These mountains are killing me—killing all of us—though I know it’s in self-defense. Getting away from here is all I can think about as I step off the bathroom scale, skim my jeans over my pelvic bones, take up the slack inch of denim with a safety pin. Another pound has slid off me this week, even though I shoveled the last of an orange-glazed Bundt cake into my mouth yesterday. Missy’s momma baked the cake for Paw, but my father-in-law wouldn’t eat it, sent it home for Jasper and me to share. Paw won’t eat much of anything these days. He went from mining to logging when the coal dust sucked the air from his lungs, then from logging to sitting on the couch when his Crohn’s disease turned to cancer and his body started dissolving. Like mine seems to be doing.  

My ribs look more like a washboard now than four years ago in high school when they nicknamed me Bony Romie. I worry maybe I have Crohn’s, too. It’s wiping out half the mountain, what ones don’t die of cancer or black lung. The GI doc in Bluefield told Paw he’d called the CDC down in Atlanta, told them they should start tracking it. Said it wasn’t normal for Crohn’s to nest in an area like it had in Stump Branch. Paw and the doctor think it has something to do with the coal mines—something they’re pumping into the ground, or something they’re pumping out—probably the same thing that’s causing the grass to burn up and the fish to swell and lay on the bank like wall-eyed shovel heads. 

The smell of sweet cornbread baking wafts into the bedroom, and my mouth waters, but I ain’t hungry. Food sometimes turns against me these days, causes a quick rush of nausea. It always passes, though. Paw told Jasper the same thing happened to him right before he was diagnosed.

I put away the pink Myrtle Beach 2012 t-shirt from our last vacation, pull down one of Jasper’s bulky West Virginia Mountaineers sweatshirts instead. It’ll hide my ribs and the little swollen paunch that’s shown up low on my belly.

“Anybody home?” Jasper calls from the living room. Our trailer trembles when he slams the front door behind him, and I massage the dull ache building behind my temples.

I snatch the notice about the mountaintop-removal-mining protest from the dresser, shove it into the drawer before Jasper sees it. I hate the anti-MTR meetings and protests. The things they say about what’s happening to the land and to us who live here scare me, give me nightmares even, yet I can’t seem to stay away. The woman who invited me to my first meeting in the back bay of Walker’s Garage told me that what I didn’t know could kill me. Since then, I haven’t missed a one. I want to learn everything they’re teaching, see firsthand the changes taking place in the people of Stump Branch. 

I’ve watched a dozen locals become spies or environmental activists in a matter of weeks. Men and women I’ve known all my life have turned into scientists who show us soil and water samples, toxicology reports, easily pronouncing six-syllable words and reading long lists of deadly chemicals—and one of those men never finished high school. Funny how staring at death makes people smarter. 

Now I smooth back my hair and make myself smile, then head down our short hallway. “There’s my man.” I lean in to peck a kiss on Jasper’s lips, the only part of him besides his eyeballs that isn’t pitch black. “Did the nightshift treat you all right?” 

Jasper nods, sets his lunch bucket on the vinyl runner by the door, slides out of his dirty twill coat. “I smell cornbread.” His blue eyes light like propane flames, their brightness intensified by the mask of coal dirt surrounding them. 

“Can’t have brown beans without it,” I say. 

“Mmm, lady! I’d marry you again, if you weren’t already mine.” 

“Get cleaned up. Cornbread’ll be done in a jiffy.” I turn off the warming flame beneath the pan and spoon potatoes fried with onions into a blue-speckled bowl. “Might want to bring in your work boots off the porch, set them in the tub. We’re supposed to get a skiff of snow later this morning.” 

“Too early for snow. I ain’t ready for it, yet.” From the bathroom down the hall, Jasper’s voice echoes as if he is still deep in the mine. “You check on Daddy after work yesterday?”

“I did.” I add a thick pat of golden butter to the fried potatoes, the same thing I made for my father-in-law yesterday, and I think of the man’s yellowing, wary eyes. Paw—I’ve always called him Paw instead of Daddy, out of respect for my own daddy who died when I was a teenager—Paw’s sliding downhill fast. It isn’t just his sickness, either. His mind ain’t acting right. He’s not himself, and I worry he’s up to something. A no-good sort of something. 

A long pause settles between us before Jasper asks the heavy question I know will follow. “He send any more Oxy home with you?”

“On the bedroom dresser.” I set the table, stand by the kitchen window and watch the morning sunrise illuminate the miles of flat, beige scab that used to be a cloud-grazing piney mountain. I unclench my teeth and work my aching jaw. 

Ten minutes later when Jasper pads out of the bathroom bare-chested, barefoot and smelling of soap, I slide the pone of steaming cornbread onto the table. “Want milk for dunking?” 

“Heck yeah.” He flashes his white smile, and just like that, my icy mood melts.

Jasper picks up a slab of cornbread, slathers it with butter, takes a big bite and talks around it. “How many pills did he send this time?” 

I look out the window again, listen to the harsh wind whistle past the windowpane. No deep folds of mountain, no heavy forest out there anymore to hedge us in, protect us. “Didn’t count ’em.” I break off a piece of cornbread, crumble it between my fingers, watch the grains sprinkle onto the plate. “Felt like too many.” I dust my hands and take a long swig of milk to wash away the bitterness on my tongue.

“You’ll wish you had more, the day comes you ever need to sell ’em.”

I set down my glass hard enough to make my fork jump. “Dammit, Jasper, you been dying since the day you walked into that mine. I’m tired of you always planning for the day you don’t come home.” I stand, rake my food into the garbage can and run scalding water over the plate. 

“Don’t be like that,” Jasper says. “Sit down, honey. Eat.” 

“Not in the mood for cornbread,” I say.

“Want me to make you a sandwich? Peanut butter is my specialty.” 

“I’m not hungry.” I dry the plate, and I’m startled when Jasper breathes into my hair, slides his arms around me, pulls me back against his chest. I rest there, let his warmth seep into me. 

“We talked about this when I started working for Prospect. You know the chances I got of coming home in a box.”

I know. Oh, yes, I know. Roof bolting is about the most dangerous job an underground miner can do. It also pays the most. 

Jasper nuzzles my neck and whispers in my ear as his hands move lower on my stomach. “Babies cost money, and if we want a little Grodin some day, I need to stick around there a while.”

I squeeze his hands, slide them a bit higher. How I ache for a child in the hollow of my belly, pray day and night for a baby. A selfish prayer, premature, but one that, if God will answer, might help Jasper see the sense in leaving. Stump Branch might cradle Grodin family land, but it’s no longer the place for Jasper and me to start our family. The land is sick, the people are sick, and now I’m feeling sickly, too. 

I turn around in Jasper’s arms, look up into his once-smooth face, now lined and creased a decade beyond its twenty-two years. “You promised you’d quit in five years.”

He nods, and a trickle of water sluices from a light-brown curl, skims his neck and slides onto his chest. “Still got part of one to go.”

“We could get out now, Jasper, go to North Carolina. Plenty of textile jobs down there. Construction jobs.” 

“You ain’t got no reason to worry about me spending a lifetime underground. I can’t stick around there no longer than six or seven years, anyhow.”

“Six or seven years! You’d consider staying longer?”

“We’re less than a year from tearing into the last big coal seam on the property. After that, no more underground mining. Prospect’s doing everything above-ground. MTR mining all the way. I’m the last of a dying breed, baby.” He grins. 

“Jasper, nobody says you got to stick out the full five you’d promised. Besides, Stinson didn’t keep his word, neither. You still ain’t got no medical card. You have to beg for a day off and lie to take one.” 

He tilts his head, touches his lips to mine, and electricity snaps between us. I flatten my hands on his chest, push him away. “Finish eating, and get some sleep. I have to run into town. I’ll check on Paw again while I’m out. I believe he’s supposed to see the doc again tomorrow. He thinks he can drive, but I want to make sure.” 

Jasper eases onto the straight-backed chair awkwardly, gingerly, like an old man.

“Your back bothering you again?” I ask.

“Not too bad. Big slab of roof fell today.” He lifts his palms heavenward. “Had my hands up just so, caught the edge and shoved it to the side before it crushed Jimbo. I might have twisted wrong.” He rolls a shoulder, arches, then digs his spoon into the beans. “Say Paw’s going again tomorrow? Didn’t he just go a few days ago?”

I take a deep breath, let it out slowly, quietly. “They go more often when it gets to end-stage.” I watch him carefully, but he won’t look at me. “The doctor called and said the big polyp he took out last week showed more cancer. Said Paw needs to have another ten or twelve inches cut out of there, but your daddy won’t hear of it. Said no more knife.”

“No more knife,” Jasper echoes, pushing his food around his plate. 

“Sorry, Jasper. I know you hate talking about these things.”

“So . . . what’s Daddy gonna do?”

I watch my husband for a moment. He wouldn’t want me to candy-coat the truth. “He told the doc to double up on his pills if he would, but no more cutting.”

Jasper chews slowly, puts down his spoon and looks up at me. 

I hold up my hand, stop him before he can speak. “He needs them pills himself, Jasper. You know he’s got to be hurting.”

“Ain’t like I’m taking anything he ain’t offering. His idea to skim off the bottles, not mine.” He breaks off another wedge of cornbread, dunks it into the milk. “He don’t take half of what they prescribe for him, anyhow. Said if he took Oxy at the rate the doctor pushed it on him, he’d O.D. in an hour.” 

I turn away before I wipe my eyes, so Jasper won’t see.

“Besides,” he says, “I told him he ever needs them back, I got them right here, and I’ll come running. Told him I’d never sell them, anyhow. They’re yours for when—”

“For when you die! Hell yes, I know that!”

Jasper shrugs, bites off the sopping cornbread, swallows with hardly a chew. “It’s the only life-insurance policy we got.” 

I blink hard, his words stinging me like a slap to the face. I yank Jasper’s good hunting jacket from the coat tree by the door, shove my arms into it and push the cuffs over my wrists. Jasper’s words circle through my head again. Caught the edge and shoved it to the side before it crushed Jimbo. My Lord. 

“I’ll try to be back before you leave,” I say, then I catch myself and speak a bit softer. “You pulling a twelve again? What time you go in?” He doesn’t answer, and when I turn, Jasper’s eyes catch me, hold me in the way that hurts my heart. 

“Baby, come here.” He holds out an arm, and before I know it, I’m wrapped up inside him, he’s wrapped inside me. 

With the groceries bought, the electric bill paid, and what’s left of Jasper’s check deposited, I head back up the mountain, almost wishing I didn’t have the day off work. Not that I like calling patients who can’t afford their medical bills to remind them a turnover to collections is looming, but it beats watching Paw die. 

The Jeep rocks like a boat among waves as I navigate the ruts and climb the ridge toward Paw’s place. I peer into the skeletal tree-line as the afternoon sun begins to sink, but I find no colorful fall leaves, no late green shoots, no encouragement that spring will follow winter, will ever come again to Stump Branch. 

As I near the top, I slow and steer the Jeep to hug the inside of the narrow road, my stomach balling tight in anticipation of meeting one of the monstrous coal trucks that race up and down the ridge all hours of the day and night. Each year since the mine opened in ’98, someone has died either in a head-on collision or from being run over the steep embankment by a coal truck. Prospect always pays the fines, but they’ve never lost a court case, and no family has ever received reparations for loss of life. My fingers ache from gripping the wheel too tight, and I flex them, telling myself that maybe tonight I will paint my nails for Jasper, telling myself anything to get dying off my mind.

I let out a pent-up breath when I round the blind turn without meeting a coal truck. A jarring blast from the mine a mile and a half away further stretches my nerves, and I grit my teeth as loose dirt and rubble tumble from the steep shale bank above onto the Jeep’s hood and roof. You can’t ever have anything nice around here. 

Topping the knoll, I gaze out the passenger window at the bleak desolation below. Another big gray slurry pond—nearly the size of a lake—burbles and pops where once a field of Queen Anne’s lace, wild strawberries, and morning glories ambled over the ground. Nearly seven years have passed since they dug the pond, and not a weed nor a blade of grass grows within a hundred yards of it. Poison slop. Full of arsenic, copper, selenium, and other chemicals I can’t yet pronounce, but have heard named at the anti-mountaintop-removal coalition meetings. I study the pie charts, and I always pay special attention to the one depicting water quality, where the chemicals cover all but a blue sliver of the pie. A pond can’t hold in that kind of misery for long. Nothing can. 

After the turn-off toward Paw’s place, the Jeep travels smoother road along the man’s well-tended drive. I pull alongside his mailbox, reach out the window and retrieve a handful of doctor bills, insurance notices, and the same anti-MTR flyer that was in my mailbox yesterday. Paw hasn’t been outside since my last visit.

The house hasn’t changed much since the first time Jasper brought me home to meet his folks six years ago, right after he’d gotten his driver’s license. The white clapboards don’t look as proud now that coal dust stains the crevices, and though Paw usually keeps up with the ditch lilies Momma Grodin planted the year before she died, he hasn’t cut them back this fall, and they lay like heaps of wilted broomstraw along the edge of the porch. 

Paw doesn’t come to the door as he usually does when I drive up, so I jump out of the Jeep and mount the steps two at a time. He could be in the bathroom, I tell myself, trying to banish bad thoughts.

I knock at the door, three quick raps. “Paw?” I open the door without waiting, knowing my father-in-law’s front door has never been locked. As easy to lock the boogeyman in as out, he once told me. May as well let him come and go as he pleases.

“Paw?” A rush of heat wraps around me, nearly takes my breath, and I cross the wooden floor and check the thermostat. Eighty-five. “Where are you, Paw?”

“Be out in a minute.” His voice sounds strangled, and he rattles a wet cough. 

Bathroom. I drop the mail on the coffee table, shed Jasper’s coat and lower the thermostat to seventy-three. “It’s hotter than Hades in here, Paw. You got the chills or something?”

The toilet flushes, followed by running water at the sink, then Paw emerges. “I’ve been a little chilly, yeah.” 

I suck in a breath. His face has grayed overnight, and his eyes have sunk so deeply into their orbits that he looks like the plastic Halloween skull I put on our front porch last week. He offers a strained smile and walks cautiously down the center of the wide hallway, as if barefoot on broken glass. 

I rush to his side. “Paw, my Lord, why didn’t you call me?” Once a foot taller than me, Paw now walks with a stoop, and he levels his hollow gaze with my stare. “You look a mess,” I say. It’s an understatement.

Paw grins around his grimace, and his watery eyes make me want to cry. 

“Ain’t nothing you can do for me, doll baby,” he says. “If they was, I’d tell you.” He pecks a hot, dry kiss on my cheek. “’Sides, I’m getting along just fine for an old feller.”

When I slide an arm around Paw’s back, his spine presses against my arm through my sweatshirt. He feels so light I think I could carry him on my hip, like a baby. “Let’s rest a bit, why don’t we?” I say. He leans on me more than usual as I lead him to his recliner and help him sit. “Can I get you anything? Drink of water? Coffee?”

He lifts a bent finger and points toward the kitchen. “Just put on a pot about six hours ago. Ought to be stout by now. Black. No sugar, sugar.” He grins at his joke, but his lips are thin and tight, and another cough bubbles in his throat.

“Want me to take you to the hospital, Paw?”

“No. Next time I come out of this holler, it’ll be in a box.”

I can’t stifle a groan. “Great. Now you and Jasper are both talking that foolishness.” I fill two mugs, add a spoonful of powdered creamer to mine, carry them into the living room.

“What’s got Jasper dying today?” Paw asks.

“Slab of roof fell while he was bolting. I swear, Paw, between worrying about him, and you, and the mine blasting that goes on all hours of the day and night, I ain’t had a solid night of sleep in a month.” 

Paw’s gaze settles on the fluorescent pink flyer that came in the mail. “Reach me that thing.”

I curse myself for not throwing it in the trash before he saw it. “Aw, you know it’s another piece of propaganda. They’re right, of course, those protesters. But it ain’t doing no good, and it only serves to stir up trouble and hurt feelings.”

He grunts, but I don’t know if he’s agreeing or not. I push to find out. “Need to take their fight to Charleston, or maybe Washington. Only making people feel bad who have to earn a living in that mine. Ain’t like the men’s got a choice.”

“Everbody’s got a choice.” He sips the steaming brew, sets his mug on the side table. “They got a right to protest, and what they’re saying is the truth, Romie. Prospect Mining is killing all of us, what ones are working in the mines, and what ones ain’t.” He stares off for a moment, then speaks softly to the air. “I’ve had about enough of it.”

He turns and fixes me with a serious stare. “Jasper don’t know you go to them anti-MTR meetings, does he?”

His question catches me off guard, and I wonder how he knows, who might have told him. “No, sir. I’ve only been to a couple. I just wanted to see what they were about.”  

“You ought to go to all of ’em. Don’t miss nary a one.” He points again at the flyer. 

I hand the stack of mail to Paw, taking care to shuffle the flyer to the bottom. His words sound foreign to me. He’s long supported the miners, worked the mines himself in the years when men only went underground, gouged deep to get the coal instead of decapitating mountains. Used to say underground mining might not be the best way to treat Mother Nature, but it sure beat chopping off her head like Prospect has started doing now. 

Paw’s glistening eyes rove the hot-pink page, then he lays the flyer on the table, sips again from his coffee mug. “They’re going about it all wrong.” He stares silently at the dark TV for a full minute. Then he turns to me. “Say you’ll help me, if I need it?”

I wipe the dampness from my forehead, wish I’d worn my t-shirt instead of Jasper’s sweatshirt. “Think you ought to go to the hospital, after all? Let’s get you a bag together.” I stand and head toward my father-in-law’s bedroom. 

“Sit down. I told you I ain’t going to no hospital.” He stares at me in a hard way that tells me not to argue. “I want your word that you’ll carry out my last wishes.”

My throat clogs. I try to think of a joke, something funny to lighten his mood, but the words won’t come. Momma Grodin’s old cuckoo clock sounds from the kitchen, as if telling me it’s time to listen, time to do what Paw wants me to do while time is left. “Of course I will, Paw,” I whisper. “You know that.” 

He points. “Reach me that Bible.” 

I lift the worn, oxblood Bible from its place on the center of the coffee table, offer it to Paw. 

He puts on his bifocals with trembling hands, then opens the leather-bound text to the last pages. “Let me read you something.”

I try not to look surprised, but it’s hard. Paw reads the Bible, believes in the Lord above, but he’s never preached to anyone, always says a man must find God on his own terms, and that he can find Him anywhere. 

“The Book of Revelation, eleventh chapter, verse eighteen . . . ‘The nations were angry, and your wrath came, as did the time for the dead to be judged, and to give your bondservants the prophets their reward, as well as to the saints, and those who fear your name, to the small and the great; and to destroy those who destroy the earth.’” A wet cough gurgles its way out of Paw’s chest, and he snatches a tissue from the side table, closes his Bible. 

He composes himself, and when he looks at me, his eyes are puddled. “You get that, Romie? ‘. . . to destroy those who destroy the earth.’” 

I start to nod, but shake my head. “I get it, Paw. I think.”

“I want to be a bondservant.”

Dread slops over me like smothering mud, and I ache to have Jasper here to hold my hand, to pull me to fresh air. “I don’t . . . what are you saying?” 

Paw dabs at a watering eye with the tissue, points toward the coat closet by the front door. “You done give me your word. Now look in there. On the floor.”

I stand, and my feet feel heavy, like they’re stuck to the carpet. “What do you mean? About being a bondservant?” 

He points toward the coat closet, but doesn’t speak. 

I think he must have taken some Oxy that’s made him loopy, and that’s good. He needs it. I open the dark wooden closet door and stare at the strange thing on the floor. I step closer, realize it’s a hunting vest that stands rigid, rust-colored sticks of dynamite holding it erect. My knees want to buckle. “Paw.” The word comes out on a half-breath.

“Destroy those who destroy the earth.”

I kneel in front of the closet. “No.”

“What time’s Jasper go in tonight? Five?”

“No, Paw.” 

“Look at me, Romie.”

I turn my head a bit, but my stare won’t leave the hunting vest. 

“All I need is for you to drive me up there.”

“People will die, Paw! You will die. We have friends at that mine. Jasper could be in that mine!” I finally turn to meet his gaze.

His smile comes easier now; his face is peaceful. “I’m already dead, doll baby. Only a matter of timing.”

It’s a struggle, but I manage to hold back a sob.

