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and new potatoes, gravy and dinner rolls. The list of food rolled over me, drowning me in delicious images and smells. I wanted. I wanted so much to go. I ached to go. But if the Home drilled nothing else into me, I did know the rules. Cute girls and boys got cuddly toys and happy mommies and daddies. Ugly oversized kids made their own happiness.
    Time to start over and get real. I let her talk until she seemed to dry up.
    “Uh, nice talking to you, ma’am. Here’s Jay. Merry Christmas.”
    I handed him the phone and started clearing the table as he wandered away to talk to her. See, here’s the problem with a loft. There’s no place to go to be private and alone. And I knew this discussion with his grandmother was one of those talks.
    After cleaning up the breakfast dishes, I put on my shoes and walked to the front door. He was still huddled over the phone. I coughed and signaled to the door as I opened it. He shook his head and held up a hand to stop me. I smiled, which might’ve looked like a grimace, I don’t know, and waved.
    When I got to my place, I locked myself inside and stood in the center of my huge loft space and felt as lost as I’d ever been in my life. I’d done what I told myself never to do. I’d walked up to the window of the white house with the green shutters and the neat yard surrounded by a picket fence. I’d put my nose to the window and looked in at the family eating Christmas dinner, and I’d drowned in envy.
    Funny how sometimes you know you shouldn’t do something, but you do it anyway. Whatever it is hurts you so much, just like you know it will, but you can’t stop yourself from doing it anyway.
    I sat down in front of my TV and found a repeat of a NFL game and turned the sound up real high. I needed noise to fill the loft and return me to my usual self. I needed something to fill me up so I wasn’t just a hollow robot plodding through the rest of the day.
    I ended up going down the back stairs to the bar, leaving my TV on so I wouldn’t have to come back to silence.
     
     
    A T TIMES like these, some guys get shitfaced so they can suffer double—first from the pitfall of too much booze, and then from the horror of whoever they end up dragging home with them. Me? I drink alone and then not enough to feel like crap the next morning. I drink to think. And then more not to think. That’s what I did on Saturday.
    “Hey, Sam!” Estefan, the bartender, yelled at me over the guys arguing about who’d win the Super Bowl this year. “What the hell happened to you, kid?”
    Estefan’s maybe twenty-five or thirty years older than me and was the one who egged me on to apply for the expansion loan. At the time he’d said, “I’d give you the money myself, kid, but I don’t got it. Sorry.”
    Since I hadn’t expected him to fork over so much dough, I’d told him it was okay and then filled out the forms for the bank loan.
    “Aw, it’s nothing, Este. I’ve been fucking this suit, and he’s way outta my league.” He put a third beer in front of me and parked himself behind it.
    “So you tell your papi ’bout it.” He started wiping the bar around my beer. “You a good guy, Sam.”
    “He’s, I don’t know, amazing,” I started feeling even more like a fucking preteen. “He’s educated, bright, funny, comes from a big, loving family. I thought we were simpatico, you know?”
    “You forgettin’ ’bout Wayne?” Papi gave me the sorrowful eye.
    I rubbed my face. Yeah, Wayne, another preppy guy, another past mistake. How come the clean-cut, well-educated ones reeled in my dick so easily?
    Since the idiots at the other end of the bar had started yelling for him, he left shaking his head. I finished the beer. Even Papi didn’t have advice for me.
    On Sunday I woke and felt a little better. The world was still merry and bright out in the stores and the churches and wherever. I was still the head of a profitable garage that was about to branch out into more space.