Forklift and the Fourth

I'm Serena, twenty-four years old, and I drive a forklift for a living. Not a glamorous job, but it pays the rent on our little two-bedroom and it keeps me moving, which my doctor says is good. I gained about thirty pounds since I got married, and I know exactly when it started. It started the month I stopped being broke and started being comfortable.

Troy says he doesn't notice. Troy is twenty-five and a supervisor at the warehouse where we both work, which is how we met. He was the guy in the safety vest who actually explained things instead of laughing at the new girl. I was twenty-one and terrible at backing up the lift and he stood there for forty minutes one shift teaching me, patient as anything, and then asked if I wanted to get a taco. A year later we got married at the courthouse and my mom cried and it was the best day of my life.

But I still catch myself in the mirror some mornings and think, well, there it is. The soft belly. The thicker arms. Troy grabs a handful of me in the kitchen and laughs and means it, and I love him for it, but there's a part of me that wonders if he settled. Guys don't say that out loud. You just think it at two in the morning.

So anyway. Tuesday. Troy had been talking about his old college roommate Elias for weeks, saying he was driving through town with his girlfriend and did we mind having them over. I said of course not, because I'm not a weirdo, and then spent three days cleaning a house that did not need cleaning. Our living room has board games stacked on one shelf and takeout containers in the trash and a couch with a sag in the middle that we've never replaced because why would we.

I actually did one sneaky thing, though. I dug out the card game we keep in the closet, the one with the spicy prompts on the cards that Troy bought me as a joke two Christmases ago and we played exactly once while drunk and giggling. I put it on the coffee table. I don't even know why. Maybe as a conversation piece. Maybe I wanted to see what would happen. I told myself it was nothing and I stacked two pizza menus on top of it like I was hiding it, which is a stupid thing to do to something you're not hiding.

They got there around six-thirty. Elias was taller than I pictured, quiet when he came in, hugged Troy like they'd never been apart. His girlfriend Nadia was twenty-seven, a freelance illustrator, and she walked in like she owned the room without trying. She had on a flowy dress and boots and she looked at my saggy couch and my cluttered shelf and said, "Oh, this is nice, it feels like actual people live here," and meant it, and I hated her a little and loved her a lot in the same second.

Because this is true about me. Nadia has that easy confidence I've never had. She laughed with her whole face. She sat on my couch cross-legged like she'd been there before. She asked about the forklift, actually asked, wanted to know if I'd ever hit anything, and I told her about the time I clipped a rack of cardboard and a whole tower of boxes came down like dominoes and she laughed so hard she snorted, which made me like her again. The jealousy comes in waves, is what I'm saying. One minute I'm fine, next minute I'm comparing my arms to hers.

We ordered pizza because I can cook maybe four things and none of them are guest food. Troy broke out the wine, a cheap red he picked because the label had a dog on it, and we drank it out of mismatched glasses. Elias got louder as the night went, and the college stories started coming out.

"There's the story about the sprinklers," Elias said, grinning at Troy.

"We do not tell the sprinkler story," Troy said.

"You absolutely tell the sprinkler story," Nadia said, leaning forward.

So they told it. Something about a rooftop, a dare, a fire hose connection that wasn't a fire hose connection. I only half followed it because I was watching Elias watch me. Not in a creepy way. Every so often, when I'd get up to grab breadsticks or refill a glass, I'd catch his eyes on me, and they'd slide off quick, like he'd been caught. The third time it happened I felt this flush start at my neck and crawl up my ears.

Nobody had looked at me like that since before the wedding. I'm not saying Troy doesn't look. Troy looks. But this was a stranger's attention, a fresh set of eyes, and it lit up something in me I'd forgotten was there. I sat back down on the couch and pulled my shirt down over my stomach and then immediately felt mad at myself for doing that.

Nadia caught it. I swear she caught it, because she looked at Elias, then at me, and she smiled this small knowing smile and refilled my wine without asking.

"Troy was always the responsible one," Elias was saying. "He'd be the guy going, guys, we should probably not die tonight, and then he'd do the thing anyway."

"He did not," I said.

"He did," Elias said. "Ask him about the ladder."

"I'm not discussing the ladder," Troy said, and Nadia laughed her snort laugh and the room got warm and easy.

By nine we'd gone through a bottle and a half and the pizza boxes were folded into trash-bag rectangles on the counter and everybody's cheeks were pink. Nadia was sitting on the floor now, back against Troy's leg like she'd known him for years, telling a story about a client who wanted a logo of a duck holding a knife. I was on the couch with my feet tucked under me, and Elias was in the armchair across from me with his own glass, and every time I laughed he looked at my mouth.

I knew I should feel weird about that. A married woman, another man's eyes on her lips. Instead I felt like I'd been sitting in a dark room for two years and somebody cracked a window. I felt watched and it felt good and I hated that it felt good and I poured more wine.