“Jasper will be going in soon, won’t he? I could go into the mine this evening at shift change, during their meeting,” he says. “They always meet in that old office trailer. Either way, won’t be a soul underground, ’cept me.” He holds out his palms like Jesus on the cross. “You take me up there, go interrupt the meeting to see Jasper, tell him loud and clear something’s wrong with me.”

I shake my head to clear the cobwebs—can he really be saying these things?

“Say it so the others will hear. Tell them you came straightaway to get help . . . phone’s out, so you couldn’t call for an ambulance.” 

Paw lets his hand fall between his recliner and the end table, and when he lifts it again, he holds up the phone line he’s cut, so I can see its frayed edges. He gives me a white-lipped grin. “I’ll mosey down past the equipment bays while you’ve got their attention. You and Jasper will be off the ridge before I let her blow. The ones atop the ground’ll shudder and shake, but they won’t be hurt none.”

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “The shafts will collapse . . . mining equipment will blow all to pieces. It’ll cost more to wade through the EPA and OSHA paperwork and replace all that equipment than it will to shut her down . . . clear out of here.” Fresh pink blooms on his pasty cheeks.

My racing heartbeat slows, and I chew on a fingernail. It can’t be that easy, can it? Jasper won’t have a job, a place to work. If he’s unemployed, we’ll have to leave the state for work then, won’t we? Get out of here. Have a baby in a place where the water isn’t chemical soup.

“It’s my dying wish.” Another cough breaks from his chest, and this time red dots spot the tissue. 

I lurch toward Paw, wrap him in my arms. 

“All you need to do is give me a ride,” he whispers. 

After a moment, he pushes me away from him, holds me at arm’s length. “They done killed more’n five hunnerd mountains and four times that in people. Somebody’s got to show them we ain’t gonna take it no more.” He shakes his head. “They poisoned me.” He pokes a finger at my stomach. “And they’re poisoning you. You, and Jasper, and everybody else in Stump Branch.”

I look down at the concave void just below my ribs, and I imagine a mound there in its place, a swollen womb full of Jasper’s child. I dry my wet face on my sleeve. “Don’t you want to talk to Jasper about this first?”

Paw shakes his head, and tears slip out again. “That’d hurt worse—hurt me and him both.” He looks away, wipes his sunken cheeks. “It’s better this way, he don’t know.” He motions toward the small table by the front door with a shaky hand. “There’s two more stock bottles of OxyContin sittin’ there, both plumb full. Ought to be enough to buy a new start in Carolina.” 

I follow the direction his fingertip points, look at the big, white, square bottles. Has to be more than a hundred pills in each, a dollar a milligram. Thousands of dollars rolled into little blue tablets.

Paw pats my hand, rubs away the dampness on my cheek with his thumb. “I done laid out my UMWA life policy on the bed, ready for you and Jasper to take to the lawyer. Ain’t much, but it’ll help. There won’t be no funeral, nothing left to bury.”

“I know you think you’ve thought this through, but them mine owners won’t shut down. They’ll just lop off another mountain on down the road. Jasper’s already said that’s their next plan. And that life insurance policy—it won’t pay for suicide.” 

Paw waves his hands, and his voice comes out in agitated wheezes. “I’m sick, Romie. They’ll say Oxy stunned me . . . old man wasn’t thinking right. He got confused . . . went to mines . . . thought he still worked there.” He swallows against the gurgle in his throat. “That much dynamite . . . all the gas that builds up around there . . . they’ll never know I blew the place. What’s left of that hollowed-out mountain . . . it will be gone. Insurance will pay, you bet. It’s the United Mine Workers Union.” 

“They’ll fight it. You know they’ll fight it. Insurance companies don’t care about us.”

Paw’s bushy eyebrows lift, and again I’m struck by how gaunt his face has become. “Prospect’ll make ’em pay. You think they want word to get out . . . that one of their own blowed up a mine on purpose? That miners are turning against the mines?” He clears his throat. “No, they’ll want to cover it up quick as they can . . . money’s the best way to do that. They think money’ll shut up anybody.” 

I grind my teeth, shake my head. “Paw, this is your sickness talking. I’m taking you to the doctor.” I stand and offer him my hand, but he waves it away. Instead, his gnarled hands grip the armrests, and he thrusts himself forward. 

“Get my jacket.”

I take a deep breath. Finally, he’s thinking right. I return to the closet by the door and pull out Paw’s flannel coat, averting my eyes from the hunting jacket. 

Hunched forward, Paw eases toward the door. “Not that one.” He points at the hunting vest. “That one.” 

“Humor me, Paw. Put this on.” I hold open the flannel coat, guide Paw’s long arms into the sleeves.

“Humor me, now.” He jerks his head toward the open closet. “Get it.”

It’s not a bad idea to get the dangerous thing out of the house. I can set it over the hill and send Jasper to take it apart later. I pick up the heavy vest, surprised that it takes both hands to lift it. I look toward Paw, but he’s headed out the door, trusting me to do as he said. I slide the vest onto one arm, and then I see the two medicine bottles. I look toward the ceiling. Would it do any good to pray? I heft the vest against my hip, and my hand trembles when I pick up the bottles and slip them into Jasper’s deep coat pocket. I hurry out the door to steady Paw as he ambles down the porch steps. 

When we reach the Jeep, I set the hunting vest on the ground, help Paw climb inside, and start to close the door.

He grabs my arm and tilts his head toward the vest. “I’ll take that.”

“Bumpy as this road is, we’ll blow to Kingdom Come before we get off the mountain.” 

“Who’s the master blaster here? I’ve hauled dynamite around most of my life. It won’t blow unless somebody blows it.” He reaches out his hands, and his voice is stern. “I said I’ll take that.”

I peer into the bone-dry woods on the other side of the driveway. I’ve never disrespected my father-in-law. Never spoken a harsh word to him. He and Jasper’s mother treated me like their own child from the first time I stepped into their home. 

My shoulders sag as I lift the awkward vest, ignoring Paw’s outstretched hands, and place it in the floorboard at his feet. I close the door, walk around the Jeep, and slide behind the wheel. 

The pills clatter inside the bottles in my pocket, and Paw looks at me and smiles. “Good girl,” he says, his voice hoarse. “I hate it’s come to this. Shame you two got to sell them pills to make a life, but the Good Lord always provides, don’t He?” He clears his throat, sinks backward into the seat and sighs. “I’m looking forward to meeting Him.” 

I press my lips together to keep from cursing. “Hope you know we’re going to the hospital.”

I glance toward Paw, but he won’t look at me, keeps his gaze on the homeplace as I head down the graveled drive. 

“Last time I’ll be seeing this place.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Romie, I won’t last another day or two. I don’t want to die in no hospital.”

“You can stay with Jasper and me.” I reach the end of the drive, brake, and the clock on the dashboard reads 4:44. The numbers seem like a message, one I can’t decipher. I turn to look at Paw. “I’ll take care of you.”

“No pride in that. I’m a strong enough man, still got one more job to do.” 

I look out across the rutted road, once smooth blacktop, now fractured into a million pieces by the too-heavy trucks hauling out tons of mountain soul. What was once the rising mountain where I picked blackberries, chewed teaberry leaves, and made love to Jasper among blooming dogwoods is now low-lying scarred craters—sterile, desolate, and barren. No place to live. No place to birth a baby. Only a place for dying. A place for destroying those who destroy this good earth.

I take Paw’s hand in mine, kiss his palm, let him go. I hold tightly to the wheel, turn onto the road and drive toward the mine.

“I love you like a daughter, Romie. You’re a real good girl. Thank you for doing this.”

“I ain’t doing nothing but taking you to see Jasper, let him talk some sense into your head. Lord knows I can’t.” I flinch when Paw’s fist slams the dashboard.

“I told you I didn’t want Jasper in on this.” Red-tinted saliva flies from his lip, and he wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, glares out the window. 

“When you brought me in, you brought Jasper in.” Another blast at the mine causes the Jeep to vibrate, and I grip the wheel tighter, shoot a sideways glance at the hunting vest standing in the floorboard between Paw’s feet. “You sure that thing won’t blow?” 

“Got to light the fuse, first.” Paw pulls an old Zippo lighter from his pocket, flips open the metal lid. 

“For God’s sake, Paw! Put that thing away.” 

Paw shoves the lighter into his coat pocket, speaks with a soft voice full of hurt. “I would never lay harm to you. You ought to know that.”

I reach the entrance, drive past the Prospect Mining sign. I want to throw up, rid my stomach of the nerves writhing like snakes inside it.  

Paw touches my arm. “Stop here and let me out.” His voice warbles, and he clears his throat. “By the time you get to the trailer, I’ll be at the equipment bay entrance. You get Jasper, and y’all get off this mountain. I figure it’ll take me four or five minutes to get to her belly. That’s where I’ll . . . you know . . . let her blow.”

I set my jaw, press the gas pedal, and cut the wheel, slinging red-dog gravel and coal dirt in an arc across the wide parking area as I drive toward the office trailer. “I’ll do no such thing. I’m going to get Jasper, all right, but only so’s he can straighten you out. You’re going to sit right here while I do it, you hear me?” I turn off the Jeep and snatch the keys from the ignition. “If you can look your son in the eye and convince him to go along with this fool idea of yours, I’ll stand with you on it. But I won’t let you put this burden on my shoulders to carry alone.”

I step out, turn, and glare at Paw. “You staying put?” 

I want him to say no. Want him to sling that heavy vest onto his shoulder, march like the soldier he’d once been into that mine, defend his family, defend this land, even at the cost of what few days he’s got left. My face grows hot, fired by coals of shame smoldering inside of me. 

Paw’s lower lip thrusts outward, and he reaches into the floorboard, tries to lift the heavy vest onto his lap. 

I hold my breath. 

Paw grunts and strains. “Help me put this thing on.”

I look skyward, blinking hard and fast. Overhead, a lone red-shouldered hawk screeches, searches the gray strip mine in lonesome circles, moves on. I look again at my father-in-law, wonder if maybe I should do this God-awful thing that he asks of me. “Paw?”

Another rattling cough shakes his body. He lets the vest fall against the floor, leans back to catch his breath. He presses his steel-blue lips together, stares straight ahead, won’t look at me.

Ahead of us sits the trailer, and I know Jasper’s in there, know this is the place where he spends his nights and part of his days making a living for us, making a life for us, and in a way I can’t pretend to understand, he likes mining coal. How can I take that away from him? 

Paw drops his head, stares at hands curled like dead leaves in his lap. He sniffs and turns to me, lets out a long, jagged breath. “Useless,” he whispers.

I climb back into the Jeep, pull a handful of tissues out of the console and offer them to Paw. When he won’t take them, I put all but one in his lap and dab the blood-tinged spittle from the corner of his mouth. “This ain’t the way you want to go out of this world, Paw. You’re too good for that kind of destruction.”

He looks out the window, surveying the wasted mountain. “I’m a foolish old man.” His chin quivers.

“No. No, you’re not.” 

A wet cough rattles Paw’s body, and I turn my face away. “What say we go, before the men come out of that trailer?”

He picks up a tissue and swabs his damp face. 

I wipe my eyes as I drive past the Prospect Mining sign. 

Paw stares out the window toward the eight-mile fissure where once stood a mountain. He reaches over, pats my hand where it lays on the gearshift. He lets out a ragged sigh, turns his ashen face toward mine. “You done the right thing.”

I try to smile at him, but can’t. “It ought to feel like it then, oughtn’t it?” I glance at the dynamite, push away second thoughts, and drive down the broken road toward home. 

When Claire traveled, which she did often, she left a message in the bathroom of every hotel room she slept in, for the eyes of whoever stayed there after she had gone. She would write it on the mirror, in big letters, with a bar of soap, smearing the soap thickly onto the mirror, then gently cleaning most of it off, with the care and precision of an art historian cleaning a painting, or anyone cleaning something that actually mattered. When she was done, it looked as if there were nothing written on the mirror, but left behind was a residue that would be invisible until the next guest took a shower, filling the room with steam that revealed to him the hidden message. That person, whoever he was, would pull the shower curtain back and see what Claire had left for him to read.

Sometimes Claire would write just one word, whichever came to mind when she had the idea to write a word, like LIAR, maybe, or PONTOON, or NOUGAT, or RAPIST. 

More often, she wrote entire phrases, like LEAVE IT BEHIND and IT MIGHT BE BENIGN.

YOU KILLED THEM, she wrote on a hotel room mirror in Ann Arbor, to excite the conscience of whoever saw the words she wrote. Who knew? Maybe the next guest was an actual murderer. Maybe he would be moved by her message to confess his crimes to the authorities. 

He might be guilty of a figurative murder. Maybe he had killed someone’s hopes and dreams.

She’d had the idea to start doing this thing one morning in Sacramento, when she’d emerged from the shower to see streaks left in the mirrorsteam. The streaks she saw did not form words, they were mere streaks. But she formed words there, after searching online for the best method for writing words on a bathroom mirror that would be invisible until the onset of steam. The best method involved the use of soap, said the internet. And so she used soap.

The first words she wrote, in that Sacramento hotel bathroom, weren’t much to look at. She wrote CLAIRE RULES. 

It was the first thing she’d thought of, when she had the idea to write something. 

It did not communicate much. It communicated CLAIRE RULES.

She knew that sometimes the women of housekeeping must have cleaned her words off the hotel room mirrors by washing the mirrors as soon as she was gone. She also felt confident that at least some of the time they didn’t clean the mirrors. So often, when she stepped out of the shower herself, streaks were left there, providing no meaning but offering evidence that someone had touched the mirror with greasy fingers and the mirror had not since then been cleaned. 

At a Radisson in Cleveland, she left behind a mirror message that read, HOPE IS BAD, which she hoped would be seen by someone who knew a woman named Hope. It wasn’t what she meant when she first wrote it; she had only meant to communicate that hope is bad, not for any particular reason.

In the bathroom of a room on the 4^th floor of a Hilton in Chicago, she was met with a mirror much larger than the ones she was used to. Surely, she’d thought, when she’d seen the hotel on her itinerary, there has been some mistake. This room is too much. It cost too much. Just look at this mirror. SURELY, she wrote on the mirror, THERE HAS BEEN SOME MISTAKE.

Claire traveled often. She had to, for her job, which was to travel to different offices across the country and hire people on behalf of whatever company had hired her to deliver the news. She was an intermediary, a middlewoman, a professional hirer. Her job was to give good news to people who needed good news—not to give them jobs, but to tell them they now had jobs. She was a messenger who only ever delivered one message, to many people.

She liked her job. She got it when the recession ended, just as she finished college and people started getting hired again, usually for less money than they’d made when they lost their jobs at the start of the recession. 

She never thought for very long about what message she would write. It would have been contrary to the spirit of the thing. She had to write the first thing that came into her mind when she saw the mirror, just before she wrote on it. If she did it any other way, it would mean that she was taking the whole enterprise too seriously. It would mean that what had started as a lark had become a hobby. 

Claire had no hobbies. Her only hobby was not about to be the writing of messages on mirrors that were meant for strangers she would never see.

And she wasn’t the only one who did this thing with mirrors. She learned as much after months of mirror writing, at a La Quinta in Kansas City.

She took two showers in every hotel room she stayed in: one as soon as she arrived, usually, to get the plane grease off her skin, the other the next morning, before she left to do her work and left on a plane later in the day, to whatever city someone was to be hired in next. 

In Kansas City, she was especially eager to leap into the shower, for a woman on the plane, or a man on the plane, had left some hand sanitizer on the handle of the door to the airplane bathroom, for the next plane bathroom patron to deal with. It had gotten on her fingers, on her way out of the facilities, and she was deeply worried that it had traveled to other parts of her body, when she later put her hand on her neck or her leg or her face. Claire was no germophobe; she was reasonable; but she had no proof that what had been on the door handle was in fact hand sanitizer. As soon as she’d felt something on the handle, she’d wanted to go back in and wash her hands again, and again and again, but another woman had already pushed past her and shut the door. 

JUST ENJOY THE CLAMS AS THEY ARE, the Kansas City mirror said. 

She hadn’t written it. She was not the author of JUST ENJOY THE CLAMS AS THEY ARE. 

What she had done, upon bursting through the hotel room door, was wash her hands for the second time since exiting the plane, and with the soap write EATING IS BAD FOR YOU, elsewhere on the mirror. She would have known it if she’d written EATING IS BAD FOR YOU and JUST ENJOY THE CLAMS together as a kind of if/then statement, like, as long as all eating is bad for you then you might as well enjoy the clams. 

She stood in the shower, dripping and watching the words slowly disappear from view as the steam left the room. As the words faded, her own body appeared before her in their place, fuzzy at first and then less fuzzy. She watched the words go for a long time, and she didn’t especially like to see her body, enough that before dismissing the idea as absurd she wondered for a moment if writing messages on all those mirrors across the country was a figurative way for her to write over the space where her body would otherwise appear, a means for her to claim authority over a space where she was otherwise faced with her lack of control, with her body the features of which she’d had no hand in deciding. 

In spite of the man she’d brought back to her room at a Holiday Inn in Seattle, three months prior, who behaved toward Claire as if she had revealed to him at last what a woman was, she did not consider her body to be something to admire. She felt strongly that her hips didn’t quite match her legs, and found she could not explain just what she meant by that in Seattle, to her gobsmacked admirer, who said her body was perfect, which made her laugh.  

She couldn’t explain to him what she meant; nor could she explain to herself convincingly the presence in the La Quinta of the words she didn’t write. 

Did someone else have the same idea she’d had? It was possible. It seemed likely that someone else would think, at some point, to write things on bathroom mirrors. 

It seemed less likely to her that whoever this person was would choose to write messages as nonspecific yet evocative as hers were. That’s how she thought of them, at least.

Did another guest write the other words? Was it a hotel employee who’d done it? Was the hotel itself sentient; had the La Quinta become self-aware, or been outfitted with an artificial intelligence that had predicted she would write something, not knowing what that would be, and preempted it? Was the place fucking haunted?

All of these things she considered as she dried off and wrapped the towel around her weird hips. As she continued thinking—something she did more or less constantly, even when she’d tried and failed to meditate, with that guy in Seattle the second time she went to Seattle, looking him up before she arrived, since she was going to be in town anyway—the words disappeared from what then appeared to be a plain mirror without any writing on it.

When she returned to the room, later that evening, after hiring an ecstatic man who overreacted to being granted a customer support position at a corporate headquarters where, without a college degree, he would never make more than $28,000 a year—$30,000 if he was lucky—the mirror still looked like nothing. 

When she emerged from the shower the following morning, no new words had been written there.

She bid them goodbye, and left for her flight to somewhere North Dakota, where a fracking company was hiring a new engineer. 

Engineers were the most fun to hire, because they rarely seemed very pleased to be hired. Almost to a man they were stonefaced, and they were nearly all men.

For another eight months, she continued to write messages on hotel room mirrors.

In that time, she stayed at 111 hotels in 28 states. She hired almost 200 people, and was growing tired of her job. As joyful a thing as it was to hire people, she was beginning to feel a little pointless, to feel somewhat or very purposeless, like a tool that was invented not because there was any need for it but because it hadn’t been invented yet. She felt like the human equivalent of a piece of metal that would help screwdrivers drive screws.

She felt also like a midwife who delivers a thousand babies but never has any of her own. After hiring so many people, she wanted to be hired herself. She wanted to partake in some of the satisfaction she saw on the faces of the people she hired. It had been long enough since she’d been granted her current position, she’d forgotten what it felt like.

Mostly, she wanted to get a different job that made more sense to her. 

She had asked men and women at the companies that brought her in why they’d bothered bringing her in, why they hadn’t just done the hiring themselves. 

It’s not hard to do, she’d said, imperiling her livelihood. You just tell them they’re hired.

Most of them said it was something they were required to do by their corporate higher-ups. Others explained that it was just better this way, that many of the people they hired wouldn’t be with the company long, and so if an intermediary did the hiring it would make the separation easier, later on. Not much later on. 

Having you here, said a man to Claire in Albuquerque, is like pulling off a Band-Aid. It’s always better if you can get Mom to do it. 

Claire didn’t like that the man had essentially just said that she was playing the role of his mother. There was nothing about it that she liked. But she knew she would never see him again. So, whatever.

She had had enough, by then, of the job and of the travel. 

It was no coincidence that she had gotten tired of writing messages on mirrors. Usually, now, when she looked at a mirror, she felt utterly uninspired. 

