Are You Lonesome Tonight?
Patricia Quintana Bidar
It was the Fourth of July. Fernanda and Phil’s thirty-one-day anniversary of joining the “no drinking” club. No meetings, no sponsor or steps. But they did need to stay away from their street’s block party. After Memorial Day’s debacle, they were barred. Fernanda had been taken aside. Rather than hole up in their own home, tormented by the sounds of their neighbors enjoying themselves, they’d escape to the quiet of a nearby suburb. Something new.
Phil’s pinkie-and-ring-finger prosthesis was also new, the originals having been smithereened by a Link Triad Cherry Bomb at the fated Memorial Day Cookout. The neighbors had pooled gas money for a couple of the guys to road trip to Nevada for explosives, meat, and a keg.
Phil spent the night in the emergency room, with the spoiled mayonnaise ingesters, the almost drowned, and the sunstroked. Since that night, Fernanda occupied the moral high ground, never divulging that she’d put away three more Mike’s Hards in the parking lot and given a hand job to the married neighbor who’d driven them to the ER. The guy had had some pretty good stories about his roadie days with Cold Blood.
Phil had work tomorrow. She’d picked a hotel in a bedroom town near an In-N-Out Burger. Phil’s favorite. But when the red-and-yellow sign appeared right off the freeway, she chose not to wake him. Phil’s bulk was curled toward the passenger door of the Mitsubishi. A line of cars snaked into the street. They’d both put on weight in the past month.
He’d been up late as usual, clacking to message boards on ancient battlefields while Fernanda fumed in bed. And sure, she was peeved to miss the cookout. And now there he was, dozing comfortably while she drove them. Fernanda passed the bright building with its hard red-and-white disk umbrellas, telling herself she was concerned about his health. Minutes later, she pulled into the hotel lot.
Phil, bearlike, stirred.
“Seems safe,” Fernanda ventured. Not like their neighborhood would be, between the combustibles and celebratory gunfire. Phil said nothing, squinting at the enormous lot. Spiky weeds split the asphalt.
The building was basic. Rectangular. With a work-away-from-home theme: the kind of place you pictured a middle manager being put up in by their employer. To get a new branch off the ground, say, or undertake a weeklong training. Down the block was a Bimbo Bread outlet, a Señor Taco, a linoleum wholesaler. Fernanda had pictured a swimming pool, a lobby with plush chairs. Maybe even a pianist, a tip fishbowl on top.
Phil humped their bags from the car while Fernanda dealt with the clerk, a sunburnt young woman with a tattoo of a toddler’s face on her upper arm. Elvis Presley’s voice emitted from a small, single speaker. Phil barely bothered to hide his derisive snort. Fernanda’s sister Yoli had said on the phone that her children were docile and well-behaved all day at school, and then fell apart when they got home. They only exploded with someone they felt safe with.
“That’s Phil, these days,” Fernanda had returned.
Their bright room featured a kitchenette with a two-burner stove and a full-sized refrigerator. No coffeemaker. No cheery binder presenting the hotel’s offerings or nearby eateries. The fluorescent overhead light buzzed. Yes. A ductless mini-split AC unit growled.
“Reminds me of my second-grade classroom,” Fernanda said.
“Funny.” Phil emitted his one-syllable laugh.
It was the goddamned Fourth of July. How did you do a hotel without booze?
The edges of things had nicely blurred when they drank together. Fernanda always the more sober, getting Phil home and to bed, relaying only his bon mots back to him the next day. Their pattern, until now. Now she flopped to the reading chair, its outline punched with bronze-plated tacks. “Hey, live outdoor concert, with fireworks to follow,” she read, scrolling her phone. “It might be fun.”
Phil scratched his nose with his prosthesis. “Around here?” He sat up on one of the queen-sized beds, performed a twisty stretch.
