The Inheritance and Other Stories

A Touch of Lavender

We grew up like mice nesting in a rotting sofa, my sister and I. Even when I was only nine and she was an infant, I thought of us that way. At night, when she’d be asleep in the curl of my belly and I’d be half falling off the old sofa we used as a bed, I’d hear the mice nibbling and moving inside the upholstery beneath us, and sometimes the tiny squeakings of the newborn ones when the mother came to nurse them. I’d curl tighter around Lisa and pretend she was a little pink baby mouse instead of a little pink baby girl, and that I was the father mouse, curled around her to protect her. Sometimes it made the nights less chill.

I’d lived in the same basement apartment all my life. It was always chill, even in summer. It was an awful place, dank and ratty, but the upstairs apartments were worse, rank with urine and rot. The building was an old town house, long ago converted to four apartments upstairs and one in the basement. None of them were great, but ours was the cheapest, because we had the furnace and the water heater right next to us. When I was real small, three or so, a water main beside the building broke, and water came rising up in our apartment, maybe a foot deep. I woke up to my stuff floating beside me, and the old couch sucking up water like a sponge. I yelled for Mom. I heard the splash as she rolled out of bed in the only bedroom and then her cussing as she waded through the water to pick me up. Her current musician took the whole thing as a big joke, until he saw his sax case floating. Then he grabbed up his stuff and was out of there. I don’t remember seeing him after that.

My mom and I spent that day sitting on the steps down to our apartment, waiting for the city maintenance crew to fix the pipe, waiting for the water to go down, and then waiting for our landlord.

He finally came and looked the place over and nodded, and said, hell, it was probably for the best, he’d been meaning to put down new tiles and spraysulate the walls anyway. “You go ahead and tear out the old stuff,” he told my mom. “Stack it behind the house, and I’ll have it hauled away. Let me know when you’re ready, and I’ll send in a crew to fix the place up. Now about your rent . . .”

“I told you, I already mailed it,” Mom said coldly, looking past his ear, and the landlord sighed and drove off.

So Mom and her friends peeled up the cracking linoleum and tore the Sheetrock off the walls, leaving the bare concrete floor with stripes of mastic showing and the two-by-four wall studs standing bare against the gray block walls. That was as far as the remodeling ever got. The landlord never hauled the stuff away, or sent in a crew. He never spraysulated the walls, either. Even in the summer the walls were cool and misty, and in winter it was like the inside of a refrigerator.

My mom wasn’t so regular about paying the rent that she could raise a fuss. Most of the folks in our building were like that: pay when you can, and don’t stay home when you can’t, so the landlord can’t nag at you. The apartments were lousy, but complaining could get you kicked out. All the tenants knew that if the landlord had wanted to, he could have gotten a government grant to convert the place into Skoag units and really made a bundle. We were right on the edge of a Skoag sector and demand for Skoag units was increasing.

That was back when the Skoags were first arriving and there wasn’t much housing for them. It all had to be agency approved, too, to prevent any “interplanetary incidents.” Can’t have aliens falling down the steps and breaking a flipper, even if they are pariahs. These outcasts were the only link we had to their planet and culture, and especially to their technology for space travel that the whole world was so anxious to have. No one knew where they came from or how they got to Earth. They just started wading out of the seas one day, not all that different from a washed-up Cuban. Just more wetback aliens, as the joke went. They were very open about being exiles with no means of returning home. They arrived gradually, in groups of three and four, but of the ships that brought them there was never any sign, and the Skoags weren’t saying anything. That didn’t stop any of the big government people from hoping, though. Hoping that if we were real nice to them, they might drop a hint or two about interstellar drives or something. So the Skoags got the government-subsidized housing with showers that worked and heat lamps and carpeted floors and spraysulated walls. The Federal Budget Control Bill said that funds could be reapportioned, but the budget could not be increased, so folks like my mom and I took a giant step downward in the housing arena. But as a little kid, all I understood was that our place was cold most of the time, and everyone in the neighborhood hated Skoags.

I don’t think it really bothered Mom. She wasn’t home that much anyway. She’d bitch about it sometimes when she brought a bunch of her friends home, to jam and smoke and eat. It was always the same scene, party time, she’d come in with a bunch of them, hyped on the music like she always was, stoned maybe, too. They’d be carrying instruments and six-packs of beer, sometimes a brown bag of cheap groceries, salami and cheese and crackers or yogurt and rice cakes and tofu. They’d set the groceries and beer out on the table and start doodling around with their instruments while my mom would say stuff like, “Damn, look at this dump. That damn landlord, he still hasn’t been around. Billy, didn’t the landlord come by today? No? Shit, man, that jerk’s been promising to fix this place for a year now. Damn.”

Everyone would tell her not to sweat it, hell, their places were just as bad, all landlords were assholes anyway. Usually someone would get onto the Skoag thing, how it was a fine thing the government could take care of alien refugee trash but wouldn’t give its own citizens a break on rent. If there’d been a lot of Skoags at the café that night, Mom and her friends would get into how Skoags thought they were such hot shit, synthesizing music from their greasy hides. I remember one kid who really got worked up, telling everyone that they’d come to Earth to steal our music. According to him, the government knew it and didn’t care. He said there was even a secret treaty that would give the Skoags free use of all copyrighted music in the United States if they would give us blueprints of their ships. No one paid much attention to him. Later that evening, when he was really stoned, he came and sat on the floor by my sofa and cried. He told me that he was a really great musician, except that he couldn’t afford a good synthesizer to compose on, while those damn Skoags could just puff out their skins and make every sound anybody had ever heard. He leaned real close and told me that the real danger was that the Skoags would make up all the good music before he even got a chance to try. Which I knew was dumb. While Skoags can play anything they’ve ever heard, perfectly, no one had ever heard them play anything original. No one had ever heard them play Skoag music, only ours. I started to tell him that but he passed out on the floor by my sofa. Everyone ignored him. They were into the food and the beer and the music. All my mom’s parties were like that.

I’d usually curl up on one end of the sofa, face to the cushions and try to sleep, sometimes with a couple necking at the other end of the sofa and two or three musicians in the kitchen, endlessly rehearsing the same few bars of a song I’d never heard before and would never hear again. That’s what Mom was really into, struggling musicians who were performing their own stuff in the little “play for tips” places. She’d latch on to some guy and keep him with her aid check. She’d watch over him like he was gold, go with him every day, sit by him on the sidewalk while he played if he were a street musician, or take a table near the band if he was working cafés and clubs. They’d come home late and sleep late, and then get up and go out again. Sometimes I’d come in from school and find them sitting at the kitchen table, talking. It’s funny. The men always looked the same, eyes like starved dogs, and it seems like my mom would always be saying the same thing. “Don’t give up. You’ve got a real talent. Someday you’ll make it, and you’ll look back at them and laugh. You’ve really got it, Lennie (or Bobby or Pete or Lance). I know it. I can feel it, I can hear it. You’re gonna be big one day.”

The funny part is, she was always right. Those guys would live with us for a few months or a year, and suddenly, out of the blue, their careers would take off. They’d be discovered, on a sidewalk or in a café, or picked up by a band on its way up. They’d leave my mom, and go on to better things. She never got bitter about it, though she liked to brag to other women about all the hot ones she’d known “back when they were nothing.” Like that was her calling in life, feeding guitar humpers until someone besides her could hear their songs. Like only she could keep the real music flowing. One night she brought home a disc and gave it to me. It was called Fire Eyes, and the guy on the front had dark hair and blue eyes, like me. “That’s your daddy, Billy Boy,” she told me. “Though he don’t know it. He took off before I knew you were coming, and he was on a national tour by the time you were born. Look at those pretty, pretty eyes. Same as you, kid. You should have heard him sing, Billy. I knew he had it, even then. Even then.” I think that was the first time I ever saw her sit down and cry. I’m still not sure if she was crying over my dad leaving us, or something else. She didn’t cry long, and she went to bed alone that night. But the next night she brought home a whole pack of musicians from some open mike. By next morning, she had a new musician in her bed.

Sometimes during a party, if Mom was really stoned, or safe-sexing someone in the bedroom, I’d get up in my pajamas and make for the food, stuffing down as much as I could and hiding a couple of rice cakes or a handful of crackers behind the sofa cushion. I knew the mice would nibble on it, but hell, they never took much, just lacing around the edges. I figured they didn’t do much better than I did anyway. If I was really lucky, there’d be some girls in the group, and they’d fuss over me, telling me how my big blue eyes were such a surprise with my dark hair, and giving me gum and Life Savers from their purses, or maybe quarters and pennies. Like people in sidewalk cafés feed sparrows. If my mom caught me, she’d get mad and tell me to get to sleep, I had school tomorrow and didn’t I want to make something of myself? Then she’d smile at everyone like she was really saying something and go, in a real sweet voice, “If you miss school tomorrow, you miss music class, too. You don’t want that to happen, do you?” As if I gave a shit. She was always bragging that I had my daddy’s voice, and someday I was going to be a singer, how my music was my life, and that the school music lesson was the only way she could get me to go to school.

Dumb. Like singing “Farmer in the Dell” with forty other bored first graders was teaching me a lot about music. Music was okay, but I never understood how people could live for it like my mom did. She’d never learned to play any instrument, and while she could carry a tune, her voice was nothing special. But she lived for music, like it was air or food. Funny. I think the men she took in might have respected her more if she’d been able to create even a little of what she craved so badly. I could see it in their eyes, sometimes, that they looked down on her. Like she wasn’t real to them because she couldn’t make her own music. But my mother lived music, more than they did. She had to have it all the time; the stereo was always playing when she didn’t have an in-house musician of her own. I’d be half asleep watching her swaying to the music, singing along in her mediocre voice. Sometimes she’d just be sprawled in our battered easy chair, her head thrown back, one hand steadying a mug of tea or a beer on her belly. Her brown eyes would be dark and gone, not seeing me or the bare wall studs, not seeing the ratty couch or scarred cupboards. Music took her somewhere, and I used to wonder where. I thought it was dumb, the way she lived for a collection of sounds, for someone else’s words and notes.

I know the day my life changed. I was about three blocks from home, partway into the Skoag sector, listening to some Skoags on a street corner. Not listening, really, so much as watching them puff their greasy skins out until they looked like those stupid balloon animals Roxie the clown used to make for my Head Start class. Then when they were all puffed out, membrane ballooned over corally bone webs, they’d start making music, the skin going in and out just like speaker cones on really old speakers. They reminded me of frogs, because of how their throats puffed out to croak, and because of the wet green-yellow glints on their skins.

I kept a safe distance from them. Everyone did. From the Don’t Do Drugs sessions at school, I knew what the stuff on their skin could do to me. I’d seen Skoag gropies, wandering around bald-eyed, hands reaching to grope any passing Skoag, to get one more rush even if it deafened them. Skoag gropies were always getting killed, squashed by cars and trucks they could no longer hear, or dreaming themselves to death, forgetting to eat or drink, forgetting everything but groping a fingerful of Skoag slime. But there were no gropies around these Skoags, and because they all still had crests, I knew they were new to Earth. Skoags usually lost their crests pretty fast in our gravity. One of these Skoags had the tallest crest I’d ever seen, like a king’s crown, and purple like a deep old bruise.

There was a mixed crowd around the Skoags. Inlander tourists who’d never seen a Skoag before, taking videos, making tapes. Locals panhandling the tourists, sometimes pretending they were passing the hat for the Skoags. Older boys and a few girls, just hanging out, calling the Skoags dirty names to shock the tourists, making out with a lot of tongue. And a few kids like me, skipping school because the sun was shining and it wasn’t too windy and we didn’t feel like doing the weekly pee-in-the-bottle thing. The Skoags played for us all.

They’d been playing all morning, the usual Skoag set. They did “Happy Trails to You,” and “Horiko Cries,” and “When You Were Mine,” and then “America the Beautiful.” That was the weirdest thing about Skoags, how they’d pick up any music they fancied, and then play it back in any order. They’d started “Moon over Bourbon Street” when I saw my mom coming.

She and Teddy had gone to pick up her aid check that morning. But Teddy wasn’t with her, and I knew from her face that another musician had moved out. I was glad in a selfish way, because for the next few days there’d be regular meals on the table, and more food, because the check would only be feeding us two, and Mom would talk to me twice as much as usual. Of course, she’d make sure I actually got up and went to school, too, but that wasn’t much price to pay. And it wouldn’t last long before she’d hold another party and reel in a new musician.

So I was determined to enjoy it while it lasted. So I ran up to her, saying, “Wow, Mom, you should hear this purple-crested one play, he’s really something.” I said that for about four reasons. First, so she wouldn’t have the chance to ask me why I wasn’t in school, and, second, to show that I wasn’t going to notice that jerk Teddy was gone because he wasn’t worth her time. Third, it cheered her up when I acted like I was interested in music. I think she always hoped I really would be like my father, would grow up to be a singer and redeem her, or justify her life or something. And fourth, because the purple-crested one really was something, though I couldn’t have said why.

“You playing tourist, Billy Boy?” my mom asked me in her teasing way that she used when it was only she and I together again. And I laughed, because it was dumb the way the tourists from inland came down to our part of Seattle to spy on the Skoags and listen to them jam. Anybody who’d lived here ignored them the way you ignored supermarket music or a TV in a store window. All you ever heard from a Skoag was the same thing you’d heard a hundred times before anyway. So what I said was sort of a joke, too, to make her laugh and take the flatness out of her eyes.

But Teddy must have been better than I’d known, because her smile faded, and she didn’t scold me or anything. She just stooped down and hugged me like I was all she had in the world. And then she said, very gently, as if I were the adult and she were the little kid explaining something bad she’d done, “I gave him our check, Billy Boy. See, Teddy has a chance to go to Portland and audition for Sound & Fury Records. It’s a new label, and if things go like I know they will, he’ll be into the big money in no time. And he’ll send for us. We’ll have a real house, Billy, all to ourselves, or maybe we’ll get a motor home and travel across the country with him on tour, see the whole United States.”

She said more stuff but I didn’t listen. I knew what it meant, because once one of her guys had stolen both checks, her Career Mother Wage and my Child Nutrition Supplement. What it meant was bad times. It meant a month of food-bank food, runny peanut butter on dry bread, dry milk made up with more water than you were supposed to use, generic cereal that turned into sog in the milk, and macaroni. Lots and lots of microwaved macaroni, to the point where I used to swallow it whole because I couldn’t stand the squidgy feeling of chewing it anymore. I was already hungry from being out in the wind all morning, and just thinking about it made me hungrier. There wasn’t much food at home; there never was right before the aid check was due.

I just went on holding on to Mom, hating Teddy, but not much, because if it hadn’t been Teddy, it would have been someone else. I wanted to ask, “What about me? What about us? Aren’t we just as important as Teddy?” But I didn’t. Because it wouldn’t bring the money back, so there was no sense in making her cry. The other reason was, about three weeks before, Janice from upstairs had sat at our kitchen table and cried to Mom because she’d just given her little girls away. Because she couldn’t take care of them or feed them. Janice had kept saying that at least they’d get decent meals and warm clothes now. I didn’t want Mom to think that I wanted food and clothes more than I wanted to stay with her.

So I wiped my face on her shirt without seeming to and pulled back to look at her. “It’s okay, Mom,” I told her. “We’ll get by. Let’s go home and figure things out.”

But she wasn’t even listening to me. She was focused on the Skoags, actually on the one with the big crest, listening to “Moon over Bourbon Street” like she’d never heard it before. It sounded the same as always to me, and I tugged at her hand. But it was just like I wasn’t there, like she had gone off somewhere. So I just stood there and waited.

My mom listened until they were done. The big purple-crested Skoag watched her listen to them. His big flat eye spots were pointed toward her all the time, calm and dead and unfocused like all Skoag eyes are. He was looking over the heads of the tourists and hecklers, straight at her.

When the song was finished, they didn’t go right into another song like usual. Purple stood there, watching my mother and letting the air leak out of his puffers. The other Skoags looked at him, and they seemed puzzled, shifting around, and one made a flat squawk. But then they let their air out, too, and pretty soon they were all empty and bony, their puffer things tight against their bodies again. My mom kept staring at the Skoag, like she was still hearing music, until I shook her arm.

“I’m coming,” she said, but she didn’t. She didn’t even move, until I shook her arm again and said, “I’m hungry.”

Then she jerked and looked down at me finally. “Oh, my poor little kid,” she said. She really meant it. That bothered me. I thought about it while we walked home. I wasn’t any more selfish than any kid is, and kids have a right to be selfish sometimes. So I walked along, thinking that she really did know how awful this month was going to be and how much I hated squidgy macaroni, and she probably even knew that the sole was coming off my sneaker. But she’d still given the check to Teddy. And that was a hard thing for a kid to understand.

So we went home. Mom switched on the stereo and went right to work. She was real methodical and practical when there wasn’t a musician to distract her. She sorted out what groceries we had and organized them in the cupboard.

Then she went through all the pockets of her clothes and dug inside the chair and got together all the money we had. It was ten seventy-eight. Then she sat me at the table with her, like I was one of her musicians, and told me how she was going to get us through the month. She explained that if I went to school every day, I’d get the free morning milk and vita-roll, and free hot lunch on my aid ticket. So I’d be mostly okay, even if there wasn’t much for dinner. We’d get through just fine. After all, we were pretty tough, weren’t we? And couldn’t the two of us beat anything if we just stuck together? And were we going to let a month of crummy groceries knock down tough guys like us? All that stuff. But suddenly, in the middle of the pep talk, she got up and knelt by her stereo. She twiddled the knobs, frowning. “Signal’s drifting, or something. Damn, that’s all I need. For this to drop dead on me now.” She tried about three different stations, then snapped it off. “Lousy speakers,” she complained to me. “Everything sounds tinny.”

It had sounded okay to me, but I didn’t say anything. Instead, I sat still and watched her take out a pot and run water and take things from the cupboards for dinner.

We had oatmeal for dinner, and toast with peanut butter melting on it. Mom gave me the last of the brown sugar for my oatmeal. “Good grains and protein in this meal,” she said wisely, as if she had planned it rather than scraped together what we had left. I nodded and ate it. It wasn’t so bad. At least it wasn’t macaroni.

That evening Mom sat at the table, reading a paperback that Teddy had left and wearing his old sweatshirt. I guess she felt pretty bad. Every so often, she’d turn on the stereo and fool with it for a while, then shake her head and snap it off. She’d read a little longer, and then she’d get up and turn the stereo on again, searching through the stations, but never finding what she wanted. In between, I was listening to the building sounds, spooky at night. The water heater in the utility room was growing and gurgling through the wall. I was coloring a Don’t Do Drugs handout from school, wishing they’d given me more than three crayons. I wanted to color the spoon and syringe silver. Yellow just wasn’t the same.

Mom had just snapped the radio off for about the twelfth time. In the quiet I heard a sound like someone dragging a bag of potatoes down our steps. Mom and I looked at each other. She lifted her finger to her lips and said, “Shush!” So I sat perfectly still, waiting. There came a slapping sound against the door, and whatever was slapping pushed against it too. The door thudded against the catch.

My mom’s dark eyes went huge, scaring me more than the noises outside the door. She went to the kitchen and got our biggest knife. “Go to my room, Billy Boy,” she whispered. But I was too scared to move. Like a monster movie, when the music screams and you know they’re going to show you something awful, but you can’t look away. I had to know what was outside. And Mom was too scared to make me obey. Instead she crept a little closer to the door, holding the knife tight. “Who’s out there?” she yelled, but her voice cracked.

The pressure on the door stopped, and for a moment all was silent. Then there was a sound, sort of like a harmonica wedged in a trumpet, and someone blowing through it anyway. It was a silly cartoon sound, Doofus Duck smacked with a rubber mallet, and my mom looked so startled that I burst out laughing. It was a dorko noise. Nothing scary could make a sound like that. Then a voice spoke, a low, low voice, like cello strings being rubbed slowly.

“That is my name on my world. But humans call me Lavender.”

“The Skoag?” Mom asked, but I was already past her and undoing the flimsy dead bolt on the door. I had to see it. It was so impossible for a Skoag to be outside our door at night that I had to see it was real. “Billy!” Mom warned, but I dragged the door open anyway.

The Skoag was there. The same purple-crested one we had listened to earlier. Only he looked a lot smaller with all his bladders deflated, not much bigger than my mom. He was wearing a sort of pouch thing on his front, and in it was a brown grocery sack, a bouquet of flowers wrapped in green tissue paper, and a skinny brown liquor store bag. He was draped in the transparent plastic robe Skoags were supposed to wear in human dwellings. His skin glistened through it in the watery streetlamp light like oil on a puddle, iridescent and shifting. His fat little flippers waved up and down slowly, like a fish underwater. His murky blue eye spots fixed on my mother.

She stared back at him. She still had the knife in her hand, but she had forgotten it. She crossed her arms, a closing, denying gesture. “What do you want?” she demanded, in the scared stubborn voice she kept for the landlord.

A little bladder above his eyes pulsed with his cello voice. “To come in.”

“Well, you can’t,” she said, at the same time as I asked, “How did you get down the steps?”

“With great difficulty,” he pulsed at me, but there was a violin squibble above the cello that made his answer a sort of joke. I grinned at him; I couldn’t help it. He’d noticed me. He’d answered my question before he paid attention to what my mom had said, and he’d answered it in the way one buddy might kid with another. I felt two feet taller.

He looked back at Mom, waiting.

“Go away,” she told him.

“I cannot,” he said, all cello again. “Earlier today, I heard you listening to us. I think. My companions tell me it was not so, that I am tricking myself because I want too badly. But I am not deceived. I have hope only. I have brought gifts. Flowers and wine for you, as is fitting, and food for your child, who said he was hungry. May I come in?”

She just stood there, staring at him. A car shushed by in the rainy street outside, and the wind gusted, blowing cold air down our steps and in past the Skoag. And still they both just stood there, waiting for something.

“I love you,” the cello thrummed, and the sound swelled, like a big warm wave washing through our apartment. The sound didn’t end with the words, it went on with musiclike embroidery on the edges of the thought. I listened to it pass and fade, and then the silence came behind it, separating us again. The silence seemed unbearable.

“Come in,” said my mother.

So Lavender came to live with us.

Everything changed.

Everything.

Within just a few days, the neighbors stopped knowing us. I’d walk down the streets, and rocks would bounce around me, but I’d never see who’d thrown them. The radio was never turned on again. There was real food, every day. Mom stopped looking at street musicians and haunting the open mikes. The street people called her ugly names, and our mailbox got ripped off the wall in the upstairs lobby. I got into so many fights at school that the principal said I had to stay in at recesses for the rest of the year. After that, I was left totally alone. I didn’t care. Because I had Lavender at home.

Every day I went to school, because Lavender said I should. It would be important later, he assured me, and that was enough for me. Every day I came home and slid down the ridged ramp that had replaced our steps. And Lavender was always waiting for me to come home, even if my mother wasn’t there. Always before, Mom’s musicians had tolerated and ignored me, treated me like a cat or a houseplant, a semiannoying creature that lived in my mother’s house. Not Lavender. He knew I was there, and he was glad. He made me important. We would have a snack together, he rubbing his sludgy porridge through a membrane on his chest, me munching cookies and milk. Then I had to show him every single paper I’d brought home, read aloud from every library book I’d checked out. All I did amazed him. But mostly we’d talk and laugh. His laugh reminded me of a giant grasshopper chirring. Once he told me that Skoags had never laughed before they came to Earth, but the idea of a special sound made just to show happiness was so wonderful that now it was the first thing that all exiles were allowed to do. Each Skoag got to make up his own kind of laugh. He said it like it was some big favor for them. Then he told me that my laugh was one of the best ones he’d ever heard. That first day, when he’d heard my laugh in the street, he’d known that anyone who could create so marvelous a sound had to be very special indeed. And then he laughed my own laugh for me to hear, and that set me laughing; and we laughed together for about ten minutes, in harmony, like a new kind of song.

