Laraine

I hadn’t spoken to Laraine in over two years, not since I asked her if she wanted to go to an Anita Baker concert with me.

“Bitch sings like a tea kettle on acid,” Laraine said.

She’d gone too far. Nobody disses Anita Baker in my presence. That woman got me through two marriages and a miscarriage. There was no way I would let Laraine talk about her that way.

But Laraine had always talked about other people that way, a quality that could either endear her to you for life or make you stay a safe ten-foot distance away, depending. In my case, it was the former; her rawness was refreshing, especially when you’re a single woman like me, living in a studio rental atop a liquor store on East Street, and used to people talking down to you. Laraine never did that, at least not to me. She would call you nasty names and make fun of you but never acted like she was any better than you.

Laraine and I had known each other since the sixth grade. We’d met on that dirty yellow school bus that drunk Mr. Albertson drove, the one with the hole in the rubber-coated floor three rows from the back that sprayed dirty slush on your legs in winter if you didn’t watch it. Bobby Crebbs had just boarded the bus and was walking past Laraine when I saw her take out a one-and-a-half-inch pin and stick it through the back of his blue jeans. She wasn’t always mean like that, but Bobby had ratted her out on the last day of school the year before for taking a dump in the boy’s restroom, so she hadn’t been able to go on the school outing to the amusement park. She took her sweet time planning her revenge.

As soon as that pin entered Bobby’s leg, the fur-lined visor on his brown winter cap suddenly popped up. I still don’t know why it happened or whether it had anything to do with the pin. I could see from three rows away that Bobby was trying not to cry, and I felt sorry for him, but I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Laraine laughed, too, and we were friends from that moment on, despite the week of detention we both received that made me miss basketball tryouts.

We always called her LA-raine, just like that. She wanted her name accented on the first syllable so no one would mistake her for anyone else. But you had to say it just so, or else she’d think you were making fun of her and maybe drive a pin into your leg. Or worse.

She had a mother the size of a Smedley truck and a father who only showed up on Christmas Eve since he had other families to attend to. I went to her house once, and her mother had been passed out on the white floral print couch with a can of PBR in her left hand and one shoe off. I didn’t want to go over there anymore, so I invited Laraine for dinner at our house the following week. After Laraine had eaten her Salisbury steak with her hands, my mother asked me to stop hanging around with her. Which I didn’t because I loved that girl so much.

She married Ryan Weltz a week after high school graduation. Ryan was a star quarterback and had a full scholarship to State. Laraine was going to go off to college with him, change her name to Lorraine and get a job on campus while Ryan was in school. I was kind of jealous but tried not to show it when I walked down the aisle at her budget wedding. Then over the summer, Ryan broke his back working construction, and there was no more football and no more college. Just Ryan and Laraine living in a third-floor walk-up with heat in only one room. Ryan spent his days taking opioids, while Laraine spent hers taking lunch orders at Patty’s Diner.

But I’ll be damned if that girl didn’t pull herself up. Five years later, she bought herself a small house with her savings from the two jobs she worked and some money her absent father had left her when he died. It was in the shitty part of town, up near the landfill, but it was still hers. She and I worked at the Park-and-Shop Supermarket back then. She did the cash register because she was so good with people. Always remembered the names of the old ladies and always flirted with their seventeen-year-old grandsons. Me, I was never much for talking, but I’d stock my shelves and watch her as she worked the front, all smiles, acting like she was hosting a goddamn talk show. Behind my dolly full of moderately dented canned goods and supersized boxes of laundry detergent, I would grin at her, trying to throw her off and make her laugh, but she would only acknowledge me with a quick smile and get right back to her customers.

Funny, as close as we were, Laraine never came to either of my weddings. I think weddings made her sad, especially after Ryan overdosed and died on the cold floor in the basement of their house. I always thought she would find someone else, but she never did. Yeah, she’d occasionally fuck some dude she met at Rick’s Tavern on a Friday night and brag about it at work. She probably even fooled around with a few of the grandsons when they got older, but she never had a regular boyfriend. She didn’t seem upset by it.

I can’t say I blame her, considering what disasters both my marriages had been. It turned out that my first husband was already married, as I discovered more than a year later after asking too many questions about his frequent business trips. My second husband was Bobby Crebbs. Need I say more?

I always thought she would apologize to me after the Anita Baker comment, and we’d be friends again. I don’t know why that one remark had gotten to me or why I didn’t call her and make up. After so many years of her being the alpha female and me tagging along, I decided it was her turn to say she was sorry. But she never did. Just wrote me off. I’d already quit the Park-n-Shop by then because of my back and was working at the post office, so I never saw her anymore.

