is smooth to the touch and dips in where his thumb has pressed against it and has faded to the yellow of a smoker’s teeth. Ernest insists on an autograph on the way out, promises to tell his niece in Toledo about their made-up show in a made-up bar, and so they provide him the autograph on a paper napkin, renaming themselves Glory and Tina. He waves them good luck on their way out. Rena flushes with shame. Ernest and his earnestness, his guitar pick, his poor niece in Toledo.