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My father closes the refrigerator door and takes seven steps, so I know he is halfway through the dining room when he lets out one of those long-winded farts to beat the band. The shuffling sound of socks on tired linoleum tells me he is doing the victory dance he always does when he thinks he has outdone himself.

My friend Debbie mouths, “Yuck, gross.” She knows better than to make a sound.

From the kitchen there is a familiar thwack and dishes rattle. I don’t need to see my mother to know she has slapped the table the way she does when she wants to make her point.

“Jesus Christ, I’m eating here,” she shouts.

“S’cuse,” he says, but he sounds more proud than sorry, which must piss her off more, because she whacks the table again.

For a minute I start humming This old man he played one, he played knick-knack on my thumb, to block out what might come next. They don’t know I’m in the closet so when I hum I do it in my head so only Debbie and me can hear. While I hum I count his footsteps. I’m good at this keeping track while I do something else like hum, so I know he’s going to sit down even before I hear him plop into his chair.

It’s always the same with him, seventeen footsteps to get from his Lazy-Boy to the refrigerator, four from the chair to the TV, five to get to the bottom of the stairs. Even though my mother always nags and calls him unreliable, you can at least guess where you stand with him. Not like her, who might take twenty steps to get from the kitchen to the living room, but sometimes gets there in twelve or fourteen.

My father rattles the handle on the side of his chair and the swish tells me he is back to half-lying-half-sitting while he swears at the idiot ref on TV, which is what he was doing before he got up to get his beer.

With him settled, and my mother still in the kitchen, Debbie and me get back to playing in the closet under the stairway. My father started to build this closet before I was born. Like most things in his life, he never finished it. He broke through the wall and put up some shelves but never hung the door. To spite him for not finishing, my mother hardly puts anything in here, which leaves room to spread out when we play.

Before my father got up, we were playing Miss America Pageant, but now Debbie wants to play Indian princess falling in love with the white-man cowboy, which is something we saw on an old movie when we snuck downstairs a few weeks ago after my mother went to bed. We waited until we knew she was asleep; watched her back through the crack of the open bedroom door. She was scrunched all the way on the edge of her side of the bed, even though my father wasn’t in there with her. Him not being there was the reason we crept downstairs in the first place. My mother always turns all the lights out if he’s not home by ten. I don’t want the neighbors to see him stagger either, but I worry he might trip and break his neck on the front steps, so whenever I can, I sneak down and turn the porch light back on.

Like every time we’ve played this new game since that night, Debbie wants to be Laughing Waters. It’s the best Indian princess name and just once I want it to be my name, but Debbie is my best friend, the only one I let inside because most kids would make fun or not know what to say, so I let her have her way so she doesn’t get mad and disappear. I can be Bubbling Brook she says, but that’s too much like Laughing Waters, so I pick Weeping Willow instead.

We don’t have buffalo teeth, or feathers, or stones to make necklaces in the closet, so we wrap winter scarves around our necks and pretend we are weaving baskets near the fire when the handsome cowboys ride up. Hers wears a white hat over his blond hair and looks like Brad Pitt. No matter what we play, my boyfriend always has shamrock green eyes and curly black hair like my father. Sometimes I wonder if my mother ever told my father dreamy things about his eyes. When I get married, I know I will tell my husband what is nice about him.

The cowboys are just getting off their horses to tell us their names when my father pumps the handle on his recliner to get up. There is one step, then a crash like thunder and the sound of breaking glass. In a blink Debbie is gone. No matter how I try, I can’t make her stay when the noise starts.

My mother’s feet thud-thud-thud ten times. Already she is in the living room. The sound coming from her throat reminds me of when the car won’t start.

I peak around the missing doorframe at her back. She steps over my father’s passed out body. Without touching him, she picks up the end table and wipes up a wet mark on the tabletop with the tissue she always keeps in the sleeve of her cardigan. “Would it kill you to use a goddamn coaster,” she says, even though he is passed out. “I can’t have one frigging thing you don’t ruin.”

I am extra careful to slip out of the closet when she isn’t looking so she won’t know where I came from, because I am going to be ten on my next birthday and she says that is too old for playing in a closet. It is never good to do what she thinks you are too old to do. I learned that once and for all when I was brushing Debbie’s hair when we were almost eight. My mother had asked me what I was doing, and when I said can’t you see I am brushing Debbie’s hair she took the hairbrush from me. She said you-are-too-old-for-this-make-believe-nonsense, spanking me with the hairbrush each time she said a word.

Ever since then, I don’t mention Debbie.

The closer I get to where my father sprawls on the floor, the more he looks dead, but I know he isn’t because he is making the fog-horn sounds he makes when he is asleep. My mother bends down to pick up some pieces of the broken vase. She gawks at those two pieces of broken glass like if she stares hard enough she might figure something out. I look closer at a wet spot on the braided rug beside my father’s face to make sure it isn’t blood, but it’s just spit-up dribbling off his chin. My mother finally sees me and as if she can read my mind and knows I want to wipe his mouth and put a pillow under his head. “Don’t touch him,” she says. “Just get the broom.” She sighs so deep she looks like a blow up raft when you pull the plug and the air escapes in a hiss.

I dart to the broom closet and grab the dustpan and broom; afraid if I take too long she’ll pass out too, leaving me alone to clean up their mess.

When I get back, she is still staring at the glass in her hand, making little start and stop sucking sounds, as if even breathing has become too much to handle.

Her head tilts to the left. I lean in a little closer, because her eyes look like what she is about to say is really important.

“I was so happy the night we got engaged and your father gave me that vase filled with violets.” For a second, she sounds like someone else, like someone I want to know better. That happens every now and then, and when it does, it makes me want to tuck in next to her on the couch, and coil my finger in her hair. I take a step toward her, but she pulls back and tosses the broken pieces into the dustpan. Her voice is all-brittle again. “It might as well be broken. It’s been empty for years.”

I sweep up the rest of the vase and put the broom and dustpan away, but when she isn’t looking I hide the broken vase in my closet. I am thinking if I fix it and buy violets; maybe she could be happy like that again.

 

A few hours later my father is still asleep on the living room floor. He is on his back, making huge, gurgling snoring sounds. In the kitchen I eat dinner in silence while my mother goes on about never having one uneventful day, and having to do everygoddamnthing all by herself.

“I’ll help,” I say.

“What can you do?”

I lower my head and separate the tuna from the macaroni and cheese on my plate. When she isn’t looking, I push little flakes of tuna over the rim and cover them with my napkin.

“I can dust and mop after school. I’m almost ten, I’m old enough.”

I know I will miss going next-door to Patty’s everyday to do my homework if my mother agrees. I like next-door Patty with her pink-tinted lips and hair neat in a bun, so unlike my mother, who doesn’t have time for smooth hair or a touch of lipstick. When Patty leans over me to check my homework, she smells like baby-powder and there’s a sparkle in her voice when her husband Eddie comes home and she asks him about his day. She kisses him hello on the lips everyday, and looks happy to see him, not just relief because he didn’t go drinking, but like she is glad just to have him there.

After dinner, I do the dishes so my mother can go out on the front step to smoke with Patty.

Maybe because she lives in the row house next door, and can hear the truth through the too thin walls, or because her Eddie drinks too – whatever the reason – my mother talks to Patty. She is the only exception to my mother’s it’s nobody’s business rule. I have overheard plenty from my closet while they sit on the porch or at our kitchen table pouring out coffee and their troubles.

I rinse out the sponge while my mother carries the coffee pot and two mugs out to the front porch. After she leaves, I cover the rest of the casserole with aluminum foil, and put the dish on the pilot light to stay warm. I scoop up the napkin filled with tuna flakes and push it to the bottom of the trashcan. Why anyone has to ruin good macaroni and cheese with tuna fish is beyond me, but the nights she makes it, it’s easier to get rid of the fish when she isn’t looking than to remind her I don’t like tuna.

Even with the water running I hear my father stir. I turn the water off and carry his warmed plate to the living room. He wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his flannel shirt and settles in his chair. I flatten a section of newspaper so he can use it like a placemat on his lap. His eyes are yellow-green and bloodshot when he winks and asks if I don’t mind getting him a cold one.

“How about it, my pretty baby girl?” he adds. I do mind, but I mind less after he says that, so I go to the kitchen and open his beer with the magnet bottle opener stuck to the freezer door. The opener has a design on it like an American flag. We got it from Avon when Patty was selling it last summer around the fourth of July. We don’t really have money for things like Avon, but we had to buy something, since it was Patty. Lucky for us she stopped selling in August, so we didn’t have to buy anything else.

After I give him his beer my mother is still outside, so Debbie and I are in the closet playing getting ready for Saturday night dates with our boyfriends. Debbie wears a pink sweater-set with jeans, and I wear a turquoise v-neck with a short black skirt. We saw Rachel wear these same outfits on Friends on TV, so we know they are the latest thing. We take turns putting on each other’s makeup before our boyfriends ring the bell to pick us up. Our boyfriends, Matt and Timmy, look the same as the cowboys, but now they wear Gap chinos and pressed shirts, and smell of woodsy cologne. They take us to Appleby’s and tell us we can order anything on the menu. I want spare ribs, but I know Rachel thinks you can’t look ladylike eating spareribs, so me and Deb get the shrimp combo with two kinds of shrimp, like on the commercial. After dinner we go dancing and Timmy holds my hand. While we’re dancing my father gets up and I don’t stop dancing, just count to seventeen, listen to the fridge door open and close, and count seventeen again and he is back in his chair.

He has hardly sat back down when the front door swishes open. My mother comes in and picks something up and slams it down. It is probably his beer. Sometimes talking to Patty calms her down, but not tonight. Tonight she starts right in on him. Already Debbie and Matt and Timmy are gone, and I am sitting in the closet alone, holding my own hand.

“You haven’t had enough?”

“One beer, Alice,” he says.

“One fucking beer, my ass,” she says.

Like usual, instead of answering, my father raises the volume on the television louder, as if by some miracle it will drown her out while she tells him for the millionth time how much she hates her life. She stomps from the living room to the kitchen, opens drawers and bangs them closed saying, I am sick of it, sick of it, sick of it. It might be my only chance, so I run upstairs and make a tent under the covers to read with my flashlight.

“I have had it. I can’t take anymore,” she says. There is a crash and rattle, like a metal tray hitting the wall, and I know she is throwing the kitchen utensils again.

“ Alice.”

“You wouldn’t drink if you loved us.”

I am trying not to listen, but needing to know if he loves us is all that I can hear.

 

When she finally goes to bed, I listen for her sobbing to stop. It seems like hours before I tiptoe to her door to hear the steady breathing that means she is asleep. My father is sitting in the dark when I go downstairs. I pick up the spatula and slotted spoon, the eggbeater and wire whip to clear a path and lead him, half-sleepwalking to their bedroom. My mother doesn’t move when I pull the cover up the best I can from his side to cover her too.

I listen from my room. When he starts to snore, Deb and me will sneak back to the closet with the flashlight. She’ll help me glue the vase back together. We’ll get it fixed, even if it takes all night.Carol Brill is the author of two novels in progress, Ordinary Eggshells and Peace by Piece. Her work has appeared in The Press of Altantic City, NovelAdvice, WriterAdvice and several professional journals. She holds a MFA degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University.

 [img_assist|nid=4293|title=”Paysage de la Drome” by Kathleen Babb © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=200]Luz blessed the day her neighbor, Don Chuy rolled-over his milk truck. Nobody would ask for an accident like that, but now, years later, she knew Don Chuy blessed the day too. It was the day he was miraculously spared from the jaws of death, the day the Virgin spoke to him.

The day of the accident that led to the miracle, Don Chuy was at the top of the hill, about to descend, his truck horn bleating, telling the housewives he’d arrived with fresh milk from his ranchito. Suddenly a young mother carrying a baby stepped in front of his old pick-up. He swerved and rolled over, down the hill.

The cans clattered, splashing thin cow’s milk over the discarded Sabritas bags and Cloralex bottles that littered the hillside. They came to rest just before the dirt road below, in a brilliant patch of sun, stacked like silver bullets. Later, Don Chuy remembered nothing about the pickup going roof-wheel-roof-wheel. Luz was outside with her soup pan, waiting to buy milk, when the truck crunched to a stop against the rock on which she sat when she bagged roasted squash seeds.

Luz, who had the only telephone on the hill, rushed inside. She remembered how her youngest son Oscar had talked about a fight at the basketball courts—a guy was cut and somebody’d called 9-1-1 for the emergency. Luz dialed and miraculously, minutes later, an ambulance screeched to a stop at the top of the hill. Two rescuers clambered down with a narrow stretcher and a bag of life-saving equipment, and when they peered into the truck, Don Chuy was not smashed to pieces in the driver’s side where he should have been, but curled up peacefully on the passenger’s side as if he were sleeping off an all-nighter.

Since the day he walked away unscratched from his truck, Don Chuy had been organizing tours to the Guadalupe Basilica in Mexico City . What better way to give thanks than to bring a busload of people to the feet of the Virgin? All the more to adore her.

Don Chuy charged an affordable fare, only 180 pesos round trip, including snacks. Everyone knew he wasn’t profiting. He ladled yogurt from big plastic tubs into cups and passed out bean and potato tacos and fruit.

Luz wanted the Virgin of Guadalupe to save her sons. Well, her daughter too. Jimena’s life was just as much a mess as her brothers, but she had more confidence in women to straighten out their own affairs. Hadn’t Jimena, fed up after years of arguing with her about what to make for dinner, crossed the river in the night and joined her brother in Florida ?

One morning as she was buying milk, Luz told Don Chuy to save her two spaces. If the Virgin of Guadalupe could spare Don Chuy, surely She could spend a little time working the kinks out of her kids’ lives. Luz and her husband Mariano would board at five a.m. , eat some yogurt, take a nap and walk past the scapula and rose-petal rosary-sellers by nine with enough time left in the day to pray for her troublesome sons.

Luz remembered when they were little, sitting on the edge of her bed, Oscar in Jimena’s arms, all five of them, even the baby rapturously watching an India Maria movie. Unlike some of the neighbors, Mariano always had work, building was booming in Mexico City and he joined up with the crews that built schools and hospitals. He came home to San Miguel once a month, pockets filled with cash. He’d bought the first television set in the neighborhood.

Luz liked to turn the dial to movies for the kids—when she was home. After dark, she’d make a pot of hot Café Legal with cinnamon and sugar and give the kids crusty rolls, warm from the night bakery. She remembered a clear moment when she’d looked at those five little faces, dirty from playing outside all day, blowing on their coffee, laughing at la India Maria. They’d been so innocent!

Late in April, Luz and Mariano rose in the dark and boarded Don Chuy’s bus in the pre-dawn gloom. The sun appeared as the bus rumbled past the outskirts of San Miguel. Luz watched the sparse, brown countryside, thinking of Raymundo, her oldest son. Happiest when he was talking the night away with his brothers, his hand wrapped around a liter bottle of beer, he had women all over the place, so that he never had to settle in one spot. If he had a fight with one, he went to stay with the next one. There was Angeles in San Miguel who followed him around like a sad cow and Luz was sure he had one over in Leon too. Couldn’t he just pick one of them, and make a home?

Lately when he’d come to San Miguel on weekends, he’d seemed jumpy, suddenly solicitous, then angry. Bueno, Raymundo had always been an angry kid. Maybe that’s why her husband had spoiled him. Raymundo always got the new shoes, the new pants, the new ball. And she’d allowed it. Maybe it was because she and Mariano knew Raymundo cared more about what others thought of him than the rest of the children. If obliged to wear patched clothing, he skipped school and picked fights with his siblings.

Maybe it was that, as the oldest son, Raymundo had suffered most from their early years of fighting. Luz had only noticed how angry he was when she stopped drinking. He’d been nineteen years old by then, a high school graduate with no direction. Had a baby by a woman he never wanted to see again. Drank all night and slept all day. What could she have said to him about making a future? She had no education and a busload of guilt. What right did she have to tell him how to live his life?

Gazing at a group of skinny rancho horses out the window, Luz remembered coming home late one night from drinking in El Gato Negro with jobless Don Ceferino. She’d walked into the children’s room (Mariano had built an extra room for the kids to sleep in by then) and snapped on the light. There was Raymundo, must have been about eight, sitting in the middle of the bed, his back rigid, his bravado gone.

"What are you doing?" she’d asked.

"Ma, I’m being good," he’d said.

She’d always thought Raymundo, the swaggerer and braggart, could take care of
himself , but she’d been wrong. He was just as needy as the rest.

Then one day he’d up and left, and when he came back, he showed her his law school diploma. Luz had sighed with relief. Now she wouldn’t have to worry. To make sure, she had him draw up the deed (now that he was a lawyer!) to the house in his name. A house, a career and now that he was working with that attorney in Leon , all the fancy clothes he could afford. Still.

Luz’s prayer for Raymundo was that he marry one of his women and have Mariano build a second floor apartment for them on the San Miguel house. Raymundo’s house. She would cook for him, well, for the couple, and her son would see she did care after all.

What Luz wanted next was for Oscar to leave his wife. Or for that big-assed piece of riff-raff who thought she was a princess to leave him. Then maybe her baby Oscar would grow into the fine man she knew he could become.

Oscar had a nice girlfriend before this one. The former girl’s father had a successful tin and iron business. He could have set Oscar up as shop manager, or in exports! She had been a sweet, quiet girl who brought Luz cheese pies. But just as they were talking marriage, Oscar saw Waggle Tail at the basketball courts and he dropped the pie-maker as if he’d been burned. The new one jiggled her ass at Oscar until he couldn’t speak.

Waggle Tail thought she had that kind of power over everyone, thought she could be served her food and get up from the table without even carrying her plate to the sink, not to mention wash it. Soon as he got her pregnant, Oscar brought Waggle Tail to Luz’s house to live. Luz didn’t protest; it was her duty to take the girl in. Now Luz just wanted a little cooperation, a little housecleaning help, a little respect! Leaving the house to board the bus that morning, Luz had to step over a stinky diaper on the step. The girl left her musty underwear in a wet pile on the shower floor!

Somebody told Oscar once his wife should be a model and that was all he could see. But green eyes and a pretty face didn’t make a girl useful and Waggle Tail was about the most useless twenty-year-old Luz had ever seen in her life. The worst part was she didn’t want to learn to wash her clothes or cook. God knows Luz had tried to teach her. Waggle Tail let her dirty clothes pile up higher every day, then, instead of washing them, bought new clothes for ten pesos a piece at the Tuesday Market. She thought a container of gelatin was a fitting lunch for a child almost a year old!

If Waggle Tail left her son, she would leave Luz’s house. And then maybe Oscar wouldn’t stay out all night long, getting into fights. Although who could blame him? With the crib squished next to Oscar’s bed now, one couldn’t take more than a step without hitting furniture or dirty clothes. And Waggle Tail couldn’t get the baby to sleep until midnight , so the room was nothing but a four hour high-decibel cry-fest. There was one way to keep your man at home, but with the baby awake half the night, Luz was sure Waggle Tail wasn’t tending to her man’s needs. And if she did give Oscar any, she made him work for it first, sending him out into the street to bring her back hamburgers from El Ranon’s stand.

Maybe she’d get fat.

By nine in the morning, the sun was higher and the bus was slowly stopping in the Basilica’s parking lot. Luz sighed as she picked up her purse. The destruction of a marriage. Was that something to pray for?

The new Basilica gleamed in the sunlight, its side construction soaring like beams of light from the Virgin’s fingertips, not Guadalupe, but another Maria, mother of God, which Luz saw once on a holy card. The old Basilica, built some four hundred years ago, was to the right, roped off in parts, tilting forward, sinking into the soft centuries-old soil.

Mariano, her husband of thirty-three years, pushed his thick hair under his cap and tucked his t-shirt further into his sweatpants as they approach the new cathedral. At his side, Luz walked with slow steps. She wanted to pray for new knees, but only after she’d ticked off everyone else on her list. Plus she thought bad knees were her penance, and maybe she was still supposed to be repenting.

