The Neighbors (8 page)

“So, I hear you’re looking to work for us.”

“Yes, sir, if there’s an opening.”

“You’ve worked in grocery before,” Cryer noted, looking over the handwritten job application Drew had filled out not a half hour earlier. “Says you were employed at Kroger just...” he paused, glanced up at Drew with a puzzled expression, “a few days ago?”

“Yes, sir, that’s right.”

“You were let go?” The look of suspicion on Cryer’s face was a comical contrast to the smiling dollar sign mascot on the vinyl banner behind him.
Thrifty says: Shop at Thriftway! Best prices, guaranteed!

“No, sir, I quit.”

The suspicion immediately shifted to distrust. Drew could read the guy’s mind: quitters never won, not even in the produce department.

“Looks like you were employed there for quite some time,” Cryer noted, shifting in his seat. “Five years, which is impressive, so I did us both a favor and called in for a reference.”

Drew’s mouth went dry.

“Uh-huh,” Cryer said. “Want to rethink your story?” With his desk chair groaning beneath him, Cryer leaned back and knitted his fingers together across his chest, as if he were convinced that managing a two-bit grocery store was the top of the food chain.

“I-I left,” Drew stammered.

“You walked out. That’s not the same as quitting,” Cryer noted. “But here”—he tapped the résumé on his desk—“you say you
quit
.”

Drew stared down at his feet, baffled by how quickly this interview had gone to shit. He frowned, coming to the far-too-late realization that he shouldn’t have lied. But it was too late for that now. He had been blinded by his need for work, by the charm of that morning’s breakfast, by the fact that he’d rather live in a Dumpster than go back to where he’d come from. Cryer was about to tell him to get out of his office; he could feel it.

Suddenly, he heard his dad yelling from the kitchen.
Just say it. The truth will set you free.
Drew didn’t know what truth Rick had been trying to get out of his mother that evening, but he knew the truth that would possibly save his chances here. Closing his eyes, he exhaled a defeated sigh.

“I really need this job,” he murmured.

“I’m sure you do,” Cryer quipped.

“My mother is an alcoholic,” he confessed. “And she doesn’t leave the house. Ever.”

Cryer perked up, but Andrew hesitated. How could he tell this man—this
stranger
—about his mom? About the way she trembled if she didn’t have her hourly drink; the way she melted into the couch with satisfaction when it finally hit her lips? Drew knew it was a disease, but he couldn’t help be disgusted by her. How was he supposed to explain that to this self-satisfied grocery store manager and keep even a shred of his own dignity? Confessing her sins somehow turned
him
into a bad person. But
it was his only shot at a job, and if he didn’t get it, he’d wind up right back there on Cedar Street, miserable, watching her slowly drown herself.

“I haven’t told this to anyone,” he said, hoping that Cryer would lend him some mercy and wave off any further explanation. But the store manager looked far too intrigued to let it go. Drew swallowed against the lump in his throat, stared down at his hands, and dared to continue.

“I’ve been taking care of her since I was a kid, and just recently—last week, actually—I saw her walking down the street back toward our house.”

Cryer leaned forward. “You said she never left the house,” he countered.

“Exactly,” Drew replied.

He’d been driving home from work when he spotted a woman hobbling along the side of the road with two paper bags. At first he suspected it was Mrs. Combs, a widow who lived alone on the outskirts of town. Every now and then, Mrs. Combs would wander into town on foot. Most of the time she’d get picked up by police; she had early-onset Alzheimer’s and often forgot where she was. Drew had slowed his truck and leaned across the bench seat, rolling down the window to offer her a ride.

But it wasn’t Mrs. Combs.

It was his mother.

He remembered the surge of joy that had speared his heart.
Holy shit
, he had thought.
She’s outside. She’s trying. She’s really trying to get well again
.

He had pulled the truck over and jumped out of the cab, but a wall of nausea stopped him in his tracks. His mother refused to look at him, her face a mask of guilt. He didn’t have to look inside those bags to know they weren’t filled with groceries.

