"Last Words" by Gordon W. Mennenga
My name is Mallory Rooney. People call me Mal. That means bad in Spanish. It’s one thing I know for sure. I live in three places: KeenTec Forms Processing where I specialize in the printing of calendars, Moby’s Pub on Rose Avenue and at home on Water Street with my pale, disappointed bingo-addicted wife, Faye. I live in a kind of work-eat-sleep Bermuda Triangle. I sometimes think of disappearing but then people would go to the trouble of looking for me. Here today and gone tomorrow but where would I go? Disappearing isn’t that easy for Chrissake.
I sit at the bar in Moby’s and stare at the bartender’s tattoos. He picked the wrong font if he was going for nasty. After three or four tall ones I think about calling Maxine, a real noodle of a woman who always welcomes a little attention. Maxine is losing vision in her left eye so we have a lot to speculate about. Speculation makes for a softer landing. “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed woman is queen,” she keeps saying. She had my brother Carlton’s baby about eight years ago, but we don’t talk about that. I didn’t ask where the baby went. When I call, Maxine knows what I need. Once I goofed up and called her Faye. She started sobbing and I had to hold her tight like I was some kind of savior. Sometimes we just lie in bed holding hands and listen to each other breathe. I don’t know what I’d do if Maxine ever told me to kiss off.
The drive home to Faye takes fifteen minutes, although sometimes I just drive around listening to Gary Greiner try to read the local news on the radio station his wife owns. Last year Faye won $2,300 dollars and a set of cookware playing online bingo, but I’d bet she spent ten times that. Whether she’s winning or losing she seldom looks up when I come through the door. There she is in her “Ain’t That a Shame” t-shirt. She wears it like a flag. Sometimes I try to put my arm around her, and she’ll say, “Take it somewhere else.” So, I make a sandwich out of ham loaf, pickle relish and white bread and think of all the times I wanted a little roll in the hay when I was sober as a stone. Faye is losing her hair so she wears a scarf wrapped around her head most of the time. It is a side effect of one of the drugs she’s taking. Take a pill, play more online bingo. Take a pill, sleep until noon. Two of the blue ones will hush her suffering. Doesn’t she ever feel the urge to stir things up? I’d welcome that. Our house is so quiet you can hear the termites feasting on the doorframe.
“Are you tired of me?” I ask.
“Remind me,” she says looking up from the comfort of her bingo chair, “are you that Rooney guy who works his life away at KeenTec?”
“That hurts, really hurts,” I whisper. She holds her hand out and points to the kitchen meaning I’m supposed to get her another Diet Mountain Dew.
“Dew Me,” is her little joke.
When we got married, she weighed 142 pounds. She had good legs and faith in Jesus. Now she weighs 103 pounds. Where did that much of her go, anyway? I know there are two sides to every story but she’s not telling hers. She once said BINGO in her sleep and then denied it the next day. Mostly I dream about trying to open a lock with a broken key. I think Garth Brooks has a song about that, keys and locks, or maybe it was Merle Haggard. He loved broken things.
“You always come home too late for supper. Why is that? You don’t like home cooked Chef Boyardee?” she asks. “And that droopy smile of yours. Don’t be so humble.”
“Well, at least I come home. This droopy smile used to mean something. It’s my face talking, and I can’t do much about it.”
“Well, here’s my face talking,” Faye says and her face goes blank. She has a nice face, but her lips are chapped, and she’s gotten wild with the eyebrow pencil. Mostly when I look at her face, I don’t see anything but a ghost of what used to be. I guess that is the point.
*
Let me speak. My name is Faye Rooney. My name means fairy.
First, Mal is wrong about my weight. I weigh 123, not 103. I don’t know where he gets that or why it matters. I do take medications for my irregular heartbeat and migraines. I take CoQ10 every day and of course my zinc, ginseng, SJW and B-12. I was a bio major in college, something Mal used to be proud of. Never really did use it. Instead, I married Mal and stayed planted in this gateway to the plains. It’s so flat here that we don’t need parking brakes.
I’ve got some secrets and I lean on them so I can survive. I had a thing for Mal’s brother Carlton before I met Mal. Carlton was quiet, confident and always looking at the horizon. Moving in, moving out, getting this, losing that, he played life like a game of chess. He got my clothes off of me a few times, but then he just touched me like a mechanic looking for a missing bolt. About Carlton’s baby boy. He was adopted by Kevin and Gwen Boudreau. They named him Ian. They lived in Colorado then but have since moved back to town with little Ian. The world’s just one big circle which is both a scary and comforting idea. Ian’s here in town in the second grade. Wicked-orange hair. A little story in a big book. Maxine must die inside every time she sees little Ian.
Shit. I feel like I’m whispering all of this when I should really be shouting. Oh, and last year I made over $30,000 gambling online. That’s profit. I’m way beyond bingo these days. I have my own savings account, and I do our taxes so Mal is clueless when it comes to money. I’ve spent five months trying to decide what to do with the money. No children so there’s one choice I won’t have to make. I never took birth control pills and I never got pregnant. Mal probably thought he had the problem. Maybe I’ll go to Costa Rica, live on the beach and let the sun burn off my regrets. Some days I would.
I know all about Maxine. I’m charitable about it. I like to know things he thinks I don’t know. And about my hair. I am losing it, strand by strand because I bleached the shit out of it for so many years. At this rate it will last another ten years. I hope. My scarf collection is the best in town.
I met a gentleman on the internet. Rolf is a scammer for sure, but I love toying with him. He says he is about to inherit a movie studio in England, but he needs $20,000 to hire a lawyer. He says he’s going to sell his house in the Virgin Islands. I tell him I was a backup singer for Jackson Browne before I started modeling bikinis. The world is filled with lies but I guess that’s what it needs to keep spinning.
“Goodnight, love.” Mal still says that every night.
Gordon W. Mennenga grew up in a small town where he learned to pay attention and take notes. His work has been featured on NPR and published in Epoch, Jabberwock Review, Necessary Fiction, North American Review, Bellingham Review, 100 Word Story, and On the Run. Gordon earned an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught creative writing and film studies. Contact Gordon at: gordonwmennenga.com
