ABSTRACT

CAMELOT, OHIO

by Will Conroy

This collection of short fiction is composed of six separate stories that are unified by place and time. Each story is set in the fictional town of Camelot, Ohio. This space is a fruitful place to investigate themes of normativity, judgment, deviance, freedom, greed, loneliness, fear, nostalgia and rebellion that structure and sometimes dictate the quotidian decisions of the characters. The stories are told from a third person perspective in order to experiment with the possible distances between two human psyches or subjectivities despite very close spatial proximity. Ultimately, my goal for the collection was to explore the tension between the uniquely American concept of individual determinism and the larger forces of history that have shaped the Midwestern landscape, and also, therefore, Midwesterners.

CAMELOT

A Thesis

Submitted to the

Faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Department of English

by

William T. Conroy IV

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2012

Advisor: Brian Roley

Reader: Nalin Jayasena

Reader: Eric Goodman Table of Contents

A Brief History of Camelot, Ohio ...... Pg. 1

The Rabbit Hole ...... Pg. 11

The Weeds ...... Pg. 20

The Storm ...... Pg. 31

Coconut ...... Pg. 51

The Black Sheep ...... Pg. 61

ii A Brief History of Camelot, Ohio ______

Many years before the existence of time, but still some time after the glaciers, the valley in which there would one day sit a thriving suburb reached the height of its popularity. The reason: salt. Between the gently sloping hills a subterranean current of saltwater broke the ground and coated boulders and rocks in a fine dusting. Animals travelled from vast distances to the salt springs. They would schedule their years around it; teach the route to their offspring. Every living thing within reasonable distance made seasonal trips to lick the salt from the rocks, or to drink the blood of those who did. Years later, amateur geologists would find the absurdly sized fossilized skeletons of mastodons, car-sized ground sloths and something they called an elk-moose. All species killed by the ice age, ossified in attitudes of repose and consternation, millennia before they could be hunted to extinction. All going to or leaving the salt springs. It was the salt that brought the first humans to the valley. And when those humans showed the salt to fairer-skinned humans, they also realized the value of the fine dusting on the boulders, almost like snow. Once the most warlike of the Native American tribes were subdued and pacified, salt became valley’s first industry and the first reason to give it a name—Saltpeter Springs. Great black cauldrons boiled the salt solution in pits lined with burning coal until it thickened enough to be packaged and strapped to a donkey or stacked in a sturdy cart. Those same carts brought back money. The money brought back fine whiskey, packs of playing cards and durable tools. In time, the tools built houses above the mud and, in turn, those houses brought women who approved of neither whiskey nor playing cards. Migrants halted their Westward progression at the springs and eventually something akin to a town had formed. Children were born. Shortly after the settlement arranged itself in optimistic expectation of permanence, bad news returned with one of the carts. The early salt-boilers were told that more fortunate settlers had discovered saltier springs in the Eastern part of the state, far saltier than their own. With that news the men who invested in the large salt furnaces and who owned the nicest houses anticipated heavy losses. When those losses were realized and the

1 local industry went under no one had the willpower to haul the cauldrons out of the pits. They simply buried them where they rested. The people who stayed in the valley fell into a mournful indolence. On the Sabbath they prayed for an explanation of the baffling cruelty of fate and they drank homemade whiskey. The hard luck residents could find no reason at all to remain except the lack of ability to do much else. Nature itself seemed eager to retake the collection of semi- permanent dwellings around Saltpeter Springs. Creepers crept, deer ate the best heads of lettuce from the gardens. A sapling grew between the floorboards of the largest home in Saltpeter Springs, once owned by the proprietor of a salt mine, who had shot himself. And yet, it was during the wintriest of these uncertain years when a man named Thornton Evans stubbed his toe in a dry streambed and looked down upon a dully- gleaming hunk of iron ore. *** Six years later Thornton was made mayor, and the town, for it was unquestionably a town now, had tripled in size. Having been recently recognized by the state government, it was decided that the settlement needed a new name, something befitting it’s current manifestation. The decision-makers deliberated on a name for weeks. They took straw polls, discussed the data, and gave impassioned speeches for their wives’ favorite choices. Locked in stalemate, they eventually decided to consult the schoolteacher and town librarian, who owned a collection of seven books, for more learned opinion. Her name was Emily Evans, Thornton’s little sister. Her calming and scholarly presence brought the committee to consensus after only three hours. The next morning, a collection of local politicians and landowners announced to everyone else that the town was to be rechristened as Camelot. In the ensuing burst of optimism and civic pride the townsfolk built a jail and a courthouse that bore the Evans name until it burned down half a century later. In the years of growth that followed, a number of migrant peoples settled in the area. The most prominent of these settlers were the towheaded Welsh. An earnest group, they mined and smelted iron ore without complaint and maintained the vitality to procreate often. Those not mining and smelting cleared and farmed the surrounding hillsides and the flatter land to the north. German and Irish trickled in. Men of 2 prominence, slaveowners, settled in the valley. When slavery became reprehensible, the slaveowners reformed into farmers who paid their minority laborers non-competitive prices. A devout group of Mennonites settled there and mostly agreed with the way the Welsh had already set up shop: the churches stood just taller than the courthouse. Many brought with them a bleak and conservative morality that has since come to identify the area and its people, to be championed by mothers and rebelled against by sons through all the subsequent years. They also brought a very defined sense of justice, fairness and propriety. That is to say, the hangings in the town square were very well attended. Two centuries later, a black sign with blocked white lettering would stand taller than any tree along the interstate highway, in the middle of a field of corn, and proclaim to all, “Hell Is Real”. Eventually, the population of the town plateaued after nearly a century of steady growth. A generation of people were born there and died. Buildings of stone were erected. Land was cleared for cemeteries and filled methodically with coffins. Children went to school, learned to read, and were taught to mistrust certain books. Infants were born, raised, left home and sometimes came back. Some stayed away, but the decline in population was gradual enough so as to not matter too much. Over those years people developed a sense of pride and identity. Camelot was home. *** When it came, the railroad split Camelot in half. On the north side of the tracks were the fields and the people who worked them. The honest, hardworking Welsh. Here too were factories for ice, steel and eventually engine parts. The town’s itinerant settled south of the tracks, happy to have a place to finally call home. They were the descendants of the old salt miners whose blood had mixed too much to be called more one thing than the other. Boozy old Indians who claimed to remember the old hunting grounds. Freedmen, escapees, and ethnic minorities. Women with unforgiving fathers. They settled around the defunct salt springs, diverted and filled in with dirt, almost forgotten. They all drank from the river that once drained the springs—and all the creeks north of the tracks—and in the water they tasted only a hint of refuse. For a hundred years, the tracks hummed with trains going north, past the fields, to a city that city grew unceasing. The trains brought everything—seeds and clocks and 3 tractors, clothes and lemons and books. Germs and anti-bacterial chemicals. And they took from Camelot too—the crops of soybean and corn, the smelted iron, the frozen water. The elder citizens of Camelot, who made more money now than ever, watched the work of their hands feed the city, the beast that crept closer each year. They watched the farmhouses they grew up in rot in the field, greying with the weather, greying with the people. Even the bible was revised. When someone died, it was not uncommon for them to comment on the relief they felt at being taken before more change was wrought, because who the hell knew what would happen next? During these years, the mayor of Camelot, the great grandson of Thornton Evans, looked warily to the north each morning. Toward the end of his term as mayor, poring over columns of red ink, he came to the conclusion that growth, as a foregrounding concept for civilization, was as irrational the dream of everlasting youth. Must something constantly grow to be worth anything at all? Fish, it was said, never stopped growing. And tumors. But not people. Not things made by people. If that was the case it was fair then to say that the remaining love he had for his wife no longer existed. His mother had started shrinking but was very much still alive. In that sleepy defeated moment over his ledgers he saw civilization like a rosebush, with the bright blooms cultivated and cherished while the once-blooming branches were deadheaded, cruelly, so more could grow in their place. Where did one put those dying or dead branches? Space was limited as is. New rows of warehouses were going up in value. His attic had been full for some time now. But it was the youth of Camelot most affected by the growing magnitude of the city. In their private theatres of fantasy, the city was the setting for daydreams. For many, it became the setting for reality too. The money was there, the people, the culture. The anonymity. The possibility that life could be lead in other ways than how their parents lived it. Or that the indignity of youth could be physically abandoned. When they realized how easy it was to get there, few returned. Over the course of century, Camelot became a sort of untended retirement village. There were fewer teenage boys to climb ladders with buckets of paint and the buildings peeled like sunburn. There were fewer daughters to innovate new recipes in the kitchen and many in Camelot complained of eating the same old things, year after year. Midwives went out of business. 4 *** Craving community or at least its appearance, the city dwellers eventually grew tired of the city. They had seen what was to be seen, they had lived the lives to be lived. They had made their money. To them, looking South, Camelot was only a collection of sleepy and peeling buildings where agricultural-types had teeth pulled and drank to get drunk. Many of these people owned the same last names as those who fled Camelot decades earlier. Once the land around Camelot was purchased, flattened and discharged of most crops and natural vegetation, subdivisions of pre-fabricated houses went up in the cornfields surrounding the town. And once those filled with refugees from the city, subdivisions of fabricated-to-order houses went up. In the span of a decade, the economically interested parties had cured the town of its sleepy bucolic existence and installed a more exciting, economically feasible version. If they could afford it, the new residents hired locals to renovate old farmhouses with drooping porches and the sweet smell of rotting wood. Generally despising the newcomers, these locals said worse about them than they ever had about the Huns, Japs, or people of suspected Korean descent. The newly elected representative body agreed to keep a mile or so of the original brick streets in the center of the town, to give it the right kind of look. That look, it was decided, would pay homage to the pastoral history of the land and would maintain the essence of an authentic Midwestern small town, with minor improvements. One of the first things they did was to have several of the oldest and most nondescript farmhouses still standing named state Historical Heritage sites. A few forgotten Indian mounds earned interstate signs and sad, day-glo T-shirts. The zoning and building codes were then rewritten to ensure that anything new built within a mile of the center of town would be clad in a uniform red brick edifice. Even the ground sloths would have approved. Year by year more people came, money in hand, suffering from Urban Fatigue, then the increasingly prevalent Suburban Fatigue. To many this town, still small and lined with deciduously named streets—Oak, Poplar, Ash—felt like home. Or like the home they should want to have. A place where their kids could play outside, maybe fishing off a dock somewhere, while pies cooled on every windowsill. For their part, the land developers and contractors named their subdivisions and business parks accordingly, taking the land and 5 its history for inspiration, with only minor embellishment. Glacier Springs Pass, Indian Ripple Run, Red Hatchet Falls. When they had to, they changed the geography. It was reasonable to dig a hole and fill it with water, dye it blue, and install a fountain, so that Lakeview Estates and Lakeview Estates Business Promenade might have some credibility, majesty even. A few developers tried to instill some authenticity to their property by appropriating the salt dusted history of the valley, but they found it not quite sexy enough. For a time, the town boomed again. It citizens made iron and car parts and the plastic molding for the nipples on baby bottles. The real estate market thrived. Loans were affordable. Everyone, even the nobodies, could get a job provided their addictions and bad habits could adhere to a 9-5 schedule. Everyone could afford nice houses. Many of the residents of the previously nice houses sold at a profit and moved into nicer houses a little further away. *** With the property taxes collected from the new residents, Camelot endeavored to put together a high quality parks and recreation system. And so, the majority of the community neighborhoods had a park within walking distance. During the day, the town parks and recreation department put on camps for kids of all ages. Over the years, the kids loved the camps for the loosely officiated games of dodgeball and biweekly popsicles. It afforded their parents the extra time to run errands, relax, and to generally think and do the things they really didn’t want their kids to know about—something everyone agreed was healthy for the community. These parks were central to the community and in time, like all good parks, they became a place for joy and play and bright memory in the day, for thrilling and uncomfortable handjobs at night. A school levy was passed on the first ballot. It wasn’t long before the schools developed a reputation for quality and dedicated teachers, fine students, an excellent testing record, and outstanding diversity awareness. They were one of the first school districts in the state to celebrate Black history month with a school-wide musical production, and to focus Thanksgiving education primarily on the contributions of the Native Americans to the horn of plenty. At the K-8 elementary, students were encouraged to develop a democratic voice by writing to local politicians. One outstanding pupil, Baker Evans, was given an achievement medal by the school for starting a K-8 political action 6 group, the Younger Republicans, who dedicated themselves to supporting local figures and homeroom representatives with a conservative agenda. The group’s primary achievement, the one for which Baker was awarded his medal, was demanding and eventually receiving fewer nutritional restrictions in the cafeteria so lunch could be delivered at a more competitive price. On the day he received his medal, Baker’s father beamed with pride. His mother, secretly independent, was less enthusiastic. Besides the parks and schools, the churches once again became central to the community. Of course, the more traditional denominations had been established hundreds of years before—Catholics, a few brands of Protestants, even the more verbose Baptist sects. The Mennonites still maintained a community a few miles outside of town where they built outstanding furniture and ignored the kids who pointed at them from car windows on the Interstate. But with the influx of citizens, reformed denominations bought cheap land on the outskirts of town to build their worship arenas. Smaller ethnic faith gatherings also became popular at community centers and school gymnasiums. These churches enabled a channeling of the community’s goodwill, expressed in food drives, organized retirement home visits, and pancake breakfasts. They also provided a moral backbone for the youth of the community who sat in the pews, or cushioned stadium seating, trying to spot attractive members of the opposite sex, but believing enough to feel guilty about it later. The steady growth of the previous decades had brought a decline in the number of the people south of the tracks. Fewer check advance loan sharks operated there. Discount furniture stores sold less-discounted furniture. The most popular thrift stores served both the needy and the hyper-ironic. Cheap hotels upgraded their cable packages and drab apartment complexes got new coats of paint and advertised using the word “upgraded.” That’s not to say that fathers stopped warning their daughters about that side of town. Or that daughters with certain proclivities stopped visiting on a dare, or to find someone willing to sell them weed, booze, pills or even drugs that needed medical supplies to enjoy properly. There were still dreamers tired of dreaming. There was still a community of low-income residents that occupied government housing. Deadbeats, addicts, bohemians and a handful of failed artists. Bankrupts. All on the outside, in relative

7 squalor, thinking hard about their problems, or thinking hard about how to avoid them. Only, somehow, much less noticeable than before. On sunny days, a few of Camelot’s homeless men cast fishing lines into the river off a bridge, trying to lure huge catfish with big pieces of hotdog or edible looking trash. The odds of catching anything were low, but no one cared much. Most believed the stories they told each other about the guy they knew who’d caught the biggest damn fish ever caught in these parts. That the river was now almost a biological wasteland was, to them, irrelevant. *** Of course, the boom came to an end when people half a world away figured out how to make cars and smelt iron and mold the plastic nipples for baby bottles cheaper than they could. Many residents lost their jobs to discover that they didn’t actually own their nice things; they were only renting them from the bank. The people south of the tracks, who didn’t own much, were less concerned about this. The blue ribbons painted on the schools faded. Dandelions in the parks bloomed a drab yellow. Husbands and wives would wake up and look at their moderately prosperous past as a dream, a phantasm that only half-existed. Spouses and kids were seen as relics from that past, and often seemed duller than the previous versions they remembered. Suzanne Evans-Gilmore awoke one day unable to feel anything acutely at all, neither love nor anger. She could only feel the approximations of these feelings—love for her husband, hope for the next day, and guilt for the things she’d done the day before. It amounted only to interior decoration. She was only renting a copy of these feelings, watching perform until they need to be returned at the end of the week. It was during this time that a local who had been laid off from the baby-bottle-nipple factory, Thurgood Evans, established a cult. His writings, compiled in a set of black and white composition notebooks, detailed a dogma founded upon the belief that gravity, not a supreme being, was responsible for the existence of people and their miserable human condition. When asked about his choice of deity, Thurgood replied that he was tired of admitting powerlessness to forces he could never measure and never hope to understand. He quoted Sir Isaac Newton and Galileo extensively in his sermons. He ritualistically sliced apples and fed them to his congregation. National media converged on Camelot the day that Thurgood organized a demonstration of the conviction of his followers. They lined the 8 roof of a local church and Thurgood preached to the masses that it was gravity—not an omniscient presence—that put them here, and grew their food and took their jobs. And it would be gravity too that took them from the Earth. Thurgood alone had the conviction to dive headfirst to the ground—his disciples escaped with severe sprains and broken bones. *** In such a time of misfortune, nostalgia became the standard mode of operation. Everything became a faded version of something that had once been much brighter. Old timers read free newspapers in the library. Only antique stores and taxidermists became profitable again. Hours were filled by television and historical romance novels fled the shelves at historic rates. This trend gripped a larger swath of the population than Camelot alone. Eventually nostalgia became so popular that it was publically traded on the stock market. However, despite huge excitement for the IPO, its quarterly yields were bittersweet. Nostalgia brought along its ugly half-sister, regret. No one behaved in ways more regrettable than before, they simply started to regret things they’d been doing their entire lives. Regret became something anticipated before action was even taken. Crowds of people stood in the supermarket, trapped in inner conflict in front of the wall of gourmet mustards, already certain that they would be making the wrong choice for their noontime sandwiches. Local high-school students graduated and left home harboring artistic aspirations, then came back again recommending business degrees. The people without regrettable youths often lived to a great age and lamented having so little to repent at the end. The red brick edifice of the buildings in the heart of town crumbled a little every year. Each repair was shoddier than the last. Those too young for nostalgia in Camelot didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. The past to them felt like a museum everyone pretended was interesting. How could something now so irrelevant have once been so desirable? Market forces liberalized the world. Places had become disconnected from their histories. Everyone was a new person in every passing minute. If simplicity was in the past then simplicity never existed. They couldn’t imagine only operating only one or two selves, most had that many Internet profiles by middle school.

