Paul hates talking on the phone so Connie’s the one who calls his daughter-in-law once a month to catch up. She doesn’t mind calling Vicky. She likes hearing about the grandkids growing up too fast in the new house in Simi Valley where they’ve never been invited. Emily’s ten and Noah is almost eight.

“He’s right here if you’d like to say hello.” Connie holds out the phone but when Paul shakes his head no she puts it back in her ear. “He says to give the kids a hug.”

“We’re taking the RV up to Santa Barbara this weekend for Noah’s soccer tournament,” Vicky says. “My parents are coming with us.”

“How nice,” Connie says. “Maybe we could meet up with you guys somewhere.”

“Sure,” Vicky says. “I’ll talk to Robert and let you know.”

Her voice carries through the receiver and Paul rolls his eyes, slides open the screen door to the balcony and goes outside. Connie can predict the future. They won’t hear back from Vicky or Robert and then they’ll see pictures of the other grandparents on Facebook.

When they get together they act more like acquaintances than father and son. They shake hands instead of hugging. They quote football scores, compare mileage on their trucks, agree on the weather and then let Vicky and Connie fill in the silence.

“I found a band for Paul’s birthday,” she tells Vicky. His sixtieth is coming up and she’s talked him into a party at the Elks Lodge. She’s hired a taco truck and Trina, her best friend from work, is baking a cake. “They sound exactly like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.”

“Paul’s going to love that,” Vicky says. “Robert too.”

Tom Petty is one thing Paul and Robert have in common. When they get together they act more like acquaintances than father and son. They shake hands instead of hugging. They quote football scores, compare mileage on their trucks, agree on the weather and then let Vicky and Connie fill in the silence. Men can be like that, Connie supposes. Maybe there’s nothing really wrong. Maybe whatever it is will work itself out.

She watches the sun sink through the black web of electrical wires and palm fronds behind their apartment building and smells garlic from their neighbors cooking dinner downstairs and the sticky-sweet scent of the joint Paul has just lit out on the patio. She wishes he’d quit. He’s already a quiet man and getting stoned doesn’t help his conversational skills.

They haven’t been married long, thirty-four months next week. She believes in celebrating every milestone and she’s got Paul in the habit too. He’ll stop by the Mini-Mart to buy her flowers and a card. She’ll pick up something special to eat on her way home from the nursing home where she works. She’s never been much of a cook, not like Paul’s first wife, Sheila.

Connie was married before too, a long time ago. Her first husband died young, in the accident she tries to forget but can’t help remembering every time she looks at herself in the mirror. She’ll be fifty-eight next year and almost made peace with her face and the fact that she never had children. When she met Paul and he didn’t mind the scar or the way her eyes don’t quite line up together or that she can only cry out of the left one, she saw a chance for grandkids.

“They coming to the party?” Paul asks when Connie joins him on the patio.

“I think so.” The sun disappears behind the San Gabriel Mountains. She imagines a photograph of the grandkids with Paul, something she can frame and put on top of the dresser in their bedroom. Someone else could take the picture so she can be in it too, as long as she’s in the back and slightly out of focus.

*     *     *

The night of Paul’s party is warm for October and the air-conditioning at the Elks Lodge takes a while to cool the room down. The guests eat tacos out in the courtyard. Robert and Vicky and the grandkids are the last to arrive. Robert shakes Paul’s hand and glances over at a table piled with gift bags and cards. “I have something for you I didn’t want to bring,” he says. “I’ll get it to you soon.”

When she met Paul and he didn’t mind the scar or the way her eyes don’t quite line up together or that she can only cry out of the left one, she saw a chance for grandkids.

 Robert and Vicky go inside with the grandkids and sit down at an empty table near the stage. Connie wonders why they don’t mingle. It’s hard to believe they’re shy. Vicky sells real estate; surely she’s good at conversation. Robert’s an investment broker, he makes his living convincing clients he knows what he’s talking about. They’re a little overdressed for this crowd. Robert wears a silk shirt and Vicky has on a linen sheath and three strings of pearls. Connie means to go talk to them but Trina needs plates for her cake and someone else wants to know where the bathroom is. She looks around for Paul later, planning to get a picture of him with the grandkids but the lead singer from the band asks her to unlock the door behind the stage so they can bring in their equipment.

One of Paul’s cousins is sitting with Vicky when Connie returns with the key. They have empty wine glasses in front of them and don’t notice Connie heading behind the stage towards the back door. Robert’s turned away to talk to the cousin’s husband and Emily and Noah stare down at their phones.

“Connie’s eyes make me nervous,” Vicky tells the cousin. “I can never tell if she’s looking at me or not.”

It’s not like Connie’s never heard this kind of thing before though it’s usually from strangers and not from family. She can’t remember the cousin’s name which is not like her at all. Remembering names is one of her strong points.

“Grandma Connie’s creepy-looking,” Noah says.

“She’s not our grandmother,” Emily says in her clear, young voice. “She’s only Grandpa’s wife.”

The door to a van slides open behind the building and someone knocks. Connie’s feet are blocks of cement in her uncomfortable heels.

“That’s enough,” Robert says. “Show some respect.”

“You don’t need to yell at them,” Vicky says.

Connie doesn’t realize she’s been holding her breath until she exhales and finds she can move her feet after all. She swings the door open and the band brings their equipment inside.

Later, when she cuts the cake, she makes sure Robert gets a corner piece. Vicky says she just wants a taste. Connie cuts a small slice and dumps it on a plate, frosting side down. Since no one is watching, she spits on her finger and cleans off the knife, flicking the cake debris to the side of the plate with her thumb. She sucks the frosting off her fingers. Her fingertips are slightly purple from the way the red and blue Happy Birthday Paul letters have bled into the white frosting.

“Vicky,” she says, holding out the plate. “Is this a small enough piece?”

*     *     *

“We never got a photo of us with the grandkids,” Connie says later as they lie in bed. “They left early.”

“I’m surprised they came,” Paul says. “It’s a long drive for them.”

“It’s your birthday. Of course they came.”

“I could have been a better father.”

Paul’s said this before. “You’re a different man now.”

“I worked all the overtime I could get and sat on a bar stool every night until closing time. Robert’s lucky Sheila had enough sense to divorce me.”

Connie finds the place under his arm where her head fits perfectly. “What do you think his gift is?”

“I don’t know.” He pulls her closer. “Something too big to fit in the car, maybe.”

“Something nice to look forward to.”

*     *     *

Paul’s back goes out the week after his party. He can barely sit much less drive and he has to lay off work for a while. He worries about the loss of his paycheck even though Connie tells him not to. She makes enough at the nursing home to cover the rent although there’s no health insurance or retirement plan.

A month goes by and Paul seems to have forgotten about Robert’s gift. Connie hasn’t. She decides to forgive what was said, putting the blame on too many glasses of wine, and calls Vicky to check in.

“When can we get together?” she asks.

Vicky itemizes their activities. Emily has cheer practice on Wednesday, guitar lessons on Friday. Noah plays soccer on Mondays and Thursdays and his games take up the entire weekend.

“It’s a lot,” Vicky says. “I worry sometimes it’s too much for them.”

“Kids need time to be kids, I guess.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Vicky’s voice sharpens. “Let them stay home alone and play video games? I’m closing on three houses right now, and Robert’s under a lot of pressure at work.”

“Maybe you could take some time off.”

“My job’s not the problem. You don’t understand. You’ve never had to juggle kids and a career.”

“You’re right,” Connie says. “I’d like to understand.”

“I love my job. And the kids are fine. I’m just tired. I’m sorry. I should let you go.”

“Robert mentioned he had something special for Paul,” she says and waits.

“I’m not sure we’ll be down there anytime soon,” Vicky says after a moment. “Maybe you could pick it up next time you’re in the area.”

As if they’d ever be in the area. It’ll take hours for them to drive back and forth to the Simi Valley from Santa Ana. Even though Vicky’s probably hoping she’ll drop the subject, Connie can be persistent when she needs to be. She’s simply holding Robert to his promise.

“What would be a good day for you?”

“I’ll need to check my calendar.”

“I can wait. How about next Tuesday? Didn’t you say Tuesdays are good for you?”

“Did I?” Vicky’s annoyed. “We don’t get home until after five-thirty.”

“We’ll see you then.” Connie hangs up before Vicky can say another word.

“They want us to come up there,” she tells Paul later when they set up the folding tables in front of the television.

“You mean to their house?”

“Tuesday night,” she says, putting down plates of microwaved macaroni and cheese. “They get home from work around five-thirty.”

“You know how much traffic there’ll be at five-thirty?”

“I don’t mind driving.”

“I mind. Robert promised he’d bring the gift to me.”

“They’re busy. It’ll be nice to spend time with the grandkids. See the new house.”

They eat and watch television for a while without speaking. “Maybe we could sleep in their RV,” Paul says during a commercial.

She knows he’s kidding. “Let’s splurge and get a motel. We can always cancel it at the last minute if we need to.”

*     *     *

Every time Connie has to pass a truck Tuesday afternoon, she murmurs part of the rosary and grips the steering wheel, feeling her shoulders hunch tight towards her ear lobes. Twice she has to get off the freeway because the lane ends and she can’t get over. Paul puts “Free Falling” by Tom Petty on the CD player. She asks if he wouldn’t mind turning it down. She needs to concentrate.

They still arrive at Robert’s house too early. It’s a huge place, three-car garage, basketball court on the side. A dog barks behind the cinderblock wall. No one is home. They get out of the car and walk around, stretch their legs. It’s hot. Robert and Vicky finally get home around six o’clock, kids in the back seat. Vicky and Robert go upstairs. Paul and Connie sit on the couch and watch the grandchildren watch television.

“How’s school?” Paul asks Emily.

She shrugs and stares at the television like she’s hypnotized. Connie sees Noah take secretive glances at her face.

“I was in an accident a long time ago,” she says.

“I know,” he says.

“It doesn’t hurt or anything. It’s just a scar.”

