Debts

My first day home after three years, and I already knew I was making a mistake. The girl was sitting out on the lawn when I pulled up. She wasn’t playing, just sitting there and staring down the street, so she was already looking at me when I turned the corner. All I could think was that I didn’t recognize her. I got out of the truck.

The screen door flung open and Cory rushed down the steps. She was dressed the way I remembered her before I left, the pink shirt and tan slacks of her uniform, everything but the apron.

“Come on. Get inside.”

I didn’t know if she was talking to me or the kid. Cory scooped the girl into her arms.

“Cory wait,” I said.

“I got nothing to say to you.”

“That’s our daughter?”

“That’s my daughter.”

I was staying with my Mom in her windowless new apartment. We sat on the couch watching a show about people who are addicted to stuffing trash into their storage units. Mom was eating a TV dinner that looked like baby food. The television light made everything look blue in the dark room and the dust was making my cough worse, or maybe it was the light which seemed to be growing whatever sickness was inside of me like mushrooms under a blacklight. This wasn’t going to be a good place to get sober.

“What’s her name?” I asked Mom. “My daughter.”

“I can’t remember.”

“You haven’t seen her?”

“After all those mean things Cory said about you, now why would I want to see her? Nobody talks about my baby like that.”

“She has your granddaughter.”

She kept on eating. “Nobody talks about you like that, baby.”

I called my friend Pat, who happened to still be alive. I wasn’t in any shape to drive, so he picked me up and took me to his place.

Pat and his brother, Rodney, worked in loans and betting. Rodney was the meanest person I’d ever met, but in the years I’d been in North Dakota Pat had turned out pretty terrible himself. Right now, Rodney was locked up on assault charges.

“He’ll be out in a few weeks,” Pat said. “Say, Scoot, if you’re looking for work, I could use a second guy till Rod’s back. Safer that way. You can stay here.”

“Pat, I…”

“And I’ll keep you fed,” he said, and placed a Percocet on the table. “As long as you can still keep your head sharp.”

I’d been about to say that I was looking to go into rehab.

Pat and Rodney kept a little black book of all the people who owed them. We drove around the next few days just picking up money like I’d never imagined a person could do. The number written next to a person’s name determined how polite Pat was to them. The black gym bag in the back seat was starting to get fat.

I kept cool while we were collecting, but in Pat’s dirty car I couldn’t control my cough.

“Could we roll the windows down?”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“I know. I just need to save up enough to go to rehab.”

“Maybe a hospital,” Pat said.

“I can’t afford that.”

Pat gave me another Percocet, as if he was giving a dog a treat.

The next name on the list was Gil Mahone, the owner of Gillagan’s Diner.

“Doesn’t your girl work at that place?” Pat asked.

“Since she was eighteen.”

Gillagan’s was our place growing up, me and Cory. There was something about the way the lamps hung just above our heads that made her eyes and skin glow. Then she started working there and it became a constant source of misery.

Pat pulled into a space right by the windows. Cory was inside.

“We’ll go around back.”

In his office, I kept waiting for Gil to recognize me; he didn’t. He was on Pat’s unfriendly list, and Rodney was going to be disappointed if Pat was letting debts this big slide. Just before Pat started working on his fingers, Gil showed us the safe. Inside was $6,000, half of his debt.

Pat was ready to leave, but I’d been staring at Gil’s face and thinking of all the times he’d kicked me out of the diner when I’d come to see Cory, all the times Cory had come home crying because of the things he’d said to her, all the double shifts he’d made her work while her belly was so big she seemed about to topple over, her agonized face and swollen feet because he’d made her wear high heels.

The words slipped out of my mouth. “I think we should take a trip to the bank.”

“Please,” Gil said. “I’ll lose my business.”

“I’m impressed,” Pat said later that night.

“He deserves it.”

“I mean if that really did put him out of business, then your lady is out of a job. She’s worked there for what, like 10 years?”

“Twelve. Maybe now she’ll have a chance to get a real job.”

“Well you sure did, huh, Mr. North Dakota?”

Something about that made me start coughing, and it kept going until slobber and bile were dripping down my face.

“Man, maybe we should get you to…”

“I’m fine. Could I please just get one more Perc?”

“Buddy, we’re celebrating a successful day. I got something better.”

Pat went to the room and came back with a little baggie of brownish powder.

When I woke up, Pat was purple. Vomit pooled in his mouth. I kept asking him if he was alright until I had to wake up. I started dialing 911, then hung up. What would I say to Rodney? But Rodney didn’t even know I was in town. I couldn’t deal with this, not in my condition.