9 In class, kids grew up hearing of times when racism, sexism and classism was relevant—bored, watching the clock and waiting for the four minutes of social opportunity between bells. Because race and gender didn’t matter anymore. Everyone rode the green arrows up and the red arrows down. Everyone was free to act and think however he or she pleased. Everyone could buy all the same things, if they worked hard enough. If Camelot didn’t have it, the city was only thirty-five minutes away on the freeway, and the city had everything. Very occasionally someone might wonder whether or not the flaws of the past were really past. Or was there another reason their parents told their older siblings to never park overnight downtown? Or that their grandfathers jokingly reenacted private conversations between effeminate men who called one another “comrade”? Or that their fathers rooted for Phil Mickelson instead of Tiger Woods? Were these things tied to their family past? To the history of the land on which Camelot had grown? Or were they only things generated individually from their parents, from other places or television, so as not to feel like a robot, or some tiny gear in a ten-thousand-gear-machine? But mostly the kids would think about other things. They dreamt dreams of ownership and popularity. While glittering phones buzzed like a June bugs in their hands, late on stormy spring nights. While they practiced loving for when loving would have consequences.

10 The Rabbit Hole ______

While Milly Burbank examined the matchbook—crisp and red, with The Rabbit Hole written in gaudy black script on the flap—she revisited the secret she had kept longest from her husband: she hated his last name. Throughout their brief and vigorous courtship her inclination against it had been overwhelmed by the immensity of young love, but as she signed her new name to the marriage certificate she felt a mild discomfort in her stomach that, at the time, she credited to the champagne. Since then, the mild discomfort had returned at every new introduction and with every bit of minutiae—permission slips, volunteer list—on which she signed her name. Her given family name of McAllister had more verve, more life, and had done much to camouflage the unattractive “Millicent” given to her by her parents. To Milly, who maintained a belief in the power of names, the substitution of Burbank for McAllister made her frumpy and dour. It sound like one of the draconian nuns from her primary schooling; somewhere, she was sure of it, a Sister Milly Burbank measured skirt lengths and disciplined knuckle with ruler. Even worse was the way she had felt herself shift towards those connotations over thirteen years of marriage. Inevitably and uncomfortably, she felt emptied of her caprice, her humor, and in their place she found her mother’s hardline prejudices against indolence, complaint and moral uncertainty. All because of a name. Milly sat mutely and alone at her kitchen counter turning the matchbook in her hands. She had found it in her husband’s pants pocket as she was doing the laundry that afternoon after she’d gotten home from Church. Todd, her husband, was playing golf. The matchbook was nearly pristine. The only evidence of use or wear was the three cardboard nubs where matches had been. The Rabbit Hole—a low place, her mother would have called it. On the drag leading out of town, next to some other bars set off from the street by a field of pavement, mostly vacant during Christian hours. Once, in the car, when the suggestive silhouettes on its neon sign drew her son’s interest, she stumbled through

11 euphemisms trying to explain its purpose, eventually stammering something about loneliness. Upon finding the matchbook earlier that day, Milly met emotion with industry. She finished the laundry. She vacuumed the living room. She pushed away dark thoughts. The things he might have been lighting. She had been home paying bills, signing checks. She searched every pocket on his side of the closet. She mixed cookie dough by hand. It wasn’t until she loaded the first tray of equally proportioned and spaced balls of dough into the oven that she allowed herself to revisit her husband’s perfidy. She considered the predictability of her find. Early in their relationship a subtle paradigm had been established; a dynamic that suggested that, in the politics of their relationship, it would usually be him in need of her forgiveness. Years of marital repartee reinforced the pattern: with every joking explanation of late hours at work; with every sincere apology he made for drinking too much around her side of the family. In the first months after the wedding she expected to discover some dark truth about him, a cipher that would explain his occasional inscrutable solitude, but she never did. Motherhood and time buried her old suspicions. Over the sink, Milly lit the matches, one by one, and mustered what anger she could. He was, the matchbook proved, a liar—he had told her he would be playing poker with some friends. And liars, she knew, didn’t just lie once, out of the blue. They kept right on lying until one untruth broke the surface of calm waters, betraying a greater mass of unseen duplicity. But, in confronting this fact, she mentally played out the scene that would take place when he got home—indignantly pointed fingers and crying and, maybe, apologies. She also thought of the two possible outcomes of such a scene. One predictable, unsatisfying and insincere. The other one unspeakable. At the prospect of dealing with either she felt her turbulent emotions washed away by weariness. So, outing the last match with a hiss in the sink, Milly decided that she might keep this as her own secret for a while. And then, aloud, she said, “I hate your fucking name,” to the empty kitchen, and lifted her fingertips to her lips, and waited for the oven to chime. *** To Father Gilbert Gilroy, who had presided at his orthopedic surgeon’s wedding and baptized the local pharmacist, addiction seemed an irrelevant distinction. Sitting in his 12 office in the back of the crurch, he dumped two pills into the creased palms of his large hands, thought a moment, checked his watch, and tapped out a third. All three he gulped down with a sip from his mug. He was a tall man, and the trophies on the shelves of his office—some of extravagant proportions—belied a successful career playing collegiate basketball. Now his knees lacked sufficient cartilage and he managed the pain as best he could with one-hundred-twenty pills of hydrocodone each month. One hundred and twenty: two pills every six hours of the day for thirty days. He often told himself that many of the old ladies in town self-medicated as bad or worse than he did. Even so, to Father Gilroy, the days he spent at the end of the month, out of medicine, knees creaking audibly, felt like penance. The trophies were overshadowed by another talisman from his past: a giant stuffed turkey that sat on the floor beside his desk. He had shot it on a hunting trip with his brother thirty years ago, before he was a priest. When asked about it by parishioners, he said it reminded him of the fragility of life. Other times he used it to cement a lesson on the irrevocability of mortal sin or the need to come to terms with a dark past. Recently, in the privacy of his office, he had taken to speaking aloud to the turkey. When it had no place in his conversations he covered it with a black towel he stored in his desk. That towel covered the turkey now. Father Gilroy checked his watch—almost two— and rubbed his knees with the heels of his hand for half a minute. Then he pushed himself up from his chair, shuffled down the hall and into the main chamber of the church and deposited himself on the holy side of the confessional. Confession ran Saturday’s two to four— after the noon crowd dispersed and he had time to lunch. In days past, confession had been his favorite part of the job. The assumed anonymity promoted an honesty that could lead a person to growth, to sacrifice and change. And his advice was akin to truth. He handed out Our Father’s and Hail Mary’s like little pills he knew would be taken. But in the past twenty years he had seen real Belief age with him and in its place he saw, too often, insincerity, or nothing. The priests he met at summits and retreats talked of the trend in terms of declining numbers and collection plate offerings. The major culprits they agreed upon—interstate megachurches lax on ritual, the rise in popularity of secular agnosticism, Darwin—but privately Father Gilroy believed that many people, surely sinning no less than they did twenty years before, chose 13 instead to make their confessions on the internet, to each other, or to strangers in chatrooms. Secretly he missed the old days, when he was liable to hear any manner of sordid offenses—sleeping with neighbors, stealing from business partners. But cheating housewives now chose divorce instead of confession, and not many people in business even pretended to be religious any more. The problem, Father Gilroy thought, was that people no longer categorized their behavior as Right or Wrong, but rather as things all people could know, things some people could know, and things no one could know. And in this shift he felt, year by year, the glacial embrace of irrelevancy. Now he considered himself lucky when anyone came at all on Saturdays. The confessions he heard were limited to bedside visits of the elderly, the occasional congregant with something to get off his or her chest, or a school age boy, forced to go by his mother, for being a petty thief or apprehended masturbator. *** After a mug of coffee, two cookies, and two mugs of white wine, Milly determined to whom she would give her cookies. The treat, being of idle hands and unconfronted emotion, had to be given away: they were her twofaced husband’s favorite treat. She first thought of her neighbors, but she struggled to come up with plausible occasion for the gift. Though friendly enough with some of them—mostly in passing, at the grocery store, or while the men labored grossly in their yards—she doubted she could handle any suspicion roused by a gift without pretense. And so she packed away four cookies in a plastic bag for her son, who had done nothing wrong lately, placed the rest in a Tupperware container, each layer separated by parchment paper, and set off for the church. On the walk, sweat greased Milly’s hands and she grew uncomfortably aware of her body. Every flab of skin and wrinkle she worried about privately felt larger, more obvious. And her head echoed her mother’s marital advice: stagnation leads to rumination leads to ruination. Until now, Milly had applied the adage to herself, taking it as an encouragement to stay active and independent. That afternoon it seemed, for the first time, too foreboding to be advice only and she saw a hint of another, bleaker, meaning. Milly arrived at the church much more quickly than she expected to and felt unprepared to enter. Slightly out of breath, she set the cookies down, wiped her palms on 14 her pant leg, and realized she still had her apron on. Without any other place to put it, she stuffed it into the hedge beside the front doors of the church. Milly found the church empty, dim and foreboding. Light spilled from the doorway left of the altar where she knew Father Gilroy’s office was located. She rushed down the aisle through the nave of the church and into the back hallway. His door was cracked slightly as she reached it. She knocked lightly before opening the door further and pushing her head through. Father Gilroy sat at his desk, staring at a pile of money and personal checks in front of him. The door creaked as she pushed it and he looked up at her. His height always surprised Milly. Even sitting down he had the lanky proportions of a marionette. His eyes met hers and he said, “Ah Milly, have you come for confession?” She stepped more fully into the room. “I’m not interrupting, am I, Father?” she said, looking at the pile of currency in front of him. He pushed away from the desk and rose halfway from his seat in an old-fashioned gesture. “Sit,” he said, referencing the chairs opposite his desk with an open hand. He then stacked the cash and checks into separate piles and put each pile in a lock box. “Not much to count anyways.” She sat. “How long has it been since your last confession?” His face narrow, serene, and inscrutable. “I didn’t come for confession, Father.” He blinked and seemed to notice her for the first time. “Well that’s good,” he said. “I thought you caught me cutting it a few minutes short. What can I do you for?” He reclined in his seat. “Father I’ve been vengeful,” she blurted out. “I see.” “I made these cookies. They’re Todd’s favorite. Peanut butter oatmeal. And I saved four for my son. But none for Todd.” “Why not?”

15 Milly mentally ran through a progression of possible answers to Father Gilroy’s question. Because I didn’t poison them. Because he doesn’t deserve them. Because he’s a liar. Because he might be a cheat. Because she didn’t love him anymore. But no, as soon as she thought it, she knew that wasn’t true. Because he no longer loved her. And it might be her fault. Because it might be her fault. In thinking these words, Milly felt something very sturdy, unnamable, within her break, and from that broken thing leaked her oldest and deepest insecurity. Her face screwed into the awkward grimace that precedes crying. However, no tears came. She tried to cry, tried to will out the tears. Shooting for catharsis. But instead, she was stuck for an instant trying to cry and being unable. She answered Father Gilroy with an imitation sob and small snort. *** Father Gilroy thought Milly Burbank to be a plain woman: she had, too often, a smile on her face. As if her happiness were as immovable as her rat-brown hair, dyed blonde, permed lifeless. His previous interaction with her—through various service projects that she spearheaded and micromanaged—had not endeared her to him. It was at those events that he occasionally saw through her smile to a devoutness that gained validation, for her, only in comparison to others. Her presence in his office, clearly distraught, came as a shock to him once it registered. “Milly, is everything alright at home?” Milly unscrewed her face, set her Tupperware on the desk and rested her forehead on it. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know,” she said, almost groaning. “Why did you come here?” For a minute, Father Gilroy only heard her punctuated breaths. Then she lifted her head from the Tupperware and looked at him, her eyes wide enough to be menacing. “I came to bring you my cookies, Father.” Father Gilroy said nothing. “It’s just, I thought about you in here all alone, and thought you might need a treat. You’re such a good man.” She stood as she said this and handed him the container of cookies.