Looking back, I know he didn’t understand much of basic human needs. Because he learned mostly from me, he had a seven-year-old boy’s idea of what was important. Food he understood, and he always made sure there was plenty of it, though he tended to buy the same kinds over and over again. He loved bright, simple toys that moved, yo-yos and tops and plastic gliders, marbles and Super Balls and Frisbees. I’m convinced he thought that flowers were essential to my mother, and he filled our little apartment with graceful glass vases full of them. I never thought to ask for anything more than what he brought and I know my mother never did. She was too used to giving to learn taking easily. Still, Lavender tried to provide for us. I remember the day I came home and found him cautiously touching his flippers to the protruding nails and scabs of Sheetrock on the two-by-four wall studs. “This pleases the Mom?” he asked me.

“No. It’s really ugly. But it’s all we’ve got,” I told him. A wrinkling ran over his deflated bladders, a gesture I had learned was like an excited grin. “This would please the Mom?” the cello thrummed, and he began pulling yards and yards of stuff out of his belly pouch. Shiny like plastic, but soft like fabric, and so thin you could crumple up a square yard of it in your fist. He began fastening it to the wall, in graceful drapery, and as it fell straight, the room warmed with both color and heat, the musky basement smell faded, and a gentle light suffused the room. Then we hid in the closet until my mom came home and was surprised by it. “Oh, Lavender, you cover up all the rough edges of my life,” Mom told him. For a long time, I thought she meant the wall studs. He could make the hanging different colors, and he adjusted it almost daily, though I never asked how. If I had, he would have told me. I just didn’t ask.

He told me anything I wanted to know. I knew more about Skoags than any of the “experts” of that time. Anything I asked him, he answered. I knew that they had been exiled to our world because they sang in public, and that was not permitted in their home world. I knew that they sang only other people’s music, because making up new music was something only a holy leader could do. The Earth Skoags were religious rebels, sort of like the Pilgrims. They believed singing was so worshipful that Skoags should do it all the time, everywhere, and that everyone should do it, not just priest-Skoags. On their own world, that was heresy, and anyone caught at it had to choose between exile or “a most unfortunate happening.” For a long time I didn’t know what he meant by that. A lot of what he told me was puzzling. Lavender kept trying to explain to me that singing was a circle, and that if one sang well enough to make the perfect music, it would create the one that would close the circle. My mom, he said, was “Close. Almost the end of the circle. The one, but not quite.” I never understood what he meant, but it was very important to him. A day didn’t pass without him trying to make me understand. There just weren’t human words for the Skoag ideas. It worried him very much. It was the only hole in our communication. He told me other stuff, like how some Skoags had long, articulated flippers like my fingers, and how they were dehydrated for their space journeys, and how they thought of humans as “half sexed” because we weren’t self-fertile. Anything I asked, he answered. But if I didn’t ask, he didn’t bother me with it. I never asked him if he had come to end his people’s exile, or if he were a very important Skoag on his world or how their spaceships operated. Or he would have told me. But I didn’t ask.

In the long evenings, Lavender made music for us, playing anything we wanted. He knew every song my mother ever asked for and could do them in any artist’s style. She would sit on the end of my couch, my feet warm against her, listening raptly while Lavender played until I fell asleep. Mornings I would waken to his slaps on the door and run to let him in. He’d be laden with cereal and milk and fruit and a packet of his own gruelly food, and always fresh flowers for Mom. He’d play back to me all the new sounds he’d heard in the night city, not just the music that drifted out from the bars, but seagulls crying over the bay, and the coughing of winos and the barking of dogs. It was always hard to go to school. I was sure they had fun without me all day at home, but to please Lavender, I went.

Life was good. There was food and talk and warmth at home, and that’s all most kids ask. But on top of all that, I had Lavender. The value of that is too great to tell. For over a year, the world was as good as it could possibly be.

One day my mother touched him. By accident. I know, because I was there when it happened. So simple, so stupid. She slipped on the kitchen floor, reached out to steady herself and caught Lavender’s flipper. Lavender’s bare flipper tip, shining with Skoag slime, caught my mother’s hand, steadied her, and transported her to ecstasy. Her face changed, she cried out, a simple “oh” like a kid seeing his first Christmas tree, and sat down on the kitchen floor. She just sat and smiled. Lavender gently pulled his flipper free of her grip, but it was too late. His dark blue eye spots fastened on me.

“You didn’t do it on purpose,” I told him. “It wasn’t your fault.” But my heart was shaking my whole body.

A scant second later, Mom was standing up, saying, “I’m all right. Don’t be upset, Lavender. Stop flapping like that. Billy, don’t stare, I’m fine.” She caught at the edge of the kitchen table, sat down in one of the chairs. “Shit. What a rush!” she said a moment later, and then sighed. And got up from the table and went to the stove and started stirring the spaghetti sauce again. And that was that. Whew, I thought as my mind darted to my Don’t Do Drugs book at school. I’m glad Mom didn’t turn into a Skoag gropie.

But, of course, she did.

At first she never touched Lavender when I was around. And kids don’t notice gradual changes. I’d get home from school, and she’d be sitting at the table, humming to herself. It got harder to get her attention. More and more, she told me to fix my own supper. At first she’d tell me what to cook, but later she’d just wave at the fridge. After a while, Lavender learned about frozen dinners and bought them for us. One day when I got home, I found that Lavender had replaced our little aid-issued microwave cooker with a more elaborate one. I cooked all the meals from then on. But even then, I didn’t catch on.

If I suspected anything, it was only that Mom and Lavender were growing closer. That first night he had said he loved her. That had never seemed strange to me. I loved my mom, a lot of musicians had said they loved her, so why shouldn’t a strange Skoag standing on the doorstep say it? I never doubted it was true, and I don’t think Mom did either. Lavender never missed a chance to show how important “the Mom” was. Not just the flowers, or the way he played whatever she wanted him to play. It was the way he respected her in a way no one else ever had. He made her listening as important as his playing.

And it started being more and more important. Now when he played for her at night, he’d stop, sometimes in the middle of the music, and say, “Is that it? Is that right?”

“No,” she’d say, and he’d deflate with despair.

Or, “Almost,” she’d say, and hum a bit to herself, a swatch of music nothing like what he’d been playing, but he’d say, “I think I hear,” and try again.

And if she said, “Yes, yes, that’s it,” he’d play the piece over and over again, while she sat and nodded and smiled. Slowly she changed. She didn’t care about her clothes anymore, and she seldom went outside. She got fat and bought big men’s shirts from the secondhand store to cover her belly. She became fussy about her hair, brushing and combing it like a fussy fiddler tuning his strings. Her voice changed, becoming dreamy and muffled, the ends of her words blunting. Sometimes when I got home from school, she’d be sitting at the table, dreaming with her eyes open. I’d talk to her but get no response until Lavender came to stand beside her. Then she’d focus on me, and answer my questions in a sweet, dreamy voice.

It was easier to talk to Lavender instead. He always knew everything anyway, and Mom was so happy and dreamy that I didn’t worry about anything being wrong. She wasn’t like the filthy, skinny Skoag gropies in the schoolbook. She was clean, and shining with health and dreams, plump and pretty. About then I found out Lavender didn’t always leave at night anymore, but sometimes lay on the bed beside her, with Mom gripping his flipper all night, her head pillowed on his plastic-coated body. So I should have known she was a Skoag gropie, right, and realized she was stone deaf. How could I? I was a kid, she didn’t look like a gropie, and even if she ignored me a lot, she was still my mom. And she still listened every night to Lavender’s playing.

Even I was enchanted by his music. Mom no longer asked for stuff by titles, and I had never cared what he played. What had mattered to me was that he was playing for me as well as for Mom. That last bit of special attention at the end of the day was what mattered to me. But slowly that changed, as the music he played changed. He started playing a lot of stuff I didn’t know. Some of it was dreary and mournful, and sometimes the words were in a different language. Sometimes it was full of strings and campfires, and sometimes it sounded like brass challenges and steel replies. But sometimes the music was so strange and wonderful it made the hair stand up on my arms and legs and tickled the back of my neck. I began to understand how my mother could live for music. Some of the music he played made my heart want to dance outside my body, pulled me from my sofa to sit beside Lavender’s fat, calloused feet-flippers, hypnotized me with joy. And some of it made me cry, isolated stinging tears because I could almost, but not quite, tell what the music was about.

That had to be Lavender’s music. No one else could have made up such music, music that knew me so well. It had to be his original music. But Skoags weren’t allowed to make their own music. Unless they were priest-Skoags, composing for the temples.

In February, the first package came for Lavender. It was at the bottom of the ramp when I got home, and I picked it up and took it into the house. Just a little flat black plastic box. “Look what I found,” I said as I came in the door, and Lavender came immediately and took it from me.

“For me,” he told me. “A message.” His cello strings quivered unnaturally as he slipped it into his pouch. I never saw him open it, and he didn’t speak of it again, just asked to see my school papers.

There were three more after that, or perhaps four. Always at the bottom of the ramp when I got home from school, and always Lavender took them. One day it started raining on my way home and when I got to our house, there were flipper prints outlined on the ramp, leading to the flat black box. So Skoags left them. I wondered why the Skoags were sending him messages instead of just talking to him.

The last message box was silver, not black. Lavender held it for a long time, just looking at it. Then the muscles around his eye spots moved and he looked at my mom for a long time. She knew something about those message boxes, and it wasn’t good. I wanted terribly to know what it was, but I was too frightened to ask. Silence wrapped me so tightly it cut into me like wires. I went to Mom, and she held me against her fat stomach and stroked my head like I was a baby. Then she gave me a gentle push and pointed to the door. I was to go outside.

“I’m not a baby anymore,” I said angrily, knowing I was being shut off from something.

“No,” said Lavender. He moved a slow flipper, and Mom let go of me. “You certainly aren’t. You are old enough to be trusted with important things.” He paused, then the cello thrummed rapidly. “Billy Boy. I have made the other Skoags very angry by being here with you. They demand I come back to them and live as they wish me to live. I cannot. Tomorrow I will go to tell them that. There may be . . .” the cello sighed wordlessly, then went on, “a great unpleasantness for me. A most unfortunate happening, perhaps. Until I come back, I will rely on you to take care of the Mom.” He turned slowly until he faced my mom again. “That is all there is to say. Billy does not need to leave.” She bowed her head, accepting his wishes. He spoke no more about it but went about the apartment tunelessly humming and adjusting the wall hanging from pale mauve to a sky blue.

That evening he played long, wordless songs with lots of strings and high-pitched wind instruments. I fell asleep to music like seagulls crying after a storm.

The next day when I got home from school, Lavender wasn’t there. Mom was sitting at the table. She didn’t even look up until I slapped my schoolbooks down in front of her. Then she looked up with eyes as flat and dark as Lavender’s eye spots. Her face was like the day she’d given Teddy our check, but a thousand times worse. “Billy,” she said, in a low swollen voice like her mouth was packed with marshmallows. She reached for me, to pull me near, but the palms of her hands were scarred with iridescence, like the pictures in the Don’t Do Drugs textbook. Suddenly I couldn’t let her touch me. My mind tagged and rejected the truth. I pulled back, feeling betrayed, knowing something was terribly, terribly wrong. “Lavender!” I cried, but no cello sawed an answer. I looked again at my mom, at her scarred hands and her deaf loneliness. I saw what he had done, but his not being here, now, was worse.

“Don’t hate him,” Mom said, in her slow, sticky voice. “We had to do it, Billy. We couldn’t help ourselves. And some day it’s going to be all right.”

She couldn’t have known how bad it was going to get. All that long empty evening, she’d shiver suddenly and then wrap her arms around herself and cock her head as if seeking for a sound. I sat on the couch and watched her and tried to imagine her loneliness. My mother cut off from music, from all sound. As kind to seal off her lungs from air. But he loved her, he loved me; he couldn’t leave her empty like that and me alone, and he wouldn’t just go away. I watched her digging her fingers into her ears like she was trying to claw out a stopper. Her nails came out with tiny shreds of dry skin and scabby stuff. She wiped at her ears with pieces of toilet paper, and they came away pink. It was awful to watch. But the worst was the sound of flippers on the ramp, and the heavy slap at the door. The worst was me jumping up, believing that Lavender had come back and everything was going to be all right. I ran to the door and dragged it open for him, and he fell halfway into the room.

It was a terribly clattery sound, his fall, but he didn’t cry out. My mom didn’t make a sound as she went to him. I stood clear of them both, watched her roll him over.

I screamed when I saw what they had done to him. The remains of his bladders fluttered in feeble rags, and a pale yellowish stuff oozed from the torn edges. They had slashed them all, every sound membrane on his body. He tried to speak, but made only a ridiculous sound of flapping curtains and newspapers blowing down the street, a terrible fluttering of ripped drumheads. My mother knelt over him and lifted his flippers and pressed them to her cheeks. Even now, I don’t believe it was the act of a junkie trying for one last rush. There was terrible wisdom and love in her eyes as his shining iridescence ate into her skin and marked her. His tattered membranes fluttered once more and then hung still.

I ran out of the apartment and down the streets. They were shiny with rain, shining like his skin, and wet like the dripping stuff from his wounds. I ran as far and fast as I could, trying to run away from those terrible moments to a place where it hadn’t happened. I don’t know who called the police or the ambulance or whoever it was that came and took the body away. I know it wasn’t my mom. She would have sat there forever, just holding his flippers while his music faded.

I came back in the gray part of morning. A man and a woman were waiting for me. They wore long overcoats and stood, as if sitting in our chairs might make them dirty. An outline was chalked on the floor, and they wouldn’t answer any of my questions. Instead, they asked me questions, lots of them. Had the Skoags killed Lavender? Why? Did I see them do it? Did my mom help them do it? Why had a Skoag been living with us? Had he ever tried to touch me? But the anger inside me wouldn’t let me answer their questions. “Where’s my mom?” I demanded each time, and finally they put me in a car and took me to the Children’s Home and left me there.

The women at the Children’s Home all wore gray pants and white shirts. They all called me “honey.” They gave me two pairs of pants, two shirts, underwear, socks and shoes, and a bath. They threw away all my own stuff. Then they showed me a bed with a brown blanket on it in a row of beds with brown blankets and told me the bed and the box at the foot of it were mine.

The next day, more people came to talk to me. Nice people, with kind voices and gum and Life Savers. A lady told me my mommy was sick but was in a place where she’d get better soon. But she said it like really my mom was very bad and had to stay somewhere until she was good again. They told me the Skoag was gone and I didn’t have to be afraid anymore. I could tell about it and no one would hurt me. They told me the best way to help my mom was to answer all of their questions. But their voices sounded like creaking cage doors and iron gates swinging in the wind. I knew that talking to them wouldn’t help Mom. So when they asked me questions, I always said I didn’t know, or I answered the opposite of what was true. I contradicted myself on purpose. I said Lavender was my father. I said my mom was his secretary. I said I was going to throw up. Then I did, trying to make it hit their shoes. After three days they left me alone.

After that I had to go to school classes each day with the other Home kids and special anti-substance-abuse classes for the kids of junkies. I got beat up nearly every day. The bigger kids called me “Billy Bun, the Skoag fucker’s son.” One of the kids had a checkstand newspaper with a picture of my mom on the front and big black print that said, SKOAG’S LOVE SLAVE WITNESSES RITUAL EXECUTION!!! GROPIE CONFESSES, “THEY KILLED HIM FOR LOVING ME!” I hit that kid and grabbed the paper and tore it up, and the playground lady said I was an animal not fit to associate with other children. I had to stay in for three recesses. Which was fine with me. That night I got out of bed and went down to that kid’s bunk and pissed on the foot of it. So he got in trouble for wetting his bed. I learned fast.

A very long time went by. Probably it was only a month or two, but it seemed forever. My real life had ended, and someone had stuck me in this new one. I felt like I was someone else, that both Lavender’s life and Lavender’s death had happened to someone I knew, some dumb little kid who hadn’t seen his mom was a junkie and his friend was her pusher. I’d never be that stupid again. The counselor told me that I must always remember that none of it was my fault. I was only a child, and I couldn’t have done a thing about my mother’s decision to become a Skoag gropie. They worked real hard at taking away my guilt and replacing it with bitterness toward my mom, who had ruined my life. But then a spring day came, and I looked out the classroom window and saw a lady with a coat and hood and gloves and a scarf wrapped around her face. I didn’t recognize her, so I just went back to arithmetic. At recess they let her take me home.

Things are simple when you’re a kid. So simple and so awful. I accepted what happened and the aftermath, just kept on day after day, and nothing surprised me because I never knew what to expect. So I wasn’t shocked to find that our door had been busted in, and someone, our neighbors or the street kids, had trashed the place. The smeared chalk outline was still on the floor, with piles of human shit all over it. Lavender’s wall hangings were dead brown tatters, and his flowers were a moldering mess of brown stems and petals and broken glass on the table. The cupboard doors had been ripped down, the microwave was gone, and my couch smelled like urine. Food had been thrown around and mouse droppings were everywhere.

Mom picked up a kitchen chair and set it on its feet and brushed off the seat. She took off her coat and scarf and gloves and put them on the chair, baring her scars so matter-of-factly that they didn’t shock me. They were part of her now, like her fat belly and dark eyes. She picked up a scrap of paper off the floor and wrote down a list of cleaning supplies and cheap food and gave me some money. Then she picked up our old broom.

No one bothered me on the way to the store. The checkout man stared at me for about two minutes before he rang up the stuff. Coming home, I passed a Skoag on the street, a big fat one, and he turned and started following me. But all Skoags are slow, and I ignored the way he tooted for me to come back, he wanted to be my friend, he had candy for me. I just hurried, going through alleys until I lost him.

I got home, and the place looked almost normal. Most of the mess had been scraped into brown sacks for me to shuttle out to the Dumpster. The chalk lines were gone, and as if that was some kind of undoing magic, I half expected to see Lavender come out of the bedroom, or to hear his cello thrumming. Instead there was silence, and the crisp brown tatters of his wall hangings dangled over the edges of a garbage sack.

I stood there and the silence filled me up, made me as deaf and isolated as my mother. Welling up with the silence came the sudden grief of knowing he was really dead. I sat down on the floor and started crying and calling out, “Lavender, Lavender!” Mom kept right on trying to put the cupboard doors back on, using a table knife for a screwdriver, and I kicked my feet and slapped my hands on the hard cold cement and screamed until someone upstairs started pounding on the floor with a broom handle. I guess Mom felt the vibrations. She came and held me until I stopped crying, and said I was okay. But I wasn’t. I knew just how alone I really was. My pain was like an invisible knife stuck in me that no one could see to pull out. I knew my mother was hurt just as badly, and there was nothing I could do to help her, either. That was when I decided to forgive her for the awful thing she had done to me, for making Lavender go away.

We found a rhythm in our days, a steady beat that kept us living. Mom became a very good housekeeper, mostly to fill her time. Everything was cleaned up, and she pieced back together the broken stuff. She saved from each aid check until we could buy an economy microwave and have hot foods again. She mended all my clothes and sewed things from my outgrown stuff. Every two weeks she’d put on her gloves and scarf and go after her aid check, but I did all the shopping. I went back to school. I got beat up every day on the playground. Then I stole a baseball bat from school and lay in wait for the kid who had done it and really worked him over. The third time a kid beat me up, and then got bushwhacked, the other kids made the connection. They left me alone. They knew they could hit me at school, but sooner or later the price for doing it was higher than anyone wanted to pay. So I got by. I’d still see the fat Skoag outside the grocery store, and he’d call to me, but I outran him. So no one bothered me. The silence of my home spread out and wrapped me up. No one talked to me much, and that seemed fitting. What better way to mourn Lavender’s passing than with silence? I was nine years old, and the best part of my life was over.

Mom got fatter and slower. I thought she was going to die. She moved like an old, old woman and sat like she was blind as well as deaf. Once a week an aid lady came, with pamphlets about how not to be a Skoag gropie, and Don’t Do Drugs coloring books and balloons and crayons for me. She’d give Mom a signed slip, and Mom had to turn it in to get her aid check. The aid lady was younger than Mom and wore gray pants and a white shirt. I secretly believed she was from the Children’s Home and might take me back there. She always made me show her my hands, and every week I had to pee in a bottle for her, even though everyone knows that Skoag slime won’t show in a pee test. She left signing booklets for my Mom, but she didn’t want them. So I took them and learned to sign dirty words to the kids at school.

And Lavender was never there.

That’s how it would hit me; I’d be going along, doing a math page or signing out something about someone’s sister or folding up my blanket or getting a drink of water, and suddenly I’d notice, all over again, that Lavender wasn’t there. It always felt like someone had suddenly grabbed hold of my heart and squeezed it. I looked all through the house one day, trying to find one thing that he had touched, one thing he’d given to us that we still had. But there was nothing. It was like he’d never existed, and the silence was like he’d never made music.

One May day I came home from school and Mom had a baby. She hadn’t warned me, so it was a big shock to find her lying in bed with this little pink thing dressed in a nightgown made from one of my old T-shirts. I knew someone had helped her from the neatly folded towels by the bed, and the gray box of paper diapers. More aid stuff. My mom’s fat stomach was gone, and I felt really dumb for not knowing she had been pregnant. I saw pregnant women in the streets all the time, but it had never occurred to me that my mom could get that way. I knew, too, that she couldn’t get a baby unless she’d done it with somebody. And the only one who’d been living with us . . .

Mom wasn’t saying much, just watching me as I looked at the baby. What fascinated me the most was those tiny little fingernails she had, thin as paper. I kept staring at her hands.

“Go ahead,” Mom finally said. “You can touch her. She’s your little sister, Billy. Put your finger in her hand.” Her voice dragged like an old tape, and she sounded really tired.

“Is it . . . safe?” I asked. But she wasn’t watching my mouth, so she didn’t know I’d said anything. I went and got my school tablet. On it I printed, very carefully, IS SHE PART SKOAG ON HER SKIN? Then I took it back into Mom’s bedroom and handed it to her.

She read it and crumpled it up and threw it across the room. Her mouth went so tight it was white around her lips. It scared me. She’d never been mad at me while Lavender was around, and since he’d died, she’d been too beaten to be angry at anything.

