It is after dark, and I’m waiting for Martin to return. He’s out jogging, his nightly ritual, though he’s been gone longer than usual. I’m seated cross-legged on the couch checking email on my laptop and, behind me, I hear the rain against the glass. I glance up to my left and see the top of the Space Needle glowing through a low-hanging cloud. An expensive view, but I’m an expensive lawyer. When I moved to Seattle a year ago, recruited by a law firm impressed with my track record litigating software patents, I made sure that I found an apartment with this view. 

When I was growing up in Indianapolis, my father, an office furniture salesman, would bring me pens from the cities he visited. Floaty pens. A San Francisco panorama with a trolley car that rolled back and forth. The Space Needle with an elevator that went up and down. I spent hours on the floor of my room, slowly twirling the Space Needle, making the elevator rise and fall, imaging myself in it. It became my lucky pen, the one I used for my diary, then exams, then my college application. The pen that got me out of Indianapolis.  

Now, I watch from my living room one of these elevators ascending without my assistance. I think about how far I’ve traveled, first the job in New York, then DC, San Francisco, and now here, a circumnavigate career. Each stop at a better firm, a higher salary. I wonder if this will be my final stop, or if this Space Needle is just a lighthouse I will pass on my way to somewhere else. 

I glance up when Martin enters the apartment, dripping on the carpet. He’s out of breath and clutching what looks like a soaked-through scarf.

“What took you so long?” I ask. Then the scarf opens its yellow eyes and looks at me. 

I follow Martin into the bathroom. He swaddles the cat on his lap in a towel I bought him as a birthday gift from Restoration Hardware. The cat is black with patches of white on its paws and patches of pink on its back and belly where fur used to be. Its left ear torn in two, partially healed over. No collar.

“Where did you find it?” I ask.

“It’s a she,” he says. “I found her on Queen Anne, by those stairs.”

“She could be feral.”

“If she was, she wouldn’t have let me carry her home.” Martin is tenderly drying her legs. The cat looks up at him with patient eyes. 

“She needs food,” he says. “Do you mind popping downstairs to the market?” 

“I could, but…” I hear my voice trail off. He looks up at me. “Martin, shouldn’t we just take her to the shelter?”

Martin stares at me the way a litigious client looks when I suggest arbitration. 

* * *

The next evening I come home to a cat reborn. The fur, combed out and shiny, covers much of the bare skin. She struts through our living room, tail erect, as if she has always lived here. 

Martin is seated on the floor as she circles him. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he asks.

I nod and watch the cat climb onto his lap, his arms surrounding her. I hover over the two of them like a mother figure. I feel my stomach clench.

“You realize that we’re going to have to pay a pet deposit,” I tell him. “Assuming this is long term.”

“We’ll pay it,” he says.

“What if she’s been chipped?” I ask. “She could be somebody’s cat.”

“I’m naming her Dido,” he says, then places his lips on her forehead and whispers something. I feel the urge to lean in. Instead, I retreat two steps to the kitchen and begin heating up some food. 

“Can you hear her purring?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say, though I hear only the microwave.

* * *

Martin is an instructor of ancient literature at the University of Washington. In his late thirties and still deep in student loans, he seems resigned to his fate. There is a novel somewhere on his computer that he claims is near completion, but I’m not optimistic. 

We have a relationship one might call modern. No marriage certificate. No kids. And, until recently, no pets. Living in a luxury high-rise in Belltown, with me covering the bills while he chips away at his liabilities. Martin carries his end in other ways. He is bookishly attractive in his black-rimmed glasses and untucked oxford shirts. He keeps the fridge stocked. He takes to the chores with a passion I find curious yet endearing. 

He gives me the room I need, not just in time and space. In San Francisco, I dated VCs who put on a show of independence but rarely ever spent a moment alone. Always in meetings, texting like teenage girls, biking every Saturday morning in spandex pelotons. Men raised by helicopter moms, offended if you aren’t there to praise their Mandarin, favorite a Tweet, offer up a hug. 