At a Holiday Inn in Columbus, she had written on a mirror I AM OUT OF IDEAS. 

Soon, somewhere in America, she would probably end up writing CLAIRE RULES again. 

At a La Quinta in Kansas City, the last La Quinta she would ever stay in for work, she wrote on the mirror EATING IS BAD 4 U. 

The news of Prince’s death had just arrived. She was trying to process it.

She looked at what she’d written, sighed, and took a shower. 

When she stepped out of the shower, minutes later, the entire mirror was covered with writing. 

Holy shit, she said aloud, brushing back her hair. 

DON’T TELL ME THAT EATING IS BAD 4 U, it read. JUST ENJOY THE CLAMS AS THEY ARE. The words overlapped in some places; it was a clumsy mess, up there on the mirror. 

But the message was clear.

The message that lay behind inside the written message grew even clearer, the longer Claire stood there, the more the words and the steam faded and her hips and the rest of her body grew less obscure. If she had stayed in this room three times in the nearly three years she’d had her job, and had written on the mirror on each visit, and hadn’t recognized the room on her return visits, and in all that time no one had cleaned the mirror thoroughly enough to remove the words she had written, then it was time to switch careers, to settle down and stop staying in hotels, or at least to find work with a company that would put her up in better hotels. 

There would be no tip for housekeeping that morning. As she waited for the Uber she ordered, she gave notice in a terse email to her supervisor, whom she had only met once, when he’d hired her. He had done it himself. The rest of the time, she had been on the road. 

She would travel to hire only eight more people in the two weeks that followed, at the end of which she would be done hiring people on behalf of the cowards who couldn’t face the temporary employees who didn’t know they were temporary. 

Her final mirror message, written in the bathroom of the apartment she moved into in St. Louis after quitting her job, because she had family in St. Louis, was written for herself. 

It was EGGENPLATZENSCHLATZ. It was a word she had made up on the spot, but she swore that when she found a job she wouldn’t travel for, except when commuting, she would decide what it meant. 

Or maybe she would have someone over. Maybe the guy from Seattle would visit, and he would take a shower in her rented bathroom, and see the message, and together they would decide the meaning of EGGENPLATZENSCHLATZ. 

It probably wouldn’t be the guy from Seattle. 

There was no telling what might happen, though, in St. Louis.

When the phone rang, Connie froze as if she’d been caught, her arm elbow deep in a family size bag of Skinny Pop. No one ever called Connie, and as she stared at the offending device she wondered, ironically, what type of person still called a landline. She ignored the jangling until it ceased and understood that this was a sign from whatever god was in charge to finally, two years after her mother’s death, get rid of the hard plastic touchtone with its clunky handset as her mother would certainly not be calling from where she was now. Just as Connie flipped the popcorn bag upside-down, yanking one side into a crease she would use to funnel the crumbs into her mouth, the phone rang again. Maybe it was her mother, calling from beyond the grave to remind Connie yet again that she needed to lose 20 pounds, that men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses, that Connie would die alone and unhappy.

When she leaned over the small table to unplug the plastic mouth of the cable from the wall jack, the telephone burst to life once more, screaming into her ear. She stared at it. Maybe something was really wrong. Mr. Bevel at the office always emailed if he had a problem or a question, but perhaps the building had burned down, the company had been sold, she was being let go. Connie reached for the receiver with a trembling hand and lifted it from its cradle with greasy fingers.

“Hello?” Her voice was a whisper, dust choked from lack of use.

“Edie?” 

“Who is this?”

“Edie, please don’t hang up. Please. Just listen. I’m really, really sorry. You know you mean everything to me. You have to forgive me.”

Connie’s heart thumped in her chest. She had never been apologized to by anyone, let alone by a contrite man.

“Why should I?” she ventured.

“I’m sorry. I will never do anything that stupid again.”

Connie did not recognize the voice but she heard the desperation, and it excited her. So this is what love did to you.

“Do what again?”

“You sound funny. Are you all right?”

“How would you sound if you’d been crying for hours?”

“Oh, Edie, please let me come over. I need to see you.”

“Not until you tell me exactly what you did. Everything.”

The ensuing silence produced a small panic in Connie; clearly Edie already knew what he had done.

“I want to put this behind us.”

“I can’t put it behind me until I know everything. All I know is…but I’m sure there’s more to the story.”

“There isn’t, Edie. It happened just once. At her apartment. I was drunk. It was stupid. I don’t even like her.”

Connie was speechless. Was this a teenager? A gigolo? A divorcee?

“I don’t believe you.”

“That it happened only once or that I don’t like her?”

“Both.”

“Please, let me come over so we can talk.”

“I’m too upset to talk.”

“I know you’re hurt. I promised not to bother you at work and I haven’t, but when you changed your number. Well, I freaked out. That’s when I knew I loved you. People don’t always arrive at love at the same time.”

“So you had to sleep with a bimbo to realize you love me?”

“No, forget about her. Please. I guess once I lost you—”

“How did you get my new number?”

“Promise you won’t be mad.”

“I’m not promising anything.”

“Josh. Last night at the bar. He was drunk and I was pathetic and he took pity on me. He agrees that we belong together.”

Connie wondered who Josh was, how drunk he must have been to convey the wrong number, what would happen when she was found out, though it didn’t matter. She would be getting rid of the phone, the evidence, anyway.

“I’m glad you’re feeling good enough to go out to the bar while I’ve been home crying myself a headache.”

“No, no, Josh felt sorry for me and took me out to get my mind off things. I had a terrible time. Until he gave me your number.”

“Why did you wait until tonight to call me?”

Silence. Connie wondered if she’d given herself away this time. Perhaps he worked the afternoon shift at a hospital and was just getting off, though that would not explain his ability to go out the night before. Maybe he was a freeloader who had relied on Edie’s money and was just waking up now.

“The damn project. But it’s almost done. Dave’ll be taking over next week.”

“You certainly found time to spend with…her.”

“I told you it was bad judgment. I was tired, drunk, stupid. And you were mad at me.”

“So it was my fault?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. Not at all. What I’m saying is that Janie is irrelevant here. She doesn’t matter to me. We don’t even speak anymore.”

Connie was now indignant on Edie’s behalf. Janie? The name alone made her furious. She thought of her mother then, eternally riding the spectrum from annoyed to incensed, and worked to channel her rancor.

“Well,” she said sarcastically, “that’s a relief. What about next time you’re tired, drunk and stupid, a combination you seem to have mastered? What then?”

“I love you, Edie. I don’t want to have a life without you in it.”

“Prove it.”

“What?”

“Prove you love me.”

“I’m trying, but you won’t let me. Look what happened when I waited outside your building. I won’t do that again.” He chuckled.

“You think this is funny?”

“If you call almost being arrested funny, then I guess so.” There was a pause, after which the pleading voice on the opposite end of the line said, “I know how upset you are. Changing your number, calling the police, threatening a restraining order. I get it.”

Connie wondered if the guy was a lunatic, a stalker, someone Edie had never loved, but then reconsidered. Edie changed her number after he had hurt her and as a result of feeling jealous. No, Edie had loved him, she decided, though she wondered if Edie had moved on, was now dating a man who sat with her on the torn cushions of the loveseat eating Skinny Pop while watching classic movies, a man who rubbed her feet despite their prominent corns, a man who insisted she wear her glasses while they made love.

“You don’t have to be near me to prove that you love me.”

“All right.”

“Write me a poem.”

“I thought you hated that romantic crap.”

“So now you’re making the rules? Now you know what I need? This is exactly what I’m talking about—”

“Okay, okay, I’ll write you a poem.”

“I want an original poem.”

“Sure. Of course. I will write you a poem tonight. Can I call you when I’m finished?”

“You’re going to finish it in one night? I’m sure that will be one deep and heartfelt poem.”

“My feelings are all on the surface now. I’m in touch with them.”

“It doesn’t have to rhyme.”

“Okay.”

But Connie did not want him to hang up. She wasn’t sure yet if she wanted this man and Edie to reunite or to be separated forever, but she saw an opportunity to influence someone’s life and enjoyed the heady feeling it gave her. Perhaps this is what her mother felt when Connie apologized, begged her not to be angry anymore.

“If your feelings are on the surface you can speak them now. In poetry form.”

“Boy,” he said, “you don’t even sound like you anymore.”

“You don’t believe this has taken its toll? After all we meant to each other? I mean, I thought we meant to each other?”

“You know what we had—have—is real. You know that I love you. Now you just have to let me prove it to you. I’ll write you a poem. I’ll take my time and make it perfect. But I need to see you, Edie. I love you. I miss you. I crave you.”

Connie went from feeling protective of Edie to feeling envious. She wondered who Edie was, what she possessed that made a man crave her. “Tell me what you love, what you miss, what you crave.”

“I love your eyebrows, the way you laugh when someone falls, your green lentil curry.” Suddenly Connie wanted to learn to cook. “I miss dancing in the shower and your jasmine perfume, I miss Ken.” Ken? A son? A friend? A ménage à trois? “I crave your supple tongue on my—”

“Well you can keep craving,” Connie interrupted. He had not earned the right to be so familiar with her after what he’d done.

“Meet me at Gould’s.”

“Now?” she said.

“Yes.”

She could hear the hope in his voice. Things were moving too quickly. “Things are moving too quickly.”

“Coffee. A quick coffee. That’s all. We don’t even have to talk about this.”

“I guess I can’t blow this off so easily.”

“Edie. We had something good. Something great. I know I have to win back your trust, and I will. I’ll do anything. I love you.”

“All right,” she said. “What’s my favorite candy?”

“Pop Rocks.”

Favorite food?

“Celery.”

“Guilty pleasure?”

“Godzilla movies.”

Favorite animal?

“Land, air or sea?”

This guy, this guy who asks Land, air or sea? in response to his girlfriend’s favorite animal question seemed to deserve something. 

“Sea.”

“Sand worm.”

Who was this woman? Connie wanted to know more about her, this person with compelling eyebrows who shared her feelings about sand worms.

“Favorite song.”

“Our song. Remember when we first met, how we spent hours texting these questions, how ridiculous they got?”

“Sing it.”

And without delay he launched into a wholly discordant rendition of “Auld Lang Syne,” stammering through the opening lyrics, which recommend that old acquaintances be forgot and never brought to mind. “That’s—”

“That was nice.”

“Not really, but thanks. Edie—”

“Here’s what you do. Write me a poem. Call it ‘Edie.’ Include the eyebrows and the curry, the shower dancing and the jasmine What the hell, throw in the tongue.”

“What about Ken? Does he miss me? Can you bring him to the phone?”

Connie realized she was gripping the receiver so tight her hand was sore. “He can’t right now.”

“Well, don’t wake him if he’s sleeping. Or is he in the litter box?”

A cat named Ken? Connie wished she had a friend like Edie and understood why the man on the phone was miserable without her. “Put him in the poem. Put Ken in the poem.”

“This will be too easy. You’re practically writing it for me.”

“I know,” Connie said. “Write the poem, buy some Pop Rocks and bring dinner to my place tomorrow night. Don’t talk about this phone call. If you bring it up I’ll act shocked, pretend it never happened. That’s how we start over. I mean, I will try and start over but I can’t guarantee anything. If I open the door just smile at me, though tears can’t hurt. Push past me if you have to and put the food on the table. Read me the poem, then look into my eyes and ask me questions: my favorite mineral, my favorite continent, my favorite constellation.”

Connie set the receiver gently into its cradle, running her palm down the length of the molded plastic before dipping her finger into the shallow valley of each button, the looped cord gathering beside the boxy relic into tidy pile. 

 

We’re in bed when I say it, he on his stomach, eyes closed, me stretched out next to him, watching his fists clench the pillow.

If you lost your wife because of this, would it be worth it?

Something I’ve asked myself over and over, in those dark hours between midnight and 5 a.m., which is about when I exhaust enough to drift into an hour of sleep before the alarm.

Unsure, still, whose answer I fear more.

Michael strums his fingers over the curve of my hip and thigh. She won’t find out. She can’t.

Quiet falls over the room, only the occasional creak of the sign outside interrupting it and Michael’s hand lingers, starting the familiar swirling in my center. That feeling like when I first start forming a new piece on the wheel, how the clay yields to my hands and the centrifugal force, as if already aware of its shape.

I say nothing, wait for him to return the question, but his breathing levels out and I know he’s drifted into sleep. An indulgence allowed to him only during our few hours together—he has a three-year-old and seven-year-old at home, and a full course load, and other obligations I don’t question. When he wakes, he’s hungry, like a bear emerging from hibernation. These post-nap, second-round fucks are worth the wait—slow and wide-eyed, inhales and exhales matching, our connection ferocious and deep, a wild blurring of our bodies into one taut gold thread of ache.

She won’t. She can’t. His sureness doesn’t surprise me. But, I wonder.

I slide toward Michael, away from my thoughts. He shifts so our bodies are flush. I bury my face into his neck, nipping at his skin. He murmurs something I don’t quite catch, but I think he says, You’re asking for it.

 

Winter solstice Michael came through my open studio looking for coffee mugs. He picked up a salt-glazed bowl, ran his fingers along the mottled surface. He asked what type of clay I used in my stoneware, where I sourced it. Then his gaze strayed to the wall of shelves in back. What’s with the broken stuff? he asked.

That— Pieces returned from friends and customers, pieces cracked in the kiln; I’d been saving them all. Kintsukuroi, I said.

He raised an eyebrow. He wore a thin silver wedding band. Like mine.

Golden repair. I led him to the shelves, held out the practice bowl. Real gold, in the lacquer. You won’t break it, I said, laughing. Again.

He thumbed the shimmer where cracks had been. What a noble concept, he said. Cherishing the broken. He handed the bowl back to me, and our hands touched and neither of us pulled away quite as fast as we should have.

We talked as people floated in and out, no one brave enough to interrupt us till the woman with the long gray braid hair and brilliant-watt smile started asking a million questions about my firing process, my temperatures, my underglazes. Michael winked, took a card and bowed out.

The woman said, He’ll be back.

Lots of browsing today, I said.

She cast her gaze toward the door, then picked up a bud vase, pot-bellied with a tight-curled lip, so thin as to be almost translucent. Is this for sale?

Not really, I said. I took the vase from her hands. It felt fragile as an egg. My first foray into porcelain. I’m not sure how they’ll fare.

I’ll take my chances, she said with a wistful smile. The soft skin of her face was deeply lined, like she’d walked a long way in the sun to arrive at my place. I wrapped the vase in kraft paper, said, Happy Solstice.

She cradled the bundle in her palms, and said, To the return of light.

 

We dress without speaking, unhurried and efficient. As I pull my socks on, Michael opens his wallet and tosses a twenty on the night table. If no one else knows, the maids in this hotel do, I think, because who else leaves such a tip for a few hours use?

After our first afternoon together—in a much fancier place—he left a fifty. Luck had it that both Dot and Anne were out of town and we spent hours naked between the bright white sheets, the electric fireplace roaring, unrushed and tender, the way it is when you first discover somebody—new skin, new fingers, new taste, new breath, new rhythm—coming together and apart once, twice, three times, till we joked about my needing one of those donut cushions.

It’d been years since I’d been with a man and I bled. Am I hurting you? he asked. No, no— We pressed together like we wanted to dissolve our skins, and fell asleep tangled. I woke to find blood smeared everywhere: sheets, pillows, fingers, sticky along my thighs, a fierce stripe across his lower belly.

Look at this mess, I said.

Michael got a towel and we sat cross-legged facing each other while he cleaned us. He slid the terry cloth over me, gaze on me as he did till I filled all over with desire. I said, It’s like I’m a virgin again.

He laughed his rusty grumble of a laugh and called me Artemis.

Why? I said.

The virgin huntress no man can tame.

I eased the bloody towel from his fingers.

Besides, you don’t seem like a Christine to me.

Only our knees touched. He traced a line from my bottom lip straight down my center into my pubic hair. I’ve never felt so exposed.

I’d been glad, that dusking evening, to go home to an empty house. Michael’d gone to pick up his kids, had made them dinner and read them bedtime stories. What did it feel like, I asked, to do that? He only said, Hard.

Now it’s easier. Now the bland rooms are familiar, our habits familiar. We shrug into jackets, I rummage in my purse for keys, he hands me my hat. We hug, bodies straining against all that fabric, and though I usually go first, tonight I say, I’m not going to leave yet. If you don’t mind.

He tilts his head, like he wants to ask why, but says, I have to run. Otherwise I’ll be late.

He kisses my forehead, my nose. His lips on my lips and I want to whisper, Stay with me, so I pull back and say, Go.

Alone in the inky twilight of the room, I draw back the curtains and watch him cross the parking lot to his truck. Does he do this for me?

On the nightstand next to the twenty is a notepad and pen and I write: Call us selfish and dishonorable, but nothing has ever felt this pure.

 

Dot doesn’t look up from her laptop when I come in. I toss my keys into the bowl by the door, slip out of my coat. How was yoga? she asks, eyes on the screen.

Backbends and arm balances, I say. A good class. How was your day?

Long. I’ve just got to answer these emails. Then I can help with dinner.

I can handle it, I say. Want anything special?

She says, I’m not very hungry.

Do you not want me to cook? I can graze.

She sighs and snaps her laptop shut, taps out a beat on the table, looks at me over her glasses. How about stir-fry? she says. Then, Your arms look good.

I open the fridge door, rummage through the crisper drawers. What I want and don’t want is for her to come touch my biceps, to hug me without my asking, though I count on her not doing this, not coming close enough to smell where I’ve been. Thank you, I say. All that throwing for the craft fair, I guess.

Nothing to do with your new yogini lifestyle?

I’m half turned toward the counter with a tub of tofu in my hand and we catch eyes. For the first time in what seems like ages, we smile. Maybe a little, I say. You want wine for fortification?

Not right now, she says.

She heads upstairs and I pour a glass of red and turn on the radio and stand at the counter, staring into the dark backyard. I think about my question in the curtain-dim light of the motel, wonder if it was unfair. Dot must be on the phone, the floorboards overhead creak as she paces—the clomp of her boots against the old wood even though I ask her to take her shoes off at the door. Have always asked that, since we first met, to keep the floors clean. A pair of slippers unused in the front closet. My own feet are bare—it is late April, and still cold, but I like to feel the ground beneath me.

What would it be like, to have Michael here? Does he sit in the kitchen with Anne while she cooks? Help her chop? Play with the kids instead of zoning out on the computer? Not that it matters. He isn’t mine. I put the wine down and close my eyes. He is not mine. But I imagine him slicing peppers, talking about minerals and aquifers, how water filters through rock, the nostalgic look he gets when he talks about digging in the earth, and there’s that question again.

My answer spins like an unruly vessel, mouth too wide, walls too thin, unable to support its own weight.

I cube and sauté, I season and stir. As if I might build, with the mundane rhythms of my life, a sort of scaffolding.

Dot doesn’t appear till I call for her. She rubs her eyes, says she’s sorry.

For what? I ask. I pour more wine.

I’ll have some now, she says, getting one of my small tumblers from the cabinet. She never uses a glass; she insists wine tastes better drunk from clay. One email after another, she says. I can’t get on top of things.

I managed fine alone, I say.

As always, she says. Smells delicious.

We clink, say Cheers. I hesitate, about to add more, but Dot’s already drinking, and what would I toast to right now anyway?

 

I see the note before Michael does and slide it into my purse while he stares out the window before pulling the drapes. Has housekeeping left that note for the last three mornings? Has no one been in the room since we were last? Is our schedule that predictable? We’ve only been coming to this motel for a few weeks. Before that, we used the house of one of Michael’s colleagues, on a research trip to Istanbul. Before that, another motel. Before that, others.

My youngest has a fever, Michael tells me as he unzips his vest. I was up all night with cold cloths and Gatorade. I said I had a department meeting I couldn’t miss.

We could have canceled—

He slips his fingers beneath the hem of my t-shirt. And miss this?

I missed you, too, I say.

He grasps my waist, holds me a little away. Looks like he’s trying to memorize me. And then he says, We shouldn’t— he reaches for my jeans zipper, tugs, eyes not leaving mine. Talk this way. It makes things—

I stop his words with my mouth.

We move slow today. Michael lets me lead, on his back holding my hips, he stares up at me, eyes half-closed. He whispers, You’re exquisite.

Shhhh, I say.