“Shit!” she said, and the word came out with hard edges, sounding like she used to. She grabbed my wrist, and I could feel the hard slickness of her Skoag scarred palms. “You listen to me, Billy Boy,” she said fiercely. “I know what you been hearing. But you knew Lavender, and you damn well know me. And you should know that we . . . that we loved each other. And if he’d been a human and we could have had a baby together, we’d have done it. But he wasn’t, and we didn’t. This baby here, she’s all mine. One hundred percent. It sometimes happens to women who get hooked on Skoag touch. They call it a self-induced pregnancy. This baby’s a clone of me. You understand that? She’s the same as me, all over again. Only I’m going to make sure she comes out right. She’s going to be loved, she’s going to have chances. She’s not going to end up in a dump on aid, with no . . .” Her voice got more and more runny, the words souping together. She let go of my wrist and started crying. She lifted her hands and curled her fingers toward the tight skin on her palms and held them near her face but not touching it. Her tears trickled into the flipper scars that her final touching of Lavender had left on her face. Her crying woke the baby up, and she started crying, too. Her little face got red and her mouth gaped open, but no sound came out. Then my mom said to her, in the most terrible voice I’ve ever heard, “Baby, what’d you come here for? I got nothing to give you. I got nothing to give anyone.” And she rolled over and turned her back on her.

I stood there, watching them, thinking that any minute Mom would turn back and pick her up and take care of her. But a long time passed, and Mom just lay there, crying all shaky, and the baby lay there, all red and crying without sound.

So I picked her up. I knew how; I used to hold Janice’s baby before she gave her kids away. I held her against my chest, with her head on my shoulder so it wouldn’t wobble. I carried her around and rocked her, but her face stayed red and she kept breathing out through her mouth, really hard. She didn’t make any sound when she cried, but I thought maybe newborn babies didn’t cry out loud. I thought she might be hungry. So I went in the kitchen and I checked the refrigerator, to see if Mom had bottles and government aid formula in plastic envelopes like Janice used to have. And there was, so I warmed one up in the microwave until the plastic button on it turned blue to show it was the right temperature. Then I sat down and put the bottle in her wide open mouth. But she acted like she didn’t even know it was there and kept up her unhearable screaming.

I sat down on the couch with her on my lap. Her little legs were curled up against her belly. I looked at her red wrinkly feet and her teeny toes. My old T-shirt looked dopey on her, and I wished I had something better for her to wear. Maybe she was cold. So I pulled a corner of my blanket up over her. Her mouth stayed open and her face stayed red. I really wished I had a suck-on thing to stick in her mouth. But I didn’t. So I started rocking her on my lap and singing this song Janice used to sing to baby Peggy, about a mockingbird and a pony cart and all sorts of presents the baby would get if she’d be quiet. And right away she closed her mouth and went back to being pink instead of red. She opened her eyes that she’d squinched shut and looked right at me. Her eyes were kind of a murky blue. I looked into them and I knew Mom had lied. Because she looked at me just the way Lavender used to, when I didn’t know if he was looking at my face or at something inside my head. I knew she was his, and as long as I had her, he wasn’t really gone. This baby was something he’d touched, something he’d left for me to hold on to and keep. Part of him for me to keep.

I suddenly felt shaky and my throat closed up so tight I couldn’t breathe or sing, but she didn’t seem to mind now. She just kept looking up at me and I kept looking at her, and I wondered if this was what Lavender had meant about closing a circle. Because I knew she was loving me as much as I loved her. It was as important as he had said it was. I held her until her eyes closed, and then I carefully lay down on the couch with her on my stomach and my blanket over us. Her face was against my neck, breathing, and every now and then her mouth would move in a wet baby kiss. Before I fell asleep, I named her Lisa, from an old song Lavender used to sing about Lisa, Lisa, sad Lisa, Lisa.

After that, she was more my baby than Mom’s. Coming home to her was like coming home to Lavender. I meant that much to her. She was always crying and wet when I got home. Mom never seemed to notice when she needed changing, and even if she hadn’t been deaf, she wouldn’t have heard this baby cry. So I’d clean her up and feed her and hold her and rock her. And I’d sing to her. She liked that the best. She was just like my mom that way. I got the idea of tuning the stereo to an all-music station and leaving it on for her when I had to go to school in the morning. Since our place had been trashed, the stereo always had a background sound like cars going by on a wet street, but Lisa didn’t care. I’d put her down in the morning and turn on the stereo for her, and she’d still be happy when I got home from school. She slept with me at night, since I was afraid she’d fall out of Mom’s bed. But my couch was perfect, because I could put her between me and the back of it, and she’d be safe all night long, just as safe as the little mice nesting inside it.

A new pattern came into my life. I was taking care of things, taking care of the Mom, just like Lavender had told me, and taking care of him, in the form of Lisa. Mom didn’t have to do much at all. She got her checks and kept the house clean. I took the checks to the store and got food and sometimes a few extra little things for Lisa. She loved anything that made a noise, rattles, bells—anything. The only time Mom got mad was when I spent seven dollars on a stuffed lamb with a music box inside it. She yelled at me in her mushy voice, because to get it I had to buy tofu instead of hamburger and skipped getting margarine and eggs and jam. But it was worth it to watch Lisa wave her little fists excitedly every time the lamb started playing.

After four or five months, I noticed Mom wasn’t keeping the house as clean. She still swept and stuff, but not like before, and I was doing almost all the cooking. Something had gone out of Mom and left her flat, something more than just a baby coming out of her stomach. I think she had expected more, had thought that Lisa was going to be better, somehow. Disappointed was how she acted at first, and then later, uninterested. I felt mad about it, and I’d try to make her pay more attention to Lisa. I’d take her to Mom and show her how Lisa was learning to smile, or how she could sit on her own. But it didn’t do any good. Mom would hold her awhile and look at her, and then she’d go set her down on the couch, without even making sure she couldn’t roll off. She never talked to Lisa or played with her. And after a while I knew she never would. So I started loving her even more, to make up for Mom not loving her.

It got harder as Lisa got bigger. Summer went okay, but by the time school started again, it wasn’t safe for me to leave her all day. I tried putting her in a cardboard box while I was gone, but it was hard to find ones that were strong enough. She’d get hold of the edges and try to stand up, and I was afraid she’d fall. She was eating more, too, so even if I left a bottle inside her box for her, she’d still be really hungry when I got home. Mom didn’t notice her at all, and of course she couldn’t hear Lisa’s silent crying. Mom didn’t seem to notice much of anything. She’d tidy up the house each day, and then just sit at the table. Late at night, she might put a scarf around her face and go out for a walk. But that was about all she did, and it didn’t make me feel any safer about leaving Lisa all day. So after Christmas I just didn’t go back to school and no one ever noticed.

When I think about those days, with Lisa starting to be a real person and all the time we had together, they’re almost as good as the days with Lavender. Lisa’s eyes turned brown, but they never lost that Lavender look, where she could look right through me while I rocked her to the music. Her hair was dark like Mom’s, but curly at the back of her head, and she was almost always smiling. I hated dressing her in stuff made from old T-shirts. The stuff was too small, and Mom hadn’t made her any new clothes. So I asked the aid lady who came about once every two months then, and she told me where I could get baby clothes that rich people gave away. She gave me slips for Lisa and me and Mom and helped me write down the right sizes on them. That aid lady wasn’t too bad.

On Monday I took the slips and Lisa and went, using my aid pass to ride the bus. Everyone on the bus thought Lisa was cute and kept calling her honey and touching her hands or bouncing her feet. She was real good about it. One old lady who sat beside us part of the way gave me a five-dollar bill and told me to buy my little sister something with it. She was really nice. When she got off the bus, she kept saying, “Bye-bye, sweetie. Bye-bye,” like she expected Lisa to say something. “She doesn’t talk,” I told her, and the old lady just smiled and said, “Oh, she will pretty soon. Don’t you worry.”

It was the same at the clothes place. A lady at the counter kept talking to Lisa, saying, “You such a sweet thing! You such a good girl, aren’t you?” Lisa would smile, but never make a sound.

“She’s shy, isn’t she?” the lady said. “I bet she babbles her head off at home.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and then felt bad for lying when the other lady came back with three bags of clothes for us. They showed me the stuff they’d picked out for Lisa, little dresses with lace and a new blanket and a chiming rattle that Lisa grabbed right away. Lisa’s bag was the fullest of all, probably because she was so cute.

I should have felt good going home. But the bags were heavy, and it was hard to carry them and Lisa. There was another baby on the bus, making fussy angry noises. It sounded awful, but I wished Lisa could do that. Her being quiet at home had never worried me, but now I was thinking, she won’t always be a baby at home, and what then?

I got off the bus with the heavy bags, and Lisa was wriggly. It was getting dark and starting to rain and I had eight blocks to go. I felt like I couldn’t take another step when the fat Skoag bounced out of an alley right in front of us.

“Hello, little boy!” he honked.

“Stuff it up your ass!” I said back, because I was really scared. Even if I dropped all the clothes, I couldn’t run with Lisa. In the dark and the rain I might fall on top of her and kill her. I squished her close to me, hoping the Skoag wouldn’t see Lavender’s eyes, and kept walking. Maybe if I just kept walking, he’d leave us alone. But his flipper feet kept on slapping the wet sidewalk beside us.

“I’ve got something for you,” he said, and I got even scareder, because that was just like the guy in the Okay to Say No book at school.

“Stuff it up your ass,” I said again and walked faster. One of the bags tore, and I wanted to cry. I’d have yelled for help, but it was dark and there was no one on the streets. This close to home, even if I did yell for help, no one would want to come.

“Boy,” he tootled softly. “It has been hard to find you, for it was commanded that none should speak of it. Every time I speak to you, I put myself in danger of a most unfortunate occurrence. Please take these and free me of a heavy promise.”

Lisa was wriggling in my arms, trying to get a better look at the tootling voice. She kicked out and one of my bags went flying. Before I could grab it up, he took a package from his pouch and dropped it into the bag. Plastic baggies, taped together, but I couldn’t tell what was inside them. I stood still and stared through the dark at him. I was scared to pick up the bag because I didn’t want to get close to him and I didn’t know what he’d put in it. Drugs, maybe, something I’d get arrested for having. But it was the bag with Lisa’s clothes in it, the ones I’d gone through all this for.

“What’s that?” I demanded, trying to sound tough.

“One for each of your months. Green trading paper, what is the word for it? Money. For you to take care of the Mom.”

“Lavender.” I said his name, knowing there was a connection but not figuring it out yet.

“Silence!” the fat Skoag honked, and he sounded like a scared Volkswagen. “To speak the name of a blasphemer is to invite a most unfortunate occurrence.”

“But . . .”

“My task is done, until your next month begins. Next time I call, do not run away. This task is heavy and I would call back the promise, if I had known what would befall the one who asked. Go away quickly, before I am seen with you.”

He waddled off like a frightened duck. I managed to snag up the fallen bag. All the way home, my heart was banging against my lungs. I felt like I’d seen Lavender’s ghost, that he was still around somehow, looking out for us. I kept wondering about the money in the bag. Not how much it was, or what I’d use it for, but what Lavender had been thinking when he made the fat Skoag promise. If he’d known he was going to die, why’d he go to the Skoags who killed him, why didn’t he go to the police or something, or even just come home and ignore those message boxes?

Somehow I got Lisa and the bags down the ramp and managed to turn the doorknob without dropping anything. When I got inside, there was only one light burning and Mom wasn’t there. I didn’t know if she’d gone looking for us because it was so late or just gone out on one of her night walks.

Some things you just have to do first. So I changed Lisa and got her a bottle and put one of the new nightgowns on her and put her in a cardboard box with her bottle, the chiming rattle, and the new blanket. She looked so sweet, all done up in new stuff that it was suddenly worth all I’d gone through. I turned the stereo to some soft music and she settled down.

Then there was time to think, but too much to think about. The package in Lisa’s bag was money, little rolls of it in plastic baggies. I opened it carefully and threw the bags away, even though the slime on them was dried, and dry Skoag slime isn’t dangerous. Each baggie was the same, five ten-dollar bills. I unfolded every single one, looking for a note, or some sign from Lavender to help me understand why he had left us and let someone kill him. But there was only money.

I wrapped the money in one of Lisa’s old nightgowns and stuffed it down into the couch. I wasn’t giving it to Mom. Lavender had left it for me, because he knew I would buy the right things with it. I already knew I was going to get Lisa a playpen so she didn’t have to crawl on the cold cement anymore. And fresh, real bananas instead of dried banana flakes that always looked like gray goop.

I went over to her box and looked in at her. She looked back at me, her legs curled up on her tummy and helping hold the bottle, one little leak of milk trickling down her cheek. I reached down and wiped it away, but she smiled at my touch and more milk trickled out of the corner of her mouth. Her dark Lavender eyes looked at me and through me, and for a second he was there, like any moment his cello voice would fill the room.

But Lisa had no voice.

And that was another thing to think about.

She could hear, that was for sure. So why didn’t she make noises like other babies? I took her bottle away and tried to look in her mouth. She sucked on my finger, but when I tried to open her mouth, she got mad. Finally, she opened it herself, in one of her silent screams. I looked in, but if there was anything wrong in there, I couldn’t see what it was. I looked until she was all red and sweaty from her soundless crying. Then I gave her the bottle back and rocked her to make up for being mean. And I thought.

Lisa was asleep and I was bedded down beside her, nearly falling off the couch now because she’d grown so much, when Mom came back in. She didn’t turn on any lights or say anything; she just came in and went straight to her room, making a little humming sound as she went.

And I lay there on the couch and I knew. I knew what she’d gone out for.

God, I was mad.

I lay there and shook with anger and being scared. Because she was going to blow us all up. I wanted to get up and go into her room and scream at her. But she wouldn’t hear me, and if I held up a note, she’d just ignore it. I could go to her and tell her everything, about the money from Lavender and the new clothes and Lisa not being able to talk, and she wouldn’t even care. She’d only go on with her idiot humming and staring. Because she didn’t care, and probably never had, not about anything except her damn music.

She wasn’t stupid. She’d keep the house clean and dress decent and pick up her aid checks. She didn’t want to be a Skoag gropie in the streets. She’d sneak out by night, find Skoags standing outside the clubs listening to the music, and touch one. I knew it as plainly as if I’d seen it. That was what mattered to her, a press of Skoag flesh. She didn’t care that if the aid worker caught her with slimy hands, they’d take Lisa and me to some children’s home. I remembered what it was like. I could imagine Lisa there, her silent crying going ignored, growing up not able to tell anyone when someone was mean to her. They’d put her with the other ones they called “special” in a big room with a lot of baby toys and ignore her. I’d never see her and she’d forget about me. I’d lose the only thing Lavender had left me. Because of Mom.

I watched Mom the next day, hoping I was wrong. But the signs were there, in the rhythmic way she swept the floor, her chin nodding to the unheard beat. She was groping Skoag slime. It was such a slutty thing to do. I had thought that her touching Lavender had been because they loved each other. Now she seemed like a whore to me, someone who’d touch any Skoag just to make music in her head. I hated her.

The next day I went out to the secondhand store. I bought Lisa a stroller, a playpen, and a piece of carpet to go in the bottom of it. And one of those suits with the feet and a hood. It took me two trips to get everything home.

When my Mom saw all the stuff, she tried to ask me where it had come from. But I just ignored her and her mashed potato voice. She grabbed hold of my arm and shook me. “Biw-wweee! Wherr aw thisss-tuff frum? Huh?”

That’s what she sounded like. I grabbed her hand off my arm and turned it over and pried her fingers open. The Skoag scars were shiny and wet in the cracks. She jerked away from me.

“I don’t have to tell you anything,” I said as she held her hands to her chest. I didn’t yell it. I just said it real clearly, making sure she could see my mouth move. I picked Lisa up and took her to the couch. I started playing patty-cake with her, ignoring Mom. After a while, Mom started going, “Hub. Huh-uh-uh! Hub!” She sat down and put her scarred hands over her scarred face and rocked. After a while I realized she was crying. I didn’t go to her. I remembered Don’t Do Drugs at school, and I knew it was true, that junkies don’t have friends, don’t love, don’t care about anything but their next fix. No one can afford to love a junkie. So I did what the books said. I ignored her. And that was the day I was ten years old.

I took control of things. I found the sign language booklets that the aid lady had left, and I started making Lisa sign. Simple stuff at first. Hold up your arms to be picked up. Finger in the mouth for bottle. Nod your head for stereo turned on. It was harder for me than for Lisa. Because I knew what she wanted, but I couldn’t give it to her until she signed, no matter how she cried. I’d make the sign and then I’d take her hands and make the sign. But after a while, I had to make her sign for herself. She cried a lot. But finally, she started doing the simple signs. By the time she was two, we were on the ones in the pamphlet.

Things went okay for a while. Mom was careful about her habit. None of the aid ladies caught on to her. She was always home when they visited, and the place was tidy. Once, I came back from the store and found her giving Lisa a bath in the sink. But it was only because the aid lady was there. It was just a trick to have her hands busy, and if the aid lady saw the wetness in the cracks of her palms, she’d think it was bathwater. Lisa was splashing water all over and smiling like it was normal for Mom to take care of her. I set the groceries on the table and said, “Hi, Mom,” like we were a happy little family. Mom kept on sponging Lisa, and finally the aid lady said she had to go, but she was glad that things were going better for us.

As soon as she left, I got a towel and took my Lisa and dried her carefully. Lisa kept signing for “cookie” while I was drying her and dressing her while she was kicking and wriggling. Mom gave her one, and it wasn’t until I got her shoes tied and set her on the floor that I realized what that meant. It made me madder than her using Lisa’s bath to keep the aid lady from checking her hands. I found the sign booklets on her nightstand. I carried them out and slapped them down on the kitchen table. Mom was watching me.

“These are mine,” I told her, making my lip movements plain. “Leave them alone.”

“Bwee,” she said pleadingly, and I could see how big and purple her tongue was getting inside her mouth. It made me feel sick and sad and sorry, for Lisa and myself, mostly. That big purple tongue was a withdrawal symptom for a Skoag gropie; it meant she’d been down for more than forty-eight hours. I thought about her washing Lisa, keeping her back to the aid lady. Hiding. She’d still been hiding from the aid lady; it was just a different way from the one I’d figured. She was still using us.

She wasn’t getting her slime. I didn’t know why, but I knew it was dangerous for us. She wouldn’t be able to last. Before long, everyone would know. It hit me. I’d have to take care of it. One more thing for me to handle to keep Lisa safe. It made me angry and at the same time, hot and satisfied because I’d been right about her; she was just going to drag us in deeper and make it all harder. I’d been right to stop caring about her, because she was just going to hurt us if we let her be important to us.

Everything was getting harder. They’d tracked me down for school, and now I had to get there an hour earlier for remedial math. Which meant leaving Lisa with Mom for even longer. And Lisa was walking, so if you left the door open she’d head up the ramp and out onto the sidewalk. I’d sit in school and wonder if Mom had gone out to finger some Skoags and left the door open and Lisa had toddled out and been hit by a car. Or worse, just wandered off and I’d go home and call her but she wouldn’t be able to answer . . . My imagining made school hours torture.

I’d race home each day, and each day Lisa would be okay. Every few nights Mom would go out, and I didn’t know what to hope for. That she’d score some slime and come home hummy, but easy to spot as a gropie? That she wouldn’t get any, but then she’d be trying to sign to Lisa and showing off her withdrawal? Maybe that she wouldn’t hear a delivery van coming down the alleys?

It all came together one night when I went to get another envelope from the fat Skoag. The streetlamp was glinting off his skin, and flashing off his voice membrane each time it swelled like a khaki neon light. He was holding out the envelope in a plastic-mittened flipper, but I said, “I need a favor.”

“No,” he tooted. “No favors.” He flapped the envelope at me frantically. He looked toward the alley mouth, but there was nothing there. I took a breath.

I said calmly, like I was sure of it, “You promised Lavender you’d look out for me and the Mom.”

“Yes. I bring you the money, every time.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s good, but not enough. I need you to come to my house, twice a week, late at night.”

“No.” He said it fast, scared. Then, “Why?”

“Yes. You know why.”

He rocked on his flippers like a zoo elephant. “I can’t,” he tootled mournfully. “Please. I can’t. Take the money and go. Dangerous for me.”

“Dangerous for me if you don’t. And you promised Lavender.”

“I . . . Please. Please. Once a week. Wednesday night, very late. Please.”

He shoved the envelope into my hand. I watched him rock. If I demanded it, he’d come twice a week, but he’d hate me. Or he’d come once a week and think I’d let him off easy. “Okay,” I said, settling for the second one. I might need something else someday, and once a week would hold Mom together.

He came late Wednesday. It startled me awake, his flippering down the ramp and then slapping the door. Mom had stayed in, looking at her hands and sighing, and gone to bed around midnight. It was two A.M. when the fat Skoag showed. I’d gone to sleep, thinking he wasn’t going to come. Odd. Just the sounds of him coming down the ramp and me opening the door like I used to for Lavender made my heart pound. Like maybe I’d open the door and somehow it would be Lavender standing there, gently waving his flippers and waiting for me.

But it was only the fat Skoag. He was pressed into the darkest corner of the stairwell, staring up at the sidewalk. As soon as I opened the door, he scuttled in and pushed it shut.

“Quickly,” he said, pulling off a plastic mitten. “Quickly, please, and then I will go.”

“This way,” I said, and led him into my mother’s bedroom.

She wasn’t asleep. She was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. The bed, wedged in a corner of the small room, was a tousled wreck. Some movement of air as we came into the room turned her eyes to us. She stared at us, between dreaming and awake, and suddenly she sat up and screamed “Lavender!”

The word came out crisp and hard and real, like she used to talk. Then she saw it wasn’t him and she broke. She made this horrible laughing-crying sound. The fat Skoag freaked when she screamed and waddled frantically for the door, but I was closer, and I slammed it and put my back to it. “No,” I said, gripping the knob. “You don’t leave until she’s touched you.”

His eye spots went flat and dead. He turned and slowly walked toward the bed. Her hysterics trailed away in broken sobs. I watched her face, her shock fading and being replaced by horror as the fat Skoag came closer. “No,” she said, clearly, and then, “Nooh. Nooh.” She backed up on the bed, pressing into the corner. “Noooh. Doanwanis. Goway. Bwee. Pease. Trynstob. No.” But when the Skoag held his flipper out, she suddenly lunged across the bed and gripped it like a handful of free lottery tickets. She held on and her body jerked in little spasms, like the kid at school who had fits. Her eyes went back and she threw her head way back on her neck and her tongue came out. I felt sick and dirty, like I was watching her have sex with someone, or watching a doctor work on guts. But I couldn’t look away. The Skoag stood there until her hands slid away. They were thick with his slime and iridescent in the darkness. The stuff was thick, like the goop she used to rub on my chest when I was little and had a bad cold. She crumpled over onto her side. I pulled the blankets back up over her. As I let the Skoag out, I wondered why I had bothered to do that.

“Remember,” I said, as he waddled up the ramp. “Next Wednesday. It’s important. And you promised Lavender.”

I was thinking that Wednesday was about right, because the aid lady always came on Thursdays or Fridays, and Mom would still look okay when she got here. The fat Skoag paused on the ramp.

“For Lavender,” he said, like brass trumpets coming from a far hill. “Only for him would I do this thing. Only for him.”

I knew then that the fat Skoag was close to hating me tonight, and that it didn’t have to have been that way. If I hadn’t demanded this, he might have become my friend. I watched the fat Skoag leave and felt pimpish and sly and small for trading on his loyalty to Lavender. But I had to, to keep Lisa safe. Sometimes the only thing I was sure of was that Lavender had entrusted Lisa to me. I went back to bed, curling up around Lisa. I fell asleep hoping that the things I did to protect her wouldn’t stain her.