I was never much of a hugger. I have no problem with sex, but sex is transactional, temporary, and comes to a definite conclusion. Hugs are open-ended, which means someone must be the first to let go. Usually me.  

The fact that Martin and I have lasted a year is as close to happily ever after as I know. On my darker days I wonder if he’s in it for the money. But not once has he ever asked me to pay off his loans, and I interpret this as love.

* * *

A month later, I’m still trying, really trying, to coexist with our new roommate, one that leaves trails of litter across the carpet and sheds tufts of black fur that stick to my clothing like stains.

Martin speaks to her like she is a child. The way his voice rises makes my spine crawl, cooing silly nonsense about her being such a good girl, such a good little girl. 

At nights, when Martin is out jogging, she waits for him by the door. I could open a can of salmon and she wouldn’t look in my direction. After Martin returns, she follows him from room to room then waits patiently for him to settle on the couch, offering up his lap. 

I am now relegated to the other side of the couch as we watch TV. I first tried sitting close to Martin, but she growled at me, the same noise she made when the vet inserted the thermometer up her ass.

This used to be our ritual. My head on Martin’s lap, Martin’s hands massaging my hair. I would hold the remote control, and Martin would signal by touch the show he prefers. One tap for YES, two taps for NO. And a tender lap around my ear to signal the volume. 

Tonight, I try leaning over, to at least share this precious real estate. But as my head touches Martin’s right knee she hisses.

 “Fucking feline.” I straighten.

“You frightened her.”

“I frightened her? She’s the one with the claws, Martin.”

“She’s still traumatized,” he says. “Give it time.”

Dido stares at me with satisfied eyes and begins purring so loudly I have to turn up the volume.

* * *

“This cat is ruining my relationship,” I tell Jeremy, my paralegal and only close girlfriend. “I’m beginning to think this would be simpler if Martin was having an affair.”

“He is having an affair,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

Jeremy shakes his head. “The name he chose. Dido is the other woman.”

Martin now volunteers at the animal shelter in Ballard. He began going Thursday and Friday afternoons while I was at work. 

“Isn’t one rescued cat enough?” I ask when he tells me he has decided to volunteer on weekends too.

“There is so much need out there,” he says. 

“There is need everywhere,” I tell him. “You can’t rescue them all. What about your book?”

“I’m taking a break,” he says. “These cats. Just spending a few hours a day with them makes all the difference in their lives. You should join me.”

I tag along one Saturday. He leads me into the cat room, low-ceilinged with stainless steel cages along the walls, stacked three high, each containing expectant, pleading eyes. Some cats meow while others stare in silence. I feel like we are starring in some performance piece in the round. 

Martin puts me to work cleaning litter boxes and refilling water dishes. I yell out when one cat bites me as I’m reaching in for his dish.

Martin looks at my finger, blood beginning to bubble up through two pinpricks. “You’ll be fine.”

“Shouldn’t we tell someone?”

“If you say anything, Tom-Tom will be put back in quarantine.”

“Maybe he should be.”

Martin’s eyes narrow. “You stick a cat in quarantine and they’ll be alone for ten days. You have no idea what’s that like.”

 “I have some idea,” I say. “What it’s like to be sequestered.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Jesus, Martin, it’s a sunny Saturday afternoon, which is about as rare as a lunar eclipse in this city, and we’re in here shoveling litter.”

“I didn’t force you to come.”

“No. Of course not. But how else am I going to get your attention these days? Crawl into one of these cages?”

Martin shakes his head and turns back to Tom-Tom. An overweight vet tech enters wearing pink scrubs. She smiles at Martin and passes between us. He follows her into the next room.

I turn the other way, leave the shelter, and go for a long run along the waterfront. I can’t pretend to love these creatures, and I know Martin thinks I’m abnormal. This shelter visit another failed audition for a role I never wanted in the first place. Dido brought a part of him to life I didn’t know existed, a maternal quality. I would think it lovely if I had such a quality lurking within me. If I had, like him, been raised with little animals scurrying around the house.