Inside, there was a mix of reverence and festival. Children played in the aisles; mothers with shawls over their heads distractedly tried to hand them sandwiches. Whole families were camped in the pews in front of the tilma, Juan Diego’s cape that still bore the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Luz gazed at the tilma in awe. Four centuries after Juan Diego carried roses wrapped in the cape to the bishop, to prove he’d seen the beautiful lady who claimed to be the mother of God, it still looked vibrant, undiminished. Luz read in a church bulletin once how the tilma had been examined and tested and scientists still couldn’t explain how the colors of the Virgin’s face and her mantle hadn’t faded in four hundred years.

Luz and Mariano slipped into a rear pew. A lady shuffled past in the aisle on her knees, a small girl, about six years of age, holding her by the elbow. Luz watched the woman’s slow progress toward the tilma with some envy. She should have crawled to the Virgin herself years ago, then maybe she’d have been spared arthritic knees , but of course by the time she’d made her first pilgrimage and promised to stop drinking, smoking and leaving her kids, her knees had already started to go.

When she was young, it hadn’t been hard to be good! At sixteen, she’d been pregnant with Jimena, happy with her man. She didn’t drink at all. Mariano was a serious boy, a worker. He’d built them a room on the little parcel of land her father gave them, a room with rounded windows, a modern touch he’d picked up listening to the stories of laborers who’d begun to work in the big building boom in Mexico City . He built a sturdy washbasin for their clothes and an alcove for a stove. He was going to buy her a stove! But before he could, he told her there was no work in San Miguel; he had to go to the city. Luz was left behind.

When he came home for the first time, after a month, Luz’s belly was rounder and he had to beg her to make him a meal. For four whole hours she refused so he could see how unfair it was that she was pregnant and alone. Couldn’t he have found something to build in San Miguel?

"Go to your mother’s house until you have the baby," Mariano said.

"Never," Luz said. She hated her sister’s boyfriend, who had moved in with her mother. He didn’t work and he went through the pockets of everybody’s clothing.

Luz thought she had Mariano convinced to stay when he rubbed her feet that night, then she rubbed his back, but then, at five in the morning, she heard him shuffling around their new room. Luz pretended to stay asleep; her husband touched her shoulder and was out the door, headed for the bus station in the moonlight, his new transistor radio tucked under his arm.

With Mariano working in Mexico D.F., Luz couldn’t help but be distracted by Nacho when he delivered iron doors to the house in which she worked and Don Cipriano selling tomatoes from the back of his truck. In the cavernous Basilica, she shook her head. Old names to her now. That was something to be thankful for.

Luz had only visited the Basilica once before, twelve years earlier. That was when she’d made her first pledge to the Virgin, the day after Cheme, her second boy, only seventeen, disappeared in the night. Luz threw her bottle of Presidente brandy into the creek when the sun rose that day and watched it sink through tear-filled eyes. She asked the Virgin to keep Cheme safe. Then she took a bus to the Basilica to send her prayers for his safety straight to La Guadalupe’s ears. For five months she was too grieved to miss her smokes, drinks and male callers. Then Cheme phoned San Miguel’s public telephone station from the United States , asking they play his message on the radio. Miraculously, while Luz was washing dishes she heard it. Cheme had tried to cross six times before he made it. He’d already been in and out of trouble (Luz interpreted this to mean jail) but he had a job and a place to stay and she wasn’t to worry. In gratitude, she stopped going out for good, made a truce with Mariano. Now it was twelve years since she’d had a drink, smoked a cigarette or entertained a boyfriend. Twelve years since Mariano came home, taking smaller jobs in San Miguel and eating regular meals in Luz’s kitchen.

During that time, Luz thought several times about getting it all out on the table, saying to Mariano, "Look, I’ve had boyfriends. You’ve had girlfriends. It’s all in the past.” But what if Mariano, instead of agreeing, turned accusing? What if he refused to acknowledge his part, and then constantly reminded her of her failings? Would he feel he had to go out and beat up Nacho and Don Cipriano? What if he left her? She used to think it was what she wanted , but faced with it, she’d felt a little sick in her stomach. They’d had five kids together and Mariano was a good provider. She didn’t say anything. And as the tantrums of their earlier years diminished, the silence about the lives they led when they were apart from each other grew bigger, until now it felt impossible to talk about.

Luz was on her knees, even though it hurt, thinking of Cheme in Florida . Owned his own trailer home now, had lived with the same woman for eight years, installed sprinkler systems, had people working for him . He called sometimes, sent checks, seemed to have forgiven all those years when he didn’t come first, when none of her kids did.

Not that Cheme was suddenly a saint. Jimena, up in Florida with Cheme now, was the one who kept Luz informed that he still liked to get drunk, smashed up his trucks. Luz’s prayer for her son was that he’d give up the bottle and work on his sperm count. Twenty-nine years old and still no children. She couldn’t understand it.

With Jimena in Florida bossing Cheme around, Luz worried a little less. Jimena didn’t set by drinking, which was what had started the real trouble between mother and daughter. Her daughter blamed the bottle for the time Luz left the children in her care. Jimena had been twelve, Luz gone without a note, their father working a construction job in the city. Jimena in the kitchen cursing Don Cipriano, imagining how, while they were in school, Luz had gathered her dancing skirt, her make-up, her vinyl purse. Imagining the old man (he was thirty and not even good-looking!) waiting with his bottle of brandy in his vegetable truck at the top of the hill.

As the oldest, Jimena had taken over, passing out bowls of beans to her four little brothers sitting on the steps, silent and scared, yelling at them extra gruff to get into bed so her voice wouldn’t shake. By the fifth day, she was cutting nopales from the cactuses in the countryside to feed the boys. So relieved on the eighth day that her mother came home, she returned to school and studied extra hard. In class, she twisted her hair so tight it fell out of her head in clumps.

When Jimena finished high school, she stayed in the house, and with nothing else to do, argued with her mother over money and food. Luz left fifty pesos when she went to work, and told Jimena to make breaded beefsteaks. Jimena made a pot of beans, bought two kilos of tortillas instead of one and gave most of the food away to a half a dozen young gay men she’d befriended, who, rejected by their parents, lived in a cheap house together nearby.

"It is not my duty to feed the neighborhood," Luz yelled at Jimena, when she came home from work to only a scraping of beans and an almost emptied bowl of salsa.

"You don’t care about anyone but yourself!" Jimena shouted back.

Luz had pledged to change quietly. After Cheme left, she came home regularly, didn’t spend afternoons in the bars any more, and made chilaquiles on Sundays while they watched All-Star Wrestling. She did care. But Jimena seemed stuck on the old Luz, which annoyed Luz as much as the missing food. She’d point out in an icy tone that the chicken soup had not been prepared as she’d instructed, and that if tuna fish and mayonnaise on crackers was the only meal Jimena could manage to put together, why was Luz leaving her so much money and where was the change?

Jimena was twenty-six when she took the bus to meet the coyote Cheme sent for her. She’d been arguing over the slightest possible thing with her mother for months, walking around the house muttering, "I can’t wait. I just can’t wait."

Luz couldn’t wait for her to leave either, if that was how she was going to behave. Then the day came. Jimena stood by the door, backpack over her shoulder, bus ticket to the border in hand. Luz was looking for an opening to say the tender words she’d rehearsed, but before she could, Jimena turned to her.

"You—left—us!" Jimena said. "How could you have done that?"

Luz had only bowed her head, her body shaking with sobs.

That had been three years ago. Luz was afraid she’d never hear from Jimena again , but after two months, she’d received a letter. Luz’s body rippled with fear as she held it in her hand. Would it be filled with more accusations? Would Jimena, with thousands of kilometers between them, finally say everything she’d always wanted to tell her mother? And wasn’t it time?

Luz steeled herself. But the letter contained photos of Jimena with a skinny boy. " Florida Beach " was scrawled on the back of the first one. "Pick-up Truck" was written in English on the back of another: Jimena leaning against a truck with a Florida plate, a bandana around her head. In a photo received this year, she was in front of a trailer home with the same skinny boy. The beanpole looked nice enough. Will he build you a house, give you a baby, buy you a stove? Luz would like to ask. One of Cheme’s lawn care guys, was all Jimena would say about him.

Luz had a vague idea that other people were capable of things she was unable to do. She’d worked in gringo houses, rich ladies’ houses, washing their clothes, cooking their meals – she’d seen people embrace, say words she was fairly sure had to do with how they felt about one another. She just didn’t know how to do it herself. As a seven-year old child, Luz had announced to her own mother she wasn’t going to school any more. Her mother, without turning from the tortillas she was putting on the fire, shrugged. After that, her father had taken Luz to the river where he collected sand to sell to the homebuilders, who mixed it with cement. Sometimes he made four trips a day, first with their burro, and later with a rattlely second-hand truck he managed to buy. Luz played at the river until the trip home, singing to herself, speaking to nobody. Maybe if she’d had playmates, she’d have learned to say things like, "You make me mad," or, "Let’s be friends."

Gabriel, Luz’s second to youngest son was the love child, always touching people, making them squirm. "Pa," Gabriel greeted Mariano, squeezing his father’s broad shoulder. Sometimes his hand lingered on Luz’s back as they spoke. Luz used to show affection by barking, "Go wash your hands!" before she gave her kids their soup , but Gabriel had his daughters on his shoulders, crawling into his lap. They kissed each other right in front of everybody. He talked to his dogs like they were people! Gabriel wanted to tell people what to do with their lives. He wanted people to talk. That’s what his problem was. Must be from being married to the American.

But sometimes Luz thought Gabriel had the right idea. "If only I had been able to look at her. If only I’d said I was sorry," Luz now told the Virgin of Guadalupe.

When she felt Mariano patting her back, Luz lifted her bowed head and realized there were tears on her cheek. At the front of the church, the Virgin smiled kindly. There! Didn’t She lift her eyes for a second? Mariano said that he’d been watching the progress of the lady on her knees. He hadn’t noticed. But Luz was sure. The Virgin of Guadalupe had smiled. People around her were busy with their rosaries; nobody else seemed to have observed it either. It was a message just for her. La Morenita had smiled on her, the former sinner, Luz Martinez . What could it mean?

Perhaps it meant Raymundo would come home to live soon. Or that Waggle Tail would leave her son. Did La Guadalupe wink? Heh, heh, sister, your house will be in peace pretty soon. The American Wife couldn’t believe Oscar didn’t give his mother a single peso for phone, cable TV, food. Food!

"Two grown people still expecting Mommy to cook for them!" the American Wife fumed. "Kick them out of the house. That’s the only way they’ll grow up!"

If it was possible anyone was bossier than Jimena, it was the American Wife. El Bolillo, Mariano called her, “White Bread” not without affection. Luz wished she had her nerve. Married to her, Gabriel was the one she worried about least. Her American parents had sent money; they’d started a hair salon, built a house, put her two beautiful light-skinned granddaughters in good schools. But toss Oscar, Waggle Tail and the baby onto the street, three people who could barely take care of themselves? She just didn’t have the heart. And suddenly her thinking was clear.

Job or no job (sometimes he worked as a waiter, then always got into a fight and got fired) , Oscar and his family would go on living in her house, until they didn’t any more, if that time ever came.

Who else, after all, would see that Oscar’s son ate chicken soup and rice, and mashed frijoles and potatoes? Maybe the Virgin’s wink meant that Luz would help Raymundo give up some of his anger. Or that Waggle Tail’s selfishness and sloth were not going to affect her like before, that she, Luz would glide through her own house with an inner knowledge that she was doing the best she could.

Luz was blindsided by a new thought. Perhaps Jimena was at peace.

Luz was sure the Virgencita was putting these thoughts in her head and that they amounted to something like forgiveness. And that was it! That was what she had come to pray for after all.

Mariano’s hand was at her elbow, helping her rise. She lifted a finger, one more moment. Luz felt at one with the thousands of prayers being uttered at that moment all around her. The lady on her knees had almost reached the altar. Luz wondered what promise she was fulfilling, if Our Lady of Guadalupe had saved a sick daughter, or seen a son safely across the border. The senora stood, making the sign of the cross. Luz stood too; vaguely aware her knees were not vibrating with pain. She lifted her face in gratitude and a warm feeling flowed through her, as if the beams of light that surrounded La Guadalupe’s cape were lifting her.

With this warm feeling came the knowledge that her hostility toward Waggle Tail, whose name was Frida, was actually shame for her own selfish life. "For the past twelve years, you’ve been nothing but giving," was the thought La Guadalupe was giving her now. And Luz knew that the forgiveness she sought was inside her and the deal she had to make was with herself.

Don Chuy’s eyes were rimmed in red as he cheerfully waved Luz, Mariano and their neighbors back onto his bus. Today’s driving would add up to eight or nine hours for him. She patted Don Chuy’s arm as she shuffled past, eyeing the empty yogurt buckets, but there were two plastic bags filled with what smelled deliciously like tacos behind the driver’s seat.

Sweet, absolving Don Chuy! Luz wondered for how many years he would go on living out his promise to the Virgin. She remembered standing stunned the morning his truck crashed into the rock in front of her house, soup pan hanging uselessly from her hand, watching the sun bounce off the milk cans, not knowing the miracle of his survival was also unfolding for her. Susan McKinney de Ortega, born in Philadelphia, is a former television news reporter and daughter of a St. Joseph’s University coach. Her stories have been published in Salonmagazine, The San Miguel Writer, Literary Bulls and and in Mexico : A Love Story by Seal Press (Spring, 2006) . She lives in San Miguel de Allende in the Mexican central highlands with her husband and their two bilingual daughters.

[img_assist|nid=4292|title=Show of Hands|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=191]As soon as the bus driver pulls the door shut, I drop into an empty seat, pressing my head against the glass, closing my eyes so I can’t see the girls waving their arms out the windows, muffling my ears so I can’t hear the boys chewing gum. Mrs. Harden and Shanna are standing in the aisle, delivering their speech about good behavior but I’m thinking about bad behavior, about Shanna’s body, which I can see even though my eyes are closed. It’s been six months since I’ve touched anybody’s body, since I broke up with Andrea. A boy named Douglas Patton sits down beside me but doesn’t say hello or slow his chatter with his friends in the row behind us or in any way disrupt my daydream. I love field trips.

Something Mrs. Harden tells the bus driver pierces my daydream, though. We aren’t going to the museum on the permission slip. We’re going to my father’s house.

“My father doesn’t even live in this town,” I say, opening my eyes. Mrs. Harden is staring at me, taking notes on her clipboard without looking down at her hands. It’s weird to make eye contact with her and still see her hand writing away as if it’s got its own brain, writing her list of good and bad things I’ve done, a compilation of faults for my end-of-the-year review. I look away. “It wouldn’t be a positive learning experience,” I say desperately.

“Mr. Mirer’s father is a teacher also,” Mrs. Harden says to the students. “A teacher of genetics.”

“No, he’s not,” I say. “He’s an accountant. He knows nothing about pedagogy.”

But Mrs. Harden is walking the aisles, passing out a two-page, stapled handout. Douglas, who’s reading his copy, asks me, “Who’s this Andrea?”

“Andrea?” I ask. “Give that to me. What does it say about her?” Andrea was my high school girlfriend, my college girlfriend, too. We planned to get married after our college graduation, to attend the same law school, to lead one preconceived life but I bailed without giving anybody a good reason, which led my father to accuse me of self-sabotage. I fell into this job, into being a teaching intern, by accident.

Mrs. Harden takes Douglas’ copy away before I can read it. She holds it in front of her while she instructs the class to find each mention of my first name – Eric – to cross it out and to write instead, “Mr. Mirer, Jr.” Even in adult-to-adult conversations in the teachers’ lounge, Mrs. Harden refers to us only by our last names. She’s the grade coordinator; look at her nametag: “Mrs. Harden, Grade Coordinator and English.” Shanna’s says, “Ms. Mercer, science and math.” Mine says, “Mr. Mirer, history.” (Mrs. Harden’s kind enough not to write “teaching intern.”) The kids have nametags with exclamation points written after their names: “Douglas Patton! Seventh Grader!”

While Mrs. Harden reads from my father’s handout, Shanna slides into the seat in front of mine. She’s 25, a real teacher, and she talks as if we’re in the middle of a long conversation that started years ago and won’t ever reach an ending.

“Nice outfit, by the way,” she says. “Field trip informal, I suppose.”

Looking down, I’m surprised to see that I’m not wearing any clothes. My testicles lie flat on the bus’ brown plastic seat like two deflated balloons. My nametag dangles from my chest hairs. When I tug, it hurts.

“But I dressed this morning,” I say. “I know I did.”

“Shh,” Shanna says. “Mrs. Harden’s about to turn around. Just walk normal, like you don’t notice. She might not mark it on her clipboard.”

 

 

The bus stops in front of our old house, the house my mother and my father and I shared until I was fourteen, until he moved west to Springfield, Missouri, where he’s lived since. After he split, my mother and I squeezed into a little apartment up the hill from the Chi-Chi’s, an apartment too small for our furniture, which we left behind in the house for the next owners to deal with.

My father is standing on the wooden front porch waving us inside. He’s shaved his beard, trimmed his bushy eyebrows, even made himself look shorter, more like a regular, middle-aged man, instead of the world’s tallest and hairiest accountant, which is what he used to call himself. He’s also wearing enormous green sunglasses, cheap ones that Mrs. Harden will think frivolous. Look at that, I say, but as she writes in her clipboard, I realize that she may well think that I am responsible for my father’s bad choices, so I rush to the porch and sweep the sunglasses off his nose. Since I don’t have any pockets I can use to hide the glasses, I toss them into the hedges.

“Nice pants,” my father says.

When Mrs. Harden catches up to us, she sticks a nametag on his lapel. “Mr. Mirer, Sr.,” it says. “Parent/ Educator.”

 

 

My father’s changed almost everything about the house. Instead of our red couch and upright piano, there are six rows of theater seating, the good kind with fluffy, reclining chairs. And instead of the kitchen and the dining room, there’s an open space and a gigantic projection-screen television where the sink used to be. I like being inside. It’s the only place aside from school that doesn’t remind me of Andrea. We never did it here, not on the couch, not in my bedroom, not in the back yard. I didn’t start with Andrea until my mother and I moved to the apartment near the Chi-Chi’s.

My bedroom is smaller than I remember but preserved intact. The same bedspread showing a map of the United States. The same stack of shoeboxes in a corner, each filled with unsorted 1982 Topps baseball cards. “Ray Knight,” I say, looking at one. Then, remembering my condition, I reach into the closet, which miraculously is full of my old things, slacks and T-shirts and collared jackets.

Even though I’ve grown nine inches since I was 14, the blue jeans still fit. The shirts, however, all disintegrate into threads when I touch them, but that problem I solve by zipping up my gray Members Only jacket.

“Don’t have to worry about Mrs. Harden now,” I say.

 

 

Before returning to the screening room, I step into the bathroom so I can clean my pants with a washcloth, so I can look teacherly for the students. Inexplicably, my mother is sitting on the edge of the bathtub, combing her long, brown hair. She’s in the white gown she wears to work at the nursing home. Her patch says, “Annie, Orderly.” She doesn’t seem surprised to see me.

“You’re upset,” she says. “Aren’t you? You don’t have to tell me why. Would it make you feel better if I held your hand?” I give her my left one. “Would it make you feel better if I held them both?”

From the hallway Mrs. Harden is looking in at us, jotting something on her clipboard, something else I’ll have to explain at the end of the year. I slam the door.

“Look what you did,” I say. I splash water on my face while my mother tells me not to get upset. “I have to get upset,” I say.

“You don’t have to get upset at me.”

“We have the same argument every day.” I turn off the faucet. “You can’t stay here. What if Mrs. Harden needs to use the bathroom? Go hide in my bedroom.”

“I won’t do it,” she says but she does. That’s the power we have over each other. My mother walks down the hallway toward my bedroom. “I don’t see why I’m doing this,” she says as I lock the door.

Back in the living room, my father is standing near the television, pointing a bamboo stick at the screen, at pictures of my mother projected there. The students are all sitting up in their chairs, sipping orange Kool-Aid from plastic cups. One girl’s taking notes on her hand-out.

