The first thing Ryan notices about her customer is how he positions his drinks next to his cigarette pack, and his Bicco lighter, assembling them like a little parade. He's been at the bar a while, drinking a lot, two whiskey shots followed by a succession of beers. Initially he seemed indistinguishable from any of the regulars, the union men that litter the building, but then, she realizes: she knows him. It's been ten years since Ryan has lived in Cedar Rapids, ten years since she's worked in her daddy's bar, and her customer's identity buzzes in her brain. She collects glimpses of him through the large mirror that hangs over the rows of liquor bottles, studying him as he talks to his fellow patrons, as he watches the Fox News on the TV that suspends in the corner. He looks like a scarecrow in his big-billed baseball cap and tattered beard. Ryan can barely see his face; it is shadowed like a veil by the front of his cap. The next time he asks for a draft she says, "I know you, right?"

He glances up at her. The plum semicircles under his flat brown eyes bulge downward. "Is your dad OK?" he asks.

"He's doing fine." She sets the beer down in front of him. "You know me?"

"How could I not know you?" he says, drinking half the beer in one mouthful. "Your dad talks about you all the time, shows everyone your picture. You're Ryan."

"Yeah," she answers, nodding. She takes the time to look at him in the face. "That's it," she says. "We went to high school together. Robert McCall? Right?"

He stands up, gulping the last of his beer. He draws his wallet out from his back pocket; a chain attaches to it like a spring snake. "Tell your father I'm thinking of him." He lays some bills on the counter and slides his wallet back into his pocket. Ryan watches him stagger out the door, then turns and shoves his tip into the ancient pickle jar that sits next to the register, glancing at her reflection in the mirror. She wonders if he knows her from school or simply as the bar owner's daughter. How much could he really recognize anyway? She was no longer that pudgy little girl in the AC/DC t-shirts, with the acne-ridden skin and slumped walk. The round face has metamorphosed into angles; long amber streaks peer out of her professionally dyed black hair. Today she's all grown up, with a husband and a mortgage, she pays taxes, and she separates her recycling. She is a productive member of society. She contributes something.

Ryan had returned to Cedar Rapids a week earlier, after her father suffered a near-fatal heart attack and required quadruple coronary bypass surgery. Following the surgery, it had dawned on Ryan and her mother that after her father came home from the hospital his recovery would be extensive. Her mother recruited Ryan to remain in town, to take her dad to his Cardiac Rehabilitation classes and tend to the care of his bar. "You can take time off of work, right? I'm sure Jeremy can do without you for a while," her mother had said to Ryan, as they stood at the door outside her father's hospital room. Ryan spied her father in the hospital bed. His chest heaved up and down, with the aid of the breathing tube that wormed out of his mouth. Ryan felt herself breathing in conjunction with him, and she nodded. Yes, Mommy, yes, yes, yes, I'll stay, yes, whatever you need. Now Ryan sleeps in her old bedroom, in the lemonade-yellow three-bedroom split foyer in which she grew up. The room has morphed extensively in the years since she lived at home. These days her mother uses the room as an office, with a daybed that feels like a day-old slice of bread.

Each morning Ryan's husband calls from Kansas City. Ryan keeps her cell phone on vibrate so it will not wake up her dad. It trembles and skitters around on the nightstand. "I know things are tough," Jeremy says, the day after she ran into Robert McCall, "but don't you think you need to be thinking about getting back?"

"My parents need me," she says. "My mom can't do this all alone. She has to go to work." Ryan spots her yearbooks on the bookshelves, the only mementos of her high school years her mother has kept around the house. She selects the one from her senior year, tucking the phone under her chin as she turns the pages. The faces of her fellow students stare up at her, the photos like jailhouse mug shots.

"You knew we were going to have this conversation eventually," Jeremy says. "It's been a week. You've got your own life here. Can't your mom figure out a way to do this stuff for him?"

"No." She reads Robert's catalogue of achievements. Honor Society, Class President, Valedictorian. "She can't." She runs her finger over Robert's face. "Once I get Daddy through these classes then we can figure things out. Right now, I'm just concentrating on him." After she hangs up, she lies back on the bed and lifts the book over her head, finding Robert's picture on virtually every page.