The only animals in my house were three gerbils, given to my older brother and kept in the basement in a cracked aquarium. I named them Ariel, Cally, and Samantha, and I visited every morning and every day after school—until my brother, out of brotherly spite, moved them into his room and locked the door. I was so jealous of him for having little creatures to call his own that I pretended from then on that they didn’t exist. 

Perhaps if I had been properly raised with pets, I’d be different now, the way children soak up second languages. Either there was something I did not soak up, or it was never there to begin with. 

* * *

I text Martin from the office, inviting him to a romantic dinner. I suggest the new Italian place on Pike, but when he replies with an offer to cook, I feel as if I’ve won a summary judgment. 

We’ve endured two months of silent cohabitation, me working late during the week and Martin absent on weekends. Tonight will be different. 

I sneak out of work and arrive home to the smell of sautéed garlic. Martin is busy at the stove. I kiss him on the neck and pour a glass of wine.

I sit at the table and look out over the city, feeling a sense of relaxation I have not felt in months. Martin used to say that cooking calmed him, gave him a sense of accomplishment absent from the rest of his day. What calmed me was my participation—chopping vegetables, washing a dish or two. But these dinners ended when Dido arrived—baked brie and risotto replaced by rescued cats. 

Martin brings the plates and sits across from me. I raise a wine glass and wait for Martin to reciprocate, but he’s staring off at a corner of the room. 

“What’s wrong?” I ask. My eyes follow his, since I assume this has something to do with the cat. “Is it Dido?”

“No,” he says, then stands and stares at the ceiling like some petulant child, and I realize I’m going to have to squeeze it out of him. Men. The closer you get to the truth, the more tightly they cling to it.

“Martin, what’s the matter?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Patent law is hard to explain.”

“I’ve met someone,” he says. “At the shelter.”

“Someone?”

“Tami. A vet tech.”

“Stop. Back up.” My mind reboots into lawyer. “You’re having an affair?”

“I’m sorry.”

“With Tami.”

“She lives in Snohomish. I’ve decided to move in with her.”

I’m trying to picture this woman. Pink scrubs.

“You mean the fat girl?” I ask.

“I knew you’d say that.” He walks to the closet and removes his luggage, already packed. Then he removes a cat carrier and opens the gate.

I want to slap the bastard. I want to push him off our seventeenth-floor balcony onto Western Avenue. 

He scoops up Dido.

“No,” I say.

“Excuse me?”

“No fucking way. Put the cat down.”

‘But you hate her.”

“I hate you.”

“I can’t just leave her here with you.”

“You can pick her up tomorrow,” I am standing. I grab the carrier away and throw it across the room. “Put her down, or help me God I’m going to start screaming.”

But I already am screaming. The cat has sprung from Martin’s arms and run under the television console, and he couldn’t get her out from under it even if I’d given him the chance. Martin fumbles with closing the door behind him. I lock the door and take a deep breath. 

I pick up the phone and instruct the front desk to change the lock. 

* * *

I’m on a conference call the following afternoon when my office door swings open. Martin’s face is burning. 

“How dare you,” he says.  “You don’t even like Dido.”

“You have no idea how I feel—just as I clearly had no idea what was going on in your twisted mind. I paid the cat fee, security deposit, food, vet bills. I have more legal right to that feline than you do.”

“I’ll take you to court.”

“Please. I’m the best lawyer you know. And I’m opposing counsel.”

I watch the words sink in. Martin exhales. His shoulders slump. He sits. He’s wearing a shirt I don’t recognize.

“Do you want me to beg? I will.”

“If you really loved Dido, you wouldn’t have left her.”

“I left you,” he says.

“In the eyes of the law, you left us both.”

Martin stands. “I’m going to get her back,” he says.

“Be my guest. I’m always up for a challenge.”

Later that night, I finish the leftovers of Martin’s meal with Dido perched at the far end of the table, back to me, staring at the door. 

“Sorry kiddo,” I tell her. “It’s just you and me now.”