16 “That was,” Father Gilroy paused as he reached for the container. “Kind of you. I will surely enjoy these later. But Milly.” “Aren’t you going to eat one now?” There was a pleading note of panic in her voice. He would have eaten one. He would have eaten ten. But his desire to comfort her was tempered by his extreme lack of appetite. After three pills he could hardly taste a thing and food met his teeth like chalk on a blackboard. “Oh not just now,” he referenced his midsection vaguely. “You know. But later,” he tried to sound hopeful. “Nonsense. You’re in wonderful shape.” “Still, I just had lunch. But they look great, I’ll certainly have some later.” “Father,” she stood and leveled her gaze at him. “Just try a little piece.” She moved around the desk, slowly, almost threateningly, sidestepping the turkey, and opened the container. She took one out, broke it in two and handed him half. She took a bite from the other half herself, chewed, and made a noise that came out as something between a groan and a manic sob. “It’s just that I’m not that hungry now, Milly,” he tried to explain again. “Just eat the cookie, Father. I made them just for you.” Reluctantly, he took the half cookie from her hand took a bite and swallowed. “Those are exceptional,” he said, mouth full. “And all for me.” Milly stood over him still holding the cookies. Watching him chew, her lips made small movements as if she were also chewing, though she hadn’t taken another bite. When he swallowed he looked at her, hopeful that his bite had been large enough to validate her gift. For a long second, his forced smile filled the room. Then, Milly’s composure broke. Slowly, as if deflating, she descended onto his lap. It was the first time a woman had been in his lap in three decades. The unexpectedness of it left Father Gilroy speechless. He thought he should say something, to console her, to decipher her misery, but nothing came out. In his confusion he caught himself rubbing her back—at times, the pills made him only marginally aware of his extremities. Looking at Milly, he saw several conflicting emotions cycle through her worn face in a series of twitches. Then, her eyes still closed, she leaned into him, as if to cry onto his shoulder, and planted a kiss on Father Gilroy’s slack-jawed mouth. Surprise rippled 17 through his numbness. Surprise at having a woman on his lap, her lips on his. Surprise that any woman, especially Milly, still had the urge, however twisted, to kiss him. And surprise too that he, for an instant, even if only in his head, instinctively kissed her back. *** Leaving the church, Milly had a bad moment where she misjudged the weight of the door and partially crushed herself against the frame. When she freed herself, she hurried home half running, half walking, under a quickly darkening sky. Her inability to cry had confused her, she explained, denied her of a healthy release of emotions. But, after the kiss, she found herself able to phrase questions clearly in her mind. What if, indeed, her husband didn’t love her? Would he leave, if confronted? Was it her fault? When she got home, she poured herself a large glass of wine on ice, took it to the bathroom, and examined herself in the mirror. It was possible, that in her desperate kiss, she had transgressed on her marriage more than her husband. Though not totally sure how to balance the kiss with the various degrees of participation at a stripclub, she felt a small freedom in the possibility, however remote. It was something like power, and looking at herself in the mirror, she couldn’t suppress a giggle. She set her wineglass down on the rim of the sink and reapplied foundation to the purple bags under her eyes. When the electricity went out, she lit candles, spaced them throughout the kitchen, and waited for Todd to get home. In her head she repeated the only two names she had ever had. Millicent McAllister. Millicent Burbank. What, if any, was the difference between them? Had their meaning changed since the day she lost one and gained the other? As darkness descended, she was seized by the panicked thought that her husband wasn’t coming home at all. That he realized his mistake and instead of confronting it, and her, he fled with his golfclubs. But after some time headlights swung into the driveway and she saw the silhouette of her husband get out of the driver’s side. In the seconds it took him to walk from his car to the front door, Milly’s brain replayed the events of the day. There was shame, and anger, and guilt, and a mania she mostly kept hidden. If he asked her about it, could she pretend she hadn’t felt those things? Would he? Could she keep on pretending the next day too? Could the matchbook recede into the nether recesses of her memory; to sit mute beside her son’s preliminary libidinous Google queries—“boobs”—

18 and the things her mother and father had done in the dark? In the flickering candlelight, the doorknob turned. *** Father Gilroy stayed in his office much later than usual, watching the weather dissolve outside. The kiss Milly had planted on him earlier seemed to exist in another time completely, and for a long time he wondered whether it actually happened. Her cookies were the only proof. The seconds after the kiss had been harried and frantic and wordless. She left looking more distraught than when she had entered his office. Milly was the type of woman, he guessed, for whom reality never suspended for too long. His role in the kiss felt small, and he figured if it ever came to it, he could deny having any role in it at all. And yet, maybe he had. However small an indication, maybe he had made her feel somehow that he was open to such a move. That, of all possible courses of personal interaction, kissing him was plausibly one. He stood. His stooped height hung from him like an unwanted companion. The old ache returned to his knees. He had a coach once who called it “getting the storm in your knees” on a day like this. He took the towel off the turkey beside his desk. It’s eyes had been replaced by marbles, but sometimes he still felt it looking at him, the way a turkey does. He thought about the day he shot it with his brother, gone now. His father, gone too, had said what a shame it was not to get to eat it, but big as it was and being the first he’d ever shot, there wasn’t any choice but to have it stuffed. And he remembered the guilt he felt, but never voiced, at killing something so big and so alive. Sometimes it was like the taxidermist had also stuffed all his indecision into the husk of the bird. “Well, you big bastard,” he said, looking at it. “You got anything to say about all that?” But in retaking his chair, Father Gilroy remembered something else too. A dark summer night. Parked on a gravel logging road. Sticky with sweat and fumbling with the clasp of a brassiere in the backseat of a car. He knew somewhere in that memory was fear. And shame too. But those things didn’t come to him that night, tornado siren blaring outside. Only something remembered sweetly, crystallized by time. Coming out of the reverie, draped on his office chair, Father Gilroy kneaded his knees with the heels of his hand. 19 The Weeds ______

He wasn’t sure when it started happening but for some time now, whenever he saw his younger sister Janice, Hugh Elliot felt as if she had usurped his role as the eldest child in the family. Sitting at a table on the cement slab patio behind her house, Hugh admired and almost feared the maternal ease with which she dispatched her kids into the house, because she had something to talk about with Uncle Hugh. “I don’t know why you stopped here first,” Janice said as she settled into a cushioned patio chair. “You could’ve kept on driving east about forty minutes. You’d see a house you might still recognize, on Poplar. 212. Just the next town over.” “That’s not fair,” Hugh said. “I just don’t know why you stopped here first. We talked everything out on the phone.” “I figured I would stop here first and see the kids. And you and Mark. It’s good to see you. Plus Mom said she’s got bridge this morning. She won’t be back until later.” “She told you that?” “Yea, I talked to her yesterday.” “She’s feeding you a line.” “What?” “She can’t play bridge anymore. And even when she did, she never played on Saturdays, you know that.” Hugh wondered if Janice took pleasure in pointing this out, but when he studied her she looked only tired. “I know that,” Hugh repeated. “You’re procrastinating is why you’re here.” After she said this, Janice slipped from her chair and reached into the well-groomed boxwood and withdrew her hand holding a large dandelion by its taproot. In her movements, Hugh was reminded of the stringy rabbitlike girl he grew up with. She set the weed down on the patio table between them and sat down. 20 “I just don’t see why I have to be the one who does it,” Hugh said. “Can’t you come down and we will do it together. Strength in numbers.” “No way. You know the way those two can hold a grudge.” “So?” “Hugh, I didn’t want to have to say this, but you aren’t going to be the one that visits her every weekend. If I tell them I won’t hear the end of it. Every time you visit it’s such a novelty they forget everything else.” “Don’t be a bitch.” “Well.” Hugh was silent. “Listen,” Janice said. “You go do it, this morning, and then you got all night to win them back. And tomorrow we will stop by with the kids and everything will be fine. I’ll make dinner.” “Jesus, alright.” Janice stood up and put her arms out for a hug. *** Arriving at his mother’s house Hugh noticed again how small everything had become, or maybe always was. The yard, which once hosted neighborhood games of wiffleball, looked too small to even call a yard. Over the years the oak tree along the front curb had brazenly pushed its roots through the sidewalk and shoved its braches into the telephone wires above. Since Hugh last visited, the city had carved away the center of the tree even though the tree and wires had peacefully coexisted for years. It now looked like a field goal post. When he approached the front door Hugh almost knocked. The smell was a familiar blend of antiseptic and department store perfume. From the entryway Hugh heard the voice of his aunt in the living room. “I bet he raped her,” Ninny shouted. “Well Mary, you fell asleep again.” She began the slow process of getting to her feet until she saw Hugh in the doorway. “Oh, Hugh,” said Ninny. “You’re here.” “I’m here.” Hugh strode over to the TV and turned down the volume.

21 “Would you like me to fix you a drink?” she asked when Hugh ducked down to peck her on the cheek. “I’ll get one myself in a minute.” “We have some of the whiskey you like in the garage,” she conceded. Then turning to Hugh’s mother, she said, “Mary, wake up. Hugh is here.” Getting no response, she set herself to try again until Hugh interrupted her: “Let her sleep, Ninny. I’ll get something to eat first.” “Suit yourself,” she said, settling back into her seat, and turned up the volume on the TV. In the kitchen, next to a cereal bowl full of unlabeled and multicolored pills, bacon drained on a paper towel. Hugh washed down several slices with bourbon and water. On such a diet he had survived his lonely twenties and some of his lonely forties. Ninny shouted to him from the living room: “I would have made something else for lunch but bacon is about all we like anymore.” Hugh thanked her loudly, feeling silly shouting conversation indoors. He couldn’t quite dissociate the current need for shouting and the scolding it would have provoked in years past. *** When Hugh sat on the arm of the sofa, his mother started awake. “Oh, Harold, you’re back,” she said looking at him, struggling to sit up. Her eyes were clouded with sleep and memory of his late father. “I’m Hugh, Mom.” “What?” “That’s Hugh, Mary.” “That’s what I said. He’s back.” She turned her attention to the TV and sat back in her chair. For a minute, Hugh respected the women’s cognitive investment in the television and studied them silently from the unoccupied couch. Ninny was perched on the wicker loveseat, her floral nightgown camouflaging her against floral upholstering. Her skin hung off her in sheets and wrinkled like old leather around her neck and hands. Yet there was

22 still intensity in her sunken eyes, so that when gazing at the TV she had the air of an ancient turkey vulture, perched on a telephone pole waiting for something to get hit by a car. Where Ninny was a prune, his mother was an ever ripening plum. After Hugh’s father died Ninny moved in and Mary’s skin became elastic with retained water. When she lay in the red recliner he had bought for her the Christmas before, she looked like a corpse from the crime dramas she loved, afloat in a pond of red leather. Next to her chair, like an obedient dog, sat a small squat humming device packed in a dark green case. To Hugh it looked like a mix between luggage and the basketball pump at the YMCA, only with clear tubing running from the top to his mother’s nostrils. During a commercial break, Hugh turned to Ninny. “Has Dr. Hoover seen her again?” “Who?” “Dr. Hoover,” Hugh said, louder. “Hoover was a socialist,” Mary chimed in. “You’re thinking of Roosevelt, Mom.” “Who?” “Oh Dr. Hoover.” Ninny said. “Roosevelt,” Hugh repeated. “Roosevelt was a no-good socialist,” his mother said without taking her eyes off the television. “What did he say?” Hugh turned to Ninny. “The same thing he has been saying. She just gets a little confused sometimes,” Ninny said. “But you should have seen her earlier. We were playing gin and she was sharp as a tack. Sharper even,” Ninny added, snorting an empty laugh through her nose. Hugh saw no cards in the room. *** The weeds in the flowerbed back of the Elliot house, having not been tended for three springs, met Hugh’s efforts to eradicate them with resolute menace. An hour after he’d arrived, Hugh was on his hands and knees pulling weeds from the flowerbed that ran the length of the backyard. Something like nostalgia mixed with the black despair of those unaccustomed to physical labor and for an hour he was fourteen again, the youthful 23 indentured servant of his parents. His despair he drowned with mouthfuls of hosewater and cigarettes smoked by the air-conditioning unit on the far side of the house, out of sight. Hugh rarely smoked anymore but, he reasoned, he also rarely did yard work. Sitting on his heels, Hugh pulled on a dandelion with an audible grunt. He misjudged the force needed to dislodge the weed and fell backwards down the sloped front of the flowerbed into the yard. Bits of dirt rained onto his face and lips and hair. He lay in the grass a moment and waited for Ninny to call to him from the back door. She had been watching him weed, occasionally poking her head out the window to encourage his hard work or lament the need he felt to do it. *** Both Ninny and his mother were asleep when Hugh slipped in through the sliding back door, so he fixed himself a drink. He rummaged through boxes in the garage until he found his father’s stash of whiskey, untouched for four years: his mother drank bourbon. He unscrewed the top from one of the bottles, smelled it, and took it inside to mix it with soda. He sipped the first drink on the only unoccupied couch in the room where his aunt and mother slept. The crime drama marathon continued into the afternoon. Gritty cops made arrests and good-looking lawyers put perps in jail. The remote was nowhere to be found. During commercials Hugh studied the blank, passive face of his sleeping mother. Her skin was smooth, stretched to capacity, except around her eyes where the skin was sunken like a bruise on a peach. She was motionless except for her lips, which quivered or curled over her teeth. He was reminded then of something he read in a waiting room somewhere. The article explained that the human tooth wasn’t naturally designed to last longer than thirty years. Without modern dentistry he wouldn’t have been alive for this. He had outlived his biological warranty. They all had. Watching his mother, Hugh tried not to think too much about how she felt about it all. Ninny made a small exclamation in her sleep when he got up from the couch. After he mixed a second drink he went to explore the rest of the house. It was, he concluded after a peek in the downstairs rooms, not much changed from his youth. The carpet throughout the first floor was the same it had been for twenty years: a deep blue, almost royal, and thick like healthy bluegrass. It was the one purchase in the house that 24 hinted at any rebellion from his mother. The regal shade was too gaudy for the old man. It was the only fight he could remember his mother winning so publically. The most apparent change was the track that ran along the baseboard and guided a motorized chair up and down the stairs—a convenience he’d purchased to spare his mother’s artificial knee. He rode the chair up the stairs himself, drink in hand. His bedroom had long been converted into a guest room but upon entering it, and shutting the door behind him, he recalled the warm embrace of solitude it had once allowed him. The room was sparse and free of its former messiness. The bedspread was new, floral print, but the bedside table and the desk in the corner were the same. The mirror he’d had in high school still hung on the back of the door. In the closet he found his old letterman jacket, put it on, zipped it to his neck. It fit shoulders that were broader than his were now. He felt like a large turtle, poking his head from an overlarge and weathered shell. On the verge of wistfulness, and with the warmth of the booze trickling through his veins and into his brain, Hugh submerged himself under the bedcovers and casually attempted to masturbate. He tried to recall Cynthia, his high school sweetheart. The rush of excitement that first time with her in a secluded part of her front lawn. And then the second time in his parents’ garage the next night. But Hugh couldn’t remain sixteen for long, and all that came back to him was the way he had seen Cynthia last: corpulent, engorged with funnel cake at the town festival. The faint sound of the television blaring downstairs permeated the closed door. Defeated and flaccid he got out of bed, hung his letterman jacket in the closet and smoked a cigarette by the open window, careful to exhale through the screen. His third drink, consumed on the front porch, gave him the courage to mentally approach the subject of his mother in an equally sad but more respectable fashion. Hugh was, most of all, confused about his mother. The weekly phone calls to her had varied little over the years and didn’t correspond with the person in the other room, who might’ve spent her entire week in the same chair, only eating bacon. Something didn’t seem real about the situation. His mother was too young to be put in a home. Seventy-two? Seventy- three?

25 A small part of him, nourished by the whiskey, maintained the conviction that she didn’t need any of it; that when he went inside she would be sharp again, like she used to be before his father passed. There had to be something keeping her whole besides the small suitcase and her complex amalgam of prescription and over-the-counter medication. She had her bridge clubs, right? Four days a week. Janice was wrong. She hadn’t been lying to him; she’d been lying to Janice. Plus he needed to talk to the doctor before any decision was made—Ninny and Jan couldn’t compose themselves around professionals. The sky beyond the porch had turned a gangrenous hue, purple and dark in the early evening. Hugh reentered the house. *** “How does it look, Hugh? The TV said there’s a tornado warning for the county. Is it a watch or a warning that’s the bad one?” his mother asked. “A warning is the bad one. You’re sure it said a warning?” “I heard it too,” Ninny said. “How are you feeling, Mom?” Hugh’s buzz made it easier for him to talk at an understandable volume. His mother didn’t answer right away. She looked down at her lap as if in thought and her hands smoothed the folds of the blanket on her lap. “Harry didn’t like what I liked to watch,” she said. “When he would get home I would fix him a drink and he would watch in one room and I would watch in the other.” Ninny darted a nervous glance at Hugh. “We were just talking about your father,” she said to Hugh. And then to Mary: “Mary, Hugh asked you a question.” “What is it, Hugh?” Her face showed the docile concern of a mother speaking to her toddler. “I asked how you’re feeling.” “Oh, I’m fine. And you? How are the kids?” “Jan’s kids? I think they’re fine. I talked to Jan for a little while this afternoon. She says hello.” “Have you been smoking? I smell smoke.” Ninny creased the bridge of her nose. “No, I quit years ago.”

