Someone calls and I answer, a woman whispering about a light off in a hospital and because I know nothing about a light or a hospital, I tell her—politely—she must have the wrong number.
The woman says, “Jenny? It’s Melissa? Perkins?” like she’s not sure of her own name. And I say, oh, yeah, Melissa Perkins like I remember her and then I do— a friend of my ex-friend Suzanne who’d eloped with Ed, my ex. I’d hung out with Melissa a time or two, usually in a big group for drinks or a concert although she rarely drank anything stronger than water because of her cancer. She was kind of prissy, to tell the truth. I’d written my number on a bar napkin one night and told her to call me if she needed something. And now she does.
What she needs, she says, is some fun. “A final day party. The pavilion by the lake, in an hour. Just us girls.”
“The final day of what?” I say, but she’s already hung up.
Okay. I’m broke and unemployed, but I’m still fun.
I pull into the parking lot between a red VW and a silver Harley with a “My kid is an honor roll student at Bishop Kearney” sticker. Two clowns in full makeup are eating lunch in the VW, windows rolled down. The breeze has picked up but it isn’t cold. The air feels just right, the kind of early October day that fools you into thinking winter won’t be so bad after all.
Melissa’s sitting on top of a picnic table overlooking the place where the bay meets the lake. She pulls a couple beers from a cooler and hands me one. “Cheers,” she says, clinking her bottle against mine, a glassy toast. She already looks loopy, a little frayed around the edges, but happy. She’s a redhead today, short and curly. The last time I saw her, she’d been a blonde.
“Cheers,” I say. I watch a boat head out of the bay into open water, its striped sails bright against the dark water.
I’m dying to know what we’re celebrating, but I ask about Suzanne instead.
“They went to Barcelona for their honeymoon,” she says. “Ed won the trip on The Price Is Right.”
“Ed was on The Price Is Right?” This is news. Ed used to make fun of me for watching it daily. Come on dooooooown, he’d say whenever he wanted a blow job.
Melissa pulls out her cell phone and punches in a few links and voila, it’s Ed all right on The Showcase Showdown, his hair poufed into a tsunami wave. He’s clean-shaven, too. Ed always had a little scruff going when I lived with him, two or three days’ worth, which was probably part of the attraction. I was all about guys who looked dangerous but weren’t, like feral cats you could tame with a can or two of wet food.
Turns out he overbid on a Mercedes SL by $23 and is YouTube famous for it. Karma.
We open more beer and eat some Cheetos and talk about Suzanne, how she had a knack for drama, but also for turning the littlest thing into an adventure. Like this party: She’d convince the parking lot clowns to join us and the sailboat guy and whoever else happened by and before long, we’d all be swapping numbers like best friends. She’d bring a cake, too, with pink roses and candles. There would be dancing instead of boring small talk.
I guess I miss her, is what I’m about to say to Melissa when a boatful of drunk dudes catcalls by, shouting hey baby and show us your tits and I’m still thinking about Suzanne, what would Suzanne do, when Melissa—prissy little Melissa—yanks up her purple t-shirt dress and flashes those guys good. Not tits, but a crisscross of scars where hers used to be.
She sits down. I hand her a fresh beer. “Badass,” I say. Worth a toast.
I look at Melissa. She’s shredding the label into little bits that float up like confetti. She’s crying.
Something clicks, I get it. The final day, a hospital. Not a light off, a leg.
“I used to think that you died once,” she says. “Not a little at a time, in pieces.”
It’s dark when I drop her off at the hospital and chilly. We stopped at a gas station to pee and I watched her rearrange her wig, straighten out her dress and wash the sand from her feet, taking extra care with her right foot. It’s a nice foot, long and graceful with a high arch.
I think she turned and waved before she walked into the hospital, but I could be wrong. Maybe that’s what I want to remember: Melissa in the before time. I thought about visiting her, thought about calling her after she was discharged, but soon enough I got a new job and the paddlewheel of days started up again—the long, slow Mondays, the buzzy Fridays and the too-short weekends, and before I knew it, another week was gone and another, and maybe it’s true that we don’t die all at once, but a minute, an hour, a day, a little at a time.
