Agatha picks up the paper bag off of the counter. Grease has already soaked through the bottom. She hates this job, but not as much as the one before this one, when she worked as a janitor and the night watchman kept asking her for neck massages. Or the one before that where she washed endless stacks of dishes. She’s tired of moving so much, tired of crappy jobs, but that doesn’t mean that she will stop.
Stopping means going home, which means she can’t stop.
“It’s the rock star,” John, the boss’s son, says, holding out a receipt with an address on it. “Your boyfriend.”
John’s younger than she is—maybe too young to work as much as he does—but he’s the only one who can translate stuff into Korean for his parents. She’s pretty sure he lies to them.
It makes her like him more.
“That’s the end of my shift,” she says, peeling bills out of her pocket. “I’m going to take off after I drop this off, so let me pay for his food.”
“I delivered to him once,” says John. “I don’t care how much you loved his music, it’s not worth it. That guy is creepy.”
“His music was pretty good,” she says, but he just shrugs because he’s already answering the phone and scratching out the next order.
She passes the corner 7-Eleven, flashing with neon, its parking lot crowded with cars. Kids from Long Branch and Deal and Elberon looking to buy drugs, partiers spilling from clubs or just pausing to flirt in person after a slow cruise down Main Street. Tattoos wrap around their arms and fabric sticks to their skin.
Her stomach growls.
Over the sticky sweet reek of spilled Slurpees, she can smell the salty air blowing off the sea. It gets on everything, tangling her hair and dusting her skin. As she unlocks her bike, a discarded newspaper warns of a fresh grave dug up in the Mount Calvary Cemetery and a body chewed on by dogs.
Once, Asbury Park was a resort city to tempt presidents with its glittering hotels and merry-go-rounds housed in fantastical buildings with sculpted Medusa faces making the spines of the windows. After those days faded, the city was at least a place that turned out rock stars—Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Colin Lainhart—all of them playing The Stone Pony before going on to take over the world. Now, Colin Lainhart is dying in a cavernous loft, and speculation about a marauding pack of corpse-eating dogs is the only thing worth putting on the front page.
She bikes to one of the row houses near the boardwalk. Despite the influx of renovators and bright rainbow flags hanging from freshly painted houses, the block is still kind of shady. Guys sitting on their stoops call to her when she passes. She reminds herself that the guys are probably harmless—their faces are leathery with drugs and age—and she’s stronger than she looks. Faster too.
After she locks the bike to a telephone pole, she takes the bag out of the basket. It’s so soaked that the brown paper tears when her fingers touch it, but she can still carry it if she’s careful. She hits the doorbell and waits for Colin Lainhart to buzz her in.
John’s wrong about him being creepy. Colin Lainhart has cancer or something and he’s lonely, but that’s all. Sometimes she can smell the illness on him, devouring him from the inside. And he doesn’t ask her to do anything bad; most of the time she’s not even sure he notices she’s there.
Agatha takes the stairs. “Hey,” she calls. The inside of the loft has no walls. Once, Colin told her that he and his wife tore them out, planning to restore it, but they only got as far as putting in the electric before he got sick. The wires are exposed, running back and forth along joists like veins.
Agatha read that he’d met his wife when they were both addicts. Supposedly he was the reason she finally went to rehab. There’s a famous picture of her from back then that Agatha saw in a magazine somewhere—stringy bright-red hair with heavy black roots, knees skinned, vomiting her guts onto a street in Tokyo. She wants to ask Colin about that, about the pictures of him with loads of curling, dark hair and a hungry smile, but he doesn’t seem like he knows the man in those photos.
She didn’t like his music when she was younger. It bothered her the way that it seemed like Colin’s songs were carefree, but if you listened to the words, they were about despair and death and misery. It made her feel like she was being tricked, like he was laughing at the audience when he sang. Agatha’s best friend when she was eleven, Selena, was obsessed with his songs. Selena played them over and over again until Agatha finally admitted they were good.
They were good; she just didn’t like how they made her feel.
His hair is growing back, a thin dusting on his head, but his cheeks look hollowed out. He’s as thin as if he were made of twigs. His black T-shirt hangs in folds off his shoulders. In the dim light from the bare bulbs on the ceiling, she has never been able to tell what color his eyes are. In the old pictures of him, they were beach-glass green.
“Cash’s on the table,” he says. His throat sounds scraped raw. All around him are cardboard boxes of vinyl records. Some of them are opened, and discs surround him on the sofa in haphazard piles.
The sofa is a beautiful thing, part sleek black tufted leather, but with silver coffin trimmings. It had come with the records and a few boxes of other things his wife no longer wanted after the divorce.
She got the apartment in the city and a lot of his money. But he still has enough that he can just stare out the massive wall of windows overlooking the sea or at his tiny black-and-white television, order Chinese, and wait to die.
“I know,” she says, setting down the bag carefully on a box near where he’s sitting. “I took an extra twenty. You’re an excellent tipper.”
“Do you want some lo mein?” he asks.
She hasn’t taken any money yet, but she knows where he keeps it—a lacquered box on the makeshift table. She doubts he counts it. She could probably take eighty bucks, a hundred, all of it, without him noticing. “You shouldn’t let people take advantage of you.”
He shrugs.
She goes into the kitchen, gets out two bowls, and brings them to the bag of food. He forks out noodles and hands her the bigger bowl.
“How come you always eat at night?” she asks him.
“I got used to it on the road,” he says, and smiles a little. He’s easy to be around. He has kind eyes. “Once a day. Like a snake.”
She picks up the controller and turns on the television, flicking through the channels. They watch a reality television show where a guy from a glam-rock hair band has to pick a girlfriend. Colin laughs every time the guy talks to the camera, because Colin knows him and can’t believe how normal the show has made him seem.
“There was this one time that we were opening for him, and after we get offstage, there’s this delay. His whole band is onstage, but not him,” Mr. Lainhart says during the commercial break. “The tour manager had already gotten into plenty of fights and doesn’t want another one, so he sends me back to his dressing room. And you know what he’s doing?”
Agatha shakes her head.
“He’s got one of those tiny cocktail stirrers and he’s down in the corner of his dressing room with two naked groupies, snorting up lines of live ants. Ants!”
“As in bugs?” Agatha asks him. “
He laughs a little, which makes him cough. “Yeah, the really tiny ones. Sugar ants. I’m glad that he didn’t try for a big black carpenter ant. That thing would have chewed off his nose.”
She leans back against the leather. “So what’s the sickest thing you’ve ever done? Anything sicker than the ants?”
“Piss-and-vodka shots.” He says it so matter-of-factly that she bursts out laughing.
“Whose?” she asks him, scandalized.
Now he’s laughing so hard that he sounds like he’s choking. “Mine,” he finally chokes out. “What kind of guy do you take me for? I wouldn’t drink someone else’s piss.”