“Oh,” he says, staring at her openly now. “I scored a goal last week.”

“How about if we come see you play sometime?” Paul asks.

“That’d be okay.” Noah grins. He’s missing a front tooth.

Paul squeezes her hand.

Robert comes downstairs and says he’s taking them all out to dinner. Vicky’s right behind him in a cloud of perfume and an angry expression. Connie and Paul follow them in their car to a Mexican place. The food’s all right but the kids are antsy and Vicky’s not in a good mood. “It’s hard for us on a school night,” she says. “The kids still have homework.”

Paul limps as they walk back to the car after dinner. “My back’s killing me.”

She almost suggests they go straight to the motel so he can smoke and she can take a hot shower. “We won’t stay long,” she says instead and they follow Robert’s car back to the house.

Vicky takes the kids upstairs and Robert brings out a small gift bag. “Here you go, Pops. A little something I thought you’d like.”

“Good things come in small packages,” Paul says.

He tries to take his time unwrapping whatever it is even though there isn’t much tissue paper in the bag and there isn’t a birthday card either. Connie can see right away it’s a Laker’s cap, a give-away item. She’s seen the photos on Facebook of Robert, Vicky, Emily, and Noah sitting courtside wearing the same exact hat and matching team jerseys.

“Thanks, son. This is nice.”

Connie clears her throat. Robert gives her a quick glance and she realizes she’s glaring at him. At least he has enough sense to look embarrassed.

“I guess we’ll take off,” Paul says.

Robert follows them out. “Emily and I are going to see Tom Petty at the Forum next week.”

“You and Emily,” Paul says.

“Yeah, since she started playing guitar she loves the Heartbreakers.”

“The Forum,” Paul says.

“Orchestra seats. I can’t wait.”

Connie gets in the car.

“I imagine you’ll see your mother for Thanksgiving?”

“We’ll go to Santa Ana for lunch with her,” Robert says. “Then Laguna for dinner with Vicky’s parents. Our holiday tradition. Drive all over Southern California and eat too much. Maybe we could get together with you guys on the weekend.”

“I’d like that,” Paul says.

“I’ll talk to Vicky. We’ll let you know.”

Paul says goodnight and angles himself in the passenger seat. Connie starts the ignition and Tom Petty sings on the car stereo, “I Won’t Back Down.”

“His first solo album,” Paul says as she pulls away.

“I know,” Connie says. “You’ve told me before.”

*     *     *

While Paul smokes in the motel parking lot, Connie cries in the shower and dries herself off with a thin towel. Even though she can’t see her face in the fogged mirror she knows her left eye is weeping. The doctors say the right tear ducts might unclog someday and if they don’t it’s nothing to worry about.

Trina claims happy tears come from one eye and sad tears from the other. It’s something her grandmother told her although Trina can never remember which eye is which. Tears are tears, Connie thinks. She’s pretended she’s not sad for so long she’s not sure she’d know the difference.

*     *     *

The only tickets Paul can get last minute are nosebleed seats. It costs twenty dollars to park in the Forum lot and the T-shirts are thirty-five each. Paul says he doesn’t like the designs and doesn’t want one. At least his back’s a little better, Connie thinks, as they climb the stairs up to the last row of the Forum. The opening act is Steve Winwood. The sound’s a little distorted up so high but they can almost see the big video screen. When Winwood finishes, most of the people in the seats around them head down the stairs.

“You want something to drink?” Paul asks. “I’m buying.”

She imagines him negotiating the stairs down and back up again. “I’ll have to pee. I don’t want to miss anything.”

They watch the crowd and wait for Tom Petty. A young couple standing at the bottom of their section seems to be staring at them. Connie automatically puts a hand across her face. The boy has a crew-cut and wears thick glasses and the girl has pink highlights in her hair. Connie wonders what it would be like to be so young and stylish with money and energy to spare. The girl runs up the stairs, two at a time, in heels no less, straight towards her and Paul, the boy right behind her.

“We’re looking for the people with the worst seats in the building,” the girl says.

“That would be us,” Connie says. She can feel the shock on Paul’s face. She doesn’t mean to hurt his feelings, but their seats are terrible.

“Here you go.” The boy hands Paul two tickets. “They’re down in the pit.”

“No thanks,” Paul says.

Connie elbows him. “How much do you want for them?”

“Nothing,” the girl says. “They’re free. We’re going to Winwood’s party. We wanted to give our seats to someone who’ll appreciate them.”

“We’re fine where we are,” Paul says.

Connie stands and hugs the girl thanks.

“It’s probably a scam,” Paul says when the couple is gone. Connie takes the tickets from Paul’s hands and heads down the stairs towards an usher. “Go down and keep going,” he says. They take two flights of stairs and then three more and finally they are on flat ground. Another usher motions them forward and points towards a group of folding chairs set up in front of the stage. The lights go down and the Heartbreakers walk out.

Connie’s never thought Tom Petty’s voice was particularly good, but tonight he sounds wonderful. The lyrics are crystal clear, the guitars ring, the keyboard slinks through the mix; the drummer brings everyone to standing. A woman next to Paul lights a joint and passes it to him. He takes a deep drag and Connie tries not to breathe in. She already feels lightheaded. She takes a picture of Paul with the band in the background. Someone taps her shoulder and she sees panic register on Paul’s face. When she turns around, it’s a large man, motioning for them to stand closer together.

“Let me get the two of you,” he says.

Afterward, they walk circles around the Forum trying to find their car.

“This building looks exactly the same on all sides,” Paul says.

“It’s round.” Connie laughs. “You’re stoned.” Her feet hurt from dancing. “Stop for a minute.” She adjusts the toe of her sock and pulls out her phone, brings up the picture of the two of them with Tom Petty in the background.

“That’s good,” he says.

“I’m posting it.”

“It’ll seem like we’re showing off.”

“Too late,” she says. “It’s done.”

*     *     *

Paul’s phone rings the next morning. “Hey, Robert,” he says and puts the phone on speaker, lays it down on the kitchen table between their bowls of oatmeal.

Connie can’t remember the last time Robert’s actually called Paul instead of texting or messaging or having Vicky call her.

“I’m impressed,” Robert says through the speaker phone. “You were down in the pit?”

“Someone felt sorry for us,” Paul says. “Great show, right?”

“We left early. This asshole kept smoking pot right next to Emily. How’d you get those seats?”

“We were up in the rafters and this couple picked us out of the crowd.”

“If I’d known you had those kinds of connections, I would have asked you to get me tickets.”

“We got lucky for once.” Paul clenches and unclenches his fist. “Is it so hard to believe your old man might have a bit of luck once in a while?”

Connie touches his arm.

“What are you pissed off about?” Robert asks.

“You could have invited me to go with you and Emily. You know how I feel about the Heartbreakers. It was my sixtieth birthday. Kind of a big deal.”

Robert’s voice bristles through the speaker. “We came to your party. We gave you a gift.”

“You did. A hat.”

Connie sucks in her breath. Paul’s never sarcastic and immediately he backs off.

“A nice hat. Did you think any more about Thanksgiving weekend?”

“Turns out Vicky has to work on Friday. And Saturday we’re heading up to Pismo with a bunch of friends. Taking the sand toys. We’re giving Noah Emily’s ATV and buying her a new one. It’s going to be a blast.”

Connie shoves away from the table. The chair legs scrape the floor. She lets her bowl and spoon clatter down in the sink and turns on the kitchen faucet full blast.

“Maybe Christmas then,” Paul says.

“I’ll let you know.”

Paul hangs up. “That right there is an example of why I don’t like to talk on the phone.”

Connie takes a few deep breaths until she feels calm again. “I don’t know about getting together with them for Christmas. It’s our anniversary.”

“Three years,” he says, and manages a smile.

He’s a good man with a big heart she might not deserve. “I was thinking of buying a pie from Marie Callendar’s. They usually have them on sale around Christmas.”

“Cherry,” he says.

“I know, it’s your favorite.”

*     *     *

On Christmas Eve, Connie waits in line at Marie Callendar’s and tries to decide if she should buy one pie or two. She couldn’t talk herself into calling Vicky this month, so she’s not sure what their plans are. If she and Paul end up going to Robert’s house, they’ll need to bring something. She thinks about how much money there is in her purse and when it’s finally her turn at the cash register she says, “One cherry pie, please.”

“There are some almost ready to come out of the oven,” the clerk says. “I’ll be right back.”

“Why don’t they have more people working the register?” a familiar voice says behind her. “It’s Christmas Eve, for God’s sake.”

Connie glances over her shoulder. Paul’s first wife Sheila is in line a few customers back. Although Santa Ana is not a small town she can’t help running into Sheila once in a while. When the clerk comes back with her pie Connie hands him a ten-dollar bill and waits for her change, then turns towards the door. Sheila’s impossible to avoid. She’s gained a lot of weight since the last time Connie saw her picture on Facebook. She’s no longer plump; she’s fat.

Good, Connie thinks and feels momentarily guilty about being so mean-spirited until she notices the smirk on Sheila’s face as she sizes up Connie’s old Christmas cardigan and her ornament earrings, the same ones she wears every year.

“This line is ridiculous,” Sheila says. “I still need to go to the market. I’m making tamales tonight with the grandkids.”

“They’re spending Christmas with you.”

“Christmas Eve anyway. Vicky will insist on leaving first thing in the morning to go to her parent’s house. At least I get to do Santa Claus this year.”

“Well,” Connie says, attempting a smile that feels more like a grimace. “Enjoy it. I’d better get back to work.”

“I thought you’d retired already.”

“Not yet. I like my job.”

Sheila smirks again. Connie wants to take the pie out of the box, smash it in Sheila’s face and watch the red cherry juice run down her cheeks and collect in the folds of her triple chins. Instead, she blurts out a quick, “Merry Christmas,” and flees towards the door. She places the pie box carefully on the floor of the passenger side. Her hands shake a little, so she decides to sit there for a minute and calm down. She won’t mention seeing Sheila to Paul. It will only upset him.

