“Oh my gosh, it’s so good.”
His smile lights up his whole face and I see his charm on full display. I see what someone could love about him if they didn’t look too closely. Sometimes I wish I didn’t always look so closely. I wish I could lose myself like other people do. But there’s no point in wishing for something that can never be. It’s a waste of energy.
“Is everything this good here?” I ask.
“Everything.”
“Then thank you for bringing me.”
The host brings a bottle of wine and pours us each a modest glass. Maybe I’ll walk here by myself one evening after work so I can overindulge in everything, but tonight I take a small sip. Patience. Self-control. The payoff will be worth it.
“Tell me about your family,” he says.
“You’ve heard most of it. I grew up with my mom. My dad wasn’t in the picture. My grandparents died recently, but I used to stay with them during the summer so Mom could work. And you know . . . I hated it then, but now I’m glad I got to spend so much time with them.” An acquaintance had once told me this story.
I had a grandmother, but she was mean and drunk most of the time. She had a weakness for Twinkies, though, and I appreciated the supply whenever my family dropped by her house to beg for money.
“So you went to high school here?”
“Only for three years, but for some reason it feels like home. That was the most stable time of my life, I guess.” I made sure to lose my Okie accent in college, so he’ll never guess my real roots. “What about your family? It sounds like you’re really close.”
“Absolutely. Well, to be clear . . . I’m close to my dad. My mom left when I was fifteen. It got pretty ugly.”
“Oh no.”
“She cheated on him,” he says tightly, and I have to stop my grin. Jackpot.
Instead of laughing, I whisper, “I’m sorry.”
One of his shoulders rises in a jerky shrug. “My dad is a pastor, so you can imagine how humiliating it was for him.”
And you, I think.
So his dad is a saint and his mom is a whore. If I were a normal person, I’d feel sorry for him. Nothing good ever comes of an ugly divorce. But I’m not a normal person and I know the kind of adult he’s become, so I feel nothing but contempt.
Regardless, I reach for him. His hand is tight beneath my touch. “It must have been awful.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you on good terms with her now?”
His lip lifts in a small sneer, but he shrugs again. “We’re fine. I got over it.” Even the most trusting person could spot that lie, and I trust no one. He hates his mother. Not a good prospect in a boyfriend.
He flips his fist over and engulfs my fingers in his grip. “Anyway, that’s all in the past. My dad and I are still close. I go to his church every Sunday. I do some work for him. My brother has two great kids, and I love being an uncle.”
“So do you want kids of your own?”
“Someday.” He winks as if he’s handed me a little treat. I’ll tuck it in my pocket and put it in my Big Book of Dreams when I get home.
“Where is your dad’s church? Is it big?”
He tells me about United in Christ Church as I do away with another piece of garlic bread. The place is out in the white-bread suburb of Apple Valley, where the Christians have money.
“It’s grown quite a bit lately. The world is chaotic. People are coming back to God. We’ve got almost twenty-five hundred members now.”
“That’s huge. And you work there?”
“I’m a deacon.”
“Wow. I didn’t think there were any good guys around anymore.”
He swallows that hook, line, and sinker. He knows he’s a good guy because he goes to church. It doesn’t matter how he treats people. It doesn’t matter if he’s cruel. He’s a God-fearing man, so he’s good. I swallow my anger down with my wine. He refills my glass without asking. Flushed from temper and alcohol, I take off my cardigan.
Today my bra is lavender lace and it peeks up above the last straining button of my dress. Steven has finished his glass of wine too, and he can’t stop his eyes from dropping. And staying. He might fear God, but he still loves boobs, and I know for a fact that he’s a big believer in fornication.
Our salads arrive and he digs in with gusto.
The nice thing about bad men is they’re easy to manipulate. If he were truly a good guy, I’d be lost. How could I know what motivates nice people? How would I get him to do what I want? But this isn’t a matter of hoping Steven notices me and wants to start a relationship. I’m good at manipulation because I’ve had to study and learn how people behave.
Before I knew what was wrong with me, I felt like an alien. I didn’t fit in anywhere with anyone. It was typical teenage angst . . . except I honestly didn’t fit in. I was so damn alone.
The first time my brother was sent to prison, I was sixteen, and I still remember my deep, disturbing confusion at the emotional reaction of my family. My mom wailed about how unfair it all was and that the system was rigged and he would never get a decent job now. My father actually cried for his “baby boy.” Wept like a child. My grandmother threw in a couple of racial epithets and complaints that a hardworking white boy couldn’t get anywhere these days.
It was all complete nonsense. He’d deserved to go to prison. He’d finally gotten caught selling stolen goods out of the back of his raggedy truck, and—lucky for him—he was only doing time for what he’d been caught with and not the hundreds of other things he’d stolen and sold over the years. Everyone knew white people got the best breaks in the criminal justice system. He’d gotten way less time than he should have.
Plus he was a lazy asshole and always had been, and a decent job had never been in his future.
So why the grief and surprise?
When I pointed out that he was, in fact, guilty and deserved to do time, my grandma called me a nasty little bitch. I’d heard it before, of course, usually from my mother. A nasty, cold-blooded, selfish, grasping, uppity, ungrateful goddamn little bitch. And I knew that to be true. I could feel the coldness in my own veins.
What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I be normal? Like any other teenage girl, I just wanted to fit in. I hadn’t been good at faking it back then because I hadn’t understood what I was trying to fake: a soul.
My senior year of high school, I took psychology as an elective, and boom, there it was. A description of me right in our textbook. That first time I read about sociopaths, I felt filled up with a bright light that was equal parts terror and joy. Finally—finally!—I understood. It was scary to know the truth, yes, but not nearly as frightening as ignorance.
I didn’t feel doubt. I didn’t feel guilt. And empathy was mostly beyond my grasp.
Of course, that was the golden age of serial killer true crime books, and for a while I thought being a sociopath meant I was destined for an existence of psychopathic evil. I thought it was the inevitable progression of my life. After all, I’d slept with my married English teacher and felt not one ounce of regret despite that his wife was my very kind calculus teacher. He, on the other hand, had sobbed with shame and guilt. Afterward, of course. Always afterward. Erections and guilt can’t exist in the same plane. One makes way for the other.
I’d watched him weeping, his penis flaccid and wet, and I’d thought, Well, that was my first act of true evil. I’d seduced my teacher just because I hated the homework so much and I wanted to blackmail him into an A. I figured I was heading into serial killer territory soon. I set my next-door neighbor’s pet rabbit free in the woods, because I was sure I’d wake up one morning tempted to kill it. I wanted to put off my degeneration as long as possible.