Her father's bar is a rectangular building. It sits on a square lot, and is accessed by a diagonal street. As a child, this placement formed Ryan's knowledge and understanding of geometry. Growing up she clocked an eternity sitting in her daddy's bar, whittling away time at the end of the counter, her elbows propped on the cracked leatherette edging as she watched her father prance with the confidence of an old college football player, cajoling and charming his customers. Throughout Ryan's childhood her mother worked as a nurse, with odd hours that required dumping Ryan off at the bar like an afterthought. Before school, after school, weekends, holidays. Don't talk to anyone, her mother would say as she dropped Ryan off in the parking lot, don't make a fuss, don't bother your daddy. It was Ryan's edict to remain silent. During her teenage rants Ryan would scream at her mother, I hate you, I hated that fucking bar. I hated being leered at by those drunks. Ryan went to college as far away as they would send her, in Kansas City, to the same Catholic college her father had attended.

As she entered her twenties she couldn't get comfortable anywhere else but a bar. She dropped out of school, moved into an apartment west of the Plaza and started her assortment of crappy jobs: the dry cleaner, Starbucks, anything that would pay for going out, anything that didn't require her to think through her hangovers. She came across Jeremy when she was twenty-five. Back then she ran with a group of girls who lined their eyes with kohl and dressed to show off their tattoos. She picked Jeremy up at Murphy's, a dumpy old tavern in Westport. Jeremy worked as a cop, he told her as they sat side by side at the bar, had been so for ten years after a stint in the military. "I never go to bars," he said. "I'm here with my brother; he's getting married in the morning. I'm just here to make sure he doesn't get too drunk." Jeremy had a lanky, athletic build, with freckles that bridged across his nose and high cheekbones, and a full head of cropped toast-colored hair. Four whisky sours later, his brother long forgotten, Jeremy told her that, despite being forty, he was still single. When she asked him why, he replied, "My ex-girlfriends all think I have issues. Control issues, abandonment issues, intimacy issues."

"Do you?" she asked him, running her right hand up the inside of his thigh as they sat facing each other.

He hesitated, then smiled over the lip of his glass, "No, of course not."

That night she took him home, knelt and gave him head as he sat on her couch. Afterwards, she removed the beer he held in his hand and took a sip, swallowing him down. "So much for intimacy issues," she said.

Jeremy wiped his face with his hands as if he were sanding it, and said, "I'm in love with you." She replied, "You all say that."

But Jeremy stuck around. He told the truth about not going to bars. They did athletic things on their dates, stuff she never thought she'd remotely enjoy, like rock climbing in the Ozarks or jogging by Brush Creek. Her girlfriends loved that he was a cop, like the ultimate bad boy, the whole thing, the gun and the attitude. He was nothing like the guys she normally dated, who stomped all over her and left her like a shit pile. Jeremy convinced her to set goals: go back to school, quit smoking pot and cigarettes, stop taking money from her parents, find a better job, get out of the bars, into the fresh air. She liked him more than she thought she should. She enjoyed the sameness of it all, his fingerprints on her flesh, the way he looked at her when they made love, like she was the only thing that mattered. As a teenager, Ryan promised herself never to marry a man she met in a bar, but when Jeremy proposed, she thought, maybe this is love. Maybe this is what it's supposed to feel like.

Her parents were furious when she reported that she and Jeremy eloped in Vegas, after six months of dating. They had only met him briefly before, on an afternoon visit to Kansas City on their way to a vacation in Branson. They argued with her, when Ryan phoned from the plane back to Kansas City, as if they continued to have a say in her decision. "This isn't at all what we wanted for you, Ryan. Is he even Catholic? Did he go to college?" her mother asked. Her father berated her as well. "What do you know about cops, Ryan? They beat their wives. They come into my bar, they start fights." Ryan and Jeremy's happiness, however, was ephemeral. When Ryan called, after the first month of marriage, to complain that Jeremy sometimes came home from work and did not speak for hours, even days, and how she felt maybe she didn't know him at all, that maybe things had happened too quickly, her mother snapped, "Ryan, we've had a lifetime of nonsense from you. You work it out. He's your husband. You're in it for good, as far as I'm concerned."

Robert McCall eventually remembers her as his classmate, not just as John Hill's daughter. "You're the one that got caught with the hash pipe, right?" he asks her at the bar a week later. "Wasn't it in your backpack or something? Didn't they find it on you in school? Was that junior year?"

"Yeah."

