.
She lies and says she's in love with him, can't find a better man...
She dreams in color, she dreams in red, can't find a better man...
Betterman - Pearl Jam
"I'm not easy to like"
This is Roger talking, describing himself. Most days he walks around town looking angry. He looks 40, but is just short of 30. He wears an old red STP hat and a blue work shirt with his name in embroidered white letters above one pocket. Roger wears the shirt even though he only works three days a week in this small town that only has four gas stations.
Roger's girlfriend is Lese, a single mom who lives with him. She just turned twenty two and is four foot nothing, but not bad looking. They live in a mobile home that sits half a block behind his mother's home on the Northern edge of town.
Roger's father left him and his crazy sonofabitch brother when they were both in middle school. His brother, Tom, is upstate doing twenty years for assault after a botched robbery that went bad. His mom, who feels guilty about the whole thing, as if it were her fault, gave him the trailer for free and so he and Lese live there for almost nothing, except utilities and satellite.
Lese works full time at a local nursing home as a nurse's aide. She also has a four year old girl, who is Daze (Lese saw that spelling in a TV Guide). Daze is cute as a button, but not Roger's. She's from Matt, the guy who Lese was supposed to marry.
Of course, that was all before Matt slept with a teacher at the high school, the volleyball coach Lese played for when she was a sophomore and still cared about all that stuff. Matt is a good looking guy and everything, but seriously, he's like five years younger than that teacher.
Lese often thinks about the night she found out, told him off and threw his ring at him.
Her friends come over to the trailer if they know Roger is out
and sometimes she wonders aloud if she should have forgiven him (He told her it was only one night, but who knows, right?)
Her friends always tell her she is nuts to even consider talking to Matt (she was two weeks from the wedding and 6 months pregnant at the time). They also tell her she can do a lot better than Roger. They tell her she is smarter than him, still young and someone who can Make Something of Herself. Lese thinks they sound like one of the high school guidance counselors.
They had big plans for her as well. Shows you what they know.