It takes all the strength she has not to run into Target and buy him something special. A complete set of those “Die Hard” movies he likes so much. New speakers for their CD player or even a few packages of socks and underwear. They’ve agreed not to exchange gifts this year but she’d do anything to fill up the big gaping hole Sheila has ripped through her holiday spirit.

*     *     *

When she gets home from work and plugs in the tree it doesn’t cheer her up like it usually does. It needs presents. She finds some Christmas paper in the hall closet and wraps up some old games for the grandkids. She doesn’t have any ribbon though and the gifts look like orphans underneath the tree so she puts them on the top shelf of the closet. The kitchen table is too fussy, she decides, with the six Santa Claus placements and the evergreen candle in the center. She takes four of the placements off the table and stuffs them in the closet on top of the gifts.

When the phone rings, Connie barely recognizes Trina’s voice. “I hate to ask,” Trina says after she finishes a coughing attack, “but could you work for me tomorrow? I’m running a fever and I can’t keep anything down. I know it’s your anniversary.”

“I don’t mind at all,” Connie says. She can use the extra money. She’ll ask Paul to come with her. They’ll make a day of it.

*     *     *

On Christmas morning they eat cherry pie for breakfast before they leave for the nursing home. Paul wears a Santa Claus hat and she puts on the Christmas cardigan and her ornament earrings. Someone brings in a spiral-cut ham and there’s red and green Jell-O salad and too many store-bought cakes.

Paul plays card games and helps the residents with jigsaw puzzles. He sees her watching him and smiles from across the room. Someone’s grandson picks out Christmas carols on the piano and she hears Paul’s tenor singing harmony.

They’re both tired when they get home and find a box propped up next to their front door. Paul brings it inside.

“It’s from Robert and Vicky,” he says. “The kids even signed the card.”

There’s no good reason to feel guilty. “Too bad we missed them,” she says.

“They could have let us know they were coming.” It takes him a minute to loosen the ribbon and open the box. He unfolds a black leather jacket, holds it out in front of him and turns it around so she can see the embroidery. The Heartbreakers logo, a red heart pierced with a Gibson Flying V Guitar.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he says, trying it on.

It’s a little too big for him. It’s more Robert’s size. “I’m sorry I made you go to work with me today.”

“Are you kidding? I had a blast. It was a great way to spend Christmas. And our anniversary.”

“You could have stayed home and been with your family.”

“I was with my family.” He crosses the room and wraps his arms around her. “They should have brought something for you.”

“I don’t need anything.” She buries her face in the soft leather, feeling the tears start. “You should call and thank him,” she says, hoping the jacket muffles the choke in her voice.

“I’m busy right now,” he says, kissing the top of her head, holding her tight against him. She wants to stay there forever but she needs to blow her nose and wipe her eyes so she won’t ruin the jacket.

“How about a piece of pie?” she asks, pulling away and trying to turn her head so he won’t see the tears.

“Are you crying?” He holds her face gently with both hands, his brown eyes worried. “Did I say something wrong?”

“I’m fine,” she says. She goes in the bathroom to blow her nose. She’s at the point now where she can inspect the scar on her face and not flinch. She never was a beauty, not even before the accident. Something about her reflection tonight though is different. The scar seems diminished in comparison to the crow’s feet stamped around her uneven eyes. She’s older, of course, and she’s tired. She looks her age. She wipes her nose again and sees what’s changed. She’s crying out of her right eye.

“You sure you’re okay?” Paul calls out from the living room.

“I will be.” She smiles at herself in the mirror and turns off the light. “How about some ice cream with the pie?”

“Sounds good,” he says.

He opens the patio door and lets in the noise from the freeway. A steady stream of cars heads home from family parties, trunks full of presents, kids asleep in the backseat, parents looking forward to taking them up to the snow tomorrow or what about Disneyland? What about New Years? Super Bowl’s coming up, then Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s and Easter and suddenly it’ll be summer and the grandkids will be another year older.

She’ll call Vicky in the morning. She’ll ask about their Christmas and thank her for Paul’s jacket. She’ll suggest they meet somewhere special for lunch next week, their treat. Some place convenient, just off the freeway, halfway in between.

Mary Camarillo’s fiction has appeared in Extracts: A Daily Dose of Lit and The Ear. She is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories. She lives in Huntington Beach, California with her husband and their terrorist cat. She is a recovering CPA and a lifelong music lover, frequently found stalking Los Lobos across the country.

When the ruddy-faced doctor at the Joshua Tree Medical Clinic announced, “It’s back,” Vera nodded, picked up her old purse from the floor and tucked it under her arm. She was still nodding when the pleasant red-headed receptionist called out, “Have a nice day,” as she exited through the sliding glass doors of the clinic. The dry heat hit her like an oven. Nice day, unlikely.

The air conditioner in the Buick spewed a lukewarm stream. On either side of the two-lane highway that beautiful shimmering floor of ancient trees beckoned to an ancient sea. On certain mornings, Vera swore she smelled its salty breeze. She longed to plunge into a water so cold it could erase everything. A semi behind lay on its horn and she turned in the direction of the green blinker on the dashboard. In the shade of the K-Liquor Mart sign, Vera shut off the engine. She took a deep breath. Frank hadn’t yet spotted her through the store window. She gripped the wheel, watching her knuckles turn white.

There was the issue of Rain.

*     *     *

Six weeks ago, her daughter Stevie the-queen-of-heartaches had showed up unannounced with a surprise at their new motor home. “Her name is Rain,” Stevie informed them, dropping a sleeping child into Frank’s recliner.

“Why not Thunder or Lightning?” Frank asked under his breath.

They’d been in a middle of a game of Scrabble and Frank hated to be interrupted when it was his turn.

“I just need you to watch her,” Stevie snapped. The circles under her blue eyes were darker than Vera remembered from the last time.

“Vera, did we put a babysitting ad on craigslist?” Frank asked.

“She’s not mine, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Stevie challenged.

“That wasn’t my first thought,” Frank replied. “But it was in the top five.”

Three in the afternoon on a Thursday, a year since any communication and already they were at it. Vera laid a hand on her husband’s broad shoulder. It wasn’t Frank’s fault that he’d inherited Stevie at sixteen when it was too late to change things.

Stevie skulked to the fridge, opened the door and peered inside. “She’s three, no wait, four, I think. She likes oranges, Cheerios, bacon, not bananas.” She pulled out a Coke and opened the can. “Oh, and be careful, she’s got this weird thing for cotton balls. Really packs them in.”

“I hardly ever serve cotton balls anymore,” Vera joked, but nobody laughed.

Stevie took a swig of Coke and scanned the room. “Not bad. Hey, where’s Bob?”

“Hit by a UPS truck,” Frank said.

“Jesus,” Stevie sighed. “I warned you.”

Frank grunted and slid his big frame out of the dining nook. “Good to see you, Stevie.” He walked to the door. “Call your mother more often.” It slammed hard behind him. They listened to his heavy boots descend the metal steps and walk the gravel path to the Mart.

“He never liked me,” Stevie said, sliding into Frank’s seat at the table.

“Bob loved everybody,” Vera replied, and her daughter laughed.

One day, the blind basset hound had pushed the unlocked mobile home door open with his nose and found his way down the stairs, around the store parking lot and onto the warmest patch of sun—in the middle of the highway. Frank had buried Bob down deep where the coyotes couldn’t get to his body. Now dog food commercials left him as misty-eyed as Christmas movies on Hallmark.

Stevie moved the Scrabble tiles around, her stringy blond hair shadowing her face. “He has the Q and the Z, but no U.”

“It’s good to see you,” Vera said, trying to keep her voice steady. “Everything all right?”

Stevie shrugged, “Peachy.” She grabbed a handful of Frank’s jellybeans from the candy dish on the table. “I thought he had diabetes,” she said, spilling out the syllables one by one.

“I can scramble you an egg.”

Stevie returned her gaze to Frank’s Scrabble tiles. “I’m clean, mom.”

Vera listened to the wind pick up, scattering bits of leaves and trash across the yard, surprised to feel a spark of hope ignite. “That’s good,” saying the words easy and slow.

“He could spell qi,” Stevie said.

“Qi?”

“You can spell it c-h-i or with a q and an i,” Stevie said, moving Frank’s tiles around. “It means inner life force.

One day, the blind basset hound had pushed the unlocked mobile home door open with his nose and found his way down the stairs, around the store parking lot and onto the warmest patch of sun—in the middle of the highway.

It’s Chinese. Every person is allotted a certain amount each lifetime. When it runs out, you’re out. But then you get a new life with more. I think I believe it.”

“Qi,” Vera repeated. In her religion, you only got one life and then it was up or down. “I like it. But, don’t tell Frank. I’m winning.”

Stevie pulled the curtain aside and peered out the window. A Camaro with darkened windows waited near the mailbox. Vera wondered if Frank had bothered to stop and inquire, probably not. A while back they’d agreed: they didn’t have any more money to spend on rehab or any inner spirit left to recover from heartache. Where Stevie was concerned, it was better for their marriage to assume that things wouldn’t get better. More than likely Frank was walking up and down the aisles inside the Mart getting rid of a slow burn.

“I could make you and your friend pasta for dinner?” Vera suggested.

“Jesus, stop,” Stevie said, sliding off the bench. “I gotta pee.” She disappeared down the short hall, sliding the bathroom door closed behind her.

Once, she’d been a pleasant person. Her name was Stephanie then. Stephanie was a bright, pretty kid who’d taken to water like a fish. “Stephanie has talent,” her junior high swim coach, Mr. Ambrosia, had told Vera. “UCLA, maybe even Texas A&M. Real potential.” And real curves and a sweet disposition.