So that’s how it went. The fat Skoag came once a week. Mom stayed slimed and happy. The aid lady never suspected a thing. I went to school enough to keep everyone happy and took care of Lisa. Lisa grew. She turned into a little kid. On Saturdays we’d bus over to Gasworks Park. I’d push her on the swings or we’d watch the fancy kites people fly there. I kept her away from other kids, so she wouldn’t be teased about being mute. When some mommy would say hello to her, or say, “My, such pretty hair,” I’d step in and say, “She’s real shy. And my mom says don’t talk to strangers.” Then I’d take her away and buy her ice cream. No one expects kids to talk while they’re eating.

She was three when the message came. The radio was always on for Lisa. Classical music made her close her eyes and sway, or suddenly shiver. Jazz made her hyperactive. If I wanted her to go to sleep, it was good old rock and roll. I should have heard about it. But I never listened to the news or wasted food money on a newspaper. So I scowled at the check-out guy when he shoved a Seattle Times into my brown bag.

“I ain’t paying for that,” I told him.

“On the house, kid,” he told me. “I figure you got a right to know, it being your Skoag and all.”

He’d never talked about Lavender before that. He’d treated me decent while Lavender was alive, and he’d never given me a bad time about shopping there after Lavender died. Not like the Laundromat where they threw me and our laundry out because they didn’t want “Skoag slime clogging the drains.” Anyway, he turned right away to the next customer so I knew he didn’t want me to say anything. I headed home.

After I got dinner cooking, I unfolded the paper, wondering what I was supposed to look at. The headlines jumped at me. SKOAG PLANET CONTACT CONFIRMED. I read slowly, trying to understand it. The story said the rumors were confirmed, without saying what they were. The big deal was the Skoags officially sending a message to Earth, planet to planet. The newspaper went on about the sending technology being based on stuff we knew but hadn’t thought about using together, and stuff like that. I had to sort through the whole paper to find the last few lines. They scared the hell out of me. Sources wouldn’t say what the message had been, but didn’t deny it had to do with the ritual murder of a “highly placed Skoag exile in Seattle.”

I didn’t know the microwave had buzzed until Mom set food in front of me. I looked up, and Lisa had already finished eating. I hated it when Mom did stuff like that. Like she was pretending she was a good little mommy, taking care of her kids instead of a Skoag gropie who didn’t give a damn. In the drug classes at school, they called that “ingratiating behavior” and said junkies and alkies used it to fool their families into thinking they were changing, especially if the families were close to sending them to a cure station. It didn’t fool me. I crumpled up the paper and gave it to Lisa to play with and ate dinner.

Two nights later, the man came. Maybe he thought no one would notice a gray government sedan pulled up in front of a slummy house at midnight. I heard someone nearly fall down the ramp, and when he knocked, I opened the door on its chain.

“Yeah,” I said, but my stomach was shaking. Skoag slime dependency wasn’t supposed to show up in pee tests. That’s what all the kids said, and I’d always believed it was true, but what if they’d changed the test and knew from Mom’s pee that she was a gropie? But I tried not to let any of that show on my face as I stared out the crack at the government man.

“I have to come in,” he said, whispery. “I have to talk to your mother.”

“Too bad,” I said, being tough. “She’s deaf. You can write it down, or you can tell it to me, but you can’t talk to her.”

“I can sign,” he said nervously, echoing with his fingers.

“She can’t,” I said, and started to close the door.

“Please,” he said, not quite shoving his foot in the crack, but leaning on the door to keep it open. “It’s about the dead Skoag. Lavender. And it’s important, kid.”

We stared at each other.

“Look, kid,” he finally said. His voice came out normal, not whispery, but real tired. “I can come back with cops tomorrow and kick this door in and drag you out. It’s that important. Or you can let me in now, and we’ll keep this quiet.”

My mom reached past me and undid the chain, and the man came in. I hadn’t even known she was awake. She looked awful, with her scarred face shining in the streetlamp light leaking in the door. All except for her hair, which was as pretty as ever. She clicked on the light and shut the door behind him. He looked around and said, “Oh, Jesus Christ.” It was the first time I’d ever heard a grown man say it like a prayer. Then he sat down at our table and started signing to my mom.

He wasn’t an aid man, or a drug man, but a real high-up government man. The second surprise was that my mom signed back to him. I suddenly remembered I hadn’t seen the signing books around in a while. Probably in her room. Ingratiating behavior. I wondered what she’d been signing to Lisa while I was away at school each day. Then I forgot that and paid attention to what he was saying. He talked out loud as he signed, like it helped him keep his place or something.

“Lavender’s . . . people . . . are very angry . . . about his death. He was . . . important Skoag (the sign for Skoag was to put your fingers on your forehead and make your hand do push-ups, like a pulsing membrane). Not exile . . . but like a priest . . . or civil rights worker.”

He went on about how important Lavender had been, how he had come in the hopes of reconciling the exiles and instead he started sharing their beliefs, and then went further than they did. It didn’t match what Lavender had told me, but I kept my mouth shut. The heart of it was that news of his death had finally reached his home planet, and a lot of Skoags were very upset. The way he said it, I didn’t know if the message had just taken that long to get there, or if the exiled Skoags had kept killing Lavender a secret. But I still kept my mouth shut. Anyway, the planet Skoags were going to send someone to look into it, and our government had agreed to cooperate fully. Including letting the Skoags talk to my mom and me. I felt like telling him it was up to us whether we met the Skoags. But I didn’t. He went on about how this was a real opportunity for humans to establish diplomatic relations with the Skoag planet, and it might be our first step toward deep space, and the United States could lead the way, and all that shit. Then he suggested the first thing we’d have to do was move.

That’s when I opened my mouth. “No,” I said, firmly, and was surprised when my mom repeated it, “No,” very clear.

He talked a lot about why we had to move. The Skoag ambassador or whatever was coming, probably within two or three years. (I was surprised they didn’t know exactly when, but they didn’t.) And we had to be somewhere nice, so the United States wouldn’t be embarrassed, and somewhere safe, so no terrorists would try to kidnap us or kill us, and somewhere more official, where advisers could tell us what to say to the Skoags.

He was still explaining at four in the morning, when Mom stood up, said, “NO” very emphatically, and then walked back to her bedroom and shut the door.

He stared at the door. Then he sighed and rumpled up his hair. “This is a big mistake,” he said. And he shook his head. “A damn big mistake that we’re all going to hate remembering. You’re going to blow it for all of us, kid, for the whole damn human race. Shit. Well, I guess we work around it, then.”

So he left.

For a while I lay awake, wondering if there really was danger, if our neighbors would turn on us or terrorists would bomb us. But then I decided that at least terrorists wouldn’t try to take Lisa away from me and put her in special school or a home while they treated Mom for being a gropie. That would happen for sure if they moved us, because there’d be no way to hide Mom’s addiction. That was why Mom said no, too. She was afraid of losing her Skoag slime source. As for me, I could never leave the only place I’d ever shared with Lavender. I stared at the spot where he’d died. The chalk marks were years gone, but I could still see them.

The government man was trickier than I thought. A month later our neighborhood was picked for Facelift Funding. All owners were given eighteen months to upgrade or lose the funding. So our walls got spraysulated and paneled, and they foamed the floor and put in carpet-heat and a tiny insta-hot unit under the sink. Then the old furnace room became part of our apartment, as a second bedroom.

The whole neighborhood changed. They jackhammered up squares of sidewalk and put in skinny little trees, and all the buildings got new siding. They hauled away the trash heap from behind the building, including our old linoleum. They put in a tiny fenced play yard, with organo-turf and big plastic climbing toys. They put flower boxes around the streetlamps. I hated it. They were trying to cover us up, trying to say, these aren’t poor people living in their own trash, these are nice folks like in the readers at school. The daddies and mommies have jobs, they go to church, and their kids drink white milk and eat brown bread. I hated it, but Lisa loved it. She kept picking the flowers and bringing them to Mom. Mom always put them in a vase, just like Lavender’s flowers. Sometimes I wanted to smash it.

I came home from school one day, and a moving van was just pulling away. Scared the hell out of me. Had Mom decided to move after all? Had she kidnapped Lisa and left?

But she was there. “Govamin,” she said disgustedly, and stood there like there was no place to sit.

All our old stuff was gone. Even the cupboards and fridge were different, and the cooker was huge, with hot beverage taps on the side. My couch was gone, the friendly smell of mice gone with it. The new one matched the fat chair beside it. The stereo was about as big as a loaf of bread, but it was a real wall shaker. There was a vid-box, a keyboard console, and a minidish. Guess the government wanted us to look good.

The new bedroom had twin beds with a dorky little screen between them, like I hadn’t been bathing Lisa since she was born. Lisa was bouncing on her bed already, looking like a kid in a catalog. I caught her as she jumped, and for just a second, as she came down in my arms, she looked just like Mom. Exactly. Same hair, same eyes, and I knew it was true, she was Mom’s clone and would look just like her when she grew up. Except that her hands and cheek would never be scarred. I set her down and she ran to Mom and hugged her around the knees. And we stood there and looked around, like there was no place left for us.

So they thought they changed us, so we wouldn’t shame the United States when the Skoag came. But they didn’t change the fat Skoag’s secret Wednesday visits, or Mom’s blank humming. The chalk lines were still there, and I could see them right through the carpet. And our neighbors still didn’t talk to us.

We waited. One year. Two years. More Skoags came but not the Skoag we waited for. Three years. Someone wrote a big article in the paper that the whole thing about a Skoag ambassador coming had been a scam, a hoax. The fat Skoag told me the truth. He’d come. He’d talked to the ones that killed Lavender. And he’d agreed it had been necessary. He hadn’t wanted to talk to humans at all.

The carpeting got worn spots, and Lisa scribbled on the new paneling and Mom couldn’t get it off. Four years. Graffiti on the buildings, and beer bottles in the flower beds. We forgot about the government and the government forgot about us.

Lisa was seven, nearly eight. We were walking home after a day at Gasworks Park. I was worrying because a letter had come from the school. Someone had turned us in, had reported that a child in our home was being deprived of an equal education. If Lisa didn’t go to school, they’d cancel the aid checks. We couldn’t get by without the aid checks. I didn’t know what the hell to do. I was thinking about running away with her. I was fifteen, nearly old enough to get work somewhere.

A bunch of Skoags were jamming on the corner, same old thing. I kept walking. I never listened to Skoags anymore. I was a block past them before I realized Lisa wasn’t with me. I ran back, but it was too late.

All she was doing was listening. Eyes big, lips parted, listening like she always listened to music. The Skoags were playing some old Beatles thing. There were a few tourists, a few hecklers, the usual mix, and the Skoags were playing and Lisa was listening.

Then all of a sudden they stopped, their membranes all swelled out, and they all looked at her. Colors washed through their crests, bright colors, and they started making a sound, an incredible sound like Jesus coming in the sky on a white horse to save us all. It got louder and louder. Skoags started coming out of buildings, flipping down the sidewalks, and as soon as they came, they started making the sound, too, and colors started racing through their crests. They surrounded Lisa, pushing to get closer, all making the sound. It was a glorious Alleluia sound, and Lisa loved it. She glowed, and her eyes were huge. I shoved my way in there. I grabbed her hand and I dragged her out of there, past Skoags who reached for us with shining flippers. I snatched her up and ran all the way home and locked the door behind us.

The next day our street was packed so full of Skoags that cars couldn’t pass. Silent Skoags, standing and swaying on their big flat flippers, but not making a sound. Staring at our building. Copters flew over, and the film was on television, but the news people had no idea what was going on, they just “urged inhabitants of the affected neighborhood to stay inside and remain calm while officials determine what to do.”

It lasted for two days. The streets packed with Skoags, our door locked, and my heart hammering the whole time until I thought my head would blow up. Suspecting, almost knowing.

On the third day, I woke up to a sound like birds harmonizing with the rush of ocean waves and the laughter of little kids. The sound had been part of a very good dream I was having, so when I woke up and still heard it, I wasn’t really awake. Then I realized what had wakened me. A smaller set of sounds. A chair being pushed across the carpet to the door. The chain being undone. I jumped out of bed.

The street was empty, almost. There was only a gray government sedan, and the same government man who had come four years ago. And a big, big Skoag, with a tall purple crest. He was singing the harmonizing bird song, and Lisa was walking straight toward him. She was smiling and her hair was floating on the wind. Like a dream walker. Then the Skoag opened his mittened flippers to her, and she began to run.

I screamed her name, I know I did, but she didn’t seem to hear me. The Skoag picked her up, and I was still running down the street as they all got in the car. The government man gunned it and they were gone.

And that’s the end of the story. Almost.

Mom was standing in the doorway, crying. The tears went crooked where they met her scars and flowed around them.

“Go after her!” I screamed. “Get her back. They just took her.”

“No.” She said each word carefully, signing them for emphasis: “They didn’t take her. She wanted to go. She had to go. She shouldn’t have to come back, not just for us.”

“You can’t know that!” I yelled. “How can you say that?”

She looked at me a long time. “Because I heard it,” she signed slowly, silently. I watched her scarred fingers move, the wonder that flooded her face. “I heard it, and it called me. But it wasn’t for me, not the me that’s here. It was for the other me, the one you made. The one you made for them. The circle closer. The one who listens so well that she has no need to speak. The me done right. But this me heard it and knew how bad she wanted to go.”

Then Mom went back in her room and closed her door.

Nothing happened after that. The fat Skoag never came back, and Mom never went through withdrawal. I guess the last song was enough to last her forever. I never went to school again, and the government people never came to ask about us. They never came to tell us anything either. There were no write-ups in the paper, no news stories about a little girl stolen by the Skoags. No one ever asked why Lisa never came to school. No one ever asked just how much one little girl is worth to the government. Or to a Skoag with a purple crest.

But the next month Boeing got a huge government contract that put half of Seattle back to work, and the papers were full of news about the breakthrough design that could give us the stars. So I didn’t need it spelled out. Do you?

The world gets the stars, the Skoags get Lisa, and I get nothing. Lisa’s gone, and with her every touch of Lavender. It was a hard thing he asked of me, but I did it. I looked after the Mom. The Skoags can go back home now. Every day, there are fewer of them on the streets. They always bow to my mom and me. They no longer sing, but all their crests ripple with color. Sometimes I wonder if Lavender even knew what he was asking.

Or maybe all he meant was that I should look out for Mom, and the rest of it was just an accident. I don’t know.

Mom and I still live here. Next month I’ll be eighteen. I’ll have to register with the aid office as an adult, and with the job office for training. Mom’s Career Mother checks will stop and she’ll have to get job training or lose all her aid. I’ll have to move out, because aid receivers aren’t allowed to let other adults share their homes. Mom will probably get a smaller place.

That’s too bad. Because just last night, as I was falling asleep on the couch, I heard a mouse, nibbling inside there.

It’s been a good home, really. I had good folks.

Silver Lady and the Fortyish Man

It was about 8:15 P.M. and I was standing near the register in a Sears in a substandard suburban mall the first time the fortyish man came in. There were forty-five more minutes to endure before the store would close and I could go home. The Muzak was playing, and a Ronald McDonald display was waving at me cheerily from the children’s department. I was thinking about how animals in traps chew their legs off. There was a time when I couldn’t understand that type of survival mechanism. Now I could. I was wishing for longer, sharper teeth when the fortyish man came in.

For the last hour or so, salespeople had outnumbered customers in the store. A dead night. I was the only salesperson in Ladies’ Fashions and Lingerie, and I had spent the last two hours straightening dresses on hangers, zipping coats, putting T-shirts in order by size and color, clipping bras on hangers, and making sure all the jeans faced the same way on the racks. Now I was tidying up all the bags and papers under the register counter. Boredom, not dedication. Only boredom can drive someone to be that meticulous, especially for four dollars an hour. One part boredom to two parts despair.

So a customer, any kind of a customer, was a welcome distraction. Even a very ordinary fortyish man. He came straight up to my counter, threading his way through the racks without even a glance at the dresses or sweaters or jeans. He walked straight up to me and said, “I need a silk scarf.”

Believe me, the last thing this man needed was a silk scarf. He was tall, at least six feet, and had reached that stage in his life where he buckled his belt under his belly. His dark hair was thinning, and the way he combed it did nothing to hide the fact. He wore fortyish-man clothing, and I won’t describe it, because if I did you might think there was something about the way he dressed that made me notice him. There wasn’t. He was ordinary in the most common sense of the word, and if it had been a busy night in the store, I’d never even have seen him. So ordinary he’d be invisible. The only remarkable thing about him was that he was a fortyish man in a Sears store on a night when we had stayed open longer than our customers had stayed awake. And that he’d said he needed a silk scarf. Men like him never buy silk scarves, not for any reason.

But he’d said he needed a silk scarf. And that was a double miracle of sorts, the customer knowing what he wanted, and I actually having it. So I put on my sales smile and asked, “Did you have any particular color in mind, sir?”

“Anything,” he said, an edge of impatience in his voice. “As long as it’s silk.”

The scarf rack was right by the register, arranged with compulsive tidiness by me earlier in the shift. Long scarves on the bottom rack, short scarves on the top rack, silk to the left, acrylics to the right, solid colors together in a rainbow spectrum on that row, patterns rioting on that hook, all edges gracefully fluted. Scarves were impulse sales, second sales, “wouldn’t you like a lovely blue scarf to go with that sweater, miss?” sales. No one marched into a Sears store at 8:15 at night and demanded a silk scarf. People who needed silk scarves at 8:15 at night went to boutiques for them, little shops that smelled like perfumes or spices and had no Hamburglars lurking in the aisles. But this fortyish man wouldn’t know that.

So I leaned across the counter and snagged a handful, let my fingers find the silk ones and pull them gently from their hooks. Silk like woven moonlight in my hands, airy scarves in elusive colors. I spread them out like a rainbow on the counter. “One of these, perhaps?” I smiled persuasively.

“Any of them, it doesn’t matter, I just need a piece of silk.” He scarcely glanced at them.

And then I said one of those things I sometimes do, the words falling from my lips with sureness, coming from God knows where, meant to put the customer at ease but always getting me into trouble. “To wrap your tarot cards, undoubtedly.”

Bingo, I’d hit it. He lifted his eyes and stared at me, as if suddenly seeing me as a person and not just a saleswoman in a Sears at night. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me. It was like having crosshairs tattooed on my forehead. In exposing him, I had exposed myself. Something like that. I cleared my throat and decided to back off and get a little more formal.

“Cash or charge?” I asked, twitching a blue one from the slithering heap on the counter, and he handed me a ten and dug for the odd change. I stuffed the scarf in a bag and clipped his receipt on it and that was it. He left, and I spent the rest of my shift making sure that all the coat hangers on the racks were exactly one finger space apart.

I had taken the job in November, hired on in preparation for the Christmas rush, suckered in by the hope that after the New Year began I would become full-time and get better wages. It was February, and I was still getting less than thirty hours a week and only four dollars an hour. Every time I thought about it, I could feel rodents gnawing at the bottom of my heart. There is a sick despair to needing money so desperately that you can’t quit the job that doesn’t pay you enough to live on, the job that gives you just enough irregular hours to make job hunting for something better next to impossible. Worst of all was the thought that I’d fashioned and devised this trap myself. I’d leapt into it, in the name of common sense and practicality.

Two years ago I’d quit a job very similar to this one, to live on my hoarded savings and dreams of being a freelance writer. I’d become a full-time writer, and I loved it. And I’d almost made it. For two years I skimped along, never much above poverty level, but writing and taking photographs, doing a little freelance journalism to back up the fiction, writing a story here, a story there, and selling them almost often enough to make ends meet.

Almost.

How the hell long can anyone live on almost? Buying almost new clothes at the secondhand store, almost fresh bread at the thrift store, almost stylish shoes at the end-of-season sales. Keeping the apartment almost warm, the dripping, rumbling refrigerator keeping food almost cold, telling my friends I was almost there. Almost writing the one really good story that would establish me as a writer to be reckoned with. I still loved it, but I started to notice little things. How my friends always brought food when they came to visit, and my parents sent money on my birthday, and my sister gave me “hand-me-downs” that fit me perfectly, and, once, still had the tags on.

This is fine, when you are twenty or so, and just striking out on your own. It is not so good when you are thirty-five and following your chosen career. One day I woke up and knew that the dream wasn’t going to come true. My Muse was a faithless slut who drank all my wine and gave me half a page a day. I demanded more from her. She refused. We quarreled. I begged, I pleaded, I showed the mounting stacks of bills, but she refused to produce. I gave her an ultimatum, and she ignored me. Left me wordless, facing empty white pages and a stack of bills on the corner of my desk. One of two things happened to me then. I’ve never decided which it was. Some of my friends told me I’d lost faith. Others said I’d become more practical. I went job hunting.

In November, I reentered the wonderful world of retail merchandising to work a regular nine-to-five job and make an ordinary living, with clockwork paychecks and accounts paid the first time they billed me. I’d leapt back into salesmanship with energy and enthusiasm, pushing for that second sale, persuading women to buy outfits that looked dreadful on them, always asking if they wanted to apply for our charge card. I’d been a credit to the department. All management praised me. But no one gave me a raise, and full-time hours were a mirage on the horizon. I limped along, making almost enough money to make ends meet. It felt very familiar. Except that I didn’t love what I did. I was stuck with it. I wasn’t any better off than I had been.

And I wasn’t writing anymore, either.

My Muse had always been a fickle bitch, and the moment I pulled on pantyhose and clipped on an “I Am SEARS” tag, she moved out, lock, stock, and inspiration. If I had no faith in her power to feed me, then to hell with me was the sentiment as she expressed it. All or nothing, that was her, like my refrigerator, either freezing it all or dripping the vegetable bin full of water. All or nothing, no halfway meetings.

So it was nothing, and my days off were spent, not pounding the keys, but going to the Laundromat, where one can choose between watching one’s underwear cavort gaily in the dryer window or watching gaunt women in mismatched outfits abuse their children. (“That’s it, Bobby! That’s it, I absolutely mean it, you little shit! Now you go stand by that basket and you hold on to it with both hands, and don’t you move until I tell you you can. You move one step away from that basket and I’m going to whack you. You hear me, Bobby? YOU Whack! GET YOUR Whack! HANDS ON THAT Whack! BASKET! Now shut up or I’ll really give you something to cry about!”) I usually watched my underwear cavorting through the fluff-dry cycle.

And so I worked at Sears, from nine to one, or from five to nine, occasionally getting an eight-hour day, but seldom more than a twenty-four-hour week, watching income not quite equal outgo, paying bills with a few dollars and many promises, spacing it out with plastic, and wondering, occasionally, what the hell I was going to do when it all caught up with me and fell apart.

Days passed. Not an elegant way to express it, but accurate. So there I was again, one weekday night, after eight, dusting the display fixtures and waiting for closing time, wondering why we stayed open when the rest of the mall closed at seven. And the fortyish man came in again. I remembered him right away. He didn’t look any different from the first time, except that this time he was a little more real to me because I had seen him before. I stood by my counter, feather duster in hand, and watched him come on, wondering what he wanted this time.

He had a little plastic container of jasmine potpourri, from the bath and bedding department. He set it on the counter and asked, “Can I pay for this here?”

I was absolutely correct as a salesperson. “Certainly, sir. At Sears, we can ring up purchases from any department at any register. We do our best to make things convenient for our customers. Cash or charge?”

