Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [94]
While I closed out the register, Marie was mopping the floor in quick, hurried strokes, looking back at me every few seconds, hooking her hair behind one ear and smiling, though she looked melancholy and oddly eager.
I left her out front and carried the night’s cash and receipts to the office, a small room on the other side of the kitchen. I sat at the desk and pushed the money and paperwork into a night deposit bag. My legs were sore. The last few weeks Sam had been coming over every morning at six o’clock to work our calves together, a body part we’d been neglecting too long. But there was no place to fit it into our workouts, so we started the day down in my basement behind the furnace doing Donkey Calf Raises, an exercise where you bend forward at a 90-degree angle and rest your elbows on a table and your partner straddles your lower back, his body weight the only resistance as you rise up and down on your toes. The day before, on my last set, the burn began on the ninth or tenth rep, and I thought, Twenty, I’ll do twenty. Sam’s sneakers were tapping my knees and hot needles were being pushed under the skin of my calves but I went for ten more, then another ten, then another, the pain barrier in my brain a flaming wall I was marching toward one scalding calf raise at a time, then I fell through it into a blue numbness and there were only sounds coming out of me, the number ninety in my head when I finally quit.
Outside, an engine revved in the parking lot. I smelled perfume and turned to see Marie standing in the doorway.
“Everything’s done.” She crossed her arms under her breasts and smiled at me, her chin low, one hip resting against the jamb. Now there was a rapping on the back door, loud and close together, then a muffled shouting. “Marie. Get out here. I know what you’re doing. I know what you’re fucking doing, Marie. I got Lee Paquette out here. You hear me, motherfucker. I got Lee Paquette.”
Motherfucker was clearly me. Paquette was big and cut and rode around town on a Kawasaki motorcycle in short shorts and no shirt, his gym muscles oiled up, his long black hair flapping out the back of his bright red helmet. He had a rep with some for being a badass, though I’d heard more about how he liked young teenage girls, how he’d charm them, then fuck them, then tell everybody all about it.
“Marie.”
“That’s just my boyfriend. He thinks something’s going on between us.”
More rapping. More yelling. I stood and stepped sideways between Marie and the doorjamb and walked through the fluorescent-lit kitchen for the back door. I opened it to see her boyfriend standing there in a white T-shirt and jeans, his hair short, his ears sticking out. Behind him Lee Paquette sat in the passenger seat of a Z-28. His eyes were on me like he was the cowboy and I was the horse, and I looked back at Marie’s boyfriend. “She’s almost done. You’re going to have to wait quietly or I’ll have to call the cops, all right?”
But he was looking past me into the kitchen, his eyes dark with something I knew nothing about. “Marie?”
“She’ll be right out.” I closed the door and locked it. Marie rolled her eyes at me, took her time card and punched out. She pulled her pocketbook strap over her shoulder, then slid it back off and rested it on the stainless steel counter. She looked at me.
“Marie.” His voice sounded farther away now, and I pictured him sitting behind the wheel of his car, Lee beside him, ready to come after me, the hired gun, which meant Marie’s boyfriend was another one afraid of me, but I felt nothing about this. It was as if I’d been dropped into a story that had little to do with me.
“You have to let me kiss you.” She walked closer. “C’mon, it’s your last night.