About Last Night

“Tell me all of it. Every single dark, terrible secret. If we’re through, it doesn’t matter. You won’t see me again anyway. So tell me. I want to know.”

She looked at him, at his pink cheeks and sweat-darkened hair. His eyes burned with disapproval and pain. His casual white polo shirt had darkened under his arms, and his formerly shiny shoes were coated in roadside dust. She’d never seen him so messy and intense before except in bed. This was different. He was angry and frustrated, pissed off and confused, and for the first time since she’d met him, he wasn’t letting her have her way. He was fighting.

She hadn’t thought he’d fight, and it infuriated her. She wanted to beat on his chest and order him to let her go. She wasn’t worth fighting for. He should have defended her, but she didn’t deserve to be defended. She hated him and hated herself in equal measure, and all she wanted was to get away from here, to escape him as quickly and completely as possible.

She’d tell him, but only because her past was the weapon that would drive him off.

“Let go of me.”

With a glance at the people on the bench a few feet away, staring through the glass wall of the bus shelter, he complied, dropping his hands to his hips.

“You want me to tell you? Fine.” She stripped out of her T-shirt and turned her back to him, giving an eyeful to the peanut gallery. Whatever. It wasn’t like they’d never seen a bra before.

“Are you mad?” he snapped. “Put your shirt back on.”

She glared at him over her shoulder. “My body, Nev. I can take off my shirt whenever the hell I please.” Sweat trickled between her shoulder blades as she stabbed her finger into the bird tattooed at the base of her spine. “You’re going to get the condensed version. Pay attention. My dad died when I was fourteen. I was his princess, his precious Mary Catherine, and when he died, I pretty much lost my shit. Started drinking, running around with any boy who’d look twice at me. Your typical teenager with daddy issues. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I needed somebody to tell me. Only you know what? Sixteen-year-old boys aren’t much good at that sort of thing.

“My mom was in mourning too, but she chose to express it by telling me what a tramp I was every time she caught me sneaking home in the middle of the night or found a contraband tube of lipstick in my purse. She decided to escape the horrible Talaricos and move back to England. I refused to go. She left me with my uncle Pete and aunt Nina.”

Cath looked up from her feet and saw all four of the bus station pa

trons staring at her. There was a teenage boy, maybe fifteen, who was honest-to-God slack-jawed, his eyes focused on her breasts. An older guy smoking a cigarette leaned against the shelter support and leered at her. Two biddies wearing church hats frowned with pruney mouths and clutched their purses tight, like maybe when she finished her story she was going to rob them and run off. She was tempted to give them the finger. She hadn’t done it in years, but then she hadn’t been this angry since she was a teenager. She’d forgotten how jacked up and high it made her feel.

“You still with me, Nev? Want to hear what the future held for poor Mary Catherine?”

His answer came out through gritted teeth. “Yes.”

“Good.” She tossed her hair and carried on. “Aunt Nina thought I was a kick. She let me sleep in the basement apartment. I lived there for a couple years, which was long enough for me to get knocked up not once, but twice. The first time, I was sixteen, and I had an abortion. The second time, I was seventeen, and I married Jimmy Calabrese. He was twenty-seven and smooth as Scotch on the rocks. Jimmy made me feel special. He told me I was beautiful. He thought I’d make a great mother. It took me three or four months to figure out that all Jimmy wanted was a ticket into the family. He tucked me away in a little house in the ’burbs and left me alone, mostly. I took these special classes for pregnant high school girls so I could get my GED, and I cooked meals out of Betty Crocker that Jimmy didn’t show up to eat.”

Her shoulder was starting to hurt from holding her finger to her back. She dropped the pointer. She’d tattooed numbers onto her skin, for crying out loud. Nev was clever enough to follow them.

“I was happy even after I figured out Jimmy wasn’t my One True Love, because I was young and stupid, and because I had Wren. I was going to be the best mother in the world. She helped fill me up, you know? That part of me that had been missing since Dad died didn’t feel so empty with Wren growing inside me. Only, bad luck comes in threes, right? First Dad, then Jimmy, and then when I was six months pregnant and hanging Christmas lights, I started bleeding like Carrie in the locker room shower.”

The cynical smoking guy raised an eyebrow, and she remembered she was in England, and Nev wouldn’t get the reference. Whatever.

“When I came to, my daughter was dead, I was sterile, and my husband was nowhere to be found. Merry fucking Christmas, Mary Catherine.”

One of the biddies gasped. Cath gave her a sick smile, and she turned her wrinkled face away, disapproval written all over it. Good. If old women disapproved of her, the world was starting to make sense again.

“Jimmy showed up eventually and took me home. I became basically catatonic, except with more vodka. Jimmy’s patience lasted a few weeks, but then he got sick of it and started telling me I needed to get over it. I didn’t get over it. I didn’t want to get over it. I baited him into arguments whenever he was around, just to feel alive for a few minutes. It pissed me off that he didn’t seem to care as much as I did that Wren was dead. One night, I pushed him too far and he punched me. I think it scared him more than it did me. I was furious. He took off, and I piled up all his clothes on the bed and set them on fire. Tattoo number two, Neville.”

“Stop it.”

“You asked for it.”

“Not like this.”

“Too bad. You don’t get to choose.” She was tempted to ask the leering guy for a cigarette, but she thought if she let a strange man give her a light while she stood there shirtless, Nev might go postal. She carried on with the story instead.

“The curtains went up, and the next thing I knew my house was burning down. I had no idea you could get arrested for burning down your own house. I guess since Jimmy’s name was on the mortgage, it wasn’t really mine. They charged me with arson, but Uncle Pete took care of it. He got me out, got his lawyers working on a divorce, and quietly shipped me off to art school in Seattle.

“He shouldn’t have bothered. I screwed it up. I could hardly stand to be alone with myself. I skipped class and spent as much of my time drunk or high or sleeping with strange guys as I possibly could. It was easier to drift than to think. They kicked me out at the end of the semester. Pete found me a spot at a university in California, but it was the same story. After a few years, he ran out of connections, and I ran out of schools that would accept me. That’s tattoo number three. The closed book. It’s symbolic, don’tcha know?”

“Cath.” He wrapped his hands around her waist and pulled her backward until the bridge of his nose rested against the nape of her neck. “Why are you doing this?”

“Do you hate me yet?”

He didn’t answer.