“Cash,” he said, and as I asked, “Would you like to fill out an application for our Sears or Discover charge card? It makes shopping at Sears even more convenient, and in addition to charging, either card can be used as a check cashing card,” he set three Liberty Walking silver dollars, circa 1923, on the plastic countertop between us. Then he stood and looked down at me, like I was a rat and he’d just dropped a prefab maze into place around me.

“Sure you want to use those?” I asked him, and he nodded without speaking.

So I rang up the jasmine potpourri and dropped the three silver dollars into the till, wishing I could keep them for myself, but we weren’t allowed to have our purses or any personal cash out on the selling floor, so there was no way I could redeem them and take them home. I knew someone would nab them before they ever got to the bank, but it wasn’t going to be me, and wasn’t that just the way my whole life had been going lately? The fortyish man took his jasmine potpourri in his plastic Sears bag with the receipt stapled on the outside of it and left. As he left, I said, “Have a nice evening, sir, and thank you for shopping at our Sears store.” To which he replied solemnly, “Silver Lady, this job is going to kill you.” Just like that, with the capital letters in the way he said it, and then he left.

Now I’ve been called a lot of things by a lot of men, but Silver Lady isn’t one of them. Mud duck. More of a mud duck, that’s me, protective coloring, not too much makeup, muted colors in my clothes, unobtrusive jewelry if any at all. Camouflage. Dress just enough like anyone else so that no one notices you, that’s the safest way. In high school, I believed I was invisible. If anyone looked at me, I would pick my nose and examine it until they looked away. They hardly ever looked back. I’d outgrown those tricks a long time ago, of course, but Silver Lady? That was a ridiculous thing to call me, unless he was mocking me, and I didn’t think he had been. But somehow it seemed worse that he had been serious; it stung worse than an insult, because he had seemed to see in me something that I couldn’t imagine in myself. Stung all the sharper because he was an ordinary fortyish man, run of the mill, staid and regular, potbelly and thinning hair, and it wasn’t fair that he could imagine more about me than I could about myself. I mean, hell, I’m the writer, the one with the wild imagination, the vivid dreams, the razor-edged visions, right?

So. I worked out my shift, chewing on my tongue until closing time, and it wasn’t until I had closed my till, stapled my receipts together, and chained off the dressing room that I noticed the little box on the corner of my counter. Little cardboard jewelry box, silver tone paper on the outside, no bag, no label, no nothing, just the silver stripes and Nordstrom in elegant lettering on the outside. A customer had forgotten it there, and I shoved it into my skirt pocket to turn it in at Customer Convenience on my way out.

I went home, climbed the stairs to my apartment, stepping in the neighbor’s cat’s turd on the way up, got inside, cleaned off my shoe, washed my hands five or six times, and put the kettle on for a cup of tea. I dropped into a chair and got jabbed by the box in my pocket. And the “oh, shit, here’s trouble come knocking” feeling washed over me in a deep brown wave.

I knew what would happen. Some customer would come looking for it, and no one would know anything about it, but security would have picked me up on their closed circuit camera inside their little plastic bubbles on the ceiling. This was going to be it, the end of my rotten, low-paying little job, and my rent was due in two weeks, and this time the landlord wanted all of it at once. So I sat, holding the little silver box, and cursing my fate.

I opened it. I mean, what the hell, when there’s no place left but down, one might as well indulge one’s curiosity, so I opened it. Inside were two large earrings, each as long as my thumb. Silver ladies. They wore long gowns and their hair and gowns were swept back from their bodies by an invisible wind that pressed the metallic fabric of their bodices close against their high breasts and whipped their hair into frothy silver curls. They didn’t match, not quite, and they weren’t intended to be identical. I knew I could go to Nordstrom’s and search for a hundred years and I’d never find anything like them. Their faces were filled with serenity and invitation, and they weighed heavy in my hand. I didn’t doubt they were real silver, and that someone had fashioned them, one at a time, to be the only ones of their kinds. And I knew, like knowing about the tarot cards, that the fortyish man had made them and brought them and left them, and they were for me.

Only I don’t have pierced ears.

So I put them back on the cotton in their little box and set them on my table, but I didn’t put the lid back on. I looked at them, now and then, as I fixed myself a nutritious and totally adequate Western Family chicken pot pie for dinner and ate it out of the little aluminum pan and followed it with celery with peanut butter on it and raisins on top of the peanut butter.

That evening I did a number of useful and necessary things, like defrosting the refrigerator, washing out my pantyhose, spraying my shoes with Lysol spray, and dribbling bleach on the landing outside my apartment in the hopes it would keep the neighbor’s cat away. I also put my bills in order by due date and watered the stump of the houseplant I’d forgotten to water last week. And then, because I wasn’t writing, and the evening can get very long when you’re not writing, I did something I had once seen my sister and two of her girlfriends do when I was thirteen and they were seventeen and rather drunk. I took four ice cubes and a sewing needle and went into the bathroom and unwrapped a bar of soap. The idea is, you sandwich your earlobes between the ice cubes and hold them there until they’re numb. Then you put the bar of soap behind your earlobe to hold it steady, and you push the sewing needle through. Your earlobes are numb, so it doesn’t hurt but it is weird because you hear the sound the needle makes going through your earlobe. On the first ear. On the second ear, it hurt like hell, and a big drop of blood welled out and dripped down the side of my neck, and I screamed “Oh, SHIT!” and banged my fist on the bathroom counter and broke a blood vessel in my hand, which hurt worse than my ears.

But it was done, and when my ears quit bleeding, I went and got the earrings and stood before the mirror and threaded their wires through my raw flesh. The wires were thin, and they pulled at the new holes in my ears, and it couldn’t have hurt more if I’d hung a couple of anvils from my bleeding earlobes. But they looked beautiful. I stood looking at what they did to my neck and the angle of my jaw and the way they made the stray twining of my hair seem artful and deliberate. I smiled, serene and inviting, and almost I could see his Silver Lady in my own mirror.

But like I say, they hurt like hell, and tiny drips of my blood were sliding down the silver wires, and I couldn’t imagine me sleeping with those things swinging from my ears all night. So I lifted them out and put them back in their box and the wires tinged the cotton pink. Then I wiped my earlobes with hydrogen peroxide, shivering at the sting. And I went to bed wondering if my ears would get infected.

They didn’t, they healed, and the holes didn’t grow shut, even though I didn’t keep anything in them to hold them open. A Friday came when there was a breath of spring in the air, and I put on a pale blue blouse that I hadn’t worn in so long that it felt like new again. Just before I left my apartment, I went back and got the box and went to the bathroom and hung the silver ladies from my ears. I went to work.

Felicia, my department head, complimented me on them, but said they didn’t look, quite, well, professional, to wear to work. I agreed she was probably right, and when I nodded, I felt their pleasant weight swinging on my ears. I didn’t take them off. I collected my cash bag and went to open up my till.

I worked until six that day, and I smiled at people and they smiled back, and I didn’t really give a damn how much I sold, but I sold probably twice as much as I’d ever sold before, maybe because I didn’t give a damn. At the end of my shift, I got my coat and purse and collected my week’s paycheck and decided to walk out through the mall instead of through the back door. The mall was having 4-H week, and I got a kick out of seeing the kids with their animals, bored cats sitting in cages stuffed full of kitty toys, little signs that say things like, “Hi, my name is Peter Pan, and I’m a registered Lop Rabbit,” an incubator full of peeping chicks, and, right in the middle of the mall, someone had spread black plastic and scattered straw on top of it, and a pudgy girl with dark pigtails was demonstrating how to groom a unicorn.

I looked again, and it was a white billy goat, and one that was none too happy about being groomed. I shook my head, and I felt the silver ladies swing, and as I turned away, the fortyish man stepped out of the Herb and Tea Emporium with an armful of little brown bags. He swung into pace beside me, smelling like cinnamon, oranges, and cloves, and said, “You’ve just got to see this chicken. It plays tic-tac-toe.”

Sure enough, some enterprising 4-H’er had rigged up a board with red and blue lights for the x’s and o’s, and for a quarter donation, the chicken would play tic-tac-toe with you. It was the fattest old rooster I’d ever seen, its comb hanging rakishly over one eye, and it beat me three times running. Which was about half my coffee money for the week, but what the hell, how often do you get the chance to play tic-tac-toe with a chicken?

The fortyish man played him and won, which brought the rooster up to the bars of the cage, flapping its wings and striking out, and I found myself dragging the fortyish man back out of beak range while the young owner of the rooster tried to calm his bird. We just laughed, and he took my elbow and guided me into a little Mexican restaurant that opens off the mall, and we found a table and sat down. The first thing I said was, “This is ridiculous. I don’t even know you, and here I find myself defending you from irate roosters and having dinner with you.”

And he said, “Permit me to introduce myself, then. I am Merlin.”

I nearly walked out right then.

It’s like this. I’m a skeptic. I have this one friend, a very nice woman. But she’s always saying things like, “I can tell by your aura that you are troubled today,” or talking about how I stunt my spiritual growth by ignoring my latent psychic powers. Once she phoned me up at eleven at night, long distance to me, collect, to tell me she’d just had a psychic experience. She was house-sitting for a friend in a big old house on Whidbey Island. She was sitting watching television, when she clearly heard the sound of footsteps going up the stairs. Only from where she was sitting, she could (she says) see the stairs quite clearly and there was no one there. So she froze, and she heard footsteps going along the upstairs hallway and then she heard the bathroom door shut. Then, she said, she heard the unmistakable and noisy splashing of a man urinating. The toilet flushed, and then all was silence. When she got up the nerve to go check the upstairs bathroom, there was no one there. But . . . THE SEAT WAS UP! So she had phoned me right away to jar me from my skepticism. Every time she comes over, she always has to throw her rune chips for me, and for some reason, they always spell out death and disaster and horrendous bad fortune just around the bend for me. Which may actually prove that she’s truly psychic, because that fortune had never been far wrong for me. But it doesn’t keep me from kidding her about her ghostly urinator. She’s a friend, and she puts up with it, and I put up with her psychic-magic-spiritualism jazz.

But the fortyish man I didn’t know at all—well, at least not much, and I wasn’t going to put up with it from him. That was pushing it too far. There he was, fortyish and balding and getting a gut, and expecting me to listen to him talk weird as well. I mean, okay, I’m thirty-five, but everyone says I look a lot younger, and while only one man had ever called me Silver Lady, the rest haven’t exactly called me Dog Meat. Maybe I’m not attractive in the standard, popular sense, but people who see me don’t shudder and look away. Mostly they just tend not to see me. But at any rate, I did know that I wasn’t so desperate that I had to latch on to a fortyish man with wing-nut ideas for company.

Except that just then the waitress walked past on her way to the next table, laden with two combination plates, heavy white china loaded to the gunwales with enchiladas and tacos and burritos, garnished with dollops of white sour cream and pale green guacamole, with black olives frisking dangerously close to the lip of the plate, and I suddenly knew I could listen to anyone talk about anything a lot more easily than I could go home and face Banquet Fried Chicken, its flaking brown crust covered with thick hoarfrost from my faulty refrigerator. So I did.

We ordered and we ate and he talked and I listened. He told me things. He was not the Merlin, but he did know he was descended from him. Magic was not what it had been at one time, but he got by. One quote I remember exactly. “The only magic that’s left in the world right now is the magic that we make ourselves, deliberately. You’re not going to stumble over enchantment by chance. You have to be open to it, looking for it, and when you first think you might have glimpsed it, you have to will it into your life with every machination available to you.” He paused. He leaned forward to whisper, “But the magic is never quite what you expect it to be. Almost but never exactly.” And then he leaned back and smiled at me and I knew what he was going to say next.

He went on about the magic he sensed inside me, and how he could help me open myself up to it. He could feel that I was suppressing a talent. It was smooth, the way he did it. I think that if I had been ten or fifteen years younger, I could have relaxed and gone along with it, maybe even been flattered by it. Maybe if he had been five or ten years younger, I would have chosen to be gullible, just for the company. But dinner was drawing to a close, and I had a hunch what was going to come after dinner, so I just sort of shook my head and said that nothing in my life had ever made me anything but a skeptic about magic and ESP and psychic phenomena and all the rest of that stuff. And then he said what I knew he would, that if I’d care to come by his place he could show me a few things that would change my mind in a hurry. I said that I’d really enjoyed talking to him and dinner had been fun, but I didn’t think I knew him well enough to go to his apartment. Besides, I was afraid I had to get home and wash my hair because I had the early shift again tomorrow morning. He shrugged and sat back in his chair and said he understood completely and I was wise to be cautious, that women weren’t the only ones distressed by so-called date rapes. He said that in time I would learn that I could trust him and someday we’d probably laugh about my first impression of him.

I agreed, and we chuckled a little, and the waitress brought more coffee and he excused himself to use the men’s room. I sat stirring sugar and creamer into my coffee, and wondering if it wouldn’t be wiser to skip out now, just leave a little note that I had discovered it was later than I thought and I had to hurry home but that I’d had a lovely time and thank you. But that seemed like a pretty snaky thing to do to him. It wasn’t like he was repulsive or anything; actually he was pretty nice and had very good eyes, dark brown, and a shy way of looking aside when he smiled and a wonderful voice that reminded me of cello strings. I suppose it was that he was fortyish and balding and had a potbelly. If that makes me sound shallow, well, I’m sorry. If he’d been a little younger, I could probably have warmed up to him. If I’d been a little younger, too, maybe I would even have gone to his apartment to be deskepticized. But he wasn’t and I wasn’t and I wouldn’t. But I wasn’t going to be rude to him either. He didn’t deserve that. So I sat, toughing it out.

He’d left his packages of tea on the table and I picked one up and read it. I had to smile. Magic Carpet Tea. It smelled like orange spice to me. Earl Grey tea had been renamed Misplaced Dreams Tea. The scent of the third was unfamiliar to me, maybe one of those pale green ones, but it was labeled Dragon’s Breath Tea. The fortyish man was really into this psychic-magic thing, I could tell, and in a way I felt a little sorry for him. A grown man, on the slippery-slide downside of his fortieth birthday, clinging to fairy tales and magic, still hoping something would happen in his life, some miracle more wondrous than financing a new car or finding out the leaky hot-water heater is still under warranty. It wasn’t going to happen, not to him, not to me, and I felt a little more gentle toward him as I leaned back in my chair and waited for him to return.

He didn’t.

You found that out a lot faster than I did. I sat and waited and drank coffee, and it was only when the waitress refilled my cup that I realized how long it had been. His coffee was cold by then, and so was my stomach. I knew he’d stuck me with the check and why. I could almost hear him telling one of his buddies, “Hey, if the chick’s not going to come across, why waste the bread, man?” Body-slammed by humiliation that I’d been so gullible, I wondered if the whole magic thing was something he just used as a lure for women. Probably. And here I’d been preening myself, just a little, all through dinner, thinking that he was still seeing in me the possibility of magic and enchantment, that for him I had some special fey glow.

Well, my credit cards were bottomed out, I had less than two bucks in cash, and my checkbook was at home. In the end, the restaurant manager reluctantly cashed my paycheck for me, probably only because he knew Sears wouldn’t write a rubber check and I could show him my employee badge. Toward the end he was even sympathetic about the fortyish man treating me so badly, which was even worse, because he acted like my poor little heart was broken instead of me just being damn mad and embarrassed. As I was leaving, finally, let me get out of here, the waitress handed me the three little paper bags of tea with such a condescending “poor baby” look that I wanted to spit at her. And I went home.

The strange part is that I actually cried after I got home, more out of frustration and anger than any hurt, though. I wished that I knew his real name, so I could call him up and let him know what I thought of such a cheap trick. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror looking at my red eyes and swollen runny nose, and I suddenly knew that the restaurant people had been seeing me more clearly than I or the fortyish man did. Not Silver Lady or even mud duck, but plain middle-aged woman in a blue-collar job with no prospects at all. For a moment it got to me, but then I stood up straight and stared at the mirror. I felt the silver ladies swinging from my ears, and as I looked at them, it occurred to me that they were probably worth a lot more than the meal I had just paid for, and that I had his tea, to boot. So maybe he hadn’t come out of it any better than I had; these earrings hadn’t gotten him laid, and if he had skipped out without paying for the meal, he’d left his tea as well, and those specialty shop teas don’t come cheap. For the first time, it occurred to me that things didn’t add up, quite. But I put it out of my mind, fixed myself a cup of Misplaced Dreams tea, read for a little while, and then went to bed.

I dreamed about him. Not surprising, considering what he’d put me through. I was in a garden, standing by a silver bench shaded by an arching trellis heavy with a dark green vine full of fragrant pink flowers. The fortyish man was standing before me, and I could see him, but I had the sense that he was disembodied, not really there at all. “I want to apologize,” he said, quite seriously. “I never would have left you that way voluntarily. I’m afraid I was magicked away by one of my archrivals. The same one who has created the evil spell that distresses you. He’s imprisoned me in a crystal, so I’m afraid I won’t be seeing you for a while.”

In this dream, I was clad in a gown made of peacock feathers, and I had silver rings on all my fingers. Little silver bells were on fine chains around my ankles. They tinkled as I stepped closer to him. “Isn’t there anything I can do to help you?” my dream self asked.

“Oh, I think not,” he replied. “I just didn’t want you to think badly of me.” Then he smiled. “Silver Lady, you are one of the few who would worry first about breaking the enchantment that binds me, rather than plotting how to break your own curse. I cannot help but believe that the forces that balance all magic will find a way to free us both.”

“May you be right, my friend,” I replied.

And that was the end of the dream, or the end of as much as I can remember. I awoke in the morning with vague memories of a cat batting at tinkling silver chimes swinging in a perfumed wind. I had a splitting headache. I got out of bed, got dressed, and went to work at Sears.

For a couple of days, I kept expecting him to turn up again, but he didn’t. I just kept going along. I told Felicia that I couldn’t live on the hours and pay I was getting, and she told me that she was very disappointed with the number of credit applications I was turning in, and that full-time people were only chosen from the most dedicated and enthusiastic part-timers. I said I’d have to start looking for work elsewhere, and she said she understood. We both knew there wasn’t much work of any kind to be had, and that I could be replaced with a bored housewife or a desperate community college student at a moment’s notice. It was not reassuring.

In the next three weeks, I passed out twenty-seven copies of my résumé to various bored people at desks. I interviewed for two jobs that were just as low paying as the one I already had. I found a fantastic job that would have loved to hire me, but its funding called for it to be given to a displaced homemaker or a disadvantaged worker. Then I called on a telemarketer telephone interviewing position ad in the paper. They liked my voice and asked me to come in. After a lot of pussyfooting, it turned out to be a job where you answered toll calls from heavy breathers and conversed animatedly about their sexual fantasies. “Sort of an improvisational theater of the erotic,” said my interviewer. She had some tapes of some sample calls, and I found myself listening to them and admitting, yes, it sounded easy. Best of all, the interviewer told me, I could work from my own home, doing the dishes or sorting laundry while telling some man how much I’d like to run a warm sponge over his body, slathering every nook and cranny of his flesh with soapsuds until he gleamed, and then, when he was hard and warm and wet, I’d take him and . . . for six to seven dollars an hour. They even had pamphlets that explained sexual practices I might not be familiar with and gave the correct jargon to use when chatting about them. Six to seven dollars an hour. I told the interviewer I’d have to think about it and went home.

And got up the next day and defrosted the refrigerator again and swept the carpet in the living room because I was out of vacuum bags. Then I did all the mending that I had been putting off for weeks, scrubbed the landing outside my apartment door and sprayed it with Cat-B-Gon, and thought about talking on the telephone to men about sex, and how I could do it while I was ironing a shirt or arranging flowers in a vase or wiping cat turds off my shoe. Then I took a shower and changed and went in to work at Sears for the five-to-nine evening shift. I told myself that the work wasn’t dirty or extremely difficult, that my coworkers were pleasant people, and that there was no reason why this job should make me so depressed.

It didn’t help.

The mall was having Craft Week, and to get to Sears I had to pass all the tables and people. I wondered why I didn’t get busy and make things in the evenings and sell them on the weekends and make ends meet that way. I passed Barbie dolls whose pink crocheted skirts concealed spare rolls of toilet paper, and I saw wooden key chains that spelled out names, and ceramic butterfly wind chimes, and a booth of rubber stamps, and a booth with clusters of little pewter and crystal sculptures displayed on tables made of old doors set across sawhorses. I slowed a little as I passed that one, for I’ve always had a weakness for pewter. There were the standard dragons and wizards, and some thunder-eggs cut in half with wizard figures standing inside them. There were birds, too, eagles and falcons and owls of pewter, and one really nice stag almost as big as my hand. For fifty-two dollars. I was looking at it when I heard a woman standing behind me say, “I’d like the crystal holding the wizard, please.”

And the owner of the stall smiled at her and said, “You mean the wizard holding the crystal, right?” and the woman said, in this really snotty voice, “Quite.”

So the owner wrapped up the little figurine of a wizard holding a crystal ball in several layers of tissue paper and held it out to the woman and said, “Seventeen seventy-eight, please,” and the woman was digging in her purse and I swear, all I did was try to step out of their way.

I guess my coat caught on a corner of the door or something, for in the next instant everything was tilting and sliding. I tried to catch the edge of the door-table, but it landed on the woman’s foot, really hard, as all the crystal and pewter crashed to the floor and scattered across the linoleum like a shattered whitecap. The woman screamed and threw up her hands, and the little wrapped wizard went flying.

I’m not sure if I really saw this.

The crystal ball flew out of the package and landed separately on the floor. It didn’t shatter or tinkle or crash. It went Poof! with a minute puff of smoke. And the crumple of tissue paper floated down emptily.

“You stupid bitch!” the woman yelled at me, and the owner of the booth glared at me and said, “I hope to hell you have insurance, klutz!”

Which is a dumb thing to say, really, and I couldn’t think of any answer. People were turning to stare, and moving toward us to see what the excitement was, and the woman had sort of collapsed and was holding on to her foot, saying, “My God, it’s broken, it’s broken.”

I knew, quite abruptly and coldly, that she wasn’t talking about her foot.

Then the fortyish man grabbed me by the elbow and said, “We’ve got to get out of here!” I let him pull me away, and the funny thing is, no one tried to stop us or chase us or anything. The crowd closed up around the woman on the floor like an amoeba engulfing a tidbit.

Then we were in a pickup truck that smelled like a wet dog, and the floor was cluttered with muddy newspapers and Styrofoam coffee cups and wrappers from Hostess Fruit Pies and paper boats from the textured vegetable protein burritos they sell in the 7-Eleven stores. Part of me was saying that I was crazy to be driving off with this guy I hardly knew who had stuck me with the bill for dinner, and part of me was saying that I had better get back to Sears, maybe I could explain being this late for work. And part of me just didn’t give a shit anymore; it just wanted to flee. And that part felt better than it had in ages.

We pulled up outside a little white house and he turned to me gravely and said, “Thank you for rescuing me.”

“This is really dumb,” I said, and he said, “Maybe so, but it’s all we’ve got. I told you, magic isn’t what it used to be.”

So we went inside the little house and he put the tea kettle on. It was a beautiful kettle, shining copper with a white-and-blue ceramic handle, and the cups and saucers he took down matched it. I said, “You stuck me with the bill at the restaurant.”