No, I mean it, he says. You should be bronzed. I lean forward to kiss him and it must be how I tilt my hips—he tangles his hand in my hair and draws me down so our stomachs, our chests, our mouths seal, seamless. He breathes into me, says, I’m going to—

He falls asleep almost as soon as I roll away. I trace the dark smudges below his eyes, stroke his sandpapery cheeks with the back of my hand. Naked, mouth open a little, snoring—this is what makes things difficult, I think—how much he trusts me.

I pad over to my bag and pull out the note.

I’m not God, I just clean the rooms.

What had I expected? Advice? Understanding? Absolution?

I tear the note into small squares and take it to the bathroom and toss it in the toilet, squat and pee before I flush. Michael sleeps. I do a few sun salutations but the carpet grosses me out so I spend the next hour thinking about my kintsukuroi project, if I’ll get it done for the fair.

I get in to bed and whisper, Time’s up. Without opening his eyes, Michael wraps his arms around me and holds me to him. He shivers. You’re warm, I say. Better get home and have some chicken soup.

He moans a little when he sits up. Sweat beads along his temples. If only you could bring me chicken soup, he says. In nothing but an apron.

I toss him his underwear. He doesn’t budge. Here, I say, picking his underwear up from the bed, lifting his leg, then the other. Let’s get you dressed and out of here.

He pulls me close again. The heat of his skin presses through my t-shirt. Not yet, he says. Those department meetings always run late.

But we don’t make love. Instead, he holds me, his chin buried in the crook of my neck, one of his legs over mine. His heart thumps against his ribs, my ribs, my heart, our flesh and bones softening like clay as we form a new body.

 

The craft fair and the yoga are honest, in their way. Every week I hit the Wednesday advanced class at noon, and I’m at the wheel most spare hours—my wrists ache—which is normal enough. Dot doesn’t question my whereabouts or distracted state. She has her own packed schedule: fundraisers and staff parties and volunteering and potlucks; these last I’m invited to, but have to decline and she comes home with rinsed-clean bowls and hugs from the hosts, wishes for my presence next time.

She falls asleep before me. I’m up most of the night, searching for things online that only leave me empty once I see them. Dot’s gone by the time I drag out of bed. I can’t remember the last time she kissed me goodbye or even left a note. Maybe I’m silly; maybe I should have stopped expecting love letters years ago. Drinking coffee alone before I head to the studio, I haunt our house. The silence, the unmade bed, the pile of magazines on the coffee table. Someone lives here, we live here, but the place feels vacant. Dust on the picture frames and a pile of unopened mail and unpaid bills—my chores, neglected.

This morning, frost laceworks the windows and sunlight wavers along the walls. Winter should have let us out of its grip by now—first week of May, and by mid-afternoon it’ll be warm enough to lose a layer or two—but things remain frozen. I trace the crackled ice with my fingers, try to memorize the fractals. On the back of an envelope, I draw a heart and leave it where Dot will see.

By the time I get to the studio, the sun’s high, and there isn’t time for me to throw before I meet Michael. The broken pots hunker on their shelf, surly and jagged. Might as well.

In my tool cabinet sit the resin and the lacquer in their squat little jars with tiny, tight Asian characters on the label. Little bag of gold powder with a price tag that made Dot shake her head in disbelief. The process increases the object’s value, I told her. An ancient practice. But she’s never been one for metaphor.

And it is a process. Caught up in the filling, the smoothing, the dipping of the brush into the gold—how decadent to devote such energy to repairing what others might toss away—I lose track of time and don’t come to till my phone buzzes. A message from Michael: where are you?

I’m a half-hour late and don’t want to leave. I text back: studio. lost track of time. come here?

Ten minutes later he’s locking the door behind him. We’ve been here together two or three times—that balding maroon velvet chair by the window finally making itself useful—but we try to avoid personal spaces, places where our spouses might appear without warning.

I almost checked in, he says. And I got this strange feeling.

Sometimes he talks like this—though he looks like a lumberjack and doesn’t believe in his wife’s God, he swears by a buried intuition I can’t help but be crazy for.

I’m waiting in my truck and who walks out of the lobby but one of my colleagues. Straightening his tie and looking rather satisfied, followed a few minutes later by another colleague, dazed and her shirt buttoned crooked.

We’ll have to switch motels again, I say.

Michael shakes his head like he’s clearing some thought he doesn’t want. I wondered, he says, if that’s what we look like.

I put down the vase I’m brushing and stand. He stares out the windows, his mouth tight. He doesn’t move toward me as I do him and I have to turn his face. Limn his lips with my fingertips, edge him in gold. No, I say.

You weren’t there, he says.

No matter what they looked like, I say. That’s not us.

He turns my hands over, revealing the life line and head line and fate line, all the creases bright with gold. He says, How do we look?

Like this, I say, leading him to my work table. I sweep the gold brush over his palms, close his fists, reopen them. I slide my palms next to his so our heart lines align. A long road. If I blur my vision I can close the gaps between.

How is it you’re so wise? he asks.

I’m not, I want to say. It’s just how I feel. That some turn at a crossroads or crossed-stars brought me to you. Words mean nothing. We stare at our palms.

Michael says, Let me help you with your pots.

I hand him clean brushes, show him the steps. Kintsukuroi, he says, savoring the word. He learns quick and fits the pieces together with great patience. He gives over his entire concentration to each bowl, each vase, puzzling the shards together, gliding on the gold.

No one will forgive us. No one will care how my heart swells with the sight of his clean fingernails, the dark hair curling on his forearms, the wrinkles radiating out from his eyes. He catches me watching, says, What?

Nothing, I say. You’re good.

I always wanted to work with my hands.

Why don’t you, I almost ask but there’s no reason to poke a sore spot that has nothing to do with me, so instead I say, You are rather talented in that department.

First smile of this afternoon and my ribs feel like they could shatter.

 

We don’t go back to the motel.

Part of me regrets this, part of me is relieved. I wonder if there are unread notes in the waste basket—notes other guests ignore, or read and interpret as they need to, like a horoscope.

We go to a different motel, but it’s too shabby, too depressing. We drive up to the waterfalls and park where no one can see us. We use my studio, more often than we should.

Dot’s musical goes up and I miss all three performances because of how behind I am. She accepts my profuse apologies with icy sadness. She says, more than once, You have to get your work done, I understand. But she doesn’t. And why should she—I am plainly being unfair. She tells me after the final show that the kids got standing ovations, that it was one of their best, and I say, Next year, I’ll be there. Next year, she reminds me, she’s handing the reins to the assistant director. Maybe someone videoed it, she says, drumming her fingers on the counter. I’ll ask around.

The next weekend, Michael and Anne go on holiday and I throw until my wrists turn stiff and fiery and I have to strap on ice packs. I doze in the velvet chair and wake as the sun sets, the clear almost-summer rays spilling in the windows. I’m not usually here this late. The light illuminates the kintsukuroi pots—all lined up in a mirage of perfect wholeness.

The weekend of the craft fair my wrists burn like they’ve been in the kiln and when I drop the coffee mug Dot hands me and scald my foot, she digs my wrist braces out of the medicine cabinet and says, I’ll come with you—you’re going to need help wrapping and handling the money.

I don’t, I think, but say nothing, go upstairs to my closet and find the arm warmers she bought for my birthday last year. It’s awkward to wear them over the braces, but at least the comments will be about the pretty yarn rather than questions about what I did to my wrists.

Dot hovers while I get ready, asking me what she should wear, like she’s never been to a craft fair, like it even matters. She asks if she can bring anything out to the car and I tell her the boxes by the back door, but when I come down, she’s gotten distracted by a phone call, she’s laughing, standing by the window. I heft the boxes, slam the screen, wait in the passenger seat for her to finish, and we drive across town in silence so thick we’d need a chainsaw to cut it.

But once inside the drafty old building, I’m glad she’s there. I shoulder the bags, and she unloads the car into the dumbwaiter, makes several trips to the booth, unwraps my wares and helps me with the display. Just before the doors open, she says, I’ll grab us some coffee.

I vow to be nicer; I vow to say thank you when she returns.

She’s gone for a while—probably bumped into someone from work—and my first customer is Anne. We’ve never met, but I recognize her the moment she appears. She’s smaller in person, more delicate than I’d imagined her. The room falls quiet and blood rushes in my ears. Act normal, I tell myself.

She picks up a kintsukuroi vase—I brought only a few, I haven’t even priced them—and says, This is gorgeous. How much?

I debate: tell her it’s a display? name an outrageous price, five-hundred, maybe? but Dot walks toward me, holding our coffees, and the sounds of the room return, chatter, coins changing hands, kraft paper wrapping breakables—and I say, They’re $50 each. Real gold in the lacquer—but they’re not functional. You can’t put water in it.

Anne turns the vase over, runs her fingers along the base. She says, But with a few lunaria pods—it’d glow.

I want to hate her. I want to say, I know your husband, I know that spot on his thighs that makes him quiver. But she’s standing there, holding the vase out to me along with a fifty, and her face is so wide open and graceful; she has a crooked eye tooth and a lopsided smile.

Dot takes the vase and the money, says, Christine hurt her wrists.

Anne points at the arm warmers, says, Great cover-up.

And like I’m possessed, I extend both arms to her, palms up, and say, Cashmere. Anne touches one wrist, then the other, says, Exquisite. And look at that wishbone stitch.

You’re a knitter, I say.

Anne looks surprised, but nods. A hobby, she says. Nothing quite this lovely.

Dot hands Anne the wrapped vase and Anne gives a little wave. She weaves through the now crowded room. Her slim hips, the perfect straightness of her hair across her t-shirt makes me want to weep. I want to call after her: I didn’t mean to love him. I never wanted this to happen.

Dot says, Here, drink your coffee. It’ll help you wake up.

 

Michael comes to the studio Monday morning. I’m surrounded by half-unpacked boxes, my hair unwashed, my hands dusty. What a nice surprise, I say.

He roughs his hand over his chin. Did you sell any of the pieces I did?

I didn’t bring yours.

He says, It’s on our mantel. First thing I see when I come in, last thing I see before leaving.

Michael, I say. It’s just a vase.

Your vase. In my house.

Break it, I say. Say it was an accident.

Michael shakes his head. I can’t do that.

Then what? It’s not like I had a choice—

I know, he says. I’m sorry. It must have been awkward.

I remember Anne’s fingers tracing the stitches of my arm warmers, her smile as she took the vase from Dot.

Complicated, I say.

I never answered your question, he says, and though it’s been a couple months, I know exactly which he refers to.

It wasn’t fair of me to ask, I say. Loosening the straps of my braces, I tug one, then the other, off, massage my wrists, my palms.

It was fair, he says. I owe you that at least.

We lock eyes. I hate the unknowing, the fear, I glimpse there.

I’m not in any rush, I say.

He takes my face in his hands and kisses me, soft as the first time, lingering way too long before he lets go.

 

Michael parks the truck overlooking the waterfalls. He hasn’t looked at me during the entire bumpy ride out here. The ticking of the engine and the water crashing down on the rocks fill me with dread. I wish we were at the motel. I wish Michael would undress me, reveal the lace bra I wear, the new underwear.

Last night was summer solstice and an almost full moon but Dot was too tired to sit out back with me and I spent hours on the porch steps alone, gulping rosé with the words where the light pours in running through my mind. My head hurts now, the wine bottle empty and Dot grimacing as she tossed it into the recycling bin.

I could write a fifty-page list of reasons not to feel bad for myself—food deserts and abandoned children and pit bulls trained to kill, GMOs blighting our agricultural landscape and fresh water going scarce, drone attacks and homeless veterans and stray cats—but here I am in the passenger seat of this F-150, wishing I had aspirin and a soft pillow, wishing Michael would pry my fingers apart and kiss me instead of clenching the steering wheel.

He says, I’ve been thinking—

I stare at the riot of green leaves, sunlight filtering down in watery bars.

He says, We have to stop.

You could leave Anne, I say. I’d leave Dot, for you.

Christine, he says. We can’t be responsible for that kind of wreckage.

A woodpecker takes up hammering somewhere nearby. In my peripheral vision, I see Michael reach for my hand, but draw back when I make no motion. I hear him say, I’m sorry.

Please, I say.

I can’t, he says.

I know, I say.

I’m sorry, he says again.

Please, stop saying that.

We’ve been reckless, he says. Selfish.

I crack the window, afraid the heat inside my chest will ignite, send splinters flying.

Michael hits the steering wheel. Damn it, he says. Nothing feels right.

Stop, I want to say. Stop.

When I first set eyes on you, in your studio, I thought some piece of me might crumble if I never held you or tasted you or breathed you. I shouldn’t have—I couldn’t resist you.

Don’t.

I can’t leave Anne, he says. I need to be there for her, for my family. And I want to be there. I couldn’t live with myself—knowing I’d hurt them.

How then? I want to ask. How?

Christine, he says, turning in his seat, cupping my cheek so I have to face him. Please forgive me. I wish I trusted my heart the way you do.

I lift my hand to cover his, pressing my cheek into his palm. For a long time we stay like this. Until I release him and say, Take me back.

 

In the studio parking lot Michael cuts the ignition and we stare into the thicket of brambles that edge the pavement. We do not kiss; we do not say goodbye. I hope he’ll do something, anything, to change this moment. He takes my hand in his and turns it, traces the lines of my palm. We’ll find a way to live with this, he says. I meet his eyes—they mirror my own, exhausted and shell-shocked and dry.

I’m not so sure about that, I say.

We will, he says. We’ll scar up.

But how deep the line he cut down the center of me, how long it will take to heal. I think of our new body, cracked in two. The gold we smeared on our life lines, our fate lines, our heart lines.

We’re strong, he says. We have to be. He closes my fingers and holds my fist between his two hands. With my free hand, I press a finger to my lips, then to his.

Don’t leave me, I want to say.

But already I can see how we shine.

I climb into my car, arrive home with no recollection of the drive, compose my face in the rearview.

Dot’s on the couch, bare feet on the coffee table, watching a music video on her computer. She glances up at me, says, You’re early. What happened?

Nothing, I say. Not feeling well.

Too much wine last night, she says with a ghost of smile.

Not that, I say. A cold, maybe. Summer flu.

You’re pale, Dot says. Go get in bed, I’ll bring you tea.

I don’t need tea, I say, closing my eyes against the sunlight flooding the room. All I want is to go upstairs and draw the shades and slip between the cool sheets of darkness. I need to rest.

Dot turns her attention back to the screen. You should have come home sooner.

 

 

 

—end—

 

I’m alone, on my blue couch, waiting for my ex wife. I play a record on our old turntable because I feel like being nostalgic. I remember we discovered a beach made of glass. It made my heels hurt even through my sneakers. That night we peeled shrimp and ate them like oil barons lost at sea.

 

A man talks to a woman. The man is married. The woman cut her hair short, platinum blonde, above the neckline. She has a tattoo of a circle. She is learning French in the mornings. The man buys her flowers and cucumber-scented water.

The man stares at the tattoo above her panty line.

“Porquoi,” she says. “Do you know what that means?”

“Why,” he says.

“Yes, exactly.”

 

My ex wife drops off her son. It’s peculiar that she trusts me with the boy. I’ve killed so many houseplants.

“This is a good opportunity for you,” she says.

She’s dressed up to go out somewhere, not in her usual brand name yoga pants. She’s wearing the earrings I bought her when we went upstate, and I spent twenty dollars at the carnival trying to knock down wooden milk bottles.

The kid stares at me from the couch. He’s more interested in me than the “zookeeper” movie she put on for him. I can’t say I blame him.

“He likes radishes. Don’t ask me why,” she says, shuffling through her pocketbook. She doesn’t find what she’s looking for and snaps it shut.

“What am I supposed to do with him?”

She scrunches her eyebrows the way she used to when I’d say the c-word. “Do with him?”

“Yeah like I can’t take him to a titty bar or a party right?”

The kid giggles. He raises his hips and cups his buttocks firmly over his green corduroy pants.

“If you could take one thing seriously you’d be ruling a country,” she says, approaching the child for a kiss.

“Yeah, but it’d be Bangladesh or something stupid like that.”

“Bangladeshis need leadership, too,” she says in a kind of prattle as she hugs the boy goodbye.

She walks over to me and gets close with her finger. She’s just done her nails, emerald. “You know what to do if he hurts himself?”

“Bail. First train to Mexico, live under the name Caesar Malone. Grow beans, meet someone decent, prove I’m more than just a bean farmer to earn her respect.”

“You’re a dick.” She kisses me flush on the cheek.

I can’t even feel her lips through all the gloss. It feels like leather pants on my skin. I liked her lips natural when I could taste them.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says.

The kid has removed the couch cushions, and he digs his tiny fingers into the cookie crumb seams. My ex wife shuts the door behind her. I remember when she’d lock it with our keys.

 

She works in finance. She is ashamed of the way he dresses. Like a “bummy artist.” The man wipes his sweaty hands on his only pair of black slacks. Her father would never approve, except he does.

The man sits next to the girl’s father. They watch a Russian movie about a submarine. He doesn’t understand Russian, but he can’t believe his luck. They take a shot of port together.

“He is basically saying that if they’re wrong the whole world will die,” says the father, through his accent, pointing at a sailor on the T.V.

“Oh, ok,” says the man.

The girl watches them intently. “You don’t even drink port, Papa.”

“When you have guests, you drink port,” he says.

The man imagines the girl tied up in a big red bow.

“It’s like I don’t even know you,” she says.

 

The zookeeper in the movie falls for a girl “out of his league.” The boy has disassembled the couch. He pulls raggedly on the foldout bed. Crumbs and nickels quiver under the sheets.

“So what do you usually get up to on the weekends, kid?” I ask.

“I like baths,” the boy says.

“Yeah, I’m more of a shower guy myself, but I see where you’re coming from.”

The boy slaps his hand against the hard base of the couch.

“You hungry?”

He nods.

“Are you past the milk stage?” I should’ve asked that. “What do you like to eat besides radishes?”

“Fig Newtons.”

“Do you know who I am?” I ask.

He shakes his head.

“Does your mom talk about me?”

“Sometimes if I eat too many Fig Newtons I poot.”

“I have a feeling you’re not the font of information I hoped you’d be.”

He rubs his little boy belly like a beer drunk.

On the way to get Fig Newtons, a funeral procession passes by. I involuntarily make the sign of the cross—a vestigial compulsion of my childhood. Everyone seems to be in good spirits. Maybe it’s one of those expected things. Everything happens for a reason: Jesus said that.

The deli is just around the block. The counter girl smiles when she sees the kid. She’s Lithuanian or something equally sexy. I bet everyone in her village looks like that. She’s one of those girls you can’t believe is wearing an apron. I want to know what sadness brought her to this moment in time. I want to be a part of it.

“What’s your name?” she asks the boy.

“Thomas,” he says, shyly. Little boys are innate cowards around pretty girls—an instinct attempting to shield us from our fate.

“That’s a cool name.”

“Thanks,” he says. “My mom gave me it.”

I’m half searching for the Fig Newtons, trying to figure out a way to tell her he’s not mine. I’m as free as a Lynard Skynard pigeon. Thank God I didn’t say that out loud.

“You guys carry Fig Newtons?” I ask.

“Next to the flower and dog food over back,” she says.

I find the crinkly pack and bring it to the register. I hand her a twenty. She gives me change. I hold up a five, fold it, and stuff it into the coffee can slot on the counter, which reads: “WE EXCEPT TIPS.”

“That’s for you,” I say.

“Thanks.” She looks past me as she says this, to an arriving bus out on the street. The ground is a little wet, and the bus makes that swishing sound when it stops.

I cradle the Fig Newtons. I hold open the glass door, and the boy follows me out.

“When was the last time you felt good, kid?”

“Today,” he says.

“Thanks, I really appreciate that.” I pat him lightly on his miniature back.

Around the corner from the church, I hear an old hymn. It emanates through the stained glass like morning or firelight.

“You ever been to a funeral, kid?”

**

 

Porquoi had known all along he wasn’t quite right. He couldn’t imagine floors existed without her anymore. That if she were suddenly gone one day, he’d fall straight through his bedroom and into the earth and become a latent diamond some millions of years later. She had created him. He knew in that moment he’d lost them both.

It’s a Catholic mass like those from my childhood. Immaculate Conception. We sit in the back next to an old man in a trench coat who looks like he also shouldn’t be there.

“It’s important to whisper here,” I say, preemptively.

“How come?” whispers the boy.

“Because God has the hearing of a dog.”