"Man, you were hardcore." He sips his beer. "I should have hung out with you guys more often." Ryan tries to recall if he ever hung out with her crowd at all. He leans in close over the bar, indicating for her to come near. "You should come over tonight. You still do that kind of shit, right?"

"Yeah," she says, her heart racing.

Robert lives by the corn processing plant, his neighborhood a collection of dumpy Monopoly houses. His house is poker-faced, no pictures on the walls, a bare magenta couch from the sixties lines the wall of the living room. "What happened to you?" she asks as she hands him the six pack of beer she snuck out of the bar.

"Nothing." His smile astonishes her, as if he doesn't have a care in the world. It takes her breath away. For a moment, he looks like the boy she observed from far away, all those years ago.

"Nothing?" she says, incredulous. "You were the class president. Weren't you supposed to go to Harvard or something?" "Princeton," he says. "I went to Princeton. You want to go smoke a bowl?" He leads her into the kitchen. Ryan notices how his ashtray, cigarette pack, salt, and pepper shakers line up like his little parade at the bar. She sits down at the table as he fills the pot into his miniature pipe. He hands it to her, and gets her a beer as she inhales the smoke from the pipe. It hits her chest hard, like a bomb going off in her throat. She coughs and he laughs at her. "Good shit, right?" He sits down and removes the pipe from her hand, an impish smile on his face She gulps some beer to calm down the cough. "It's been a while," she says, "My husband doesn't let me smoke anymore."

"Good thing he isn't here, then, right?" He takes a toke and hands her the pipe. This time she inhales deeply, holding the smoke in her lungs until she is sure it will take effect. Not much later, she's on her knees in front of Robert, a place she's been a million times before. When Jeremy calls her cell phone the next morning, she doesn't hear it. She's asleep in Robert McCall's bed, the cell phone tucked away in the pocket of her coat, which is lying across the house on the living room floor.

On the way home, her head pulsates in reaction to the sunrise coruscating off the fresh snow. Her mother, dressed in her work scrubs, reads the paper at the kitchen table, her cigarette smoldering in the ashtray next to her coffee cup. "How do you want me to deal with this, Ryan?" she asks, not looking up from the paper. Ryan pours a cup of coffee, and eases into a chair across from her mother. "Because I don't think there are any rule books. I don't want to be up in the middle of the night worrying about you," she continues, finally meeting Ryan's eyes. In the sunlight, her mother's steel gray eyes appear washed out, and the lines in her face draw her frown down in a clownish manner.

"So don't worry," Ryan says. She leans her head against the back of the chair. Her mother is quiet for a while. "Listen, Mom, I met a guy at the bar, someone I went to school with. Robert McCall. Remember him?" Ryan avoids looking at her mother, concentrates on the antique flower lined plates that hang in a checkerboard pattern on the wall behind her.

"Of course I remember him. I see his mother at the store all the time. They go over to church." Her mother stubs out her cigarette into the square nuclear green ashtray Ryan made in the second grade. "Judy McCall looks great. Of course, I would look great too if my husband sold all the real estate in town." She takes a sip of her coffee, folds the section of her paper in half.

"Robert invited me back to his house." Ryan rubs her eyes. "We just hung out at his house last night and I fell asleep." Her mother waves her hand, chopping through the streams of smoke that highlight the sun pouring through the windows. "I'd hate to think that you're using your dad's illness to…" and then shuts her mouth, running her fingers back and forth over the crease of the paper.

"It was nothing, Mommy," Ryan says. "It's a one time deal. I just fell asleep. I'm sorry. It won't happen again." Her mother stands up, flaps down the paper, shrugs on her winter coat, and grabs her purse from the counter. She hesitates in front of Ryan, leans down, gives her a kiss on her head, and chucks her under the chin before leaving the house.

The next morning her father procrastinates as he gets ready to go to his therapy session. Ryan waits in the car, her head pounding from the bourbon hangover she procured while drinking with Robert the night before. Her cell phone rings, and the trill ricochets in her ears. She looks at the ID screen and sees it's Jeremy. She hesitates, then turns the phone off, shoving it in the pocket of her coat. Ryan and her father are silent on the way to the hospital. He cranks up the heat. The blast turns her stomach, which is already churning from the mixture of fury over having to wait for him, and the four ibuprofen pills she swallowed after six fitful hours of sleep on the daybed.