* * *

Martin had identified six meows. 

The feed me meow. 

The good morning meow. 

The calling for other cats meow. 

The where have you been all day meow. 

The about to use the litter meow. 

The looking at seagulls meow. 

I never could tell them apart, but I’m quite certain that Dido is now using the full repertoire, all night long, every night. 

She sits at the foot of my bed and wails. The first night, I tried locking her out of the room, but she just stood outside the door and turned up the volume. Then clawed at the door. Then figured out how to open the door. 

I began using earplugs. That only spurred the little miscreant to position herself next to my head. 

One night, at three in the morning, nerves spent, I remove the carrier from the closet and I wave it at her. 

“You think I wouldn’t fucking do it?” 

She sits at the foot of my bed, expectantly. She knows I am bluffing. That or she is hoping for a way out.

I return the carrier to the closet and bury my head under a pillow. A few minutes later she is seated on my nightstand filling the room with one of six meows.

* * *

Jeremy hands me a coffee as I yawn into a fist. “Cat?”

“It’s like having an infant that won’t sleep the night.”

“And you still refuse to get rid of her?”

I wave him out of my office. Of all people, I know the value of a contract, and now I have nothing but this furry bargaining chip. 

“My friend Eddie has this little terror of a tabby,” says Jeremy later that day, during a break in a deposition. “Peed on their carpets. Clawed everything in sight. Then he hired Ron, and a week later—problem solved.”

“Ron?”

“They call him the cat whisperer.”

“Have you met this whisperer?”

Jeremy shakes his head.

“What did this person do? Give the cat pills?”

“Eddie says Ron just talked to the cat, played with him. Like therapy.”

“I refuse to hire a cat shrink.”

“He saved their marriage.”

“It’s too late for that.”

“Plus, Eddie says he’s got an amazing ass. I’ve been dying to see it.”  

Martin took a major standard of living hit when he left me. Now he is living on the east side of Seattle in some generic apartment complex with a shitty walk score and a woman who can barely support herself. I remember her from the shelter. In her scrubs like some nurse. The way she passed between us in the cat room. If only I had spent more than one afternoon there, maybe I would have seen it coming. 

The next evening, I am sitting in my car in front of Martin’s apartment. The information Jeremy can unearth when I promise him a half day.

I watch Martin emerge from the apartment, alone, dressed for his run, right on schedule. He looks up at the mist, raises a hood, and starts. I follow in my car. 

He’s wearing the same jacket as the day I met him. It was raining then too, and I had beaten the movers by eighteen hours and was irritated to have so much empty time. I wandered the streets until I found a small park overlooking the sound. Tourists, umbrellas, selfies. I watched a ferry headed toward Bainbridge and wished I was on that boat because at least I’d be headed somewhere. 

I felt self-conscious so I took out my phone and pretended to be busy. I opened a dating app. My fingers scrolled through all the available men in my vicinity. The faces were new, but so much else felt sadly similar. Men who loved to travel, try new restaurants. Men who sailed, summited Rainier, hiked the PCT. Men who had children. Men who wanted children. Men who loved children.

I heard his voice, looked up. He was asking directions to the Sculpture Park, and I didn’t see him clearly at first because there were tears in my eyes.

He had just moved to Seattle and was looking for an apartment, living out of a hostel. And he laughed when I told him I did have an apartment but would probably be more comfortable in a hostel.

I treated him to a trip up the Space Needle. From there, I pointed out what I thought was my apartment, and I invited him to stay. For a week or two until he found a place of his own. 

I have stopped at a light, and I watch Martin getting away. I picture myself the star of a David Lynch film, the camera tight on my face, tense music. Do I accelerate and cut the runner off and yell at him in the middle of the street? Or do I accelerate and swerve into him? 

I turn the car around and park across the street from his apartment and close my eyes. And for a moment I am back at my own apartment, listening to the rain against the glass, waiting for Martin to return from his jog.