Fernanda valued the softness they’d built between them. The trust. Seven years of in-jokes, shorthand, the easy familiarity of the other’s body. But last year his body stiffened in their bed at night. He was still a nice-looking man. A hard worker. Was it wrong to crave some sharpness? Angles? Fernanda grasped his foot, began to knead.
“Thank you,” Phil said, genuinely surprised. Fernanda pushed knuckles into his arch, eliciting a soft moan. It was mildly unsettling. She loved him. She did.
She grabbed his other foot, pulled softly on each toe. It was something her massage therapist did. But the role of purchaser and hired professional was clear in that professionally soothing space. Here there was only Fernanda and Phil’s middle-aged bodies in a chilly, tile-floored hotel room.
To her surprise, Phil responded with a kiss to her shoulder, a tug at her bra strap. He regarded her with serious eyes, cradling her head in his hands.
Fernanda kissed his jaw.
Then, “So, what happened to In-N-Out?”
“Closed on holidays,” Fernanda returned. “Bible thumpers. Ever see the passages they put underneath the French fry cups?”
“I know for a fact you’re lying. I called ahead.” His jaw was set now. Who the hell phones a fast-food restaurant?
“We’ll find somewhere nicer.”
“This was not the plan, Fern.”
“Come on.” She gave him a smile. It wasn’t worth raising his ire. Deflect, Yoli had advised.
“Looking out for my health, huh?”
“Something like that. Hey, I’m gonna jump in the shower,” she said, thinking they’d start again with the fooling around.
When they’d first met at the environmental nonprofit in the city, Phil would roar at Fernanda’s jokes, sometimes reaching out to touch her arm, then drawing back as if fearful of overshooting. They’d bonded over being knockaround types in the bougie environment. About not wanting kids, with the way the planet was headed. Fernanda was technically Phil’s boss. It was thrilling to sneak around. Meet for drinks at the no-name bar between their apartments. Until Fernanda’d been laid off and Phil promoted to IT manager. Somehow, no matter how much he drank the night before, he could still unsnarl computer crises and do it with a smile.
When Fernanda finished her shower, Phil was gone. There was no note on the small table or on his suitcase. This was it. This was it. The old pit widened inside of her. Not this. She felt the strong pull of the dark hole. The unfillable need. Fernanda had always been a defeatist thinker. A clinger. Her response to being neglected in her early years. In relationships with men, she’d turned herself inside out to hide it, cultivated a deep hug whose light filled her, a hum of warmth from the one she embraced. Her therapist said she needed to manufacture her own light. Lose herself in her own life. It would come.
But right now, she needed a drink. Something cold. She felt the swallow burning her throat. The sweating glass, so right in the hand. She dressed quickly, scooped up the old-fashioned hotel key, and strode out the door. But Phil had taken the car. Fuck. Up ahead, the Señor Taco sign spun.
She passed one gated condo community, then another. Frills of sturdy pink and white oleanders sentried their gates. Behind the curtained windows, she pictured the units humming with people absorbed in work. Presenting reports. Celebrating birthdays, babies. Virtual fist-bumping. Teams. Ridiculous, given the holiday, the hour. Fernanda would be alone. She was alone. Deep breath. A bus rumbled past, empty apart from the driver. The reddish sun squatted near the horizon.
When she arrived, the Señor Taco dining room was dim. Only the drive-thru was open, a hand-lettered sign read. Another sign prohibited pedestrians from approaching the window on foot. Oh, this was ridiculous. Fernanda planted herself at the entrance to the drive-thru lane. She held up her two twenty-dollar bills to show she had money.
A convertible eased through. Then a small truck. Then a sedan filled with baleful teenaged girls. “Two tacos and a beer. Cerveza? I have the money,” Fernanda kept saying, but no one would meet her eyes. She returned to the dining room doors and banged with her fists. She felt like a jigsaw puzzle scrambled by an unseen hand. Finally, the counter clerk, clearly apprehensive, approached the glass door from inside, calling, “Ma’am, I will call the cops!”