After they won the lawsuit against the school district, Vera moved them to the desert. Yes, she’d been single and working two jobs, but she was the only line of defense against the ugly in the world. Why hadn’t she noticed sooner? They tried child therapists, family therapists, and various medications. Vera apologized until her face turned blue and capillaries broke in her eyes but no one could resuscitate the daughter. Frank appeared solid and steady, but Stevie wasn’t interested in a good male role model. She’d escaped into the wrong crowd with the right drugs. Would it be smack or meth or the needle? It was a marvel a heart still beat in her tortured body, that it would continue once Vera’s had silenced.

“Stevie, there’s something we need to talk about,” Vera started.

“Oh, hey, Mom, can you spot me some cash?  I lost my ATM card somewhere in Colorado. It’s a fucking mess. You won’t believe this. I went to the bank, but they needed my driver’s license. It’s expired, whatever, I don’t carry it on me. I can’t drive. They made me call an eight-hundred number and some woman with a seriously heavy accent said the bank could only mail a replacement card to my address on file. But I’m in-between places. Rick moved that bitch in, whatever, we have to be in LA tonight.”

And there it was. The longer the story, the bigger the lie. Vera reached for her wallet and pulled out forty dollars. Not enough to buy real trouble.

Stevie stuffed the twenties into the front pocket of her jeans. “Thanks.”

“How long do we have to watch Rain?” Vera asked, feeling the return of the hard edges.

“I gave her dad your number,” Stevie replied, draining the last of her soda and setting the can on the counter instead of putting it in the recycle bin.

“Good to know you still have it.”

“I’m sorry.” Stevie threw her bony arms around her mother’s neck, “I’m such an asshole.”

Vera took a deep hungry whiff, hint of beer and cigarettes, and yes, the faintest trace of sweetness. I’m sorry. It’s my fault. She tightened her jaw to stop the unconditional from rushing out and pried her daughter’s arms from her body. “Enough, Stevie. Enough.”

As the dark Camaro peeled out onto the highway, Stevie’s arm shot out the window in salute. Vera gave her the finger. To grieve the loss of the dead was too unbearable.

A while back they’d agreed: they didn’t have any more money to spend on rehab or any inner spirit left to recover from heartache.

A short time later, Frank returned with orange juice, milk, and Cheerios because he was a good and reliable person. The little girl devoured two bowls and fell back to sleep on the pullout sofa without a single question. Frank and Vera finished their game of Scrabble without a mention of the word qi, but Frank won anyway.

*     *     *

Now, six weeks later, everything had changed.

Frank caught Vera’s attention through the front window of the Mart. Quite a few customers were lined up at the cash register. She faked a smile and gave him the thumbs up.  He held both up at her. Her hand shook as she unzipped her purse, pulled out a gold tube, and carefully applied cherry red to her chapped lips before returning to work.

Later that night after a dinner of cold fried chicken and pork ‘n beans, Vera washed the dishes while Rain, emotional, recounted a children’s story about a lost kitten.

“It was white,” Rain repeated at Vera’s side. “But it had a black spot. And it was lost. In the big city.”

“Honey,” Vera assured her. “I read that book to Stephanie when she was little.  In the end, the mama kitty finds her kitten and they all live happily ever after.”

Rain wiped her nose with the back of her small arm. She stared at Vera with big saucer eyes. “Truth?” she asked. The kid was way too smart. She ran to Frank, sitting in his recliner watching a ball game. He pulled her up onto his big lap. “I don’t remember that ending, Pa Frank.”

“Rain of the forest. Rain of the sea.” Frank sang in deep baritone. “Rain, the dark-haired beauty queen of the desert.”

It was a miracle, each day that passed without a phone call. At church people assumed she was Stevie’s. Folks had prayed on her troubles, so the delusion fell easy. At first, they’d been afraid of what Rain might say, but the girl acted like they were her real grandparents. Every day, Vera meant to bring it up to Frank, but the days kept passing, and in all fairness, Frank hadn’t mention it to her, either.

He carried Rain to the sofa bed. “We will never lose you in the big city,” he said.

“You have to say, promise,” Rain said, looking up at him. “Twice.”

“Promise. Promise,” Frank said. “Promise, three times.”

Vera pulled the covers up under the child’s chin, examining the defined cheekbones, the jutted chin, the dark hairline that grew low over her forehead. Where was the mother?

*     *     *

One month later, the well-tanned cancer specialist at the Palm Springs Clinic pronounced “metastasized.” While he rattled on about the minimal benefits at this stage of chemotherapy, Vera traced the hardened crescent moon of the old wound across the taut skin where the right breast had once lived with the left. Frank had spread aloe and kisses across her old road map of a scarred chest. She grabbed her big white bra with the foam prosthesis and stuck it in her purse. “To hell with appearances,” she said, but the specialist rattled on.

A brown-skinned receptionist quietly handed Vera a scribbled prescription for oxycodone, one of Stevie’s favorites, on her way out. She rode the noiseless elevator down to the sparkling empty lobby and called Frank from her cellphone. “Store busy?”

“Nothin’ me and Burt can’t handle,” he said, over the din of after-school teens loafing near the register. “Everything all right?”

“Peachy. I’ve decided to stop wearing a bra,” she announced. When he didn’t respond, Vera added, “Sign me up for Beer & Brawl’s white t-shirt contest.” That at least got a laugh.

At church people assumed she was Stevie’s. Folks had prayed on her troubles, so the delusion fell easy. At first, they’d been afraid of what Rain might say, but the girl acted like they were her real grandparents.

The sky was bright blue, the 10 freeway shimmering ahead. She shivered and rolled down the window. It was hot, but she didn’t feel warm.

Inside the Dairy Queen, Vera picked a booth near the back. She slowly spooned cold sweet vanilla into her mouth trying to fill the emptiness and watched the people in line. A short man held the hands of two small fat boys. Three teenaged pimply girls giggled behind a tall handsome boy. The boy pretended not to notice. Sweet young boys and budding teenage girls with promise. Vera unfolded the map and spread it across the table. It was a three-hour drive to Lake Havasu. They’d leave Burt in charge and the mobile parked behind the Mart so as to not arouse suspicions. With the camper on the truck, they could enjoy themselves until the weather turned.

“Planning a vacation?” Betsy asked, sliding her wide frame into the booth across from Vera.

Vera jumped. “Jesus.”

Betsy laughed and set a small milk carton down, sloshing white liquid across the table. “Sorry, sorry, but I am clumsy.”

The woman reeked of cheap drugstore perfume. Vera blotted the wet map with a napkin, trying not to show her irritation.

“I told the leader at Weight Watcher’s this morning, ‘You don’t understand the power of my drive,’ but I resisted and ordered a small two-percent. Hopefully, my lactose intolerance won’t act up.” She stared at Vera’s sundae. “You should join Weight Watchers, Vera. We could be buddies.” Betsy turned her focus to the map.

“Havasu. Frank wants to teach Rain to swim.”

“Take her to the Y.” Betsy shivered, holding up the stump of her left arm as evidence. “Less dangerous.” A boating accident one summer in Wisconsin.

Betsy smiled. Vera smiled. Once, they’d been friends, not the best, but good enough. Ah well, old age showed unattractive in different ways. Vera scraped the last bite of fudge into her mouth.

“Wanna split a dog?” Betsy asked, slurping down the last of her milk.

“No, thanks—” Vera started, but stopped at the word MISSING stamped on the side of the cartoon. Underneath was a black and white photograph of the child living in their house.

“Must’ve been quite a shock finding out Stevie had a kid,” Betsy said, slowly crushing the carton with a fat, pink palm. “She’s good-looking, no offense, but she doesn’t look like either of you. What is she, half Mexican? Excuse me, Latino, whatever it is they wanna be called these days.”

Vera quickly refolded the damp map. “Sorry, Betsy. But I promised I’d make mac ‘n cheese for supper.”

“It’s only three-thirty.”  Betsy stared into her eyes. “Vi, are you all right? You look a little drained of color.”

“It’s the air-conditioning is all,” Vera said, standing. She picked up the smashed carton. “Let me recycle this for you.”

“Huh?” Betsy asked, a look of confusion crossing her face as Vera jammed the evidence into her purse. “All right, thanks.”

“No, thanks—” Vera started, but stopped at the word MISSING stamped on the side of the cartoon. Underneath was a black and white photograph of the child living in their house.

“Good luck with Weight Watchers,” Vera added, then quickly left before the idiot said another word.

*     *     *

After two weeks at Lake Havasu, Frank looked well-rested and Rain looked well-fed. In the mornings while it was still cool, Vera sat in a lawn chair under an old beach umbrella and read her romance, while the two, well-slathered in sunscreen, waded out into the shallow reddish water—Frank wearing swim trunks, a faded Dodgers t-shirt stretched over his thick middle, and Rain, skinny with a protruding girl belly, in a new pink suit she’d picked out herself from Walmart.

Frank balanced the shrieking girl on his shoulders and slowly lowered himself blowing bubbles underwater. Rain shrieked and the two laughed so hard it was like chords of music to Vera’s heart. He’d married her sans uterus and never complained once about not having his own family. Now, twenty years later, she watched her lumbering husband patiently make circles with his arms in the water and a little girl’s mirror in unison. She’d always suspected that Frank loved children. His never having mentioned it made her love him all the more. What had she done to deserve such goodness? Suddenly, a rolling wave of tiredness coursed through her body. She felt a little frightened over the imminent.

Rain Gomez was snatched from a small town named Cortez down near the four corners in Colorado. Three months ago. In broad daylight. By a “skinny white woman with stringy blonde hair wearing a black leather jacket.” In almost every case on the missing children’s website, the words “Taken in broad daylight,” were near the top paragraph, as if children were only safe under the dark of night. Vera remembered how easily Stephanie would slip through her fingers under a clothing rack at Target, behind a tree in the park, and recently, a Camaro with darkened windows. She’d known Stevie capable of many things, but never child-stealing. Funny to learn that kidnapping was in the family genes.

“Ma Vi!” Rain called out. The child dunked under water, then popped up, sputtering and coughing, wet strands of hair clinging to her cheeks. “See my can hold my breath as long as my want to!”

