Read Online A Good and Useful Hurt by Aric Davis - Free Book Online Page B

of pissed.”
    Deb called out, “Me too!”
    “That’s both of us, Mike. You’ve got to talk to him about the mystery date.”
    “Do you think it’s the dud?”
    Deb said, “Wait. You played Mystery Date?”
    “I had a big sister.”
    “Not that I’ve heard about. I call bullshit.”
    Mike and Becky could hear her customer laughing, a heck of a thing for someone having his cheek invaded by needles, forceps, and small pieces of steel. The microdermals were a fairly easy procedure when done singly, but to have a few done at once could be rough for the client.
    “OK, fine,” Mike said, “not a big sister, a nice neighbor friend. One day G.I. Joe, the next Mystery Date. All fair trade stuff.”
    Becky said, “Did you play Barbies, Mike?”
    “Yeah, Mike, did you play Barbies?”
    “I need to get back to cleaning this shit, you guys. I want to leave at some point tonight.”
    “Backpedal!”
    “Total copout, boyfriend! Weak. Very weak.”
    “Sorry to let you down, but I’m going to get back to work.”
    “Mike,” Becky called from the front, “it’s your duty to drill him over this tomorrow.”
    “I’ll do my best.”
    And he did, he really did. Lamar stayed mum though, not out of embarrassment due to a girl below the Lamar standards of beauty, as Becky claimed, but out of what he said was a renewed vigilance to be decent. Actually, he said, “I don’t want y’all fuckin’ up my prospects. This girl is cool.”
    Still it was odd, especially for Mike, for his friend to have such a secret from him.
    Odd or not, there was nothing about Lamar’s secret that could keep the rest of the world from moving on. For Becky that meant an endless string of appointments to book, credit cards to run, and care instructions to pass out. For Deb it was piercings and scars and implants, one after the other in an endless chain. For Mike it was work as it had always been, tattoos both large and small in a constant string, and none of them involving ashes.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
    Wes Ogden played baseball most nights with his son, but sometimes it was soccer or street hockey, and when he woke he felt like he really had seen Josh. He looked at the tattoo after one of those nights, the black ink still so foreign on his arm, and the baseball seemed different to him. It was just a crude outline of a baseball, true, but Josh had been gone before he got it poked into his arm.
    Would his son grow in his dreams? Almost a horrible thought, but if the older Josh were real, why should that be horrible? It was all real in his mind, like no dream he’d ever experienced, and when Wes woke up one morning with a grass stain on his knee from where he’d fallen playing soccer, he just looked at it and smiled.
    There was still pain in Wes, still sadness, and he didn’t expect either of those things to go away—part of him wanted to always be bitter. Still, something like waking with a grass stain on his knee was exactly the kind of thing that would have made the old, pre-tattoo Wes Ogden seek psychiatric help. The new Wes just stared at this other sort of tattoo and smiled. He’d fallen playing with Josh, and as long as this other version of his only son stayed with him, he felt like he could probably keep on living, and maybe, someday, even let the sadness of a dead wife and son become part of living, and not part of dying.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
    Deb moved into Mike’s small apartment above the studio after they’d been dating for about eight weeks. She was going to be sharing the rent and bills with him, it would be more convenient for both, and it had been some time since they’d not shared a bed, anyway.
    She’d asked to hang the burlesque pictures in the living room above the small television, her sole addition to the already covered walls in the living space. Mike had decorated as he saw fit, and his paintings adorned almost all of the wall space in the apartment. It was an explosion of art and made the walls almost loom in and fade out