Page 15 of Sublimate
“He doesn’t. Tell me more about your trip,” I requested, but he didn’t have a whole lot to say. It had been fine. Yes, it wasfun, he agreed but only when I suggested it. Yes, it was warm. Yes, there were beautiful beaches, a turquoise ocean, swaying palm trees, and everything I’d dreamed about Hawaii. Except he didn’t think that everyone knew how to hula.
“It would be like saying that everyone in Nevada is a card shark,” he said, and I answered that I sure wasn’t and neither was anyone else I’d grown up with, except for my mother’s second husband. That guy had hung around for years after they’d split up so I had known him as an uncle kind of figure and had heard a lot about his skill at the tables. He had thought he was a genius who could beat the house with a complicated system of predicting the suits of the cards.
“I think it was based on the angle that the dealer laid them down,” I said. “Maybe it wasn’t so mathematical and more like psychology stuff.”
“Or maybe, like a crock of shit,” Nolan suggested, and I had to agree. The method hadn’t worked and that guy had usually departed the casinos with less in his pockets than he’d gone in with. If he was a card shark, he was a bad one.
“You said he was your mother’s second husband?” he asked me. “It sounds like he was part of a series.”
“He was,” I confirmed. “She got married four times but the funny thing was, she had never divorced the first guy, my sister’s dad. He took off and I guess she kind of figured he was dead, or that it was like when you let go of a balloon by mistake. It’s out there somewhere, likely in a worse condition than when you had it, but you’ll never see it again.”
“That’s an interesting comparison. So, your mother was a bigamist,” he said, and I had to confirm that, too.
“She was never formally charged,” I said. “And it turns out that the first husband didn’t just pop off someplace. He’s in prison.”
“Oh.”
“Her final husband got mad when she asked him for money when they split up, and he was the one who figured out that they had never been legal in the first place. She did stop marrying people and she just switched to boyfriends. My dad was the third ‘husband.’” I did air quotes around the word. “He had already taken off so he wouldn’t have to pay any child support and he never found out that they hadn’t actually been married.”
“It’s too bad he left you like that.” He did look sorry about it.
“Well, I heard that he was kind of a jerk, but that was according to my sister, and she’s kind of a jerk herself. She also loves to exaggerate, like saying that the spider she just saw was as big as an orange, or her feet hurt so much that she had to go to the hospital…it was just a blister from new shoes,” I explained. “She told everyone that she was married to a guy she went out with once, just once, and you should have seen him run when he heard that rumor. They didn’t go out again. By the way, what ever happened to your fiancée?”
He started, a funny jump. “My what?”
“You had told me that you were engaged before. Holy bells, I love that word! But yeah, your fiancée. You said that she ended things.”
“When did I tell you that?” he wondered, and I explained how we’d gotten onto the topic when we’d been at Roy’s Tavern back in November. “That’s strange. I never talk about her,” he mentioned.
Nolan didn’t seem inclined to talk about her now, either, and I had learned the hard way not to press people. “I’m sorry,” I immediately apologized. “I shouldn’t have brought her up. My boyfriend says that I’m like poison ivy because I’m always irritating people.”
“Vivi, I don’t know you very well,” he said. “But I have to tell you something.”
“Oh. Ok,” I agreed, nodding. “Go ahead.” It was impossible to hurt my feelings.
“Your boyfriend is an asshat. Every time you talk about him, he sounds worse. After what you also just said about his mother, I’m thinking that the apple didn’t fall far.”
“Yeah.” I was still nodding, slower now. “I could see how you’d think all that.”
“How did you get together with him?”
“It was actually very lucky for me,” I said. “He was very helpful. I’ve probably painted a pretty ugly picture of him but you also seem to catch me when he and I are having problems, like the night when I found you on the road and the day we went to the hamburger place, and again today because he didn’t come home last night. It’s too cold for him.”
“He’s afraid of the weather?”
“I mean that it’s too cold inside his house, because of a…never mind. You don’t want to talk about your fiancée, and I completely respect that.” I made a quick X over my heart to show him that I was sincere. “But I don’t want to talk about Kolter, either. Ok?” I held out my hand so that we could shake on it.
“Ok. Fair enough.” We shook and then he patted his breast pocket again.
“Did you forget your flask?”
“Yes. No.” He looked annoyed. “I’m not carrying it today.”
“Are you cutting back on drinking, or is that something we also shouldn’t talk about?”
He stood up, and I supposed that was my answer. “I’m going to get another cup of coffee,” he announced. “Do you want something?”
“No, thanks.” My water had been fine, and they had put it into a hot beverage cup as I’d requested. I hadn’t needed to advertise my cheapness, like Kolter thought I had done at Christmas with the perfume. He really had been an asshat that day and he also had been last night. He was a lot of the time.