Today several fellow-vacationers had looked more than once in the little girl’s direction. And a woman with binoculars had been enough to arouse Vera’s anxiety. “I can,” Vera called back. “I can hold my breath as long as I want to.”

Later that night in bed, Vera suggested, “I think we should drive on.” There were dozens of small towns along the Rockies—Durango, Buena Vista, even down into Cortez, the four corners, where history got interesting.

“All righty,” Frank said, patting her bottom. “Lots more fun to be had.”

If Frank knew about the black and white photo on the milk carton, which she’d destroyed with garden shears back home, he showed no signs of wanting the party to end.

*     *     *

The third week they stayed in a faux-chalet motel in Durango with a pool and cable television. It was hotter than normal for Colorado. They spent a lot of time when they weren’t in the water napping on the queen beds in the air conditioning. They ate dinner each night at Denny’s—Rain’s favorite, always fried chicken. The waitresses fawned over the girl wearing an oversized pink sunhat to hide a new, very bad, haircut. Even though she was nauseous, Vera tried to eat enough so as to not arouse Frank’s suspicion.

By the end of the week, they had poked in and out of art galleries and shops in historic downtown, eaten ice cream and buffalo burgers, and were ready to move on. But before they did, Frank wanted to take Rain on the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad.

“The train departs at eight-fifteen, so we gotta get a move on! Oh, Rain, but it will be beautiful, traveling along the winding Colorado river with you, Rain of the forest, Rain of sea,” he sang. “Rain, the beauty queen of the desert.”

Vera declined with a headache. She was having a hard time waking up over the weak coffee Frank had brought up from the motel lobby. After the door closed behind them, Rain chattering away, Vera lay back against the headboard and tried to take in a deep breath. She may as well have been sipping air through a straw. Maybe it was true what Stevie said about chi because Vera could feel it draining from her body.

For the first time since they’d left Joshua Tree, Vera dropped the façade. She took an oxycodone, then lay back on the bed in the dark, the air blowing ice cold across the sweat beads on her skin. So, this was bone-tired. Against the dark pain, she cried out for Stevie the queen of the heartaches, whose cell phone had been disconnected. I’m sorry. I love you, still and always. I see. I see it now, this life, this life offers beauty and pain up to its very edges, take it, take it.

Hours later a voice brought her home, “Ma Vi! Ma Vi.” Rain wrapped her arms around Vera’s neck, planting little kisses across her check. Vera struggled, clawing her way back. “Settle down, gracious,” she snapped as Frank flipped on the light by the bed.

“We got pizza for dinner,” he announced, holding a large box in his hands.

“Roni with cheese,” Rain said, jumping on the bed. “Cause we all like it.”

Vera shook her head. She reached for her glasses on the nightstand. “I must look a fright.”

“You sleep all day?” Frank asked, a worried look on his face.

“What time is it?”

Rain interrupted, holding up Frank’s phone. “Ma Vi, lookey,” she said, sticking the screen in Vera’s face. “My took a selfie. And drank a Shirley Temple. But don’t worry, it isn’t real, only make believing.”

In the photo, Frank and Rain sit in the train’s dining car under a plastic dome. On the table, maraschino cherries sparkle inside two glasses of soda. They grin for the camera. Rain’s little body leans against Frank’s, pink sunhat pushed back from her smiling face. They could be related.

“It’s the funniest thing,” Frank told Vera, biting into a slice. “A woman on the train recognized Rain.”

“What?”

“She had a weird finger,” Rain said.

“It was in a splint,” Frank explained. “She swore up and down that she recognized Rain.”

“I said my name was Susan,” Rain jumped in.

And so Vera told them about the MISSING girl on the milk carton.

    *     *    *

Cortez. The four corners. Land of the Anasazi. Canyon of The Ancients, the ancestors, tall silent red rocks which had stood the test of time.

“This is a cute little town,” Vera declared, trying to sound joyful but ending flat.

Frank pulled the truck alongside the curb. “It’s nothing more than fast food, a drive-thru liquor, and a hardware.”

Rain sat quietly between them.

Vera grabbed the AAA travel book from the dashboard and opened to a cornered page, trying to steady her shaky hand. “Rain, did you know that your town features real live stagecoach rides?”

The child pondered Vera’s false cheer. She climbed up onto her knees to get a better view through the windshield. “My going to be lonely,” she prophesied.

“No such thing as alone when you’ve got people who love you,” Frank said.

Vera could hear the tight pain in his throat. She took the child’s small hand and squeezed it.

Rain bit her lower lip, fighting back big tears. “But, you love me.”

Frank worked his jaw hard. He reached over and placed his hand on theirs. It was heavy and hot and felt all right. The three stared through the front windshield at a Ruby’s Diner just down the street.

“First,” Frank said. “I could use a slice of pie.”

“I like cherry,” Rain announced. “But only with white ice cream.”

In the distance, dark ominous clouds threatened an afternoon storm. Frank helped Vera down the sidewalk to the diner. Her legs felt like jelly and they took their time, Rain hiding at the edge of his left side. Once inside they ordered three slices of cherry pie with vanilla ice cream from a young man with angry acne across his forehead and listened to the thunder growing closer. There were only two other customers—an old man in a cowboy hat sipping a cup of coffee, and a young woman with a pierced eyebrow eating a greasy burger.

On her way to the ladies’ room, Vera spotted the MISSING poster with Rain’s face. She ripped it from the wall and took it into the ladies. In the disabled person’s stall, she sat down on the toilet and closed her eyes against the stabbing pain. Relief, relief what in the hell was this life about anyway? She opened the poster and saw the number scratched in red ink with a name. Five, four, three, two, she grabbed the sticky metal bars on either side and with a grunt and stood. Thunder bellowed nearby. Rain, likely.

The payphone by the emergency exit was keyed with four letter words. She took a Wet Wipes from the pack in her purse and cleaned off the numbers as she dialed.

He answered on the fifth ring, voice thick with sleep. “Yeah.”

“Is this Dylan Gomez?”

“I ain’t got your money,” he yelled, slamming down the phone.

Back at the table, Vera flattened the crinkled poster.

“Rain, can you show us which way?”

Rain stuck out a small arm and pointed west, her dark eyebrows knitted together.

The waiter gave them a suspicious glance as he set down the check, but then it could have been Vera’s imagination. By then, her fever was one hundred and four.

Rain lived in a clapboard house of peeling green paint and old furniture on the front porch. A brown muscled dog in the yard lunged as they approached, but his leash caught up short. “Get back, Harley,” Rain commanded. The dog whined and sat back on its haunches. Vera and Frank each took a small hand and they walked shoulder-to-shoulder up the concrete steps and across the squeaky wooden porch to the front door. Vera had to stop twice to catch her breath.

Rain let go of their hands and peered inside through the locked screen door “D?” she called out. A TV blared a news program inside. A young man appeared. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. “Girl?” he asked, peering out, and not in a way that seemed excited or relieved, but more like he wondered if he were still stoned on the sagging couch in front of the television.

Rain nodded her small head. “Yes,” she whispered.

The winds picked up in the cottonwood tree and the dog growled low.

Dylan Gomez stepped outside. He wore faded jeans but no shirt. His chest was shiny brown and shrunken. His dark hair grew past his shoulders. He had her eyes. But his were rimmed in red. The heavy pit in her stomach told Vera that she had made the wrong decision. He reached out and grabbed the little girl by the arm. “Where in the hell have you been?”

“Easy,” Frank said, his voice steady. “She’s back now.”

“I’m sorry, D,” Rain whispered.

“Girl?” he asked, peering out, and not in a way that seemed excited or relieved, but more like he wondered if he were still stoned on the sagging couch in front of the television.

Dylan Gomez’ fingers gripped her arm turning the flesh under his tips white. “Cops been lookin’ for you.”

Frank took a step toward him. Dylan couldn’t have been more than five-seven. He looked up at Frank. The dog barked, straining at its leash.

“Let go now,” Frank said. “Let her go.”

Ignoring the warning, Dylan jerked Rain closer. “Do it again—I’ll give you somethin’ to be sorry about.” Dylan turned to Frank and Vera. “You with child services? Did the cop catch that bitch?”

A shiver ran down Vera’s spine and she grabbed the back of a rusted chair to keep from falling.

The dog lunged to the end of its leash, barking with fury. “Come on, girl. Inside.” He jerked her toward the door.

“D, don’t,” Rain cried. “It hurts.”

“I said let her go,” Frank commanded.

“Fuck you,” Dylan said. “She’s mine.”

And so, Frank cold-cocked him.

*     *     *

The sky cleared without a warning just outside of town, the storm leaving traces of dark wet pavement and small puddles in its wake. They drove to Monument National Park. Frank paid the fee at the ranger kiosk and drove into the park.  He found an empty campsite off the main road, far from any facilities or tourists, and parked beside a large boulder. The last of the day was sinking soft pink light toward evening.

After he made Rain an impromptu treat of cheese and Cracker Jacks in the cab to keep her occupied, he joined Vera in the back for their conversation.

Vera said she was glad that she’d done it the way she had and hoped that Frank wasn’t too mad. The sheets of pain made it hard for her to sufficiently explain her reasons, but they had loved each other long enough to let misunderstandings slide. She wouldn’t go into hospice. It was best to give things their proper respect. They’d lived in the desert under stars their whole married life.

Frank wiped the tears from his face. He gave her a pain pill. He pulled the quilt over her shaking frame. “Your daughter finally did it,” he said, kissing the top of Vera’s head. “Get some rest.”

As night passed, Vera flew, circling over the canyon of red arches while her husband seated in the cab of a truck below stared out into the darkness and made plans for the small peace offering curled in sleep beside him.

In the morning, Frank’s voice carried through the heavy fog. “Thought we’d head on down to El Paso, then through the Franklin Mountains down into Chihuahua, Mexico.”

“My has never been to Mexico,” Rain sang, patting Vera’s head a rat-a-tat-tat with her small hand.

