Back From Rehab

The bus smelled like bleach and other people's sadness. I'd been on it for eleven hours, pressed against a window that didn't open, watching the landscape do its slow dissolve from pine trees to strip malls to the particular gray of a city that never quite dries out. My duffel bag sat between my feet, holding everything I owned that was worth carrying. Which wasn't much. A few shirts. A notebook with water damage. The thirty-day chip they'd given me at the facility, tucked into the bottom of a sock because I didn't know what else to do with it.

The driver announced the stop, and I stood before I was ready.

Downtown at dusk. The kind of dusk that makes everything look like a photograph someone forgot to develop. I walked three blocks with my collar up, past a pawn shop and a noodle place and a mural of a woman holding a torch that someone had spray-painted a mustache onto. The city hadn't changed. I had. That was the problem.

Joey was supposed to meet me at the fountain on Mercer. I got there early because I couldn't stand still, and standing still in a bus station felt like asking for trouble. The fountain wasn't running. It hadn't run in years, according to the plaque someone had bolted to the rim, and now it was just a concrete bowl full of cigarette butts and one abandoned shoe. I sat on the edge and waited.

He showed up seventeen minutes late, which was on time for Joey.

"You look like shit," he said, dropping onto the bench beside me. He was wearing the same leather jacket from two years ago, the one with the broken zipper, and his hair was longer, falling into his eyes in a way that made him look either younger or older depending on the light. He pulled a deck of cards from his pocket and started shuffling without looking at them.

"Thanks."

"I mean it in a loving way. Like, you look like a man who's been through something and came out the other side looking like shit. That's a compliment."

I laughed, and it surprised me. The sound came out rusty, like a door that hadn't been opened in a while. "How's business?"

"Business is business." He fanned the cards and closed them. "I've got a game tonight. Small stakes. You want in?"

"No."

"Right. Right." He nodded, still shuffling. "The thing. The program. You're doing the thing."

"I'm doing the thing."

We sat there for a minute. A woman walked past with a stroller and a phone pressed to her ear, arguing with someone about dinner. A pigeon landed on the fountain's rim and stared at us like we owed it money. Joey kept shuffling. I kept not saying the things I'd rehearsed on the bus.

"You could stay at my place," he said finally. "For a while. Until you get your feet under you."

"You don't have a place. You have a room above a bar that smells like pickles."

"It's a sublet. Very exclusive. Pickle smell is a feature, not a bug."

"I can't afford it."

"I didn't say anything about affording. I said stay."

I looked at him then. Really looked. He'd always been the one who could talk his way into anything and out of anything, the guy who made you feel like the world was a game and he knew all the rules. But there was something different in his face now. A tightness around the mouth. A watchfulness. Like he was waiting for me to disappear.

"I don't need a babysitter," I said.

"I'm not offering to be your babysitter. I'm offering to be your friend. There's a difference, and if you can't tell, then maybe the program didn't take."

That stung. It was supposed to. Joey had a way of cutting through the bullshit that made you want to punch him and hug him at the same time.

"Fine," I said. "A week. Maybe two."

He grinned, and for a second he looked like the kid I'd met in juvie, the one who'd taught me how to palm a card and how to lie to a cop without blinking. "You won't last a week. My couch has a spring that stabs you in the kidney."

"I've slept on worse."

"I know you have. That's why I'm offering."

We walked to his place through streets I knew by heart, past the record store where we'd spent entire afternoons arguing about music, past the alley where I'd kissed a girl named Sarah Chen and then never called her back, past the church where Joey's mom used to drag him every Sunday before she died. He didn't look at any of it. I did. I couldn't help it. The city was a museum of everything I'd ruined, and I was the only visitor.

His room was exactly as promised. Small, cluttered, smelled like vinegar and old wood. He cleared a pile of clothes off the couch and threw them into a corner. "Bathroom's down the hall. Hot water's temperamental. If you run the sink, the shower gets cold. It's a whole thing."

"I'll manage."

"There's beer in the fridge. And by beer, I mean one beer. I don't know whose it is. It's been there for months."

"I'm not drinking."

"I know. I was just telling you what's in the fridge."

He stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at me like he wanted to say something else. Then he pulled a card from his deck, the queen of hearts, and flicked it onto the couch beside me. "Welcome home," he said, and went to take a shower.

I picked up the card and turned it over in my hands. It was worn soft at the edges, creased down the middle. He'd had this deck for years. I remembered him doing tricks with it on street corners, pulling coins from behind kids' ears, making old ladies laugh. He'd always been good at making people forget their troubles for a minute.

I tucked the card into my pocket and lay back on the couch. The spring dug into my kidney. I didn't move.