“It’s fine,” Max says, as if answering the question she didn’t ask. Already, he’s looking away from his sister, snapping his fingers to gain the attention of the nonexistent bartender—unless the bartender is one of the men in lumberjack uniform. He wants the check. Then, with his voice low, almost the sound of a cell phone vibrating in a neighboring diner’s pocket, he says to his sister, “Are you fine with a sleeping bag?”
“That’s a joke, right?”
Max snaps his fingers at his sister now—a fluid movement from the bar to her face. “No, you know what? I’ll put you on the futon. We still have the futon.”
The futon, where Mom stretched her legs, exhaled her poison breath after nights out, and closed her eyes—still here, as Max promised, along with so much else. Her brother has discarded little of what Mom used to have in this apartment; all her posters and bead curtains still hang where they hung a decade ago, the rooms preserved perfectly in her image, preserved as the place where Max, years ago, settled in to watch thousands of films, to write his screenplays, and to believe himself a genius, back before sadness gripped his throat and reality came to matter. And Kelly, now a part of this preservation again, only this time as some version of Mom, here on the futon, where she slept each night, leaving the two upstairs bedrooms to her children; after all, Miles Bennett bought this apartment for her when she thought she was pregnant with only one child, not twins.
When Max pulls the futon out, it vomits dust, likely having avoided any and all snoring bodies since Mom’s death. The cushion is torn, the fabric shredded and stuffing coming out like congealed orange goo. Evidence of cats, maybe—though when has Max ever shown any interest in cats? He disappears into the closet where Mom used to keep nothing much beyond an inexplicable pile of sleeping bags and produces, yes, a sleeping bag, which he tosses atop the futon, now yawning open in front of them. Kelly can’t say why exactly, but she knows that sleeping bags are not something an indoorsy man who lives alone should own. If this were a date, and she came back to the dude’s apartment to find sleeping bags? No way.
Still, it’s not a date, and it could be worse. She puts down her glass of murky tap water (handed to her automatically upon entrance), and she climbs inside the sleeping bag on the futon, wondering as she stretches out if it’ll feel funny, lying like this, if she’ll feel suddenly—even though she must’ve slept here once or twice while growing up—if she’ll feel suddenly, today, like Mom. But no, when her body goes horizontal and she feels the foam under her all misshapen and bent—no, she feels nothing like Mom and feels only homeless. Besides, she does something Mom never would’ve done: she looks at Max and chides him. “Aren’t you going to ask if I need anything else?” she sneers good-naturedly (or so she hopes). “Man, what kind of host are you?”
“You going to sleep already?” Max asks.
It’s not even nine yet, though the blanket of winter darkness makes it feel past midnight. “I’m exhausted,” Kelly says. “I just want to lie down for a minute.” Really, what she wants is to lie down on his bed upstairs, to—fuck it—just share her brother’s bed tonight, or, at least, she wants him to offer this as a possibility so if the futon becomes too backbreaking, she can make a move. But he hasn’t offered—hasn’t offered her anything, in fact, other than the glass of murky tap water, which she reaches toward the floor to fetch.
“Anything I should know about your roomie?” Kelly asks. “Heavy cougher? Allergic to women? Ax murderer who stands over your guests in the night?” She takes the water into her mouth, cringing at the taste, like breaking an ink pen open between your teeth.
“You won’t even see him,” Max says. “He’s out of town.”
The sip crams in her throat like salt water from the ocean, and she chokes on it before spitting it back into the glass, no less discolored now than it was straight out of the tap. “What, for how long?”
“Death in his family.”
“When’s the funeral?”
“Someone’s dying,” Max says, voice flat. “Don’t know how long it’ll be.”
“I’m not diseased, you know. I could sleep in his bed and just, I dun-no, wash the sheets?”
Max shakes his head. “He’s very private. Even has his door locked when he leaves so I can’t get in. It would concern my roommate greatly.”
“Your roommate,” Kelly says, “whose name again is …?”
Max’s eyes head toward the ceiling for a second and he mutters, “Tobias.” Then, stronger, “Tobias. I told you already.”
“Sure,” she says, then sets the glass down on the floor again. Looking down into it from this aerial view, she can see all kinds of scuzz around the top rim that she hadn’t noticed before; it looks almost like streaks of milk, dried. Kelly licks her lips, which taste suddenly bitter. “How often do you guys have visitors?” she asks, before changing her mind: “No, never mind, forget it.” The condition of the glass answers the question well enough.
On her back again, she looks up at Max, who has his hands in his pockets. It would seem polite, or at least normal, to comment on the condition of this place. An apology would be too much to hope for from Max, of course—sorry for the mess, that sort of thing—but wouldn’t most people acknowledge that the place had gone to hell? In her adult life, Kelly has found herself in the apartments of countless young men, often way past midnight, often when the beer waterlogging her brain made acknowledgment of uncleanliness mostly unnecessary, but even in those cases, the majority of young men would at least look a little ashamed for a second—ashamed at having someone else see the pile of unwashed dishes in the sink, or at having to brush the dirty boxers off the bed and onto the floor—and vaguely apologize: Sorry I didn’t clean, didn’t know anyone was coming over tonight, etc. This crass duplex was bad before, with its drooping eyes of windows; its sun-paled blue skin, the worn-away patches of paint looking like bruises; its roof, the entire thing at a forty-five-degree angle, some odd sloping haircut that was maybe trendy decades ago. But inside? Dishes clog the sink, packages of opened and partially eaten ramen tower on the kitchen counters, bananas blacken on various surfaces, grime makes jam on the unmopped floors, the living room looks torn apart and in the midst of a deep reorganization—well, shouldn’t Max shrug and apologize, however meekly, for not taking care of the place? Shouldn’t he at least look ashamed? And what does all this trash—both the garbage in the kitchen and the retro Mom-junk on the walls—say about Max’s supposed roommate?
But before she can ask anything else, she spots something dark moving on the floor—something scurrying then darting between some piles of DVDs. “Christ,” Kelly says, sitting up, “was that a Satan bug?”
Max nods solemnly—the saddest he has looked over this whole mess. House centipedes, which the siblings used to call Satan bugs, have always been a problem here. After Mom died, Kelly had to go into the basement to get her stuff out of storage in preparation for her westward move, and when she flicked on the exposed bulb, she watched the centipedes, with their thousands of legs and their slithery bodies, scatter from all over her boxes of clothes. Most of that stuff she left behind.
“Wanna know what I hate in Tucson?” she says.
“What?”
“Palo Verde beetles. Google them; they’re disgusting. I can’t even stand to look at pictures.” She shudders, though mostly for dramatic effect, since she actually got used to the beetles fairly quickly, accepting them as one of the many unpleasant realities of a Sonoran summer. “They hang out in the trees. Sometimes, during sunset, you see them flying around. They look like birds, until they hit you in the face. Just like big, nasty cockroaches—ones with wings.”
“Huh.” Max scratches at the stubble on his face. “That’s unfair.”
“What’s unfair?”
“I