The boy nods as if what I said makes perfect sense. I feel like I can tell him anything, and he’ll approve. This must be how CEOs feel.

The church isn’t that old. Nothing in America is as old as we think it is. We tear down our monuments and build them back up in their own images. The stained glass is vibrant, not faded, as I’d like it to be. Little fake red candles flicker next to my pew. I wonder if they are still operated by quarters.

Three bells ring.

 

The man confesses to a small Vietnamese priest. The man is frightened because he has forgotten the words to the Hail Mary. There is no screen between them like there used to be. Just him, the priest, and liquid sin boiling like chicken stock.

“I am unfaithful,” he says. “And the worst part is I didn’t regret it until I had to.” She does not belong to him anymore, he tells himself.

When her father dies, she asks him to be there anyway. He can’t understand any of the words at the service. All he can think of is that submarine.

 

“My peace to you,” says the priest from the pulpit to the mourners.

“My peace I give you,” I say, not knowing why. My hands sweat. I rub them on my black slacks.

“Let us show a sign of peace,” says the priest.

I turn, reluctantly, to the old man in the camel-colored trench coat. He smells like cooking. He extends his leathery palm to me. It’s shaking. I steady it in my own, then look down to the boy.

“Peace be with you,” I say, lowering my hand.

The boy is scared of the man in the camel coat, his hands out, discolored and dry. I rip open the Fig Newtons, clutching the box in my armpit. The bag’s crackle makes me wince. I offer a single Newton to the boy. He cups his hand, and I place it in his pink, interlaced fingers. He takes it in his mouth whole.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say.

When we get home, he and I polish off the bag of Fig Newtons and the zookeeper movie. Its abject hollowness makes me sleepy.

I give the kid my bed and a glass of milk by the side of it on my crooked modernist nightstand. I take the couch. I feel as though I am under the surface of the earth. I drift off, thinking of my ex wife and where she must be, all gussied up like that. I try to dream of her.

The next morning she comes by right on time. She has the humanity not to wear the same clothes. I put out orange juice and cereal and fresh strawberries on the sticky kitchen counter. The truth of the matter is that the kid and I ate Fig Newtons for breakfast. I went out to the deli before he got up and bought him a fresh bag.

“How was it? What’d you boys get up to?” she asks, pulling the kid’s puffy red coat that I forgot about, over his head.

“This and that,” I say. “The kid’s a real charmer.”

“Oh yeah? Want one of your own now?” she smiles in a way that tells me I should not give her the answer.

I smile back. “You know me.”

“I certainly do.”

The boy hugs my ex wife’s leg. I can’t think of a single valuable thing I own. I look at my stupid toaster that I don’t use.

“Everything ok with you?” she asks. “You look more morose than usual.”

I think back to a time when the world still belonged to us.

“Porquoi—do you know what that means?”

“Why,” she says, gently stroking the boy’s hair.

“Yes.” I say, “Exactly.”

 

Wednesday, 7:45 PM

They leave the car running and duck into Kwik Trip for what Nate insists on calling “necessities.”

He and Melanie walk the aisles slowly, trailing fingers over nonsense items: foam beer koozies, ping pong balls, flip-flops in the shape of Minnesota. Athlete’s foot medicine. Paper clips. Mints whose flavor is identified as “fart-taste.”

There’s an aisle of candy and an aisle of chips. They float down each, and Melanie is certain the man behind the counter, old and tough and sick of everyone’s shit, assumes they’re going to steal something. He raises to his toes to watch them.

Near the beer cooler there is a small display of remaindered clothing. The t-shirts would fit an obese person, yet Nate holds one to his chest as if to check its fit. The hem hangs by his knees.

“Breathtaking,” Melanie says.

Nate flips through the choices. John Deere. Golden Gophers. Minnesota State Fair.

“That one,” Melanie says. She holds the state fair t-shirt to her chin, modeling. It is poorly silk-screened with the words

Everything’s Better on a Stick!

Nate takes one of the Gopher t-shirts, and nearby finds a matching baseball cap and two pairs of heart-shaped sunglasses. All of this he deposits in front of the old man behind the counter, who frowns at the pile.

“You here to yank my chain?” he asks.

Nate shakes his head solemnly. “No, sir,” he says.

“Pete send you?” the man asks. “Is he behind this?” “No, sir.”

“Nobody wants this stuff.” The old man holds up Nate’s t-shirt then looks at Melanie. “You in some kind of trouble, Miss?”

He’s probably imagining the worst of what he’s seen on TV— tortured prostitutes, kidnapped ex-wives, human trafficking rings—but that kind of trouble isn’t the trouble Melanie is in.

Hers is a more usual kind: she’s flown here to be with a man married to someone else.

“No trouble at all,” she says. She smiles and hopes it looks convincing.

The old man touches a pair of sunglasses with the tip of his finger, as if he’s afraid it might snarl to life. “Something’s fishy about this,” he says.

“It’s all right,” Nate says. “I’m a cop. This is police business.” He digs his badge out of his coat.

The old man squints. “That for real?”

Nate hands it over so he can examine it. It’s for real, and just being in its presence makes Melanie uncomfortable. When Nate broke up with her at twenty-six, both of them fresh from graduate school, he cited his career as one of the reasons they couldn’t be together.

“Our life paths just don’t mesh,” he’d said as Melanie lay weeping on her bed. He stroked her hair. “Mel, we’re so different. A cop and a screenwriter? What will that be like in five years? We couldn’t ever have kids.”

“What does that mean?” Melanie demanded. “Why the fuck not?”

But he only frowned, as if the answer were obvious, and continued to comb his fingers through her hair.

Now he gestures to a rack of chips. “Do we need snacks?” he asks.

The two of them are already a couple of gimlets in, and they have a bottle under the front seat of the car. “We have the gin,” Melanie says.

“Okay,” Nate says. He looks back at the man. “We’re good on snacks.”

“Well, that’s fine,” the man says, pushing the badge to Nate.

He rings up the t-shirts, the sunglasses, the baseball cap. “It’s $17.95.”

Nate hands him a twenty and waves off the change. “Have a good night,” he says. He puts his hand on Melanie’s lower back— it’s the first time they’ve touched since he picked her up at the airport—and guides her toward the door.

Wednesday, 8:10 PM

They drive for a while, passing the gin back and forth, taking a tour of the blank land stretching between towns. She is careful not to touch Nate when she takes the bottle from him. She doesn’t want to confuse touch with something else, like decision. She still isn’t sure.

They’d taken pains to avoid promises or plans beyond the most basic: Melanie would fly to Minneapolis and Nate would pick her up. No one else would know. Melanie’s friends think she has a speaking engagement in Colorado; Nate’s wife thinks he’s training in Duluth.

Nate pulls into the parking lot of another gas station and cuts the engine. Melanie studies him. He looks different, like a slightly inflated version of himself. He’s put on weight. He’d warned Melanie about it before she came, breaking news with a bunch of fat cop jokes.

“Maybe it’s happiness,” Melanie suggested. “Maybe your life agrees with you.”

“Maybe,” he said, managing, somehow, to sound neither incredulous nor convinced.

Now he passes her a t-shirt and a pair of sunglasses. “We’re nearby,” he says.

During the first round of gimlets Melanie decided she wanted to see his house. This was a concession; what she really wanted was to meet his wife and two year-old daughter. But how could that happen? What would she do—pretend to be a Jehovah’s Witness stopping by to preach the Good Word? A local politician glad-handing for votes? A lost courier? Ridiculous. There was no way. But at least she could see the house, see the place where Nate lived. Maybe that would help her, one way or the other.

Melanie shoves the shirt over her head. This isn’t anything like how she’s imagined an affair to be. Movies, television, other people’s stories—all so sexy and dramatic. Those scorching looks. Those dark alleyway kisses. How does anyone decide so quickly?

If only she hadn’t written the movie, that stupid film she’d first imagined as post-apocalyptic with a twelve year-old heroine but, in a side-tracked, wine-soaked fit, had actually written as a dark, dreamy movie about what would happen if Nate came back to her. Wine was also to blame for her sending the script to her agent when she should have stuck it in a drawer. But before she could truly process these events, the movie was cast and shot. Then came the Oscar buzz and, later, the Oscars themselves— two for the lead actors and another for Melanie’s script.

During all of this, Melanie never told Nate about the film. She’d never called to run it by him or ask how he might feel seeing a version of himself on screen. She convinced herself it wouldn’t be a problem because it wasn’t a movie he would ever see. There was a lot of crying in the movie, a lot of drawn-out lovemaking, and a subplot involving a mother with Alzheimer’s. Nate would rather die than pay to watch those things. Plus, they hadn’t spoken since his baby was born, so he had no idea what she was working on. Melanie figured there was a good chance the whole thing could be released and go through its press cycle without Nate knowing a thing about it.

But at three A.M. the night of the Academy Awards Nate called just as the hired car dropped Melanie off at home. It had been a long night of champagne and tiny appetizers that, despite her best efforts, Melanie couldn’t cobble together to stave off bone-shaking hunger.

When she answered, she knew immediately he’d been drinking. “That actor was really good-looking,” he said. “You must have had a handsome muse.”

She slammed the car door and watched it pull away. The night had turned chilly and somewhere along the way she’d lost her wrap, so she shivered, teeth chattering. Her mind felt slack from champagne and terror, and she scrambled to find something to say. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I hope you aren’t mad.

“Did you like it?” she asked.

“I did,” he said. “Stephanie too.”

It seemed terrible, the idea of Nate’s wife—a dental hygienist from Nebraska—gazing up at the screen and thinking how romantic it was, how beautiful, how lovely—when the story was about her husband and what could have happened if he’d come to his senses.

“Does she know?” Melanie asked.

“No,” Nate said. “She’s doesn’t know a thing about you.” Melanie slides the heart-shaped sunglasses up the bridge of her nose and consults the mirror. It is dusk. The empty bowl of Minnesota sky is flooded pink and purple. There is no need for the glasses anymore, but the anonymity feels appropriate.

How could Stephanie know nothing about her? After all, Melanie and Nate had been together for three years. And surely Nate and Stephanie must have talked about their own past relationships. Wouldn’t they have compared notes? Revealed the sorry state of affairs that had led them to each other? But apparently not. Nate had made it so Melanie never existed at all.

Nate plucks at his giant t-shirt, blousing the fabric around his waist. “The house across the street from ours is for sale,” he says. “We’ll park there. It won’t be suspicious.”

He drives them through subdivision after subdivision, each of the streets named after a fruit: Persimmon. Peach. Lingonberry. But there is no fruit to be found, only scraggly saplings bending in the wind.

Nate turns onto Crab Apple Street and slows, easing the car to the curb in front of a palatial Colonial. A for sale sign sprouts near the edge of the lawn.

“That’s my house,” Nate says, gesturing across the street. “Steph’s SUV is in the driveway.” His own is sitting in the Hertz lot at the airport; the one they are in now is a rental, another disguise.

Melanie turns slowly, taking it in piece by piece. Tiny tricycle in the driveway. Purple ball on the lawn. Rocking chairs on the porch. Melanie leans closer. The edges of the dusk sky have dimmed to black, and it’s easy to see inside the lit-up rooms. At the far end of the house, Melanie sees movement near one of the windows and then the tip of a bushy tail as a dog snuffles by.

“There’s your dog,” she says.

“A Pomeranian,” Nate says. When they were together, he had fantasized about his future dogs, retrievers and setters and pointers, smart dogs with aristocratic faces and lust for blood. “A fucking Pomeranian,” he says. “Can you believe it?”

“What’s its name?” “Dog.”

“Come on. Dog?”

“The toddler’s choice,” Nate explains, shrugging. “When I write it out, though, I spell it D-A-W-G. Thug him up a bit.”

And then Nate’s wife is in the room, perfectly illuminated and glowing. She is the basic nightmare: slim and sylvan, a Shakespearian wood sprite.

“Don’t turn around,” Melanie says. “Your wife.” She leans closer and puts her hand on Nate’s thigh, a move she regrets immediately. How long has it been since she’s touched him?

“I’m getting out,” she says and steps outside before Nate can protest. To keep up pretenses, she nudges one of the pamphlets from the cylinder near the for sale sign. It’s partially waterlogged, but she glances down at the home’s selling points: indoor lap pool, game room, stainless steel kitchen. She raises her eyes and makes like she is taking in the home’s possibility, then turns to examine the neighborhood. Would anyone notice her gaze lingers longest on Nate’s house and the woman inside, bending to heap her arms full of toys—both child’s and dog’s—before leaving the room?

Melanie ducks back into the car. Nate’s face is frozen in an odd way, as though he’s had a minor stroke.

“This was a mistake,” she says. “We need to get out of here.” “Yeah,” he says and has the car in drive before she can get the door fully shut.

Wednesday, 9:38 PM

Another bar. That’s what they decide they need. Nate drives through the suburbs—Edina, Eden Prairie, Chanhassen— and stops finally somewhere in Chaska. The bar is a hastily-constructed clapboard structure lit with a Leinenkugel’s sign, its Indian princess logo poorly translated into neon. She looks lipstick-smeared and demented.

Inside, the crowd is sparse. A few men play pool in the back corner, and a few more grimly watch the History Channel. The only woman in the place is asleep on the bar, snoring in the nest of her folded arms.

Melanie finds a table in the back, partially obscured by dart machines. Nate comes back from the bar with a tray of drinks: a set of shots, a couple gin and tonics.

“I think I arrested one of those guys,” Nate says, settling in next to her. Her jerks his head behind him, toward the guys playing pool.

“This is probably reckless,” Melanie says. “Us being out in public.”

“Nah,” Nate says. He leans back to grab a bowl of peanuts from a neighboring table “For all he knows, you’re my wife.”

Melanie closes her eyes and tries to let that remark slip into nothing. Away, away. But it doesn’t go.

They sit quietly for a while. Melanie can’t figure out where to put her hands. She tries her lap, the table, her chin. Every pose she makes feels like crappy stage direction: Girl fidgets, unsure of herself.

What are they doing? Aren’t they smarter than this? Between the two of them, they have degrees and awards and accolades. Nate even received special commendation from the governor after pulling dozens of people to safety when the 1-35 bridge collapsed. She’d seen still shots of him in the national coverage— Nate dragging screaming children out of the water, one under each arm. It seems to her that people capable of such bravery should also be capable of restraint, though, really, what does one thing have to do with the other?

“Your house is lovely,” she says finally.

Nate sets down his drink. “You don’t have to do that,” he says. “We don’t need to do niceties.”

Across the room, one of the men playing pool makes an impressive shot and the rest cheer and clink glasses.

“We have to do something,” she says.

It is strange they suddenly have nothing to say after so many months of late-night phone calls, conversations that ended as the sun came up, first for Nate, then for Melanie. Melanie felt breathless those mornings, her chest cracked open from the pressure of her longing.

“What are we doing?” she asked once, afraid of the answer. None of the ones she came up with on her own were very good.

“Just remembering,” Nate said. “That’s all.”

Melanie is warm from the gin and shifts, uncomfortable, in her chair. Nate won’t look at her. He pretends to study the dart machine’s instructions for Cutthroat Cricket.

“You can go,” Melanie says. “At any time. I can get a cab.” Nate shakes his head. “No,” he says, “I’m not leaving.”

They are quiet again, and the noise of the bar overtakes them: the crisp click of a pool cue hitting its mark, the television’s chatter about Nazis, an amber trail of whiskey snaking into a glass.

The night’s momentum has faltered. Another bar, more drinks—it had seemed logical, but, really, what are they doing? Somewhere, somehow, the night had split along it seams and left them in a place they didn’t belong.

“I’m going to splash some water on my face,” Melanie says.

She heads for the hall, which pulses in the flickering light of the emergency exit.

In the bathroom, she stares at herself for several long minutes, until the door swings open and the only other woman in the place—the one who’d been napping on the bar—comes in. She pauses near a stall door, appraising Melanie.

“I don’t see a lot of women in here,” she says.

“No?” Melanie asks, smiling, trying hard to look like she hadn’t been seconds from crying.

The woman shakes her head. The dress she is wearing—a cheap black shift, sequined and feathered—rustles against her skin. “Do you have a cigarette?” she says. She holds out her hand before Melanie can respond.

Though she has never smoked, Melanie pretends to look in her purse for a pack of cigarettes. She shakes her head. “I’m out,” she says.

“Maybe a mint?”

Those she has, in spades. At LAX, Melanie killed time before her flight standing in front of the personal hygiene wall of the kiosk near her gate. She’d bought everything that seemed even vaguely associated with adultery: lotion, mints, mouthwash, Excedrin, a beard grooming kit, wet wipes.

She hands a whole package of mints to the woman. “Keep it,” she says. “I have plenty.”

The woman clutches the package under her armpit and swings open the stall door. “He’s handsome,” she says, turning to look again at Melanie, who can, out of the corner of her eye, see her own reflection in the mirror, and it is stricken. “Your man out there,” the woman says. “Handsome.”

“Oh,” Melanie says. “Thank you.”

The woman changes her mind about the stall and lets the door swing shut. “You two having an affair?” she asks.

Melanie isn’t sure what happens then, but it feels like what she imagines a stroke to be. A jumble of words explode soundlessly in her head and jagged lines of lightning cut across her vision.

“No!” she says. “God, no! Not at all!”

The woman removes the container of mints clutched beneath her armpit and pours out a handful. She crunches into them savagely. “Honey,” she says, and the room is awash in spearmint, “you need to get better at lying.”

Melanie’s heartbeat careens into a desperate, militant rhythm. “It’s obvious?” she asks.

The woman smiles. “Oh, sweetie,” she says. “But how?”

The woman tugs at her hemline, which is far too high for her age. She smiles again, extra sweet, the way you’d smile at a baby or a dumb dog.

Melanie’s cheeks burn. The woman’s dress, the nap on the bar. It’s suddenly clear: she’s a prostitute. A working girl waiting for business to pick up.

The woman comes over to the sinks next to Melanie. “Is this your first?” she asks.

“My first?”

“Affair.”

Melanie nods. “I don’t know how I’m going to do it,” she says. “You’ve got some guilt?”

Melanie isn’t sure what she’s got, really. Stephanie was a fixture in Nate’s life a mere seven weeks after he’d ended things with Melanie, and because of this Melanie had spent years planning elaborate scenarios in which she would exact revenge. But for a while—at least before the baby came—Nate tried to keep in touch, to keep things friendly, and this way Melanie learned things about Stephanie that made her seem less hateful. Melanie knew, for example, that Stephanie had lost her virginity in the parking lot of a Days Inn. She knew Stephanie called Nate “Pickle,” something he’d vehemently tried to dissuade early on. She also knew that Stephanie had crippling anxiety and sometimes Nate came home to find her in the car, still in the garage, weeping and paralyzed, never having made it to work.

Melanie sort of liked Stephanie, or the character of Stephanie she’d built from these details. And Melanie definitely liked the idea of the little girl, Opal, who liked to ride the dog like a horse—yelling yee-haw! every time she clutched his scruff and clambered onto his back—and slept each night in the shadow of a giant stuffed armadillo. Shouldn’t knowing these details make it harder? Shouldn’t they override the stupid, brutish argument that keeps clattering around her head: but he’s mine.

“I don’t know if it’s guilt,” Melanie says.

“You’ll have to get out there and figure it out,” the woman says. She leans in to examine her own face in the mirror. It’s heavily made up, the foundation at least two shades too dark for her. “That’s the only way.”

Melanie washes her hands. Despite having turned only the cold knob, the water comes out painfully hot but Melanie keeps her hands beneath the stream, watching them turn red. She begins to cry.

The woman reaches over and turns off Melanie’s water. She yanks away a paper towel and wraps Melanie’s hands tenderly, almost like a bandage, and presses them between her own.

“I’m going to tell you what I think,” she says. “You’re here. That means you’ve already made up your mind. Don’t pretend you’re waiting around for permission. You already gave it to yourself.”

Melanie cries harder.

“Your makeup,” the woman says. She unwraps the towels and blots until the tears stop. Melanie blows her nose and wipes her eyes.

“You’re all right,” the woman says. She opens Melanie’s purse and digs until she finds a small pot of blush and a tube of mascara. “Hold still,” she says. She blows her minty breath across Melanie’s face to dry it. She works quickly, feathering the blush across the apples of Melanie’s cheeks and applying two coats of mascara. “There. You’re good.”

