Free Pretending Normal by Mary Campisi

of the cars around us. “You’re a goddamn pusher!”
    “I can explain —”
    “With another lie?”
    “Get in the car.” He opens the door, forces me in and gets in the driver’s side. But not before he scoops up the packets on the ground. “I didn’t lie to you, Sara.” His words are brittle as he meets my gaze. “You lied to yourself. You’re the one who said I wasn’t a pusher.”
    “You let me believe in you.” My world is spinning black. “Let me trust you, let me… let me care about you.”
    He bends down and grabs a packet of pills. “This,” he says, holding it in the flat of his palm, “is about business, not us. You and I, us, have nothing to do with this.”
    “You really thought it wouldn’t matter,” I whisper.
    “I thought you would think it mattered,” he says. “That’s why I wasn’t ready to tell you yet.”
    “When would you have told me?”
    He shrugs. “Later. When we were a little tighter.”
    “How could you?”
    “Grow up, Sara. This is not about us. Can’t you see?” His eyes glitter. “I’m providing a service, giving them what they want, that’s all. And my old man’s got lots of them. And they’re safe.”
    “Safe?”
    He blows out a disgusted sigh. “They’re only uppers and downers. It’s not like I’m pushing PCP or LSD.”
    “Well good for you. Maybe you should get a medal for only selling uppers and downers.”
    “I knew you’d be like this.”
    “What do you expect?” There is a scream in my lungs fighting to explode. “I find out my boyfriend’s a pusher and I should say ‘Great? No big deal?’”
    “Look , I’m still just me.”
    “No .” I try to bring his face into focus again, but the tears keep everything hazy. At least I will be spared the crispness of remembering. “Why me? You could have had anybody, and most of them wouldn’t have cared about any of this.”
    “I didn’t want just anybody, Sara. I wanted the girl no guy could seem to get.”
    “Well you can’t have me.”
    “You’re just going to walk away? You’re going to go back home and play little Suzie Homemaker to that drunken father of yours?”
    “How do you know about my father?”
    “I figured it out the second time I saw him coming out of The State Store at eleven in the morning.”
    “You shouldn’t talk, Peter. You”—I point at him, give him a smile that isn’t a smile, but a cruel twist of the lips meant to hurt the way I am hurting—“should not talk.” I hurl his ring at him, then I am out the door, running, half-hoping to hear the duel exhaust of the Chevelle idling beside me, with Peter’s voice calling my name, telling me it is all a big mistake.
    W hen I reach my front porch and double up against the wrought iron railing, I press my hand to the pain in my left side and suck in great gulps of air. The road behind me is empty. I make my way to the backyard, half-stumbling, half-running, to the rosebushes where I collapse on the soft lawn, belly first, grabbing tufts of grass in my hands, and let the tears come.

Chapter 12
     
    Surprises come when you least expect them. That’s why they’re called surprises, right? Or maybe they’re called that because you don’t really expect them at all—they just sort of pop out when you’re looking the other way. So, it surprises me when Frank calls me into the garage one afternoon and says, “Peck O’Grady needs your help.”
    He is sitting on the edge of his stool, an old cut-up T-shirt balled in one hand—he says they buff out the best—and looking at me like I should have anticipated the announcement.
    “What does she need?”
    “Help cleaning out the basement, and yard work. Hunt hurt her back and can’t lift anything, but don’t worry”—he snorts—“she’ll be supervising.”
    The last family I want to work for is the O’Grady’s. Nina went to their house once to collect money for the American Heart Association, and Mr. O’Grady made her stand in the doorway for ten