He said, “My enemies fell upon me in the restroom and magicked me away. I told you. I never would have chosen to leave you that way, Silver Lady. But for your intervention I would still be in their powers.” Then he turned, holding a little tin canister in each hand and asked, “Which will you have: Misplaced Dreams or Forgotten Sweetness?”

“Forgotten Sweetness,” I said, and he put down both canisters of tea and took me in his arms and kissed me. And yes, I could feel his stomach sticking out a little against mine, and when I put my hand to the back of his head to hold his mouth against mine, I could tell his hair was thinning. But I thought I could hear wind chimes and scent an elusive perfume on a warm breeze.

I don’t believe in magic. The idea of willing magic into my life is dumb. Dumb. But as the fortyish man had said, it was all we had. A dumb hope for a small slice of magic, no matter how thin. The fortyish man didn’t waste his energy carrying me to the bedroom.

I never met a man under twenty-five who was worth the powder to blow him to hell. They’re all stuck in third gear.

It takes a man until he’s thirty to understand what gentleness is about, and a few years past that to realize that a woman touches a man as she would like him to touch her.

By thirty-five, they start to grasp how a woman’s body is wired. They quit trying to kick-start us and learn to make sure the battery is charged before turning the key. A few, I’ve heard, learn how to let a woman make love to them.

Fortyish men understand pacing. They know it doesn’t have to all happen at once, that separating each stimulus can intensify each touch. They know when pausing is more poignant than continuing, and they know when continuing is more important than a ceramic kettle whistling itself dry on an electric burner.

And afterward I said to him, “Have you ever heard of ‘Lindholm’s Rule of Ten’?”

He frowned for an instant. “Isn’t that the theory that the first ten times two people make love, one will do something that isn’t in sync with the other?”

“That’s the one,” I said.

“It’s been disproved,” he said solemnly. And he got up and went to the bathroom while I rescued the smoking kettle from the burner.

I stood in the kitchen, and after a while I started shivering, because the place wasn’t all that well heated. Putting my clothes back on didn’t seem polite somehow, so I called through the bathroom door, “Shall I put on more water for tea?”

He didn’t answer, and I didn’t want to yell through the door again, so I picked up my blouse and slung it around my shoulders and shivered for a while. I sort of paced through his kitchen and living room. I found myself reading the titles of his books, one of the best ways to politely spy on someone. Theories of Thermodynamics was right next to The Silmarillion. All the books by Carlos Castenada were set apart on a shelf by themselves. His set of Kipling was bound in red leather. My ass was freezing, and I suspected I had a rug burn on my back. To hell with being polite. I went and got my underwear and skirt and stood in the kitchen, putting them on.

“Merlin?” I called questioningly as I picked up my pantyhose. They were shot, a huge laddered run up the back of one leg. I bunched them up and shoved them into my purse. I went and knocked on the bathroom door, saying, “I’m coming in, okay?” And when he didn’t answer, I opened the door. There was no one in there. But I was sure that was where he had gone, and the only other exit from the bathroom was a small window with three pots of impatiens blooming on the sill. The only clue that he had been there was the used rubber floating pathetically in the toilet. There is nothing less romantic than a used rubber.

I went and opened the bedroom door and looked in there. He hadn’t made his bed this morning. I backed out.

I actually waited around for a while, pretending he would come back. I mean, his clothes were still in a heap on the floor. How he could have gotten redressed and left the house without my noticing it, I didn’t try to figure out. But after about an hour or so, it didn’t matter how he had done anything. He was gone.

I didn’t cry. I had been too stupid to allow myself to cry. None of this made sense, but my behavior made the least sense of all. I finished getting dressed and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror. Great. Smeared makeup and nothing to repair it with, so I washed it all off. Let the lines at the corners of my mouth and the circles under my eyes show. Who cared? My hair had gone wild. My legs were white fleshed and goosebumpy without the pantyhose. The cute little ankle-strap heels on my bare feet looked grotesque. All of me looked rumpled and used. It matched how I felt, an outfit that perfectly complemented my mood, so I got my purse and left.

The old pickup was still outside. That didn’t make sense either, but I didn’t really give a damn.

I walked home. That sounds simpler than it was. The weather was raw, I was barelegged and in heels, it was getting dark, and people stared at me. It took me about an hour, and by the time I got there I had rubbed a huge blister on the back of one of my feet, so I was limping as well. I went up the stairs, narrowly missing the moist brown pile the neighbor’s cat had left for me, unlocked my apartment door and went in.

And I still didn’t cry. I kicked off my shoes and got into my old baggy sweat suit and went to the kitchen. I made myself hot chocolate in a little china pot with forget-me-nots on it, and opened the eight-ounce canned genuine all-the-way-from-England Cross & Blackwell plum pudding that my sister had given me last Christmas and I had saved in case of disasters like this. I cut the whole thing up and arranged it on a bone china plate on a little tray with my pot of hot chocolate and a cup and saucer. I set it on a little table by my battered easy chair, put a quilt on the chair, and got down my old leather copy of Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. Then I headed for the bathroom, intending to take a quick hot shower and dab on some rose oil before settling down for the evening. It was my way of apologizing to myself for hurting myself this badly.

I opened the bathroom door, and a stench cloud of sulfurous green smoke wafted out. Choking and gasping, I peered in, and there was the fortyish man, clad only in a towel, smiling at me apologetically. He looked apprehensive. He had a big raw scrape on one knee, and a swollen lump on his forehead. He said, “Silver Lady, I never would have left you like that, but . . .”

“You were teleported away by your archrival,” I finished.

He said, “No, not teleported, exactly; this involved a spell requiring a monkey’s paw and a dozen nightshade berries. But they were last year’s berries, and not potent enough to hold me. I had a spell of my own up my sleeve and . . .”

“You blasted him to kingdom come,” I guessed.

“No.” He looked a little abashed. “Actually, it was the ‘Incessant Rectal Itch’ spell, a little crude, but always effective and simple to use. I doubt that he’ll be bothering us again.” He paused, then added, “As I’ve told you, magic isn’t what it used to be.” Then he sniffed a few times and said, “Actually, I’ve found that Pine-Sol is the best stuff for getting rid of spell residues . . .”

So we cleaned up the bathroom. I poured hydrogen peroxide over his scraped knee and he made gasping noises and swore in a language I’d never heard before. I left him doing that and went into the kitchen and began reheating the hot chocolate. A few moments later he came out dressed in a sort of sarong he’d made from one of my bedsheets. It looked strangely elegant on him, and the funny thing was, neither of us seemed to feel awkward as we sat down and drank the hot chocolate and shared the plum pudding. The last piece of plum pudding he took, and borrowing some cream cheese from my refrigerator, he buttered a cabalistic sign onto it.

Then he went to the door and called, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”

The neighbor’s cat came at once, and the ratty old thing let the fortyish man scoop him up and bring him into my living room, where he removed two ticks from behind its ears and then fed it the plum pudding in small bites. When he had done that, he picked it up and stared long into its yellowish eyes before he intoned, “By bread and cream I bind you. Nevermore shalt thou shit upon the threshold of this abode.” Then he put the cat gently out the door, observing aloud, “Well, that takes care of the curse you were under.”

I stared at him. “I thought my curse had something to do with me working at Sears.”

“No. That was just a viciously cruel thing you were doing to yourself, for reasons I will never understand.” He must have seen the look on my face, because after a while he said, “I told you, the magic is never quite what you think it to be.”

Then he came to sit on the floor beside my easy chair. He put his elbow on my knee and leaned his chin in his hand. “What if I were to tell you, Silver Lady, that I myself have no real magic at all? That, actually, I climbed out my bathroom window and sneaked through the streets in my towel to meet you here? Because I wanted you to see me as special?”

I didn’t say anything.

“What if I told you I really work for Boeing, in Personnel?”

I just looked at him, and he lifted his elbow from my knee and turned aside a little. He glanced at his own bare feet, and then over at my machine. He licked his lips and spoke softly. “I could get you a job there. As a word processor, at about eleven dollars an hour.”

“Merlin,” I said warningly.

“Well, maybe not eleven dollars an hour to start . . .”

I reached out and brushed what hair he had back from his receding hairline. He looked up at me and then smiled the smile where he always looked aside from me. We didn’t say anything at all. I took his hand and led him to my room, where we once more disproved Lindholm’s Rule of Ten. I fell asleep curled around him, my hand resting comfortably on the curve of his belly. He was incredibly warm and smelled of oranges, cloves, and cinnamon. Misplaced Dreams tea, that’s what he smelled like.

And that night I dreamed I wore a peacock feather gown and strolled through a misty garden. I had found something I had lost, and I carried it in my hand, but every time I tried to look at it to see what it was, the mist swirled up and hid my hand from me.

In the morning when I woke up, the fortyish man was gone.

It didn’t really bother me. I knew that either he would be back or he wouldn’t, but either way no one could take from me what I already had, and what I already had was a lot more magic than most people get in their lives. I put on my ratty old bathrobe and my silver ladies and went out into the living room. His sarong sheet was folded up on the easy chair in the living room and the neighbor’s cat was asleep on it, his paws tucked under his chin.

And my Muse was there, too, perched on the corner of my desk, one knee under her chin as she painted her toenails. She looked up when I came in and said, “If you’re quite finished having a temper tantrum, we’ll get on with your career now.”

So I sat down at my machine and flicked the switch on and put my fingers on the home row.

Funny thing. The keys weren’t even dusty.

Cut

Patsy sits on a bar stool at my breakfast counter. She is sipping a glass of soy milk through a straw. I glance at her, then look away at my rainforest cam on the wall screen behind her. My granddaughter had an incisor removed so that she could drink through the straw with her mouth closed. She claims it is more sanitary and less offensive to other people. I don’t know. It offends the hell out of her grandmother.

“So. SATs next week?” I ask her hopefully.

“Uh-huh,” she confirms, and I breathe a small sigh of relief. She had contemplated refusing to take them, on the grounds that any college who wanted to rate her on a single test score was not her kind of place anyway. She swings her feet, kicking the rungs of her stool. “I’m still debating Northwestern versus Peterson University.”

I try to recall something about Peterson, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it. “Northwestern’s good,” I hedge. As I set a plate of cookies within her reach, I notice a bulge in the skin on her shoulder blade just above the fabric of her tank top. An irritated peace sign seems to be emblazoned on it. “What’s that? New tattoo?”

She glances over her shoulder at it, then shrugs. “No. Raised implant. They put a stainless steel piece under your skin. Works best when there’s bone backing it up. Mine didn’t come out very good. Grandma, you know I can’t eat those things. If the fat doesn’t clog up my heart, sugar will send me into a depression and I’ll kill myself.”

She nudges the plate away. I smile and take one myself. “I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I’ve been eating chocolate chip cookies for years.”

“Yeah, I know. And Mom, too. Look at her.”

“Doesn’t it hurt?” I ask, nodding at her implant. I evade the topic of her mom. It is not that I expect my granddaughter to always get on with my daughter. It is that I don’t want to be wedged into the middle of it.

My gambit is successful. “This? No. A little slit in the skin, then they free the skin layer from the tissue underneath it, slide in the emblem, put in a couple of stitches. It healed in two days, and now it’s permanent. Besides, women have always been willing to suffer for beauty. Inject collagen into your lips. Get breast implants. Have your ribs removed to have a smaller waist.”

I give a mock shudder. “I never went in for those sorts of things. I think God meant us to live in our bodies the way they are.”

“Yeah, right.” She snorts skeptically and picks up a cookie crumb, then licks it off her finger. I catch a brief glimpse of her tongue stud. “You made Mom wear braces on her teeth for two years. She’s always telling me what a pain that was.”

“That was different. That was for health as much as for appearances.”

“Oh, let’s be honest, Gran.” Patsy leans forward on her elbow and fixes me with her best piercing glance. “You didn’t take her to an orthodontist because you were worried she couldn’t chew a steak. She told me the kids at school were calling her ‘Fang’.”

I wince at the memory of my twelve-year-old in tears. It had taken me an hour to get her to tell me why. Katie was never as forthcoming as her own daughter is. “Well, appearance was part of it. It was affecting her self-esteem. But straight teeth are important to lifelong health and—”

“Yeah, but the point it, it was plastic surgery. For the sake of how she looked. And it hurt her.”

I feel suddenly defensive. Patsy is going over all this as if it is a well-rehearsed argument. “Well, at least it’s more constructive than some of the ways you hurt yourself. Tattoos, body piercing, tooth removal. It worries me, frankly, that so many people can damage their bodies for the sake of a fad.”

“Hardly a fad, Gran. People have been doing it for thousands of years. It’s not just that it looks good, it makes a point about yourself. That you have the will to make yourself who you want to be. Even if it means a little pain.”

“Or a lot of infection.”

“Not with that new antibiotic. It kills everything.”

“That’s what worries me,” I mutter.

I take another cookie. Nothing betrays my amusement as Patsy absentmindedly takes one and dunks it in her milk. She slurps off a bite, then says with a full mouth, “I’ve been thinking about getting cut myself.”

“Cut?” The bottom drops out of my stomach. I’d seen it on the netnews. “Like a joint off your little fingers like that one group of kids did? To express solidarity with one another.” An almost worse thought finds me. “Not that facial scarification they do with the razor blades and ash?”

She laughs aloud and my anxiety eases. “No, Granma!” She hops off her stool and grabs her groin. “Cut! Here, you know.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Circumcision. Everyone’s talking about it. Here.” While I am still gaping at her, she takes her net link from her collar and points it at my wall screen. My rainforest cam scene gives way to one of her favorite links. I cringe at what I see. Some net star in a glam pose has her legs spread. Larger than life, she fills my wall. Head thrown back, hair cascading over her shoulders, she is sharing with us her freshly healed female circumcision. Symmetrical and surgically precise are the cleanly healed cuts, but all I can see is the absence of the flesh that should be there. I turn away, sickened by the slick pink scars, but Patsy stares, fascinated. “Doesn’t it look cool? In the interview, she says she did it to get a role. She wanted to show the producer her absolute commitment to the project. But now she loves it. She says she feels cleaner, that she has cut a lot of animal urges out of her life. When she has sex now . . . here, I can just play the interview for you—”

“No, thanks,” I say faintly. I tap my master control, and the screen goes completely blank. After what I have just seen, I could not bear the beauty of the rainforest cam with the wet dripping leaves and the calling birds everywhere. I take a breath. “Patsy, you can’t be serious.”

She clips her link back onto her collar and pops back onto her stool. “You know I am, Granma. At least you aren’t going all meltdown like Mom did.”

“She knows you want to do this?” I can’t grasp any of it, not that some women do this voluntarily, not that Patsy wants to do it, not that Katie knows.

Patsy crunches down the rest of her cookie. “She knows I’m going to do it. Me and Ticia and Samantha. Mary Porter, too. We’ll be like a circumcision group, like some African tribes had. We’ve grown up together. The ceremony will be a bond between us the rest of our lives.”

“Ceremony.” I don’t know when I stood up. I sit back down. I press my knees together because they are shaking. Not to protect my own genitals.

“Of course. At the full moon. The midwife who does it has this wonderful setting; it’s an open field with these big old rocks sticking up out of it, and the river flowing by where you can hear it.”

“A midwife does this?”

“Well, she used to be a midwife. Now she says she only does circumcisions, that this is more symbolic and fulfilling to her than delivering babies. But she is medically trained. Everything will be sterilized, and she uses antibiotics and all that stuff. So it’s safe.”

I suppose I should be relieved they are not using broken glass or old razor blades. “I don’t get it,” I say at last. I peer at my granddaughter. “Is this some sort of religious thing?”

She bursts out laughing. “No!” she sputters at last. “Granma! You know I don’t go for that cult stuff. This is just about me taking control of my own life. Saying that sex doesn’t run me, that I won’t choose a man just because I’m horny for him, that I’m more than that.”

“You’re giving up sexual fulfillment for the rest of your life.” I state it flatly, wanting her to hear how permanent it is.

“Granma, orgasm isn’t sexual fulfillment. Orgasm isn’t that much better than taking a good shit.”

I smile in spite of myself. “Then you’re sleeping with the wrong boys. Your grandfather—”

She covers her ears in mock horror. “Don’t gross me out with old-people sex stories. Ew!” She drops her hands. “Sexual fulfillment—that’s like code words that say women are about sex. Women need sexual fulfillment, like it’s more important than being a fulfilled person.”

We are arguing semantics when what I want to tell her is not to let some fanatic cut her sweet young flesh away from her body. Don’t let anyone steal that much of you, I want to say. I don’t. I suddenly understand how grave this is. If I become too serious, she won’t hear me at all. She is poking me, trying to provoke me to act like a parent. I hold myself back from that futile abyss. Reasoning with her won’t work. Get her to talk, and maybe she will talk herself out of it.

“Have you any idea how much it’s going to hurt? Well, I’m sure she’ll use an anesthetic for the surgery, but afterward when you’re healing—”

“Duh! That would defeat the whole purpose. No anesthetic. It would go against the traditions of female circumcision throughout the world. Ticia and Mary and Sam and I will be there for each other. It will be just women sharing their courage with other women.”

“Female circumcision was invented by men!” I retort. “To keep women at home and subservient to them. To take away a precious part of their lives. Patsy, think about this. You’re young. Once done, you can’t go back.”

“Sure you can. At the midwife’s site, there’s a link to a place that can make you look like you did before. Here.” She is fiddling with her net link. I press the Off on my master control again.

“That’s appearance, not functionality.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. And you should know that much before you get into this. I can’t understand how that woman can do this to girls.” The parent part is getting the better of me. I clamp my lips down.

Patsy shakes her head at me. “Granma! It has always been women doing it to other women, in all the cultures. Look.” She reaches over to push my master button back On. “Here’s a link to her website. Go look at it. She has all the historical stuff posted there. You like anthropology. You should be fascinated.”

I stare at her, defeated. She is so sure. She argues well, and she is not stupid. She is not even ignorant. She is merely young and in the throes of her time. Patsy will do this if she is not stopped. I don’t know how to stop her. Her words come back to me. Women doing it to other women. Women perpetuating this maiming. I try to imagine what she must be like. I can’t. “I’d have to meet her,” I say to myself.

Patsy brightens. “I hoped you would. Look. On her site, my link is the Moon Sisters. Our password is Luna. Because we chose the full moon. There’s pictures of us, and the date and time and place. You’re invited. Mary wanted to have a webcam on the ceremony, but we voted her down. This is private. For us. But I’d like you to be there.”

“Will your mom be there?”

Again her snort of disbelief. “Mom? Of course not. She gets all worked up whenever I talk about it. She threatened to kill our midwife. Can you believe that? I asked her if she ever bombed abortion clinics when she was a kid. She said it wasn’t the same thing at all. Sure it is, I told her. It’s all about choice, isn’t it? Women making their own sexual choices.” Her beeper chimes and she leaps from the stool. “Wow, I’ve got to get going. Big date with Teddy tonight.”

I make my last stand. “How does Teddy feel about this?”

She shakes her head at me. “You just don’t get it, Granma. It’s not about Teddy. It’s my choice. But he’s excited. After this, if I have sex with him, he’ll know it’s not because I’m horny at the moment, but because I want to give that to him. And I think he’s excited because it will be different. Tighter because of how she sews us up. You know men.”

She doesn’t wait for an answer from me, which is good, because right now I am sure that I don’t even know women, let alone men. As soon as she is out the door, I phone Katie. In a moment, I see her in the corner of my wall screen, but she does not meet my eyes. She is looking past me, at something on her own wall screen. I stare for a moment at my beautiful talented daughter. By a supreme effort of will, I don’t shriek, “Circumcision! Patsy! Help!” Instead I say, “Hi, whatchadoing?”

“Sorting beads from the St. Katherine site. It’s fascinating. You know my beadmaker from the Charlotte site? Well, I’m finding her work here, too. They’re unmistakably hers from the analysis. Which means these people traded over a far greater area than we first supposed.”

“Or that the trade network was greater.” I have to smile at her. She is so intent, her eyes roving over the screen as she continues working. When she is enraptured in her archaeology like this, she suddenly looks eighteen again. There is that fierceness to her stare. I am so proud of her and all that she is. She nods her agreement. I know she is busy, but this is important. Still, I procrastinate. “Do you ever miss actually handling the beads and the artifacts?”

“Oh. Well, yes, I do. But this is still good. And the native peoples have been much more receptive to our work now that they know all the grave goods will remain in situ and relatively undisturbed. The cameras and the chem scanners can do most of the data gathering for us. But it still takes a human mind to put it all together and figure out what it means. And this way of doing it is better, both for archaeology and anthropology. Sometimes we’re too trapped in our own times to see what it all means. Sometimes we’re too close, temporally, to understand the culture. By leaving all the artifacts and bones in situ, we make it possible for later anthropologists to take a fresh look at it, with unprejudiced eyes.” She glances up at me and our eyes meet. “So. You called.”

“Patsy,” I say.

She clenches her jaw, takes a breath, and sighs it out. The intent eighteen-year-old anthro student is gone, replaced by a worried, tired mom. “The circumcision.”

“Katie, you have to stop her!”

“I can’t.”

“You can’t?” I am outraged.

She is weary. “Legally, her body is her own. Once a child is over fourteen, a parent cannot interfere in—”

“I don’t give a damn about legal—” I try to break in, but she continues doggedly.

“—any decision the child makes about her sexuality. Birth control, abortions, adopting out of children, gender reassignment, confidential medical treatment for venereal disease, plastic surgery—it’s all covered in that Freedom of Choice Act.” She gives me a woeful smile. “I supported that legislation. I never thought it would be construed like this.”

“Are you sure it covers things like this?” I ask faintly.

“Too sure. Patsy has forced me to be sure. Shall I forward all the web links to you? She has, in her typical thorough way, researched this completely . . . at least in every way that supports her viewpoint.” She shrugs helplessly. “I gave her a set of links to websites that oppose it. I don’t know if she looked at them at all. I can’t force her.”

I realized I have my hand clenched over my mouth. I pull it away. “You seem so calm,” I observe in disbelief.

For an instant, her eyes swim with tears. “I’m not. I’m just all screamed out. I’m exhausted, and she has stopped listening to me. What can I do?”

“Stop her. Any way you can.”

“Like you stopped Mike from dropping out of school?”

Even after all the years, I feel a pang of pain. I shake my head. “I did everything I could. I’d drop your brother off at the front door, I’d watch him go into the school, and he’d go right out the back door. Battling him was not doing anything for our relationship. I had to let him make that mistake. I stopped yelling at him in an effort to keep the relationship intact. At least, it saved that much.”

“Exactly,” Katie says. She stares past me at her screen, but I have broken the spell. She can no longer forget her daughter’s decision in wonder at some ancient beadmaker’s work. “I was quite calm last night. I told her that all I asked was that she always remember the decision was hers and that I completely opposed it. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Fine.’ At least this way, she’ll come back here after the damned ceremony. If she gets an infection or doesn’t stop bleeding, at least I’ll know about it and can rush her to the hospital.”

“Can you legally still do that?” I ask with bitterness that mocks, not her, but the society we live in.

“I think so.” She stops speaking and swallows. “Pray, Mom,” she begs me after a moment. “Pray that when the other girls scream, she loses her courage and runs away. That’s my last hope.”

“It’s a slim one, then. Our Patsy never lacked for guts. Brains, maybe, but not guts.” We smile at each other, pride battling with despair. “Once she’s said she’ll do a thing, she won’t back down no matter how scared she is. She’ll let that woman cut her up rather than be seen as a coward by her friends.”