“A good woman,” my father says. “A woman with a good soul.”

I sit down beside Shanna, who glances at me, then whispers, “This is such perfect timing. You walk in buck naked and up on screen you’re about to be born.”

It’s true. I look down at my white legs; run my fingers through my chest hairs. Where did my Members Only jacket go?

My father taps the television screen firmly with his bamboo stick, pointing at an overblown picture of me as a child. He’s talking about me like I was his patient.

“Eric was a well-developed baby,” he says, “with a propensity for night-time crying. Typically Eric would cry for a few minutes at about 3:30 in the morning, then pause for ninety seconds while he defecated, then resume crying again. Eric had the largest lung capacity of any child ever born in Mirth-Lace Hospital.”

Shanna leans over, whispers to me. “It’s true that you were a cute baby.” For some reason this feels like an accusation. Mrs. Harden stands up quickly, raises her palm in the air, her signal for quiet. “Mr. Mirer, Sr. means to say Mr. Mirer, Jr.,” she says. I cannot tell you how much this reassures me.

“Mr. Mirer, Jr.’s extremities grew quickly,” my father says.

 

 

I try not to listen during my father’s talk, which is mind-grindingly dull, but for some reason the only thing I can think of is Andrea. When I stand up, I have to shield my genitals with my hands.

This time no one’s waiting for me in the bathroom. I sit on the john and think about Andrea’s legs, about her tan lines, which isn’t a good idea; just as I feel myself getting excited, someone knocks at the door. It’s Douglas Patton.

“Mr. Mirer?” the boy says. “Mr. Junior? I have to go.”

I look hurriedly through the closet for towels to cover myself, but finding only washcloths, I tear the shower curtain from its loops with two good pulls. On the shower wall, I see my old poster of Tom Seaver, from his chubby, Cincinnati Reds days. As a boy, I wouldn’t get in the bathtub unless my father taped the poster one more time to the wall. Of course with the humidity, it was always falling off.

“Mr. Mirer?” Douglas says. “It’s positively an emergency.”

For some reason the idea of Douglas seeing my poster feels wrong to me. With one graceful tug, I pull it down from the wall and shove it into the towel closet. Then I toss my shower curtain toga-style over my shoulder, bunching it up over my groin so nobody will notice.

After Douglas comes into the bathroom, I slip back into my bedroom, hoping to find some new clothes, but instead my mother’s in there bent over my bed, untucking the sheets, which makes me nervous. What if my old Hustler magazines are still down there? What if those sheets are still stained?

“Relax, Mom,” I say. “Don’t do anything.”

“I’m not doing anything,” she says. “This is what not doing anything looks like.”

Back in the screening room, there’s an ominous clap of laughter, and I have to go check on it.

 

My father’s up to my teenage years, which explains the laughter.

“He was a fine soccer player with a good left leg,” my father says, “but he wanted challenges and so he played baseball, a sport where his lung capacity didn’t help him. Andrea and I both thought he shouldn’t play baseball. But he didn’t need our advice.”

“I had a good arm,” I protest, but Mrs. Harden scowls at me and jots something on her clipboard. I have to raise my hand to talk.

“Can I talk to you privately?” I ask my father. As he and I walk to the bathroom, I hear the children behind me whispering, “Who’s Andrea?”

When I open the door to the bathroom, Andrea’s looking into the mirror, patting powder over a zit on her forehead. I close the door, hoping she hasn’t seen me.

“Coward,” my father says.

“It’s not your life,” I say.

“This life isn’t your life, either. It belongs to somebody else, somebody dumber than you, and you’ve stolen it so that you don’t have to bother with your real life.”

“What happened to all those compliments you were telling the students?”

“That was a different audience.” We hear some grumbling from the living room. “That’s them,” he says. “They’re waiting for me.”

When I walk back into the screening room, they’re all staring at me. Mrs. Harden. Shanna. Douglas. The blond-haired girls who adore Shanna. All of them. Getting stared at is worse than watching this awful documentary. “Everybody hush now,” I say, repeating one of Mrs. Harden’s lines. “It’s time to be serious.” Then I sit deep in my chair, pressing my hands to my face so no one can see me.

 

 

The documentary shows pictures of Andrea in bathing suits, in prom dresses, in business suits, and then strange, empty photographs of the bedroom in my mother’s apartment, of my Tempo, of a state park picnic table, of the hospital parking lot. I can’t ignore this any more. I can’t keep from staring, remembering.

“They did it here,” my father says, tapping the screen. The picture changes. “They did it here,” he says. “He was brave enough to say all those things and do all those things in all those places and still not marry her. Lots of people would have felt obligated by their promises, by the way he used her, but not Mr. Mirer. He’s too courageous to be trapped by anything. Now turn to page two of your hand-out.” Papers shuffle.

On the screen my father shows a picture of Andrea sitting in our college health clinic. By herself. A magazine open across her lap.

“He was so clear in his morals that he would not stoop to soil himself with birth control, with medical opinions, with comfort during infections, but instead kept himself above it, entertaining himself with video games while his girlfriend sat alone in a clinic.”

Now all the children turn away from my father. They kneel on their seats, pressing their chins against the padded chair tops, staring at me. They’ve decided it’s time for me to respond, but I can’t speak. My teeth are locked together, my tongue heavy as cement. Mrs. Harden has her clipboard ready; Shanna is asking me a question I can’t hear. Douglas is raising his hands, signaling that once again he needs to go to the bathroom. Since Mrs. Harden won’t recognize him, Douglas finally forgets about permission and sneaks down the hall to the bathroom, to the bathroom where Andrea is waiting for me. I chase after him, but he gets there before I can catch him.

“Don’t worry about her,” I say.

“Worry about who?” he says. The bathroom’s empty; I start to breathe again.

“Mr. Mirer, what is this field trip supposed to teach us?” he asks. He’s one of those gentle boys who loves to tease his teachers, who understands teachers aren’t machines. “If the next trip is about Mrs. Harden’s life, I’m staying home.”

“I don’t know why we’re here.”

“You’re supposed to know. You’re also supposed to be wearing pants.”

I look down again. “Shit,” I say.

“You’re also not supposed to cuss,” he says and closes the door.

Luckily my father’s bedroom door is open, so I run in there and close the door behind me. Andrea is sitting on my parents’ bed, a blue blanket pulled up to her chin, her white arms spread over the pillows. “Come in,” she says.

“You’ve got to get out of here,” I say. “They’ll see you.”

“If you don’t want to see me, then why are you so excited?”

“I’m not excited.”

“Look down,” she says.

“That’s not excitement. That’s something else.”

There’s a knock on the door, my mother’s voice. “Shit,” I say. “Help me find some clothes.” Dutifully, Andrea helps me find slacks and a collared shirt, matching shoes and socks, a brown leather belt. The more she helps me, the angrier I get. When she tries to thread my belt through my slacks, I push her hand away. “I can do it,” I say. My mother is still knocking on the door.

“I’m coming,” I say. After Andrea hops under the sheets, I open the door. Along with my mother, there’s a mob of children in the hallway, pressing into the room, pointing at Andrea, pointing at me. From far down the hall, I hear my father and Mrs. Harden calling them back. “The show isn’t over,” they say but the children keep asking questions. What am I doing? Why am I still naked? Explain, they say. Explain.

Caught in this mass of words, I hear my mother say something cutting about Andrea’s fashion sense, and Andrea responds by insulting my mother’s cooking. They’re bickering back and forth, trying to pin me to different targets on the same board. The only thing I can do is run past them down the hall and through the screening room where my father and Mrs. Harden and Shanna and Douglas are looking at a picture of me on the television, a picture of me on the school bus, a picture taken earlier this morning as we drove to my father’s house. I’m leaning against the window, my eyes closed. Shanna is looking back at me from her row; Douglas is sitting on the seat beside me. In the picture my arms are crossed over my chest. I’m wearing clothes, thank God. The children in the hallway ask me to explain.

“Ask him,” I say, pointing at my father. “It’s his show.”

“It’s boring,” they say. “Tell us.” In the hallway behind them, I see my mother and Andrea arguing bitterly with each other about my physical health.

Outside there’s air, cold and cutting, and I gulp it as I run through the yard. When I reach the street, I stop, unsure where to go next. Douglas is walking across the lawn toward me, carrying a folded-up piece of paper in his hands.

“Mrs. Harden wrote this for you,” he says. Instead of reading it, I throw it on the ground. “Cool,” he says.

“What do they want from me?” I say.

“They want to understand. They don’t even know who you are.”

“They don’t need to understand. They don’t care who I am. They don’t even listen to what I say when we’re in class.” They come running down the steps, children first, adults behind them. Mrs. Harden scratching notes on her clipboard. Shanna asking questions I can’t hear. My mother wagging her finger at Andrea. Andrea wagging her finger at my mother. Behind them my father is waving his arms, trying for attention.

“Let’s run,” I say, and Douglas and I take off across the street. As I look over the houses on our block, it occurs to me that our old neighbors – the real ones, the retired firemen and schoolteachers who lived there when I was a boy– are dead.

“You need to put on some clothes,” Douglas says.

“I am wearing clothes,” I say. I touch my chest. “Shit. I have got to stop this.” The two of us bound up the nearest house’s porch steps and press the bell until an Asian man opens the door. He’s wearing a blue Oxford shirt, khaki pants, a hat advertising a casino. When he sees us, he yells something unintelligible; we hear pounding footsteps. A pudgy Asian boy in a sweat suit jogs down the stairs.

“I need some clothes,” I say.

The man and the boy say unintelligible, laughably complex things to each other. Talking faster and more intelligently than I ever could. If I could say anything with that much assurance, I would surely be a happier person. The man says something that sounds like “Konizipachen.” The boy says, “Howzibatsu.” I have the feeling they’re talking about me in an unflattering way.

“Clothes,” I say, pointing at the mob of children running toward us. “I need clothes.” While his father blusters on, the boy grabs a purple robe for me from the hall closet. It’s a beautiful, shimmering thing that falls lightly around my shoulders, gliding over my skin. Beside me Douglas Patton is sliding into a large orange robe. The extra fabric pools glowingly at his feet. After we are properly attired, the boy says, “Sorry. We are eating turkey. It is a bad time.” The door closes.

Now everyone is standing a few feet beneath us in the neighbor’s yard. They look to be beyond quieting, but when Douglas raises his right hand, Mrs. Harden and Shanna and my mother and Andrea all follow suit, raising their own hands, calling for quiet. Soon everyone is silent. Everyone is waiting for me, fanning themselves with those awful handouts. And at this moment I would like to oblige them, to be profound and exculpatory, but I can’t. While I stammer my father bounds up on stage and starts introducing me, explaining that the documentary’s montage ended precisely at this moment of free choice when I can decide what direction the story will follow. He’s blathering, hogging attention.

“Talk,” Douglas whispers to me. “You’re supposed to teach them something.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

There’s a single, awful moment then, while Mrs. Harden lowers her hand and begins to write on her clipboard, while my father continues talking, while my mother and Andrea resume their argument, while Douglas pounds his head with his fist, muttering, “Think, think.” Then he whispers to me, “Konizipachen.”

“What?”

“Konizipachen,” he says, pointing at the crowd. “Say, ‘Howzibatsu,’” he whispers. “I say, ‘Konizipachen. You say, ‘Howzibatsu.’”

“Konizipachen,” he says to the crowd.

“Howzibatsu,” I say dumbly. I step forward, nudging my father off the porch.

“Marzusikibad,” Douglas says. I mumble, struggling over what to say next. “Say anything,” he reminds me.

“Marenship hibitersen.” I say it loud. The sound makes me giggle.

Then Douglas starts to say something, a full sentence of silliness, a sentence that wraps around us both like a robe, soothing us, a sentence that would make sense of all of this if I could ever decipher it, but since I don’t have time for puzzles, I start talking too, cutting him off before he runs out of breath, before the silence can hurt us. And I say my sentence, a sentence from far in my past, a sentence of nonsense, a sentence like I’ve never said before.Greg Downs lives and writes in West Philadelphia. His short story collection, Caught Up in the Past, is forthcoming in October 2006 from the University of Georgia Press, which awarded it the 2006 Flannery O’Connor Award.

[img_assist|nid=4306|title=|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=150|height=106] It’s very hot here. Hotter than I’ve ever liked. Even when I was a kid. Growing up, summer was only good for me because school was out. Swimming’s okay but I don’t go crazy for it. I like camping to get out into the woods where it’s a little bit cool, ‘cause those nights when you can’t sleep for being all sticky sweaty, that’s not for me.

What I especially don’t appreciate is being able to see the heat. Sure, back at home we had hot summer days when you could sometimes see it rising off the road – notice I said sometimes. Here, everything’s distorted by the heat every day. Yeah, there’s sand everywhere, but that’s not what gets you. It’s the asphalt. Asphalt and concrete. You go outside around here and it’s the roads that pack a real wallop. All they do is soak it up then throw it right back at you. They’re long and wide, and they melt away into heat waves long before they ever reach the horizon. And they are waves, really. The roads, the farther out you look, it’s like they move, swells at sea, rolling up and down, just a little bit, and then they’re gone. After that, it’s all desert.

This is what I think about lying on my cot every night. And every day. Not much else to do. That and pray. Yesterday, I knew something was up. Abdul – I have no idea what his name really is, we’re not on a first- or last-name basis. I just call him that ‘cause it’s better than thinking “that guy with the fucked up eye.” He should wear a patch but he doesn’t. It’s not good to look at. It’s like he was burned or something, and some of his eyelid got shriveled off and can’t quite close the whole way. And then there’s always something seeping out of it. As I said, it’s not good, so I call him Abdul. I figure that’s better than tying up his whole identity with something that probably happened in a split second and wasn’t one of his best moments.

But anyhow, Abdul, when he came to drop off my bread and water, didn’t smack me across the head as hard as he usually does. When he barked out some orders – or insults – at me, I thought I noticed a little touch of hesitancy, almost like a look of sympathy in his good eye. I tried to grab its focus for just a second. I said, “Hey, can you tell me what’s going on in the world?”

He said something then pointed at the food. That’s when I noticed a small dish of peaches – canned, in syrup. I hoped it was extra heavy. I wanted him to know I was grateful. I put my hands together in front of me, prayer-like, and gave a quick bow of my head. I thought I might have seen him give just a little nod back. Then, I couldn’t believe it, he took out a cigarette, put this down on the tray, and threw a matchbook down along with it, after showing me its one remaining match. He spoke again and this time it came out sort of like a mumble, maybe even an apology. That gave me hope. I wanted to speak with him, have him speak back to me.

“Tatakalm Alingli’zia? Sadik. Me sadik – friend. Kobry. Kobry. I build kobry.” I gestured wide with my hands trying to demonstrate a bridge, cars zooming over top of it.

Abdul looked nervously out the hallway, again said something that I didn’t understand, then began to leave.

“Telephone?” I said, louder than I had intended. I knew I sounded like I was begging, and thought maybe it was time for that. “My family – can I call my family? Usra, usra,” I yelled. That reached him.

He stepped away from the doorway, walked right up to me and shoved his face in front of mine, his bad eye an inch away from my good two. His voice, rapid but contained and intense. Well, seemingly more intense than usual – he always sounded intense to me. Then he smacked me good. The hardest one yet. I fell back against the wall and didn’t see anything for a while.

 

[img_assist|nid=4307|title=|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=136]The fall. My favorite season here. Joey – that’s my best friend, since second grade we go back. Him and me and the other kids on our road, we’re up on Shaeffer’s farm field. It’s perfect for football and so’s the weather. Cool, not cold. Sunny, but not blinding. Today, we cut to the field through the cow pasture. Joey has to be home early for some special dinner so we don’t go through the woods that come up on the one side. It’s longer that way but that’s how you avoid the patties. Today, though, we take the pasture because we want to get a full game in.

We do. My side wins by 16 points – two touchdowns and one safety. The safety’s courtesy of Joe. He’s almost always good for at least one per game.

We’re twelve years old. Seventh grade. Joe’s five foot eight, weighs at least 190. He always plays the line – offense or defense, because he don’t have speed but he has power. We’re winning too good to quit with the sun, so Joe has to make it home quick as possible through the pasture.

We fly down the hill. I tell him good game before I split off right up the road toward my house. Lucky for him, his is right there because he’s lumbering and puffing just from rolling down the hill. I’m still sprinting but pause a minute to yell back, “Hey, don’t forget to kick off your shoes.” He waves his hand like he hears me.

 

Joe’s late, by over two hours. He goes in through the back door, into the kitchen. He doesn’t turn on any lights but still sees that the dinner dishes have already been washed and put away. The only signs of life are coming from the living room, voices from the TV set. He figures he just has to make it down the hallway, past the living room, where his mom and dad are sitting, probably steaming, get up the stairs to his bedroom and he’ll be safe. Well, remember Joe’s stats – chances were pretty good he wasn’t sneaking anywhere past anyone, besides he’s still breathing hard from his downhill flight. So there he is in the hallway. He takes just a couple steps past the living room archway, and his mom’s on him, yelling, “Joe, is that you? That better not be you. I told you be home by five.”

Does Joe stop and take his punishment? No, that’s not Joe. He still thinks there’s a way out of it. So he takes off down the hall trying to get to his room as fast as he can, as if that’s some kind of sanctuary or something. He gets to the steps, does this quick pivot to launch himself up the stairs, but all of a sudden his feet fly out from under him and he goes into this massive slide. Like, what? there’s something on the floor or something? And wham! he goes down, slams his mouth against the first step, big time.

Pop! his mom turns on the lights, and there’s Joe bleeding from his mouth real bad, one of his front teeth is hanging by a thread. He starts crying. His mom, she’s ready to start yelling, but there’s blood everywhere, so she’s all worried instead. By now his dad’s up, too, all grouchy ‘cause something’s interrupting his Wheel. His dad rounds into the hallway and you hear this “What the” and he takes a slide too, but doesn’t go down, thankfully. That would have been real bad if he’d gone down, too. But anyhow, that’s when his mom sees it. First, right there beside Joe and then all the way down the hall. She marches into the kitchen and there it is, beginning at the back door. A trail of cow poop right through the house. Idiot Joe, it was all over his shoes and he didn’t kick them off outside the door, like I reminded him to. Yeah, he’s still bleeding and all but the trail of cow you-know-what is too much for Mrs. Zupanic to handle. She’s mad, real mad. She’s there yelling at him about the cow crap. His Dad’s all moaning that his back’s gone out. He’s slapping Joe upside his head, his Mom’s ranting up a storm while she’s trying to get the dentist on the phone. Buster, their dog, he’s sniffing all over the place and then starts licking it up.

Next day at lunch, kids fight to get a seat at our table, all morning whispering and wondering what happened to Joey and his front tooth, knowing that him telling about it at lunch time will be the highlight of the day, probably the week. This is one of the things that makes Joe real popular at school. He can make one story last through a whole lunch period, in between bites of sloppy joe and tater tots and the extra deserts kids give him. And it doesn’t matter he’s been grounded for a month, and that he’s going to miss that tooth until he’s old enough to get a permanent implant. He looks at anything happening – good or bad – as just another chance to be the center of attention.

So now we’re at lunch and Joe’s telling us all about it, every cow-poop covered step of the way. We howl. Me sitting on Joe’s right, Jerry on the other side, Rob and Stanley across the table from us. When he gets to the slide, I laugh so hard my chocolate milk comes squirting out my nose. I’m laughing so hard I wake up, uncomfortable for some moments with the sensation that these memories are really only a story, figments of someone else’s imagination that have somehow played themselves into my head without having any real connection to me.

 

I could tell it was coming on evening. Not because I had a window in my room but because I could see through the bars at the door the failing light in the hallway. My neck ached. I’d passed out crumpled against the wall, my head at a bad angle to my body. It took a few minutes to get a sense of where I was. The ache in my neck and shoulders resonated down to my empty stomach. I hadn’t had the chance to eat yet that day. The tray was still there. But not the cigarette or the single match. Then I saw the peaches, too, but they’d been thrown across the room, lay scattered about the floor. I ate them, anyway. What’s a little dirt gonna do you? The syrup was all gone, though.