Peachy, Vera thought, feeling the pills enter her blood stream. Maybe there was chi and maybe there wasn’t. Maybe it was one time and that’s all you got, no matter how badly you screwed it up, oh well, it was all just water flowing underground until it reached the ocean. And then . . . cold refreshment.

Staci Greason is the author of The Last Great American Housewife. Her essays have appeared in Brevity (Jan 2017), Slate, Angel’s Flight Literary West, the Huffington Post, and many others. She also coaches fellow writers at The Write Muse. www.thewritemuse.biz.

“Please don’t misunderstand me.” She is barefoot and wearing a robe, all soft and white.

This is in the nineties when we live in the house on Taney Avenue, about twenty-five miles from the edge of Harrisburg. She names herself Zephyr and our parents amiably allow it, granting her this little teenage rebellion. I want to change my name too, but I can’t think of anything so I keep it for now.

“Please don’t misunderstand me,” she says. She is seventeen and when she laughs it comes out in a rush like wind. “I’m not crazy.”

Earlier that day, Marla throws a stick at my bedroom window and when I look down, she whispers-screams, “Avette, your sister has lost her mind.”

I want to say, “What else is new,” but don’t, instead climb down clutching the rain gutter. This is all just for show. On the way down, I spot my parents through the kitchen window and they both give me a wave. My mom motions for me to zip my sweater.

We have the type of parents who allow us to make our own bedtimes and to do our chores on whatever time frame we see fit and to set our own punishments when we get out of line, and perhaps this is why my sister and I end up the way we do, although our parents also taught us to take responsibility for our own actions, so perhaps not.

Once I reach the ground, Marla hugs me tight, her body shaking. We are not like this, Marla and I. I try to think of a way to disentangle myself. Eventually, I pretend I’m having a sneezing attack, and she releases me.

“What’s happened?” I ask when I’m freed. “I thought she was with you?”

My sister Zephyr often disappears, from home, from school, from my life, and then pops back up again with a new haircut, or a nose ring, or a venereal disease as she does later when she is twenty-seven and needs me to take off work and drive her to the clinic. She likes to try out different Zephyrs and I love to watch and wait for her to turn and ask me which one I like the best.

Marla sniffles. I notice then that her nose is quite large. “She was but then she just kinda lost it, and went running out, talking about fixing things. You know how my parents are moving us to Cleveland tomorrow. I think she went over to Flanders Park, over by the hiking trail?”

I sigh, roll my eyes, but inside my heart is a hammer. Zephyr’s world is like mine but only louder. I have to take advantage when I get invited in. “OK, let’s go find her,” I say.

Marla’s got her bike there. It still has purple and white streamers coming down from the handle bars even though she is seventeen. I am embarrassed for her, and then for myself as I hop on the back and we glide down the street. I hope I don’t see anyone from school, even though I remember nobody cares so it’s not a big deal. I’m too quiet at school, it freaks people out. The only kids I hang out with are the ones who read fantasy novels during lunch. And Zephyr, of course. But even though I know no one would care, I’m embarrassed anyway because I’m riding on this silly bike with a girl who is wiping tears and snot from her face, and it’s really just the principle of the thing, I guess.

When I am seven, Zephyr is ten, and she is not Zephyr but another name that I am not allowed to say anymore. She shaves both my eyebrows with our mother’s Lady Bic. She does mine as an experiment to see how they look before she does her own. The Powerpuff Girls don’t have eyebrows. It doesn’t occur to her that number one, their eyebrows are probably just covered up by their bangs, and number two, they are cartoons. My mother explains this to her right after Zephyr finishes with me.

She likes to try out different Zephyrs and I love to watch and wait for her to turn and ask me which one I like the best.

They try to draw some eyebrows with markers, but it ends up looking worse. In the end, I go around looking like some kind of alien and at school I freak the other kids out a little. Zephyr starts calling me E.T., but whenever she says it she puts an arm around my shoulder and gives me a squeeze so I don’t mind as much as I should. Still, it takes months for my eyebrows to grow back. You don’t realize how much eyebrows do until you don’t have them anymore. It is worse when it rains. I can’t keep the water from my eyes.

This is not the last time my sister uses me like I am a toy. She dresses me like John Oates to go with her Daryl Hall costume. I hate the mustache she tapes on my upper lip; it itches the bottom of my nose and sneaks into my nostrils whenever I inhale, but I stick with it because she would look ridiculous in her blonde wig without me. I should be more bothered when she uses me how she likes, but I can’t ever help but feel like I am helping her.

On the bike, I look down and see Marla’s got greasy hair. I wonder if Marla even knows. Maybe it’s a fashion statement, shows she’s committed fully to that grunge look, like Kurt Cobain and his hair that’s been dipped in sweat. It would be almost too sad, I think, for Marla to be walking around all day with hair like that and not even realize it. I see she’s got one earring that’s a white cross and one that’s a gold moon. They’re cool, I think, against my better judgment. I wonder if Zephyr’s seen them, though of course she has.

I know Marla’s parents don’t like my sister and they will not be the last ones to feel like that. I’m not surprised. She’s a hard one to like, honestly. She wears these combat boots that we found in my grandfather’s attic after he died. They are two sizes too big, so there’s this loud clomp whenever she puts her foot down and then an accompanying drag when she picks her foot back up. You can always hear her coming from a mile away. She lives her life noisily and doesn’t know any different. When I move into my first apartment after graduating from college, Zephyr crashes at my place for two months and while I am away at work, she leaves a burning grilled cheese sandwich on the stove and doesn’t pay much attention when the fire alarm goes off. “I had my music on,” she tells me, “and you won’t believe how well a fire alarm goes with the beat. It sounded seamless.” The wall next to the stove needs to be redone and the landlord is ready to sue, and even after Zephyr talks him off the ledge by offering some cocaine she just has lying around, I still decide to move out a few months later when my lease is up.

Marla and I ride down the street, then round the corner. I’m impressed with how fast Marla is going, despite having both our weight on the bike. It is the very launch of fall, so when the cool breeze whips at our faces, it feels nice, not punishing. The leaves on the asphalt look like they’ve been painted from fire.

“Whose homeroom are you in this year?” Marla calls back to me.

I grip her shoulders tighter as we ride over a speed bump in the road. “Willoughby’s,” I reply. I don’t want to talk more about it. School is only two weeks in, but I have a feeling that eighth grade will be just as terrible as everyone promises. I ask Zephyr if she has any tips on how to survive middle school, and all she does is roll her eyes and tell me that in the grand scheme of human suffering, middle school ranks considerably lower than global warming and genocide in the Sudan. Zephyr should not write an advice column, I have come to realize.

I could have skipped to tenth but my parents think my social age isn’t quite that advanced, whatever that means. My locker is right by the English wing staircase, so people are always bumping into me on their way to class. In Phys. Ed. we’ve been doing an archery unit, and my arms are so weak that I can’t pull back the bow string. I get out of Home Ec., though, by saying I am so terrified of needles that the sight of them immediately causes me to vomit and faint, in no particular order. My mother even signs off on the note herself and I spend my third period on Tuesdays and Thursdays filling out crosswords in the nurse’s office. So I have that going for me, I guess.

“Cool,” Marla says and I grunt back. If I ask Marla about how to survive middle school, she will probably tell me just to lay low. I think she might have more concrete advice than Zephyr. I consider Marla’s greasy hair and have a feeling eighth grade was no picnic for her.

We reach Flanders Park and she slows to a stop. She walks the bike over to a bike rack and locks it up, although who would actually want to steal that silly thing, I don’t know. “She’s by the hiking trail?” I ask.

Marla shrugs. Her eyes are wide and too large. “I think so. She said something about needing to find virgin earth.”

“Of course she did,” I say, and stifle a chuckle. Marla looks really worried, but she doesn’t know Zephyr like I do. When I am eleven she refuses to talk to me for a week. I wrack my brain for reasons why she’s mad at me, I wonder what I’ve done wrong, if it is because I took the last ice cream sandwich in the freezer, but at the end of the week she tells me she just decided to take an oath of silence to see if she could do it. Zephyr says things, does things, but most of the time doesn’t actually mean anything by it. My mother calls her, not unkindly, “a well of false profundity.” At twelve, she leads an environmental protest at her middle school, but forgets to turn off the bathroom light at home. Even so, she protects me in her own way, like by making me smoke cigarettes when I am thirteen, until I learn how to do that cool trick of puffing out smoky little rings with my mouth, and by punching Tommy Enzo square in the nose at the bus stop when I am in fifth grade, the day after he calls me a whore for taking his seat on the bus, hitting him over and over till he starts to spurt blood all over his yellow polo shirt, till he begins to whimper like a hurt animal, till I have to hold Zephyr back myself while I let him wiggle free towards safety. She is like that.

We walk along the hiking trail, our eyes peeled for Zephyr. When she is eighteen she will have midnight-colored hair but now at seventeen she’s got this bleached blonde look so I hope it will be easy to spot her through the trees. I keep looking past the dark for the flash of light that is my sister. “So she ran away because you’re leaving?” I ask Marla.

When she turns thirty, Zephyr disappears for a little over a week. My parents say she’ll turn up, but I am concerned, and keep calling her cell phone until her voicemail is full. I go to her place but a neighbor tells me she doesn’t live there anymore, and when I peep through the windows, I see only the sun falling in through the glass, flooding with light the empty rooms where my sister used to be. When she finally returns, she laughs and shoves some poker chips in my cupped hands and tells me she went to Atlantic City for a break, just a little getaway is all she needed, and maybe she can stay with me for a while, but when I look down at the poker chips they are made of cardboard, like she got them at a dollar store or something, and when she tells me she is sorry she made me worry, I don’t believe her.

Whenever she runs, I can’t understand why. Marla shrugs, sighs deep. “She was over at my place and my parents wanted her out. They don’t know I’m here. I’m not allowed to talk to her anymore.” She pushes her hair behind her ear and I spot that gold moon glint in the sunlight. “They said they’ll rip up a letter if they find one in the mailbox.”

