The Wallet

Laurie Barton

Maximo looks skinny on Instagram, like the boy he was in high school. But he’s a retired orthodontist, now, pushing 65. In his latest picture, he’s posing with a group of cyclists in Seattle, one of them his husband Will. They’re on their way to Alaska, stopping in Seattle to enjoy some city life before cruising to the totem poles and moose. It seems he does nothing but travel—to Monaco, Uruguay, Panama, Turkey. I see picture after picture of him and Will living it up somewhere miles away from their expensive home in Corona Del Mar, thousands of square feet left behind as they lock the doors and board another plane.
            I’ve seen Maximo every ten years at our high school reunions. Once, we had lunch, just the two of us, and he suggested we get together with Lindsey and Meg, two pep girls that danced with him in his Buccaneer Bill days, when he cart wheeled around as our school mascot.
            Both pep girls married well and didn’t have to work much. Meg had a daughter who died in a ski accident, but aside from that, they both seem to have enjoyed all the finer things, like Maximo has. We chatted and giggled at lunch, promising to meet again, but none of us followed up. Since then, I’ve only seen Maximo online.
            I’m on the periphery, someone he knew in high school.
            Back then, I had a few talents but was not good at science or math, so Stanford was out, and so was a medical career. My mother mentioned law school a few times, but nothing seemed duller to me. I had vague ideas of moving to New York and becoming a writer, or living in Paris as a philosopher, but what happened was I got pregnant with twins and married young, making pies at my in-laws’ pizzeria. After the divorce, I moved back in with my parents, giving piano lessons in the same room where I’d spent hours unraveling the majestic puzzles of Bach. I started drinking too much, and that led to AA and a second marriage and a move to Big Bear, where I’m still living now with my husband Tommy. He has a problem not contained in a wine bottle, or a two-car garage, or 25 storage units. He’s a hoarder.
            This means living with newspaper stacks and popsicle sticks, yogurt containers and worn-out Frisbees. The second bedroom is mine, an inviolable space—if he places so much as a safety pin there, I remind him. But the kitchen’s a mess, and so is the bathroom we share. No one comes over; we eat on the deck, wrapped in our coats, the dining table buried under pizza flyers, lasagna boxes, fast-food napkins and Oreos.
            What really ticked me off was the American Standard toilet box that sat in our living room for months. As a joke, I put tinsel on the box and told the twins it was our Christmas tree–we didn’t have room for a real one. Tommy finally stuffed it with broken tools and dragged it out to the shed.
            On the surface, it all seems miserable, but you don’t see the look on my face when Tommy slides up to me, kissing my neck. Up here, we’ve got pine trees, friends at the waffle house, blue jays. The twins aren’t thrilled with Tommy, but he’s been good to me, never a mean or critical word. There are worse things than hoarding, I tell them.
            Still, I see those pictures of Maximo and wish I had enough money to leave the mountain. Tommy gets excited about a drive to the Mission Inn for some green enchiladas. He never wants to see a bigger world. But the bridges of Paris appear in my daydreams. I look up music jobs and wonder if I could be jazzy enough to play on a cruise ship. The passengers don’t want my Bach.
            For now, I work at Rainbow Ranch, loading tourists onto a string of trail horses. One morning I help a Chinese lady mount Ginger, and her wallet falls out of her back pocket. She’s so excited to be in stirrups she doesn’t notice a thing. As Ginger plods off, she clutches
the saddle horn and chatters to the girl in front of her. Faster than you can say “rigorous honesty” I pick up the wallet and slip it into my vest. There it stays all day, a guilty secret, and I can hardly bear it when the woman calls in a panic, asking us to search the barn for her wallet. I hear Gil, the manager, tell her that nothing’s turned up and he’s truly sorry that we can’t be responsible for lost items. He’ll call her if anything changes.
            I sneak the wallet into my bedroom that night, afraid to find nothing but a few Chinese bills and a picture of someone she loves. Then again, there might be an ID and a gold card. There might be some kind of resource to help me do something glamorous, something I can post for Maximo to like, the pep girls too, something to offset the impression that my life has been buried, lost in a pile of outdated maps.

Laurie Barton is a Pushcart Prize nominee, Best of the Net finalist, and winner of the New Southerner Literary Prize in Poetry. Her work has appeared in juked, Glass, Bending Genres, Lunch Ticket, Jabberwock Review and Snakeskin UK. Her chapbook, Coco Sinatra, is available from Finishing Line Press. She lives in southern California and teaches English to speakers of other languages.