As I was crawling over to the peaches, I tried to pull back those memories of Joe. I wondered why that cow poop story had come to my dreaming mind. Then I realized it was always the cow poop story that came to mind when I thought about Joe. I was reminded of it for years, every time he took out his false tooth, which he liked to do a lot especially when there were girls around.

Joe was plenty of things to me. My best friend, since the second grade. A teammate. Partner for a while when we thought we’d have a try at selling insurance. He’s plenty of things to a lot of people. A husband now, a father, businessman – he works in a car dealership, makes good money. And I’d bet he’s up to 300. A real Santa. There’re few people I’m as close to and shared as many laughs and worries with as him. In fact, he’s the guy I talked to most seriously about whether or not I should come over here. He tried to tell me that if it weren’t for his family he might have come to – the money was real good, what’s the chance something would happen? Yeah, he’s a lot to me – we go back twenty years. So why is the cow poop story the first thing I tell you about Joe? Then it occurs to me that in a person’s life, it seems like there are some stories that get attached to them more than others, and for me, that one will always be a part of Joe. I always wanted to be there for that one, ‘cause I really wish I’d seen that slide.

 

The peaches were good, if dry and dusty. The syrup, I guessed, had been extra heavy. I wished there’d been some left. They tasted especially good after a couple of weeks of just bread or rice and water. It didn’t give me a good feeling, though, to be eating them. With every bite, I kept getting a deepening sinking feeling that peaches and a cigarette weren’t a good sign. Why would they show kindness now? I didn’t like it. Panic started rising up off my body like the heat from the roads, but I couldn’t allow it. I knew if once I let it go, that’d be the end. If I had any self-control left, I’d have to put it to work now.

The hotter it got in the room, the more visions of Shaeffer’s farm came to me. I’d close my eyes and sometimes could almost feel the breeze coming over the field. I’d see Joe, and Jerry, Stanley, Rob. Nine years old. Then ten, twelve, into our teens. Running around up on the field, or in the woods.

Growing up in my – I can’t really say home town, because it was so spread out, just a whole bunch of roads, and houses along roads and then farms, acres and acres of farms, so I guess neighborhood is better. So, anyhow, growing up here, you tended to hang out with the guys you lived closest to. I was lucky that Joe lived right down the street. And Jerry Miller, Stanley Kukovich, Rob Belaski. We all lived on Pleasant Valley Road . In elementary school, we were walkers. Our school was just up at the far end of the road, at the top of a big hill. Sunrise Knoll Elementary School . When I found out later on in high school, or whenever it was, that “knoll” was another way of saying “small hill” I was kind of pissed off. I mean, who came up with that name? Our school was not at the top of a small hill – it was a full-fledged mountain; at least it was to a seven-year-old. I guess the guys who named it weren’t the ones who had to climb it every day. Four years of trudging up that hill – the school didn’t open until we were in the second grade – and I never once got to the top without puffing, at least a bit. At the bottom, you would get just the slightest feeling of queasiness looking up, you know, like that twinge you get at the bottom of the first hill of a rollercoaster. So there’d be like this pause and a gulp, a squaring up of your shoulders to get inside what you’d need to make it all the way to the top, then you take that first step.

That’s when Joe, Jerry, Rob and Stanley and me got to be good friends. It was funny how some days we’d do nothing but complain the whole way, but on other days – without a word between us – we’d decided that we wouldn’t show if we were having a tough time. It was always hardest for Joey – he was fat even in the second grade. You know, when I saw that Harry Potter movie with my nieces, the brother or the cousin kid, that character, he reminded me of Joe – not because Joe was ever mean like that or because he was spoiled, not by any means, but because he was fat like that and just couldn’t not eat. Especially the sweets. That kind of skewed my take on the movie. I knew I wasn’t supposed to like this fat kid, but I felt bad for him, because he reminded me of Joey.

 

Being heavy got Joe teased when we were younger. But once we got past gym class’s scooter soccer and tumbling and building pyramids, which Joe couldn’t stand because he was always at the bottom getting someone’s knee right in the middle of his back, once we got past that kind of stuff and got down to playing real sports, especially football, Joe was the best. All he had to do was stand there and he’d knock you down. Starting from about fifth grade on, our football games got going up on Shaeffer’s farm field. It was kind of magical how they came together. No one ever planned a thing. But after school, kids would just show up. Some of them we didn’t even know. They’d come in through the woods or over the pasture. And always enough to pull together a game; almost never too many – just the right number for a couple of teams, everybody got a chance to play.

Joe, Jerry, Stanley and Rob and me, we stayed tight right through middle school. We survived our first bouts with girls and all that stuff. And that probably came a little later for us, ‘cause we were such good friends, we didn’t need girls around.

Once we got to high school, yeah, there were some changes. Stanley , he didn’t want to be called that anymore. We were only allowed to call him Stan. He joined the band, played alto sax, and he started getting pretty weird, dying his hair and all that. You know, whenever it was just the two of us it was okay, but our crowds didn’t fit together anymore and it’s hard to get past that in high school. By junior year, all we did was say hey to each other; sometimes not even that. At a reunion today, I bet we’d still be friends. But we drifted apart back then. It was okay, I didn’t mope about it or anything, it’s just looking back you feel bad when a friendship kind of dies.

But then something real bad happened. Rob’s dad kind of wigged out and he shot his mom and then himself. He died, but Rob’s mom lived. They say it was a miracle. But Rob … I know this is a terrible thing to say but sometimes I thought it might have been better if she had died too, ‘cause then maybe he would have gone away and started over somewhere – things were never right for him again at our school. Nobody could look at him without thinking, “there’s the kid who’s dad went crazy.” And even us, me and Joey and Jerry, we tried to stay tight with Rob, but what had happened to him, that was always somewhere in our minds. You couldn’t shake it off. Even now, no matter what I remember of Rob in all the years we spent together – all the games, the camping, just walking to school every day – when I think of him, the first thing that pops into my head is when his dad shot his mom and then killed himself. The face I see of Rob is him at the funeral – dead blank, like he’d been killed, too. We went for Rob, my mom said, “because no earthly prayers could ever forgive his dad for what he’d done.” But we went to show our support for Rob, she said. He did move away a couple of years later, once his mom got back on her feet. That was a good thing, because it was never right again for him at home. He knew it, we all knew it. And it hurt him, I know, that this stood between us. So they left and started life somewhere new. I never heard from him again. I hope things worked out for him. And I guess I hope he kind of knows now how we felt back then, because of what’s happened here. He’ll have heard about it and I don’t think he’ll ever be able to think of me without this popping up in his head. Maybe he’ll know now how hard it is to put some things out of your mind.

 

That was the last thing I remembered thinking before falling asleep. No dreams or memories came to me that night, but still I woke up feeling good, if a little bit empty. Was it a trick of my wishful mind or had the air turned cooler? There was a quiet all around me, too, but whether this was coming from my insides or the outside, I wasn’t sure. The sun was up, as usual making its rounds, its light slowly finding its way into my cell. I pushed my brain to recall Joe, Mom and Dad, my sister Jill and her kids. Forced myself to see their faces, remember their stories.

My self-control had won. I was calm and at peace when Abdul and two other guards came to get me. They took me, not to a courtyard or somewhere outside, but to a place that seemed more like a conference room. Okay – so it’s not a firing squad. Okay, I thought, okay. There was a raised platform at the far end of the room – a stage. Lights, a camera. A podium off to the side. A dozen or so men, outfitted as soldiers, were preparing for something, looking so serious about it all – putting a microphone first here then there, moving the camera around. I half expected to see a director calling out shots, carrying a megaphone, wearing those old style puffy pants, what are they called, jodhpurs? This suddenly struck me as funny and a short snort of laughter escaped from me. That earned me the sharp butt of a gun in my back. They were leading me up to the front of the room, to the stage, and I thought how I wished I had a report prepared, something to talk about. After all, maybe they were just finally giving a nod to my expertise on bridge building, wanted to hear my thoughts on the plans for reconstruction. Slowly, though, an old but familiar queasiness came to me. I was looking up the hill leading to Sunrise Knoll Elementary School . That one step – just that one step up onto the platform was as hard as that climb had ever been.

Microphones, the camera, the panel of speakers. It’s a press conference, I thought. They’re sending a message. I’ll have to say something for them, I guessed. Lay out their demands. That’s what this is, I said to myself. And as much as that idea made sense and me trying to hold onto it as being what was really going on, my stomach knew otherwise.

It was when they pulled my hands behind my back and bound them together that I could admit to myself what was happening. A guard I had only seen a couple of times pushed me down so that I was kneeling. Then Abdul waved him aside, and knelt down to meet my eyes, my two good eyes. For once, I wanted him to really see me. I hoped that something of who I was would get through to him, through that good eye as blind to me as the other one. It could have been a lifetime that we stared at each other, but it probably wasn’t even ten seconds. I remembered the last time I had uttered the word for family, what it had got me, but I didn’t care. I said it again. “Usra,” I whispered, just to him. That was the closest Abdul and me ever came, when I dared to say the word for family one more time. His mouth relaxed a bit and he nodded – just the slightest motion, barely perceptible, but to me it felt for a brief second like a blessing. But from somewhere in the background another word was said and his eye got hard. He spat something out in Arabic, then spat on the ground in front of me. Someone else jerked a blindfold down over my eyes, tied it tight. I could feel the light of the camera, heard its quiet whirring. Words, many words were said. I knew none of them but felt their meaning. I tried to will myself back up to Shaeffer’s farm, feel the cool fall breezes, smell wood fires, see trees and rolling grass-covered fields. Hands grabbed my head and shoved down. Then something sharp and cold and silent.

 

I was gone, really, before I could have told you what had happened. The next thing I see is the look of anguish on Mom’s face when she finds out. Dad looks like he’s about to be sick but he keeps it together and holds Mom up, her legs giving out she’s about to fall down. Jill walks into the girls’ bedroom. They’re giggling, flipping through a teen magazine but stop cold when they look up and see her face. And Joe – he sits alone in his garage with the door closed, on a stool in the back corner and he lets it go, cries for hours, mopping his face, shaking his head no and no and no. I hear the news play in their heads. How they find out. I hear it told over and over again for days and days to friends, to strangers, to people who will never know me any other way, and all I can wonder is how is this my story? And was it told from the very beginning, even when my mother brought me into this world, held me in her arms for the first time, me all pink and defenseless? Was this always the end, mocking everything good and right that ever happened in my life? Because how will anyone ever be able to think about me and not think about this? Joe, will you ever again be able to talk about me with a laugh and a joke? Because, really, that’s what I would like you to do. No matter how hard it is for you, that’s what I’m asking. Don’t let this be what pops up first in your mind. Dig down hard and deep and remember something else. Don’t let this be my story. Kathleen Donnelly works as a writer, actress and teacher in her hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her play A Restoration Comedy, secured her a fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. “How Is This My Story” was performed at InterAct Theatre’s Writing Aloud Fiction Performance series.

[img_assist|nid=4309|title=Fish, Simona Mihaela Josan © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=151]There was nothing wrong with where we lived, except that the neighborhood was radioactive and the house was pitched at a sharp angle. When I was in high school and obsessed with my body, I used to lay my dumbbells on the floor, and they’d roll to the wall of their own accord. My room was small and cluttered then, and my bed was missing a leg, so I had to prop it up with a brick. My sister Margaret was a year older than me and had a job at a flower shop. She was a mistake, or an “oops” as my mom referred to Margaret’s conception in rare moments of kindness, and was born while my parents were both in college. The wedding was thrown together in under two weeks, and my parents held what passed for a legitimate reception in a dance hall called the Luau Lounge, which was famous for the massive fiberglass pineapple that teetered precariously over the front door. Then came the house and the mistaken impression that if they filled it with daughters and tasteless knickknacks, they could turn it into a home or, at the very least, distract themselves from the fact that half of it was sinking into the earth, a sign, my father would lament while Margaret was in earshot, visited upon him by God to let the world know that he had made it with the wrong girl at the wrong time.

My mom invested in commemorative dinner plates and porcelain figurines she saw advertised in the slick, shiny inserts of the Sunday paper. I wish I could say I was being facetious when I say she “invested” in these things, or that some finely tuned sense of irony had inspired her each time she shelled out four payments of $17.95 to the Dearborn Mint for an eight-inch statue of a baby in a bunny suit or a frog in a tutu or a lone wolf baying at the moon, but my mom truly believed that most, if not all, of her purchases would pay off in the end. After all, the ads always noted in block capital letters accompanied by charts and graphs, many of the mint’s limited-edition plates and figurines went on to sell at auction for upwards of ten times the original sale price. Despite their alleged worth, however, mom kept all of her collectibles out in the open—lined up on the narrow mantle over the fireplace, crowding bookshelves and windowsills, and competing for showcase positions on the dining room table or in the china cabinet.

In addition to Margaret, I had two younger sisters, Kathy and Rose, and none of us were allowed to touch any of mom’s collectibles because, in her words, they were our legacy. From dad we would inherit four guitars and a copy of what appeared to be every LP pressed in the United States between 1966 and 1987, a period he frequently referred to as the golden age of vinyl. Growing up, I assumed that everyone had armies of porcelain figurines and massive stacks of old records cluttering their homes, and I was always amazed and partially scandalized when I discovered they didn’t. It was like finding out that my friends and their families didn’t believe in God or flush the toilet or own a television. If they didn’t spend their weekends scouring flea markets and yard sales for hidden treasures, then what kinds of lives were they leading?

[img_assist|nid=4310|title=Top Spot, Alana Bograd © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=224]Another oddity about my friends was that their parents beat them far less frequently than mine beat me and my sisters. Not that they were monsters about it, exactly. I mean, they knew when to stop. The only problem was that we could never be sure of exactly what was going to set them off. Like the time dad whipped me for picking up a porcelain sailor mom had just received in the mail. Had it been mom, I would have understood—and did, in fact, understand when she let me have it for dropping the sailor as dad growled my name. Since it was dad who made the initial call, however, I couldn’t even begin to guess what I’d done wrong until he informed me (between applications of the strap) that little girls who played with sailors would inevitably grow up to be prostitutes. Though I wanted to ask him what a prostitute was, I kept my mouth shut because I knew the answer would only be more of the strap and that mom was already twisting her rings. Not only had I touched my legacy, but I’d broken it, too. The sailor had lost an arm, and there were still three payments pending on him. I was six years old at the time. Margaret was seven, Rose was four, and Kathy was still in diapers. Two nights later, curiosity got the better of me, and I asked Margaret what a prostitute was.

“The same thing as a whore,” she said.

“You mean like mom?”

It was summer, and our windows were open, so we had to whisper. Otherwise, our voices would bounce off the vinyl siding of the house next door and into our parents’ room.

“Mom’s not really a whore,” Margaret said. “Dad just says that when he’s angry.”

“So what’s a whore?” I said.

“It’s the worst thing in the world,” Margaret said.

“Like Aunt Gina?”

“No, she’s just divorced.”

“How ’bout Aunt Birdie?”

“She’s an abomination,” Margaret said.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Worse than a whore, I think. It means she likes women.”

“I like women,” I said.

“Not like Aunt Birdie. She wants to marry other women. She wants to make babies with them.”

“How would that work?” I said.

“It wouldn’t,” Margaret said. “That’s why she’s an abomination.”

I already knew how babies were made, more or less, and the thought of it made me want to puke. The more dad drank, the more explicitly he discussed his failure to pull out of mom before the boys, in his words, rushed the field on the night of Margaret’s conception. Likewise, the more mom drank, the more willing she became to narrate their lovemaking using words dad grunted in her ear. Even with the windows closed, Margaret and I had to cover our ears to block out the sounds of their fucking and fighting. When they were done, there’d be snoring, and all I could do was wonder why mom let him touch her the way he did.

“Margaret?” I said, half hoping she was already asleep. “What if I wanted to marry another woman, too?”

“Mom and dad would have to kill you,” Margaret said. “And themselves.”

Lying awake, I considered my options. On one hand, I could pick up a sailor one day and let him make a prostitute out of me. On the other hand, I could marry another woman and try to make babies with her, and my parents would have to kill me. As far as I could tell, there was no middle ground, unless you counted what my mom had, but I really couldn’t see the difference between actually being a whore and only being called one, so I decided to err on the side of caution and swear off men forever. Not that it was really a decision so much as a revelation, learning the name for the thing I already knew I was. As long as Margaret kept her mouth shut about our little conversation, I figured, no one could kill me. Even if mom and dad did catch me trying to marry another woman one day, I could always plead ignorance. After all, dad had only warned me about sailors. Women were another matter altogether.

*

In the beginning, it was like having a secret identity, like being Wonder Woman or, better yet, Cat Woman. Ears perked and eyes peeled for any and all information pertaining to Aunt Birdie, I’d prowl around the kitchen, pretending to look for rubber bands, thumbtacks, tape or scissors in the junk drawers whenever mom talked on the phone on the off-chance that my fellow abomination’s name might pop up, or I’d page through old photo albums at my grandparents’ house, hoping for even the briefest glimpse of an abomination in the wild. To all appearances, Birdie looked like everyone else in her black and white universe—always a little taller than mom because she was older, always in a plaid jumper, always with her long, straight hair, fair skin and the wide, toothy smile that hid the secret longing she and I would always share: not a longing for the touch of another woman so much as a longing for the unconditional love of the people we loved unconditionally.

Birdie wasn’t my mom’s sister. They were cousins, a point mom clarified whenever she could. And her real name was Bridget. “Birdie” came about when my mom was two and couldn’t quite wrap her tongue around the right diphthong. When Birdie was in high school, she had a lot of boyfriends. Then came college, and the girls there made her go lesbo. At least that’s how mom told the story to our neighbor, Mrs. Reed, snorting derisively into the back of her fist when Aunt Birdie showed up with her “friend” Joanne to the barbecue my parents held to celebrate my first communion. Joanne wore a denim dress and a straw hat, and Birdie wore a pair of blue jeans and a white blouse embroidered with flowers. They didn’t hold hands, and they sure as hell didn’t kiss, but when their eyes met, it was like they were both in on the same joke, a special secret that, for all their half-muttered comments, sideways glances and raised eyebrows, the rest of the world would never understand.

Mom hugged Aunt Birdie and shook Joanne’s hand. Dad asked if he could fix either of them a hotdog, and Mr. Reed choked back a laugh in a paroxysm of hacking coughs he blamed on the smoke from the barbecue grill. All through the party I stole glances at Birdie and Joanne from behind my white communion veil, and all through the party I prayed to God to keep me from getting caught. If they beat me for saying hi to a sailor, there was no telling what my parents would do to warn me against going lesbo. But I couldn’t help myself. The looks that passed between Birdie and Joanne meant that I was right, that being an abomination was really something special, that one day maybe I could look at someone like that, and she’d look back at me, and we’d share the same secret Birdie and Joanne shared.

The first girl I ever wanted to marry was Katie Wilcox. She had green eyes and a gray tooth, and her mom drove a Pontiac Firebird. Our relationship hit a snag, however, when I realized that the only subjects Katie found interesting were kittens, her mom’s car and boys. That’s when I fell in love with Jennifer Schmidt, whose mother was the school nurse on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. But Jennifer liked boys, too, and so did Nicole Short, Kim Mifflin, Andrea Brady, Erin O’Connell and Elizabeth Nolan. In fact, the more time I spent in third grade, the more I realized that my life as an abomination was going to be one hell of a lonely ride if I didn’t at least pretend that I saw the boys from Menudo as likely suitors and Ricky Schroder as a potential husband. By the time I was in seventh grade, I’d gotten so good at the game that I took the strap across my newly pubescent bottom for letting a boy grope me under a cafeteria table at lunchtime. Then came high school and the beginning of my dumbbell years, an awkward period where I tried to like boys and starved myself to make them like me. I wasn’t an abomination, I told myself. I wasn’t a lesbo. In fact, I hated lesbos—hated them so much that one night I practically made my dad shit himself with laughter when Aunt Birdie called and I shouted upstairs to let my mom know that “the dyke” was on the phone. When she hung up, mom said that Joanne had been diagnosed with cancer.