Early this summer I walk out to the back deck and they are there kissing on the steps. I am not surprised by it really, but rather by the way Zephyr looks at her afterwards, like she wants to swim inside her skin. I don’t understand because Marla seems so utterly ordinary.

At twelve, she leads an environmental protest at her middle school, but forgets to turn off the bathroom light at home. Even so, she protects me in her own way, like by making me smoke cigarettes when I am thirteen, until I learn how to do that cool trick of puffing out smoky little rings with my mouth…”

I have never seen my sister’s eyes look that way, like they could chip in an instant. Usually they are like tiny boulders and I have to be careful when they roll my way to keep from going under.

I guess Marla’s parents want to move away so they can escape Zephyr, but they don’t know that you can never escape my sister. “I used to love them a lot more,” Marla says quietly. “Before.” Before Zephyr.

Finally we see my sister’s bobbing blonde head through the fall foliage. She is a few yards from the hiking trail, standing in a big expanse of dirt. When we get close, we make sure we don’t step on any sticks. There is something in both of us that doesn’t want to make any noise and scare her away.

Zephyr is wearing all white, this ivory-colored robe that makes her look young. I recognize it from my closet. When I am nineteen, she borrows my very first car, a Dodge Neon, to road trip to a Dave Matthews concert. She crashes it after one too many but doesn’t pay me back.

Out near the trees, her feet are bare and black from the earth. Her eyes are closed and she’s got her hands folded together like she’s praying, and I’m surprised. Never before have I seen her pray and I won’t see it again after this.

Her eyes are still closed when she turns to us and says, “Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not crazy.” Her voice rings in the surrounding stillness.

She says the same thing to me soon after that mysterious trip to Atlantic City. Only this time she is not standing in a mess of trees, but lying in a tangle of sheets at the hospital, her eyes a dry red, wild and wide.

I don’t say anything to her that time, but now I ask, “Zephyr, what are you doing?”

“Relax, guys,” she laughs. She is calm. “I know it’s silly, but it just felt right, coming here. You remember, Avette? The golem?”

I remember, but am surprised Zephyr does. There are times I don’t think she’s listening when in fact she’s picking up every word. The golem comes from our dad. He tells us stories sometimes from his mother, who dabbled in Kabbalah every now and again. “You mean the man of clay?”

“What man?” Marla asks.

I think back to what our father told us. “The golem, it’s this man you make out of the earth. You need to have a pure heart and you need to know some word to write on his forehead before he can come to life, and then he’ll be there.”

“To protect you,” my sister adds with a knowing smile.

“He’s just a myth, Zephyr,” I say. “Just from a story. He’s soulless, this Frankenstein thing.”

Marla steps closer to her. “Who is he coming to protect?”

There is a silence that is loud because it is Zephyr’s and she says it without saying it: Us.

I can’t understand. It is not that she wants to create a man out of clay, but rather that she wants to do it for someone like Marla. My sister, who at nine tries to teach herself German and only remembers key phrases, like “Where is the bathroom?” and “I have a headache.” Who draws a comic strip of a feminist superhero named Super Bitch who goes around throwing thunderbolts of enlightenment at every misogynist she sees. Who is the only person I tell after I pee my pants at Pammy Lytle’s house and throw my dirty underwear out her bedroom window where it lands in a tree. She hangs out with Marla nearly every day after school but sometimes I see her twirling her hair at Anthony Slimner at the bus stop. Sometimes she talks to Jennifer Ypsilantis on the phone at night and I overhear her say honey. Why the golem now? I’m not sure of this sister standing in front of me wearing white.

“You’re not making any sense,” I say.

When she is in the hospital for the first time, she holds up her hands to me and asks me if I see all the thousands of pixels in them, how those little boxes of light make up her body and cover her whole, but I don’t see a thing, just skin stitched over veins. I tell her she’s got to stop mixing her medication with coke.

Zephyr stomps one foot on the forest floor. “Avette, your negativity’s bringing me down,” she snaps. Her face is tight. “I know it’s stupid, it won’t work, but it just makes me feel better. You know what I mean?”

We don’t reply. It wouldn’t matter if we did. She tells us we can stay if we want but we are not allowed to help. Marla wrings her hands and leans against a tree, never taking her eyes off Zephyr. I crouch in the dirt, write our names on the ground with a leaf.

She begins and we are witnesses to it all. Grabbing clumps of dirt, sifting through till the sticks and rocks and leaves are thrown out, sprinkling drops of water from an Evian bottle she’s brought, she crafts a man out of mud, with eyes of earth, muscles made from mounds of soil. I wonder how she can stand it, she who’s never had the patience to finish a full game of Monopoly.

I think about my father’s stories. They never end well. “You can’t play God, Zephyr,” I say, but it isn’t true. She’s been playing God my whole life.

Zephyr doesn’t reply. She is busy sculpting the face, with its square chin and wide full nose. It looks a bit like Bruce Springsteen. She presses her thumbs sideways to make indents for the blank eyes.

“Z, let’s just talk for a second, okay?” Marla says. She is hugging herself like she wants to climb inside her own skin. Zephyr stands, shoots Marla a crushing glare meant to level her, and then turns back to her dirt.

When she is done he lies there flat on the ground and Zephyr towers over him holding a stick like a blade. She carves something onto his forehead. “What is it?” Marla asks, but Zephyr doesn’t answer. A secret word.

By this point, her hands are black with soil and her white robe is stained. She looks down at herself a moment and then takes the robe off. She is above him in her underthings, a matching Tweety Bird set that makes her look younger than she is. Her hip bones jut out sharply, she looks scrawnier than I’ve ever seen her. I could take an arm and splinter it like the stick that’s in her hand. I feel like her body will flutter away in the wind and I want to cover her with leaves to keep her warm, like I do that day when we are older at the hospital, tucking that soft white sheet up to her chin while she trembles underneath.

She stands over him and waits.

I feel like her body will flutter away in the wind and I want to cover her with leaves to keep her warm, like I do that day when we are older at the hospital, tucking that soft white sheet up to her chin while she trembles underneath.

Marla goes over, tries to hold her hand but she pushes her away. She doesn’t look at her, but down at him. Marla chokes back a sob. I wish I could tell her to wash her damn hair once in a while but I feel like that would just be embarrassing for everyone involved. She returns to her tree and slumps to the dirt, her head in her hands.

Later when she is in college, Zephyr buys a yellow lab pup on a whim and keeps him until she gets sick of him peeing on her rug. The pup goes to my parent’s house, where I am finishing up high school. I master staring down the dog right at the exact moment when he’s about to pee on the carpet, till he’s so uncomfortable that he learns to go outside in only two weeks. My parents don’t mind having him, but it’s me who ends up taking care of him, just because I can’t ignore the begging, the need that’s embedded in every muscle of his body. There are times when I look at that dog and am reminded of Marla, in more ways than one.

“Babe, stop it,” Zephyr says. “Please. You know why I’m doing this, but I need you to stop crying. I’m trying to concentrate.” Marla quietens down. I think she’s got a future in drama club, except for the fact that her nose is too big. She’d only get bit parts playing dancing trees with her face all covered so you couldn’t even tell it was her, which is kind of tragic if you stop to think about it.

The sun tumbles down the sky slowly. My stomach growls and I wonder what’s for dinner at home. I wonder how long we’re supposed to stay here before we realize what won’t happen. I wonder if I can get away with skimming chapter six of Lord of the Flies before the quiz tomorrow.

At nine, she constructs a lemonade stand out of my dad’s old poker table and parks it at the corner of our street. We spend all day making the product and she swears we’ll be rich, but we only get three customers, bringing our grand total to seventy-five cents. But she insists that it will happen, people will come, so we wait until the air cools and it has grown dark. We wait until the flies swarming around our lemonade pitchers have all gone to sleep, until my arms are pocked with goosebumps, until I use my sugar-coated hand to loosen her clenched fingers and hold onto her disappointment, until my father walks over and says the time has come for us to go back home.

From my spot on the ground, I can see the golem’s thick stomach, looking much like a pillow packed hard and full with flour. I wait, watching, and it is just like the day when I am all grown and I sit on the floor of Zephyr’s bathroom, where she lies sprawled, and I clean up her face and scoop up the pills that have escaped from her meds tray and I flush the coke down the toilet and I wait, staring at her strange stillness, because I know if I will only be patient, it will happen.

There in the woods, I look at the golem and I wait for his stomach to rise and fall.

She tells me often how she dreams of me before I am born. As a toddler, she thinks up my hair, each brown curl, my eyes, one slightly rounder than the other, the lone freckle on my nose. I am her blank canvas.

When I am a young child, our bedrooms are right next to each other and the walls are paper thin, so I hear when Zephyr cries out from her nightmares. Our parents want us to soothe ourselves, so they don’t come running, but I do. I sneak into her room, and by then she is awake, and she is crying, and holding her hands out for me, and when I squeeze them tight, she whispers to me that she dreams she is in heaven being made, constructed from scratch, but there is a clog somewhere on the assembly line, and so when she tumbles down to earth, there are a few parts of her that haven’t been put in just yet. In the morning, she turns my sleepy face to hers and says, “Don’t worry, I didn’t mess up with you. You’re all finished.”

She sees me entire, imagines every particle, tries my name on her tongue before I am even a kernel of life in our mother’s womb. She tells me I am a creation of her own heart and I believe her when I am a young child chasing after her in the grass and I believe her even still sitting now in the dirt.

When the time comes, Marla tells us she needs to leave. Her parents are waiting for her, they’re probably livid that she’s snuck out. “I wasn’t allowed to come out, you know,” she says to my sister. “But I wanted to see you one last time.” There is a note of hope in her voice that makes me wince for her.

She pecks Zephyr on the cheek, and Zephyr flashes a lazy smile, still standing over the golem. Marla waits, expectant but only for a moment. I wonder if she’s thinking about her parents and the way they look at her now. I wonder if she’s worrying about starting over in Cleveland, where there probably won’t be someone who finds that greasy hair charming. I wish she had known before she started with Zephyr, I wish I could have warned her not to love this girl who can’t even give her a goodbye after shaking up her entire life.