“The bags were full of booze,” he told Cryer, his voice barely a mumble.

Cryer leaned back again, clearly relishing the tale.

Drew clenched his jaw, his rage bubbling up now as strongly as it had then. He had begged her to go out with him so many times—to hop into his truck so he could take her out for a burger, so they could go to a movie; he wanted her to see that the world still existed and she could still be a part of it. He had tried to help her beat her disease, had even suggested that they pick up and move somewhere new, start fresh. She had refused him every time. And yet she had temporarily beaten her agoraphobia—not to make her only child happy, not to make his life easier, not to make up for all the mistakes she had made, but to fill the empty liquor cabinet at home.

“So I packed up my stuff and I moved out,” he said bitterly. “I didn’t want to keep any part of my old life, especially not the part that supported her for the past five years, so I quit my job.” He paused, corrected himself. “
Left
my job, I guess. I hadn’t missed a day of work in like...” He shook his head, not able to remember the most recent unscheduled day he had taken off. “I don’t know. A really long time. And I felt really bad about it, you know? The people there were great, and I should have put in my two weeks, but I just had to get out of there.” He looked up, desperate for approval, for some glimmer of understanding. “Out of my house, I mean. And I didn’t want her to find me, or send someone to find me, or, I don’t know...” His words drifted off. He looked back down to his hands again.

“That’s it?” Cryer asked after a painfully awkward few seconds.

“That’s it,” Drew told him. And just like that, he felt terrible.

He had raced back home after catching her along the side of the road, nearly mowing down their mailbox when he careened into the driveway. He stumbled out of the pickup like a drunk, careened up the porch steps, fumbled with his house keys. He dropped them once, then again, and finally flung himself inside, slamming the door behind him so hard and fast, all that was missing was the murderer, the ax, and the chase. With his back
to the door, he saw the house he’d lived in his entire life through a new set of eyes. The house that his Gamma had lovingly decorated and his PopPop had kept up for so long was now little more than a living corpse. The sunny yellow color that had danced across the walls had faded to a sad brown. Nothing was clean. Nothing was new. There was no hope to be found, not in any of it.

The one thing that was truly different about that familiar landscape was that Julie Morrison wasn’t in it. Instead, the self-proclaimed agoraphobe was dragging her feet along the road, two bags of booze heavy at her sides.

He had been betrayed. By his mother. His
mom
.

He stumbled forward, his vision blurred by tears, and did what he had only seen done in movies: he began to destroy the place. He dislodged the couch cushions and tossed them across the room, one of them clipping a small table full of knickknacks. Small ceramic figurines tinkled against the hardwood floor like rain, exploding on impact—all of his mother’s precious trinkets, annihilated by a pang of hate. He grabbed the coffee table by its rim, overturning it with a sudden upward shove. Empty bottles flew up; glass tumblers spiraled through the air; a full ashtray spun like a Frisbee before crashing to the floor. When the table hit the ground, it fell with a cacophony of shattering glass, bottles exploding beneath its weight. The stink of alcohol wafted up from the floor. He backed away from the mess, knocking a lamp off a side table as he did, wiping at his eyes.

She had asked for it. She deserved it. But no matter which way he spun it or how he explained it, it boiled down to one thing: he had left her—an ill, mentally unstable woman; his own mother—alone. It didn’t matter how much he had done for her or how hard he had tried, because in the end he hadn’t tried hard enough. He had failed. And he had run. And nobody was going to give a shit about how he had given up college, how he had lost the only girl he’d ever loved, how he had spent Friday nights mopping up vomit rather than hanging out with the people who
had once been his friends. Nobody cared about that because it didn’t matter. Andrew was the bad guy. He was the one to blame.

Cryer sat silently for a long while, staring at Andrew as he replayed the drama that had become his life. A compassionate smile worked its way across the store manager’s mouth.