Ryan parks in the top level of the parking ramp. Even if Ryan's mother bothered to get a handicap placard for the car, it would not have mattered. The handicapped spaces are taken, probably long before they arrived. Her father wears a nylon track-suit and it squeaks against the vinyl seat as he turns and shifts his legs out of the car. He presses his feet against the wet pavement. "I don't know why I try," he says, his voice still raspy from the tube they had down his throat. He braces against the seat with his free hand, reaches out to her with the other.

"Daddy, come on. I'm freezing." Ryan holds onto his arm, pulling him out as she shuts the car door with her free hand. Her father leans on her as they walk through the lot, his body like dead weight, making it feel like her arm could snap in two.

As they enter the automatic doors he says, "Sometimes I think this is enough. I hate coming here." Ryan guides him to the waiting room, the only noise provided by the morning anchors chirping on the TV in the corner.

"Do you want to go home, Daddy?" Ryan asks, as he hesitates picking a seat.

"I didn't have a clue it was happening," he says, ignoring her question. He clutches to his chest the little notebook the doctor gave him to notate what he eats, his exercise, and his medicine. "I was downstairs watching the Packers game, and the pain was unbearable. But Doreen, she didn't believe me when I told her. She said, wait, she had to get the roast," he says, gasping for breath from the walk. He turns and lowers himself into the seat. "She came down and told me it was probably heartburn. I've had heartburn. That's the problem with living with her; she thinks she knows so much. She finally called 911, they all came, the police, the ambulance, the fire department. There must have been eight people in the house, plus your mother and me." Ryan sits down next to her father, avoiding the pale and watery eyes that bulge out of his ashen face, and diverts her attention to the TV, trying to concentrate on the weather report. Her father rambles on about going to the hospital and the second heart attack that night. "I was ready, Ryan. I was ready to go. I had made peace with God, you know, years ago. I was ready."

"Daddy, we don't have to do this today," she says. "We can go home." She slides her shaky hands under her thighs.

The perky therapist, who looks about fifteen years old, appears, as if by magic, to take him for his workout. "Hi there, Mr. Hill!" she says, her voice reverberating over the chatter from the TV. She reminds Ryan of the morning-show anchors, with her bouncy blonde hair and her magenta-lined lips. "Are you ready, Mr. Hill?" Ryan stands up and helps him out of his chair. The therapist takes his arm, as they walk away she smiles back at Ryan. "He seems to be doing better, don't you think?"

Ryan resumes her seat, exhausted. Her headache has migrated to her shoulders, and she cannot shake the nausea that lingers in her belly. She watches her father and the therapist recede down the brightly lit hallway. Her father hangs on to the bar that lines the wall, the therapist's hand hovering over his shoulder. Throughout the years she lived in Kansas City Ryan rarely returned home; it occurs to her she should be more stunned by the astonishing change in her parents. However, the progression seems so natural. The gait her mother adopted to overcome her bad knee, the lack of interest in covering up her gray hair, the weight her father has gained and then suddenly dropped, his legs like spindles. She can't imagine them in any other way.

Ryan learns that her presence in the bar is not really required. It practically runs itself; his employees tell her that they'd do anything for her father. "He's like a father to us," one of the bartenders says. They handle the books, the ordering, everything Ryan thought she needed to do. Ryan hangs out each day enough to make her presence known, then skips out to Robert's house. They stay up late, drink, get high, have sex. The only time they leave his bed is to pee and answer the door for the order from Pizza Daddy. She goes home late, normally drunk, driving in the sub-zero temperatures, her frosty breath filling up the car. On her rides she practices what she'll say to Jeremy when he calls. He wants her home. "Everything is fine," she slurs into the dead space, maneuvering through the empty streets. "Please don't worry about anything. I'll let you know when I am ready to come home." She believes he's on to something. She's sure he's seething. She speculates on how much he is aware of, considers that he must know a lot. After all, he's her husband.

Due to his illness, her father can receive communion at home, but he insists on attending Mass as soon as he feels good enough to go, on a Sunday morning three weeks after the surgery. Ryan can't remember the last time she stepped into a church. Maybe a Christmas or Easter, during those times she used to come home for the holidays, her attendance required but perfunctory, before she dropped out of college. Sitting on the rigid blonde pews causes the small of her back to throb, and she shifts around, trying to find a comfortable spot. Her mother glares at her, as if she's an errant six year old, but during the Sign of Peace her mother's hug is unyielding. "I love you, Ryan," she whispers into her ear. "I'm so glad you're here."