So I was surprised when I saw her for the last time late that Sunday morning. Driving home from my mother’s, I had to pee from all that tea I’d been drinking. I decided to take a shortcut through Barry Park when suddenly traffic stopped. I opened the car door and stood on the edge of the driver’s seat to see what was going on. There was a line of maybe twenty cars ahead. I really had to take that wiz, so I pulled over and started walking toward the park entrance. I knew there was a restroom twenty feet from the gate, and although my bladder ached like crazy, it would be quicker to go there than wait for all those cars to clear.

I had just reached the restroom when I saw the line of cops and the yellow tape in front of the row of trees next to the parking lot. Then I noticed a pair of red pumps with sequined flower petals and silver straps jutting out from beneath one of the bushes. I knew those shoes anywhere. Laraine had bought them on one of those websites that sold used women’s clothing for cheap and wore them to the Park-n-Shop holiday party. I remember teasing her for ordering them, warning her they probably wouldn’t fit, and anyway, how did she know they wouldn’t take her money and never send her shit?  But the shoes had been delivered as promised and were a perfect fit. I never saw Laraine happier than that night when she worked the dance floor with those goddam red pumps. I was stuck sitting in a metal folding chair in my mother’s old green dress and white orthopedic shoes, drinking rum-spiked fruit punch and making small talk with Bobby.

The first thing I thought of was the Wicked Witch of the East from The Wizard of Oz, her legs sticking out from beneath Dorothy’s house, right before the ruby slippers disappeared and her body shriveled up. And goddammit, I started to laugh, just like I did when she stuck my future ex-husband with that pin, even though I knew I shouldn’t. Then I wanted to cry, ashamed of myself for my first reaction. I forgot all about the bathroom by the gate because I was running through the grass, peeing in my jeans, and crashing that police barrier to see her for myself.

I stopped before I got to the yellow tape. Something held me back. I didn’t want to know what had happened to Laraine. I didn’t want to see how she died. I didn’t want to know that she died.

It wasn’t until Wednesday that the police confirmed it was likely the same killer as the two other women. The first one, Allison Bates, a seventeen-year-old student at Mercy, the private Catholic school on the other side of the park, had disappeared at lunchtime six months ago and was found the next day, her badly beaten body tossed next to a rusty swing set in a section of the park that had been closed for renovations. Cherry Allen, a prostitute, and mother of two, had been the second. Three weeks ago, her body was discovered in a broken-down car with no tires that someone had dumped behind an abandoned gas station just off the freeway exit. The cops hadn’t connected it to Allison’s murder until they found the same red fescue grass as in the park in the crevices of Cherry’s shoes. Her front teeth had been broken with the bloody tire iron the killer had tossed in the back seat.

Laraine’s funeral was well-attended. Dozens of people crowded into the tiny church and sat behind the casket with her broken body inside. I recognized many of her former co-workers from Park-and-Save, as well as a few longtime customers and a couple of the grandsons, now older and married. Even Ryan’s parents were there, which surprised me because Laraine had always said they blamed their son’s addiction on her. After the service, I decided not to go to the cemetery because I was afraid of bawling out loud and making a fool of myself. Besides, post office policy on bereavement leave of a non-family member was four hours.

I drove past the high school on my way back to work. I saw the empty football field on my right and pulled over. I looked through the chain link fence toward the visitors’ section of the bleachers where Laraine and I drank that twelve-pack after she found out Ryan wasn’t going to college after all and was crying over the life she had imagined and suddenly lost. I found the gate unlocked and walked over to the spot where we sat through the afternoon and into the evening. Even now, I could smell the beer-drenched vomit we puked onto the stainless steel benches.

“I was going to be someone,” she said to me, her sharp tongue licking the tab of the can.

“Laraine, you are someone,” I said like I was reciting a line from a Hallmark movie. But I meant it. She was somebody, at least to me.

She shook her head. “I’m the girl from the wrong side of the tracks who got lucky and married the star quarterback. I was going to go away with him and start my life over. Pretend I was someone else.” She looked at me with those blue eyes that sparkled even through tears. “I wouldn’t have embarrassed him, Sandy. I would’ve kept my mouth shut. I would’ve watched the way I ate. He wouldn’t have been ashamed.”

“You would have been fine,” I said. Then I kissed her red face, then her soft lips, and then the tiny crevices of her forehead. I knew I shouldn’t, but I was drunk as hell and couldn’t stop. I never loved anyone as much as I did Laraine at that moment, just because of the way she wanted to make Ryan happy.

I didn’t go back to work that day. They could fire me if they wanted to. I was a 37-year-old woman who lived above a liquor store and had no money, no husband, no children, and no friends. But so the fuck what? I had Laraine, or at least the memories of her, and I would stay with her and those memories for the rest of that chilly November day.

Even if she had said that bad stuff about Anita.