When he returns, pacing back and forth, his head steaming, glasses fogged, I lower the car window. This is my plan. I will call out to him and he will join me in the car and I will apologize. I will ask, beg, for him to return to me. 

But I am too late. The door closes behind him, and I watch shadows moving against the curtains. I get out of the car.

Then I notice the curtains moving, parting. A cat has slipped between the curtain and the window—gray with a white chest—and it studies me. All this time, I thought there was only Dido. 

I get back in my car.

Later that night, I am coming out of a dream when I hear breathing next to my face. I can see Martin’s face, the short nose and stubbled double chin and they way he stares at me. Those eyes dark and reflective, and I can see myself in them. He is talking, and I can’t hear him over the noise. I ask him to speak up but the noise is so loud, a scream.

I am the one screaming, Dido’s claw hooked into my left nostril. 

I grab at her collar and squeeze until she disengages. I toss her out of the bed and hear books falling. By the time I get the light on, the cat is limping across the living room floor, tail dragging. By the looks of the damage I had hurled her into my tower of unread books. The next morning, a Band-Aid on my nose,I tell Jeremy to make the call.

* * *

I answer the door. Jeremy is standing there, dressed for a date. 

“Is he here yet?”

I shake my head.

“Mind if I wait with you?”

“Sure, whatever.”

Jeremy looks around. “Where is the little Beelzebub?”

“Staring out the window. She took a crap on my pillow yesterday while I was at work. I believe that’s what they call passive aggressive.”

“That’s not passive aggressive,” he says. “That’s aggressive aggressive.”

I open a bottle of wine and pour out two glasses. The front desk calls to let me know Ron has arrived. 

“He’s on his way up,” I say, and Jeremy rushes into the bathroom to check his hair.

When I open the door, I see a man in jeans and flannel shirt carrying what looks like an old metal toolbox. He says nothing.

“Are you Ron?”

“I am.” He walks past me. 

Jeremy extends a hand. “I’m Jeremy. The person you spoke with. I was hoping I could watch. The session.”

“I work alone with my clients.”

“Clients?” I ask. 

“Where is she?” he asks. I point her out, now crouched on the back of my leather chair, watching us.

“What’s her name?”

 “Dido,” I say. “And, for the record, I didn’t give her that name. You think she blames me?”

Jeremy giggles, but Ron says nothing. He kneels down and opens his toolbox, which I realize is an old fly-fishing tackle box. He removes several pieces of bamboo and assembles them into a sort of fishing rod.

“Going fishing?” Jeremy asks.

“In a manner of speaking,” he says as he strings a small fake mouse, colored purple, to the end of the rod. Dido slowly approaches, tail in the air, and follows him into the bedroom.

“You think he needs an assistant?” Jeremy asks.

“If this doesn’t work out, you’ll be available.”

Jeremy follows me out onto the balcony, and we watch a container ship making its slow escape from the harbor. 

“You need to take a cruise,” Jeremy says. “Get your mind off things.”

“Too many people.”

“Must be weird to be alone again.”

“I’m not alone. That’s the problem.”

Ron emerges from the room. Dido follows a few steps behind, her tail curling upward like smoke. 

“So?” I ask.

“Dido is full of rage.”

“No shit.”

“I’ll need two more sessions.”

We watch him return his toy to the toolbox. I try rolling my eyes at Jeremy, but he is too focused on the man’s backside. And I must admit the man is built like a lumberjack. He starts for the door.

“Wait,” I say. “Is that it?”

He gives me a blank look. “For now.”

“What all did you do with her in there?”

“We played.”

“You played. And how much do I owe you for this playtime?”

“Two-fifty.” 

“That wasn’t even an hour.”

“I explained everything to your assistant.”

“I’m sure you did. I just assumed I was paying for more than cat R&R. I mean, for this kind of money I’d expect more out of this cat than a better mood. Like the ability to open her can of food. Do her own litter.”

“Speaking of that, it needs cleaning,” he says. “I’ll see you Monday.”

The door slams shut before I can respond.

“Can you believe that? The nerve of that man.”