“I appreciate your opening up,” he said.

Drew blinked, that smile giving him hope. Maybe it
did
matter; maybe all that self-sacrifice was about to pay off, right here, right now.

“But given the fact that you didn’t even put in notice...”

Drew shook his head. “What?”

“Well, you have to see this from my perspective,” Cryer told him. “Admittedly, it doesn’t look good.”

“But I have experience,” Drew protested, his voice cracking with emotion. He hated himself for how desperate he sounded. “There’s no reason for me to leave
this
job. I
need
it.”

“And I appreciate that,” Cryer said. “I really do. But there’s just nothing I can do.”

Drew’s stomach twisted. The back of his throat went sour. The nerves that had taken hold of his insides flared into anger; the guilt that Cryer had forced him to regurgitate roared into rage. He felt used. Cryer had known he was going to turn Drew down from the get-go, but he sat there anyway, allowing him to pour his heart out, and for what? Drew rose from his chair, trying to keep calm.

“I’m really sorry, Andrew,” Cryer insisted, standing as well. “I know it’s rough.”

“Really?” The question tumbled from his lips before he could suppress it. He wanted to scream, to tell Cryer he was an asshole; he wanted to flip his desk the way he had flipped his mother’s coffee table and tell him that nobody shopped at Thriftway anyway; he didn’t need this job. But he
did
.

And then he remembered Harlow—her smiling face, the way the skirt of her dress swayed like a metronome when she walked,
how her hair had glowed in the morning sun, the way she had brushed his hair aside as if assuring him that everything was fine, everything would be OK.

He exhaled a slow breath, glanced up at Cryer again.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “you’re right.”

Cryer forced a smile, extending his hand across his desk. “Good luck,” he said. “With everything.”

Andrew shook the man’s hand with a faint nod and took a step toward the door.

“Really,” Cryer told him. “I mean it.”

When Drew looked up at him again, Cryer really did look like he meant it. And somehow, that made up for how hard it had been for Andrew to make his confession. He hadn’t told anybody what he had been dealing with. To see that it had affected a stranger, even in the tiniest of ways, made him think that maybe he wasn’t in the wrong after all; that maybe, sometime soon, the weight of that guilt would lift from his shoulders, and he’d finally be free.

Creekside had a total of five grocery stores, so after the disaster at Thriftway, he visited the rest of them, minus the Kroger he used to work at less than a week before. He filled out three applications despite two of the managers telling him they weren’t hiring, and scored another interview only to be told that they’d call him later. Drew tried to be optimistic, but that “later” felt like a “never.”

His frustration started to mount.

He dropped into a couple of video game stores, a bike shop, three coffee places, and a Dairy Queen. Everyone shook their heads. Everyone gave him an apologetic smile, a shrug of the shoulders. It appeared that Creekside was far from immune from the Capitol disease. The economy had gone to shit, even in the heartland.

Despite the work he’d put into Mickey’s house, he didn’t want to go back there yet, didn’t want to face the bitter reality that he was living in a dilapidated house—a blight on an otherwise perfect neighborhood. So he decided to get something to eat instead. But the urgency of his situation hit him full-on while sitting in line at a Burger King drive-through. After numerous fast-food runs, his funds were in the double digits. The seven dollars he handed to the guy at the window suddenly seemed an extravagant amount for a burger and some fries. He tried to enjoy his sandwich, but was hindered by his inability to stop thinking about how, if he kept going out to eat, he wouldn’t last longer than a week.

Parked in front of the house, the aftertaste of french fries still on his tongue, Drew sat in his truck for a long while, staring blankly at the steering wheel. Suddenly overwhelmed by frustration, he grabbed the wheel, clenched his teeth, and tried to shake the damn thing free of the dash. It didn’t budge, and eventually Drew simply slumped in his seat, his forehead pressed to the wheel. He had expected this to be easy. His current disillusionment only served as proof that he was an idiot. Because nothing was ever easy. Especially not this.