Melanie turns to look at her reflection. Her skin is puffy, but her makeup is back on and she looks marginally less terrifying. She can’t remember a time she has felt more grateful. In this moment, her love for this woman is immense. “Thank you,” she says.

“Now we’re even,” the woman says. The mints stay tucked in the crook of her armpit even when she waves Melanie out the door.

When she steps into the hallway, Nate is there, leaning against the wall, waiting.

“Have a good time?” he asks, grinning. “Make some friends?” He reaches over—slowly, as if she is a skittish horse—and lifts the purse from her hands. “I think it’s time to get out of here,” he says.

Melanie nods. “Yes.”

“Let’s go to the car,” he says, moving his hand to the small of her back. He leads her down the hallway, which seems longer now and darker. The light from the exit sign beats erratically, matching perfectly the cadence of desires in Melanie’s dark heart.

Wednesday, 10:48 PM

While Nate drives to Melanie’s hotel the radio plays quietly in the background. “Silver Springs” comes on, seeming like a sign, Stevie Nicks’ ragged voice howling You’ll never get away from the sound of the woman that loves you.

At the hotel, Nate puts himself in charge of Melanie’s bags and loiters near the elevators while she checks in. They ride to the fifteenth floor and say nothing. They haven’t said much since they left the bar. Nate made a few offhand comments about restaurants or galleries they passed, but other than that it was quiet.

“You still have time,” she says. He has her large suitcase in one hand and her carry-on slung over his shoulder. “To back out,” she says. The key registers and the door opens loudly, the lock sounding like teeth unclenching.

“I know,” Nate says.

While she shoves her suitcase in the closet, Nate fixes them a drink. He fills the ice bucket and pours the gin. From his pocket he produces a lime—boosted, probably, from the last bar.

They sit on the bed. The room is nice, expensive—she’d sprung for a suite, thinking an affair would be better suited to a large room.

Melanie sets aside her drink and curves her body toward his. He turns off the light, and comes down next to her. They are bathed in the beatific glow of the city, a light silver and forgiving.

“You’re sure?” she asks him. She doesn’t want to be presumptuous about his choice. Hers, she knows now, was made long ago. It feels ancient and heavy, something she’s been carrying since the moment he told her they could no longer be together. Her choice was always—will always be—yes. She can sense other choices, smarter choices, moving around the periphery of her brain, dragging their reasons—the wife, the girl, the disaster that is sure to follow—but how can they be expected to compete with the choice that will bring her back to where she’s longed to be?

Everything about them had, right from the start, felt fated. They met in line to get ID passes that allowed graduate students to stay in academic buildings long after undergraduates had been shooed elsewhere. They’d exchanged only hellos in that line, but then, over the course of the first month of school, they ran into each other everywhere: the bus stop, the coffee shop, the sculpture garden, the laundromat, the Ethiopian restaurant at the edge of town. Then one night they found themselves in line for the bathrooms at a damp, disintegrating townie bar that occasionally brought in good bands, and Nate stuck out his hand.

“This is getting ridiculous,” he said, and they shook. “How many people are at this school?” “Forty thousand,” she said.

“And here you are,” he said. “Again.”

When she came out of the bathroom moments later she found him waiting for her. He bought her a drink, and they spent the rest of the night huddled in a far corner, trying to be heard over the band. After last call, they were herded out, caught in the crush of the crowd, and Melanie lost sight of the friends she’d come with. Nate called a cab for her, but by the time it arrived she and Nate were hidden in the alley, pressed against the cool brick of the building. He kissed her in a way that made her feel savored, known. He bit her, catching her lower lip in his, but gently, and Melanie moved closer, memorizing the feel of him. Back on the street, the taxi beeped once then drove away, its lights washing through the alley, illuminating them, throwing languid shadows against the wall.

“This is exactly what I knew it would be like,” Nate said. He framed her face with his hands and pressed their foreheads together.

“Oh, you knew?” Melanie asked, teasing.

He smiled and kissed her, lightly, on the cheek. “Hoped,” he said. “Really, really hoped.”

From then on it was easy. Their relationship was insistent and steady, right up to the day Nate left. Afterward, Melanie’s friends badgered her. Weren’t there signs? Surely there were signs! He must’ve given some kind of indication. But he hadn’t. Melanie had a stack of dog-eared wedding magazines under her bed, and they’d recently spent an entire Sunday touring each jewelry store in town—his idea!—discussing payment plans and the virtues of asscher-cut over square.

But. That word—but!—so small and terrible. It invaded her life, became an echo, a litany in her head: He loved me. But. We were so happy. But. We made plans. But. Everything hinged on that one word.

Now she moves even closer, pressing her forehead into his. Up close, his eyes are remarkable, great pools of icy, Nordic blue, but it’s difficult, suddenly, to look at him. There’s so little left to say. In a moment, they will be kissing and it will be just like it always was, and the room will light with different colors— blue, red—as outside sirens wail down the avenue. And there will be another sound too, one only Melanie can hear, subtle, a different kind of wail. It will roll toward her across the prairie, gaining speed, gaining momentum—the sound of exquisite misery coming her way.

May 30, ‘09. My last splurge in NYC was this 30-pound slab of wax. I paid $150 for it, and made this mystic writing pad. I thought I had enough trust fund money left to buy it, but I didn’t. Turns out I spent most everything on pastry trends: Bundt cakes, boxes of rainbow macaroons, cronuts, donut holes shaken with powdered sugar, pastel mini-cupcakes. I had an Etch-a-Sketch as a kid. It did the same thing as this $150 DIY, but my therapist practices in Brooklyn so I had to use beeswax.

July 5, ’09. What I write here will stick until I push the words back down into the wax and write something else. I sometimes tilt the wax all around, in different lights and at different times of day, to see if I can read what I wrote a week or month ago because I don’t remember who I was then. Mystic writing pads were Freud’s idea. I’ve already been assigned to read Freud six times at Sarah Lawrence, no joke. I get him because sometimes I have penis envy. If I had a dick, I could say a lot of bullshit in a low, gravelly voice, and idiots would be like, “Yeah! Wow! Your dick’s so smart!” I wouldn’t mind a following of idiots.

July 20, ’09. Dave is such an authentic and original writer. His selfhood, his soul are so accurately represented on the page! What he does is pure, unmediated, a true expression of his mastery.

September 8 ’09. Dave listens to a lot of didgeridoo music…

October 15 ‘09. My mom works as a registrar and all of the books on the bookshelves in her house are alphabetized. I think I should alphabetize our books, but we don’t have any bookshelves in our apartment because it’s tiny (Prospect fucking Heights). I moved in with Dave, why why why why? BECAUSE YOU LOVE HIM YOU TWIT

January 3, ’10. I haven’t gotten my period for two months. I cut out gluten and am doing a lot of Pilates. I think that might be why??

February 12, ’10. It’s still hard to believe that this is my life at 23. If you’d asked me a few years ago what I’d be doing, I would never have imagined that I was going to be a mom. But it is my fate. Dave and I did an Ayahusca ceremony in Harlem, and I had a vision where I felt my baby kick. I found out I was pregnant a week later. When I called my mom to tell her, I said that the Amazons had come to me in a vision and planted Chullachaqui in my womb. She said, “No, Caro. Dave did that.” That’s the difference between New York and Wisconsin. I’m about to graduate, I start work at this artisanal soap distillery in Bushwick, and then, bam: here’s Chullachaqui! (That’s gonna be her name). Dave suggested it. He says it’s the name of a Peruvian forest nymph. He put it in one of his stories. It’s beautiful.

April 2, ’10. I get bad morning sickness, and sometimes I listen to the sound of the ocean on YouTube videos. The East River smells like something dead. I listen to the sound of rain on the ocean because I’m so sweaty and my stomach flips around all day. Sometimes I stumble onto videos of other people’s dead, other people’s grandparents. My grandma’s voice is only on VHS at my mom’s house, speaking at Passover, at my fifth birthday, but my mom doesn’t have a tape player anymore.

May 8, ’10. I graduated from college today. I was so pregnant I just felt nauseous and couldn’t wear stupid cute pumps like the other girls.

August 12, ’10. When I read Wikipedia after I got out of hospital, I found out that Chullachaqui is the name of an ugly creature in a Peruvian folk tale, a masculine humanoid thing with one leg that’s shorter than the other. I guess Dave didn’t read the Wikipedia page or maybe Dave can’t read. Grandpa thought we were saying Chulla’s name was “Tchotchke,” and he couldn’t get over what a terrible name that was for a little girl. He kept saying, “Caroline, tchotchke means a tacky little thingamabob! Tchotchke! A tacky thing! This precious angel is not TACKY.”

September 2, ‘10. Now that I’m back home in Wisconsin for good, I’m not sure I want to leave. My mom is rich because of the grisly nature of my dad’s death (it involved a boat and the Mosinee River Dam), and she would have paid our NYC rent if I’d asked. But Dave was too proud to take a handout, so we took my mom up on her offer of a nearly-free place to live instead. This is how she sold it to us (we who were not too choosy in the first place), basically verbatim:

“It’s cheap considering you get a clean, well-kept home, furnished,” my mom said.

I was like, “Mom, I’m not disagreeing. It’s a great place. You’re very generous.”

“I was going to rent it anyway, but I’m picky about who moves in,” she said. “No riff raff.”

We, Dave, Chulla, and I, live in my mom’s mother-in-law apartment now, a place in her backyard that I used as a spy hideout when I was a kid. We’re supposed to pay $100 a week, but Mom’s so happy to have her granddaughter around that she’ll never collect. We don’t really have the money anyway.

September 10, ’10. Dave says he feels a fissuring between his concept of himself and the way that he inhabits this particular space. He’s like, “Brooklyn was my place.” OK, but he made like zero dollars as an adjunct, and only published one book in 1997 called A Natural Outcropping of an Internal Subjectivity, about sexy twentysomethings in crisis. The newspapers lauded him as a wunderkind. Dave says being a wunderkind was a terrible curse because he’s never published another book. I convinced him to leave New York because I wouldn’t raise a baby without green space in an apartment so tiny that even the stove was miniature. But Dave doesn’t like the Packers or Midwest kitsch or Midwest Gothic or fall leaves or parades or mock brick facades or coffee shops serving enormous frosted cinnamon buns or strip malls or regular malls. He also doesn’t like Pan-Asian restaurants because he can’t tell the ethnicity of the proprietors so he can’t say “Ni hao!” like he did in Chinatown. He said “Ni hao” to some Korean-American kids who were fucking jogging the other day.

September 15, ’10. My mission in Wisconsin is to show people that there are pencils that write so much better than the standard No. 2’s—ash pencils made from fallen trees taken out of the suicide forests of Japan that draw unsmudgeable lines, clay pencils designed in the 15th-century and made by the same Russian monk order they were back then. I’m selling Ludwig van Wodka pencils—Phillip Lopate’s favorite—for $100 apiece. When I open my pencil store, people will be able to write with these pencils, smell them, hold them. I don’t have a shop yet, just a cart that I wheel to the Saturday farmer’s market. A lady picked up the Russian monk pencil, let it weigh down her palm, and said, “It’s hefty.”

September 20, ’10. My psyche is easier to communicate now with now because, like Wisconsin, it is slow, calm, dull, palatable.

September 29, ’10. In Wisconsin, every sensation is new and precise. Pregnancy changed my eyes, I think, made them too demanding, made them expect too much of my attention. The leaves on College Avenue are crisp. They look like they stand still when I see them from certain angles, from too far away, from down the block and across the river. The dogs in my childhood neighborhood bark like they’re vicious, and when I see them, my eyes tell me that they’re moving faster than they should be, bouncing higher, even though my brain disagrees. My memories are exploding. I look at my high school and see my English teacher, the kids in my homeroom, the hairs I found twice in my lasagna. I see the first boy I ever kissed in the second-floor window of his parents’ house. I can see that the river is full of bodies and branches and car tires. I breaststroke through the stagnancy in my mother’s house. I puzzle over the pair of shoes I once threw over a phone wire. They are grey, not brown. They are Nike, not Adidas.

November 20, ’10. Dave was my writing professor at Sarah Lawrence, and when I took his introductory fiction course, he said that we were meant to be together, even though I was 21 and he was 43. I thought we should have sex, sure, but he thought we should get married, instantly, per the level of passion he felt. When I said, “Maybe later? Like, when I graduate?”, he clung to me, his fingers lingering on my arms and slipping down the sides of my shoes. He cooked me eggs and baked me lasagna, he drifted behind me with his hands on my shoulders, my back, my knees until I decided that his convictions could lift up my convictions until I had some. We didn’t get married, but I moved in.

November 27, ’10. Dave might apply at Lawrence down the street for a teaching job, but those liberal arts professors all have doctorates. He just has an MFA. If he did get the job, the girls there would probably swoon for him like I did at 21. I didn’t swoon, I guess, I coalesced. Midwestern girls might be easier to seduce because we’re, on the whole, fatter. It seems so insane that I have a boyfriend who lives in my old super-spy hideout with me and wants girls to cream at his thoughts and a little daughter who is named something unpronounceable and incomprehensible and an expensive writing pad that I talk about as a metaphor for my mind and a converted hotdog cart that I sell expensive pencils out of, but that’s the life I’ve got. Until I press my hand into this wax to make it go away, I guess.

December 4, ’10. Dad died almost 10 years ago and Mom is online dating. She is! We made her profile. She looks beautiful in a string of blue beads in her picture. She wrote that her three essentials in life are as follows: 1. Family 2. Food (guilty pleasures: chocolate and pizza!) 3. Long walks on sandy beaches. There are no sandy beaches here. “It’s winter in Wisconsin, Caroline,” she said. “I’ve gotta give the guys something to dream about.”

March 8, ’11. I told my mom about the pickers who had all gotten lupus in Apopka, Florida, about how they’d sued but the state wouldn’t pay them anything anyway. She said she knew that part of Florida, that it was rough there, that they were probably all illegals anyway.

March 17, ’11. Dave sometimes writes his stories with the suicide forest pencil, even when I ask him not to. He doesn’t think that I know he does it, but I do. He re-sharpens the lead with a penknife, but I can see the shavings on top of the apple cores and spoiled rice in the garbage can, and I can tell the pencil is getting shorter. I tell him to stop using it, but he always shrugs, grins by only lifting up his one side of his mouth. I think he thinks it makes him look like Harrison Ford. He’s always shrugging, grinning like someone who’s recently had a stroke. Always always always always He doesn’t look like Harrison Ford. Dave is probably writing with the pencil, his stories, his thoughts, on pieces of paper that preserve them, rather than on a piece of wax that isn’t supposed to.

April 9, ’11. Dave says that my work, like his, should be my heritage to myself, and our daughter’s life should be an expression of our essential beings, a continuous, reasonable, and natural outcropping of the truthfulness of our love and our union. Chulla is a little baby who clings to my sweater in a way that makes her feel like insulation.

June 21, ’11. Dave believes in relating the particularities of local experience and the specific to a larger cosmic order. “More precisely,” he said once as he put his fingers to his chin.

“I would label this concept ‘tradition.’” Chulla was asleep when he said it, and I just wanted to watch Gordon Ramsay yell at some poor schmo on the TV and discover new pencil brands on obscure, poorly-translated international websites. Just pencils, nice, precise, and easy. But Dave wanted to talk about the linkage between locally-based creations and universally-relatable lineages. Dave likes to pretend. He knows he’s really only interested in good food and malleable women, not in serious intellectual pursuit. Dave hates himself really.

August 11, ’11. Dave’s moving to California. I MUST I MUST I MUST he said over and over again like he was Juliette Lewis playing that retarded girl in The Other Sister. I must I must I MUST He says he wants a new place to write, a place that isn’t mired and stagnated in the traditions of the past. LOL. California’s not a place of its own, I don’t think, but at least he won’t be here. I bought a new pencil today. It has a white gold cap and is carved from repurposed wood from an abandoned country church on the Saskatchewan plains. The lead was mined piece by piece, separated from the dark mud of the Appalachian forests. The man I bought it from was a Christian, he said the pencil was supposed to make Jesus write through you. I laughed on the phone, but I bought it anyway. I might sell it at the farmers’ market this weekend. Or I might write with it myself.

We want to extend a huge congratulations to writer Grant Gerald Miller whose short story “We Should Have Named Him”  (published in our first issue) was selected by Robert Olen Butler to be included in the anthology The Best Small Fictions 2015. We’re so proud!

by Adam Jernigan

Curtis walked until West Girard turned into East and his feet hurt. It was 5:15 in morning and the sky was still as black as it comes when he went through the bright blue door with the sign above saying PHILADELPHIA POLICE DEPT 26TH DISTRICT. Inside, it was too hot and crowded. He felt itchy. But he kept still as he waited his turn. When it came, he unfolded the flyer with the pictures and put it flat on the counter with the thick scratched glass between him and the cop. He said, “I’m the one killed them kids.” He turned the paper around so the two children in the black and white photo stared right up at the policeman on the other side of divide.

Around him in the stuffy room all the sniffling and cussing and shuffling stopped. The all of a sudden quiet made Curtis sweat. He started to unzip his coat, but the officer put his hand up and Curtis stopped moving. Somebody held up a phone and took his picture.

The man behind the glass was saying things into a walkie-talkie stuck to his shirt. A door in the waiting room Curtis hadn’t noticed opened, and a white man in a suit stood there, said for him to come along. Curtis nodded and took the flyer and followed. A lady’s voice, saying that was bullshit because she’d been there all night long, got cut off when the door closed behind him.

The man in the suit didn’t look back to see that he was still following. That made Curtis feel okay about him. It wasn’t too warm anymore. They went in a room with brown carpet that was so thin it was as hard as the concrete it covered. The walls were cinder blocks painted glossy grey like pigeons and all pocked up. There was a metal table bolted to the floor in the middle of the room with a microphone standing up on it. The man said he was Detective Moore. He pulled out one of the two chairs. Curtis sat in the other.

He did the same thing with the flyer then—unfolded it, carefully because the creases were thin like tissue, and made the kids stare up at the policeman. He said it was him that did it.

“So you said.” Moore took out a notebook and wrote something on the top of a blank page. His knuckles were hairy. “What’s your full name?”

Curtis gave it.

“Age?”

“Thirty one, about.”

“From around here?”

“Dauphin up by 16th. My whole life.”

“Who with?”

Curtis pressed his lips together, pulled them in between his front teeth and bit down, not hard. Moore looked up from the notebook. Curtis licked his lips like that’s what he’d wanted to do. He put his hand over the faces on the flyer, said, “It was me. Put em in the river.”

Moore leaned back. He was skinny with pointy hunched shoulders. His clothes were too big. The collar of his shirt was buttoned to the throat with still enough room between skin and cloth for a couple fat fingers. His neck was raw and bumpy from shaving, his cheeks sunken and shadowed to the color of the insides of McNuggets. The hair on his head was short and thin enough to see that his scalp had a boiled-red look to it. He squinted a little. “Do you know what you are saying?”

The looks and the questions, like he didn’t know what he was doing, made Curtis mad. He got angry at himself too. Never go to the cops.

Never. His dad had told him that the first time after a bunch of older kids had wanted to start something. Walking home on Girard from school in seventh grade three boys started yelling. “Yo retard.” “We talking to you.” “Stop motherfucker.” He did when they got in front of him. They backed him up against a brick wall that scraped his jacket. The three surrounded him. He didn’t look up, didn’t have to to know who they were. “Nigga smell like piss,” the one in the middle said, spitting it. “You piss yoself?” A hand smacked him hard in the ear, the flat palm making suction that popped once loud inside his head then fizzed like soda. His hat fell off and the wind took it into the street. He pushed off the wall to go after it and six hands held him where he was. “Not til we say.” They yanked his backpack off his shoulder and held it upside down, unzipped. Papers drifted to the ground and scattered on the sidewalk. One caught on a telephone pole, hugging it like a notice for a missing dog. Jolly Ranchers fell out of the bag and the boys crushed them under their sneakers. The autobiography of Malcolm X he was never going to read got kicked in the gutter and soaked in brown water. They started in on his jacket. “Empty them pockets.” He crossed his arms around his chest. Fingers dug into his wrists. They tugged on the collar and pulled at the pockets. Fabric ripped. Curtis dropped his hands to his sides and got spun around as the jacket came off. Wind cut through his shirt and went into his blood. They laughed. “Lookit them stains.”