“He is so hot,” Jeremy says. “I have to get a cat.”

* * *

I am seated cross-legged on the couch, laptop balanced on top. I feel movement and look over to see Dido sitting on Martin’s cushion. 

This is a first. Dido has never shared the couch with me. Could this be progress?

I tentatively reach over to pet her. I try to do it the way Martin did, not from in front of her face but from behind, gentle. My hand rests on her head, and I find myself smiling. I feel I have passed a test, made some sort of breakthrough, and I suddenly want to thank her for suffering me all these weeks, for letting me in. And for the first time I can imagine a life together. A peaceful coexistence, which was all Martin and I enjoyed anyway. Why can’t I enjoy this? Must my life consist only of adversarial relationships? 

I feel before I see that her head has swung around, her jaw landing on my wrist. 

I don’t push her away. I let her teeth pierce the skin, going deeper. I welcome the pain. Even pain is a currency. A point of negotiation. The absence of accustomed pain is in itself a form of pain. I watch the blood trickle down my arm. I think of the slipcover, the cleaning deposit on the carpet.

I am no match for her, and I yank my hand back. She jumps to the floor. I’m shaking.

“Martin left you too, sweetheart. It’s time you got on with your life.”

* * *

Truth is, I could have had the front desk give Ron a key to my apartment. He could do his business and be gone before I got home from work. 

On his second visit, I ask Ron to let me sit in on the session. 

He looks at me for a moment like I’m just another one of his cats. His eyes are blue, and he has a habit of massaging his neck when thinking, exposing firm biceps, which he is doing now. “I will call you in when I’m ready,” he says.

I go into the bedroom and wait. I can hear them out in the living room. Sounds of a cat galloping from room to room. 

“We’re ready for you,” he says.

I sit on the couch and watch the way he plays with her, how focused she is. A ballerina on hind legs, paws extending, twirling. It occurs to me that Ron is nothing like Martin. With Dido, Martin sought out purrs and intimacy. Ron seeks only to work the cat out, dispensing trivial doses of attention, minimal eye contact. As if he is working with a hardened convict.

“How do you do it?” I ask.

“There are no secrets—no secret language, if that’s what you’re getting at. Cats were here before humans. I think at some level they all know that. If you look into a cat’s eyes, really look, you’ll see it. Something you won’t see in a dog’s eyes.”

”What?”

“Resentment,” he says. “Which is the highest form of intelligence.”

“Everything is claws with her.”

“She hasn’t learned how to use soft paws,” he says. “She’s like you.”

“Me?”

“You’re a lawyer,” he says. 

“I don’t get paid to be gentle.”

He hands the toy to me. “You try.”

I jingle it in front of her. She is motionless.

“See. Nothing.”

“Not in front of her face like that. You make it too easy. You have to give her a challenge. Keep it out of reach. Slow it down.”

I do as instructed but Dido is now staring in the opposite direction. 

“She hates me.”

“Appears the feeling is mutual.”

“I don’t hate her,” I say. “I just don’t like cats all that much. My ex was the cat lover.”

“Why didn’t he take her?”

“It’s complicated.”

“You’re using her for ransom?”

“I’m the one with all the money.“

“How long has he been gone?”

“Six weeks.”

Ron rubs his neck again. “He’s not coming back for Dido.”

“How would you know? Martin is not a cat.” 

“He’s a man, and I know a thing or two about that species as well.”

I feel a tug on my hand and I look down to see Dido playing with the toy. 

“I wasn’t even doing anything.”

“You let it drop behind your shoe. She couldn’t see it, she couldn’t hear it, so she had to have it. Silence means more to a cat than noise,” he says. “Cats are minimalists.”

Ron kneels down and opens his toolbox. He reaches up for the toy.

“I’m not done yet,” I say.

“I have to go.” He grabs the toy and I tug on it playfully, until I nearly coax a smile out of him. 

“How about a drink?” I ask, standing by the door, blocking it. He looks at me, and I think he is considering it, but then he opens the door. Before I know it, I have grabbed the belt loop of his jeans and pulled him to me.