Dad grunted and laid the needle on a Bruce Springsteen record, thus initiating a string of incidents that stick in my mind like a sappy montage in a made-for-cable coming of age movie: We skipped the funeral because Joanne wasn’t technically family. I started kissing boys. Birdie stopped coming to family functions. Margaret let a delivery boy make it with her in the back room of the flower shop. A girl at school showed me how to puke without putting a finger down my throat. The plumbing leaked. The kitchen ceiling caved in. Mom took in a cat. Kathy discovered needlepoint. Rose got caught smoking. One grandmother won a hundred bucks in Atlantic City. The other lost over three hundred to a bogus roofer. My grandfather stopped wearing pants. I learned how to get high using a paper bag and an aerosol spray can. Kathy gave a boy a black eye. Rose got caught drinking. Margaret was late three times in a row. Mom’s cat ran away. I turned eighteen and voted Republican. Dad bought a new guitar and wrote a song about New Jersey.

One night when I was a freshman in college, I asked Margaret what sex with boys was like, and she told me it was like sticking a balloon in yourself if the condom wasn’t ribbed. She was still working at the flower shop, but the delivery boy was long gone. There were other boys now, with pencil-thin mustaches, and men with hairy chests. Margaret rarely slept at home anymore and didn’t care when dad called her a slut. Or said she didn’t, anyway, but I knew what the emptiness insider her was like because it was my emptiness, too. The only difference was the balloon. At least she had that to fill her up from time to time. All I had was my secret identity and a straw hat I bought at a flea market.

*

I wish I could tell you I’d been confused by my sexuality and that was why I tried to starve myself through high school and slip through college stoned, but I always knew I was an abomination. Or a lesbo, to use mom’s word. Or a dyke, to use dad’s. I wasn’t gay- or bi-curious, as some women claimed to be in newspaper ads for women seeking women. This wasn’t dabbling or experimentation. It was who I was, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I’d hear dumb sorority girls speculating that every woman would have at least one lesbian experience in her lifetime, or that everyone was at least slightly homosexual, or that it was probably okay (in theory) to “dyke it out” with another girl in front of your boyfriend if that was what he wanted, or that it would be really cool to have a friend who was a hardcore lesbian as long as she wasn’t the kind who hated men and refused to shave her legs.

I rode a trolley and two buses to hear gems like these every day—in the library, in the cafeteria, in the classroom. As if being gay were a merry-go-round and you could get off whenever you wanted, or having a gay friend was like knowing a well-behaved badger or a talking moose. It wasn’t cool, I wanted to scream. It was lonely. Yes, there were plenty of “resources” on campus for those of us who wished to “embrace alternative lifestyles,” but then there was always the prospect of going back to my sinking radioactive house and trying to convince my parents that my sudden interest in rainbows and pink triangles would in no way impinge upon their collective right to continue amassing vast quantities of porcelain and vinyl. Not that I thought they’d kill me anymore. They’d just throw me out on the street with no place to go. Or, if I were really lucky, allow me to live out the rest of my days with them under a dark cloud of silence and disgust. My only real option, as far as I could tell, was to let scruffy boys continue to grope their way through my bases as I grew increasingly intimate with the mind-numbing effects of household cleaners and other chemical solvents.

By the time I was a junior in college, Margaret had left for good, and the responsibility of getting Kathy and Rose off to school each morning had fallen squarely on my shoulders. Between signing permission slips, writing absent notes and pretending to be my mother when any of their teachers called, I barely had time to dwell on the fact that if they ever learned my secret, my sisters would turn on me as viciously as I’d turned on Aunt Birdie. Rose probably knew that I was sneaking hits off the blackened pipe she left on her dresser, but she never said anything (I’d like to think) because she was concerned about my health. In her own sweet seventeen-year-old way, Rose saw pot as a healthy alternative to Carbona and never stopped to think that I might be mixing the two before heading out the door in my wide-brimmed straw hat and dark glasses to ride the trolley and two buses to an American Lit class where the professor would try to scandalize us by revealing that Herman Melville may have thrown his wife down a flight of stairs or that Emily Dickinson might have been gay. This was the first class I shared with a girl named Allison Kravitz.

Allison had red hair and an overbite and always sat near the door. When she raised her hand, other students would roll their eyes. The problem wasn’t so much that Allison was particularly disruptive or held extreme political views as much as the fact that our professor, Dr. Eck, had a habit of deflecting all questions put to him back upon the class. This strategy kept him from revealing how little he really knew about anything and had the added advantage of conditioning his students to keep their mouths shut. But Allison didn’t seem to get it. Despite the murmurs and groans of our classmates, she always demanded to know why the rumors about Melville mattered and how questions about Dickinson’s sexuality were supposed to help those of us living in the here and now. Even if Emily Dickinson really was gay, she once demanded, did that make her poems suck any less?

Okay, so she was a little disruptive. But in a good way, a way that made me feel like maybe I wasn’t alone, and I liked to think I’d be asking the same kinds of questions if my brain weren’t so fuzzy all the time and I wasn’t so scared to reveal too much about myself. I was still an abomination after all, and even if Allison’s notebooks were all decorated with the appropriate geometric figures, holding on to my secret was—for me, anyway—still a matter of life and death. Which is probably why I couldn’t stop thinking about her. When it came to her sexuality, Allison was cool. Not in the dumb it-would-be-cool-to-know-a-lesbian sense, but in the sense that she didn’t wear her orientation like a badge. In fact, I never once heard her refer to herself as a lesbian. She was just Allison, and if you couldn’t deal with it, then fuck you. Although this attitude didn’t do a whole lot to improve her social life, at least she could look people in the eye, which was a lot more than I could say for myself.

Back at home, Margaret’s name was never mentioned. Dad was trying to resurrect the singing career he’d abandoned when he found out that mom was pregnant, and no one even raised an eyebrow when he introduced the delivery boy who had taken Margaret’s virginity as the new bass player in his band. Of course, Rose was too busy scoring weed off dad’s drummer to notice much of anything, and all Kathy seemed to care about was rescuing her share of the legacy from imminent doom as dad’s friends set up their instruments and amplifiers in our living room. In the kitchen, mom was making sandwiches for the band and asking over the thump of the bass drum if I thought she had to worry about dad and groupies.

“I don’t think that’s an issue, mom.”

“You don’t think he’s sexy?”

“He’s my father.”

Mom smiled as if to say she couldn’t see my point but was willing to let it slide. Dad was going to be big, she said. Maybe not like the Beatles or Bob Dylan, but that was only because he’d taken time out to raise a family. If not for the “oops,” we’d already be millionaires.

Wondering how much luck Rose might have had with the drummer, I turned away from my mother and her sandwiches only to feel her fingernails digging into my wrist.

“You’ll take care of me, won’t you?” mom said, pulling me toward her. “When dad runs off with his groupies and the other two move out?”

“I’ll take care of you, mom.”

“Promise.”

“I promise, mom. I’ll take care of you.”

“You were always my favorite,” she said, releasing my wrist. “You were the only one I wanted.”

In my mind, I was already telling Allison about the terror in my mother’s eyes, the abject fear of heartbreak and loneliness and groupies who would never materialize. Which isn’t to say that I’d actually spoken to Allison yet. To the best of my knowledge, she didn’t know me from Adam. Even so, I’d already had about a million imaginary conversations with her and held her hand through countless imaginary walks across campus, both of us stealing glances at each other the way Aunt Birdie and Joanne once did. Fuck the world, these glances said. Fuck anyone who can’t let us be who we are or love the way we want to love.

Allison lived, or so I imagined, in a tiny apartment with a single window that overlooked a gray alley. When the rain fell, heavy drops of water would pelt the glass, and we’d hold each other against thunderclaps. I’d tell her about breaking the sailor’s arm and my Aunt Birdie’s heart, and she’d say it was okay. I was just a dumb kid, she’d tell me. Dumb and scared, like my mother and sisters and even my father the first time mom broke the news of Margaret’s imminent arrival. Then Allison would say that she loved me, and I’d say I loved her, too, and I’d promise myself I’d stop getting high.

When I wasn’t busy trying to construct an imaginary world for Allison outside of class, I was doing my best to gather data on her real life. HISTORY major, the back page of my American Lit notebook read. Germantown. Bartender? “Corporate rock sucks!” Dog=Snickers. Soft pretzel w/mustard. Snapple (raspberry). Parents okay with “it.” Toyota Corolla (tan). Lunchbox!!! Strawberry Shortcake (ironic?). Presbyterian. Dead Milkmen. “Beam me up Scotty! There’s no intelligent life down here!” The list went on and on. It was Aunt Birdie all over again, the spying and the strategizing.

The class met on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. On Mondays and Fridays, I’d sit right behind her. On Wednesdays, I’d sit to her left. The trick was to get Allison to notice me without being too obvious about it, to strike up a conversation that didn’t sound forced or desperate or just plain crazy. With boys, it had always been easy. I just had to drop a hint or two that I was willing to let them touch my breasts. Allison, on the other hand, had breasts of her own and wouldn’t be so easily swayed. Besides, I had no idea where to begin as far as letting her know I liked women was concerned. It wasn’t as if I could just walk up to her and say hey there, Allison, I’m an abomination, too! Want to go for some coffee?

Or maybe I could. I didn’t know. How to talk, how to laugh, how to be who I was. All I knew was that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life alone. The image in my head was me at fifty or sixty, still living with my parents and sneaking hits of paint thinner while mom dusted her porcelain, dad listened to his vinyl and the house sank further and further into the ground. In all honesty, I knew that Allison could never live up to my expectations. I knew that pinning all my hopes on her was completely unfair, that one day Allison and I could very well end up screaming obscenities at each other the way my parents still did, that we’d open ourselves up and make ourselves vulnerable and possibly live to regret it. But it was the kind of regret I was willing to live with, the kind of risk that could lead to something better, so I called her name one day on the way out of the classroom and said something dumb about liking her lunchbox.

Maybe we could have lunch together sometime, I said, and she said that would be fine.

Maybe today, I said, and she said yes.

We walked to the quad. We sat beneath the bell tower. We unwrapped our sandwiches.

Allison asked if I was hitting on her, and I said that I was.

I was happy and nervous and scared as hell.

To think, she could have been a sailor.Marc Schuster teaches English at Montgomery County Community College. He defended his doctoral dissertation at Temple University in May of 2005 and is a founding member of the Elliot Court Writers’ Workshop. His fiction has appeared in After Hours, Schuylkill, Redivider and Weird Tales.

You and Peggy don’t agree on many things, but the communication strategy for this whole mess might just be the worst of it. Waiting for the gray of dawn to fall into your bedroom you are having tough time with all of it. And you want to cry, cry like a baby without having to pretend everything will work out. But you cannot risk Damian hearing you. You want him to know the things he will need to know, but even you are not ready to have the discussion just yet. How does it get to this point?

Peggy drove out to State College last night to spend the weekend with her parents. Explanation of your impending separation is her sole agenda item. “With intent to divorce,” you hear Peggy’s voice project into your thoughts. Fifteen years of marriage will do that for you. Peggy told you as if it were a done deal, that this would be good practice for your weekend visits. You want to scream at the insinuation that you need to practice being a father. You have more than carried your own in that regard. You are considering a stronger stance – maybe Damian should move with you – but your lawyer is doubtful. Seems that most courts think that fathers are less capable caregivers. You know that your case could be made, but not without some serious collateral damage. Something you would like to avoid. For the kid’s sake, if nothing else.

Damian, that one focusing element in your lives, is ten, almost eleven. Good kid, too. Still very trusting and genuine, though you expect the next several months will suck all of that out of him. He has strong facial features with locks of curly black hair atop his head. He is starting to take an interest in girls, or maybe they are starting to take an interest in him. Either way he refuses to get his mop of hair cut. Never bothered you, though. You have always encouraged his individuality. Unlike Peggy, trying to homogenize him into the pages of a Pottery Barn Kids catalogue. Soon he will slink into the room sleepily and fall down next to you. He will have forgotten that Peggy will be away. Might as well get that one ready now.

 

“You know how sometimes it feels good to be with your parents?” you inquire.

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s like that even when you’re older. Mom just wants to spend some time with her mom and dad. Does that make sense?”

“Uh-huh. I miss her though.” What about me? A strained voice whispers in your ear.

“She’ll be back Sunday night. Meantime, me and you’ll have a wild boy’s weekend. Right?”

“What will we do?” he asks.

“Well, the Eagles play tomorrow. I thought we’d get a pizza delivered and watch the game together. What do you think?”

“What about today?”

“Today? I don’t know. Any thoughts?”

“Something fun.”

“Alright. Bowling?”

“Maybe.” He seems surprised somehow that you have made this suggestion. “Anything else?”

“I need to run to Home Depot. But that won’t take long. I need new hoses for the washer.”

“Why?”

“One is ready to burst. Has a big bubble in it.”
“Why?”

“Over time things get worn out. It’s a good thing Mom saw the bubble before it gave out. It could have caused a ton of damage.” These words form slowly for reasons you do not immediately fathom. Damian does not seem to notice this.

“Can I see it?”

“Hmm?”

“Can I see the hose?”

“When we go downstairs.”

“Okay.”

 

Every conversation with Damian has become like walking on eggs. He is too smart not to know something is wrong. A point that you have repeatedly reminded Peggy. He is also too innocent to know what is amiss. The plan has been mapped out. Mostly by Peggy. In February you are moving to an apartment in the city. Something reasonable and reasonably near the office. As to not spoil Damian’s Christmas, you – both of you – would not tell him until the beginning of the new year. Peggy has a therapist all picked out, despite the fact neither of you has any idea how he might respond to the news. “No matter, therapy will do him good.” She states things like this with an irrefutable certainty, another thing that irks you.

You have lingered too long in the shower. Damian has subtly let you know this by flushing the toilet in your bathroom, siphoning the cold water from your shower. Sorry I forgot, he shouts merrily as he heads down the hall. You are left exposed to the cool air as you wait for the tank to refill, returning the needed cool water so you can rinse the suds from your graying hair. (Peggy has the habit of doing her business near every morning while you are showering, flushing without regard to your plight and offering a meaningless, daily apology of her own, leaving you – literally – steaming.) You quickly finish and dress for the day ahead.

 

“Eggs?”

“Nah.”

“French toast.”

“Uh-uh.”

“A Quarter Pounder with cheese?”

“Dad!”

“What then?”

“Pop Tarts.”

“Sure.”

“And orange soda.”

“Not on my watch.” This expression, one you might have used with him a hundred times, now staggers over your lips. Again you hope he does not notice.

“Mom lets me.”

You repress the urge to shout that you are not mom. “Does she now?”

“Sure. All the time.” You admire his poker face.

“Maybe you are confusing the words ‘soda’ and ‘juice.’ Could that be it?”

He is smiling at you. “Oh yeah. Juice. Thanks, Dad.”

“Busted,” you laugh. Damian laughs with you.

Damian pretends to be bothered by the Home Depot trip. This was supposed to be a ‘wild’ boy’s weekend, he nudges. He gets impatient when you start singing along with Tom Petty on the radio. Free Fallin. You turn off the music with a sincere, though reluctant, apology. Once in the store, everything changes, however. He has decided what he would like to do with his day.

“Dad? I’ve got it!”
“What?”

“What we can do while Mom is away.”

“And that is?” you ask, but you can already guess, as his gaze is fixed on and eight-foot tall air-filled snowman.

“Let’s decorate the house for Christmas.”

“Buddy, it’s barely November.”

“Who cares? This is awesome.”

It has been a while since you’ve seen that glow in his eyes. “Yeah,” you say, “who cares?”

“Really?”

“Really! Let’s do it. And do it up right too! Best ever.” This is so wrong you almost picture Peggy stopping whatever it is she is doing at the moment, instinctively racing to the car to intervene. But, alas, she is four-and-one-half hours away; if the Nits are playing at home it’ll be five and a half – at best. Much progress could be made in that amount of time.

“Can we get the snowman?”

“And the Rudolph.”

“Really?” He does not allow for a reply, “Awesome.”

You are both laughing to the point that you are drawing the attention of near everybody in the store, even those supposedly learning how install a chair rail. You have fully loaded a cart for Damian with outdoor lights of various sizes and colors, as well as several good quality electrical cords. You push a lumber dolly loaded with lawn decorations, including two white-light reindeer with bobbing heads. You were in the checkout line when Damian realized that you had failed to get the new washer hoses. You and he are far too noisy at this discovery, but every face you see seems to enjoy the irony of it all. If only they knew. The thought makes you laugh louder still.

Peggy and you were never really much for decorating the outside of the house. The inside, thanks to her expert touch, resembled a Crate and Barrel holiday display. Your first year in the neighborhood, you made a weak effort at outlining the porch beams in colored lights. The effort paled considerably to the efforts made by those around you, to Peggy’s embarrassment. You, reasonably enough, thought that all efforts were worthy. Peggy pointing out the deficiency in the end caused you to never want to decorate again. Let her, you remember thinking. That was six years ago. Nothing more than a wreath purchased from the local Boy Scout Troop and eight faux candles outwardly announced your spirit of glad tidings. This year would change all of that.

Every time an item is scanned, Damian announces the total cost of the sale. When it finally ended – just over seven hundred and eight dollars – the clerk is singing along with your son. You slap your Visa card onto the counter, holding back a fresh run of laughter. Inflatable Rudolph – forty-five dollars; outdoor Christmas lights and hooks enough to outline your house and shutters and two young apple trees – four hundred and seventy dollars; oscillating garage door shadow display – thirty-seven dollars. Seeing the look on your soon-to-be ex-wife’s face – priceless! You want to shout this out to the store. Or at least tell Damian; he’d think the knock-off humor was funny—except for the bit about the ex-wife.

 

Damian is more focused on this task than you have ever seen him with anything. He has a linear side that you would have never assumed, having navigated the disaster that is his bedroom. He is fixated on keeping the spacing of the lights spiraling up the apple tree trunks at an exact three inches. He has taken full responsibility for the tree trunks and lower parts of the branches – one in green and one in red – as you work your white-light magic on the house. He calls you off the roof when the higher branches need wrapping, but barks orders from the ground like an Irish foreman. The two of you are shouting pleasantly back and forth in the cool afternoon breeze. You warn him too often to be careful on the ladder despite the fact that he has jumped from branches higher than the six-foot aluminum A-frame. Because he is having such a good time he does nothing more than reply, Okay. The sun is hiding behind the house when you have attached the last icicle strip to the westward eave. Before you can see to the lawn ornaments, Damian coaxes you back to Home Depot for some more red lights. It looks stupid this way. I’ve gotten all of the main branches except this one. People will laugh. You are trying not to do the same. Though the branch in question is in the back of the deepest set of the two trees and well obscured, you agree, giving an accepted hair tousle and praising the amount of hard work put into the undertaking.

Back at Home Depot, Damian finds the necessary lights as you eye a reindeer-driven sleigh complete with Santa. You tell him you think it would look perfect suspended from the low roof to the higher. Cool, he agrees. You stop at Wendy’s on the drive home and break the news – over some deep-fried chicken strips – that the balance of the decorating will have to wait until tomorrow. You can tell that the strenuous day is catching up with him; he doesn’t even fake protest. Before the Eagles game, right? After breakfast you both will be back at it you promise, although you are certain you will be sore as hell tomorrow. At home, Damian showers then falls asleep on the sofa watching a Harry Potter DVD.

“Hello.”

“It’s Peggy. I left two messages this afternoon. Just calling to check on Damian.”

“He’s asleep.”

“Already? Is he sick?”

“No. Just tired is all.”

“From what?”

“We did some work in the yard today. He’s fine.”

“Can you get him?”

“Let him sleep, Peggy. How are your parents?”

“They’re broken up. I’m afraid they don’t know what to do.” Welcome to my world, whispers the strained voice.

You say nothing.

“I guess they’ll get used to it soon enough, though. They’ll have to, really,” Peggy says.

“I guess so.”

