I Was Here(62)

             “The person staying over is Alice,” I tell Tricia. “I met her in Tacoma. She needs a place to crash on her way to Montana.” There. The truth, or a sliver of it. One of the things I’ve learned from dealing with All_BS is that if you hew close to the truth, it’s much easier to lie.

             “Hasn’t she ever heard of a motel?” Tricia asks.

             “I’ll take the couch; she can have my room.”

             Tricia sighs. “No. You can take my bed. I’ll stay at Raymond’s.”

             I nod, as if the idea never occurred to me.

                          x x x

             The next night, at precisely six o’clock, Alice arrives, tooting her horn as she comes down the street like she’s the marshal of a July Fourth parade. Some of the neighbors come out to see what the commotion is, and Alice waves to them, grinning.

             “So this is where you live?” she says.

             I nod.

             “It’s not what I expected. It’s so . . . small.” She stops. “Not your house. Your house is big. I mean, the town.”

             My house is a cinder-block cell with two tiny bedrooms. Small would be a step up.

             Now she’s flustered. “I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just, you seem so streetwise. I’d have thought you grew up somewhere else.”

             “Nope. This is me.”

             We go inside. I show Alice to my room. I’ve put clean sheets on the bed for her. She flops back onto it, taking in the band flyers on my wall, all the pictures of me and Meg.

             “So this is where Meg grew up too?”

             I nod again.

             “How long did you guys know each other?”

             “A long time.”

             There’s a picture of the two of us at a rodeo, maybe from fifth grade. The bucktoothed phase. “Is that you?” Alice asks, leaning in.

             I should take all this down. “Yep.”

             “You must have a lot of history here.”

             I think of the Dairy Queen. The rocket ship. The Garcias’ house. “Not really,” I say.

             We’re silent for a while. Then Alice announces she’s taking me out to dinner. “No arguments!”

             “All right. Where do you want to go?”

             “What are our options?”

             “Your usual fast food. A bar and grill where my mother works, but trust me, you don’t want to go there. A diner. A couple of Mexican places.”

             “Is the Mexican any good?”

             Joe always said that Sue’s cooking was better than his mother’s, and much better than any of the places in town. We almost never went to them. “Not particularly.”

             “I passed a Dairy Queen on the way in. We could go there.”

             I picture the DQ, Tammy Henthoff, the usual suspects hanging out. “Let’s do Mexican,” I say.

             We head over to Casa Mexicana, full of red booths and velvet paintings of bullfighters. Our waiter is this guy Bill, whom Tricia used to hang out with, which is how it always is in Shitburg. We order our food, and then Alice asks for a strawberry margarita with a shot of tequila. Bill cards her, and she hands over an ID.