26 “Harry used to like to smoke in the bathtub. I would make him a drink and take it to him and if the kids were in bed he would ask me to get in with him sometimes, if he had a few already,” Mary gazed at the floor. “Mary, please. Hugh is here, he doesn’t want to hear that,” Ninny said uneasily. *** When Jan called his cell phone, Ninny and his mother were still in their places, rounding into the fourth hour of a crime drama marathon. “Did you do it yet?” was the first thing Jan said. “I’m getting to it.” “Mmhmm. There’s a storm coming. I just wanted to tell you.” “We’ll manage.” “You sound drunk, Hugh.” “Thanks, Marge.” Marge was his ex-wife. Hugh mixed a fourth drink, took a sip, took a step toward the living room, then turned and in a fit of responsibility dumped it in the sink. When he entered the room both women looked at him, as if he was the arbiter of bad news or maybe just surprised he didn’t have a drink in his hand. In that moment the siren blared outside. Not long after, the lights cut out. The hum of the central air, the buzzing cable box, the whir of fans that had certainly been spinning for months seemed to make more noise in their absence. But gone too, Hugh realized, was the small humming coming from the green case beside his mother’s chair. In its place: a pattern of irregular breathing. Three short inhales and one long exhale. In the instant between breaths, Hugh was fourteen again, being interviewed by the local paper for his act of amateur heroism. While on lifeguard duty he had pulled an old lady from the deep end of a local swimming pool. His mother framed the article that ran in the paper, and let it hang until it yellowed before moving it to storage. A new scene of heroism filled his head. Hugh stood and left the room without a word so as not to alarm Ninny or his mother. He navigated the kitchen, into the dining room, ramming his hip on the corner of the dining room table and, trailing expletives, into 27 the complete blackness of the windowless garage. Calmly, Hugh took his lighter and cigarettes from his pocket, stuck two in his mouth, lit them and inhaled. A small halo of light would infiltrate the darkness on each breath. The dead silhouettes of fishing poles, trashcans, empty boxes and plastic toys for Jan’s kids. Sure enough, next to the door was a small case made of the same material as the oxygen suitcase. In the room lit by the intermittent lightning flashes and the eerie glow from the storm outside, Ninny’s desiccated shadow loomed huge on the wall. While he installed the replacement battery, Hugh conjured a scene where he told his mother of the decision he and Jan had come to. His mother would be silent but Ninny would flare in the darkness, “You with your city arrogance, You think because you left that you know better. That you know better than us.” He would be firm, even when Ninny would ask, “Don’t you see what this means for me? I’m all alone and I’ll be next.” The machine clicked on with the new battery and hummed as before. Neither Ninny or his mother seemed to notice. When he listened for relief in his mother’s breathing, he heard the same pattern. Three short and one long. Ultimately, he couldn’t even be sure her breathing was any different than before the power went out, only with courtroom banter and the clinking of ice in his glass masking the arrhythm. In the darkness Ninny said several chipper and meaningless things. Hugh sighed or shrugged or laughed in response but mostly stayed silent. Mary said only one thing: “Hugh, you ought to have kids. It’s so nice to have them come visit you when you’re old.” She spoke in a light tone, as if it was an observation made about pleasant weather, totally without a trace of the sarcasm or longing Hugh listened for. *** Hugh would have liked to think the courage to speak came from something other than his headache, nausea, and the feeling that he deserved whatever came to him. When the power came back on, it felt as good a time as any. The cable box would take a few minutes to reboot. “We need to talk,” was how he started. Both women looked at him. “Well, you know Jan and I have been worried about you mom,” he said and then paused. Neither woman said a thing. The rest of it spilled out. 28 “And listen, we just think it’s time for us to consider something else. I spoke, well actually Jan did, to someone out at New Horizons and they said they’ve got space out there and the rooms are painted real colors, not that muted blue and white shit, and that way someone will always be there to take care of you if you need it.” He waited for his mother to protest, for Ninny to scold him. Instead Ninny said, “Well it’s about time.” She looked at Mary. “You know Grace Evans has been out there for almost a year and she said the doctors are nice and she’s moving around better than ever with the physical therapy.” After a long minute his mother said simply, “You can’t sell the house until after Ninny and I die. I’ll come back here if I want to.” *** Hugh only woke up once that night, in need of water. He stepped lightly, careful not to make a noise, past the opening at the top of the stairs. Though walls obstructed his view into the living room, he could tell from the pulsing edge of the light spilling through the doorway that the TV was still on, muted. Of the wicker-loveseat he could see only enough to confirm Ninny’s presence from his view of her wizened feet. Of his mother, either sleeping or feigning sleep, he could see nothing at all. Pieces of one memory woke with him. He was twenty-two. He’d stopped home to pick up a few belongings, knowing that when he returned it wouldn’t be his home again, only his parents’ house. His father approached him at the side door with two twenty- dollar-bills in his hand and a face that registered an approximation of sadness. “Here,” he said with affection, handing Hugh the bills, “you’re on your own now.” Hugh could not remember if there was an embrace. But he could remember entering the house again to retrieve the wallet he forgot on the counter. He remembered wanting to say something else to his father before he drove away. He found his mother on hands and knees, smacking the tile floor with the closest object at hand—a paperback Western his father was reading—yelling, “These ants, these God damn ants!” It always stuck with him, however distorted by time, the way moments of strong emotion sometimes do. Sleep returned late to Hugh that night. Late enough to finish a glass of water and refill another. Because in his stomach there had settled a lurching feeling like the one he 29 always got from an ascendant plane or that he had gotten in the past, on trips, as the family wagon crested a hill unexpectedly.

30 The Storm ______

Olivia

Before she decided whether or not to sleep with the mailman, a choice that had stood, kneeled, and sat with her throughout midmorning Saturday mass, and much of the year before, Olivia Snodgrass considered two things. She first considered the enormity of the cliché attached to sleeping with one’s mailman. She could recall her burning ears when, as a little girl, she concealed herself around a corner and listened to her father and some men from the neighborhood tell a very blue joke the punchlined with a housewife sleeping with her mailman. In the front lawn of the church Olivia brought one hand discreetly to the side of her head as if to tuck in a stray hair, to an ear she felt flushing red with the memory. The second thing she considered, balanced against the first, was the freedom allowed in those post-coital moments, when she could be whomever she wanted, if only for the afternoon. She would wake up next to him and ask for a cigarette—not that she smoked—or even request that he leave immediately, because she liked to be alone after sex. The more she considered these moments the less she considered the cliché, or her husband, Jack. For the moment Olivia’s attention was drawn back to the person in front of her— Cindy Evans. A hedgehog of a woman who stood much too close when she spoke—a habit especially problematic after Mass as her misaligned teeth gnashed through a sour cloud of Eucharist-breath. “The weather,” Cindy was saying, “is supposed to be awful this afternoon. I wonder if the boys will have their game.” Olivia scanned the crowd for Jack and found him on the steps, framed ingloriously by the heavy wooden doors of the church. Neat enough, dark hair swept across his head and sharply parted and mashed down with a wet comb each morning. But doughier than he ever had been, and even the one-size-bigger-than-usual shirts she bought for him could not hide his growing paunch from twenty yards away. Seeing him now, she felt irked to

31 know that two mismatching socks belied that exterior tidiness. Above all she felt tired of feeling irked. She put her hand up to beckon him. In the car, Olivia daydreamed. Where Jack was soft and shapeless, Louis Shamrock was chiseled from far different material, something like the countertop granite that had been installed in the Snodgrass kitchen. Louis Shamrock—wasn’t that just a delightful name, too?—and his permanent stubble and throbbing baritone. He had been a classmate of hers in high school and their brief pleasantries always felt more familiar than those she’d had with other mailmen. “I don’t know what’s wrong with the air,” Jack was saying, rolling down the windows. After baking on blacktop the cloth seats of the car emitted the thick, stale smell of spilled milk, vaguely rotten. Once at home, Olivia reapplied her makeup and alternated between pacing in front of the muted TV and lying on the couch chewing off her fingernails. “Are you alright?” Jack asked. “You seem nervous.” “Storms,” Olivia said simply. “I completely forgot about that storm. It should hold off for a while.” He leaned over the back of the couch and leaned down to kiss her, stopping short. “Did you do something new with your makeup?” She paused, taken aback. “I did for church this morning,” she lied. “Oh. Well I like it.” He continued with his kiss. “Thanks, sweetie. Where’s Aaron? Shouldn’t you be on your way by now?” “Showering. He’s a strange boy—wouldn’t shower for church but then he hops in before his baseball game.” *** As the mail hour approached, Olivia felt an urgency she hadn’t before. She had, almost as an afterthought, given herself the chance to act on her morning’s daydreams. After she’d told her lie—a headache, such a subjective thing, barely even a lie—her men left, and a resistance in her relented. She stopped finishing the sentences in her head that started with the words, “If I’m caught…”

32 Plus, it’s not as if Jack didn’t have his own little secrets. Only last summer she found a little bag of marijuana, stuffed in a men’s multivitamin bottle. He had hidden it behind all their other expired medication in a mud room cabinet. Two days later, she heard the rattle of pill bottles that signaled his panicked and fruitless search. A day after that, he had casually asked where all his vitamins went and she affected ignorance, simply stating that the cabinet was too cluttered and she had thrown out all the things they didn’t use anymore. Any vindictiveness on her part was offset by a relative unconcern about her discovery. She understood the need to compartmentalize one’s sanity, to withhold a thing or two from the ones you loved. It was proof Jack still loved her and in her forgiveness, she reasoned, she had earned her own little secret. Usually, on empty weekend afternoons, Olivia spent the day putting her house in order. She threw away expired food. She refilled hand soap dispensers. She laundered. That afternoon, however, she did none of those things. She started to but in looking for a notepad to make a list of chores, she found colored pencils on the desk in the kitchen. And under them, a letter from the manager of their low-risk college investment portfolio, nautically themed, that referred to his “captaining” of the fund, assuring that any hard luck was due to “turbulent economic waters”, but “the seas were calming”, standard to above average growth was expected. On the back of this letter, Olivia drew. She drew Jack first. Dull pencil tips made it difficult to portray the thinning that was occurring on Jack’s scalp, so she gave him a thick head of hair and compensated with an oversized inverted “u” above his navel and the shaded hint of two sagging breasts. She drew Aaron with his head stooped and his shoulders comically slumped to indicate indifference and a generalized mediocrity for which she secretly felt responsible. Then she drew Louis. His legs and ankles and feet she drew with a masculine thickness and she used many short straight lines to indicate the musculature underneath his postal uniform. She took time to flatteringly shade his thigh- high shorts. With little room left on the back of the letter, Olivia riffled through the papers on the desk for something disposable. She guarded the paper in the crook of her arm and started to sketch a figure of herself. When she drew her legs she considered the real ones beneath her. They looked smooth in her jeans and her ankles ascended delicately from tasteful flats. 33 She pinched the bit of skin over her waistline and at the back of her arms. She fingered the benign mole on her neck about which she never could stop feeling insecure. All of these details she conscientiously included in her self-depiction. Then she scribbled it out and drew another. In the next one, tucked even deeper into the crook of her arm, she drew herself reclining, more comfortably than would be possible in reality, on the chifforobe in the basement Jack had promised to paint but never did—the one he always called a wardrobe instead. She was, in this scene, nude. She quickly sketched Louis into the scene. He leered at her with obvious intent, also nude. She took time to extensively detail his intent and veins both red and blue coiled realistically around its unrealistic girth. Blood coming, blood going. After she shredded the picture, she looked at herself in the brass-rimmed mirror in the hallway. She tugged at the bottom of her blouse. “I’ve had too much coffee,” she said aloud to the reflection and went outside to tend to her flowerbeds. *** When Louis called to her, Olivia was taken aback. She had spent the previous fifteen minutes digging up and replanting the dahlias she had planted a week before. “Good afternoon, ma’am.” “Oh. Hello, Louis.” Olivia stood from the flower bed and wiped the dirt from her knees. She pulled off her gloves and dropped them in the yard. Louis looked down into his shoulderbag full of mail, walking his fingers across the banded stacks. She studied him—his jawline, the white circle he’d worked into his back pocket with a tin of dipping tobacco and all those steps. “Louis.” He looked up to her. His eyes registered a permanent apathy that concealed, she thought, a bit of mischief. “Louis, would you like to come inside.” “Mrs. Snodgrass…” Before he could answer she turned around and walked slowly onto her front porch, stopping before she got to the door to throw what she hoped was a seductive glance over

34 her shoulder. After a minute, Louis followed—a fact confirmed by the slap of the screen door. When he sauntered into the living room, Olivia was doing her best to sit still on the couch and keep her hands from shaking. He had a knowing smirk and she thought that he had, perhaps, entertained other offers similar to hers. “Can I get you anything?” she tried to load innuendo into the words. “Do you have a cigarette?” “What?” He mimed smoking at her. “I’m trying to quit lipping so much,” he said. “Plus, it can get in the way.” He said this with a straight face that offered no further elaboration. Olivia stayed silent. She added confusion to the seduction on her face. “Worth a try.” He pulled a slightly crushed pack from the side pocket of his navy mailbag, still on his shoulder. He extracted a cigarette and set it between his teeth. He put the pack away but left the unlit cigarette in his mouth. “What’d you want me inside for?” He set his bag down and stepped lightly to the spot on the couch next to her. Operating with confidence and obvious experience, he reclined and put a hand on her knee. After a decade of married life Olivia wasn’t accustomed to so much foreplay. Only an obligatory dry hump beforehand. He affected a look of pure innocence. Louis was lightly pressing each of his fingertips into her thigh, one after the other, almost musically. Her stomach turned over hotly and she tasted vomit at the back of her throat. “Sex?” The word came out something like a hiccup, something like a question. Speaking it aloud to a man who was not her husband, in the home they shared, had a strange effect on Olivia. In an instant, it put in stark contrast this sexual experience and the many Olivia had in her past. There was Steve, in middle school, who steered her hand to his lap in the movie theatre, and who later returned the favor. The primary consequence was salt and butter product in her pubic hair and the teasing of her friends. With Chip, in college, her misadventures meant sleeping on the bare mattress for half the semester after her bed 35 sheets and the spares in the closet were ruined. With Randall, Chip’s friend, the consequence was a year full of rash decisions and several of her favorite albums that she had lent to him but had been too proud to request back when he left her. And with Jack, from Jack, came everything she knew now. A kid. A home. And the kind of love that is more blood and memory than the rush and thrill of love itself. “Oh, and what about it?” Words left her then, for an instant. She could think of nothing at all to say about her chosen subject. Olivia groped for the nearest thought she could put to words. “My husband, when we, um, have sex”—she almost said ‘make love’—“sometimes he does this things with his hands. Ehrm,” she coughed, “and his wrists. When he’s on top. He bends his wrists so his hands”—she demonstrated by bending her own—“look like a gorilla’s.” Louis looked at her unblinking. She chuckled awkwardly in response to his face and hiccupped. His hand stopped six inches from its destination. “What?” “Nevermind,” she said. “With gorilla-hands?” “Yea,” she said, suddenly defensive of Jack’s sexual idiosyncrasies. “It’s kinda funny actually. Cute, you know.”

