Cracks

For the six months following his nineteenth birthday, Tanner did so many drugs that it took him a year to recover. 

So when Gerald pulls the hand-rolled joint from his pocket and offers it to Tanner, he shakes his head. He is twenty-three now. Gerald is twenty-five, and he offers Tanner something to smoke every time his break follows his. During work, Gerald pulls his hair into a low ponytail that hangs along his spine. He knocked up Tanner’s sister when she was eighteen but didn’t marry her. Tanner’s nephew is three now and his sister has moved in with a guy named Paul, who her son calls Daddy. The kid calls Gerald “Daddy-G.” 

Tanner sits on the curb beside the back entrance to Kentucky Fried Chicken and pulls out his paperback. Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky. In June he’ll have his associates from Western Nevada College, the community college tucked between the Domino's Pizza and the old Walmart building. It’s just an associates degree, but it’s better than nothing. 

The April air doesn’t rest. It dances with the dirt parking lot across the street and a small dust devil forms for five seconds before being sucked back into the dry ground. Tanner’s hair would be a victim of the wind, but his black baseball cap keeps it hidden.

The first customer he serves after his break is Kristen. Barely. Dark crescent moons hang below her eyes. Amber roots peek from beneath her bleached hair and a small silver ring is hooked through her right eyebrow.

“Tannerite,” she says.

“Kristen. How can I help you?” he says.

She stares at him, unblinking. “I’ll have a number five.”

He completes her order and she takes a seat at the table closest to the counter. Between orders, he watches her. She seems thinner—which he would have thought was impossible—but in an I’ve-been-working-out sort of way. Her collarbones are more obvious than they used to be, and her fingernails are trimmed and polished. She taps her foot to the Tim McGraw song playing over the speaker system. Her napkin rests neatly on her lap and she takes small bites of her chicken and mashed potatoes. She reads something on her phone for ten minutes after she’s finished eating and then approaches the counter where Tanner is standing.

“When do you get off?” she says.

“An hour.”

“Meet me at Telegraph.”

He doesn’t have the chance to refuse before she walks out the door. 

“Damn, she’s back?” Gerald says from the drive-through window. “Be careful.”

“Rumor is you’re a college boy now,” Kristen says. They’re at Telegraph Cafe, waiting in line behind two women wearing Nike tank-tops and neon yoga pants. The name of the coffee shop/bar changes every few years and Tanner hasn’t been inside since it was “Jive-N-Java.”

“Just getting the associates,” he says.

“I’m almost done with my BS.”

Tanner snorts. “That’s what they all say.”

“Hey, I haven’t touched a joint in three years.”

“Technicality. I’m sure you were shooting up last week.”

Cheap vinyl stickers line the beige walls. They take the shape of swirls and motivational quotes that he doubts were actually said by their attributed authors. The longer he stares at them, the more he’s convinced that they’re moving. He orders a black coffee while Kristen orders a milk smoothie featuring coffee. They take their drinks to a table in the corner.

“So what will your bullshit be in?” he says.

“Math,” she says.

“What the hell are you going to do with that?”

“Find answers.”

“Smartass.”

She takes long sips of her drink. Tanner watches her. The last time he saw Kristen, she was passed out next to him, drool slipping from the corner of her mouth. She had hit so hard that for a while he was afraid she wouldn’t wake up. Eventually she started snoring and he’d pulled his clothes on and slipped out the back door. The next day, he left town to work for his uncle and when he came back four months later, she had vanished. 

“So. You clean?” he says.

“Three years,” she says.

“Almost four.”

“Ever miss it?”

“No.”

“I do,” she says. “How have you been able to stay here? I’ve been back for twelve hours and I’ve already screwed up.”

“Who’d you screw?”

“Dammit, Tanner. I said I screwed up, not that I got screwed.”

“How much did you buy?”

“Too much.”

“How much is left?”

“I told you I’ve been clean for three years.”

She chews on her thumbnail, then stops when she seems to remember her manicure. 

“Kristen, if you buy it, you’ll do it.”

“1+1=2, right?”

“Every time.”

They sit in unsettling silence as they finish their drinks, then they leave the cafe and walk through the backstreets. There aren’t sidewalks in this part of town. The livestock show is this weekend and the stench of manure and animals hits Tanner’s nostrils. Kristen starts to cough. 

They make their way into the residential area where his parents still live and where Kristen’s aunt raised her. The sidewalk is fragmented and weeds have begun sprouting in the cracks. Kristen clings to her satchel.

“I love math and Nevada with my whole heart,” she says. “But I hate these sidewalks and these streets and you.”

“You only hate three things? That’s not too bad.”

“We could both do some, you know.”

Tanner kicks a rock. 

“Relapse is such an ugly word,” she says. “I bought an 8 ball, Tannerite. An 8 ball.”

“What the hell, Kristen? You could’ve just grabbed some edibles from the dispensary.”

“You think I don’t realize that? The problem is, if I go back to my aunt’s house now, I’ll use. I know I will.”

“And if you stay with me then we both will,” he says. “2+2=4.”

“Man, I wish math was still that simple,” she says.

“It is for me.”

“Everything was simpler when I got high.”

“You’re right.”