“Are you sure he’s asleep.”

“I’m sure. Have a safe drive tomorrow.”

“Lance?”

“Yes?”

“Never mind. I can tell you later.”

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

 

Damian bounds into the room. He wants to finish everything now. It is seven o’clock . Give a guy a break, Dame. Cook me some breakfast or something. Of course he cannot cook. He offers to ‘make’ you some Cheerios, an offer you respectfully decline. After a quick – and flushless – shower, he agrees to a Bob Evans breakfast. The balance of the morning will be dedicated to finishing the decorations. Over breakfast you share another idea. Tonight, after dinner, the two of you move the fire bowl to the front yard and light a fire. Together you can take in your festive handiwork while waiting for Peggy to return. Damian says he cannot wait to see her face. Me either, pal. Me either. Damian wants S’mores for the fire. Excellent suggestion, Dame!

The ascending Santa proves trickier than you imagined, but eventually he and his team are heading for the upper roof. Rudolph and Frosty are anchored in the front lawn and bobbling in the wind. Damian has positioned the oscillating shadow wheel perfectly, projecting a Christmas tree, a flying sleigh with Santa silhouette, and a trumpeting herald across the garage door. Wires are secured and duct taped at the point they cross the walkway. You put your arm on his shoulder and tell him, maybe more sincerely than you have ever spoken to him, that you are proud of him. He pats your shoulder and tells you that this is the best Christmas ever. And it’s not even Thanksgiving, he adds with a laugh.

The Eagles drub the Cowboys as the two of you eat Papa John’s. You are glad finally to have some down time. You allow Damian to drink Coke as you drink Michelob. You both are laughing at anything and everything, feeling free. Damian is more concerned with the progression of the sun than the football game. Every now-and-again he peeks out the curtain to measure the impending darkness. Is it time yet? Three, four, five times. The Pats are on the late game, but he will not let you concentrate. You take a glimpse outside, rub your hands excitedly together and announce that it’s time to get a fire started. Damian grabs the S’mores ingredients and races to the door. Maybe this really is the best Christmas ever. You insist he put a jacket on. You don’t want Mom to be angry with me, do you?

You were never one much for S’mores; sweets of any sort actually. But Damian likes making them, so you eat every other one. Dan Lipzowski, he who formerly presented the neighborhood’s most ornate holiday offering, is walking his Labradoodle. He stops by your fire with a thinly veiled look of disgust. “Bit early for all this isn’t it?”

“It’s six thirty , Dan. Dark enough this time of year.”

“I mean the season.”

“My Dad and I worked all weekend. Doesn’t it look great, Mr. Lipzowski?” interrupts Damian.

The man’s face softens, you fear in pity. “Sure it does, son. Never seen one look better. Just usually not in November is all.”

“My Mom is coming home soon. She’s gonna love it I bet.”

“It’s quite the display, Damian,” he offers before heading down the road, a soft grumble in his wake.

You and Damian sit wordlessly listening to the crackle of the firewood. Could Lipzowski know? Is that why he made that face at your son? Could Peggy have told his wife? Could the entire neighborhood know? How the hell can it be acceptable that this Labradoodle-owning nobody is made aware of your impending separation-with-intention-to-divorce before your own flesh and blood? Before Damian? Damn her! And all of the pain she has inflicted on you. She can play all the games she wants. You will fight her at every turn. And to hell with the collateral damage! She may win, but you will fight. He is your son as much as he is hers.

Staring at the embers, you smile. You are just waiting for her headlights to stream down the hill. Whatever else happens this moment will be yours. She will never touch it.

 

“Dad? Dad? You okay?”

“Huh? Oh, sure. Smoke in my eyes is all.”

“You think Mom is gonna like it?”

“Would I have done it otherwise?” you ask. “She’s gonna love it.”

“Yeah. This is the best Christmas ever.”

“And it’s not even Thanksgiving,” you laugh.

 Peter Cunniffe was raised in  Delaware County and has spent most of his adult years residing in Chester County.  He is currently completing a collection of short stories related to marriage set in the Philadelphia region.

 

The Glock has one bullet in the chamber and fifteen in the magazine. Roy’s got it cocked and ready. He bets me twenty bucks he can fire all sixteen while the target’s coming at him, but that’s not all. He says: “I’ll alternate – head shot, body shot, head shot, body shot, squeeze out all sixteen, and make fourteen, before the target’s five yards out.”

“You’re an idiot,” I tell him. “You can’t shoot that fast. Nobody can shoot that fast.” I tear the cellophane wrapper off a box of .38’s.

“Fuck you, you want to bet or not?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say. I drop the wrapper into an empty ammo box and I load my .357 for when it’s my turn to shoot. “If you’re gonna be a jerkoff about it, I’ll take your money from you.”

He puts the Glock down on the tray with three of our other pistols, a couple rentals, and about a dozen boxes of ammo. He wipes his hands on the front of his gray hooded sweatshirt. He adjusts his goggles, his earplugs, and his oily old Phillies cap. Then he picks up the gun and aims at the target at the end of the range, twenty-five yards away.

The target’s a life-sized photograph of a mustached terrorist armed with an Uzi. Not that we’re allowed to shoot at moving targets, by the way, but the rangemaster is outside catching a smoke. It’s a slow day here; there are only two or three other guys shooting. And they’re like six lanes away, so we’ve pretty much got the place to ourselves. It’s Tuesday afternoon. That’s one of the decent things about working 3:30-to-midnight at the bubble gum factory: I’m home every day when Jeff and Shelley come home from school; I can stay up late, get wasted, and watch ESPN after Peggy and the kids go to bed without worrying about being late to work the next day; and I can shoot when hardly anybody else is here.

Roy says, “Let her rip.”

I press the green button. The guy with the Uzi comes whizzing at us and Roy fires away. First, he completely forgets to alternate his shots to the head and body. And that was his idea! Second, he misses so many, it’s a joke. I swear three ricochet off the ceiling. Never mind firing at a moving target which it says all over the place you’re not allowed to do. If the rangemaster had seen Roy shoot up the ceiling, we’d be totally fucked. And third, if a guy with an Uzi was coming at Roy in real life, Roy would be dead.

But that’s not why we shoot. That’s not why we come here every week. And when Roy looks at that target, he doesn’t see a terrorist anyway. The twenty bucks won’t even cover the cost of the ammo and targets. But that doesn’t matter. We come here because of something Roy said after the first time we came to this range three months ago: “That felt pretty good, man,” he said. “I guess it beats blowing that motherfucker’s brains out – or my own brains out for that matter.”

And considering what he’d been through, I took him seriously. So I was like, “We should do this again.”

And he goes, “Fuck yeah.”

We used to shoot with my dad at a range near where we grew up. But we stopped on my eighteenth birthday. That was seventeen years ago. That was the last time we shot together until we started coming here – which does not in any way excuse Roy from his shitty aim today.

“You suck,” I tell him.

“You moved it too fast,” he says. Roy fishes a twenty from his wallet.

“It’s a button, retard,” I say, taking the twenty and jamming it in my pocket. “There’s just one speed – there is no faster or slower.”

“No,” he says. “The problem is it picks up speed on its way down.”

“Nah,” I laugh, “the problem is you suck.”

The whole time Roy and I didn’t go shooting, we basically didn’t talk to each other. We didn’t go to each other’s weddings. I didn’t take Roy out and get him drunk when he got his divorce. You know, shit like that. It was crazy, because we’d been best friends since first grade and we lived three blocks from each other, in the same neighborhood where we grew up. I’d run into him at Cricket’s Hoagies or Eagle Hardware or whatever, and it was always like, “Hey, how’s it going? Alright, how’s it going? Take it easy. You too.” It was fucked up, but not saying anything would have been more fucked up. It’s not like we were strangers. You know?

We started talking again four months ago at his son’s funeral. At first I wasn’t even going to go, but Peggy said I should. She said if I didn’t I’d probably regret not going. But if I went, I probably wouldn’t regret going. She was right, as usual.

I felt so bad for Roy. I didn’t know what to say to him at the wake. When I walked in it was intense. Roy was in the kitchen opening a beer. At first we were like, “Hey, how’s it going…” But that was insane because we both knew how it was going. And it was different because it wasn’t just running into each other at Cricket’s. You know? It wasn’t the same old bullshit. “I’m really sorry,” I said. I put out my hand.

Roy grabbed me and hugged me. He started crying. “I’m sorry too, man,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” Then I was crying too. His shoulders shook. For a split second it seemed like he could have been laughing, but I knew he wasn’t. He was crying like he never cried before. Times like that, what can you say? I just held onto him for a while, and we cried together. Then, it being a wake and all, we got ripped as hell.

After that we were best friends again. Up until then I figured I might go the rest of my life without ever getting together with Roy again. The thing of it is: you never know what the fuck is going to happen; and you can take that to the bank.

* * *

On the night of my eighteenth birthday I got in a fight with my girlfriend, Denise Brady. That night my mom and dad took Denise and me out to dinner down in South Philly. So after my parents went to bed, we go down to the basement where I had my bedroom. We were watching MTV. I tried to get Denise either to smoke some weed or give me a blowjob. I don’t remember; maybe both. I was like, “Come on, it’s my birthday!”

And she said, “We have to talk about something serious.” That’s when she told me she was leaving me, going to college in some dumb-ass place in the Midwest.

I was like, “What the fuck!”

And she was like, “I told you. I’m going.”

She told me there was nothing to discuss; her mind was made up. That’s what really got me. She’d made up her mind without even telling me what she was thinking! And she wouldn’t listen to what I had to say. I snapped. I pushed her, and she pushed me back. It got worse and worse, you know? Finally, I got so pissed I hit her; I smacked her in her face.

After that, Denise bolted. She ran upstairs and out. She ran three blocks, all the way to Roy’s house – not for Roy, but for Roy’s sister Liz who was Denise’s best friend.

Roy answered the door. He took one look at Denise’s bruised face and he knew I did it. I mean, he knew Denise had been over my house, and it’s not like girls got mugged in our neighborhood. And the thing of it for Roy was his dad didn’t live with the family anymore on account of beating the crap out of Roy’s mom. That situation had gotten way out of hand before the old man finally left. Once he put Roy’s mom in the hospital. And more than once social services showed up at their house.

So that night, on my eighteenth birthday, when Roy saw Denise all banged up, it’s like Peggy says: that must have pushed his button, because he flipped the fuck out.

After I hit Denise and she ran away, I stole a bottle of vodka from my parents. I went down to the basement and drank about a quarter of it. Denise and I had been going together since tenth grade. Here it was the end of twelfth; we were supposed to go to community college together, and bam! She dumps this on me. I was supposed to take business classes at community. We were supposed to move to this place on Lake Michigan – she had family there. I was going to save up and buy a fishing boat, be a charter captain, take people out fishing for lake trout and salmon and shit. We had it planned.

I sat in bed drinking the vodka, thinking about Denise, and feeling like crap. I cried like a baby for about an hour, and I guess I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was dark. I was on my back; my forehead felt cold, like someone was holding an ice cube against it. Then my eyes adjusted and I saw somebody standing over my bed, pointing at me. Jesus fucking Christ! A gun! A burglar! No. It was Roy, holding a .38 revolver to my forehead. I tried to say something, but nothing came out. I thought I was going to throw up. I looked up at him. I moved my lips; I could hear my teeth chatter. But I was so freaked out I swear I couldn’t even talk!

Roy goes, “Close your eyes.”

I shivered.

He shouted, “Close your fucking eyes!”

I thought, this is it – Roy’s fucking crazy and this is how I am going to die. I scrunched my eyes closed. There was nothing; just dead silence.

“Please don’t kill me,” I managed to say. I couldn’t breathe.

“Three…” said Roy.

“ Roy, please, man, I don’t want to die…Please, don’t…!”

“Shut up!” he said. And then he said, “Two…” and then he said, “One…”

Then there’s nothing, except for me shivering and slobbering like an idiot. And finally, Roy goes, “If you ever lay a hand on her again, you’d better never fucking fall asleep.”

I didn’t hear him leave. But when I opened my eyes he was gone. I ran up the basement steps and opened the kitchen window in the back of the house. Roy was two houses down, almost at the end of the alley. I grabbed an empty beer bottle from the kitchen counter and threw it out the window at him. It missed him and smashed against the Fitzgerald’s garage door. “Motherfucker!” I yelled into the darkness. By then Roy was gone. I know I shouldn’t have hit Denise. After that night, I never hit anyone again – never even spanked my kids. So it’s not like some good didn’t come out of it. And like Peggy says, it wasn’t really me he was pointing his gun at. But at the time – and for a long time after – it was like, what the fuck was that about?

* * *

I never saw Denise again. Before the next Christmas break her dad died and her family moved to the Midwest, where her mom was from. Community college sucked. I dropped out after the first semester and got a job at the bubble gum factory. It’s pretty decent, good benefits and that’s where I met Peggy. She worked there summers and Christmas breaks while she got her teaching degree.

Roy and I pretty much avoided each other until I heard about his son. That poor kid got run over by some dumb-ass drunk driver out on Route 1 where he lived with his mom and her new husband. For the first couple weeks after the accident, Roy was on some heavy-duty drugs to help him keep his shit together. Even then, just about all he could talk about was killing the guy who killed his son. And when he wasn’t talking about that he’d talk about “just fucking ending everything, everything…” Roy’s mom told me her brother was going to take Roy’s guns out of the house. That definitely sounded like a good idea. I told her I’d keep an eye on Roy.

A couple weeks later, when we started talking about the old days, about the old shooting range, and Roy said he wanted to try out the new range, I figured it would be good for him to blow off some steam, you know?

* * *

I load the .357 magnum with .38 bullets, because the .357 ammo has way too much kick for a little guy like me. Hell, Roy’s already done enough damage to the ceiling of this place for one day. And besides, the rangemaster’s back in his booth, so we can’t do any more stupid shit. I tape up a new target – a standard bull’s eye – and move it out 15 yards. I raise the pistol, set my sites on the bull’s eye, take a deep breath, let it out slow, squeeze the trigger, and blast a nice big hole, right through the middle of the target.

“Good shot,” says Roy.

I answer with five more rounds – BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! – emptying the revolver.

Now the range is silent. It’s that buzz in your head after there’s noise – guns, jack hammers, packing machines or whatever. You hear it even after it stops. You feel it against your eyelids and your temples.

The guys in the other lane pack up their stuff. The rangemaster flips through the Daily News. Roy wipes his Glock with an oily rag, and I reload my .357.Louis Greenstein’s one-act plays, Smoke, Interview with a Scapegoat and The Convert, have been produced many times in the U.S. and abroad. Louis is the co-author of With Albert Einstein, a one-man show about the life of the great scientist, which has enjoyed critical and popular success at the Walnut Street Theater, Princeton University, and schools and science museums. Louis is the recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts playwriting fellowship. His fiction and haiku have appeared in Muse Apprentice Guild and Dream Forge. Currently, he is working on a new novel. Louis lives in Lower Merion with his wife Catherine and their children, Raven, Hannah, and Sam.

[img_assist|nid=4339|title=”3 Mamaie” by Simona Josan, © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=113]Evie is a good daughter in some ways. When her stepfather keels over suddenly from a heart attack, she takes off two weeks from work to fly back to Iowa. She helps her mother organize the kitchen cabinet, separating the canned goods from the pasta boxes. She lets her weep and brings her Kleenex after Kleenex. She waters the plants whose leaves are brown and curling at the ends. She wears black to the funeral service, holding her mother’s hand, listening to the priest drone on about her step-dad and what a great man he was (as well as a dedicated Shriner) and she does not burst into hysterical laughter. She bows her head and doesn’t yank her hand away even though her mother grasps it tighter and tighter as if she’ll never let go, squeezing until Evie’s fingers tingle and turn cold. She calls the realtor to put their cramped and unhappy house on the market. She helps her mother sort through his junk and doesn’t correct her long, inaccurate, sepia colored reminisces.

“Do you want to take anything with you, honey?” her mother asks, holding up his round pocket watch, his WW II lighter, his fishing tackle box.

“No, thank you,” Evie says each time in a voice like someone refusing a second serving of mashed potatoes.

She even stays to search for a place to put her mother once the house sells, but her mother, in her vague manner, finds something wrong with every potential new home.

For instance:

They cruise by Sunny Vale Retirement Village, an apartment complex made of cheery yellow brick with red shutters and flowerboxes in the windows. Reasonable rent, ceiling fans, and a weekly Yahtzee game at the clubhouse. “Oh, there is no yard!” her mother says, tapping her fingers to her lips.

“ Who cares?” Evie says. Her mother blinks at her rapidly like a baby bird. Bewilderment and hurt ripples across her face. This makes Evie want to shake her or wrap her safely in a blanket.

“Why do you need a yard? Will you be sunbathing?” Evie’s new approach requires her to use sarcasm blended with a dash of autism. She’s hoping her refusal to react will force her mother to be more practical. But this is not how their relationship usually goes and it has put her mother out of whack. She looks at Evie like she is someone else’s child, one with fangs. She shouldn’t have been so clingy when she was younger, Evie thinks, each separation from her mother resembling an Irish wake. She shouldn’t have slept with her mother’s green shirt under her pillow because she missed her so much. At twelve, she should’ve shaved her head, gotten a nose piercing, and smoked cigarettes behind the school gym. Instead, she went to the library to check out books about misunderstood horses. She should’ve been a different person entirely.

Her mother looks out the car window. “Well, I think a garden…” her voice trails off, leaving a suspended silence that drives Evie to bite off her fingernails one by one.

Finally, Evie explains she really has to get back to work. Really. She has to leave. Soon. Now, if possible. She imagines dropping her mother off at the neighbor’s door with a note pinned to her blouse, “Please take care of me” and speeding off into the night, like someone released from a prison sentence. Instead, she tells her mother that she has to be back in Chicago the very next morning. It’s imperative.

Her mother nods her head slowly, like a hearing-impaired person learning to read lips. “Oh, I understand. You have things…”

Before she leaves, she tells her mom to call her any time, as much as she wants, day or night. Giddy with the knowledge that she will soon be gone, she even goes so far as to suggest that her mother could move to Chicago for a while. As soon as the words leave her mouth, Evie freezes, suddenly picturing her mother sitting on the sofa all day while Evie works, her hands folded in her lap, waiting patiently for her daughter to return home.

Her mother shakes her head. “Oh, no. I wouldn’t think of it.”

They say good-bye in the driveway next to the oil spot left by her step dad’s [step-dad’s] old wreck of a Plymouth. Her mother hugs her hard, for too long, an interminable amount of time, until Evie pushes her away. “I have to go, Mom.”

“Okay, my darling.” she gushes wildly, sounding like a lover.

Evie jumps in the car. She puts on her seat belt. Her mother continues to stand by the window until Evie rolls it down.

“I miss him,” her mother announces.

What can she miss, Evie wonders. He was a bad husband, full of rage and given to Tennessee Williams theatrics. He liked to throw things that would shatter spectacularly. He slammed doors. When introducing Evie to others, he referred to her as “the competition.” Her mother would laugh uneasily, trying to catch Evie’s eye, as if telling her silently, But you know how much I love you, right? Now, her mother waits for Evie to say something, but Evie’s brain is an empty cave. If she opens her mouth, bats will fly out. Instead, she rolls the window back up, puts the car in reverse, and drives away.

A wonderful daughter, yes.

 

The phone calls start. Her mother has taken Evie’s words to heart and calls at least ten times a day. Evie can let the machine pick up at home, but at work, she has to answer. Sometimes, she puts her mother on hold for half an hour at a time, hoping the theme from The Nutcracker playing over and over again will drive her to hang up. No such luck.

She tries to keep the calls brisk, the conversations short, and to remind her mother how busy Evie is. Busy, busy, busy. Except in real life, Evie’s nights consist of crossword puzzles, braiding and re-braiding her hair, cat tricks, TV, and paint-by-numbers. So she creates a crazy social life and a complicated divorce case at work involving necrophilia. She invents a night class on wine tasting and two new best friends who have forced her to join the Chicago Social Club. She joins an imaginary volleyball team that practices at the Y on Wednesday nights. She constructs such a rich and rewarding life that she begins to feel jealous of the self she’s made up. When her mother exclaims about an invitation Evie has pretended to get to an art opening, Evie snaps. “Well, it won’t be that fun.”

