Job Security 3, pt 1

My sister wrecked my car when I loaned it to her for the weekend. I worked Cochella - a weekend out in Indio, the memory of which is a long confused blur of sun and bottled water and motel room floors - and bought a truck.

We didn't mark our one year anniversary with anything but a drink and a cigarette. Summer came and Lisa quit her university job. Another fight, because the uni job had paid just a little less than security, but it was steady. Makeup sex on the living room floor. 

Days passed in a blur.

I remember waking up on the beach at six in the morning, hungover and shirtless, water lapping at my feet. It was June and Lisa had turned twenty one the night before. I had a bottle of rum with me and I couldn't remember why I did, because all our drinking the night before had been in bars. I found her in the back of my truck, curled up with my jacket covering her, asleep. I watched the sun rise and took her home.

I took her to the Museum of Man and Seaport Village. Places I had loved as a child. We walked for hours in Balboa Park telling each other our family histories. Stories of our grandfathers in WWII and our fathers and mothers and the revolutions in between. Her father made toys. Her mother taught. My father was a salesman. My mother a nurse.

She asked me what I wanted to do with my life and I told her I didn't know. She said she didn't know either. I offered her a cigarette and she took it. I lit it for her. She asked if I was happy and I said yes. She didn't say anything so I asked her if she was happy and she said she didn't know.

We went home and got high and slept.

Took a week off after getting punched in the kidney breaking up the pit at a punk show. I cooked dinner every night. Only burned some of it. I had told the truth when she asked me if I was happy because when I looked at her I was. 

She broke her arm tripping over a broom. It was the only time she ever let me see her cry.

Her cast was pink. She never let anyone write on it.

I went back to work and she stayed home for a little while until money got tight. The company didn't let her work much on account of her arm, but she took what she could get. I remember the feeling of her cast on my side in the dark. Sound of her breathing at four in the morning and wondering if anything else in the world could be so wonderful.

She told me the next day that her visa would expire. The security work was technically seasonal, and not enough for a visa. She'd gotten a reprieve with the university job. I told her to go back to them. To beg for her job back.

She told me she couldn't, and I asked her why. Because she'd been fired. Because she missed one too many Monday morning meetings, hungover and sleeping with me.

"I love you." I said. "We're going to make this work."

"I don't know if I want this to work." She replied.