Fernanda ran. Her sandals slapped the asphalt. She began cutting through dusty lots, thistles scratching her feet. Alone as she would be tonight, in the cold room in the dismal, cold-floored hotel. The air tore at her throat.
In the sky, a white chrysanthemum flowered. Then red dragon talons, orange peonies. A green strobe. White smoke dropped after every new firework. The honeyed sound colored the air: a theme song from a lesser Disney. That city park must be nearby.
Now she was sprinting. Toward the colored fire and smoke. Phil was gone. Okay! She’d move alone to the desert, closer to Yoli and the parents. A place where security cameras captured weird animals drinking from HOA fountains in the night. Javelinas. Gila monsters and coatimundis. Where deer flung themselves into chill back yard pools. She would jog at daybreak under pink and orange skies.
Behind her, the Señor Taco lights flicked off. The fireworks finale was starting. You could tell by the way the popping sounds accelerated and thickened.
She picked up the pace. She needed the gathered crowd. The vendor booths with beer. She’d buy as many as the forty bucks covered. Down them fast. Feel syrupy looseness enter her limbs. Sweating freely now, Fernanda began moving through the crowd. The faces lit before disappearing again. Lit. Gone. Lit. She registered awe’s purity. That beer would taste magnificent.
That’s when a gust of wind sucked the twenties from her hand and into the dark sky.
The bills flashed before disappearing behind the walled condos as Fernanda stared, open-mouthed. “Damn it!” she shrieked. She began to punch the air, that unendurable gap between what you planned for in this life, and what you got.
That’s when Fernanda’s own car eased up beside her. Phil at the wheel in his too-small Oakland A’s cap. “Get in, loser; I got us In-N-Out,” came his voice, followed by the dumbshit laugh that was part of him, part of Fernanda because they were together. She ran to him. Pressed her body against the driver side door, enveloping his shoulders, his head in her arms. The puzzle pieces inside of her shifted and clicked.
Oh! That such a duo could persist in this world!
Thirty-one days.
Patricia Quintana Bidar
It was the Fourth of July. Fernanda and Phil’s thirty-one-day anniversary of joining the “no drinking” club. No meetings, no sponsor or steps. But they did need to stay away from their street’s block party. After Memorial Day’s debacle, they were barred. Fernanda had been taken aside. Rather than hole up in their own home, tormented by the sounds of their neighbors enjoying themselves, they’d escape to the quiet of a nearby suburb. Something new.
Phil’s pinkie-and-ring-finger prosthesis was also new, the originals having been smithereened by a Link Triad Cherry Bomb at the fated Memorial Day Cookout. The neighbors had pooled gas money for a couple of the guys to road trip to Nevada for explosives, meat, and a keg.
Phil spent the night in the emergency room, with the spoiled mayonnaise ingesters, the almost drowned, and the sunstroked. Since that night, Fernanda occupied the moral high ground, never divulging that she’d put away three more Mike’s Hards in the parking lot and given a hand job to the married neighbor who’d driven them to the ER. The guy had had some pretty good stories about his roadie days with Cold Blood.
Phil had work tomorrow. She’d picked a hotel in a bedroom town near an In-N-Out Burger. Phil’s favorite. But when the red-and-yellow sign appeared right off the freeway, she chose not to wake him. Phil’s bulk was curled toward the passenger door of the Mitsubishi. A line of cars snaked into the street. They’d both put on weight in the past month.
He’d been up late as usual, clacking to message boards on ancient battlefields while Fernanda fumed in bed. And sure, she was peeved to miss the cookout. And now there he was, dozing comfortably while she drove them. Fernanda passed the bright building with its hard red-and-white disk umbrellas, telling herself she was concerned about his health. Minutes later, she pulled into the hotel lot.
Phil, bearlike, stirred.
“Seems safe,” Fernanda ventured. Not like their neighborhood would be, between the combustibles and celebratory gunfire. Phil said nothing, squinting at the enormous lot. Spiky weeds split the asphalt.
