So there is this guy; good looking, good paying job, lives in a nice place. Sam seems like he has it all together. The only problem is, he lives with his mother. Darla, a thin and frail looking Irish woman who never sheds her robe and slippers, was supposed to graduate from college. Instead she had a son who, as she puts it, sucked all possibility of accomplishment and success out of her life. After paying the court fees to have her boyfriend Dan let out of jail, the following year had to pay more fees to have the restraining order extended to 100 feet instead of 50 feet. This they had originally agreed to when all he owned was a bottle opener and a pack of cigarettes, and his only problem was he kept breaking his promise to not hit Darla in front of Sam. You see, Darla was hit by most men she slept with, the problem with Dan was she wasn’t sleeping with him. This was largely because of his chronic infections that kept moving from his face to his genitals. But being unable to follow the doctors order to shower daily, or work the medication into his budget after his women’s underwear fetish, Dan started taking his feelings out on Darla. Each tirade was unique, but were always an intermix of anger and drug induced delirium. Darla would always kept a spare pair of clearance Victoria Secret V-String panties ready to distract Dan while she had her waffles in the morning. Effective though they were, they were sometimes deployed only after the first swing and a nonsense proclamation like, “I don’t even want to live here anymore!!”. 5 months after he moved out, and Dan moved up in the world being promoted to stock clerk at 7/11, his entrepreneurial spirit got the best of him and he started selling weed in his off hours. After the 3rd beating from the local thugs, who’s profits where dwindling since Dan started offering stolen Double-mint Gum with the weed he sold, they decided he was worth more as a fall guy than a dead guy now that the Police were looking for the “Gum Dealer” in an effort to clean up the streets. This plan would have worked out perfectly except Dan had ideas of his own; he always wanted to drive a police car. So late one night after filing a police report explaining that his broken nose and the broken mail box were due to a misunderstanding between him and a prostitute that premature ejaculation was grounds for half off the price; he took the red Honda colliding into an adjacent tree, and the now distracted officer, as his opportunity to discretely slip into a squad car. His first stop was Darls’s house to announce that his new job allows him to carry a gun. It was that early Sunday morning on her front yard, watching Dan speed off, obviously headed somewhere very important with all the other police cars following him, that Darla decided to start drinking in the morning. She wonders if requesting a greater distance in the restraining order was worth it. She never saw Dan again.
Sam however, despite the incessant pleading, refused to give in to his mother’s wish to bring his girlfriend home to meet her. Kayla, a running enthusiast with a taste for Korean food and an inconsolable fear of the dark, first met Sam at AMPM picking up some ketchup for his mothers famous lasagna surprise. She first took Sam’s lanky figure and clean shoes to mean that he was looking for drugs at 2:30 in the morning in the lower east side of town where she had been the overnight clerk for the last 3 months. Much to her surprise, his smile was filled with straight teeth, and his sentences were just as complete. Sam was delayed 45 minutes with the ketchup that morning, but neither the burned lasagna or the rant of disappointment from Darla could dampen his smile. It had been 6 months now, and ever since Kayla nearly stabbed Sam to death when the power went out while she was chopping celery to feed her pet hamster, their relationship has blossomed. Sam bought a generator, and had plans to move in with Kayla as soon as the parole officer could confirm that her husband Ben was dead.
Ben had been missing for 22 days, last seen fleeing the scene when his red Honda collided into an tree. The police report was incomplete, but it was noted that Ben had only minor injuries as we was able to yell out, “Don’t taze me man!!” to the officer as he ran across a yard and behind a house. The officer’s official report states the suspect evaded arrest, but further investigation revealed the officer was distracted by the loss of his patrol car.
Sam kept a clipping of the news article from the next day and hung it on the fridge the evening he purposed to Kayla over a bread bowel of clam chowder with extra cheese. Her surprise by the idea was dwarfed by the awe of the beautiful new FitBit in her favorite color yellow. Kayla had always wanted to run in a real marathon but never knew how fast she could run, and often spoke about how she would not want to race if she would come in last place. Once a police officer said she was ran “like a Tasmanian Devil” after she stole a pack of chewing gum from a Seven Eleven two years ago. It could have been the angle dust she had just snorted, or maybe it was the sound of dogs behind her, or maybe it was that she could’t feel her legs; but ever since then she has loved running. It was a very thoughtful gift. Sam had a strange way of always knowing what Kayla needed, so it didn’t seem strange when the next morning Sam asked to borrow Ben’s golf clubs. With sweat still running down her hips and her FitBit still counting calories the way a stock market ticker tape follows the rise and fall of oil prices, all she could say was yes. Running enthusiast though she was, endurance was not her gift. Her running shoes, with the tags still connected by a thin plastic string that Sam had bought her 3 months prior, stood as proof that her relationship to running was in direct conflict with her love of sex.
As he stopped for a red light on the end of town on his way to the junk yard where he would often spend hours beating old cars with new clubs, a smile crawled over his face. A woman in high heals and a long dress pushed a baby carriage across the street following her husband in a polo shirt tucked into khaki shorts. His disapproval of the woman and child was made obvious as he threw his Starbucks frappuccino to the ground saying, “Well fuck you then!” She looked at Sam in his car, smiling with the shining wood driver leaning out the back window in the morning sunshine, and thought to herself as she stepped in the spilled frappuccino, “That guy probably has the perfect life.”