At some point Nadia stretched, arms over her head, and her eyes landed on the coffee table. On the card game, right where I'd left it, half-hidden under pizza menus like an idiot.

"What's that one?" she asked, reaching for it before anybody could stop her. Because of course nobody was going to stop her, that's not a thing you do.

"That's, uh," Troy said.

Nadia flipped the lid open and read a card and went quiet in a way that made everybody go quiet. Then she started laughing, that snort again, and turned the card around so we could all see it. It was one of the spicy ones. Of course it was. Of the whole deck, her thumb landed on one of the spicy ones.

"Serena," she said, and she was looking at me with those easy eyes, "you've been holding out on us."

"We played it once," I said, my face going hot. "It was a joke. Troy bought it as a joke."

"It's a good joke," Elias said, and his voice had gone a little lower, and I felt that flush again, all the way up.

Troy looked at me. I looked at Troy. He had that expression he gets, half amused, half asking a question he doesn't want to ask out loud. The lamp buzzed faintly the way it always does. Nadia shuffled the cards in her hands, slow, like she was giving everybody time to say stop.

I didn't say stop. That should have scared me more than it did.

Nadia dealt us each five cards and we scooted around the coffee table into a lopsided circle, me on the couch, Troy next to me, Nadia on the floor, Elias still in the armchair like he wasn't sure he was invited all the way in yet.

"Okay, so the rules," Nadia said, reading the back of the box. "You draw a card. It has a prompt. You either do it or you pass, and if you pass you take a sip."

"That's not rules, that's just drinking with extra steps," Elias said.

"That's every game," Nadia said, and dealt.

The first few cards were dumb. Sing a commercial jingle. Show the last photo in your phone. Troy had to show the last photo in his phone and it was a picture of a pallet in aisle nine that he'd taken because the forklift had knocked it crooked, and I laughed so hard I snorted, and Nadia pointed at me and said we were nose laugh twins and I liked her instantly more than I already did.

Then Nadia drew a card that said trade one item of clothing with the person on your left.

The room did that quiet thing again. Nadia was on my left. She looked down at her flowy dress like she was doing math, then kicked off one boot and slid it across the carpet at me.

"That's not clothing," Troy said.

"It's an item," Nadia said. "It's an item of clothing. Take off your sock, Serena."

So I took off my sock and put on her boot, which fit me weird because I'm a size bigger than her, and everybody laughed, and it was fine, it was nothing, except I was aware of my bare ankle the whole rest of the round and aware of Elias looking at it too.

Troy drew dare a person to your right. He turned toward me, and I braced, and he said, "I dare you to tell everybody what you actually thought of Elias when he showed up."

"Babe."

"He asked for it," Troy said, grinning. "He's been looking at you all night."

"Troy," Elias said, and it wasn't angry, it was embarrassed, and that made my face go hotter.

"He's taller than I pictured," I said, which was true and safe. "And his hair's better than yours."

"Everything's better than mine," Troy said, easy about it, and drank his wine, and I could tell he wasn't mad, he was watching, the way you watch a pot you set on the stove on purpose.

I drew a card and my heart did a thing. Whisper something you'd only say to a stranger. I sat there with the card and the whole table waited and I thought, well, I'd already told Elias nothing, so.

"I think strangers are nicer to me than people who know me," I said, and immediately wished I'd said something funny instead, because it came out too honest and the room shifted, just a little. Nadia reached over and squeezed my knee once and let go, and that was somehow worse and better at the same time.

"Pass," Elias said suddenly, before even drawing. "I'm passing preemptively."

"You can't pass preemptively," Nadia said.

"I just did. Pour me wine."

Troy drew next and read it and didn't say it out loud at first, just read it again with his eyebrows up, and Nadia grabbed it out of his hand. Kiss a guest of your choosing, anywhere they choose.

"Oh," Nadia said.

"Pass," Troy said fast, reaching for the card, and Nadia pulled it away.

"You can't," she said. "You already made the rule about passing. Sips are the coward tax."

"Who made you referee?"

"You did, when you dealt me in."

They bickered like a married couple and I sat there feeling my pulse in my ears. Because here's the part I haven't said yet, the part I'd been sitting on since Nadia flipped that box open. I wanted to be picked. Not by Troy, Troy picks me every day. I wanted the other two to pick me. I wanted to be a thing somebody chose, out of a whole room, one more time before I got old and soft and invisible.

"Serena," Nadia said. "If it were your card. Who would you pick?"

The lamp buzzed. Elias had stopped moving entirely.

"I don't know," I said. "That's a big question for a Tuesday."

"It's a small question for a card game," Nadia said. She was turned toward me on the floor, knee tucked up, wine glass dangling from two fingers, and her face had