Jack

Jack Snodgrass figured he earned a clandestine joint to be smoked later that day when he looked at his watch and calculated that his wife had lingered for fifteen whole minutes after church. Jack stood on the front steps of St. Martin’s Catholic church, slightly bigger than the Lutheran church across the narrow street. The milling congregation thinned gradually as parishioners leaked into the Lutheran parking lot, poached by the Catholics because it was closer to St. Martin’s front door. From his vantage point, Jack considered his wife Olivia—her unforced, reassuring laugh, the thoughtful touch on the arm of Cindy Evans, the natural way she cocked her head and lifted her chin slightly to indicate concern and compassion. She managed to look chic,

36 or what he imagined chic was supposed to look like, in her tight fitting jeans tucked into black boots with a modest heel and a pink sleeveless blouse he did not remember having seen before. Less pink, more salmon, he thought and shuddered at the internal correction. Something like jealousy swelled in his gut before he stepped into the crowd to produce his own slightly-less-than-genuine version of his wife’s social affectations. “Jack!” He heard his wife shout above the crowd. He weaved through the bodies towards her. “Jack,” she said, looking at him, “Cindy was just telling me there’s a storm coming this afternoon.” “Supposed to be a big one too!” Cindy agreed. She was a toad of a woman, Jack thought, and had spawned a toad of a son, who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, ever stop kicking dandelions in the outfield. Aaron and the Evans kid had been on the same team for three straight years now, tragically, and Cindy had mistaken the Snodgrass’ bad luck for a genuine friendship. She capitalized on every opportunity to further cement their mutual cordiality. He looked for the Evans kid and seeing him nearby, speculated that Cindy probably needed a joint or two herself over the years. “A little rain can’t keep our champions off the field,” Jack said almost without self- loathing. *** At home, Jack changed into gym shorts and tennis shoes while his son showered— an oddity in which he delighted. It provided him the ten minutes he needed to sneak to the garage and hastily roll a joint. Against the far wall of the garage stood a set of freestanding metal shelves where Jack kept rusting handtools and half-empty aerosol cans. On the bottom shelf, in a box that once held Jack’s Playboys, under a few coils of extension cord, sat a toolbox in which Jack now hid his weed. Sweat dampened the hair at Jack’s temples as he sat crosslegged on the floor of his garage, hidden from view by the car, concentrating on his fingertips. When he finished he gently tucked his creation in his pocket and lazily shot a basketball in the driveway, wondering if his son had use yet for a Playboy or its’ online counterpart. “Got everything?” Jack asked as his son emerged from the house. “Is Mom coming?” “She’s not feeling well.” 37 Aaron said nothing. They started walking. As was his custom, Jack educated his son on the finer points of the game during their walk to the field. But this day, Jack couldn’t focus on his words, instead considering his son. Not a bad kid. Intelligent but generally disinterested. Maybe too self-conscious. Too vain, too invested in the opinion of others. Too much like Olivia. Too much like himself as a kid. Jack remembered his own teenage vanity: violent mood swings, the variations in his temper according to the opinions of girls or his overall social standing. He saw himself as a 12 year old, keeping his shirt on at the pool, choosing to feign a sunburn instead of being subjected to physical comparison with his better looking acquaintances. He could still feel the gaze of the sunkissed meat-appraisers adorning the lawn chairs around the pool—girls in his grade, girls in the grades above. And he was there, hiding in an oversized t-shirt, a cow refusing inevitable slaughter. Jack looked at his son, skinny knees concealed by his athletic pantaloons, and felt empathy for whatever teenage—or preteenage—preoccupations that made his son so moody these days. The commonplace malaise of someone with not enough to complain about, he thought. Maybe it was a girl. Jack hoped it was a girl. “Dad?” “Huh?” “You stopped talking midsentence.” *** When they got to the field Jack waved to several parents on the third-base-line, setting up their folding canvas chairs with umbrellas in the umbrella holders, unopened and anticipatory. Beyond them the chainlink fence curved around the outfield, covered in faded plywood advertisements, some for places long out of business. The trees behind the fence flashed the underside of their leaves in the stiffening breeze. “You go warm up, I’m going for a run,” Jack said stopping short of the field. “A run?” “Sure, a run.” “You don’t run.”

38 “I know I don’t but,” he leaned closer to Aaron as if to let him in on a secret, “I have a feeling your mother is starting to think I’m getting fat.” It was true, Jack knew it—and Jack did plan to run, if only to the abandoned auto lot two blocks away. An involuntary grimace seized his upper lip, clearly disapproving of Jack’s decision to include him on the inner resentments of his parents’ marriage. He turned and trotted to the bench; Jack in the other direction. When he neared the empty gravel auto lot Jack veered off the sidewalk into some overgrown honeysuckle and approached it from behind so no one could see him enter. The old teeth of broken glass decorated the window openings in the cinderblock building that once had anchored neon banners proclaiming deals, deals, deals. Squatting behind the building, Jack examined his joint and, seeing it still in working condition after his run, set flame to the tip. “Fucking A-right.” He said aloud, tickled by the vulgarity. He took a long drag and exhaled. Then he made a nonsensical sound. Then he plunged his little finger up his nose, extracted a booger, and wiped it on the cinderblocks at his back. He took another hit. Then he pulled his car keys from his pocket and used the tip of his house key to scrape earwax from his ears, one after the other, taking time to look at the honey-like glob on the end before wiping it on his shorts. He sucked at the husk of the joint a few more times before outing it on the bottom of his shoe. In a momentary fit of paranoia he swallowed the roach to destroy the evidence. “Good weed,” he admitted to the gravel. *** Jack returned to the field at a brisk jog and sat on the bleachers by the other fathers. He’d missed the top of the first inning but was confident the ring of sweat around his neck lifted all suspicion about his absence. Just in case, Jack did his best to participate with the other fathers, a group whose only discernable talents were for monogamy and various whistling techniques. He pitched his comments below the wifely encouragement that betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of sport—Good try, Jimmy! You’ll make a hit next time!—but above the desperate barks of some of the other fathers—Why? Why? Why would you swing at that? He rehashed the merits of pitching from the wind-up instead of the stretch. When a kid wearing sweatpants came up to bat he traded appropriately 39 judgmental looks to Mr. Sandburg and Harry Jones when a kid wearing sweatpants came up to bat. And he did it with an air of authenticity of which Olivia would have been proud, he thought. She always liked him to play nice. When his son came up in the second, it was with the ominous accompaniment of a towering green cloud. Jack watched Aaron take the first pitch for a ball. Then the second. But before the third pitch, Jack’s attention wandered to the approaching cloud. It sailed ahead of the other clouds like a ship at the head of a fleet. Jack imagined himself at the helm of that ship, riding the dips and swells, exploring previously unknown horizons. In this vision he adopted a thick brogue and yelled nautical gibberish unrecognizable from the rest of human speech. He rode the prow into the stinging salt spray. He was fairly high at this point. Two distinct sounds snapped Jack from his reverie: the crack of lighting nearby and the collective inhale of a crowd spectating gruesome injury. Somewhere underneath those two was a dull thud: the sound of the ball meeting his son. The game was called before Aaron got off the ground and stopped crying. The second crack of lightening sent the mothers scurrying to start minivans while the fathers and sons were left to collapse lawn chairs and pack equipment bags. Eventually, Aaron rose with an embarrassment heavier than a normal display of public weakness. The best part of Jack attempted to cull a story from his past that would show empathy to Aaron. Something that might make him laugh. But with the approaching storm, they had to hurry. There was only time for a curt promise not to tell Olivia anything had happened. When the rain started four blocks from home, Aaron outpaced Jack despite a noticeable limp, and Jack let him run ahead, to give him some space. As he ascended the driveway Louis Shamrock stepped off his front porch with his mailbag. “Ahoy, Louis,” Jack said. “A squall approaches. Come belowdecks and we’ll batten down a hatch or two.” “What?” Louis asked with some disdain. “Seriously though, I think a bad storm is coming. You can wait it out with us.”

40 Aaron

Aaron Snodgrass didn’t sit on the black top—once he had gotten in trouble for ruining a pair of khakis that way—but rather crouched by the wheel of the family car, picking at some melty tar and avoiding his parents’ friends and Jimmy Evans, the most annoying of his acquaintances. The one who collected boogers in his pencil tray and didn’t pay attention in the outfield. He’d just gotten a new pair of cleats and Aaron didn’t want to hear about it. His hiding had another advantage, namely, the clear view it provided of Suzy MacMillan, looking angelic in a floral print Sunday dress with her loose red curls spilling from her head. She was standing impatiently beside her parents, shifting her weight from foot to foot while she tugged at her mother’s arm, begging departure. Aaron’s mind drifted from the real Suzy to the one he kept locked in his head. He thought casually about marrying her, having a litter of children with her, and her emerging boobs. Though he had been shown the blueprints for babymaking in health class, he still couldn’t quite imagine the mechanics of it all. The biology alone wasn’t very appealing. “Bad news,” his father’s voice sounded from above him. Aaron started and stood up, “What’s that?” “Supposed to be a storm this afternoon. Might not be able to get the game in.” Normally this news would not have disappointed Aaron, no real lover of baseball, but that afternoon they were scheduled to play the Johnson’s Tire Service Rangers, Ronnie MacMillan’s team, Suzy’s twin brother. “What’s a little rain?” Aaron asked. *** When they got home, Aaron decided to shower before he changed into his uniform, in case Suzy got close enough to smell him. Nothing felt better than nudity after climbing from khaki pants and escaping a shirt with more than three buttons. While he waited for the stream of water to warm, Aaron sucked in his stomach in front of the mirror. Then he turned to the mirror and flexed every muscle in his body. He poked the soft cords at the base of his neck with his finger.

41 Walking to the game, Aaron tuned out the pregame pep talk—equal parts advice, encouragement and castigation. Try hard and hustle, etc. To Aaron, cumulatively, it felt like a mild scolding. Instead, Aaron thought about the Friday lunch table. The first thought: when he’d opened his applesauce cup and put it on the chair of his friend the moment before he sat down. Suzy Macmillan blessed him with a delightful laugh from only a few seats down the same table. The second thought: only moments after his hugely successful applesauce gag he was laughing loudly between glances at Suzy, demonstrating to her his overall good humor. Their eyes met, and if not for the food in his mouth he surely would have confessed his love to her then and there. He swallowed and they started to speak in unison. Being a gentleman, he deferred—She told him to stop chewing with his mouth open. In retaliation, that afternoon, he laughed at the rotten things the older kids on the bus said about girls with red hair. “You’ve got talent,” his father was saying. “More talent than most of those kids out there, but…” Aaron tuned out again, only nodding occasionally and robotically producing sounds that indicated listening. Instead, he was watching his feet advance over the pavement, avoiding the cracks. He wondered again if Suzy would attend the game, forced by her parents to support her twin brother. Aaron could see himself hitting a homerun, high over the left field seats. He would round the bases slowly, making eye contact with her as he touched third. Casually accepting high fives in the dugout. Then he thought of a more likely occurrence. A 1-for-3 afternoon, maybe with a walk. There was always the chance that he’d make a great defensive play. More potential highlights reeled in his mind. “…get one down the middle you can’t let it go by. The last time you played this team most of their pitchers could hardly get it to the catcher so if that moon-faced kid puts one across the plate you have to…” *** Once they arrived at the field and his father left on a run, Aaron threw himself vigorously into the mandated warm-up routine. He took batting practice and hit hard two of his allotted five pitches. He fielded grounders with aplomb. He absorbed a bad hop off the rocky infield into his chest and recovered to throw a dart across the infield. He spat into the warm white leather heart of his glove. He ground infield dust in his molars. He lead the 42 team on the rousing pregame trip around the bases and spotted Suzy on the third-baseline, chewing on the end of her hair. When he shook hands with Ronnie McMillan before the game, he couldn’t help but see Suzy in him, and Aaron caught himself imagining kissing Ronnie. He wondered what the difference would be. His hair was almost the exact color of Suzy’s. An uneventful inning passed. The coach put Aaron in right field, where no one ever hit the ball, so he spent his time trying to locate Suzy among the lawn chairs that had been set up along the opposing baseline. Ronnie doubled to left-center and while he stood on second Aaron wondered whether he would feel similarly about Ronnie, if he were a girl. In the bottom half of the inning, before Aaron could bat, a rally was halted when Jimmy Evans tripped over second base and was tagged out. In the top of second Aaron played second and fielded a dribbler for the third out. His trot to the dugout gained importance and strut in the tide of parental applause. He started the inning in the on-deck circle behind the backstop. He added a donut weight to his bat and took some hard swings, and then some less hard swings that didn’t hurt as much. His teammate at the plate took four straight pitches and walked while his mother hooted several times, “Good eye, Roger.” Aaron’s turn. The pitcher towered on the mound and Aaron thought he saw a shadow of a mustache on his upper lip. He tried to stop himself from shaking with a few deep breaths and businesslike practice swings. Why was he so nervous? Where was his dad? Was he ready? the umpire asked. Oh God was he ready? He stepped into the box. Aaron passed on two errant pitches and then took two less errant pitches for strikes. The next pitch he didn’t remember so well—only closing his eyes and swinging hard. Then the deadening pain in his thigh. He collapsed as the umpire called strike three; his knees gave all the resistance of pudding. The first second in the dirt left him processing the fact that he had swung at and missed a ball that hit him. Then for the next minute he cried hot and shamefully public tears that, along with some snot, dripped off the end of nose and chin into the dust. Tears he couldn’t stop even as he thought, ‘I don’t usually cry like this. Why can’t I stop crying?’ 43 Lying in the batter’s box Aaron was sure he could hear Suzy’s laughter above the thunder. *** The storm seemed to arrive the same time the ball had. And even before Aaron had cleared the field and discreetly mopped the snot off his upper lip the parents scattered and his dad was motioning him to hurry-up. Time, Aaron thought, if he’d only had more time to lie in the dirt. Time would have allowed him to walk to first base, to publically overcome. Time would have let the spectators reconfigure their emotions—their embarrassment for having known him could turn to respect for his sacrifice. But the thunder had postponed that forgiveness. Humiliation hung onto him like wet clothing as he jogged home ahead of the storm, ahead of his father. When he got home, Aaron took the front steps in one bound and nearly collided with the mailman. They eyed each other suspiciously for a minute before Aaron mutely slid by him into the house. When he entered, he recognized something wrong with his mother. He saw weakness—a rarity for his mother, but no less visible in the set of her thin lips and the way she rearranged the limbs of the fake plant in one corner of their front hall. He watched her for a minute, in silence, and then recognized it. He couldn’t articulate what it was, but he saw the same thing on his mother’s face that had felt laying in the batter’s box. In less than a minute, even before she could turn to ask about his game, Aaron deduced his mother was sleeping with the mailman. Jeremy Brockman’s parents were divorced and sometimes he threw around that phrase—“sleeping with”—as if he was proud that it applied to his Dad and “that whore” Jeremy’s mother occasionally referenced. Sometimes Aaron fantasized about taking tremendous naps with Suzy MacMillan, both of them waking with tousled hair, refreshed. There didn’t appear to be another explanation for Louis to be leaving his front door when he got home.

Olivia

Sitting in the basement, surrounded by a ring of sputtering candles, Olivia’s nerves jangled. The razor-thin divide between herself and the other masses of firing synapses and

44 dividing cells in the basement with her—became almost passable. The difference between her reality—her identity of wife, mother, homeowner, non-cliché—and a totally different, possibly darker, future was only a word or two from Louis’ mouth, or her own. For the moment though, only silence. Aaron sat on the steps, inscrutably deep in thought and brooding. Jack drifted around the basement, as if unsure where to sit. Louis Shamrock eyed the cardboard box full of holiday liquor that he sat next to. She actively forced herself not to bounce and jitter like a drunk. Each minute in the basement passed like a hangover, an unavoidable penance. Olivia followed the small conversations between Louis and Jack intently, only interjecting to eliminate doubt and uncertainty, or anything with real consequence. She was at ease when Jack said, “We’ve been thinking about finishing this basement for years. We just haven’t gone through with it yet.” Louis absentmindedly flexed his calves and eyed the box of liquor. “Say, you wouldn’t mind if I sampled a bit of this, would you?” Louis directed the question to Jack, who stood by the unpainted chifforobe and said nothing. “Our home is your home,” Olivia filled in. Louis sampled a bottle of crème de menthe, made a face and settled for the second bottle he chose, cognac. “Are you a berber guy or a shag guy?” Louis eventually asked. “You said earlier you were thinking about finishing the basement.” “Oh I don’t know if I would call myself a ‘guy’ of any kind…?” Jack laughed nervously. “We were going to…” “What?” Louis interrupted. “We’re the berber types.” Olivia answered for him. She could see his face processing the thoughts that she knew were running through his head. He would be considering what it meant, the berber types. What did they share with other berber types? He would feel shoehorned into something he hadn’t agreed to and would have to restrain himself from telling Louis that he was no goddamn type at all. She felt enormous affection for him as she watched all this, and even when he choked out, “Yea, berber.”