Marla doesn’t look at me when she leaves. There will be more days, September and October ones, yet she is only temporary. There will be more hers to come, but despite Zephyr’s little cruelties, I am here for the long haul, all the way until she decides she cannot endure the noise of her life any longer.

Zephyr is shivering now in the wine-tinted air. I tell her to put the robe back on. She shakes her head no, but after another moment she does. She stares at him still. “What do you think he’ll say?” she laughs. It is a sharp sound in the silence we have been sitting in. It crashes against the trees around us and slices its way to my eardrums. I would not be surprised if she’s forgotten Marla entirely by now, but that only makes me want to stay here longer, to make sure she remembers me.

“He can’t talk,” I tell her. “He’s an unfinished man.” I stand, creep closer to her but she doesn’t move. When I am near enough, I crouch down to see him better. Even in the dimming light, he looks like he is only sleeping.

“That’s right,” she nods. She looks down at me. “Isn’t that sad, Avette?” Zephyr pulls her hair back into a ponytail. I don’t answer. I am suddenly touched by the crude life in front of me. I want to reach forward and grip his hand but I know that it will only crumble and that Zephyr will smack me for it.

My sister sighs. “Sometimes I feel like the biggest idiot on the planet,” Zephyr says. “I thought he could help me. I just didn’t want things not to be real this time. But it’s always the same, Avette. Things are never real.”

I am hunger and fear solid enough that you can hold in your hand. She is all sound and sheen. She is made of splinters that crack down to her very marrow.

I clean up her face and scoop up the pills that have escaped from her meds tray and I flush the coke down the toilet and I wait, staring at her strange stillness…

I say, “Things are real enough. And at least you know you’re not made of dirt, like this guy.” She kicks my shoe, but it is not as hard as I think it will be, and that makes me want to give her my jacket and carry her all the way home. And the part of me that doesn’t love her hates her because I know she will not let me, she will never let me. But despite all those times she disappears from me, from those small moments when we are children until that last final hour, I never want to stop trying to hold her still, to push my own air into her lungs whenever she thinks she can’t keep on breathing.

We wait. The park will close soon and we will make the trek back home in the night. She will convince me tomorrow to go vegetarian with her because she’s been reading about cruel practices in the livestock industry. She will confess how much she likes Celine Dion and beg me not to laugh. She will want to know what I think about Marla’s earrings and I will be oddly grateful when she doesn’t say anything about the greasy hair. She will ask me to follow her and I will, anyplace.

But now, here in the plum dark, we wait for the golem. She says, “Tell me a story. Anything. You talk and I’ll listen. I just want to hear you talk.” I place my hands in the dirt and when I open my mouth, I don’t even know how to begin.

Taylor Kobran holds an MFA from Hollins University. She was runner-up for the 2016 Andrew James Purdy Prize for Short Fiction and was the 2013 recipient of the Moorehead-Timberlake Award for Creative Writing at Dickinson College. She is interested in literacy education and is from New Jersey.

 

 

Since you always wanted to know. Since you’ve been asking me ever since I moved here.

I had lost my job and she had lost her mother. We were great at losing things. She asked her therapist, how could we lose all these beautiful things in a small world? Where do they go if we live in the same house, barely leave town? There was no good answer I ever heard. She stopped seeing the guy after he suggested we break up. No way, she shook her head. I can’t lose anything else. He can’t lose anything else. There’s no sense in that, she screamed. She got led out of there by a rent-a-cop.

We sat for hours at the kitchen table, going over the same bills, plucking magical money from the sky. I drank gin and she drank milk as The Band played on our old record player, like a haunted old quartet that roamed the narrow nearby dirt roads. The same piles of dust appeared on our cabinets and duvets. I put a hand on her shoulder and she said, don’t tell me it’ll be all right, I’m just not in the mood to hear that right now. I said, what are you in the mood to hear? She just shot me this pathetic smile and said, this dumb old song on the record player. So I took my gin outside and watched a few hawks fly back and forth in the dark ugly air.

I think what really started it is that her fucking brother showed up one day. He carried this old Sears & Roebuck luggage bag and started asking for money. He was missing a few teeth and was growing this biker beard, much different than the college know-it-all that he was when I first met him. My wife gave him the royal treatment, letting him sit down in my chair, even, and I told him he couldn’t until he shaved off that ridiculous beard. A small fight broke out. I knocked over the lamp. He got me in the kidney with a decent hook. My wife screamed at us to stop and I made sure to put a hand on her shoulder this time to tell her I would be all right. She said something and I said something and her brother did leave and he never got his fucking money. Which is all I wanted in the first place. That takes a real coward, to walk into a house of confusion and ask for something. I never did see him again but I’m sure she ran after him days later when I was off looking for work.

And I did look, too. I tried warehouse and farm work. I even tried the goddamn diner as a fry cook but nothing ever came out of it. Most days I would just sit with a six pack of Shiner and a pack of Parliaments on a park bench and watch the same dark ugly air. This entire place was just coated with the stink of everyone’s lives. I knew the end was coming and I tried to blanket it with as much beer and smoke as I could, as most people around these parts do. 

I drank gin and she drank milk as The Band played on our old record player, like a haunted old quartet that roamed the narrow nearby dirt roads.

I know this story isn’t exciting. But you asked.

So about a few weeks later, what I was waiting to happen finally did happen. I caught her sneaking around. I had come home in a haze and I found them necking on the back porch. He was drinking my gin and they had Blue Cheer on the record player. I tried to be stealthy but all I did was grab the motherfucker by his neck and throw him down and kick him in the ribs. My wife just sat there. Didn’t say a word. Which was surprising. I threw him down in the yard and he tried to run but I caught him down by the marsh and grabbed a big clump of mud and rammed it down his throat. I let him go after. I saw him stumble off towards the ridge up far ahead and those same damn hawks were flying, watching us, watching him, thinking what fools we were, more than likely.

I went back up to the porch and she didn’t say a word. Is it all right now, I said? She sat there, silent, happy probably, in a stupid tiny kingdom. I said, I’m gone. Still nothing. I went in and threw everything I could in a few trash bags. I stood in the doorway then, all these shadows of us and other things dancing around, trying to settle. I called her name and said to kiss me goodbye but she sat there, just listening to the music. I left and took the truck, figuring it’d be a good damn idea to strand her for a while.

Well, it really didn’t end there. Because she found me soon after. It really was a small world. Remember when I said how could we lose such things in a world as small as this? We never lose them. Not finally, anyway.

I moved back home with my mother. She wasn’t doing very well. I did all the housework and was getting it ready to put up for sale since I knew she didn’t have long. I didn’t have much desire to sleep in the same room again, drink gin in the same basement. So it had to go. Everyone would have wanted it that way, I think.

Well, one day my mom was at the doctor’s office, and I came home quick to eat lunch. I was out in the front yard, about to get the mail, when this taxi pulls up and my wife gets out. In this big old white sundress and this ridiculous hat, like she was First Lady or something. Guest speaker at the church bazaar, I guess. Well, she took a long deep look at me, and I held out my arms, as if to say, make your move, this is a boxing match now. She started to weep and I didn’t know what to do so I started to turn back to the house when she grabbed me by the arm. I turned and I finally saw the grief in her eyes. All the sorrow she had conjured in full plain view now. But I didn’t give in. I said, go find the man with mud in his mouth. Go run to him and sing Rock Me Baby, maybe he’ll come by and make you feel sixteen again. She acted like she was going to slap me, but instead just turned and went back into the same taxi. I guess she told him not to leave. She stuck her head out of the window and told me that if I ever changed my mind, I would know where she was. I just spat on the ground and they drove away. I got the mail. Everything became ordinary again.

A month later my mother did die. I guess she just had a bad doctor. I buried her, sold the house, had a yard sale, left everything that didn’t sell in the small dead yard. I posted signs all over wobbly telephone poles and grimy phone booth walls, but no one came biting. No one wanted the things I had, even for free. I expected her to come by, to rifle through all the dust and gin-soaked pieces of my life, but I guess she had enough of seeing the dots and blurs and marks of our ridiculous time spent. I left it all in a box for the trash man and I went to go find another place to live. What I had fit in the trunk of the car. I went to a diner, asked to see a phone book, picked the first town that I thought sounded even halfway welcoming, which was here. Got back in the car, drove down, knowing full well that even though I had a wife I guess I could go home to again, she wouldn’t be able to accept my dust, and I wouldn’t be able to accept the bullshit silence she gave when I beat her lover to an inch of his stupid, rotten life. I couldn’t live with someone who didn’t appreciate what I did for them. I can’t even live with myself, barely. It’s enough to make a man sick.

One day I know she’ll find me, she’ll have to. She’ll search for an address just like I searched for money or reasons or even another glass of something cold to drink. You’re given things throughout your life and you can choose to hang on or you can choose to lose them, only to find them and touch them again. There’s plenty of chances for someone—even if you’re pathetic like that guy who drank with my wife—to find what you want, to find what you need. Right now, I have no reason to get up off this stool and go hunting for something that’s just an ugly piece of an old nightmare. Especially not now, when this town looks the way it does. It’s better than the old ugly air that I saw before, many times, many nights, when I knew that life could get better than what I had.

I’m rambling, I’m sorry. But you wanted to know. You’ve been asking me ever since I got here. Tell me your story, now. Come on. I’ll buy you another beer and we’ll take a table and you can tell me the best story you ever heard or the worst one you ever heard. I promise to listen. I promise not to talk over you.

That promise I can keep, this time.

Kevin Richard White is the author of the novels Steep Drop and The Face Of A Monster. His short fiction has been previously published by Akashic Books, Tahoe Writers Works, Crack The Spine, and Cactus Heart Press. He is also a contributor to the indie music magazine Manifesto Of Sound, and is the head editor of Viewfinder Literary Magazine. He lives in Pennsylvania.