Chapter 7
VISCOSITY
The rusty iron staircase at the back of the apartment creaks like it always does when I walk up it after my shift, and it occurs to me suddenly that Rig might not be here.
He did disappear before, after all. But the smell that greets me when I open the door is definitely not the norm. I’ve walked into a bakery.
“Hey, babe.” Rig’s voice drifts through from the living room, and my heart does a strange little swoop.
The brown wooden cabinets and the battered faux-wood countertop look nothing like they did this morning.
If I hadn’t been living here for so long, I would swear that the blue patterned linoleum floor was new.
Where did all the ground-in dirt go? And where has all the food gone that was piled on all the surfaces because there was no space in the cabinets?
The cabinet doors that were hanging askew on their hinges are no longer doing that.
I walk over to the stove and bend down to see a big earthenware dish inside.
The stovetop gleams. In fact, the whole place gleams. I blink around.
The oven didn’t even look like that when I moved in.
I open the cabinet on the right-hand wall above the counter.
The door opens perfectly. It’s also half empty.
“Threw all the expired stuff out,” Rig rumbles from behind me, and I turn to find him standing in the doorway in jeans, bare feet, and a worn gray T-shirt.
He looks amazing. “When I was cooking. I couldn’t work out what you did and didn’t have …
spices, shit like that. So I ditched anything past its expiration date. ”
“You cooked dinner?”
“Yeah. You hungry?”
Just the smell is making my mouth water. I nod because the words are stuck in my throat.
“It’s almost ready.”
“You cleaned.” It spills out kind of squeaky.
He sighs and nods. “Yeah, babe, like I said, I couldn’t find stuff.
I’ve gotten used to being tidy because there’s no room on the rig or in the trailer, especially for a big guy like me.
I’ve been holed up here all day lyin’ low; I had to do something.
Also, I cook. Because I’m a big guy, I need to eat and not junk, either.
Can’t keep in decent shape if I eat crap, so I made myself a pact a while ago that I’d cook.
Large casserole. Lasts a few days. Nothing fancy. ”
I glance around the kitchen. “How did you get the floor so clean?”
“Elbow grease, a bit of Clorox.”
“It looks amazing.”
“Easy enough to do.”
Maybe, but who would do it? And he’s covered in bruises, too.
I take my coat off and walk back to the door to hang it up.
Then I head over to him, his hazel eyes tracking my every move.
Going up on my toes, I press a kiss to his lips, and he hooks me around the head and presses back, his tongue stealing out and into my mouth as I relax into him.
When he lets me go, he clears his throat and says, “Good day?”
“The usual.”
“What’s the usual?”
“Little old ladies in little old bodies who need a lot of help and some company.”
“Sounds sad.”
“It’s not a bad gig. They’re a giggle most of the time … except the ones who complain.”
“Sick?”
“I mean, they’re pumped full of meds, but none of them are sick at the moment. They’d be in the hospital if they were. Just old bodies and medication I have to keep an eye on.”
“You got mats and shit for your table?”
When did I last eat anywhere but in front of my TV? “Somewhere.”
I pull out the top drawer that holds the silverware, and it comes out easily. I don’t think it’s ever done that. “Did you fix the slides?”
I stopped asking my scummy landlord to repair things years ago because he said yes and never did anything.
“Yeah, and by the way, babe, your landlord turned up today asking about the rent, and I had words with him about how bad the outside of this building is because it’s not bein’ properly looked after. He’s coming by tomorrow to fix the shower drain and the window.”
“Did he ask who you were?”
“Said I was a friend of yours, and I told him he needed to get his shit together or he’d be getting a visit.”
Christ. Bending down, I open and shut every drawer. Holy shit. My throat tightens. This is like a normal apartment, a normal life. Someone looking after me. He needs to go back to telling me what a fuckup I am.
I find the mats and set the table, and he pulls the casserole from the oven and puts it on the mat in the center, heaping out huge spoonfuls of meat, potatoes, and gravy onto the plates.
He places a loaf on the table and hacks a chunk off it with a blunt knife.
He smiles. “You need a new bread knife, babe.”
“Is that homemade, too?” I say.
“Like I said, nothing to do.”
He places a hunk of bread on my plate next to the meat and another one on his own, sits down, and picks it up, piling the food onto it and taking a huge bite, closing his eyes.
“Fuckin’ bliss. Good food. Nowhere to be, nowhere to go. No howling gale I have to go out in to fix some gears that some idiot didn’t grease right and have seized up. No fucking guys trying to rile me up or on my back giving me grief to fight.”
“You don’t like working on the rigs?”
“It’s difficult but it pays well. Can’t complain.
It gets lonely. Different people come and go all the time because people can’t hack the cold, the weather, or the sheer hard physical labor.
Some men are okay, some are assholes. A lot of ’em aren’t right in the head.
A few I’ve known for a long while. Wouldn’t say they’re friends exactly, but I don’t hate ’em. ”
I pick up my fork and pop some stew in my mouth. The gravy is rich, and the meat melts on my tongue. God, that’s delicious. We eat in quiet companionship for a minute.