I needed to go to rehab and get straight. In Pat’s bedroom I found the little black book, a drawer full of drugs, and a gym bag with $20,345. The rehab I’d read about cost $1,500. Just yesterday that amount of money had seemed impossible.

I didn’t know how long rehab would take, and I had to see Cory. I drove to the diner to find it had already gone out of business.

The lights were on at Cory’s house. I knocked on the door and she shouted for me to leave until finally opening it. She was crying.

Our girl was with Cory’s mother for the next 24 hours. We sat at the table and Cory sobbed to herself. There was a beer open in front of her.

“It was a shitty job,” I said.

“It was my job,” she said.

“Now you can get a better job, somewhere better that you want to be. You can finally go to Florida like you always talked about.”

“I can’t just go to Florida, Scoot. And I can’t just take the time to find another job. I have a daughter and she needs to eat, now. She needs clothes, now. I can’t run away to try and get rich on some oil rig in North Dakota.”

“I have money, enough to get us to Florida, put down a deposit, even enough for you to open your own business. We need to leave this place… for her.”

“Things can’t just go back to how they were between us.” She took a long pull on her beer.

“Let me prove it to you.”

We finished off the beer at the house and then I drove us to the north side of town. We took an elevator up to a hotel rooftop bar overlooking the river, a place I’d seen advertisements for but had never dreamed I’d actually go to.

“I haven’t been to a bar in so long,” Cory said, looking at the lights of the bridge.

We took shots and laughed, and I realized I hadn’t coughed all night. When the bar was closing, I ordered three bottles of wine to go.

“Let’s get a room here,” I said.

Kissing in the room, she pulled back softly and asked, “Do you have any of that stuff we used to do on nights like this?”

I’d been planning to leave all of Pat’s drugs in the car, but for some reason several different powders and pills had found their way into my pockets. Then it was like the night had just gotten started again.

I woke up to an earthquake in my lungs, blood on the carpet in front of my mouth. Cory was naked on top of the bed. At the sight of her I remembered Pat, purple and cold. There was puke on the pillow and in her hair. I shook her until her eyes fluttered awake.

Cory looked around. “The fuck am I?”

She started panicking. “I was supposed to pick her up.” She looked in the mirror and then we were both hyperventilating. I found one of the baggies on the table and frantically snorted a line. When I looked back, Cory was looking at me in disgust. After a second, her face changed.

“I need something to get my head straight,” she said.

Her mother was standing at the front door, holding the little girl. Before Cory got out, she said, “There’s nothing holding me back anymore. I’m going to pack up the things we’re taking. We can leave for Florida tonight. It’ll be like it used to be.”

I thought of how things had actually been between us. I thought of Cory snorting lines off of a hotel table and the vomit still in her hair when she took our daughter into her arms. We’d spent all night together and I still didn’t know our daughter’s name.

I drove to Pat’s place. At the sight of him, I fell to my knees and coughed until blood was running out my nose. I put all the money on the bed and counted it again. $17,127. I couldn’t have spent that much. I must’ve lost some. I felt like the money was turning to water and running out between my fingers. Soon it would all be gone.

I needed to go to rehab, but…

The girl. I needed to go to rehab like she needed food, needed clothes. She didn’t just need them now; she’d always need them.

“What is this?” Gil said, looking at the bag on the floor.

“The money we took from you,” I said, “plus more.”

“I can’t…”

“You will. You’re going to do whatever you gotta do to get the diner open and use the rest to make sure it never closes again. You’re going to make sure that Cory always has a job there, and if she needs to borrow money, you give it to her and let her work it out of her hourly.”

“Why are you doing this?” Gil asked.

“So my daughter has a home. And if you get the idea to run, I’m gonna show this book of debts to Rodney when he gets out.”

That night the temperature dropped fifty degrees. I found myself driving down the dark road headed to the rehab in the next town over. $1,500 sat on the seat beside me.

My wheezing breath fogged the windshield on each exhale. My lungs hurt, and it made me think of warm ocean air. Cory had never seen the ocean, and I realized then that neither had my little girl, and I wondered if she ever would. I thought about how much she looked like Cory, and when I imagined her grown up I imagined a waitress.

My breath consuming the windshield, I prayed, I prayed that Gil would take the money and run. I prayed that God would ignore every wish before this one. And as I prayed, I could feel my breath quicken but I couldn’t see it anymore. I should’ve gone to rehab sooner. The glass cleared in front of me, leaving only darkness beyond it.