At work one Monday morning, she suggests to her boss, Matt Becker, Esquire, that maybe it’s time to change the office phone number. Ever alert in his red suspenders, MB asks, “Is someone stalking you?”

[img_assist|nid=4340|title=”Thief of Hearts” by Aloysius, © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=306]“Yes.” Evie tells him. “My mother.”

He steeples his hands under his chin. He is sympathetic but explains that, unfortunately, the phone number must remain the same.

“Then will you pretend to almost fire me?”

MB practices divorce and bankruptcy law. He understands the intricacies of relationships and has learned when to ask questions and when to button up. He has a second wife named Emma and a first child named Dexter and he never stares at Evie’s legs when she wears short skirts. The next time Evie’s mother calls, he picks up the line, speaks to her in a low, polite, and professional voice. The calls at work don’t stop completely, but they slow down to once or twice per day.

Then finally one Saturday night, Evie has a real event to attend. She’s been invited by a friend of an acquaintance to a party called “The Parent Trap.” The idea is to dress up as a mom or a dad, either someone famous or one of your own parents. People in Chicago are very clever that way. She hears clever conversations everywhere; in Starbucks, on the El, in the bathroom at work. She tries to join in, but her attempts are always slightly off, like a person who has stumbled into a conversation too late and laughs before the punch line has been delivered.

The phone rings just as she’s about to leave for the party. She stands in the doorway, her hand on the knob. “Evie, honey? It’s me.” She pauses. “Your mom.” She can see her mother clearly, standing by the yellow phone, the circle of light from the kitchen lamp casting her face in shadows, half-packed boxes towering around her. “The realtor called today and said something.” Another pause. “I think it was important but I couldn’t find the thing to write down the phone number and so now I’m worried he’s showing the house tomorrow and I just can’t…” Evie shuts the door, locks it, and hurries away. The sound of her mother’s voice echoes in her ears all the way down the long hallway.

In the elevator, she looks at her reflection in the silvery door. Her face appears distorted, like someone underwater. She surrounds her mouth with dark, dark lipstick and is startled by the results. She is all mouth. That is fine, because tonight, she is someone else entirely; someone brave, a girl with an attitude.

The party is filled with moms and dads. There are mom’s everywhere—Drag Queen Mom, a Mom with a beehive hairdo and bright pink lipstick, Martyr Mom with a fake wooden cross strapped to her back, Whistler’s Mother, a girl dressed like a cat. The dads include Mr. Cleaver, several 1950s’ dads in corduroy jackets with patched elbows and unlit pipes, dads in football jerseys with pot bellies made out of sofa cushions, sitcom dads, and a Father Christmas. Also, a man dressed as the Virgin Mary. “Get it?” he asks everyone. “Get it?”

The moms and dads bump into Evie, who can’t escape the front room. She finds herself repeating, “Oh, sorry, sorry. Whoops! Excuse me!” until finally, she’s able to wrench free by elbowing a Joan Crawford Mom carrying a handful of wire hangers.

One woman in a blue dress with puffed sleeves trails around holding a martini glass between sharp red fingernails, her face covered in white powder. Evie asks the woman what her mom is like. The woman coughs neatly into her hand. “She’s like, dead.” Evie takes a sip of her paper cup filled with warm pulpy orange juice and Smirnov vodka. She nods, unsure of what facial expression to wear.

The hostess Mom, with a black eye and an arm in a sling, circles around offering meatloaf, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Wonder Bread, juice boxes, Little Debby cakes, and green beans.

For half the night, she is cornered by a frizzy-haired guy in a black turtleneck with a huge yellow construction paper question mark taped to his shirt. “I’m adopted,” he explains. He leans in until Evie can clearly see his nostril hairs. Tiny spittle projectiles fly when he talks. Evie considers rummaging through the hostess’ nearby dresser for sunglasses.

She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Something too intricate and personal to untangle over the music. She catches sight of a very cute Dad leaning against the wall near the bathroom. It seems that she and the Dad are exchanging heated eye contact, but it’s hard to tell in the dim lights.

Adopted Guy has posed a question. Evie asks him to repeat it. “I said it’s an interesting idea. Do we have to turn into our parents? You know, like no matter how hard we try and rebel and not make the same dumb mistakes, we’re sort of predestined to fuck it up the same way anyway?”

Evie doesn’t know how to answer that question. She says, “Oh, hold on. I think I have something in my eye." She weaves her way over to cute Dad, who wears a long blond wig, a tie-dyed shirt, a suede vest with a peace emblem, and billowy-legged blue jeans. A knot of loud-talking girls gather near him. Evie squeezes by close enough to allow one of her breasts to brush his arm. She feels suddenly very brave and very drunk and it’s an exhilarating feeling, as though she might cause a scene.

“Mom? Mom, is that you?” Hippie Dad says, touching her arm.

Evie stops. “Son?” They’re going to have the “theatre school” conversation where they banter like two actors auditioning for Second City. While they talk, Evie imagines their wedding, their children; the interesting story they’ll recount years later about meeting at a parent party. He’ll tell their family, “As soon as I saw her, I knew she was the right Mom for our children.”

He has straight white teeth with a slight gap in the front. He probably drinks lots of milk. She could grow to love that in him. “Please tell me you’re not an accountant in real life,” she says.

“No, I don’t even own a brief case.” It turns out he’s studying to be a geneticist at the University of Illinois. He researches the mating habits of fruit flies. It’s more interesting than one would think. Luckily, he doesn’t go into detail. He has a fat, spotted mutt named Jack whose nose is flaking off at the moment. He’s taking Jack to the vet very soon. He asks Evie if she likes drive-in movies. She says yes, of course, yes! The important thing is to keep the conversation going. He reads and reads and reads and then takes naps and reads some more. He regrets not traveling to Prague with his best friend from undergrad when he had the chance (God, his thin wrists are so fucking attractive. Her mother once told her that men with thin wrists are better kissers because they’re more evolved. It’s something she read in a book). His favorite scene from any movie ever is the last few minutes of Manhattan when the Woody Allen character lists reasons not to blow his head off: the existence of the Marx Brothers, jazz, his lover’s face. He takes a breath. “But wait, what do you do?”

Evie considers making something up. She could be a private detective or the amateur photographer hired by the private detective. She says, “I work in a law firm.” His face falls. “But I am extremely unethical.” He perks up again. She confesses to reading the divorce files at work. She has access to them, technically, yes, but only to fit them alphabetically into the file cabinet. But often now, when Mark Becker, Esquire, goes to court or to lunch or to the dry cleaner’s to pick up his suit for the next day, Evie waves goodbye, counts to twenty, and then opens the files to read the personal information of the clients, all written in MB’s neatly blocked script; all the evidence needed for the divorce proceedings.

“What kind of evidence?” Her confession has not caused him to make a face like someone biting into a mealy apple. For this, too, she might love him.

“Evidence as to why his client should get everything accumulated over the course of the relationship. Including the toothbrushes.” She describes the diary the wife kept in Vitullo vs. Vitullo. It detailed the wife’s unrequited crush on the director of their church choir, and also how her husband kept old issues of Playboy underneath the bathroom sink, magazines their 10-year-old son could have found at any time. On March 15 of last year, Mr. Vitullo called Mrs. Vitullo a son of a bitch at Denny’s in front of the Sunday brunch crowd. He played his 78 of “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” so many times that the neighbors phoned the cops. The complaints went on for three more pages. Most files are like that, long laundry lists of small things. It’s not always huge catastrophes that split them apart, not torrid affairs or child abuse or alcoholism, but something else; a slow, mundane animosity that sprouts from knowing another person too intimately for too long.

The room has thinned to only a few bedraggled moms and dads milling around here and there with wigs askew and smeared lipstick. The hostess flips the lights on and off. “All parents please report home to check on the children.”

“I should go,” Evie takes a last hard sip of red wine, hoping it hasn’t turned her teeth cranberry colored. He nods.

“Just wait for me for one second,” she says and ducks into the bathroom.

Her face in the mirror is startling, too pale and there are dark purplish circles under the eyes. She doesn’t appear glamorous; she looks frightened, as if someone has just threatened to punch her. She narrows her eyes, practices a better smile, one belonging to a starlet. She rummages through the medicine cabinet and finds a pair of scissors. She pulls down a long section of hair at the front of her head and cuts it quickly. The hair springs back, short. Now she has bangs. Or a bang. She snips a section off the other side. The two sides are uneven. She tries again. Dark hair falls into the sink in question mark shapes. Someone knocks on the door. She takes a few last hacks. She hasn’t had bangs since was twelve and there’s a reason. They make her face look bare, her eyes even bigger, like a real life replica of one of those horrible children in a Walter Keane velvet painting. The person outside pounds the door. “Hurry up or you’re grounded!”

When she comes out of the bathroom, Hippie Dad has vanished into the night, lost, gone on the road with his band maybe. She knew it. She knew it. She can’t pull this off. She starts for the door and nearly bumps into him as he rounds the corner with two paper cups in his hands. “Your hair!” he exclaims, taking a step back.

“Let’s go,” she says. She walks away without glancing back, hoping, please God, that he’s following and that when she turns around, he will still be there with her. And miraculously, he is.

In the cab, Evie nods and tries to laugh at the right places as he’s telling her a story about his uncle who breeds Bichon Frise’s. She makes a hurried mental survey of the state of her apartment as she last left it. Did she pick her underwear up off the floor after her shower? Are there neon signs of weirdness in plain sight such as the paper dolls she bought on impulse last week and cut out while listening to the audio version of In Cold Blood narrated by Robert Blake?

The apartment won’t be too, too bad, because she’s taken to keeping it presentable, due to a recent Saturday late night marathon of a true-life crime series on A&E that showed colored photos of dead people’s homes. They didn’t reveal the bodies, but it was still deeply disturbing to witness the way some people lived; with garbage bags piled around or stacks of decade-old Better Homes and Gardens or pizza boxes; rooms that looked like the occupants had given up at some point and said screw it, I’ll just live with the dog shit on the floor. If Evie is found murdered in her apartment, she wants the place to at least look presentable. She imagines the detective shaking his big lovely head and saying, “What a shame that the life of such a nice, clean, well-organized girl had to come to an end such as this.” It’s a comforting way to live, picking up her underwear and socks, half-thinking about the detective and how impressed he’d be with her.

But now they are in front of her apartment. When Evie glances at the front of her building, she sees a fuzzy round figure sitting on the brick planter by the two doors. Her heart zigzags. Her mother! Her mother with her brown suitcase and sewing basket! But then the person moves and she sees it’s not her mother at all, but the old bald man from 2-C who appears periodically to smoke cigarettes and pace along the sidewalk in the dark.

Hippie Dad seems to be waiting for Evie to speak. In the dark of the cab, his face looks young and cavernous. “Isn’t that terrible?” he says.

As with Adopted Guy, Evie has lost the thread of his story. She shakes her head sympathetically. She hopes that’s the response he wants. “That is a shame.”

“I know. The entire face was just, like, gone.”

The cabbie says “I never trusted little dogs,” and Hippie Dad pays and they are on their way.

He walks up the stairs behind her. She jumps when he touches the small of her back as though to stop her if she starts to fall.

Once inside, they stand in the middle of the room, looking around her apartment together. She thought she was living wittily, being brave, starting over, no furniture to move besides a few things from college and an old brown sofa of her mom’s. Everything else has come from the Brown Elephant thrift store or been found on sidewalks, other people’s discarded furniture, including a wooden crate with “Bombay India” written in black ink on the side. She’s covered that in pictures cut from magazines; a collage of children, animals, women from the 50’s, a giant pair of lips, a cartoon man in a hat running from a speeding train. She has hung aprons up as curtains and nailed a rusty bicycle wheel rim to the wall for art. Now, she views her place for the first time as a stranger might. It doesn’t look interesting or eclectic at all. It looks sad and desperate to please, like a performing monkey in a tiny red hat.

Hippie Dad pulls off his wig. His hair is blond and curly and beautiful. He says, “I love your apartment. It’s so you.” He excuses himself to go to the bathroom.

The message light on the answering machine blinks three times in rapid succession, like a warning on a heart monitor. Evie throws a dishtowel over it and then unplugs the phone and tosses it in the oven.

She’s never had anyone stay over, with the exception of her ex-boyfriend from Iowa. That had been a disaster. The moment she saw his puffy, sweet face as he exited the airport terminal, she remembered why she couldn’t be with him–not someone so open and vulnerable, a person too much like herself or her mother to be of much help. As a couple, they could never make a decision, always deferring to the other person. Do you want to go see that movie? I don’t know. Do you? I don’t know. Do you want to just rent a movie? Only if you do. They’d stumble through life together in a series of indecisive moments that left them treading water in circles around each other until both were exhausted.

She feels very pleased with herself to have Hippie Dad in her apartment. She wants to tell her story to someone; have the person say, Do you know how dangerous that is? Did anyone see you leave with him? Did you even catch his last name? But it doesn’t feel dangerous. It feels like something she has to do.

They talk and talk and talk and Evie’s cat sits calmly on his lap. He pets the cat gently and absentmindedly. Evie tries not to interpret this motion to be a sign of what he’d be like in bed. They must tell each other everything, searching for some mystic parallels. Evie has to stop herself from crooning, Me too! every time he boldly claims that he loves something (the Ramones) or despises something (people who don’t know how to parallel park). Love the death penalty? Me too! Hate babies? Me too! She is not herself. All of her opinions have vanished in the night like so much smoke. She’s not even sure if she likes him.

It’s slipping away from them, the joking flirtation from the party. They start to cover mundane topics with the utmost seriousness. The winter hasn’t been so bad this year. No, it really hasn’t, has it?

“Wow, this is a really interesting space.” His eyes scan the room and he drums his fingers on his jeans. The more he talks, the more he slips into his dad hippie character.

She too seems to be acting more like her mother. She keeps jumping up to offer him things. Do you want chamomile tea? Are you hungry? I have cookies. Any second now, she’s going to lose herself completely and bring him a stiff drink, the newspaper, and offer to give him a foot massage.

“Would you like a glass of water?" He nods. She stands, a little wobbly in her heels, and goes into the kitchen. When she turns around, he wavers in the doorway, blocking the light from the living room. Then they’re kissing. "You’re tall," she says during a pause.

"It’s in my genetic make-up." He tugs at the collar of her dress. His mouth feels soft but not too soft, tongue wet but not too wet, and his arms around her waist urgent but not too urgent. She’s becoming distracted trying to remember which fairy tale this thought reminds her of, which in turn makes her think of the story of Hansel and Gretel and the wicked witch. And that reminds her of the oven and the phone in her own stove, a white and secret thing, waiting.

His mouth finds her ear. “So, what’s with the widow costume?” he whispers.

Evie feels her spine straighten, her fingers go cold.

When her mother called to say her stepdad had died, Evie felt a stabbing pain in the palm of her hand, where she’d always felt her sharpest grief. The pain wasn’t for him. She would miss him, probably, at some point, regret that they were never close, never said I love you or did any of the father-daughter things recommended by family therapists. Instead, when she heard that he was gone, she couldn’t stop thinking, Mom, mom, mom. She missed her so much in that moment.

She misses her still.

Evie steps out of her shoes and kicks them across the kitchen floor. She wishes there were someone to tell her what to do next. All that matters now is that he’s watching her. She’ll take him to her room. She will be someone else; someone who is not afraid of the dark or of being touched by another person. She will do whatever he wants. She will be amazing. Wonderful, even. A wonderful girl, at last. Aimee LaBrie’s short stories have been published in Beloit Fiction Journal, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Minnesota Review, and Eclipse, among others. "Ducklings," which appeared in Pleiades was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

[img_assist|nid=4342|title=”Comfort Zone” by Indigene, © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=186]I confess that I broke the cactus. The poor plant had been growing well enough in its little auburn pot. I counted eleven spiny spears shooting out from the center to form a mangled circle of sorts. Somebody gave it to me. I don’t remember who. And then smack in the middle of the cactus, this morning, there was a strange brown wire. I thought, is it a twig? A thread? And without further reflection, I grabbed that funny brown thing and yanked it out. I don’t know when I realized it – as I was pulling it out, or in the instant afterwards, as it lay in my hand. I have just destroyed a cactus, I thought. This twig, or stem, or what have you, was growing in that cactus. It belonged there. This twig was not trespassing. Neither was it destined to become a spiny spear. I have just destroyed what would have been the only flower of this spiny, green cactus.

I left the cactus where it was, poor wounded thing, and went to make the waffles. I made them the old way, stirring the batter with a wire whisk and pouring it into the waffle iron. On good days, when Elroy was in the mood and I was feeling up to it, I’d go out into the backyard and pick fresh raspberries. Or fresh strawberries, depending on the season. I would stir these into the batter before cooking. There is nothing like a homemade waffle with homegrown berries.

Elroy isn’t coming home today. I feel it in my bones. Today’s the day. It’s the one. La una, as they say in Spain. Or is that one o’clock? It’s been so long. The dancing is a long way off. Sometimes when I’m trying to fall asleep and Elroy is breathing lightly next to me, his soft wheezing in my ear, short phrases come back. Detached words, the lyrics of the songs we used to dance to in Sevilla or Granada. Elroy says I’m living in the past. Stuck there. “We ought to get a microwave,” he says.

“What for?” I ask. “So we can both die of radiation?” This is a genuine concern of mine.

“I’m already dying of radiation,” he says. “Skin cancer. All those summers in Florida.”

I take a good look at his leathery skin. “You have a healthy tan, is all.”

He doesn’t answer for a moment and then he says, an impish twinkle in his eye, “Want to make a bet?”

This is beyond propriety. “Elroy, I don’t want to bet on the welfare of your skin cells. They won’t like it.” He begins to chuckle. “Don’t laugh, it’s true. These are live things. They hear what we say.”

He strokes my hand and says, “Ok then, love. We won’t bet on my skin cells. That wasn’t even what I was going to say.”

“Oh? What did you want to bet on?”

He pauses and then adopts a rather serious tone. “Let’s have a bet on which one of us is going to kick it first,” he says.

And that’s how it started. As a joke. Just like any of Elroy’s jokes. Like the time he let my brother think I was pregnant. This was nearly thirty years ago, when Elroy was sixty-two and I was fifty-four. But still. At that age? It’s absurd. It’s downright lewd. We had George going for a while. If he had a known a thing about women he would have known that I’d stopped menstruating years earlier. But George did not pay attention to such things. He never has.

George died last Christmas of lung cancer. I try to tell Elroy to keep away from cigars, but he doesn’t listen.

“They don’t cause cancer,” he tells me.

“Like hell they don’t.”

“They have nowhere near as much nicotine as cigarettes.”

I don’t know if this is true or false. “Well then, do it as a favor to me,” I ask. “I can’t stand the smell.”

“You’ve been standing it for sixty years, what’s to stop you now? Besides, you should be encouraging me. That way you might win,” he says with a wink. “I might drop first.”

I tell him that I don’t like this form of banter anymore. That I want to cut it out.

“Cut what out?” he says. “Mary Beth, if you don’t have your death to laugh at in these years, what do you have?”

He has me, I think. He has me. Unless, of course, I go first.

He’s gone out for his morning walk. That’s where he’s been while I’ve been making breakfast and killing cacti. I used to go with him. Then I broke my hip. It’s a wonder the way your body hangs back as a shadow for year after year after year. And then one day it creeps up on you – bam! Here I am, it says. Feel me. Feel me.

How different the pains of the body are. How different from its pleasures. I think of the early days, when life was new to me. I used to have the sensation of flying, of being above and beyond and outside of my body. I was a spirit. I was on air. Now the body comes to me as a casement, sealing me in, keeping me shut, tight, creaking and cramped. I can’t even go for a walk.

