I didn’t understand yet that desperation was a trade I’d learn, too.
“He doesn’t work in a shop,” Frankie said. “But we can tattoo you for sure.”
She said it again—“we.” When couples are together long enough, they speak as though they are one creature. I wondered if that was a thing only women did, as if we were absorbed into the bodies of men, molded inside of them with only the indigestible parts of us left over. I thought of my mother and how unmolded she had become since my dad died.
My first memories of her are as a homemaker. We ate dinner at the dining room table every night. Then my dad would watch TV as she did the dishes. He would complain about the noise of the water and she would bring him a Seven and Seven. After that, we’d all watch The Simpsons together before the evening news. His glass would empty and he’d shake it like a Yahtzee cup, the ice rattling around inside. My mother would fill it again, and another time. When the evening news came on, she’d ready me for bed.
After his death, my mom and I ate off TV trays in the living room. We ate microwave dinners, pizza Hot Pockets, and boxed macaroni and cheese. Sometimes she would make Hamburger Helper. She worked a lot of evening shifts. I learned how to unlock a deadbolt and use a microwave. Her weight crept up—rapidly at first, from antidepressants and anti-insomnia drugs, and then later it evened out. If she wasn’t working, she was asleep on the couch with the soft glow of the TV on her skin while I sat cross-legged on the floor, eating from a greasy paper plate on the coffee table. Her excess weight led to joint pain, which led to Vicodin and Percocet. Eventually, we stopped eating together.
Matt shifted on his feet and Frankie got up from her seat at the kitchen table.
“I seriously love that tattoo,” Frankie said. She came over and lifted my shirt. Matt leaned in to get a better look. “Where did you get it done again?”
“Glory Badges,” I touched my stomach protectively. “But the artist who did the outline split. I have to figure something out.”
“Shit,” said Matt. “That’s rough. Maybe I could do the color for you.”
“I’ll have to think about it,” I said.
When I got the outline done, I went back to the empty mobile home and burst into tears. I didn’t know if I was crying because it hurt so bad or if I was crying because I had failed by letting the pain hurt me so much. Matt sensed my hesitation.
“I haven’t worked that big yet,” he said. “But we can bang out something small on you first.”
“He’s so good.” Frankie grabbed a sketchbook and took me over to the couch. “Look at some of this.”
The weight of our bodies on the couch pushed us together. I could feel her torso against my own, the light, flimsy fabric of her shirt against my arm. She spread the sketchbook open on both of our laps and flipped slowly through the pages of Matt’s sketches. A lot of the pictures were similar to what I saw on the walls, but unfinished. Eventually, she flipped to a page covered with the speckled purple bells of foxglove flowers. They hung heavy and low toward the bottom of the page, with smaller buds toward the top, a thick stem and a few leaves for aesthetic balance. It struck as me as feminine, more so than any of the other half-finished drawings in the book, maybe because it was the most natural and realistic of the drawings.
“This would be so perfect on your skin,” Frankie said. “This is so you.”
Matt leaned over us. “Oh yeah, that would look good on you.”
“I’ve never done anything like this before,” I said. “Not like—a tattoo in someone’s house.”
“It’ll be fun,” said Frankie. “Matt tattooed Jenny before. Did you know that?”
Jenny never told me about any tattoo. I wondered what else she hadn’t told me.
•
We left their house in one car to go to the metal show. The Black Sheep sat on the border between the rich and the poor part of town, where the drainage in the sewer systems gets bad. We arrived late, and the second band was already playing. The stage was set against the back wall, with a few scratched-up tables and chairs and room for the mosh pit. Matt went to mosh in the pit while Frankie and I sat at a booth near the bar.
“It’s nice to be out without the baby,” she said.
I fumbled with a pack of cigarettes. She rested her face onto her knuckles, as if she also needed something to do with her hands. Our nervous energy was contained in the ways we kept our bodies occupied. I inhaled my cigarette and blew out, turning my face away from her. I did not know yet what it was like to be needed all the time.
“Is it hard for you, being with the kid all of the time?” I asked.
“It’s the treasure of my life,” she said, and smiled. I realized she’d had Jett at seventeen. I asked her if she finished school after.
She shook her head. “I’m working toward getting my GED,” she said. “And anyway, school didn’t work for me. I don’t know why. I just didn’t care.”
I agreed with her, keeping to myself that I had recently graduated with an almost 4.0 average. I offered her a cigarette and she said no. We watched Matt move through the mosh pit, enjoying the music.
Matt’s friend Patrick showed up with his girlfriend Maya. He wore a brown bomber jacket, which he unzipped to show us he’d snuck in a bottle of vodka. We all drove to the Satellite Hotel, a brutalist brick building in the shape of a three-armed star. When I was young, I thought it was called the Satellite