The building was basic. Rectangular. With a work-away-from-home theme: the kind of place you pictured a middle manager being put up in by their employer. To get a new branch off the ground, say, or undertake a weeklong training. Down the block was a Bimbo Bread outlet, a Señor Taco, a linoleum wholesaler. Fernanda had pictured a swimming pool, a lobby with plush chairs. Maybe even a pianist, a tip fishbowl on top.
Phil humped their bags from the car while Fernanda dealt with the clerk, a sunburnt young woman with a tattoo of a toddler’s face on her upper arm. Elvis Presley’s voice emitted from a small, single speaker. Phil barely bothered to hide his derisive snort. Fernanda’s sister Yoli had said on the phone that her children were docile and well-behaved all day at school, and then fell apart when they got home. They only exploded with someone they felt safe with.
“That’s Phil, these days,” Fernanda had returned.
Their bright room featured a kitchenette with a two-burner stove and a full-sized refrigerator. No coffeemaker. No cheery binder presenting the hotel’s offerings or nearby eateries. The fluorescent overhead light buzzed. Yes. A ductless mini-split AC unit growled.
“Reminds me of my second-grade classroom,” Fernanda said.
“Funny.” Phil emitted his one-syllable laugh.
It was the goddamned Fourth of July. How did you do a hotel without booze?
The edges of things had nicely blurred when they drank together. Fernanda always the more sober, getting Phil home and to bed, relaying only his bon mots back to him the next day. Their pattern, until now. Now she flopped to the reading chair, its outline punched with bronze-plated tacks. “Hey, live outdoor concert, with fireworks to follow,” she read, scrolling her phone. “It might be fun.”
Phil scratched his nose with his prosthesis. “Around here?” He sat up on one of the queen-sized beds, performed a twisty stretch.
Fernanda valued the softness they’d built between them. The trust. Seven years of in-jokes, shorthand, the easy familiarity of the other’s body. But last year his body stiffened in their bed at night. He was still a nice-looking man. A hard worker. Was it wrong to crave some sharpness? Angles? Fernanda grasped his foot, began to knead.
“Thank you,” Phil said, genuinely surprised. Fernanda pushed knuckles into his arch, eliciting a soft moan. It was mildly unsettling. She loved him. She did.
She grabbed his other foot, pulled softly on each toe. It was something her massage therapist did. But the role of purchaser and hired professional was clear in that professionally soothing space. Here there was only Fernanda and Phil’s middle-aged bodies in a chilly, tile-floored hotel room.
To her surprise, Phil responded with a kiss to her shoulder, a tug at her bra strap. He regarded her with serious eyes, cradling her head in his hands.
Fernanda kissed his jaw.
Then, “So, what happened to In-N-Out?”
“Closed on holidays,” Fernanda returned. “Bible thumpers. Ever see the passages they put underneath the French fry cups?”
“I know for a fact you’re lying. I called ahead.” His jaw was set now. Who the hell phones a fast-food restaurant?
“We’ll find somewhere nicer.”
“This was not the plan, Fern.”
“Come on.” She gave him a smile. It wasn’t worth raising his ire. Deflect, Yoli had advised.
“Looking out for my health, huh?”
“Something like that. Hey, I’m gonna jump in the shower,” she said, thinking they’d start again with the fooling around.
When they’d first met at the environmental nonprofit in the city, Phil would roar at Fernanda’s jokes, sometimes reaching out to touch her arm, then drawing back as if fearful of overshooting. They’d bonded over being knockaround types in the bougie environment. About not wanting kids, with the way the planet was headed. Fernanda was technically Phil’s boss. It was thrilling to sneak around. Meet for drinks at the no-name bar between their apartments. Until Fernanda’d been laid off and Phil promoted to IT manager. Somehow, no matter how much he drank the night before, he could still unsnarl computer crises and do it with a smile.