45 “I’ve installed some carpet before,” said Louis pensively, as if that statement was only the tip of much larger cerebral iceberg. Louis looked like the type of person that knew how to install most things. “Berber is a nice kinda carpet. Durable.” After that, for a time, little was said. Intermittent flashes of lightning outside illuminated the basement. In the stillness, Olivia projected the evening ahead of them, after Louis was gone. The irregularities of the day would disappear into the night, with TV and small talk and exclamations of feeling or opinion no one felt all that passionate about. She would see flashes of Jack’s humor and feel the surges of affections for her son’s idiosyncrasies. She would kiss Jack with only her lips and tell both her men that she loved them. Maybe, the next morning, she would caress Jack’s legs before he woke to indicate that she wanted love that morning. And she also knew that there would be a moment, lingering between sleep and wakefulness where nothing at all would make sense and afterwards she would be left to interpret it, or forget it entirely by the morning. Briefly, she thought of praying but abandoned the idea quickly. She couldn’t overcome an old feeling, the hollow shell of past guilt. For the time when she was thirteen and she promised she would never ask for anything again if He could just make it snow enough for school to be cancelled and, miraculously, He had.

Jack

The confined space and close company made Jack very nervous indeed. His high required solitude, it required silence, and the current situation required the comfortable performance of Jack, normal, sober. Packed into the basement with his son, wife, and the vaguely threatening mail carrier, Jack was left fighting off the urge to panic. Louis had taken a seat on a crate of creased paperbacks, sipping Jack’s good cognac. Aaron sat on the bottom of the steps and watched Louis closely. Olivia sat in her ring of candles and looked into the melting pools of wax with the pious, downturned eyes of Mary. The flames exaggerated the shadows on her face and Jack appreciated how tired she looked. “Well I guess I ought to deliver your mail while I’m down here,” Louis said.

46 “You haven’t delivered it yet?” Jack asked. He looked at Olivia but she kept her eyes on the candles. He saw that Louis too was looking expectantly at his wife. “Storm came upon me before I got the chance,” Louis said slowly. He squinted into his mailbag before pulling out a rubberbanded stack of mail and handing it to Jack. Bill. Bill. Life insurance literature. Home and garden catalogue. Coupons. Jack mentally categorized himself into proper demographics and market segments. Likely to buy berber carpet and also: sports memorabilia, middle-shelf whiskey, outdoor grills, hair growing shampoo. Likely to have a wife who bought him low-sodium bacon. Likely to have 1.2 disappointing children. Likely to believe in a Judeo-Christian God. Likely to vote Republican. Jack quietly lamented his recent rightward political lean. “We get anything good?” Aaron asked of the mail in Jack’s hand. Jack looked at the stack again. “Nothing.” He said. “Life insurance.” “What’s that?” asked Aaron. What indeed, Jack thought. Insurance for life. But what life, and whose? Jack then looked at Louis, whose columnar backstraps would tense as he laughed at the idea of someone as hearty as he buying insurance. He studied Lewis in further detail: forged, it seemed, from a harder substance than the rest of humanity. Dimples danced up his calves and thighs every time he moved his legs. His postal shorts only reached midthigh and knots of muscles like tennisballs grew above his knees. If this were an action movie Jack felt sure Louis would be the star and Jack his fat sidekick or his pathetic friend, squeaking out the wretched setups for Louis’ much funnier jibes. Louis would ride the prow of the ship and Jack would mop up vomit below. Louis would get laid by Olivia, the female lead, while Jack would be left in awe of his on-screen counterpart, sadly masturbating off-screen. When Jack looked up at the room everyone was staring at him. Jack was pulled between the two extremities of human experience: substance- induced pleasure and real and mortal fear. There was terror that he would be caught; that his eyes were the yellow of one too many hits. Terror that his wife desperately wanted him to leave and Louis to stay. Terror that at any moment he would start laughing, as if he was viewing from afar a life that belonged to someone else.

47 He tried occupying several seats in the basement. On top of the old TV that still worked but was too obtrusive for their modern living room. On the collapsing and weathered box that held old piles of branches to their synthetic Christmas tree, pine scented, because of Olivia’s allergies. On the worn seat of an exercise bike, the pedals of which no longer provided the resistance which gave the device its meaning. If only it worked, Jack thought, twisting the dial that once had increased the resistance, he would start today and pedal until he could leave the basement, the storm abated, and when he woke the next day his legs would burn but he wouldn’t say anything about it. Only he would know that he was a fractionally better man than the day before. Jack rose slowly from his seated position on the bike. He silently bent and grabbed a candle from the floor and walked toward the darker recesses of the basement. Flickering light was thrown wider and illuminated the studs in the unfinished walls, a pile of holiday wreaths, his old set of golf clubs, miscellaneous cardboard boxes that rotted with mildew like corpses and held the trinkets he bought but never wanted. In the middle of the room, solemnly shedding white paint like flakes of skin, sat the large unpainted wardrobe. Chifforobe, he corrected himself. Jack blew out the candle.

Aaron

After a half hour in the basement, Aaron started to view the unrelenting thunder as a sign of the end of the world. The tornado siren wailed outside. When he closed his eyes, he saw himself climbing from the wreckage of the house, pulling his unconscious mother behind him and lifting heavy things from the limp form of his father. The mailman had died, but the family had survived the tornado, the biggest the county had seen in a century. He then imagined invaders crashing through the basement window and down the steps. He scanned the room for weapons, and settled on the patio umbrella he knew he would have to help set up later that spring. He envisioned several invaders impaled on the pointy end. He also imagined if Louis became his step-dad and what might that look like. Would his mom get pregnant immediately, the way Mrs. Brockman did when she got remarried? 48 Aaron wanted a little brother. But then he figured they might like the baby more than him, because he was his Dad’s. When he asked it, no one answered Aaron’s question about insurance. His dad appeared to think about an answer, but instead took a candle from the floor and walked to the other side of the room. His mom didn’t look up from her candles. After a minute, Louis started to speak, between sips. “A crock of shit,” he said, looking at Olivia but clearly addressing Aaron. “Just a scam some Jimmy worked up a while ago to take people’s money.” He sipped. “Trying to convince everyone that their nice little bubble might pop any day. But I’ll tell you a secret,” Louis turned conspiratorially to Aaron. Aaron looked at his mother to see if he was allowed to listen, allowed to believe this mailman. She looked back at him with the vacant look of a goldfish trapped a dirty fishbowl. Louis continued, “It’ all about fear. They just want to get you scared so they can take your money. Or make you into the kind of person they think you should be.” “Fear?” “Yes fear. It’s the same with religion and politics and everything else. If you’re scared your weak, and if you’re weak they used to kill you, but now they just get you to buy their shit or vote for their candidate.” Louis sipped again. Aaron didn’t want the words to stop. They were the words of an adult. The secret words never spoken to kids twelve years old. They were rare in their unrestrained profanity. Some of his friends cursed like that but it sounded imitative and lacked conviction. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt that if he had known these words before his game he would have kept the bat on his shoulder, avoided the pitch, avoided the humiliation of it all. Then the siren ceased its wailing. For a minute his mom looked to be on the verge of speaking, about to quash the mailman’s counsel. His dad stood by one of the small windows near the ceiling, craning his neck to see the sky outside. Aaron felt the need to flee before his mother could refute Louis. He wanted to hold onto those words exactly as they were spoken. He rose, feeling newly light and ran up the stairs, to the mudroom and out the side door. 49 But his lightness was briefly lived, suppressed by air as thick as peanut butter. He sat heavily on the concrete step between the side door and the driveway. He could already feel the exact words leaking from his brain. Inside the house, the muted voice of his mother and father wished farewell to the mailman. Even if what Louis said was true, what good was it? Would it make Suzy forget that he had cried in the dirt? Could it impress her? Maybe it could, just maybe. A hint of a grin crept to his lips. He reset the basement scene in the theatre of his mind; this time putting it into the words he would repeat at the lunch table on Monday, when he was sure Suzy was listening. He could add carefully chosen embellishments to make it funnier, to make his role in the story more central, but not so much as to make it unbelievable. His account of Louis would earn laughter. The revelation of cheating mother would earn Suzy’s sweet and gentle pity. No one else had a better story than this one, he was sure of it. And since it happened following his game, Aaron figured there was a good chance he could erase Suzy’s memory of having ever seen his woeful athletic display. He was seized with hope and the horrible uncertainty that fills the gaps between moments of importance. Full of it, Aaron rose from the step as if triumphant. As if resolved to take a step further into the world. But also because the dampness from the rain- dampened step had crept into the seat of his pants.

50 Coconut ______

Shawn had never really seen into Joanne’s apartment, so when he arrived home to find her door wide open, he couldn’t help but pause to look. Her walls were mostly barren. Holes from thumbtacks and strips of tape indicated where things once hung. Her floor was covered by an area rug either made by Native Americans or by someone appropriating that style. Empty glasses and were piled on the single end table and beneath it were several individual shoes, unpaired. The material backing of the loveseat hung down like a tent flap, exposing the flimsy wooden skeleton beneath. It wasn’t until he studied that loveseat that he noticed the small portion of her foot, a few toes, visible on one armrest and a few ropes of her hair on the other. Even after two years of living next to her, Shawn still knew very little about Joanne. He knew how much rent she paid because The Wimbledon Estates only offered one apartment model. From the parking pass on her windshield, he knew she worked at the library. He knew she got home every day around 4:00, or 3:55 if she snuck out early. He knew that she used to entertain a certain man, thick of wrist and deep of voice, but Shawn hadn’t heard him through the walls for more than a year. He knew she smoked marijuana occasionally. He knew she liked to shower at night and sometimes fell asleep to environmental documentaries. He knew she occasionally talked to herself. After finding this out, Shawn was careful to talk to himself only in subdued tones. Shawn’s longest conversation with Joanne consisted of twelve consecutive words. They were, he remembered clearly, “Is that purple car yours? I think someone might have hit it.” Her response—a prolonged one-syllable profanity—was without even a tinge of the gratitude he was hoping for. Her car had absorbed many dents and smaller blemishes and over the years the sun had cooked its original plum color to the hue of a week-old bruise. He always wondered why she didn’t park it in a little slice of shade under one of the trees surrounding the lot when one was available. It roasted in the same spot nearly every day. *** 51 The two years allowed Shawn the time to fill with color the silhouette of Joanne that was gotten from the habits he observed: She grew up loving novels in a household that had no use for them. Her father preached from the book of reality, synonymous with disappointment, and thought that novels would only get her hopes up. He was a large man. He never hit her but wasn’t above physical intimidation and he grew a mustache appropriate for a man of his disposition. Her mother was outwardly timid, but through her childhood Joanna occasionally saw flashes of an interior life that transcended the veracity of experience. She secretly read her mother’s astoundingly eloquent gardening journals. When they were alone running errands, her mother would sing her own lyrics to the syncopated beats of Top 40 radio. After high school, always a good student, she got a scholarship at a college in the city. Tragedy intruded on her story then, though Shawn could never choose between cancer in the family or a sibling befalling a gruesome death. Or perhaps after two years she became jaded by academia and had moved on, eventually settling on a job at the library in her hometown. Shawn presumed that Joanne’s story, like all great stories, was fraught with heartbreak. The guy Shawn heard through the walls seemed a gentleman upon first impression. He bought her groceries—Shawn had seen him carrying paper sacks in from his car—and even cooked them sometimes. He visited her at work. They read the same books, liked the same music, and he treated her well, well enough that she could overlook his small natural endowment. He was a nature enthusiast and had influenced her to lean that way too—he rode a bike, voted Democratic, liked vegetables, and started impressive, towering, compost heaps. He showed her his own amateur documentaries about squirrels in the local park and one of the bums who fished from the bridge. He was also the one who introduced Joanne to marijuana. He felt, to Joanne, like family. It was this alluring cocktail of fear, comfort and familiarity that drew her to him—a bug to blue light. And yet, despite it all, there was a side to him Joanne could never access; depths to his soul she could never plumb. It was something in these depths that she glimpsed after he left town unexpectedly, without a call or explanation of any kind. She saw him afterwards only once, or she thought she did, at an airport, but when they’d made eye contact, he pretended not to recognize her. ***