After the service, Ryan abandons her parents to retrieve the car. She takes several moments to compose herself, wiping away the tears that sprung in surprise on the way out of the building. The parking lot is a maze of people and cars, and she finds it difficult to maneuver in the icy snow. As she pulls up to the front of the church, she sees a pair of women, including Robert's mother, talking to her parents. "Maybe Ryan can be good for Robert," Mrs. McCall says, as Ryan approaches the quartet. Mrs. McCall reminds Ryan of Robert, with the same amber eyes and skeletal limbs. The other woman Ryan recognizes as a friend of her mother's from years back, Nell Riley, who Ryan wants to believe teetered on the edge of the elite crowd that the McCall's probably ran with.

"I was just telling Judy and Nell that you see Robert over at Daddy's bar." Ryan's mother hangs onto her father's arm, who stares at the pavement.

Mrs. McCall takes a pair of sunglasses out of her purse, puts them on, despite the overcast day. She pats Ryan's father on the arm. "We're thinking of you, John." She smiles, and her teeth are as straight and white as piano keys. "Tell my son to give me a call, will you Ryan?" She laughs hollowly. "I can't seem to get through to him, that's for sure. Okay, well, I'm not going to keep you out in the horrible weather. Isn't it just freezing? I wish we could escape to Arizona again this winter but there's just no way Robert's going to allow that." She gives a defeated wave as she flutters away towards the parking lot.

"Do you know what happened to Robert McCall?" Nell turns to Ryan and her parents after Mrs. McCall is out of earshot, her face knitted in conspiracy. "He's been a real drain on Judy and Dennis. From what I hear, he's had these drinking problems and they've spent a mint on keeping him in rehab, all through those years he went to that expensive college." Nell grabs her coat around her, leans in closer to the three of them, her bright blonde curls bouncing around her face. "He got married a few years ago, to some very nice girl, back East. I guess everyone thought that it was all behind him, but then he left his wife and baby in Boston a couple years ago and came back here. And now all he does his demand money from them, lives in some shack somewhere." She steps back as she spies her husband's car driving up. "Ryan, I haven't even said hello to you. Welcome back. You're such a good girl to be helping your parents like this."

On the way home, her mother pipes up, from the backseat, "I think you better steer clear of that boy, Ryan. I didn't realize what kind of trouble he was."

"He seems like a nice kid to me," her father whispers to the passenger window.

Ryan isn't sure if her mother heard her father. Her mother continues, "Did you hear that, John? They can't go South in the winter anymore? Cry me a river; we should all be so lucky." Her mother unzips her purse. "Isn't it rich, though, that we have that in common? How we've had similar problems with you over the years? The drugs, the money problems, all those boys you've gotten mixed up with?" She lights up a cigarette, rolling down the window a crack. Ryan glimpses at her mother through the rear view mirror, grasping the wheel of the car so hard her knuckles feel like they are going to burst through the skin. "It's nice to know our kid isn't the only one that hasn't won the jackpot with her life, either." She blows a stream of smoke out the gap of the window and the door. "But at least you finally got married, even if it was to that Jeremy, and cleaned up your act." She laughs hollowly, exactly the same way Mrs. McCall did.

"That's not funny, Doreen," Ryan's father says, in a voice almost as strong as it was prior to his operation.

After a moment, her mother says, "No, it's not, John. It's not funny at all."

They're silent for the rest of the ride home, and Ryan tries to forget what her mother has said, wonders how Robert could possibly have kept his parents from spending the winter in the South.

The next morning her father decides to discontinue going to therapy sessions. "What's the point?" he asks Ryan and her mother. Each moment at the house is a tunnel of silence, her mother in the office or the kitchen while her father spends his days planted in his Laz-E-Boy, watching the Golf Network.