When Fernanda finished her shower, Phil was gone. There was no note on the small table or on his suitcase. This was it. This was it. The old pit widened inside of her. Not this. She felt the strong pull of the dark hole. The unfillable need. Fernanda had always been a defeatist thinker. A clinger. Her response to being neglected in her early years. In relationships with men, she’d turned herself inside out to hide it, cultivated a deep hug whose light filled her, a hum of warmth from the one she embraced. Her therapist said she needed to manufacture her own light. Lose herself in her own life. It would come.
But right now, she needed a drink. Something cold. She felt the swallow burning her throat. The sweating glass, so right in the hand. She dressed quickly, scooped up the old-fashioned hotel key, and strode out the door. But Phil had taken the car. Fuck. Up ahead, the Señor Taco sign spun.
She passed one gated condo community, then another. Frills of sturdy pink and white oleanders sentried their gates. Behind the curtained windows, she pictured the units humming with people absorbed in work. Presenting reports. Celebrating birthdays, babies. Virtual fist-bumping. Teams. Ridiculous, given the holiday, the hour. Fernanda would be alone. She was alone. Deep breath. A bus rumbled past, empty apart from the driver. The reddish sun squatted near the horizon.
When she arrived, the Señor Taco dining room was dim. Only the drive-thru was open, a hand-lettered sign read. Another sign prohibited pedestrians from approaching the window on foot. Oh, this was ridiculous. Fernanda planted herself at the entrance to the drive-thru lane. She held up her two twenty-dollar bills to show she had money.
A convertible eased through. Then a small truck. Then a sedan filled with baleful teenaged girls. “Two tacos and a beer. Cerveza? I have the money,” Fernanda kept saying, but no one would meet her eyes. She returned to the dining room doors and banged with her fists. She felt like a jigsaw puzzle scrambled by an unseen hand. Finally, the counter clerk, clearly apprehensive, approached the glass door from inside, calling, “Ma’am, I will call the cops!”
Fernanda ran. Her sandals slapped the asphalt. She began cutting through dusty lots, thistles scratching her feet. Alone as she would be tonight, in the cold room in the dismal, cold-floored hotel. The air tore at her throat.
In the sky, a white chrysanthemum flowered. Then red dragon talons, orange peonies. A green strobe. White smoke dropped after every new firework. The honeyed sound colored the air: a theme song from a lesser Disney. That city park must be nearby.
Now she was sprinting. Toward the colored fire and smoke. Phil was gone. Okay! She’d move alone to the desert, closer to Yoli and the parents. A place where security cameras captured weird animals drinking from HOA fountains in the night. Javelinas. Gila monsters and coatimundis. Where deer flung themselves into chill back yard pools. She would jog at daybreak under pink and orange skies.
Behind her, the Señor Taco lights flicked off. The fireworks finale was starting. You could tell by the way the popping sounds accelerated and thickened.
She picked up the pace. She needed the gathered crowd. The vendor booths with beer. She’d buy as many as the forty bucks covered. Down them fast. Feel syrupy looseness enter her limbs. Sweating freely now, Fernanda began moving through the crowd. The faces lit before disappearing again. Lit. Gone. Lit. She registered awe’s purity. That beer would taste magnificent.
That’s when a gust of wind sucked the twenties from her hand and into the dark sky.
The bills flashed before disappearing behind the walled condos as Fernanda stared, open-mouthed. “Damn it!” she shrieked. She began to punch the air, that unendurable gap between what you planned for in this life, and what you got.
That’s when Fernanda’s own car eased up beside her. Phil at the wheel in his too-small Oakland A’s cap. “Get in, loser; I got us In-N-Out,” came his voice, followed by the dumbshit laugh that was part of him, part of Fernanda because they were together. She ran to him. Pressed her body against the driver side door, enveloping his shoulders, his head in her arms. The puzzle pieces inside of her shifted and clicked.
Oh! That such a duo could persist in this world!
Thirty-one days.