52 After some time looking into her apartment, one of Joanne’s cats came to investigate. That was something else Shawn knew about: her two cats. As it approached, Shawn released a breath he had been holding for some time. He wagged his foot at the cat to shoo it back through the open door, afraid of the noises it might make. Not understanding this, the cat mistook his foot for a plaything and set about attacking it inelegantly. It would protest soon, or else purr with delight, Shawn thought, and he would then have to explain his presence: how he had seen her door open; how he had stood there long enough to stir the cats’ intrigue. Unprepared for this, Shawn scooped the cat with one hand and with the other opened his apartment door as quietly as he could. The problem with stealing a cat, Shawn soon realized, is figuring out what to do with it next. It had been some time since another living thing had been in his apartment. The cat wasted no time getting comfortable: knocking down a stack of DVD’s by the television, on a roundabout route to the bathroom, where it busied itself with drinking from, and eventually falling into, the toilet. Shawn fished the cat from the toilet bowl, dried it with a t- shirt, and locked it in the bedroom. In the stillness, Shawn tidied his already tidy apartment. Dark leather couches contrasted the light wood end and coffee tables. He kept the lights dim—enough light to define the dangerous edges of the corners in the room but not so bright that anything gained definite meaning. It was lit the way Shawn imagined his therapist’s office would be lit, if he saw a therapist. On the wall hung some of the paintings Shawn did in his free time. More canvases leaned against the walls, facing the corner: some half complete, some just uninspired. Painting was his one true passion—if anyone asked that is what he would say. But it did not pay the bills. For money Shawn worked as a freelance telemarketer, cold-calling potential clients for a medium-sized credit union owned by a family friend. All day he wiled away, paid mostly on commission, accepting rejection with diamond-bright good manners. He had the unique ability to sustain politeness in the face of exasperation, annoyance or outright disdain. Such rejection stoked his creative fire, he told himself. Through those rote and disappointing phone calls, he had the habit of working as his own biographer—something he did that afternoon while he cleaned. As Shawn dusted his lampshades, he mentally detailed a section about his totally original aesthetic and how it 53 arose from the frustrations of the corporate capitalist economy. As he vacuumed his area rug, he expounded upon the demoralizing, robotic nature of work. He could see himself at a later juncture in life talking to a bespectacled and bearded man with a notepad, who asked him insightful and slightly fawning questions about the early catalysts for his work. Shawn went on to explain to the man how daily rejection had damaged him. How loneliness gnarled him like an old tree, growing towards the ground instead of towards the free blue sky. After he would say this, the man with a notepad would pause to let it assume appropriate gravity. *** A door cracked shut to scatter his daydream. After a minute, he poked his head out to check the hallway. Joanne’s door was closed. The knob was locked when he tried it. Through his window he caught a glimpse from his window of the raincoated figure of Joanne turning south on foot out of the parking lot. As Shawn waited for Joanne to return, he thought about his next move. He could be waiting outside the apartment on their shared landing. Waiting and rubbing the cat affectionately. As if all cats, all creatures under the sun, found his presence comforting. He could reject her attempts at gratitude, saying it was nothing, denying all remuneration besides the cup of coffee she begged him to take. He wouldn’t judge her for her shabby style of living. And yes, the coffee was delicious. And how did he know it was her cat? He had found it at her door, pawing to get in. Twenty years after that conversation she would tell the story of that day at one of his exhibitions. She would be on his arm, laughing as she told his wealthy patrons about the day they officially met. The weather was sour and Shawn had found her cat, her favorite cat, the one she loved so much. At the time she was still wrung-out from heartbreak, exiling herself from the outside world in a dingy apartment. Sleeping on the couch to sound of the late night infomercials, empty even of the energy to make it into bed. And then Shawn was at the door. One thing had led to another, and then Joanne would lean into the circle of listeners—the neckline of her red dress dipping low, dangling her till shapely breasts—and say, in a conspiratorially low voice how she always knew it was always the quiet ones with the biggest, ahem, paintbrushes. 54 Shawn laughed aloud in his empty apartment. He walked back to where he had locked the cat in his bedroom and found it asleep under his desk. He filled a bowl with coffee cream, thinking how he might tell Joanne how her cat liked the hazelnut flavor. He set the bowl just inside the door, careful not to wake it. *** When Shawn saw Joanne slink back into the lot a half an hour later, he rushed to sieze the cat. In the time she was gone it had started to rain. He briefly considered sticking it under the faucet for a few seconds so he could claim that he found it outside but eventually decided against it. Heroism can be unbecoming. He clucked gently at the cat while corralling it into the corner of the room. The cat misunderstood these advances as the overtures of play and scampered out of reach every time Shawn got close. As he finally cornered the cat and grabbed at it more roughly than he meant to, Joanne audibly shut her door. Minutes passed as Shawn summoned the courage to knock. He busied himself by explaining, in his head, to the guy with a notepad, that he had never been more nervous than when he stood in front of her door. The delay was terrible, the way waiting for good news always is. He tried to imagine what she was doing or thinking in her silent apartment. It usually never took her this long to turn on the TV when she got home. Might she be sulking? Or else contemplating suicide, stricken with lost-cat-grief. The imminent feline exchange gained nobility for a split second before Shawn chided himself for wishful thinking. As two more minutes passed, then five, he found himself explaining to the interviewer—then his mother—that the reason he didn’t knock right away was that he was just an introverted kind of guy. And there was that whole rejection thing from his job. And he was maybe a little scared too, he could admit that. Because as he grew older so too did the distance between his expectations and reality. Shawn knocked on the door. “I found your cat,” Shawn said. “I’m Shawn.” “And I thought I was that much closer to freedom,” Joanne said when she recognized the creature drooping like a raw egg from Shawn’s extended hand. “How’d you know it was my cat?” 55 “It isn’t?” The cat mewed feebly. Joanne looked more ragged than usual: still in her raincoat and with hair that haphazardly fled her scalp as if afraid of the thoughts beneath it. Also, she smelled faintly of garbage. “No it is. That’s Roscoe.” Joanne still hadn’t accepted the cat. “I had thought of selling my furniture and moving before he got back.” “Oh.” “How did you get ahold of him?” “I saw him in the hallway and took him into my apartment. Just until you got back.” “You could’ve just left him there.” After a minute’s hesitation Shawn said, “I think I just wanted the company.” Joanne mistook this for a joke and laughed: a choppy, sincere sound. There was something in her teeth when she smiled. “Roscoe’s the worst company there is.” She took the cat from Shawn. “Listen, do you want to come in for a minute?” she asked. “I’ve got a little pot we could smoke,” and as if sensing his hesitation she added brightly, “Or some coffee?” Once inside Joanne qualified the offer of coffee by doubting the existence of two clean drinking vessels. It turned out that she also had no coffee either, and only one teabag left of some ancient green tea she didn’t remember buying. After she set water boiling in a possibly-hygienic saucepan, she removed her raincoat and sat on the couch opposite Shawn. “I like your place,” Shawn said, earnestly. “It’s about how I imagined it would be.” “Hold that thought,” She responded. She got up from the couch and disappeared into the bathroom. *** Shawn spent the time alone in utter stillness, imagining what she could be doing in the bathroom. Perhaps it was vanity that moved her there: a realization that she wasn’t dressed for company. Shawn listened for the sound of running water or the pull and snap of

56 a comb through knotted hair, but only heard the click of the electric range heating the water for his tea. When she returned she smelled less like garbage, he thought, but her vanity did not extend to such lengths that she’d combed her hair or put on a bra. “I was just kidding about Roscoe. I’m glad you brought him back. That’s why I smell like trash: I was out looking for him,” she said as if reading his thoughts. “It was just one of those days where you spend some time in a dumpster.” Her eyes protruded blue and were set narrowly. Her nose humped slightly in the middle and her teeth, which had once been straight, now slouched like a gaggle of school kids waiting to be picked for kickball teams. A mole rose high on her cheekbone prepared to comment on the rest of it. This was as close as Shawn had ever been. “I saw so much roadkill today looking for him. Smeared into the pavement.” Joanne paused, “On one hand, it made me sad to think that so much is just dying all the time. But on a whole ‘nother hand, it me feel better about things.” “What things?” Shawn asked. “My boyfriend wrote me a poem one time. Well my ex-boyfriend. He wasn’t really my boyfriend, inasmuch as someone who writes you poetry can be not-your-boyfriend.” She shifted into a deeper recline. “Anyways he wrote a poem: ‘A deer smeared, thinly/roadside, strawberry preserves’. I thought about that all day today. He was such a cynic.” When Joanne got up to get his tea Shawn became aware again of the apartment around him. During their discussion Roscoe had wedged himself between the small of his back and the couch. The other cat had taken up a disinterested post on the armrest next to Shawn, stealing from him the possibility of comfortable languor. Outside a passing train mixed with distant thunder and the light leaking in from the window had grown preternaturally dim in the early evening. But when she returned with his tea the rising storm receded from existence like so many things that sank between the couch cushions, only to be forgotten. “Do you believe in guilt?” she asked when she handed it to him. “I didn’t know you could not believe in it.” He casually burned his lips and tongue. The tea tasted like unfiltered well water. 57 “People choose to believe or not believe anything they want.” “Then yes, I probably believe in guilt,” Shawn said. “I don’t think I do. I don’t buy the whole victimization story that comes with guilt. There doesn’t always have to be a victim.” Shawn let his silence convey agreement, but Joanne seemed not to notice. “To tell the truth, I always thought you were some kind of holy man,” Joanne said. “An ascetic.” “No more than you are.” “But I’ve never heard anyone else in your apartment.” This was the first indication that she thought about him when he wasn’t around; a thrilling prospect. “I try to get out of my place during the day. I work,” Shawn said. She thought for a second. “I wish I never had to leave.” “Don’t you get lonely?” Shawn said. She didn’t seem to notice any urgency in the question. She the grabbed the cat on his armrest and palmed its tiny head with a measure of affection. “Only when I want to be,” she said. “Sometimes it’s melancholy. Sometimes it’s delicious.” The way she said the last word, Shawn doubted ever having had anything delicious before in his life. “Most of the time being alone is no more or less tolerable than having company. And it’s much less work.” There was something in this statement that indicated to Shawn something he and Joanne shared in common. For an instant he was lifted above the scene, to a cosmic height. He felt in that moment as if he was, she was, a coconut, floating. Adrift for miles and years looking to grow roots and palm fronds, or else maybe just drift forever. And now the years and miles and wind had pushed them into the same current. Maybe it was only that they had spent years of their lives alone in an efficiency apartment; maybe it was something else. The thought inflated Shawn with optimism. And so when Joanne got up to go to the bathroom again, he followed. He slipped off his flip-flops on the rug so as to make less noise crossing the room . He stood outside of the doorframe and leaned his ear to the door so his shadow would not betray his presence. Through the door he heard very distinct sounds. A little metallic and plastic click, like that of a cheap lighter that were sold in packs 58 of three at the dollar store. The creak of leather, like a belt being pulled tight. The clink of a spoon on the porcelain sink basin. Patient heavy breathing, a soft slow exhale, the almost audible shutting of eyelids, a very weak giggle wrought from pleasure. As Shawn left the apartment, holding the knob while he shut it to prevent the click of the latch, he heard Joanne flush the toilet. **** For what seemed like a long time, only a single candle and the glow of battery- operated devices broke the darkness in his apartment. The Wimbledon Estates was often the last building to regain power during outages. In the dark, Shawn listened to Joanne meander around her apartment. He imagined movements that coincided with the sounds that leaked through the walls. Once, in the dimness, he stood from the couch to examine the most recent painting he’d done of Joanne. Some of it was bad, he could admit, especially now that he had seen her up close; had seen how she lived. But there were a few strokes in it that he was unafraid to call genius. There was an accuracy in his depiction that went beyond visual similitude. It was her posture, the way she slumped, and her hair, its electrification, captured on canvas. Studying it, a fledgling sort of hope sprung inside him. When the power returned, Shawn turned his TV to same the channel Joanne was watching next door. It was a documentary he had watched before. The one about the Marianas trench. The deepest part of the deepest ocean. He remembered a twist at the end, but couldn’t quite remember how he’d felt about it. During a commercial break, the one right before the intrepid scientists dispatched their unmanned sub to the depths, he set his feet on the ground prepared to take a step towards his door, a step toward hers. He resolved to bring her here and show her his paintings. It would be the start of their life together. Years later they would look back at this night as the beginning. Where happiness germinated. And even after so many years they would still be together. But something halted his feet, another sound coming from Joanne’s apartment. A sound that rose and fell and then repeated like a ringing phone. It lasted only for a minute before it ended, rolling over to voicemail. It was this sound that drove Shawn back onto the couch. It stayed with him as he watched submarine look for the life that had adapted to 59 such an alien environment. And when the submarine instead found a lifeless expanse of sand and a mountain of garbage, desposited there by currents millions of years old, the sound repeated in his head. Even the next morning, Shawn couldn’t say whether what he had heard Joanne’s laughter or weeping.

60 Black Sheep ______

Denny sat in the backseat of his truck in the lot of the Corner Pub with his grandmother’s gun in his hands. He’d taken the gun from her some time ago but still didn’t think of it as his own. Denny sometimes liked to cut the engine, climb in his backseat, wait for the overhead light to blink out, and draw the gun from the old tee shirt he wrapped it in. He would sit there in the blackness and heft the gun in his hand. Then he’d run his fingertips across the folds and angles of the stock, trigger, and six-cylinder chamber. Sometimes he would stuff each of his fingers and tongue in the barrel, or bring it close to his face and breathe in the musk of gunmetal. Before putting it away he might even pull the trigger, sometimes pointed at his head or in his mouth, sometimes pointed at nothing. He’d then stash it again in the old tee shirt and slide it under the front passenger seat. On rare occasions he would stuff the gun in the back waistband of his pants, tuck his shirt over it, and go about his business. Now, in the dark of his backseat, outside of the pub he said to himself, “We never know what kinda roaches’ll be out after a storm” and “Someone in there is liable to start a thing or two” and “It ain’t even loaded,” but mostly he just liked it there, uncomfortable against the small of his back, something only he knew about. He said to himself again, “It ain’t even loaded,” and tucked it into his belt and let his shirt hang over. Denny had kept a loaded gun once but didn’t anymore. In the bar, he said to the fake-breasted barmaid, “Wanda, let me just start here with a water, we got a game tomorrow,” and sat at a table in the corner. The Corner Pub was one rectangular room with a bar running almost the entire length. In the corner opposite Denny a middle-aged man wearing an untucked collared shirt, jeans, and white tennis shoes sat in front of a laptop connected to a karaoke machine, reading a book. Above him two wallmounted effect bulbs shone at angles onto his back so that when he dropped his head to look at the laptop, light dazzled on his bald spot. From across the room, he looked like a large ant under a magnifying glass. Besides the DJ, Denny counted five others in the room: fake-breasted Wanda, the heads of two ladies and an old

61 man in a booth, and the owner of the place, ogling Wanda as she preened behind the bar. No one took much account of Denny. In the corner Denny ground ice cubes between his molars and pored over a small list scrawled earlier that night in the powerless dark of his grandmother’s house. It was custom for Denny to go to the pub the night before a game, order an icewater, and review his gameplan. They knew him there; no one bothered him. Often, his trips to the Corner Pub were the only ventures he made into the social world each week. His list read: 1.) Forwards high pressure 2.) 4-4-2 3.) Diamond midfield 4.) Man- marking 5.) Watch big girl—2 goals prev. 6.) Play Carly midfield. Denny’s eyes bored into the sixth entry on his list and a spasm of dark pleasure rattled through him as he recalled the conversation that lead to Carly playing midfield. Carly’s mother in her ass-tight jeans, nipples alert through a pressed blouse, eyes replaced by black sunglasses. Her daughter only ever got to play defense she said, calmly, showing her brilliant white teeth. It wasn’t fair that her daughter didn’t get to play offense. And wasn’t that the point—for everyone to score? And Denny had stood and nodded and said, Of course, Of course, he was just waiting for the right opportunity and all the while he thought to himself how nice those white white teeth might look, pulled from her mouth, strung on a necklace. When he came out of this reverie he shivered and slouched down in his hardbacked seat. No need to be thinking like that again, he thought. We’re in a good place now. He sipped his water and scanned the room. Someone new was at the bar. A girl he didn’t recognize.

The circumstances that brought Sarah to the Corner Pub, alone, and dressed with clear intentions, could be traced back to the day Sarah, then eighteen, decided to get a small tattoo. The subsequent conversations with her parents solidified in Sarah the desire to get several more. This is not the daughter we raised, they said at first, in horribly small voices. We understand your need to try to be an individual, but there are more responsible ways. We love you but, Sweetie, think what Grandpa will say. All over a couple of music notes on her wrist. They tried tactics more subtle than anger after the second and third tattoos—a snake coiled around her ankle and the words “Let It Be” on her ribcage. Forced long car 62 rides under suspicious pretense, girls only trips to the mall. We love you, they said, we just want to understand. Why would you want to do that to your own body? Your sisters never did. Oh what is Grandpa going to think? And then they would finish their talks with some version of: We love you, but no more OK? The threat of consequences thinly veiled. The fourth tattoo, a small black sheep just inside her protruding hipbone, suggested to Sarah the real depths of her parents’ vanity. When she returned from the tattooist Friday night, her father’s redfaced diatribe revealed to Sarah her older sister’s betrayal of sororal confidence. I don’t want to see it he’d said, I don’t even want to see it. Spittle accumulated at the corner of his mouth. That’s it. That’s it. If you want to go and brand yourself like a whore again, that’s fine, but then I’m not paying for school anymore. You can forget about it. Her mother’s response was more subdued. Your body is a gift from God, she’d said. You disrespect Him when you do these things. And you disrespect your father and me. The Lord still loves you. We still love you, but. And she didn’t finish her sentence after that. It seemed, to Sarah, unreasonable, a violation of her individuality; her right to do whatever she pleased with her youth and still elastic skin. The more she thought about their small mindedness, the more she distained her parent’s withheld love. Because she didn’t need it, she said to herself. Because maybe she already lost it, or never had enough of it in the first place. Like her mother had said, her sisters never acted this way. Her response was in many ways inevitable given the gratification she derived from the ink. Her body reduced to an object; her mind removed and balanced on the tip of a vibrating needle. The division was simple, freeing. Tattoos might be off limits, but there were other ways to prove her point, other ways to turn the screw. She really only had to make the practical decisions: who, when and where? Sarah figured proximity to her parents’ house would make the revenge sweeter. And she knew of a likely place, The Corner Pub, next to a couple of fry joints in the strip mall on the way out of town. She’d heard that was where a lot of divorcés celebrated their loneliness. As she was home for the weekend to get the tattoo, she saw no reason to wait. Before she could leave the house that night she had to outlast a storm, a lengthy power outage, and the reproving silence of her parents. But when the power returned she prepared. 63 Her wardrobe was inadequate for what she had in mind, but she picked something tight that no longer fit her and figured to make up the difference with a generous application of eye shadow. Earlier that day she’d borrowed some money from her mother, drove to a sporting goods store and purchased a can of pepper spray, out of concern for her own safety. To her parents she said she was going to a friend’s, and without elaboration she exited the house. At the end of the street she parked her car and removed the hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants that concealed her outfit and carefully applied makeup using her rearview mirror. *** Denny avoided most confrontation, however small. Whether it was shame, natural introversion or some defect in his character, he didn’t know. Except when coaching, he usually preferred to be alone, requiring less and less social contact to survive. He got lonely sometimes, but figured loneliness to be a necessary condition for someone like himself. The years receded slowly as he counted his days away from past experience instead of towards an anticipated future. But that was all right with him. Past is past, he thought in his corner, sipping his water. In a different place. He was over it all. His fear of confrontation and his slight build made him an easy target over the years for drunken men and cruel women. Not all who met him felt strongly one way or the other about Denny, but those who did often formed and acted upon opinions significantly lacking in pity or sympathy. However, from this lifelong conditioning to physical and mental degradation there arose in Denny a wonderful capacity for forgiveness because he felt, often more strongly than those delivering abuse, that he was deserving of the punishment. He felt he needed it to keep himself in balance with the rest of the world. More than once he had found himself thanking his assaulters under their rain of heavy blows, cheering them on, forgiving them, asking for more. I forgive you, I forgive you, he would say. And they would tell him to shut his fucking gob, and hit him a few more times or call him a freak and leave him alone. He could forgive them, though, because they did for him what he couldn’t do for himself. It was this odd combination of fear and a great capacity for forgiveness that made him a successful member of a girls’ 12- and-under select soccer organization, in which he was the coach of two teams. The girls who played for him required instant forgiveness for 64 their tactical and physical gaffes, and the parents didn’t mind a doormat for a coach, as long as he cowed to their suggestions and the girls liked him, which they did. It was in his role as a coach that he felt he had a place where he could grow his twisted roots, however shallow. He was comfortable talking to fragile young women, he was good at it. And his dark predilections were focused on more conventional fare. Despite his inclination to avoid it, he sensed inevitable confrontation in the girl at the bar. She was looking at him funny. He waited for her to take her eyes off him before he got a good look. Young, dressed as she was, garishly made-up and a brown drink in front of her. He recognized the symptoms. She might get in trouble, he thought. She ought to be careful. She better not be thinking of coming over here. I’ve been good for a long while now. With my girls in the tournament tomorrow morning. I don’t need it. Been good a long while.