They take a seat at a concrete table beneath a tree in Laura Mills Park. This place has hardly changed during Tanner’s lifetime. In the spring the crew overwaters the grass. The lone drinking fountain drips chalky water. Parents in town still tell their kids not to come here because it’s where drug deals go down. Tanner’s sister will tell his nephew the same thing. 

“You agree then?” Kristen says.

“Yeah. Everything was simpler when you got high,” he says.

“Asshole.”

“You said it first.”

She pulls the small plastic bag from her satchel. “So, you in?”

He shoves the bag back into her purse. 

“You’re the one who said that 1+1=2 every time,” she says. 

“Where are you going to go when you finish school?”

“Who knows? Math is everywhere.”

Tanner digs his finger into a dent on the rough surface of the table. The parking lot at the church across the street is empty. A metal Jesus-fish hangs on the side of what looks like a storage shed and he thinks, What would Jesus do if Kristen started using right here, right now? If Jesus were at the picnic table with them, Tanner thinks he’d ask Kristen a math question that she can’t solve and then he’d ask Tanner what he thinks of Dostoevsky. 

Alcoholics Anonymous holds meetings in the multipurpose room of the church. Tanner started attending on Thursday nights after he found out his sister was pregnant. He only relapsed once, and he used to stare at the Jesus fish and zone out whenever someone else in the group started crying. 

A high pitched sound catches Tanner’s attention. He watches as two teenagers across the park move from the squealing swings to the collection of cracked, plastic slides. The boy is a twig. His dark hair is disheveled and his clothes fit loosely. The girl, who alternates between grabbing the boy’s hand and looking at her iPhone, comes to his shoulders and has orange hair. 

“Shit, Tanner,” Kristen says.

“What?”

“They’re us.”

“They are not.”

“I bet that she’s done all of her homework already and is supposed to be helping him with his,” she says. “He lives in the house down the street with missing shingles and they come here at least four times a week. They’ve been together for three months but she’s still trying to decide if she's going to sleep with him.”

The boy runs up the tallest slide and then flings himself off the top. When he lands on the sand, his knees buckle and he collapses. 

“Hardcore parkour!” the girl says. She laughs but does not leave her resting spot on a smaller slide to help him up. He walks over to her, sits down, and kisses her. Tanner looks away.

“2x2=4,” Kristen says. 

Tanner keeps his eyes fixed on the tabletop. 

“You know, I never would have done drugs if you hadn’t done them first,” Kristen says.

“My bad.”

“I never would have gone to college if you hadn’t disappeared.”

“I guess you could say I lead you to new opportunities.”

Kristen stares at the teenagers. She grabs her bag.

“You want some? Last chance,” she says.

“I want you to get rid of it.”

“Okay.” She pulls the bag out of her purse, stands, and starts to walk away.

“Kristen, where are you going?” Tanner says, following a few feet behind her. He looks around for any cops that might have made an appearance in the last few minutes. Within the last few years they’ve switched from driving white sedans to giant black SUVs and it’s been awhile since he has had any reason to avoid them. 

“A parallel universe. An alternate reality,” she says.

Kristen walks up to the high schoolers and drops the bag of coke on the girl’s lap. The boy starts laughing and the girl looks up at Kristen in horror. The boy grabs the bag and shoves it into the front pocket of his hoodie. “I ain’t got money,” he says.

The girl glances between Kristen and her boyfriend’s pocket. Tanner pulls Kristen away from them. “What the hell are you doing?” he says.

"’If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?’ Einstein said that,” she says. She turns her attention back to the couple. “Have fun on your trip.”

Tanner stares at the shadows beneath her eyes. A mosquito lands on his arm and he swats at it, but misses. The sun is disappearing behind the mountains, and it won’t be long until the cops start circling the entire neighborhood. 

“You guys don’t have to keep that,” he says to the teenagers.

“Of course they don’t have to,” Kristen says. “But they will. Won’t they?”

Tanner and Kristen look at them. The girl has not stopped staring at the pocket of the boy’s hoodie. Oblivious to her hesitation, he wraps his arm around her. 

“Yeah, we’ll keep it. Thanks,” he says.

Kristen turns and walks back to retrieve her satchel from their table. Tanner follows, keeping at least ten feet between them.

“You’re going to hell,” he says.

“Already been there and back,” she says. 

“You do realize that you’ve just given them a self-destruct button, don’t you?”

“Self-destruct is such an ugly word. Or is it a phrase? Either way, it denotes way too much permanence,” she says. “We made it back, didn’t we?”

“I did. You only made it back to hand drugs to a couple of kids.”

“And you only made it back to watch me hand drugs to a couple of kids.”

Kristen grabs her satchel and walks towards the street. Another mosquito finds Tanner’s arm and he hits it, smearing a patch of blood across his skin. She continues down the cracked sidewalk, the way back to her aunt’s house. He watches her until she disappears into an alleyway. 

Aside from the sound of crickets, the park is silent. The teenagers have vanished and Tanner finds himself alone with the Jesus-fish across the street. His feet sink deeper into the water-logged sod. He thinks of Kristen’s feet crunching the shattered glass that coats every alleyway in town. 

“1+1=2,” Tanner says to the six foot ornament. “Every single time.”