“I’m already wondering what I’m going to do when you move out,” I say, and immediately I want to clamp my hand over my mouth.
Not the right comment to make, Carl. But all this help is overwhelming.
I already liked him, the sex has been stellar, and he’s made it completely clear he doesn’t want anything more.
“Well, brace, because I could be here for a while.”
I don’t like how warmth radiates through my gut at that. Knock it off. “Why’s that?”
“Someone torched my trailer.”
My head snaps up. “You’re kidding me?”
“When I find the assholes who did it, I’m taking them apart limb by limb.”
“How do you know it was torched if you were holed up here?”
He holds up his phone and shows me a picture of a burned-out trailer.
“My buddy, Jake. He knows I’m lying low, but he’s keeping an eye on things for me.
He brought some food around that they didn’t have at that store downstairs so I could make a decent meal.
My truck’s stashed at his house. Luckily, I took everything out of the trailer and put it in the truck because I had a feeling something like this might happen given the assholes in this place.
I lost people a lot of money with that fight.
Jake tells me there’s no end of chatter about a rematch, so I’ve got that hassle coming down the line, and Marco’ll want that because it’ll make him a shitload of money.
Jake’s getting aggravation because people are looking for me, and he’s telling them I’ve left town. ”
I stare at him. How could I ever have thought he wasn’t very communicative?
“God, I’m sorry about your trailer, Rig.”
He shakes his head. “It was a shithole. Don’t want to think about it now or I’ll get mad. Let’s have this. Quiet night, good sex.”
I grin at him. “Bit presumptuous, don’t you think?”
He smiles at me over his plate. “Babe, I fixed your cabinets.”
I burst out laughing. “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.”
“And your drawers.”
“What do you think that’s worth?”
“Blowjob?” He squints at me, grinning.
“At least. Those drawers weren’t working when I moved in here years ago.”
He laughs. “Two blowjobs, then. Though I’m remembering now that you promised me a shower together this morning before you shot off.”
“I’m up for that.”
“Got a confession to make. That isn’t all I’ve done. You haven’t made it past this room, but the whole apartment has had a going over.”
“Jesus.”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
No, because I cleaned it the last time I saw him, so this time it was only a month’s worth of grime.
“But I found some shit in your bedroom,” he adds.
I cover my eyes. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“Pictures. Drawings. Paintings.”
Oh, fuck. “Oh.”
“Decent pictures.”
Heat builds in my cheeks as the smile slides off my face. I don’t want to see the pictures.
I stare down at my plate, but his finger comes out and he tips my chin up so I’ll meet his eyes.
“They’re cool, babe,” he says softly.
“I did them a long time ago, Rig.”
“How long ago?”
“Ten years, maybe more.” I’m lying. I know exactly when I stopped.
“You want, I can put them up for you.”
I shake my head, and he watches me for a minute as I study my food and toy with a potato.
“You want to look at them at all?”
Could I? “Probably not.”
He heaps another spoonful of stew onto his plate and breaks off another huge chunk of bread. And we’re silent as we shovel casserole into our mouths and a couple of cars rumble past on the street out front.
“So, you stopped drawing and painting,” he says after a few minutes.
I nod my head.
“Why?”
I want to say that I stopped doing the thing I love to punish myself, but that sounds whacked.
“I got a full scholarship to study art in East St. Louis, but I realized fairly fast that I couldn’t make any money selling my stuff, so I did an accelerated nursing degree, worked at that for a bit, then took up the caregiving gig. ”
“I found something else in your bedroom,” he adds.
This is going from bad to worse. I’m surprised he wasn’t crushed by all the secrets falling out of my closets.
“A guitar.”
“Ah.”
“You play?”
I shake my head. What do I say here? “Boyfriend.”
“Ah.” He nods. “And he left it behind?” His mouth quirks. “Babe, he’s coming back.”
I almost choke. “I hope to God he isn’t.”
He chuckles. “That bad, huh? You mind if I play it?”
I give him a small smile. “Now that I would like to hear.”
“Then eat up, because that’s your entertainment for this evening.”
And what a night’s entertainment it is. He’s not a great player, but good enough, and he downloads music from the internet and practices a bit, and strums away and I start singing and he sings with me. It’s years since I did anything like this, and it brings tears to my eyes.
After, we have a shower together, and he takes me apart on my bed again, and tucks me into his huge body, and we fall asleep in my clean room which now smells like Pine-Sol.
I have dreams about drawing: long swirly pictures of the sky and faces appearing out of a page of charcoal.
My grandma, my dad, my mom. Charlie. And I start to cry, and I wake up with a jolt, hiccupping into the silence with Rig snoring softly behind me.
Those pictures of Charlie don’t exist anymore because I burned them, and my heart pounds and aches as I lie there remembering his small, perfect body, perfect toes, and tiny hands that I drew over and over and then destroyed.
I want him back more than I want to breathe.