Today must be the day. It’s icy out. February. No berries of any kind to be plucked for waffles. Elroy has his boots on, but still. I know how slick that ice can be. I know how you can be walking steadily and carefully one second, and the next you’re sucked to the ground. I have a vision of falling. Of Elroy’s blood seeping onto the ice for some animal, or worse, a child to find.

These are the images that fill my days now. Phones ring and I think – hospital? Elroy? Was it the cigars? A stroke? Sirens roar a few blocks away and my heart leaps with a rush of adrenaline. Until I remember, he’s napping upstairs. Yet even once I know that he’s asleep or watching television or taking a bath, my heart keeps hammering on. Last night I dreamt I was at my own funeral. I was lying in a casket, wearing my wedding dress. I had gone back in time to my former bridal self, twenty-four years old and glowing. One by one, people came up to greet me. I remember a blur of faces and then Elroy. He leaned over the edge and simply said, see, I won.

I try to tell myself that it hasn’t really become a contest. That neither of us would wish death for the other. Or loneliness for ourselves. But there is this competitiveness. We both have it. It surfaces exactly the same way in casinos as in graveyard gambles.

“So did you take your vitamins?” he asks me. “Don’t forget. Especially calcium. You wouldn’t want to develop osteoporosis.”

This is a joke. I try to take it as such. Secretly, I make mental notes about his breathing: Scratchier than last night. Has developed a cough. He says it’s just a tickle, but I can tell. It’s a cough.

Elroy, I think. Please be careful. It is slippery out there and you are not as limber as you once were. Elroy. I was kidding when I said those cigars would do you in. Let us pray, dearest, that our words do not bury us alive.

I pour the batter into the iron and press it firmly shut. I listen for the sound of ice crunching or the doorknob turning. Today’s the day, I can’t help thinking. Something awful. We’ve wished it on ourselves. Something terrible. I think this a lot of late.

It’s not that we’ve actually made a wager on our respective dates of doom. We haven’t. We’ve only been kidding around about the bet ever since Elroy brought it up. But that was just the problem. He brought it up. And now it is here, lurking in the kitchen and the bedroom and all along Elroy’s walk. Which one of us will go first?

Aside from that question there are the other details. There are the non-competitive details, ones not so amusing as the thought of Elroy saying I-told-you-so at my funeral. There is, for instance, the image of lying in bed alone.

I tried it yesterday afternoon. Elroy was downstairs watching television and a sudden, ridiculous fear rose in my chest. Now, I’m no scaredy-pants. I’m not going to tell you I’m looking forward to death, but when it comes I will meet it with open eyes. What I am not ready for is a year, or two years, or even ten, living in this house alone. Without him. That’s why I got into bed yesterday. I pulled the lavender sheets back and thought, This is what it is like to have a king-size bed to yourself. It didn’t feel so odd at first. Well, of course it didn’t. I’d taken plenty of naps without Elroy by my side.

If I had only stayed there. If I had only stayed on my side of the bed, next to the alarm clock, all would have been well. But I really wanted to test it out. I thought I’d make the idea as tangible as possible. So I rolled myself into the middle of the bed. Not all the way over to Elroy’s side. But smack into the middle of the bed. I was a buoy bobbing on a sea of lavender.

And so this is the work, the daily work, of staying afloat. This is the making of waffles and the butchering of cacti. The mundane acts that make the anxiety shrink. If I knew exactly what was going to happen I could be at peace. If I knew that I was to go first, or Elroy, or that I would have to live without him for three years or six or ten, if I could only know the number I could get a grip on it. I could be at peace. It’s this not knowing that stretches out like an ocean before me, full of mystery, suspense at its worst.

I can’t tell if Elroy’s bothered by it or not. He’s always been so carefree. But they say that in every joke there’s a hint of truth. And he’s the one who made the joke. He’s the one who made it, but the unfair thing is, I’m carrying it. It’s weighing me down like a lifetime of cigars or a hearty dose of skin cancer.

The waffles are on the table. I’ve set the syrup out, and the butter. The napkins are set, two saffron napkins and two forks and two knives. Pairs. Doubles of everything. When we got married, everything came in twos. We were given two golden candlesticks, two porcelain teacups, two bathroom towel sets – did they think we couldn’t use the same towels? But we don’t. I use the mauve ones, and Elroy, the lime. We never discussed it. It just happened that way.

Is this the way it will happen? No word, no phone call, no ghastly sight on the staircase or in the den? Just this empty space, vacant time, the waffles getting cold and the coffee. And then I hear them. Footsteps. They are approaching the house. They are the sound of Elroy or a policeman or a stunned neighbor. They are going to hit the front door any second now. “Mary Beth?” he calls. It’s him.

“Elroy?”

He steps into the living room and crosses over to where I am standing.

“Yes, love?” His cheeks are flushed with cold. He isn’t wearing enough clothing. Beneath his jacket there’s just a red flannel shirt. “What is it?” he asks.

He ought to be wearing a sweater. A wool hat. He has leather gloves on, but they aren’t very thick. “You must be freezing,” I tell him. “You’ll catch your death.” And then I hear them, these awful words of mine.

“Is something wrong? Mary Beth, what’s the matter?” He lays a gentle hand on my wrist. It is papery and dry and firm.

“Breakfast was ready twenty minutes ago,” I tell him. “You’re late.” Kabeera McCorkle is a Philadelphia area writer and native. Her work has previously been published by the Danforth Review, and has been produced by Philadelphia’s InterAct Theatre Company.

It was my highlight of the year, telling the class of freshman boys they all wanted to murder their dads and screw their moms. Freud’s idea—not mine. We were reading about Antigone, Oedipus’s daughter, buried alive for attempting to bury her traitor brother. I wanted them to see that her fated end resided in her family line—and that there were many such invisible connections perhaps guiding their own lives even now.

I sought out the most uncomfortable face. Tim Boggs. He first buried his face between both hands, rubbed his eyes, twisted in the chair, shook his head. Tim never met the world’s gaze, his look always askance. Here, again, someone who’d rather not see. Well, I’d see about that.

“A problem, Tim?”

“That’s a load of crap," he said. He avoided me, his classmates, choosing the black of the board. I waited and slowly, uncomfortably, he swiveled to face me.

I winked at him and said, "Yeah, Tim. Figures you’d say that. I’ve seen your mother."

Ah, the eruption of laughter, some of them even falling into the aisles. Usually the act brought a smile from even the kid in Tim’s position. But not this year. This year, he trembled, his eyes searching for something else to rest upon, back, forth, like a darting trout crossed by a shadow from above.

The thing was—I’d never seen Tim’s mother.

That next day, Robin sat at the end of the kitchen island, its green granite flecked with dark brown, hazel like her eyes. She wore her brown hair pulled back, no attempt made to hide the bones that protrude in her cheeks, shoulders. It gave her the look of someone unapproachable, someone wrapped too tight.

She took deep breaths. "Okay Nick, so the mother was what?"

"I don’t know," I told her. "Disfigured. Burns or something."

"Fuck!" She stood up, swung at the air, tried to kick the stool, missed. "And so now what will we do? Move? Who’s going to hire you here?"

I knew, but I didn’t want to say it. My mother. I’d have to return to my mother’s lodge. A linebacker, my mother. Looming. Foreboding. What was it Sylvia Plath called her father? A bag full of God. Well, my mother was a bag full of God-knows-what.

Robin leaned on the island. "Look, I’m not moving—not going to lose my job." She was the school psychologist. "So what precisely were you thinking?

"I don’t know. They laughed. That’s it."

"They’re a bunch of teenage boys. Just make farting sounds if you need a laugh."

That was the challenge in class, to catch them with these off-the-wall comments, show a willingness to go where most teachers wouldn’t.

"It was funny," I said. "You have to admit that."

She raised her hand into the air. I expected the middle finger, instead got the ring one, the ring. Oh Jeez.

"The ring," I said. A few paychecks away. "I didn’t think—"

"Nick, I used to like your recklessness, as if the things that mattered to the rest of the world had yet to make an impression upon you." She put on her coat. "But now, I don’t know, it’s not working for me anymore."

I said nothing.

"You really believe the fleeting pleasure of this laugh was worth it?" she said. "Well, was it? Was it?"

I knew not to answer. Robin was an anchor, in a good way. She kept me from drifting too far out. Was she right about all this? Why wasn’t it funny anymore? What about the world had changed?

I told her I got it, understood now. But proof, Robin said. She wanted proof.

"Like what?" I asked. "A polygraph test?"

"Figure it out. You know where to reach me. Where you used to work."

Robin lived in a world void of excuses, focused only on what was clear. Incontrovertible proof. Or she would be gone. Just like that.

* * *

Client after client, all women. Her son, aren’t you? I’m fishing with Elinor Longarden’s son. Wooha! A flyfishing guru, my mother, had her own line of products, the Longarden Triangle, her very own parachute pattern, the Fuzzy Elinor, and even her own fly floatant lotion, the Rub-A-Daub. The Yoda of Dry Flyfishing. Dry flies. Only dry.

I sat under the pavilion, watched the water. Nothing yet. How daring and mature, I thought, such a return, here, to prove to Robin how wrong she was about me. But three weeks later Robin still wouldn’t talk to me, believed this return to my mother was actually a regression. A great example of irony for the class—if I’d still had one.

I heard the footsteps of the morning’s client, turned to her, squinted, saw mostly sun.

She stopped, waited, hands on hips. "Well," she said.

I shrugged, spread my outstretched hands, a "what’s up with you?" gesture.

"You have no idea who I am."

I squinted at a tiny stick of a woman, still masked by the sunlight. Thought of a cartoon: "I hate being a stick figure; every time I rub my hands, I catch on fire."

"I’m Denise." The pause, waiting for a shock of recognition. "Boggs … Tim’s mom?"

"Oh, jeez … You’ve come to fish. Or kick my ass?"

She moved, finally, under the pavilion. Her face, around her left eye, caved in, a crater, a black patch over the eye. "You sat behind me on the school bus," she said. She plopped down across from me on the bench, cracked, ready to collapse. "Said Denise the Dog. Denise the Dog. All the way to school."

"Really? That sucks." I looked back at the water, a few bugs had begun to appear, tiny olives, here, there, not enough to bring the fish to the surface yet. More proof of my idiocy, my saying stupid things that seemed funny at the time–the consequences lingering, like the smell of trout in my clothes. But still. How I hated grudges, people who held on to things way too long. They should let go, for god’s sake! Was her face like that in school? Wouldn’t I remember such a thing?

"So … your injury," I looked up into the black patch. "That wasn’t in school, was it?"

"No, you weren’t making fun of me for this. This came later. A few years after high school."

And then I remembered. Something my mom mailed me in college. A note. Wasn’t she a classmate? A baby. A Doberman. A mom between them. Disfigurement. A bite out of her head. An eye hanging. "The dog," I said. "That was you. That dog attack."

"Yes. I saved my son only to have him told later by his English teacher that he’d never want to fuck me." She didn’t smile, looked at the water, at the sound of the splashes.

They were all wild trout, none of them over a foot, but hundreds of them like boiling popcorn–fish rising here, there, everywhere, the problem being so many flies that the trout often ignored the client’s fly, floating among the naturals; but I knew the technique to catch the wariest of these trout. Course, never told my mother. Swore the clients to a vow of silence. No one had squealed, yet.

"You’ve got quite a problem, Nick. You lost your job, and your fiancée so I’m told. Yet all you see is this hole in my face. You can’t even be mad at me, can you?"

I shrugged. "Why are you here exactly?"

"Well," she said, standing up. "I paid for a day of guided fishing. You’re going to guide me."

"Forget it, okay. I was just making a joke. I didn’t know anything about you." I stood up. Names popped into my head, taunts to whisper as if we were still in school. Then I thought of Robin. Something was horribly wrong inside me. “Just go. Please.”

"Look," she said. "I thought maybe you could show me you weren’t such an asshole. And maybe, I don’t know, I could do something about your job. My son. Well. He’s getting blamed for it all. And I guess the kids liked you."

The proof Robin needed was here. The guide tied knots, undid snags, removed miscast flies from trees, changed flies, pointed out prospective trout lies, suggested casts, netted the fish, wiped a dripping nose, if need be, if the client asked. Magic, I was, out here.

I nodded. "It’s a deal," I said.

* * *

Denise Boggs, knee-deep in this always-cold mountain stream, placed the fly wherever she wanted, her eye never leaving its drift.

"Another one, Nick. That’s what, two dozen now?" she said. She high-fived me.

We stood at the bottom of a small waterfall. The stream turned, spilled against a large rock, the straits of Gibraltar. The foam gathered in that far bend of the curve. Follow the foam and you find the food; find the food and you find the trout. With all the currents between them and the fish, the key was to cast in a way so that the line had no drag.

"Drag-free drift," I said to Denise. "Throw an S-curve cast. Shake the lines and it’ll put curves of slack in the line."

"Thank you, sir," Denise said, and then did exactly as instructed. The current took the S’s, left the fly alone, and there, in center of the bend, Denise got her rise.

Sometime in the morning, the fish stopped hitting the dry fly, and so I switched her set-up. "Really," she said. "Your mother know about this?"

"My mother," I said, purposely trying not to stutter over the ‘m’ and sound like Norman Bates. No, my mother, the guru of dry fly fishing, the writer of a billion articles on the horrors of subsurface fishing, the artlessness of it, knew nothing about the fact that I tied wet flies onto the dry fly, and that I fished under the water. "Knows, Of course, she does."

Denise looked up at all the placards on all those trees: DRY FLYFISHING ONLY.

"An exception," I said. "For her son. But that doesn’t mean we have to tell her, right? She’d rather not hear about it."

"Whatever you say, Guide." Denise held out her hand, pulled me up from my crouch. Could anyone get past the missing eye? A great test of love, such a gap. Could I? Did I have such a heart, such strength?

And so it went, the morning spent taking care of her, putting her into dozens and dozens of trout, and finally Denise winked at me. "So I guess you’ll pass. Tim will be relieved. I’ll talk to Headmaster Whitling."

She made her last cast, and up rose a trout, a beautiful brookie, shimmering green. She reeled it in, held it under its belly, let it slide back into the current.

Denise wiped her hands on her shirt. "By the by, it isn’t true. What you said."

"What I said?"

"The Freud crap. It isn’t true. That’s all." We were on the bank now, stomping the mud and water away. "No boy would want his mother. It’s unnatural."

"Well, well." Another voice. I looked to the woods. Here she came, my mother, pounding down the path like some sort of Sasquatch, her red hair ablaze, the goddess of flyfishing and insanity. Born in a crossfire hurricane, jumping jack flash. I felt the earth rumble with each step she took towards me. Denise looked up, at this form bearing down upon her, stopping only inches from her, putting her into the cool darkness of shade. An eclipse, she was.

"Saw your name on today’s ledger and I thought, why that’s the bastard who got my son fired."

"I don’t think women can be bastards, Mom."

"They can! And don’t hit me with your English teacher gobbley goop." Denise caught in the burning headlights of Elinor Longarden had yet to recover her senses. "Now, Denise. What the hell happened to you that you can’t take a harmless joke? A grown woman."

Denise looked at me. I understand, her look said. You grew up with a crazy woman.

"You did this stupendous thing–saved your son. You should be proud." And then she reached for the patch, as if to grab it and rip it off Denise’s face. Denise stepped back, held her rod out like a sword. "Come now," my mother said. "You need to let the world see what you did for your son."

I envisioned my mother finally grasping the patch and holding it in the sky, far beyond Denise’s grasp. Like a tiny dog, Denise would jump after it, the emptiness of the eye, a black hole, my mother would glare into, unafraid.

"Your badge of honor," my mother told her. "A sin, to cover it up."

Denise looked ready to run her through. She backed away, aimed the rod toward my mother’s heart, wherever that might be, even though the rod would only bend, then snap. You couldn’t kill Elinor Longarden with a fishing pole.

"She’s a hell of a fly-fishing woman," I said to my mother. "The trout didn’t have a chance."

"Doesn’t surprise me. I knew as soon as I read that article that you must be something else. But this? This school thing? Doesn’t add up."

"Oh," Denise said, putting the rod down. "What’s it matter? Your son apologized. He’ll get his job back."

"He apologized?" my mother looked to me. "You? What do you have to be sorry for? You didn’t rip out her eye, did you? Attack her son?"

"No, Mother."

She glared down at Denise as if she were going to pick her up by her collar, hold her kicking in air. "My God. How I hate what’s become of women!" She kicked at a fallen stick. "Pathetic. The whole lot of you!"

A crunch of sticks and leaves. I looked up. Robin strode down the path. What? I felt dazed. On the stream, with my intense focus on one act, one goal, the world floated away, but then when it returned … I shook my head, wiped my eyes, and Robin still appeared to me, hands on hips now and still. Had she come for me, finally? Her eyes passed me by and focused on Denise. "Mrs. Boggs. Tim told me you were here. I couldn’t imagine why." And then she looked at me. "What gives?"

"You’ve got some nerve," my mother said. "Nick would be a fool to take you back. Runs away at the first sign of trouble."

"Is that right, Nick?" Robin said, then to my mother, "Don’t you know this was the proof of his love for me, Elinor? Coming back here. Purgatory. Didn’t Nick tell you that?"

Denise raised up, face red, dirt-streaked. She held the rod straight up, as it were now a lance she rested upon. Robin turned back to Denise. "They weren’t tormenting you, were they?" Robin asked.

Denise looked at me. "No. He’s not bad. Once you get him on the stream."

"Really?" Robin asked. "I never had him on the stream. Did you?"

"Jesus, Robin," I said. "What are you thinking? She’s going to Whitling. Going to get my job back. So you should be happy, now. Right?"

Robin walked by my side. "You really are sorry about all of this? Or do you feel the way she feels?" Her head bobbed toward my mother.

"I know my Nick," my mother said. "He isn’t about to bend to your demands. He’s much bigger than that."

My mother envisioned me as something big, solid, unyielding. In Robin’s eyes, this same person verged on childish and scatterbrained.

Robin walked forward and latched onto me. And as she did, Denise watched her, and Robin’s unbitten, uncratered face. Denise shook her head. "By the way," Denise said to my mother. "Your son’s wet-fly rig is something else. Especially when the trout turn off to the dries."

My mother grabbed at her chest. "My God, Nick."

"A bit much, mother," I said. "Don’t tell me this is the ‘big one’?"

Robin reached for me, grasped my elbow. "You went against your mother? Really?"

So that was it. Robin wanted the snapping of that connection, the type of run a monster of a trout makes, so the line breaks with a crack and the angler falls backward from the force of it.

Denise smirked. Perhaps I understood it. How are you ending up with Robin, the smirk asked. What if she had a patch, a crater for an eye? What then? I see your heart, Nick, and there’s not much to it. You’ve bought into myths, and so here you are, married to your new mother.

"The sanctity of my stream, Nick," my mother said. "You, of all people—"

“Yes,” I said. “My fly’s wet.”

Robin pulled me towards her. I didn’t move with her, so she stumbled backwards, tripped on a branch lying across the path. Crack. She fell into my mother’s legs, knocking my mother over, straight down, like a bag of sand, plop, next to Robin, plop.

I ended up beside Denise. "So, we’re it." I said. "The only ones left standing."

My own foot slid along the mud on the bank, split me, and I twisted against this fall and hit the cold water on my belly and struggled against, what, surely not drowning. The stream wanted to pull me away, down, under, and I wanted it too, but it lacked such will or the power or something.

When I opened my eyes, I hoped to find myself alone, finally and utterly.

Instead, I found Denise. Her one eye scanned me, up, down, then penetrated the vest, the guide shirt. I thought—finally—of Tim, her son, a lifetime caught in that gaze, searching his heart for things it didn’t have.Randall Brown is a fiction editor with SmokeLong Quarterly, an MFA in Writing candidate at Vermont College, a recipient of a 2004 Pushcart nomination, and a three-time winner of Zoetrope Workshop’s Top Story. Three dozen or so pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of publications such as Timber Creek Review, The Iconoclast, Ink Pot, The MacGuffin, and Del Sol Review.
He’s also worked closely with Nance Van Winckel, Abby Frucht, and Terri Brown-Davidson.