“It’s the baby I feel sorry for,” Katie says suddenly.

“Baby?” All the hair on my body stands up in sudden horror.

“Mary’s baby. She decided to have her baby done; the midwife is doing the baby first.”

I didn’t even know Mary had a baby. She is only a year older than Patsy. “But she can’t! She has no right to make a decision like that, to scar her daughter for the rest of her life!”

Again the bitter smile makes Katie a sour old woman I don’t know. “It’s the flip side of the Freedom of Choice Act. The compromise Congress made to get it passed. Under the age of fourteen, a parent can make any choice for the child.”

“It’s barbaric.”

“You had Mike circumcised when he was three days old.”

That jolts me. I try to justify it. “It was a different time. Almost all boys were circumcised then. Your dad and I didn’t even think about it, it was just what you did. If the baby was a boy, you had him circumcised. They told us it made it easier to keep the baby clean, that it helped prevent cancer of the penis, that it would make him like all the other boys in the locker room.”

“They do it without anesthetic.”

I am silent. I am no longer sure if we are talking about Mary’s baby girl, or my own tiny son, all those years ago. I remember tending to the fresh cut on his penis, dabbing on petroleum jelly to keep his diaper from sticking to it. I am suddenly ashamed of myself. I had not hesitated, all those years ago. I had charged ahead and done what others told me was wise.

Just like Patsy.

The silence has stretched long and said more than words. “She invited me to be there,” I say quietly. “Do you think I should go? Is that like giving my approval?”

“Go,” Katie pleads quickly. “If it all goes wrong, you can rush her to a hospital. She won’t tell me where it is, and I won’t ask you to betray that confidence. But be there for her, Mom. Please.”

“Okay,” I say quietly.

Katie has started to cry.

“I love you, baby. You’re a good mom,” I tell her. She shakes her head wildly, tears and hair flying, and breaks the connection.

For a time I stare at my rain forest. Then I get up. There is a backpack in the hall closet. I go to the bathroom and begin to put things in it. Clean towels. Bandaging. I shudder as I put in the alcohol. I try to think what else. There is a spray antiseptic with a “nonsting, pain-relieving ingredient.” Feeble. What else should I take, what else?

I draw a breath and look in the mirror. Katie’s face is an echo of mine, made perfect. Patsy, I see you in my green eyes and almost cleft chin. They are mine, the daughter of my body and my daughter’s daughter. Born so soft and pink and perfect. I make my arms a cradle and wish they were both still mine to hold and protect.

I grope up behind the towels and take it down. Shining silver, it slips from the holster. There is a horsie on the handle. Fred always loved Colts. There is a dusty box of ammunition, too.

I am suddenly calm. Don’t be afraid, baby. Not my baby, not Mary’s baby, no one’s baby need fear. Granma is coming. No one’s going to cut you.

I think for a moment of what a mess I’m going to make of my life. I think of the echoes that will spread out from one bullet, and I wonder how Patsy and her friends will deal with it, and what it will do to Katie. Then I know I am too close to any of it to understand. Maybe we should just leave the midwife’s body where it falls. In situ. Perhaps in a hundred years or two, someone else will know what to make of it all.

The Fifth Squashed Cat

That’s the fourth squashed cat we’ve passed today,” Cheryl observed as the left front wheel bumped gently. I didn’t trust myself to reply. I was trying to remember why driving cross-country to New Mexico with Cheryl had seemed like a good idea. Had working at Ernie’s Trucker Inn really been that bad? The grease. The noise. The rude customers. Ernie’s flatulence. The peepholes poked through the wall from the men’s room to the ladies’ room that Ernie would “repair” by poking full of wet paper towels. The witty way Cheryl would shout, “Hey, Sheila! Drop another order of chicken tits in the fryer. This guy’s no leg man.” Watching her turn back and simper at some infatuated trucker while I tried to fix six orders at once. All of that had added up to make me believe there must be a better job somewhere.

Chicken tits. I pulled irritably at my seat belt. Resettled, I focused my eyes down the endless stretch of rainy afternoon freeway. So I had quit my job, to drive to New Mexico, where it was warmer and maybe there would be better work. That much made sense. But why had I chosen to take someone who thought “chicken tits” the epitome of humor? Why hadn’t I realized that the same person would find counting squashed cats an exercise in higher mathematics?

“Hey, where are the Cheetos? I know we had nearly a full bag back here somewhere. You eat them while I was asleep?”

“No, Cheryl, I didn’t eat your Cheetos.” Nor your Ding-Dongs, Nerds, Twinkies, not even your Jalapeno and Sour Cream Flavored Pork Rinds. God only knew how I had resisted them, but I had.

She had twisted around and was hanging into the backseat, rummaging for food. I glanced over at her and saw only a pair of blue-jeaned cheeks. She continued to rustle papers and toss unwanted items to the floor. Reminded me of a black bear ransacking a garbage can.

“You sure you didn’t eat my Cheetos?” she asked again, a small whine slinking into her voice. “ ’Cause remember, when we bought them, you said you didn’t like them, and I said, ‘Okay, I’ll eat them, then,’ and you said okay. Remember? ’Cause I don’t think it’s fair if you ate them like that, after you said you didn’t like them. If you’d said you’d liked them, I woulda bought two bags and then there would have been enough for both of us. But you said you didn’t . . .”

“Cheryl,” I said in a level, reasonable voice. “I didn’t eat your crummy Cheetos.”

“Well, jeez, don’t get all bent out of shape about it.” She dived deeper into the wreckage in the backseat. “I just wanted to, you know, ask . . .” Her rear end pressed against the ceiling of the car. I wondered what passing motorists thought she was doing.

It was then that I saw the hitchhiker. He was carrying a backpack with a green sleeping bag strapped to the bottom of it, and his worn felt hat was dripping water off the brim. He wore old green fatigue pants and a red checked wool jacket and high-laced hiking boots. The hair that stuck out from under his hat was gray. He was hoofing along the side of the road, his querying thumb stuck out almost like an afterthought. I like that, when hitchhikers are walking while they hitch. I never pick up the ones who just stand there with their thumbs stuck out. They’re too much like beggars. I like the ones who look like they’re determined to get somewhere, whether you help or not. I hit the turn signal and tapped the brakes to get a station wagon off my bumper before I swerved to the shoulder of the road. Cheryl gave a squeal of distress.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, plopping back into her seat.

“Giving a guy a lift,” I muttered.

A big grin was splitting his weathered old face as he jogged toward us. I was impressed. The guy had to be at least seventy. Gutty old man, hitching his way somewhere at that age.

“Well, you didn’t even ask me! I don’t think that’s a good idea; I mean, all that stuff you read in the paper, he might have a knife or be an escaped convict or anything. Sheila, pull out quick before he gets here. I never pick up hitchhikers.”

I ignored Cheryl, something I was getting better and better at doing. She folded her arms across her chest and started that huffy breathing she always did when she was pissed. Used to drive the truckers crazy, big boobs bobbling up and down like corks in a swell. Didn’t bother me at all. By this time the hitchhiker was standing outside her door, but she wasn’t moving. He grinned at me and tried the back door on her side of the car. It was locked, and she didn’t move to unlock it. I unlocked the one on my side. He came around right away and opened the door and pushed Cheryl’s junk over to make room for himself. He squished in with his backpack on his lap. As soon as he slammed the door, I pulled back onto the freeway. I glanced in the mirror, but all I could see was backpack and hat.

“So where you headed?” I asked. Cheryl was still huffing.

“Where you going?” he asked in return.

“New Mexico,” I said, swerving slightly to miss some bloody fur on the road.

“Sounds good to me,” he said.

Cheryl muttered, “That’s the fifth squashed cat we’ve passed today.”

“Actually, that looked more like a coon to me, missy. Didn’t ya see that ratty kind of tail it had? More likely a coon. Dead cat, its tail don’t look like that lessen it’s been rained on a lot, and it hasn’t rained all that much yet today. Besides, that one looked near fresh. Cat’s tail don’t look like that until it’s been out there, oh, two, three days. Probably a coon. Dumb old thing. Nothing dumber than a roadkill.”

About then I was thinking there were at least two things dumber than a roadkill. Possibly three, if you counted the person responsible for getting both of them into the same car.

“You see any Cheetos back there?” Cheryl asked him, her voice brightening. Nothing like shared interests for bringing people together. I heard the sounds of dedicated rummaging, and Cheryl turned, presenting cheeks once more. Great. Well, maybe they’d occupy each other and leave me alone.

“Here they are!” announced the old man, and handed her the bag after helping himself to a generous handful. Cheryl flopped back into her seat again and thrust the bag into my face.

“Here, Sheila, you want some?”

“No.” I pushed her hand away and she sat back. The crackle of cellophane and the rhythmic grinding of teeth filled the car. “Why are you going to New Mexico?” I asked the old man. Anything to cover Cheryl’s feeding sounds.

“Me? I thought you were going to New Mexico.”

“Well, yeah, we are, but when you got in, I thought you said you were going to New Mexico too.”

“No.” The old man had a cheerful, hearty voice. Nothing old about the way he sounded. “No, I don’t think I said that at all. I think I said, ‘Sounds good to me.’ That’s what I said. And it does. New Mexico. ’Bout time those Mexicans got a fresh start somewhere. Maybe in New Mexico they’ll do things a little better. Their biggest mistake, I always thought, was in having Mexico so close to Texas. Bound to be a bad influence. Glad they got a new place now.”

I forced a chuckle at his humor and then glanced at the rearview mirror. His eyes were blue and calm as a summer sky. Not joking. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Hey. Hey, missy. Did you say that was the fifth dead cat you passed today?”

“Yeah. Only if that’s a coon like you say, then it’s only the fourth.” Cheryl sounded disappointed.

“Yeah?” The old man sounded incredibly pleased. “Well, that’s good, really, actually, that’s good. Fifth dead cat you see is always the lucky one. When we get to number five, now, you just pull over and I’ll show you a thing or two about a number five squashed cat. Thing most of you young folk don’t know nothing about.”

I really wished the radio was working. Maybe I’d check the fuse box at the next gas stop. Maybe it was only a blown fuse and there was an alternative to listening to a dialogue about dead cats.

“Why’s it got to be a number five dead cat?” Cheryl was asking earnestly.

“Well, it just does, that’s all. You can work it out any way you like. Crystals, pyramids, channeling, or tarot. No matter how you compute it, it always comes out to a number five dead cat. And if you don’t believe me, just have your aura checked. Number five, every time.” The old man chuckled happily. “Guess I’m just lucky, throwing in with you and having you folks be on cat number four already. Know how long it usually takes me to pass five dead cats on foot? Days, sometimes. Days! And an old man like me, it’s hard for me to go days between number five squashed cats. Gimme a few more of them Cheetos things, missy.”

Cheryl obligingly passed the bag back to him.

“Only fifty-two more miles to the California border,” I observed brightly as my contribution to the conversation.

“There’s some Kool-Aid Koolers back there in little boxes, if you want,” Cheryl offered. “Would you pass me one, too?”

The Cheetos bag and a little waxed box of Kool-Aid were passed forward. Sensitive as I am, I realized they were ignoring me. Childish as I am, I felt piqued by it. “Wait a minute,” I interrupted loudly. “How do you know which cat is the fifth one? Doesn’t it all depend on when you start counting?”

“It sure does!” The old man was delighted. “And I’m real glad you saw it right off, like that. Only the fifth dead cat will work, and it all depends on when you decide to start counting them. Ain’t that real Zen, now?”

I didn’t think it was Zen any more than I thought it was tapioca pudding, but I didn’t say so. The conversation lagged.

Cheryl jabbed her straw into the grape box, took a long gurgling sip, and suddenly choked.

“Omigod!” she exclaimed, pointing down the road. “What’s that?”

“Something dead,” I muttered, changing lanes.

The old man craned his head forward. “Cat for sure! Look’s like a calico, but it might be a Persian with real good tire tracks. Hit the brakes, kid, this here’s pay dirt!”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said, not even easing up on the gas.

“Please. You’ve got to!” The old man’s hand closed on my shoulder and squeezed like a vise as Cheryl began bouncing up and down on the seat, squealing, “Please! Please, Sheila? Please stop, I wanna see it. It’ll only take a second. Come on, Sheila, be a sport!”

So I pulled off on the shoulder, more out of concern for my car’s shocks than for any curiosity. Besides, it was the only way to get the old man’s grip off my shoulder. I hate being touched by strangers. And the old man was definitely a stranger, and getting stranger all the time. Maybe if I stopped, I could leave him with his dead cat. I wished I could leave Cheryl, too, but she was paying half the gas and it was her cousin in New Mexico we were going to stay with until we got jobs. So I pulled my old Chevette over and cut the engine.

Cheryl and the old man were out before I got the car into Park. I leaned back in my seat. I wasn’t getting out. I’d seen dead cats before. Their little mouths are always open, fangs bare, neat pink tongues curled, as if making a final snarl at death. I like animals. Seeing dead ones always gives me a sense of loss, of waste. Tiny little lives, flame bright and candle brief, snuffed out. Probably had been someone’s pet.

I glanced in the rearview mirror and nearly gagged. The old man had found a piece of cardboard by the roadside and had coaxed most of the cat’s body onto it. The hindquarters were dangling. Obviously everything in the cat’s middle was crushed. He was using a stick to poke the rest of it onto his improvised stretcher. Cheryl trotted back to the car and jerked open a back door. Her eyes were wide, her face pink.

“Get in,” I said softly. “And let’s get the hell out of here. Just push his stuff out the door.”

She reached in and grabbed his backpack and unstrapped the top flap. She dug into it, pulling out a single-burner hiker’s stove, and then an aluminum pot.

“What are you doing?” I demanded. “Just drag the whole thing out.”

“What? No. This is all we need. Oh, and Dougie says it would look better if you got out and acted like you were changing the tire or looking under the hood. Okay?”

She didn’t wait for an answer, but stepped away from the car and nestled the stove down into the gravel of the ditch and set the pot on top of it. The car blocked the casual glances of passing motorists. “Cheryl!” I hissed, but she crouched down by the pot, not hearing me.

I opened my door just as a semi whooshed past. A gust of damp air sucked at me, and a horn blared aggressively. I staggered out in the wake, slamming the door behind me, and hurried around the car.

“What is going on?” I demanded, but I had a sick feeling I knew. Dougie was sliding the cat off the cardboard and into the pot. It didn’t quite fit, so he bent it in half and tamped it down with the stick.

“Now we need the canteen of water,” he announced, and they both looked up at me like I was supposed to bring it.

“This is sick,” I told them. “And I’m leaving.”

“Sheila!” Cheryl whiningly protested, even as Dougie asked her, “Well, what’s the matter with her?”

I got back in the car and slammed the door. Cheryl opened the door and leaned in. “You can climb in and go with me,” I told her. “Or you can pull your stuff out and stay here. But I’m leaving.”

“Sheila, why? What’s the matter with you?” She looked genuinely perplexed.

“Look. I’m not sticking around while you two barbecue a roadkill. It’s disgusting.”

“Oh, Sheila!” Cheryl started laughing. She reached over the seat and fished a canteen out of the old man’s pack. “We aren’t barbecuing anything, silly.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Just boiling it down,” she said reasonably. “Dougie says we boil it down to the bones. Then there’s this one certain bone, and you put it under your tongue and . . .”

“Oh, gross!”

“It confers perfect health and vitality upon you. Dougie says that’s all he does anymore. He used to work for a living, go after that old paycheck, slave away for somebody, just to keep body and soul together. But no more. All he has to do now is hike along the road until he gets to a fifth squashed cat, boil it down, and put the bone under his tongue. Easy. And his life is his own.”

Her cheeks were flushed with more than the wind that was blowing her hair across her face. Her blue eyes sparked through the net of her hair. Oh, you True Believer, you!

“That’s stupid,” I told her bluntly.

“Oh, Sheila, don’t you ever try anything new? Look, it’s only going to take a minute or two. Come on. Have an open mind.”

I looked at her, unable to believe what I was hearing.

“In the interests of science,” she added, as a finishing touch. She spun away from the car, leaving the door open. As I leaned across the seat to reach the handle, I saw her dumping water onto the cat in the pot. Yes. It had been a Persian with good tire tracks. Gotta give it to the man, he sure knew his roadkills. Dougie dug in his jacket pocket and came out with one of those camp knives that unfold a spoon at one end and a fork at the other. He prized the spoon out and began poking the cat down into the pot with it. That did it.

“Cheryl. I’m leaving. Either get in or get your stuff out of my car. You, too, Dougie.”

They glanced over at me, then back at their cat. It was gently steaming now, and the smell of simmering cat blended with the smell of rainy freeway. Dougie spoke, but not to me. “For me, it’s the fifth neck bone down from the head bone. Now, I don’t know what one it’s gonna be for you. Too bad you never had your aura done with a crystal, so’s you’d know. But what we can do, Miss Cheryl, is just try the bones one at a time, keeping track of which one is which, until we get the right one. Okay?”

I slammed the door on it. Damn, I was mad. Furious. Because they knew, both of them, that my threats were empty. They weren’t even worried. I am not the kind of person who can drive off and leave two people stranded on a freeway, even if they’re sautéing a dead Persian. Because I’m a sucker. A wimp. I closed my eyes and worked on my anger. Remember the time I asked Cheryl to quit calling back orders for chicken tits? Remember how she smiled at the trucker and said that it was the girls with little tits who got offended about tit jokes, because they didn’t have anything to laugh about? Remember the night her drunk boyfriend threw up all over the men’s room and I had to clean it up because she had to drive him home and none of the guys would touch it and Ernie was coming in any second? Remember that I am almost sure she’s the one who snitched all my tips out of the coffee mug I was keeping them in?

Remember that she’s the one who has a cousin in New Mexico for me to stay with while I job-hunt?

So I heaved out a big sigh and lolled my head back on the headrest and looked at the ceiling. I have always been a spineless wimp. And I think I give off some signal that attracts people who prey on spineless wimps. I despised myself. And I despised those assholes out there boiling their cat. Cretins. But then, I thought, Oh, well, what the hell, and slid to the passenger seat and watched. It couldn’t be any worse than what I was imagining.

It was raining in a misty, invisible way. Damp made a sheen on Dougie’s wool jacket and jeweled Cheryl’s hair. They were hunkered down beside the pot in cheerfully primeval companionship. The cat had softened and sunk into the pot. Maybe it had been dead longer than I thought. Dougie kept poking at it with his spoon and nodding approvingly. He noticed me watching them and waved the spoon at me and said something. Cheryl laughed. A few minutes later she got up and came back to the car. She opened the door, letting in rain and cat steam.

“Dougie says he’s not offended or anything. Come on over and he’ll figure out which cat bone is right for you.”

Like Mommy tapping at your bedroom door and saying, “Okay, you can come down to dinner now if you promise to behave and not call your brother ‘snotnose’ anymore.” Same answer to both.

“No. Thanks.”

“Suit yourself, then.” She turned and went back to her stewpot, leaving the door open. She whispered to Dougie and he shrugged elaborately. They ignored me assiduously.

She’d make someone a great mommy someday. Now, Priscilla, don’t sulk in your room. Come down to the family room and suck on your kitty bone like a good girl. What a crock!

I slid out of the car to stretch my legs. The afternoon was fading. We could have been in California by now. Unremarkable stretch of freeway. Pavement, gravel shoulder, chain-link fence, nondescript woods beyond it. Cretins stewing a cat.

“There now! See how that’s falling apart. I think she’s ready. Now, you hold that cardboard steady.”

I turned involuntarily as they fished out the cat. Soggy, steaming fur slipping off gray boiled meat that was sliding off bones. Dougie burned his fingers as he arranged it on the cardboard. It was falling apart, legs going different ways, the trailing guts swollen shiny.

“Usually I ain’t so careful,” Dougie exclaimed as he laid his patient out. “Usually I just count down from the head bone. But we gotta be careful until we find out what bone is right for you. And for your friend there.” He tipped his head at me, but his eyes never left the stewed kitty. I folded my arms and watched from a distance.

“Hope you don’t mind I go first, Missy Cheryl. I’m an old man, and it’s been two days since my last fifth cat. My Vital Essences need recharging bad.” The blade of his camp knife lifted the cat’s neck and spine free of the clinging meat. I stepped closer to watch. He counted and coaxed free one tiny spinal bone. A gobbet of cord dangled from it when he picked it up in his thick fingers. He popped it into his mouth.

He closed his eyes, rocked back on his heels, and glowed. Glowed like a jack-o’-lantern with a candle inside it. The light outlined the bones of his skull, glowing redly through his nose and eye sockets, showing his teeth against his cheeks. Cheryl gazed at him raptly. I stumbled back until I felt the chain-link highway fence cold against my back.

The glow faded as slowly as embers being masked by ash. Dougie smiled and opened his eyes. He looked more like forty than seventy. My heart was hammering in my chest and the skin of my face went hot with blood. But I wasn’t scared, or even awestruck. I was furious.

See, I’d never respected people who hung crystals from their rearview mirrors and suspended pyramids over their beds and read their horoscopes every day. I laughed at their ignorant hope that they could get through life that way. I respected people who knew the world was real and lumpy, and that you had to make your own way in it, not look for some mystical shortcut. Practical, realistic people who worked hard and bettered themselves with education and saved money for the future. People like me.

I was angry at the monstrous unfairness of it. It worked. It was real. But the whole thing was too damn easy. It wasn’t fair for anything in life to be that easy, for anyone. I didn’t want it to be real, and I was pissed off that it was. It’s tough to find out you’re wrong about something as basic as that.

Cheryl’s eyes were wide. “What happened to the bone?”

“Gone,” he told her, and opened his mouth wide to show her. She craned her head to peer into his mouth.

“So it is!” she exclaimed delightedly. “Okay. Now me. How do I start?”

“Well, let’s just start with the tip of the tail and work forward from there. May take us a while, Missy Cheryl. These cats gotta lotta bones, specially when you get down to all their little toesie bones and such. Let’s hope it ain’t the head bone. Be awful hard to get that under your tongue.”

They laughed together over their feline box social. The mesh fence was cold against my fingers. I let go of it, crept closer. Dougie was neatly laying the tail open, lifting the thread of bones out skillfully. He set it carefully on the grubby piece of cardboard. The tip of his knife blade freed the end one. “Here ya go,” he said, picking it up. “Number one tailbone. Now we gotta keep track, unless you wanna try every bone in every number five cat you ever use. So pay attention. Just pop this under your tongue. If it takes, you’ll know. If not, just pass it on to your friend there. Maybe it’ll be the right one for her.”

“Well, come on, Sheila, don’t just stand there! This is gonna be fun!” Cheryl waved me over excitedly, then opened her mouth to receive the first bone from Dougie’s grubby fingers.

I swallowed as I watched her take it like she was receiving communion. She shut her eyes and rocked back on her heels. After a few seconds she opened them. “Nothing,” she said matter-of-factly, and reached fingers into her mouth to fish out the bone. “Here, Sheila.” She held it out to me.

“No.” I crossed my arms on my chest.

“Yes,” she said simply. “You have to believe it. It works. You saw it. You’d be crazy not to try it.”

“It’s not that.” My skepticism was hanging in tatters. No hiding behind that. “It’s sick. The whole idea of spending your life that way. What are you going to do, Cheryl? Go hiking down freeways forever, sucking on the tailbones of every fifth squashed cat? Is that what life is going to be for you?”

