Sacred

Models, and The Guys Who Love Them

Benny sat on a cement parking block, tired, sweaty, stinking, but smiling.

There was a funny feeling, an unpleasant one on the big toe of his right foot.

He thought about taking his shoe off, then thought better of it. If his armpits were creating stench, his feet had to be worse.

Benny realized the feeling was probably a blister he hadn’t realized he developed until it popped.

The last week had been a cyclone of…what word could he use to describe it?

Most of the usual words were too sappy, too Hallmark, too…poemy.

He wasn’t sure if he believed in love, but if it existed it was this, and whatever this was it snared him, gobbled him up almost from behind even though he was the one who started it.

When he first saw Tamara, she was strapping a package on the back basket of her bike, and almost left the beverage she had just purchased on the roof of the car parked next to the bike rack. 

Benny yelled Hey!, she flipped him off, he did some strange gyration and finger-pointing to alert her to the fact that she was about to leave thirteen bucks worth of raw juice behind. Benny didn’t know what it was, but he had heard that juice joint was expensive, and yeah, he would admit to her later, he thought she was hotter than the coffee in the break room at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant.

As she pedaled off, hand still in the air with middle finger aloft, thinking that Benny was just a straight off-the-shelf harasser, Benny had grabbed the biodegradable container of juice and run her down, keeping a respectful lateral distance until she could see what he was carrying.

Tamara stopped, her face absolutely Jonathan-appled with embarrassment that the guy had just been trying to help her out and she misjudged him.

She apologized.

He said he didn’t blame her for thinking some rando on the street might be a creep, and he didn’t. 

Then Benny had asked her out, specifically for Friday night, and for some reason he really couldn’t figure out, he leaned into Friday night like his night off was the only one that existed on the calendar.

Tamara was shaking her head before Benny had finished the long I in Friday.

“Fridays are sacred,” Tamara told him.

The way she said it, Benny knew it wasn’t a blanket “no.”

But he was inquisitive, too much so most of the time, so he asked why they were sacred.

He immediately apologized for being too nosy.

“Sacred is probably a term that piques a lot of interest,” Tamara said.

“It did,” Benny said, accepting the wriggle out.

“My stepbrother comes over to visit on Fridays. He likes these dinosaur models. So we make dinosaur models when he comes over, when I can find the one he likes.”

“I love kids,” Benny said, almost inviting himself over for Tamara’s “sacred” family model-making night.

Tamara looked at the pavement, looked back up, smiled, took a sip of the juice Benny had rescued.

“I do too,” Tamara said. “Lance is thirty-four.”

When Benny’s eyes flickered, Tamara told him about her stepbrother, ASD, gentle, doesn’t hate anything except thunderstorms and changes in routine.

And he only likes to make one particular pterodactyl model, made by one company in Elgin, Illinois.

No triceratops, no brachiosaurus. No pterodactyls from the other three companies who make ‘em.

And then she asked Benny if he could do Saturday. 

The muscles in his throat had spasmed as he was about to say “I have to work.”

He realized he would quit before he would miss a date with this girl he knew very little about.

They would give him the night off, or he would quit.

Benny ran that Saturday back in his mind. Then breakfast Sunday morning, then lunch Tuesday, the movies Tuesday night.

She showed Benny a picture of the finished pterodactyl, and how she told Lance she probably wouldn’t have another one on Friday.

Benny had taken his phone and opened up his subscription delivery account, found two of the pterodactyl models available, and Tamara had slowly, gently pushed Benny’s phone down away from his eyes.

“No. I will not give money to that man, to have his trucks spewing exhaust down our streets, for him to mistreat his employees. No. Thank you, super sweet, but no.”

Thursday had been one of the best days of Benny’s whole life, and it had only started after Tamara got off work in the afternoon.

He replayed it like a bad music video, with an X-rated montage that would never make it into any broadcast channel, and Tamara had thanked him for spending time with her, and for making her laugh.

He knew he couldn’t spend Friday with her, and he knew he couldn’t get another Saturday night off.

So Benny had woken up Friday morning and called every toy store, and hobby store and closeout dealer in the five-county area.

For a girl he just met. 

She might not love him yet, but she loved her stepbrother and hated pollution, so he had left his car in the lot of his apartment complex and hopped on his bike.

He was exhausted. He smelled. His ass hurt. 

He knew he had a popped blister on his big toe.

But he had a bag holding four pterodactyl models, three of the kind that Lance liked and one of the wrong ones. The old guy at the hobby shop thirty-eight miles north of the first hobby shop and nineteen miles west of the third one had looked so disappointed when they realized it wasn’t the right model, Benny had bought the damn thing anyway.

He would leave the three correct ones on Tamara’s porch as a surprise, along with a biodegradable container of overpriced raw juice. 

Then he would sit alone in his apartment on Friday night, gluing together the wrong pterodactyl, and hoping that one day soon he could be part of the sacred.

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Photo Courtesy of Getty Images