Sarah surveyed the bar and steeled herself against disappointment. The only eligible candidates were the owner of the place, who already had designs on the bartender, and a reedy-looking guy in the corner. He was small, with angular shoulders and once- close-cropped haircut that had grown out for several months. He reminded her of a scarecrow dressed in second-hand clothes, with a rotten pumpkin head. When he looked up from his drink she saw that his face was neutral but not without some lurking kindness. And he was drinking water. She only briefly considered going home. After all, she didn’t have to do anything. But even as she tried to convince herself of this, she knew that if she left she would never be this close to doing it again. And she wanted to do it. To prove her point. Only once. To draw a permanent line between her parents and herself. To mark her territory in a way that, once marked, it would always be hers. It was a way of making concrete the fleeting freedom she felt in the needle. To erase the taboos inscribed on upon it by her parents. And if she couldn’t do it, her tattoos would become a cruel and equally permanent mockery of her limitations. The cash too would be nice. The black sheep had drained her account and would make her miserly father even more tightfisted. Maybe she ought to have another drink. To calm down a little, she thought. To work up a little nerve. “Vanilla vodka and diet,” she said to the woman behind the bar. 65 Waiting for her drink, she decided her hesitation was unconnected to issues of performance. It wasn’t that she was scared to do anything, or worried about her ability. She’d had plenty of practice, mostly with guys she didn’t like anyways. Giving it away wasn’t the hard part. Always, though, she felt rebellious afterwards and, if at a guy’s place instead of her own, she would pilfer little objects—a DVD she wanted, a tie clip, spare change off the bedside table. Once a library card. Those always felt a little like payment. She was, however, slightly worried about the pricing of her wares. She’d spent an hour on Google studying the economic side of the sin market, going rates and all that. But anything she found was information for an established market with established clientele. She wasn’t sure those prices were accurate or reasonable for her. She had a few numbers in mind but would maintain flexibility. She would take whatever felt right at the time. She finished her drink quickly and glanced sidelong at the scarecrow in the corner. Ultimately she figured her hesitation came from the deflated hope that she might stumble upon a lonely thirty-something divorcé, swarthy, tragically alone. Maybe with kids somewhere, kids he’d lost in the divorce. This scarecrow wasn’t quite that, but he wasn’t quite the worst thing either. And he looked harmless besides. She felt instinctively for the pepper spray in her purse. It made her feel better. Maybe she should talk to him. Just for a little bit.

Denny tried to relax a little in his seat as the girl strode towards him, unsteady on her highheels. She had black hair, angularly cut across her forehead, with big eyes like a fish and a puckered little mouth set in an almost perfectly round head. A snake tattoo coiled around the bonewhite flesh of her delicate ankles. She was showing a good bit of thigh meat, she was. Much too much. Denny, who relied mostly on regimented isolation to suppress and maintain his darker thoughts, knew the booze and bare flesh being carried towards him suggested a disruption in his pregame routine. As she got closer, Denny’s mind started to slip into that darker place again and he cast about wildly for something in front of him, something solid to tether himself to, but neither the saltshaker nor the empty glass had any effect on his darkening psyche. The gun, he thought, slipping further into himself. With enormous effort he sat up straight and pushed the small of his back against the back of his chair. The gun dug into the base of his 66 spine. The loose flesh at the small of his back absorbed the cool metal, and brought him back to himself for the time being. “Say,” the girl said standing over him. How did cross the room so quickly? “Buy a girl a drink?” “Oh, I don’t know,” Denny said, pushing himself backwards in his seat, palms flat on the table in front of him. “I oughtn’t to be drinking tonight.” The girl looked at him as if she was trying to figure out what to say next. “Well, sometimes you just got to do what you shouldn’t be doing. Sometimes it just feels too good.” She must have thought she earned a seat with that line, for after she spoke it she laid her small purse on the table and sat in the chair across from him. “I’m,” she paused for a minute. “I’m Sarah.” She frowned after she said it and turned to beckon Wanda with a finger. “What can I getcha?” Wanda shouted from the bar. “One more for me and,” she turned to look at Denny. “Dewar’s and water.” Denny said quietly to Sarah. “And a Dewar’s and water.” Denny had kept himself relatively composed through this interaction. And now that she was sitting down he felt better about things, being unable to see her bare hams. One drink couldn’t hurt anyone. Even so, he kept the gun pressed firmly into his back as they waited in silence and watched Wanda mix their drinks. “So, stranger, what’s your name?” She loaded innuendo into the words and batted her eyelashes several times at him in a nervous, cartoonish gesture. She was new to this, Denny could tell. Sarah was probably her real name—she didn’t have the good sense to give him a fake one. Her innocence put him more at ease. Like she was one of his girls. Only a little older, and driven to a different goal. Things were easy as long as he kept the gun pressed to his back, her legs stayed under the table, and her obvious intentions remained cloaked by her nervous affectations. She couldn’t be more than ten or eleven years older than his girls. Denny felt comfortable talking to fragile young women. She was just like them, he told himself. Just in need of a little forgiveness, a little encouragement. 67 He told her his name. *** Sarah finished her second drink quickly, and the pervading warmth loosened her tongue. The scarecrow, Denny, made her feel oddly at ease, enough to abandon her overt promiscuity and Sarah settled into a manner more comfortable for her. He was a feeble character, scrawny and hidden in clothes that were too big for him. She felt for him the pity that she felt for all fragile creatures and, as he showed a willingness to listen to her talk, her pity became a fledgling, misshapen sort of affection. In his undivided attention she felt the urge to tell him things she usually only voiced aloud to herself. “And you should see them both do the same thing,” Sarah said. “They act like I’ve done some personal injury to them. Like they’re the victims. And I can see them making up the things they’re planning to tell grandpa.” “What’s your grandfather got to do with it?” “He’s got all the money in our family. They’re afraid I might fuck up the inheritance. Or that I already fucked it up.” “I’m sure they don’t think the things you think they think. Or at least not all the time.” “I’m getting another. Do you want one?” “No, I think I’ve had enough.” The booze made Sarah rebellious and lustful. Talking about her parents strengthened her resolve to complete her original mission; a determination that was dampened by a seeming lack of interest from Denny and the way he kept averting his eyes whenever she flashed a little skin. It wasn’t as if she were being subtle. She had thought it would be much easier, with fewer decisions to be made. She sipped her drink when it came and said, “It’s like they think there’s only one way to be their daughter or something. That there isn’t room for anything else.” “Well,” Denny said, “you might as well get used to that. There’s not a single person you’ll meet that won’t try to make you into what they want you to be. I’m not sure you can ever really be the person you think you are around most people.” “It just seems pointless, you know? All this over tattoos. My dad called me a whore when he found out about my last one.” 68 “Where’s it at?” “Play your cards right, and all that.” Sarah said, attempting a wink. Do you have kids?” “No. But I coach a couple soccer teams. Girls U-12. First place right now. We have an early game tomorrow. S’why I shouldn’t be having a second drink,” he said. Then he dropped his voice and said to himself: “But the rain earlier might’ve washed out the fields. Game could be canceled,” Denny paused. “On second thought, I maybe could stand another one.” “You can coach without a kid on the team?” “Sure you can. Not many parents have the time or knowledge of the game to run a select team. Training sessions four times a week. Games on the weekend. Footy year round. I love my girls. Keeps my head on straight.” “People don’t think it’s a little creepy for you to be coaching young girls?” “Oh they might, they might. But they can tell I love it. Something about young girls—the way they encourage each other. The earnestness of it all. As long as you support them and they know it, you’ll never have any problems. Much less ego in the girls game.” His face lit up as he talked and for the first time he relaxed in his chair, and the tension oozed from his shoulders. “I’m not sure exactly where I would be without it.” Sarah’s cynical heart was touched by his honest affection. In the rush of booze and warm feeling she concluded Denny was suitable. Hell, she might even give him a discount, though she still didn’t have a firm number in mind. *** “Do you want to see my newest tattoo?” Sarah asked. Oh, please don’t show it to me, thought Denny. He would be all right as long as she kept all that flesh hidden. As long as he could keep thinking about his girls. Why had he gotten that second drink? He ought to set it down. “I don’t…” Before he uttered a complete answer, she hiked up one side of her dress to show her newest ink. With her thumb she moved aside the strap to her panties that partially concealed the small black sheep. “What do you think? It still hurts a little.”

69 Denny felt the color drain from his face as he took in her bare white leg. His body became, momentarily, a disjointed sack of bones, and he melted downward into his seat, eyelids half closing over his eyeballs. But after a second it passed, and when he straightened, his eyes were less hidden under heavy lids and there was an alertness to him that hadn’t been there before. “I think it’s wonderful,” he said, and reached out to pass his thumb over the still raw skin. Seeing the tattoo and all that white skin laid out like lunchmeat was too much. He sunk into himself, only able to watch and cheer feebly for the best outcome, a spectator. His speech and action were dictated by an irresistible craving that drowned out his rational protests. With brain under new management, Denny became a smooth operator, quick with sinister excitement, manipulating Sarah into doing what he wanted, thinking it was her idea the whole time. In less than ten minutes he had got her to confess to her mission and lead him outside into the parking lot. “We could use my truck,” he said. “No one to watch us in there.” “Ok. But you pay first.” She was adamant on this point. “Well, what are you giving me and what am I giving up for it?” “Umm, I could,” she made a crude gesture with her hands and mouth. “Or, you know.” “Sure, sure,” Denny heard himself say. “Just get in the truck. Can I write you a check? I don’t have much cash on me.” “How much do you have?” He took out his wallet and took his time fingering the bills. “Bout thirty.” “A check would be good then, I guess.” “Just give me a number.” “A hundred.” She seemed to be guessing “Not a problem. Not a problem at all. I sure am glad I met you, Sarah.” He opened the driver’s side door and pulled a tattered checkbook from the center console of his truck. “Tell you what,” he said, filling out the check, “I’ll just leave the name

70 part blank and you can fill it in later.” He tore the check out, folded it in half carefully, and offered it to her between his index and middle finger. “Why don’t you just get in the back there?” Denny opened the door for her and helped her in. “That’s right,” he said, as he got in behind her and shut the door. “Let me show you what you are going to be working with,” he said, and struggled to free himself from his jeans. “Well, it just looks like any other.” “What did you expect?” She didn’t answer. Instead she made a few investigatory jabs at it, and stooped down for a much closer look. As she settled her mouth down onto it, flashes of lust and scenes of gruesome love filled Denny’s head. He closed his eyes and saw Sarah, strung upside down in his basement; flesh even more white, drained to translucency; her head removed and on his lap, in a position similar to the one it was in now; her teeth separated into piles on the table. While his desires painted the scene of delectable gore in his head, a small voice from deep in his core pleaded for control. Please don’t do this, it said. We’ve been good for such a while now. It’d be silly to waste it now. We’ll have to leave again. To give up the teams, my girls, right as we’re doing so good. With Sarah’s head in his lap diligently at her work his hand crept towards the small of his back. His fingers slipped around the snub barrel of his grandmother’s gun and he gently extracted it from the waistband of his jeans. The gun was heavy, the metal warm and moist now, and in it Denny felt the smallest measure of control seeping back into the hand that held it. And yet his arm still lifted the gun upward, in the dark, above Sarah’s compliant head. All it would take is a word to get her to dislodge herself, to look up, and receive the blow to her temple. Please, the voice inside him pleaded with his arm, his hand. It hung in the air, poised above her head. Please don’t. We just need help. Help is all. She’s a good girl. Like us. Misunderstood. Just needs a little forgiveness. We can’t run again, we can’t do it. We can’t. *** With the help of the booze, Sarah found her task not totally without its charm. Servicing Denny, she felt a kind of pride that comes with acting upon conviction. She found herself able to look at her actions objectively, removed, above the scene. Her mind could 71 exist anywhere, everywhere she wanted, and she was suddenly excited to go home and perform the mundane tasks of familial communication. Hell, she could almost forgive her parents. It wasn’t their fault they were the way they were. She wanted to please them; she wanted to please everyone. A shift in Denny’s weight brought Sarah back to herself. She listened to him unbreathing. She wanted to ask him if she was doing it all right. If he would prefer something different. When she disengaged and looked up she saw the gun in his hand, held like a club above her, his eyes closed. Completely still. Without exclamation, she launched herself away from him against the door, upsetting the contents of her purse on the backseat. Blind with panic, her fingers searched desperately for the small tube of pepper spray among the scattered debris of her personal belongings. In the seconds it took her to find it she glanced at Denny only briefly and saw that he still held the gun like a club over his head, frozen and only partially aware she was no longer at work. It wasn’t until she found the spray and aimed it at Denny that his face twisted in surprise. The long jet of acid spray landed fully in his open eyes and drove him backward into the door, clawing at his face. Sarah quickly assembled the contents of her purse, opened the door, and jumped into the still and damp night air. Denny’s cries, muted by the car door, were that of a wounded or entrapped animal. Sarah’s instincts told her to run, but she stayed rooted to the spot a few yards away, listening to his muffled wail. A minute passed. Another. Her fear subsided gradually, replaced by adrenaline and then by an emptiness not unlike hunger. In this emptiness she felt, almost, a flicker of pity for Denny, a fleeting sadness for what she had done. Somehow, in the scattered seconds after she saw the gun, she didn’t feel in Denny the desire to hurt her. He hadn’t even held it right. She had felt in him an understanding of things similar to hers. It was a likeness she couldn’t explain, even hours later when she stayed up late watching an old musical with her dad. Sarah looked in her purse for the check he had written her. Like he said, everything was filled out but the place for her name. If she had a pen on her she would have signed it right then and there. As she prepared to walk to her car, she saw Denny’s face fill the window. His unseeing eyes were lumps of smoldering red charcoal awash with tears. He 72 said something quietly, something she didn’t quite make out. Then he repeated it. Again and again.

73