Jeremy's calls begin to increase in frequency. Throughout the following week each conversation is like an interrogation by the Gestapo, with pointed questions about where she has been, what is she is doing, who she is doing it with. The next Saturday morning he calls when Ryan is at Robert's house, naked in his bed, and she's so high she can't picture Jeremy's face. "I'm not doing anything, Jeremy," Ryan says to him, as Robert sticks his tongue into the supple folds of her belly, and she tries to suppress a laugh. "I'm working, helping out Mommy and Daddy. I'm just about to leave to take Daddy for his walk." She envisions an imaginary wire from his phone to hers: if Jeremy yanks on it, he could pull her back, over Iowa and Missouri, back to him in Kansas City.

She can hardly hear his voice over the staccato of the phone. "Maybe I can come up, and help you get things settled. I have some time coming."

Robert bites Ryan's other earlobe, and she runs her hand through his hair, which softly curls around her fingers. "That's not a good idea," she says, and then, "I can't hear you at all, this connection stinks. I'll call you tomorrow." She hangs up and she and Robert laugh as she tells him she doesn't know what her husband looks like anymore.

Robert takes the cell phone from Ryan's hand, and jerks the battery out of the back, tossing it towards the overflowing wastebasket that sits the corner of his bedroom. It rests for a moment on top and then slides to the floor, landing with a thud. "See, now you won't have to remember what he sounds like anymore, either," Robert says as he flops on the bed and kisses her, and Ryan grabs him back, willing all thoughts of Jeremy out of her head.

Six hours later Jeremy calls her mother at the hospital, who in turn phones Ryan at Robert's house, waking them both up. Robert answers, and says, "Yeah, she's here." and hands the phone to Ryan.

"Jesus, it took me forever to find you," her mother says. "Why aren't you answering your cell phone? I've left you a dozen voicemails."

Ryan gets out of the bed and staggers into the kitchen. "Yeah, the battery died."

"Jeremy's here. He's at the Best Western by the mall. He tried to call you, too." Her mother's voice is pinched.

"What do you mean he's here? He's here in town?" Ryan rubs her eyes, tries to adjust to the daylight in the kitchen.

Her mother pauses. "Ryan, it's four o'clock in the afternoon. What are you doing?" Ryan can hear the buzzing of the intercom over the phone line.

"Nothing. I'm not doing anything." Ryan takes a flannel shirt that hangs on a chair and pulls it around her, as if her mother is standing right there in the kitchen and sees her naked.

Her mother's voice cuts through the phone. "I'm calling him right now. I'm telling him you're coming over. You, little girl, need to get your butt over to that hotel."

"Yes, Mommy," Ryan says automatically.

"What's that?"

"I said, yes, Mommy."

Ryan picks up a bottle of Stoli on the way to the hotel. Jeremy's room is on the first floor, off the indoor swimming pool. The walk to the door seems like a death march to her. The peepholes from the doors that line the wall eye her like a jury. Jeremy opens the door before she can finish knocking. Ryan takes the vodka out of the bag. "You want a drink?" she asks, rocking the bottle back and forth. He shakes his head. She brushes past him into the room. It possesses a dank smell, a history of cigarettes and cleaning solution. The curtains are drawn and the lamp lit in the corner casts a dirty muted effect on the dusty rose theme of the room. She removes her coat and throws it on one of the beds. He sits in a little round pink chair in the corner, his mouth twirling down in judgment as she opens the bottle and pours a drink into one of the plastic glasses provided by the hotel. She takes a drink of the vodka, and the smell of plastic and alcohol wafts into her nostrils. She sets the bottle on the little hotel desk, and turns her head to look at him.

His eyes match his faded red polo shirt, and his face and clothes are wrinkled from the car ride. He wipes his hand over his mouth and says, "Who's Robert?"

"I went to high school with him. He's my high school friend," Ryan says, folding her free arm around her stomach.

"Who is this guy? I've never heard of this guy."

"He's just a guy." She tips the last of the vodka into her mouth, and it slides down her throat.

Jeremy picks up the opaque glass ashtray that sits on the table next to him. "What were you doing at his house today?" He looks at the ashtray. "I ask your mother where you are, she says, 'Ask her. Ask her who Robert is.' So I'm asking, who is Robert?"

Ryan breathes in. "It doesn't matter who he is."

"I feel like fucking breaking this over your head." Jeremy grips the ashtray, as if it were her head in his hands. "I feel like smashing it against your face. I want to take your head and fucking crush it against the wall."

She fills the cup again. "Why don't you?" She takes a drink. "Go ahead."

"I did everything for you." His loud voice echoes against the walls.