 “What are you doing?” he asks.

I say nothing, and now I have my right hand on his right butt cheek, holding tight, feeling it flex as he tries to turn. And I’m now one with him. My other hand on his other side, grabbing just as firmly. And my mouth on his evasive mouth until I hear the door fall closed again. 

Later, in the dark, we lie naked on the couch. He is staring at the Space Needle.

“What did you do before this?” I ask.

“Fisherman.”

“Not exactly a lateral move.”

“I woke up one morning and realized that I was on the wrong side of life.”

“What do you mean?”

“There is a right side and a wrong side. Those who kill for living are on the wrong side.”

“Somebody has to do it.”

“No,” he says. “Nobody has to do it.”

“So I take it you given up on seafood.”

“All animals.”

“Oh, I see. You’re one of them.”

“Them?”

“You know. People who try to make the rest of us feel guilty about eating meat.”

“I don’t have to try,” he says. 

He pulls away. I hear him getting dressed.

“I didn’t mean anything by that.” I sit up and turn on a light. Dido is high on the bookcase, looking down on us with knowing eyes. 

* * *

Ron doesn’t show the following Monday. Nor does he return my calls. 

“Typical male,” Jeremy says. 

Walking home, late, I check email. An invoice for $500 with one line item: Feline behavior sessions. Payable Net 30.

The cat has torn a linen couch pillow to shreds. She sits on the kitchen counter with a fuck-you look.

I park the cat carrier on the dining room table. 

Dido climbs on top of the bookcase. I reach up for her and grab a hind leg. She slashes me but I hold on. She is biting me now. 

Some people are cat people. Some are dog people. But what if you’re none of the above? What if you are unfit to care for any pet? 

Even gerbils.

My brother quickly lost interest in his gerbils, which stands to reason because our parents had already lost interest in us. Three weeks without food. That’s all it takes to turn childhood pets into cannibals. 

I, following the smell, was the one who found Ariel, alone and skeletal. I watched her die, surrounded with lettuce and sunflower seeds, my feeble attempt at rehabilitation. When my father returned from Dallas, he yelled at my mother, who yelled at my brother, who yelled at me. If I were a lawyer then, I would have sued them all for negligence and abuse. But I was only ten years old. The best I could do was convince my father to let me bury Ariel in the backyard. 

The Space Needle is blurry, and at first I think it is raining. My body trembles when I feel her, the fur, curling up on my lap.  The purring begins and grows louder, like an ocean. 

* * *

I place the carrier on the front porch. I kneel to look at her one more time. Her eyes are black, unblinking. I don’t dare poke a finger through the gate. 

Martin answers the door. When he sees the carrier he studies my face for sign of a practical joke. 

“She missed you,” I say.

He kneels at the carrier, and she meows at him. When he stands, Dido in his arms, I see tears in his eyes. 

“Which one of her meows was that?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Must be new.”

The cat is purring now, and they are both staring at me with satisfied eyes. 

* * *

A month later, driving through the city at night, I see a dead animal off to the side of the road. Raccoon? Possum? I tell myself to stop asking such questions. The animal is dead. But these are the questions I now ask. Since Dido. Since Martin trained my eyes to see them. Sniffing around dumpsters. The far corners of parking lots. Emerging from under mufflers. Tails low. Collarless. Were they always there? Or was I always so blind?

I turn towards Ballard.

Tom-Tom is still there, along with the god-awful name the shelter gave him. I vow to change it.

Back at home, I open the door to the carrier and watch him take his first tentative steps, as if he is walking on the moon. Which my apartment must feel like after two months of living in that shelter. I am lying on the floor, at eye level, as he sniffs at the clawed-up couch.

“You’re an only cat,” I assure him. “But I have to be honest with you. I’m not a very good cat person. Still learning to use soft paws.”

He tilts his head and rubs against my forehead.

“But you are a good little boy,” I say. “Such a good little boy.” 

END

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.