It has stopped raining, though the parking lot is still wet. I tuck a twenty under my glass, and drag David to the door. “David, I can’t-I can’t pay for your drink.” He pulls a wadded five from his pocket and drops it on the table. “She can’t see us.”ĭavid looks alarmed, like I’m suggesting we storm the stage. “This isn’t right,” I say, and finish my drink in one long draw.
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I wonder how to get the girl’s attention without waving a dollar bill. Beneath the makeup, and the done-up hair, it is still easy to see it’s her. Her tiny hands look absurd clinging to the pole on the stage. One, across the club from us, is paying for dance after dance, but his sullen expression never changes, even as a stripper grinds against his leg. It smells like sweat and sadness, and is filled with men. The dancer is a tall blond, and to avoid watching her, I scan the room. “They never check our IDs near base,” he tells me when the waitress leaves. I think about ordering soda, but go for gin and tonic instead. I raise my eyebrows at him when he orders a PBR. He is still laughing when a waitress comes to take our drink order. “Now? Now you’re going to start calling me Ms. “This,” I say, motioning to the darkened room, and to him, sitting across the small table from me. To distract myself, I flip through the stations on my hotel-room television. When I call the friends I left her with, they say she is down for a nap. I should be planning what I will cook for Chloe tonight. I should be at the board right now, posting the homework. When he goes back to Fort Lewis, I am alone for the day. We do not talk about America over breakfast. But then he smiles, and is my sweet kid again. At first glance, he is not at all the boy I once taught. Basic training had bulked up his muscles, made him look like a man, and the previous nine months have only added to it. He ducks away from my headlights.Īt a Denny’s near base, I see David Brady for the first time in nearly a year. A large man in a tee shirt that rides too high and tight across his belly exits the club. Besides, I will see David in the morning. The club is still open when I pull into the lot, but I can’t bring myself to go in alone. The man looks me up and down, trying to decide if I am a customer, or looking for a job. In the book, it wasn’t a family member.”Īt the car rental desk on the lower level of Seattle Tacoma International, I ask for directions to the Déjà Vu strip club in Tacoma. In the book, though, it only happened once. I still remember the exact wording of the assignment I’d graded that Saturday-“I relate to the book because like Melissa, I have been raped. America’s impact had been in her leaving. She was the kind of skinny that startled, the kind of skinny that urged a quick note to the school nurse.īeyond that fleeting concern, America never called attention to herself. At fifteen, America had just hit five feet tall. I picture America, not as she might be now, but as she was then. The truth is that I haven’t heard from America in three years. Then there are the days I see her crouched in a protected nook of some downtown building, a ratty blanket around her shoulders. If I’ve had a good day, if I’m feeling optimistic about humanity, I imagine her smiling-maybe working in a coffee shop, a healthy fullness to her face. I picture America now-and the image shifts. With high school, there were always more troubles. Caring about their troubles and triumphs. In those days-before I had a child of my own-I gave more of myself to my job. Bruises mar their thin skins.Īmerica Perez still comes unbidden to my mind now and again.
There is a display of nectarines, and I check if they are ripe. Sunday morning, I drop Chloe off for a play-date and take the opportunity to grocery shop without my two-year-old in tow. “We’d already been there for almost an hour. I sit up in bed, pulling the blankets close around my chest.
He is trying to be cavalier, but I can hear tears in his voice. “What was I supposed to do, call her over for a lap dance and say, ‘Hey, America. “Dancing?” I ask, though I already know the answer. “I was in a strip club with a bunch of guys from my platoon,” he begins. I speak quietly, so as not to wake Chloe in the next room. Though it is after midnight, I hit the call button. So Fort Lewis is the real America? Is it the food, or all the camo? My former student has formed a habit of late-night calls and texts. When my phone jingles on my bedside table, I know it will be David.
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