Ryan laughs. "What did you do for me? All you wanted to do was change me."

"Jesus, that's what I wanted for you. Don't you get it?" He tosses the ashtray on the table, and it spins around, like a top.

"I thought I loved you," Ryan says, jabbing a finger at him. "I thought that's what you wanted from me. But I'm not that girl. Who you wanted, a girl you could mold into what you wanted, someone to put up with your shit, then fuck you when you felt like it, that's not me."

Suddenly Jeremy is up like a shot, and he wraps his left hand around her neck, bringing his face millimeters away from hers. "You didn't want to change? Your life was so goddamn great? You think about where you would be without me. You'd still be drunk in some bar somewhere." He jerks her head back and forth as he speaks through gritted teeth. "Ryan, I love you," he says, his face flushed, his grip tightening like a vise. "I love you." Ryan drops her drink to the ground and tries to pry his fingers off her neck. He lifts up his other hand and covers hers, shoving her against the desk. The vodka bottle and the other plastic glasses tip over. Ryan can feel the alcohol seep into the back of her jeans.

"Please, Jeremy, stop," she whispers.

Jeremy releases his grasp and they look at each other for a dash in time. His hands migrate to the back of her head and he pulls her into a kiss, so hard his teeth force down against hers. He props her on the desk and in a split second pulls her jeans and underwear down below her knees. He unbuckles his own pants and enters her without hesitation, his hot cheek next to hers, panting into her ear. Ryan grabs him around his lower back and pulls him deeper inside of her. He comes in an instant, and remains in her for what feels like an eternity, as if they have been fused together. He brings his left hand back up to her neck, gently rubbing with his finger and thumb. "I'm sorry," he murmurs, kissing her, and slides out. Ryan avoids looking at him as she pulls on her jeans, which are now soaked. Jeremy has quickly dressed himself. He sits on the edge of the bed and covers his face with his hands. "I'm so sorry," he says, repeatedly, as if it were a mantra.

Ryan turns around and upends the bottle of vodka. She discovers that only a small portion has actually leaked out. She retrieves her cup up from the floor, and fills it. The vodka burns on her throat, which feels like raw meat. "Don't be sorry." Ryan wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. "I deserve it."

He stretches his hand out to her and she takes it, unable to stand on her own any longer. He pulls her into his lap. "You need to come home with me." He puts his arms around her. Her head spins from the effects of the vodka, from him choking her. "You know you do." She nods, tucking her face in between his shoulder and neck, and breathes in. His skin is damp, and smells of shaving cream and soap, of laundry detergent. To Ryan, it almost feels normal, almost as if she were in the right place.

Ryan wakes at dawn, Jeremy wrapped around her like a blanket. She lifts his arm up and slips out from under him, and gets dressed. The early winter air hits her hard as she exits the steamy hallway to the parking lot. It is so cold that morning that the windshield is a panel of ice. She does not have gloves or an ice scraper. She hurriedly chips off the ice with a phone card, her fingertips burning from the pain. At home, no one is awake. She climbs on the treadmill her mother had purchased for her father, when he came home from the hospital. It is the first run Ryan takes in weeks. She runs for forty-five minutes, six miles, all the while staring at the wood paneling of the basement walls. Sweating and exhausted, she half expects to see Jeremy in her mother's kitchen when she reaches the top of the stairs, but the kitchen is empty.

She wonders about Jeremy when she goes to work, wonders when she goes and gets high at Robert's house that night, wonders, as she and Robert lie naked on his bed eating Cheetos and drinking vodka shots, their legs covered by an itchy blanket the color of sandy snow. Robert drinks a shot, reaches over and kisses her. His mouth tastes like chocolate cake to her, frosty and sweet. She has him pour another shot, and she chugs it down.

"We could do this every day, you know," he says, as he runs a hand down her torso, in between her legs, and rubs the softness of her inner thigh. "We could."

"We do," Ryan says.

"No, I mean, you could move in here and we could live like this." His raspy voice flitters up her spine. Ryan considers what Robert has said. She leans over him and takes a cigarette out of the pack that is lying on the nightstand, and lights up. The vodka cozies up her brain, the nicotine crawls into her lungs. At this moment, nothing feels better. Maybe Robert is right, she thinks, as she leans towards him, lifting the cigarette up to his lips, watching him take a drag. Maybe they could live like this.