A girl pushing a stroller walked by. Curtis looked her in the eyes. She looked at him, then away quick. She didn’t slow down. The three boys turned to watch her walk in her tight white jeans. One sucked his teeth. Another said something about making more babies. They grabbed themselves like they had to pee. And Curtis took off. He ran north a block and turned on 15th. He heard them coming. They weren’t yelling. Just their feet, fast and light on the pavement. He went down Flora and into the first row house with no door, hoping to go through and out the other side onto Girard. But it was boarded up in the back. He pulled on a piece of wood but it didn’t budge. He couldn’t feel his fingers anymore. And they were in the house now, not even breathing hard. They didn’t say anything, just surrounded him again and swung. He dropped down because he knew it’d be better that way, curled up, with his head covered. They stopped kicking after awhile and grabbed at his shirt. It tore off easy. They took his shoes. They said, “I aint touchin them pants.” They each kicked his one last time before leaving.

He waited a minute in the silence with his eyes shut tight, then got up and started home. On Cabot Street an old cop riding alone pulled over so the front wheel was on the sidewalk. “Come on” was all he said. He let Curtis ride up front and turned the heat on all the way. “I suppose they got everything,” the cop said.

Curtis looked straight ahead, pointed when it was time to turn.

“You know em?” the cop asked.

Curtis nodded and said their names.

“I know their people,” the cop said, “not them though.”

Curtis pointed again. The car slowed to a stop in front of his place. The man put his coat over Curtis’s shoulders and walked him to the door.

His dad came out and pulled him in. “What he do?”

“Nothing,” the cop said. “Just had trouble with some boys is all. I can try and sort it if you want.”

His dad shook his head, took the coat off Curtis and handed it back. Then he shut the door hard.

Curtis had wanted to say something else to the man. He didn’t know what though.

His dad slapped him on the cheek and pushed him against the wall. “Never the police, boy. They come to this house it better be with a charge. Anyway else aint gone fly. You hear?”

Curtis nodded.

“We handle shit on our own.” His finger was an inch from Curtis’s eye. “Who was it?”

Curtis said. He went to bed that night without eating.

His dad woke him sometime late. He stood beside the bed huffing and propped a pipe up against the wall. “They not going to the police neither. Watch.” In the soft yellow light from the street Curtis saw shiny wet spots on the pipe. In the morning they had dried to a kind of brown that was different from the rust. When he got home from school that afternoon it was gone. His ear still hurt.

And those boys crossed the street always when they saw him. One limped. One’s arm swung loose. One twitched. But Curtis didn’t feel any better or any safer.

To Detective Moore he said, “I know cause I did it. Now you know too.”

Moore said, “And I want you to tell me all about it. Do you care if I record what you say?”

Curtis shook his head.

“I also need to bring another officer in, just for a second set of ears. You mind?” Moore got up and left the room when Curtis said he didn’t.

He took off his coat while he waited. He got bored quick and his left leg bounced. He thought about having no place and both legs started going at once. His knees knocked against the underside of the table. The noise made for something else in the room.

Moore came back followed by a man dressed like a cop. “This is Officer Bess. He’s here just to listen.”

Curtis’s legs stopped.

Bess dragged a plastic chair behind him and put it in the corner, took a seat after Moore did, and started picking at his nails. He didn’t look at Curtis. Moore pushed a button beside the microphone. A light glowed red. He spoke for a long time about Curtis coming here on his own, not because anybody made him, and about Curtis talking because he wanted to, not because police asked him. When he was finally done he asked Curtis if all he’d said was true.

Curtis nodded.

“I need you to say it.”

Curtis said it.

Moore put one fingertip on the flyer and said, “You’re here about Tyrese Brown and Omar Gibbon. Correct?”

“I’m the one done it.”

“Did what?”
“Kill em.”

“When?”
“I’s twenty-eight.”

Moore looked down at his notepad. “Three years ago. Where?”

“Fairmont Park. By the river.”

Moore sighed, said, “Can you maybe tell it like you’d tell a story?”

Bess looked down at his feet and shook his head.

Curtis wiped his forehead with his sleeve. He took a deep breath and made his hand into fists under the table. He thought about the shows he used to watch on the TV. He had been sitting in front of it when his dad pulled the cord out of the wall. Curtis hadn’t said anything, hadn’t moved. His dad carried the TV out of the house, banging it against the wall as he opened the front door, and took it down to the corner. When he came back cussing about cheap motherfuckers, Curtis was still sitting in the same place, still staring straight ahead at the hole in the room where the TV had been. He’d never know how the episode ended.

The detective cleared his throat.

Curtis said, “It was cold like now. Light out still. I’d went to the store. Somebody throw away a bunch a bread so I took it and went to give it to the ducks. They quackin and scootin around and peckin at each other to get at what I give em. And this one starts throwing rocks.” He tapped his finger on the flyer in the middle of Tyrese Brown’s face. “The other one laugh when a duck got hit. They all flew off. But I don’t say nothing. Just walk on down the trail to go where the ducks go cause I still got more bread. It’s colder and dark now and I can’t find em but the boys follow me. They throwin rocks at me now. This under the bridge for the trains. I put the all the bread in the water cause I don’t care when they hittin me with rocks and laughin. That bridge made a rock, got real big ones all on the ground. So I throw some at them cause they started it. Hit that laughin one first in his eye and he go quiet. That one that started it just stand there lookin at his friend so I get up real close before I hit him too. I stayed for them to get up cause I know it’s bad even though it aint my fault but they didn’t move. So I put em in the water.”

Moore said, “Were they still alive?”

“What?”

“Could you tell if they were still alive when they were in the water? Moving? Breathing? Anything?”

“It matter?”

“I don’t know yet. It might. Think hard. You see any bubbles?”

Cutis didn’t know what his answer might mean. It made him nervous. He waited until he knew he couldn’t anymore and finally said, “Yeah.”

He’d thrown the bag of bread in the water but wanted it back when he saw some more ducks. It was plastic, full of air, bobbing away from him on the surface like a little ugly balloon. He found a long stick and reached with it. Bending forward with his arms stretched out all the way still wasn’t enough. The end of the stick dropped in the water, making ripples that pushed the bread farther. He stepped out onto a rock. It was slick and his foot slipped off with a splash. He was leaned forward so far he had to put his other foot in the water so as not to fall all the way in. The cold snatched the breath from him. He backed out fast and fell on his ass in the mud. The wet soaked through his jeans and the cold moved from his middle to cover the rest of him. The bag was letting out air as the bread sunk.

He moved up the bank on his hands and knees and started walking. His shoes made squishy sounds. It was all dark by the time he made it back to the street. He couldn’t feel his feet and he stumbled sometimes on the broken sidewalk. On Diamond he walked through a crowd of whores in short skirts and cracked leather jackets. They leaned into car windows and showed their panties to guys on stoops. A vacant’s second floor was burning on 25th. Kids stood around in the street and stared up at the flames that pushed out broken windows and caught on the overhanging roof. Blind dumb pigeons rose up with the smoke. Curtis stopped to watch them scatter and cry and shit. His head tilted back as far as it’d go, his mouth hung open, and he smiled at them. The cold of being still pushed him on. A paddy wagon and three patrol cars blocked up the intersection of 19th and Diamond. The wagon got loaded down with boys fast and it drove off with the three cars following. Curtis didn’t even slow. He turned left up 16th. At Tanner Elementary a lookout leaning on the wall painted bright blue and red and yellow got in his way. He had on a knit hat with loose threads and gloves with the fingers cut off. He put a hand up and asked Curtis what he wanted in a high crackly voice. He was maybe thirteen. Curtis pointed down the block, said, “My house.” The words came out shaky through clicking teeth. The kid gave some kind of wave, asked Curtis what he was waiting on, then leaned back against the wall. The dealer was in the middle of the block under a busted street light wearing a fat black bubble coat with a fur-lined hood pulled up and cinched. Without looking up he said, “Keep moving, fat man.”

When he got inside it felt at first like it was as cold as the outside. Then the warm came. It made all of him shake and twitch and every small move made a sharp hurt. He didn’t hear his dad come down the steps. Curtis jumped when he yelled, “Fuck you been?” His voice was low and thick and hard. He was at the bottom of the steps, panting. His chest swelled and his shoulders rose. “I sent you for cigarettes and you come back hours after all dirty and shit. Fuck’s wrong with you, boy?” He undid his belt and it made that hissing sound as he pulled it free of the pant loops. He brought the strap down on Curtis’s shoulders, across his neck, his cheek. “I asked you a question.” He stretched the belt out and looped the end he’d been hitting him with around his knuckles. He swung the buckle over his left shoulder and brought it down on Curtis’s right leg, then switched sides. The blows were hot. He couldn’t remember getting the cigarettes. Everything in the day already felt so long past it might as well never have happened. When his dad stopped he ran up the stairs. In his room he dropped onto his mattress and covered his eyes. The front door slammed and his dad’s cussing faded.

He didn’t know how much time had passed before the door opened and closed again, softer now. He was still in bed. The mud on his pants was dry and flaky. His socks were wet and his shoes too tight. He just didn’t want to move. He heard his dad stumble on the steps, stop, light a cigarette, breathe in deep and out slow, and start up the stairs again. He was at the doorway and said, “Curtis?” His voice still sounded thick like there was a bubble in his throat.

Curtis knew he wasn’t the angry kind of high anymore, knew he’d got to that sad loving kind now. Either way made Curtis the same kind of scared.

His dad got on his knees at the foot of the bed and started pulling on his wet laces. “What you done?” he said. The shoes made sucking sounds coming off. His socks peeled away. It felt so good he didn’t care about anything. He told about the ducks and said he was sorry. His dad stood and crushed the cigarette out on the floor. He sniffled, wiped his nose with a hand. Then he crawled on to the bed and put his arm around Curtis. “I don’t know what’s gonna come of you,” he said. The words already had a half-sleep sound to them. He put his face in Curtis’s coat. His arm relaxed and his breathing changed. Curtis stared into the dark corner of the room and listened to his father sleep. He was heavy and warm against him.

Curtis was folded over now with his elbow on the metal table and his face down in the crook of his arm, so tired all of sudden his thoughts just stopped. The Detective Moore tapped his pen on the table and said, “Stick with me, just a bit longer.”

He lifted his head and wiped some crust from his eyes.

Officer Bess shifted in his seat and looked at his watch when Curtis looked at him.

Moore said, “Did anyone other than the boys see you at the water?”

Curtis shook his head.

Moore pointed at the microphone.

Curtis said, “No.”

“Did you tell anybody about what happened?”
“No.”

“Not then or ever until today?”

“Til today.” He put his head back down on his arm.

“So why now?”

He lifted his shoulders up in a small shrug and waited for Moore to tell him to say it out loud. He didn’t though. There was a little click and the whirr of the tape recorder stopped.

“Jus cause,” he said into his sleeve. He closed his eyes, making everything go black.

Probably wasn’t dark outside anymore. But when it still was he’d gotten out of bed to use the bathroom and seen his dad’s door was open. Light from candle flames flicked and jumped on the walls in the hall. He looked in the room. His dad was sitting up on the bare mattress with his back to the wall. The leather belt with twenty years of teeth marks was across his lap. Two candles burning down to nubs stood in shot glasses beside the bed. His eyes were open and staring at the place in wall were the plaster had crumpled off and the brick showed. He didn’t have a shirt on. Throw up was drying in the little bit of hair he had on his chest. Curtis coughed into his hand and when nothing happened he said, “Pop?” He stepped in the room slowly, lightly, to blow out the candles. He felt something like emptiness when he got close. He pulled the sheet up to cover his dad and his fingers brushed against cold cold skin. He shivered and straightened and just stood there looking down for a while.

Then he went to the other side of the mattress and sat. His weight made his dad shift and slide sideway down the wall until his head hit the floor. Curtis didn’t try to sit him back up. He stayed there for maybe an hour. Some of the street lights turned themselves off. His dad’s guts made gurgling noises and a heavy bad smell made Curtis have to go. He went his dad’s pockets and pulled out a wadded up dollar bill and a quarter.

Between the candles that had gone out on their own was an old silver Zippo lighter his dad had had forever. He flipped the lid and rolled the wheel. It sparked and lit the first time. He laid it on its side on the mattress gentle so it wouldn’t go out. The flame pulsed like it was trying to grab hold of something. Then it did. Black oily smoke coiled up and the burning mixed with the other smell. He went downstairs, put on his shoes and tied them tight, buttoned his coat all the way to the neck, left the door open when he stepped outside, and started walking east. He stopped at the McDonald’s and waited for them to open. He was the first one there. With the dollar and quarter he got a hash brown that he ate while he walked.

“Just because,” Detective Moore repeated. He tapped on the table again and said to Bess, “Keep him separate while I call the courthouse.”

A hand was on Curtis’s shoulder. He looked up at the man in uniform and stood slow. He was led past the bullpen where a hundred eyes watched him, then past other rooms like the one he’d been in so long. They went down a narrow stairway with little uneven steps to a hallway with six heavy metal doors in a row on the right and a smooth wall of concrete on the left. Bess stopped at the first open door and pointed inside.

It was a six-by-eight with no windows. Curtis went in and folded his coat lengthwise first and then into a nice square. He placed it at the foot of the cot. He sat to untie his shoes and then put them side-by-side underneath his bed with the toes pointing out. He took off his socks and stuck one in each shoe. He rubbed between his toes and looked at Bess who was just standing there watching. Curtis said, “Can I get a TV?”

The cop said, “You won’t be here long.”

“Well, but when I get were I’m stayin, can I have a TV?”

by Keija Parssinen

 

When Brin Lambert started her first Regimen, she began to have visions. Unlike other dieters, who hallucinated slices of black forest cake or supersized French fries, Brin, in the fever of hunger, saw Jesus. The more she gave up—sugar, fat, dairy, carbs—the more elaborate the visions became. Neighbors and co-workers took notice of her transformation, complimenting her new figure and beatific glow. In a matter of months, she went from a mediocre real estate agent to the firm’s top saleswoman. With the extra income, she bought a bigger house in a better neighborhood, a 4-2 with a small above-ground swimming pool for her daughter, Laney.
For the first time in her life, Brin felt beautiful. Often, she would stand in front of the deep freeze in the garage, staring at the freezer-burned bacon and ice cream bars and frozen lasagnas that she had been careful to save in the move, as a reminder. There, she would weep from gratitude that she no longer weighed two hundred and thirty seven pounds, that she could, for the first time in her adult life, wear pants. Moments like these, she felt powerful sense of duty to share her message with others, so that they, too, could be freed from the bondage of food.
Six months later, with a proper ad campaign that included radio and television spots, purchased with the commission from the last house she sold, Brin started the Feast of Love church. People came from outlying towns and Plano proper, obese mothers and fathers and children seeking Brin’s cure. Even before the TV spots, they had heard of it from Brin’s realtor friends, who had started the Regimen and never felt or looked better. As word of the church’s successes spread well beyond the Dallas metro area, Brin appeared on Larry King Live and on the cover of Texas Monthly, and parishioners began to call her Brin Lambert, Lamb of God.
Because of this, Laney Lambert often found it difficult to call Brin mother. Laney was unnerved by her mother’s rapturous sheen and the flagrant emotion that came along with it. The Texas Monthly cover featured a picture of Brin looking arachnid as she sat folded on a chair. Above her, the headline read: “Feast of Love, or Fasting to Death?” The article came out just after Laney’s father, Brin’s first husband, had nearly died thirty-one weeks into a year-long fast. Water in the mornings and evenings, a cup of apple cider vinegar mixed with half a cup of honey at midday. Gradually, he had grown pungent, vinegar steaming off him in the July heat. Laney could barely bring herself to hug him for fear of the sour wavelets of moisture, a fact that shamed her after he was hospitalized. He left them soon after and now lived with a new family outside Tulsa. Sometimes, she still missed him, but she never told Brin.
Under scrutiny after the debacle with the first husband, Brin modified the Regimen, but only slightly. Privately, she was convinced that he had failed because he hadn’t truly believed. She had only to look at the pews spilling over with happy, skinny people to know that the church was a success story. And when that wasn’t enough, she pulled out the issue of Forbes magazine in which she came in second after Joel Osteen on the list of wealthiest Christian motivational speakers.
The church celebrated its five-year anniversary by releasing a special edition line of nutritional products and giving every congregant a voucher for any Feast of Love item sold in the gift shop. Soon thereafter, Brin remarried, a tall, God-fearing man named Corson. They agreed she should keep her first married name, because Schifferdecker hardly leant itself to puns. Brin and her family moved again, this time to a stately stone mansion with a long driveway that encircled a fountain and a topiary maze in the spacious backyard.
**
It was in one of the mansion’s seven bathrooms that Laney, fifteen, now stood, examining her body in the mirror. She had small breasts, more suggestion than flesh, but she liked what she saw. She touched her flat stomach, could practically feel it puckering with hunger. Sometimes, the pain got so bad she felt she would fold up like a tent.
She pulled open the bottom drawer of the bathroom cabinet, fumbled around for what she’d hidden there—a small tin of frizz-control pomade that smelled of sickly sweet green apples. Her stomach burbled. Scooping a gob of clear green gel onto her fingers, she brought it close to her nose, then licked it off. But there was no hint of the apples or sugar she smelled. She spat it into the sink.
Downstairs, a door slammed.
“Elaine?” Brin called up from the base of the spiral staircase. “Are you home?”
“Yes, mother,” Laney shouted. She threw on a robe, then took the steps two at a time. She would have to increase her aerobic output if she hoped to keep her new breasts from getting obscene. Sometimes when they passed a large-bosomed woman, Brin sighed quietly and told Laney that only weak-willed women let food dictate their body shape. “Laney,” she would say. “Do you think our Lord would give a woman breasts so big they would give her back pain? A woman’s breasts are one hundred percent fat. If those women would only come to a retreat or try one of our Full Souls cleanses, then Double D cups wouldn’t be such an epidemic.” Brin’s own breasts formed two triangular teabags beneath her oversized shirts.
When Laney arrived in the kitchen, she stood silently in the doorway for a moment, watching her mother unpack a bag of groceries. Brin Lambert, she thought. Her mother filled her with awe, and not a little fear. When Brin stood up, Laney could see the vertebrae moving under her mother’s thin shirt.
Brin noticed her and said, “Laney dear, come here and give Mother a hug.” Laney approached, reaching tentatively around Brin’s mid-section. Laney felt Brin’s long arms coil around her waist, the hands at once caressing and inspecting. When Brin pulled back, she gave Laney a little pinch where her hip started its outward curve. Ouch, thought Laney. Their eyes met.
“You’re glowing, sweetheart,” Brin said. “Have you just cleansed?”
“Not today,” Laney said, thinking guiltily of the pomade.
“If we could capture that flush in your cheeks and turn it into some sort of powder or cream blusher, women would buy it by the pound. We could call it…” She paused, and Laney held her breath, wary of interrupting a moment of illumination. “…Prince of Peach Blush. You could be the spokesmodel. A woman whose body reflects the respect she has for the instrument God gave her.” She took Laney’s chin between her fingers. “I can’t tell you how proud I am of the way take care of yourself. Your body is a prayer, I tell you. A prayer!”
Brin pulled a tiny notepad from her purse and jotted the blush name down.
“What have you had to eat today?”
“A banana.”
“Oh good,” Brin said. “Good.”
As she helped unpack and put away groceries, Laney thought about the calories in the banana; eighty, according to a Weight Watchers calorie guide that she’d found in the West Plano High cafeteria. If Brin knew that Laney was counting calories, she’d be livid. It was against church doctrine. A few years earlier, when Laney had first learned of the concept of burning calories from a friend’s dieting mother, she had asked her friend’s pinched, gray-skinned mother where the burned calories went. The woman had taken a long drag on her cigarette and said, They go to feed the hungry children in Africa.
“How was the Trial of Will, mother?” Laney asked.
“Tough,” Brin said. “Always tough, always a blessed lesson in restraint. Golden calves at every turn. But all of them got through it with divine strength, praise Jesus. Even Bob Taylor, though Edith Pickler caught him hovering in the packaged foods aisle, holding a box of donuts. She said the licentiousness in his gaze was just shocking.”
“Licentiousness?” Laney asked.
“Depravity, honey. God hates it.” Brin paused and looked ceiling-ward. “Laney darling, aren’t you excited to meet Jesus one day? To look upon His perfect beauty?”
Laney nodded yes, but the truth was, she didn’t like to think about it, because it meant thinking about death. “Poor Mr. Taylor,” Laney said, remembering the time that she and Hannah Best had, out of curiosity, gotten drunk off of Mr. Best’s bourbon, then walked two miles to the country store, purchased a box of Entenmanns’s crumb-topped donuts, and finished the entire thing before they got home, the powdered sugar sticking to their gums like glue.
“Well, Bob won’t advance if he stays at his current weight. But he knows the consequences. He must choose his own path. Feast of Love is not a good fit for everyone.”
“Because they’re fat?”
“No, Laney. Heavy people are just sinners in search of grace, and we help them find that grace. But sinners who keep on sinning, that’s another matter altogether. The Bible teaches us that some people cannot be steered away from the Golden Calf. And the Lord smote those people, did he not?”
“Are you going to smote Bob?”
“Smite, honey. And no, only God can smite. But I may have to excommunicate him.”
Laney wondered if she could be excommunicated for the Weight Watchers calorie guide or the pedometer or the Vogue article crumpled in her bedside dresser in which Beyonce lauded the effects of the cranberry juice-flax seed-cayenne pepper diet. Laney was sorry if her behavior disappointed God, but she was sure He’d understand her methods were a means to an end.
Her stomach growled loudly. “I’m going over to Hannah’s for a Supper Meditation,” she said. Was it her imagination, or did the lie burn a little on her tongue?
“Fine, but we’ll eat at six, sharp. Hurry back.”
As she pulled out of the garage, Laney recalled her own Trial of Will advancement ceremony from last year. Her step-father, Corson, said she was too young, but her mother, tall and august as a Corinthian column, said, “Dear, I hardly think you are the moral authority.”
By that point, Corson had just started to noticeably flesh out, and later, at the advancement ceremony that followed each Trial, Brin burned with righteousness as she delivered the sermon:
“I ask you, Feast of Love congregation, IS IT or IS IT NOT a BLESSING to be FREE of scales and calories and exercise and obsessive thoughts of FOOD? To give your body and soul over to HE WHO KNOWS YOU BEST, HE WHO CAN BRING YOU PEACE?”
A thousand congregants met her questions with a roar and uplifted, waving arms. On the huge television screens that projected her face to the furthest corner of the expansive church, Brin’s eyes gleamed.
“Or would you RATHER be back where you WERE, waiting for the next GODLESS CELEBRITY to tell you how to LOOK GOOD IN A BIKINI in TWO WEEKS?”
She stood triumphantly beside the lectern, her headset microphone feeding back ever so slightly, giving an electronic twang to her Texas drawl. The stage lights transformed her blonde highlights into a shining corona.
“Feast of Love congregants, I ask you, to whom do you ENTRUST your TEMPLE? Kirstie Alley? Oprah? Anna Nicole Smith?” At this, she paused and grinned at the shouts of No, Lord, No!, letting her flock become frenzied before ending the ceremony with her favorite line: “How about THIS for a celebrity SPOKESperson, AMERICA? THE LORD JESUS CHRIST!”
**
Laney steered towards the main road that divided the city, a weary stretch of highway lined with brightly-colored but cheerless fast food places. Laney felt sorry for Corson. When he had first joined their family, he’d been muscular and handsome, self-assured in the way of athletic men, and Brin showed him off to all her friends. She daubed on perfume and teased up her hair extra high and stiff before they left on dates. And Laney’s mother was magnetic: beautiful, confident, and suddenly wealthy. Together she and Corson looked like prom queen and king. But then they had married and within a year, Corson started to sneak chicken nuggets and Ho-Hos out to his workbench in the garage. When Laney found a splayed cardboard burger box crushed at the bottom of the trash, she had covered it up with paper towels, trying to protect Corson. But after a while, he couldn’t hide it anymore.
Laney shifted into the turn lane and cut across the road at a break in traffic, turning into the Whataburger parking lot. She pulled around back so the car wouldn’t be visible from the highway. Even though the BMW was a discreet gray and could be mistaken for any number of sedans in the area, she didn’t want to risk Brin’s questions if a nosey congregant saw her there. As she cut the engine, her hands trembled. The orange glow of the sign’s giant “W” fell across the dashboard. Clutching five dollars, she got out and locked the car. From the large vents next to the kitchen, thick steam reeking of fried food poured out. She hoped the smell wouldn’t linger in her hair. Through the glass door, she could see Marshall Barrett smiling. Tyler, the older boy he worked with, was moving his hands as he talked, eyebrows rising and falling as he shook his head dramatically. The dining area was empty, and when she opened the door, both boys looked over.
“Hey there, Lambert,” Marshall said. “Been waiting for you, babe.”
“Hi Marshall,” she said. “Hey, Tyler.” She flipped her hand up in a small, self-conscious wave. She loved it when Marshall called her babe. It sounded so adult. “How’s the burger business?”
“Pretty good,” Tyler said. “Not all of us are as pious as y’all Lamberts.” He thumped his belly.
“You look like you could use a bacon double yourself, girl,” Marshall said. “Got to give me at least a little something to hold on to.”
Now he was teasing, but in a way she liked. He reached out and put his hand over hers on the counter. She shivered. A Mexican woman walked in with a small child, so Laney stepped back to let the boys work.
When she had turned thirteen and got her period, Brin told her that if she let boys touch her before she was married, her skin would break out in a rash. She said it was God’s way of exposing the sin of Lust, just like fat was His way of exposing the sin of Gluttony. The first time Marshall had touched her—rubbing the back of her neck, up down, up down, up down, so slowly—they were at the last football game of the year. With the rain coming down like shards of cold glass and the players’ white helmets streaked brown with mud and the sound of tubas low and victorious from the band section, she’d arched away from his touch, though it had felt so good. When she got home, she rushed to the bathroom, half expecting to see her skin bump and pucker before her eyes. But all she saw were goose bumps, the pale hairs on her neck stiff with electricity.
Laney watched as the woman gathered her food and her child and left.
“Man, it’s boring as fuck around here on Sundays,” Tyler said.
“Got a preacher’s daughter here,” Marshall said, smiling. “Mind yourself, Ty.”
Tyler rolled his eyes. Inhaling quietly, Laney ordered a kid’s meal and handed Marshall the five dollar bill. When he gave her the change, he took hold of her hand and squeezed it around the quarters until it hurt, but in a good way.
“Enjoy that burger, ok?” He tossed some extra condiments into the bag. “See you at school tomorrow.”
Outside, the street lamps formed a chain of orange discs melting into one another. For a moment, Laney didn’t think about food. She didn’t count calories. She closed her eyes and thought of Marshall’s hand on hers. After weeks of hunger, she felt full.
From the road, she heard the blast of a horn. She blinked, straightened up, and walked towards the car. When she passed the trashcan, she jammed the unopened burger bag into the hole.
**
“Corson, didn’t you hear me?” Brin called. “Dinner’s ready.”
She stood in the doorway to the kitchen, backlit by its rows of expensive spotlights. He pulled himself up out of the chair, pelvis first, his knees popping loudly under his substantial weight. He did not like being fat. After enjoying women’s attention for most of his life, starting when he was thirteen and first poured himself into a spandex football uniform, he did not much care for his exile from female notice. But the weight, which originally resulted from unhappiness, now made him weirdly proud, his love handles a revolt against Brin’s despotism.
On the dining room table, a roasted chicken sat in a pool of melted butter, its skin flecked with rosemary. There were whipped red potatoes and a row of fat white asparagus lining the silver tray that Brin’s mother had given them for their wedding. For Corson, Sunday dinners were a torment. Brin took care to make everything look perfect, though they weren’t supposed to eat more than what could fit in their palm. The rest, they donated to the soup kitchen.
“Mother, this looks delicious,” Laney said, glancing at the clock and noticing with relief that she was on time.
“Elaine.” Brin looked horrified.
“I’m sorry Mother,” Laney said, realizing her mistake. “I…I was distracted.”
“Reveling in earthly pleasure will only hinder your faith, you know that.”
“Brin, she said she was sorry,” Corson said.
“Repentance is a fine thing, but you know what’s finer? Discipline.”
“If you like, I can just drive this over to the soup kitchen right now,” he said, gesturing toward the table. “Why wait until the end of the meal if we’re just going to pretend it’s not here?”
He stuffed his napkin under his plate. As they sat in silence, Brin carved the chicken. Corson and Laney watched its juices pool near the blade of the knife with each determined saw.
“Laney, I’m sorry,” Brin said. “But I must follow Church guidelines in this situation.”
“Aw, Brin,” Corson started, before Brin interrupted.
“A supper offense warrants a water week. I want you to think about what you’ve done, and I want you to pray extra hard while you have the advantage of hunger’s clarity.”
“Yes, mother,” Laney said. “Thank you.”
Laney got up and left the room, her sneakers noiseless on the carpet, her smile broadening, unseen, as she walked away. A water week would work faster than any diet.

As she rinsed the dishes, Brin watched her husband. Corson was slouched in a corduroy chair watching reruns of Press Your Luck on the Game Show Network. She couldn’t stop staring at his elbows, the way the folds of fat made them look like little faces puffing out of his sleeves. There was no way around it. Corson Lambert was fat. She could see his veins crystallizing with sugar, his body’s unused fuel yellowing to oleaginous fat, thickening as it crawled towards his heart. She had tried everything to get him right with the Lord again. Extra meditation, even a prayer retreat during which he was permitted only water and an occasional Choco-Cherry Love Wafer, when fainting seemed a possibility. She wanted so badly to save him from himself; she had done it for thousands of other people, herself included. How could her own husband continually avoid redemption? Brin knew the Corson situation was getting dire. He was a walking advertisement for sin. But what could she do about it? She closed her eyes and ran her fingers along the raised pink rosebuds rimming the plate she had just washed. When she opened them, Corson stood at the kitchen island.
“I’m going to Peaches,” he said. “Please come. Share a slice of rhubarb pie with me. Please?”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“I’m told you used to love that place.”
She hesitated, thinking about the deliciously sour pie, granular with sugar. She had loved Peaches and their rhubarb pie. She had loved it, and other things, too much. It was why she’d had to sacrifice. That’s what you did to have a good life.
“You should pray to God to release you from your cravings, Corson.”
“Oh, for goodness sake. God made rhubarb, Brin. He gave us sugar and eggs and wheat and milk. He gave us the brains to put it together and make pie!”
“I’ll continue to pray for you to become free, Corson,” Brin said, drying her hands on a dishtowel. “Goodnight.”

Upstairs, Laney sat in bed, entering the day’s meals in the food journal she kept in her closet, beneath the shoe rack. No dinner meant she had finished out the day well under the calorie limit.
A knock at the door and Corson’s muffled voice.
“Come in,” she said, shoving the journal under her quilted bedcover.
He peeked around the door. “Laney honey, you want to go to Peaches with me? Come on, girl. There’s something I need to tell you.”
His face was round and sad, his pale cheeks so fleshy it looked like his lips had to fight to form words. Laney folded her hands in her lap and stared at them. “Maybe you oughta do the Water Week with me.” She waited for him to acquiesce, or get angry, but he did neither. He just said he was worried about her, that she was skin and bones and needed a proper meal. And then he walked over to the side of her bed, knelt down so he could look her in the face, then wrapped her in his huge arms. She closed her eyes and let him press her head against his shoulder. She had always liked Corson, even after he got fat.
“Sweet girl,” he said. “Sweet Laney girl.”
**
The following Sunday, Brin watched Corson slide onto the pine bench closest to the church stage. His shadow swallowed Laney so that Brin could only see her daughter’s pale eyes and dark nostrils. He hadn’t taken a meal with the family since their fight about Peaches, and he came home smelling of fried chicken every night. But Brin had held her tongue because she knew that this level of personal discord required something stronger than nagging.
The crowd rippled with movement as congregants hugged and shook hands and laughed. Look at the abundant happiness, she thought. How dare Corson bring his gnashing, tireless teeth and grease-spattered tie here, among the flock?
Tapping the microphone, Brin silenced the audience. She loved that moment before speech, so pregnant with possibility. They were all waiting on her words.
“My blessed friends,” she said. A few heads nodded as murmurs of affirmation moved through the room.
“Every Sunday, I stand before you and offer my love and assistance to you on your quest to live a life right in the eyes of our Lord. I hope I have helped you. When you’ve been in that dark place, where God seems far away.”
“YES, Bless you!” A balding man shouted from his place towards the back of the room.
“Thank you.” She bit her lip, looked down, nodded her head. “But today, I need your help. I am asking you to stand beside me in my hour of need. Are you willing to stand beside me today?”
“YES!” Their collective reply echoed off the stone walls of the church. Brin breathed deeply. Yes. Today, the Spirit was there. She glanced at Corson, who sat with his ankles crossed, looking uneasy. I’m coming for you baby, she thought. Ready or not. She clipped her microphone to her collar and walked to the edge of the stage, following the stairs down to her family’s bench. She stopped in front of Corson, who kept his eyes fixed on the ground.
“Today, my blessed friends, I am filled up with the Spirit,” she said, voice rising. “I feel it in my bones. I am alive! The Lord is here!”
She raised both hands and the hall burst out in applause, a waterfall of amens spilling from the uppermost benches. A few people jumped to their feet.
“My problem today, blessed friends, is that I love too much. I love my husband too much. I am not going to stand here and watch him turn himself over to the devil!”
At this point, as she had predicted, Corson stood up and took a step toward the door. But this was how much she loved him: she would not allow him to leave. As had been planned prior to the service, Bob Taylor and Grady Wahler stood up from the bench behind Corson and took him firmly by the shoulders.
“Get your hands off me,” Corson said. He shook free from their grip, but the two men grabbed him again, harder this time.
Brin knew she had to work quickly. “Pray with me now! Lord, I feel you here in this room. I know You’ve come to save this man. He is good but plagued by evil urges. Help to free him from these urges. Free his mind, free his heart. Re-dedicate him to you, O Lord! Help him value the body with which You have blessed him.”
She reached out both hands towards the struggling Corson, whose head whipped this way and that like a tethered mustang. She placed her hands firmly on his forehead, threading her fingers into his hair at the roots and pulling tight. She needed to sustain the physical connection, to give the Spirit enough time to move through her fingers and into his scalp, down deep into his brain, deeper still into his heart. She counted one two three four five before Corson let out a roar, then stepped hard on Grady’s left foot, elbowed Bob in the stomach, and lumbered up the aisle towards the door. As he passed by, congregants shrank from him as if he were contagious.
Let him go, thought Brin. She had succeeded in laying hands. The rest was up to God. “Thank you, witnesses!” She cried. “Praise Jesus!” She glanced around the room. A single tear streaked down her flushed cheek. Ecstasy, these moments. People exclaimed. They danced. They sang. Brin skipped back up the steps onto the stage, clasped her hands over her heart, and did a small, spontaneous bow.
**
When Brin arrived home, she nearly stumbled over Corson, who sat on the floor with his back against the cabinets.
“I want a divorce,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“I said I want a divorce,” he said.
She saw her reflection, orange, distorted, in the copper pots which hung from the kitchen ceiling.
“What?” She’d heard him, but it was a reflex.
“You’re lucky I don’t claim spousal abuse, after that show you put on today. And all those fasts. The damned berry cleanses that turned my shit pink.”
No, she thought. Absolutely not. Brin Lambert could not be twice divorced. Better to be married to a fat man than not at all.
“Now, Corson…”
“Stop,” he said. “I’m weary. You exhaust me. I thought I could do it. Or maybe I thought you’d lighten up a little after we got married. But you know there’s no room for me in your plan anymore.”
“You’re rushing this,” she said. “Why don’t we wait and see how the Spirit moves you?”
“If you think that being miserable for three years counts as rushing, then yes, by all means, I’m rushing my ass out the door.”
She felt her throat go dry. Steadying herself against the counter, she glanced at the knife drawer. She had the urge to run him through—to puncture his fat, unappreciative gut and ribbon him up into neat filets that she could store next to the bacon in the deep freeze. Clenching her jaw, closing her eyes, she said a quick prayer begging forgiveness.
“Very well, Corson,” she said. “I can’t control you. But I wish you the very best, I really do.”
“It’s like I was your accountant or something.” He turned and went upstairs while she stuck fast to the floor, unable to move. Finally, after she heard the swish of the front door closing behind him, she retreated into her bedroom, and further, into her closet. She plugged in the rotating fan and lay flat on her back under the rows of tailored suits that she had collected from years of public speaking. Hours passed and she fell asleep. That night, she dreamed of Jesus. He was so beautiful, his body lean and well-muscled, his eyes kindly and wise. When she finally dared to look up at him, he took her face between her hands and kissed her long and hard. The next morning, she woke flushed and confused, heart thundering. Could a dream be sacrilegious? But it had been so wonderful, that kiss!
She stumbled down the stairs and ran outside, expecting to find Corson’s truck back in the garage, but there was only a large oil spot in its place. On the other side of the garage, his workbench sagged in the middle from where his bulk had rested on it so many evenings. She noticed that he’d taken his toolbox with him, along with the equipment that usually hung on the wall over his head—handsaws and sandpaper and gleaming drill bits.
Opening the garage door, she stepped out into the humid morning. A whippoorwill called from the rosemary bush in the herb garden she kept by the side of the driveway. She moved towards the garden. Pushing aside the leaves of a tomato plant, she plucked a small fruit from the vine, felt its face smooth as a baby. She tightened her hand around it until it burst, its insides wet against her palm.

Later that day, Laney returned home to find Brin still kneeling in the dirt of her herb garden. She had pulled up all the plants at the roots. Her mother announced that Corson had left them. Laney wondered where Corson would stay that night. Once, when they had passed Happy Buddha on their way home from church, Corson had told her it would be his last supper if the Lord gave him any forewarning. She imagined him there now, ordering a plate of the hot oil dumplings, curling up to sleep beneath the red paper dragons propped on the Formica dining tables.
“Why couldn’t he see the glory of the world he was being offered?” Brin asked, sifting soil through her fingers. “All that glory, right in front of him, and he turned away.”
She scooped the ruined plants together, smelling the lemony basil leaves, the piney rosemary. She held a branch of oregano tight in her fist. She had liked the look of them outside her house, their perfect, tiny leaves and the immaculate white flowers that turned up on the untrimmed stalks. She thought of the lasagna her mother had made every Sunday, its browned crust like a protective shell, the tender noodles and bright red sauce beneath it, flecked with dried herbs. After church, the family—cousins, uncles, some neighbors—took seconds and thirds until it was all gone, washing it down with Coke or root beer, the TV on in the background, some football game. The whole house smelling of burnt cheese. The sloppy chaos of that life. Brin tipped her head forward so her chin touched her chest; she closed her eyes and listened to the silence of her hovering daughter, her absent husband.
**
At school the next day, Laney felt eerily alert. It was the seventh and final day of the fast. It was as if being emptied of food allowed her to be filled up with everything else—facts about the Whiskey Rebellion, special triangles, whole passages of Lord of the Flies catching and sticking in her gray matter like bluebottles to fly tape. She nearly cried when Mrs. Smith read the passage about Piggy falling to his death on the rocks. Piggy and his ass-mar. How could people be so cruel, she wondered. People younger than she was. Her mother would say it was because Piggy was fat, and being fat meant he was weak, and that people reacted cruelly to perceived weakness. Laney felt like that wasn’t what the author had in mind when wrote about Piggy’s brains being dashed on the rocks; that he hadn’t meant to be punitive. She looked out the window and watched the tops of the live oaks rustling, their leaves waxy in the late spring sunlight.
The bell rang, reverberating inside her ribcage. Leaving the classroom, she let herself be pushed down the hallway by the crowd of students. She smelled someone’s peppermint gum, the lavender sweetness of a clean cotton shirt. Out the door, down the steps that led away from the rotunda and out to the student parking lot, one step, another, then another. The sky was a bright May blue, the sun cutting a direct line to her eyes. She stopped, closed her lids against it. She thought of her father, skeletal and small in his hospital bed. In the white light of the Texas sun, Laney felt him there with her. How much she had missed him in the first years after he’d left, like the insane hunger in the early days of a fast. Now she just felt empty.
She heard Marshall’s voice behind her.
“Babe? You ok?”
She turned to him.
“No, I don’t think I am,” she said. She was so dizzy. She swayed, then fell into him.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Laney, what’s wrong with you?”
She wrapped her arms around his neck. Then she opened her mouth wide and pressed her tongue and then her teeth hard against the cords of his neck. He cried out, but even then, she didn’t let go.