“You’re making it out a bit bare, missy,” Dougie interceded. “It ain’t all asphalt and exhaust, it ain’t even all freeways. A lot of time it’s backcountry roads, with the birches turning gold along the shoulders, or bare white stretches of snowy highway in Utah, or the hilly streets of San Francisco. I mean, squashed cats are everywhere. Crisscrossed this country ten or more times; seen a lot of Canada and Mexico, too. I’ve had blue-sky days and thunderstorm nights; I’ve waited out hailstorms under overpasses and slept in deep sweet-smelling hayfields under harvest moons. My time belongs to me. I get lonely, I hitch a little. Sure, I get a little cold, I get a little wet. But as long as I get my number five cat bone, I don’t get old. Don’t get tired, don’t get sick. It may not be a fancy-dancy way to live. But it ain’t a bad life, and you got no right to go scaring Missy Cheryl away from it.”

Cheryl’s chin had come up. She looked me straight in the eye and spoke with a dignity I’d never known she possessed. “No one’s scaring me away from this. You and me, Sheila, we worked a few months together. You think you know all about me. But it’s me who knows about you. I seen how you are. You’re looking. You believe you’re gonna end up doing something better. Being something better than I’ll ever be. Well, maybe you will. But I won’t. I know that. I’ve seen myself in every truck stop we passed. All those old waitresses, swollen ankles and big behinds. Still getting pinched by the truckers, still putting out cups of coffee for guys who don’t tip. That’s as good as it’s ever going to get for me. And frankly, this looks better.”

She set the rejected bone down on the dusty cardboard and took the next one from Dougie’s fingers.

A curious embarrassment overtook me. I’d always known I was smarter than Cheryl. No. Smarter’s not the right word for it. But the world’s a different place for me. I’ve known hundreds of girls like her. Guys, too. High school was full of them, and all the seedy little jobs I’d taken since screwing up my college had put me right alongside them. The biggest dream the guys ever have is, like, rebuilding the ’66 Thunderbird that’s rusting behind Uncle Joe’s shed. For the girls, it’s always something to do with a guy. A handsomer guy, a richer guy, a sexier guy. The biggest change they ever make is going on a diet or dyeing their hair. I had plans and dreams they didn’t understand. I’d always felt both pity and scorn for them. What I’d never realized was that Cheryl had known, all this time, that my future was brighter than hers, that the things that would work for me would crumble to pieces in her hands. She had always known it and lived with my secret scorn for her shopworn hopes and generic dreams.

What Cheryl was doing right now, placing the second bone under her tongue, took a sort of grubby courage. She was reaching for something a little better than she believed she was entitled to. And I, who had always believed that when my chance came, I would boldly seize it, I was hugging myself with cold hands, shivering in the gliding caress of the raindrops sliding down my arms.

Wimp out.

So I stepped into their magic circle and picked up the bone that Cheryl had discarded. It was warm from the pot and slick with her saliva, but I slipped it under my tongue and waited. Nothing. I set it aside and reached for the next one. Nothing. Now she was waiting for me, and I took the bone she fished out from under her tongue and put it under my own. Nothing. But there was an excitement building, an electrical current jumping and sparking from Dougie to Cheryl to me and yes, to the dead cat, and around again. A mystic togetherness that was warm and friendly. We three would soon be free of the world’s bonds. Another bone. Nothing. We would walk with our heads bare under the bright blue skies of autumn, the scent of falling leaves blowing past us. Another bone. Spring would sprout about our feet. We’d see the Grand Canyon, hike across Death Valley. Nothing. Another bone. The snows of winter might chill us, but the ways of man, of jobs and money and petty rules, would no longer bind us. Nothing. True freedom to see the world with eyes uncluttered by schedules and obligations. Like the old gods, like fey folk. Another bone.

We were about halfway through the cat, going down the ribs, when Cheryl lit up. Twice as bright as Dougie, like a blast furnace. I felt the warmth radiate from her body before I even turned my head to see her transfigurement. She had a halo like a catechism saint. The brassy blondness burned out of her hair, and it went a rich mahogany. Her complexion cleared as if her body were casting off all impurities. I stared at her as the glow gradually faded. I crouched long moments in the rain, blinking the drops from my lashes, waiting for the last light to fade from her face before I realized it wasn’t going to. That new light would stay, a vitality burning inside her, giving off the same aura of health and determination that had made me stop and pick Dougie up. She smiled, and it was like someone pulling up the blinds to let in a sunny day. I felt blessed.

“Well, go on,” she told me, and it took an instant for me to realize what she was talking about.

“That there was the sixth rib on the left side, Missy Cheryl. You’re going to want to remember that now.”

Cheryl smiled her beatific smile and gestured toward me. Dougie passed me the next bone. We worked slowly through the rest of the ribs. I felt a shiver of excitement as we started down the left front leg. Soon. Only the leg bones left. Cheryl and I exchanged a smile as I started on the right front leg. Soon now. She was watching me closely, waiting for it. She reminded me of a lover I had who always tried to look at my face during orgasm. It seemed a very personal thing, but I wasn’t bothered by it. Cheryl and Dougie and I would soon share a very unique bond. I didn’t mind her witnessing my initiation.

The left hind leg. Dougie was handing me the bones more slowly now, and I held each under my tongue a few seconds longer, just to be sure. As I took the first bone of the right hind leg under my tongue, my heart began hammering against my ribs. I felt heat rise in my face. For a moment I thought this was it, but it was only my building excitement. “Come on, come on!” Cheryl was chanting as I continued down the leg bones, the fine thin bones of the leg, and then the smaller, knuckly bones of the foot and toes, and then . . .

There were no more bones.

I stared in disbelief as Dougie dropped the last remnant of boneless cat onto the heap of discarded fur, meat, and entrails. It still steamed faintly in the fading afternoon light.

“What happened?” I asked groggily. I felt as if I were just coming to after a faint. The blackened burner of the camp stove, the scorched pot, the slithered flat cat remnants, the mounded bones on the road, dusty cardboard. It was like a videocassette tape snapping, or sex suddenly interrupted. I couldn’t grasp what had happened. Dougie looked like a man who had suddenly lost his erection just before his partner climaxed. “What happened?” I demanded again. “What went wrong?”

“Ain’t gonna work for her,” Dougie announced, and turned away.

“What do you mean?” I cried out, and Cheryl asked, “How come?”

Dougie jerked open the car door and started dragging his stuff out. “Look at her,” he said gruffly. “She’s not like us. I shoulda seen it. Bones don’t work for someone like her.”

I swung my gaze to Cheryl. I tried to meet her eyes, but her look roved over me, summing me up. “I see,” she said slowly.

I looked back to Dougie. I felt like the family pet at the moment when the car door swings open on the country road and Bubby pushes you firmly out. Dumped. Cheryl stood up, took the kettle, and emptied out the liquor of cat.

“Wait a minute,” I said as she handed Dougie the empty kettle. “I probably just missed a bone. Just missed it, that’s all.” I grabbed one at random, slipped it under my tongue. Nothing. Go on to the next one.

“Nope.” Dougie’s voice was final as he picked up the camp stove. “Don’t work for people like you. And you knowed it all along.”

“No!” I wailed around a mouthful of ribs. I spat them out, grabbed another handful of tiny bones, and shoved them into my mouth. “Wait,” I choked as I struggled to get my tongue over them. “Eweul see.”

“What’d she say?” Cheryl asked Dougie.

“I don’t know. Who cares? Now look, missy, you can’t take all this stuff. You got like a pack or something?”

“I got a pillowcase,” Cheryl said brightly. She dug through the back of the car, came up with her pillow. “And a sleeping bag.”

“Well, good. Now that’s real good. Dump out the pillow, ’cause you ain’t gonna need that. Keep the sleeping bag. Now, in the pillowcase, you put a change of clothes, a comb, that sort of thing. Nothing much, ’cause you ain’t gonna need much no more. No, forget makeup, you’re prettier without it. Sure, take the Cheetos. Not that we’ll be hungry, but snacking’s fun as we walk along. Now let me tie it up for you.”

The bones were wet with rain, and grit from the cardboard clung to them. I calmed myself, forced myself to do one bone at a time. They’d see. Any minute now, they’d see. As I watched them hike away, I thought how I’d jump and shout and they’d look back to see me glowing like a torch, brighter than either of them, burning like a bonfire. I’d show them. The rain pelted down faster. It grew harder to see them through the dusk and falling water. It didn’t matter. I had the car, I’d catch up with them. I picked up the next bone.

I don’t know how many times I went through the bones. I stopped when blue and white lights started flashing before my eyes, wondering if I’d hit it. A blaze of white light hit my face and blinded me, and a cop asked, “You okay, miss? I saw your dome light on and stopped. You sick or something?”

He took his flashlight beam off my face as I staggered upright and leaned against my car. I’d never closed the door, and the dome light inside was still burning. Cheryl’s stuff was spilled half out of the car. I told him something about the stuff in my backseat falling over so I stopped to rearrange it. He couldn’t have believed it, not with my clothes soaked to my body and my hair dripping down my back. He played his light over the deboned cat while I stuffed everything back into the car. Probably decided he didn’t want to know what was going on. He stayed behind me while I got my car started again and watched me pull out onto the freeway before he spun off the gravel shoulder and passed me in a flicker of headlights.

I drove on, not going anywhere special now, just counting the cats. I never saw Dougie or Cheryl again, but I did once find another stewed cat by the side of the road. I gathered up what was left of it and took it to a motel that night. I tried every bone. Probably two or three times. Nothing.

I never got to New Mexico, either. I stopped off in San Rafael, to live between my car and the women’s shelter there until I found a computer firm that would hire me.

They’re paying me to go to night school now, and I know that things are getting better for me. If I study hard and pay attention to my job and get along with my coworkers, I’ll get ahead. If I work at it.

There are still times when I think about it. Sometimes, when I’m lying in bed, semiawake after a restless night, waiting for my alarm clock to go off, I think of them, rising from a peaceful night in some dewy field, glowing with health, to start their daily trek down the highways and byways of America. No clocks to punch. No classes to study for. Nothing to do but hike down the road in the fresh morning air, looking for that fifth squashed cat. That’s what works for them. And what works for me is getting up at five to leave the house at six so I can fight traffic and get to work by eight. Who’s to say which way is better? Who’s to say who has the better life? But sometimes, on those mornings when I wonder, I step out of my door early, at five thirty, into the fresh morning air. I look at the wide blue sky, at the sun just opening the day. And I get into my car and drive slowly and carefully to work.

I wouldn’t want to hit someone’s cat by accident.

Strays

Lonnie Spencer looked like a boy. She sat on a rusty bike, one foot on the curb, the toe of her other ratty sneaker in the gutter. She had scabby knees, a smoking skull on her baggy sweatshirt, and a baseball hat backward over her chopped black hair. What’s wrong with that kid’s face? was my second thought when I saw her. My first had been to avoid him because he looked like he’d kick gutter water at you just to get it on your school clothes.

As I edged past, she spoke in a clear girl’s voice, “Take a picture, it’ll last longer.”

I had been staring. I’d never seen anyone my own age with a big scar down her face. It ridged her Native American skin, pulling her cheek and her eye to one side. It was hard not to stare. So I looked down and saw the Barbie doll lashed to the front of her bike. It had a fur skirt and one boob. Her clumpy hair was tied back with gold thread. A tiny wooden bow was slung over her shoulder.

“Amazon,” I said without thinking.

“Yeah!” Lonnie grinned and suddenly didn’t look so scary. “She’s an Amazon warrior. That’s why I cut off her tit. So she can shoot a bow better. I read that they really did that.”

“I know. I read about it too.”

Our eyes met. Connection. We both read, and we read weird stuff, stuff about women who were warriors. It’s so simple, when you’re a kid.

In her next breath, Lonnie announced, “I’m a warrior too. I been teaching myself martial arts. Ninja stuff, swords and pikes, too. I want to learn to shoot a bow. Scars are okay, on a warrior. Hey. My name’s Lonnie Spencer.” She stuck out a grubby hand. She had a boy’s way of doing things. “What’s yours?”

Her hand was scratchy, scabs and dirt and dry skin. “Mandy Curtis.”

“Mandy, huh. Bet you get teased a lot about that in school. Handy Mandy. I hate school. All the teachers hate me and the kids tease me all the time. ’Cause of my scars, you know, and because I don’t dress like they do. They think if you don’t have the right kind of clothes, you’re nothing. Lower than shit.”

Her words spilled forth. I sensed she needed to talk but didn’t find many listeners. I’m a listener, like my mom. She says it’s our curse, to have total strangers tell us their darkest secrets. I glanced at Lonnie again. Not many of the girls I’d met at school would want to be seen talking to her. My clothes were a lot better than hers were and I was still having trouble making friends.

I kept walking. I was supposed to come straight home from school every day. We were new to this neighborhood and Mom was jumpy. Our building was okay, but two blocks away was a commercial strip, and the apartments that bordered it attracted what Mom called “a rougher element.” Mom had never defined that but I looked at Lonnie and knew. She coasted her bike alongside in the gutter as I walked. “I didn’t get my scars in a fight, though,” she volunteered abruptly. “My mom threw me through a picture window when I was two. She was pretty drunk and I was fussy. That’s what she says, anyway. Cut up my face and cut my leg muscles, too.” She watched for my reaction. Her words challenged me. “That’s why I limp when I walk. They had to put over a hundred and seven stitches in me. After that, they put me in a foster home, until my grandma came and got me. Now Mom has me.”

Kids ask the questions that adults swallow. “Why do you want to live with someone who threw you through a window?”

Lonnie lifted one shoulder. “Well, you know, she’s my mom. She went to counseling. And the court says it’s okay, and Grandma is getting pretty old. So.” Again the one-shoulder shrug.

So. That could sum up a lot of Lonnie Spencer. So.

The conversation lagged awkwardly. Mom wouldn’t want me hanging around with Lonnie. I knew it. I think Lonnie knew it too. But I was as desperately lonely as she was. “You go to Mason School?” I asked her, just as she exclaimed, “Oh, no! Not Scruffy, oh, man . . .”

She hopped off her bike, letting it clatter into the gutter. Without a look at me she hurried to a sodden calico body at the edge of the street. I followed her, reluctant but curious. Lonnie crouched close over it; I stayed back. The cat’s mouth was open, white teeth and a sprawling tongue. I wouldn’t have touched that sunken body with a stick, but Lonnie stroked it, smoothing its soggy fur.

“I hope his next eight lives are better than this one was,” she said quietly.

“You really believe a cat has nine lives?”

“Sure. Why not? One old lady, a foster mom, she told me if a cat really likes you, it can give you one of its lives. Wouldn’t that be something? Get to live a cat’s life?”

I looked at the dead cat. “Doesn’t look like he enjoyed it much,” I pointed out.

“I can think of worse lives than being a stray cat,” she said darkly as she unslung her backpack. She pulled out a can of neon orange spray paint. The balls inside it rattled like dice as she shook it. Then she outlined the cat’s body, meticulously tracing each leg and the tail, even the jab of an ear against the pavement. She surveyed her work, then capped the paint and put it away. Without squeamishness, she picked up the little body and moved it to the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street. The orange outline of the body remained on the pavement, a grim reminder. I was speechless.

Lonnie wiped her hands self-consciously down her shirt. “I don’t think people should just hit a cat and forget it,” she said quietly. “This way, whoever hit that cat has to look at that outline every time they drive past. I put the bodies up off the street and some city guy comes and picks them up instead of the next fifty cars making him mush.”

“Do you think we should try to find his owner?” I asked in a hushed voice. In a macabre way, I relished the idea of being the bearer of such sad tidings.

“Naw,” Lonnie said dismissively. She looked down at the dead cat with bitterness. “Scruffy didn’t belong to anyone except himself. A stray disappears, no one wonders about it.” She shrugged into her backpack. As she picked her bike out of the gutter, she added, “I figure it’s something I owe them, in a way. My loyal subjects should not be left dead in the street. I done all I can for him, now . . .”

“Your loyal subjects?” I asked skeptically. Being weird is okay unless it’s fake-weird. A lot of kids pretend to be weird just to impress other people. I wondered about Lonnie. Maybe even her scar story was fake, maybe she’d just been in a bad car wreck.

She gave her shrug again. “I’m Queen of the Strays. Even my mom says so. Which reminds me, I’m supposed to be picking up some junk for my mom. See you around.”

She was already pedaling down the street. When she hit puddles, muddy water rooster-tailed up her back, but she didn’t avoid them. Fluorescent cats and a one-boobed Barbie. Genuinely weird, I decided. I liked her. “Yeah, see you,” I called after her.

I got home just as the rain resumed. I called Mom’s office and left a message on her voice mail that I was safely home. I dumped my books in my room and went to the kitchen. Not much in the fridge. There used to be little microwave pizzas or pudding cups when Mom and Dad were together. Not that we’re starving now, just on a budget. I grabbed an apple and some cheese. Then I watched television and did homework until Mom got home. I forgot about Lonnie until late that night. I thought about rain soaking the cat’s body and hoped someone had picked it up. Then I thought about all the live strays, shivering in the rain. Lonnie was Queen of the Strays. I wondered what she had meant and then I fell asleep.

Three weeks passed. I didn’t see Lonnie. I watched for her, in the lunchroom at school or when I saw kids on bikes in the street, but I never saw her. Then one day, walking home from school, I found two outlines of dead cats in the street. The paint was bright and fresh.

I had reached the front of our apartment building and was fishing my key out of my shirt when Lonnie yelled to me from down the block. I waved back and she came in a lopsided run. She favored her right leg. As she came, I realized that her whole body twisted that direction. It hadn’t been so obvious when she was on her bike.

“Hey, Mandy,” she greeted me.

I was surprised at how glad I was to see her. “Hey, Lonnie! Long time, no see. Where’s your bike?”

She shrugged. “Got stole. My mom left it out and someone took it while I was gone. She didn’t even notice until I asked her where it went. So.” She paused, then changed the subject. “Hey. Look what I made.” She pulled a little drawstring bag out of her shirt. It was hanging around her neck on a string. “This is my new, uh, whatacallit, omelette.”

“Amulet,” I said reflexively.

She tugged the bag open. Inside was a little princess doll from a McDonald’s Happy Meal. Like the Barbie, it was missing a boob. As it was dressed in a ball gown, it looked very peculiar. Lonnie shrugged at my frown. “It doesn’t look as good as the other one.”

I changed the subject. “So. Where were you, then?”

She shrugged again as she replaced her amulet. “CPS came and got me, ’cause I missed so much school. They stuck me in a foster home, but they couldn’t make me go to school either. So now I got a deal with my social worker. She lets me live with my mom, I stay out of trouble and go to school.”

“I didn’t see you at school today,” I pointed out. “If you live around here, you should go to Mason.”

“Yeah, I should,” she conceded sarcastically. “But even when I’m there, you wouldn’t see me. I’m in the special-ed classes at the end of the hall.”

“But you’re not retarded!” I protested.

“Special ed isn’t all retarded. There’s deaf kids. And ADD. Hyperactive. Emotionally disturbed. They got lots of names for us troublemakers. They just shove us together and forget about us.”

“Oh,” I said lamely.

“I don’t care.” She smiled and wagged her head to show how little it bothered her. “Mostly I just read all day. They don’t bother me, I don’t give them any grief.”

“Well.” I glanced up at the sky. “I’ve got to go in. I have to call my mom as soon as I get home from school.”

“Oh, latchkey kid, huh?” She watched me stick my key in the security door. “Well, after that, do you want to hang out?”

I stopped. “I’m not supposed to have friends in when Mom isn’t home,” I said awkwardly. I hated saying it. I was sure she’d take it as an excuse to ditch her.

“So who’s going to tell?” she demanded with a superior look. I quailed before it. Knowing I was going to regret this, knowing I’d have to tell my mom later, I unlocked the door and let her in ahead of me.

Our apartment was on the third floor. I was painfully conscious of Lonnie limping up the stairs. There was an elevator at the other end of the building but I’d never used it. I felt almost ashamed that my body was sound and whole and that the climb didn’t bother me. As I unlocked my door, I automatically said, “Wipe your feet.”

“Du-uh!” Lonnie retorted sarcastically. She walked in just like a stray cat, with that sort of wiggle that says they’re doing you a favor to come in. She stopped in the middle of our living room. For an instant, the envy on her face was so intense it was almost hatred. Then she gave her shrug. “Nice place,” she said neutrally. “Got anything to eat?”

“In the kitchen. I’ve got to phone Mom.”

While I left my message, Lonnie went through the refrigerator. By the time I got off the phone, she had eaten an apple, drunk a big glass of milk and poured herself a second one, and taken out the bread and margarine. “Want a sandwich?” she asked as I turned around.

“I hate peanut butter and that’s all there is,” I said stiffly. I’d never seen anyone go through a refrigerator so fast. Especially someone else’s refrigerator.

“There’s sugar,” she said, spreading margarine thickly on two slices of bread. “Ever had a sugar sandwich? Mom used to give them to me all the time.”

“That’s gross,” I said as she picked up the sugar bowl and dumped sugar on the bread. She pushed it out in a thick layer, capped it with the other piece of buttered bread. When she lifted it, sugar dribbled out around the edges. Her teeth crunched in the thick layer of sugar. I winced. I imagined her teeth melting away inside her mouth.

“You ought to try it,” she told me through a mouthful. She washed it down with half the glass of milk, sighed, and took another sandy bite.

As she drained off the milk, I suddenly knew that Lonnie had been really hungry. Not after-school snack hungry, but really hungry. I had seen the billboards about Americans going to bed hungry, but I never grasped it until I watched Lonnie eat. It scared me. I suddenly wanted her out of our house. It wasn’t all the food she had eaten or the sugar mess on the floor. It suddenly seemed that by living near people like Lonnie and having her inside our house, Mom and I had gotten closer to some invisible edge. First there had been the real family and home, Mom and Dad and I in a house with a yard and Pop-Tarts and potato chips in the kitchen. Then there was Mom and I in an apartment, no yard, toast and jam instead of Pop-Tarts . . . We were safe right now, as long as Dad sent the support money, as long as Mom kept her job, but right down the street there were people who lived in cruddy apartments and their kids were in special ed and were hungry. That was scary. Mom and I weren’t people like that. We’d never be people like that. Unless . . .

“Let’s go hang out,” I said to her. I didn’t even put her glass in the dishwasher or sweep up the sugar. Instead, I took a pack of graham crackers out of the cupboard. I opened it as we walked to the door. She followed me, just like a hungry stray.

I felt safer as soon as I shut the door behind us. But now I was stuck outside with her on a cold and windy day. “Want to go to the library?” I offered. It was one of the few places Mom had approved for me to hang out on my own. Even then, I was supposed to say I was going there and phone again when I got back.

“Naw,” Lonnie said. She took the package of graham crackers, shook out three, and handed the stack back to me. “I have to pick up some junk for my mom. But we can do my route before that. Come on.”

I thought maybe she had a paper route. Instead it was her roadkill route. Lonnie patrolled for animal bodies. The only thing she found that day was a dead crow in the gutter. It had been there awhile, but she still painted around it and then moved the body reverently up onto the grassy strip. After that, we stopped at two Dumpsters, one behind Burger King and the other behind Kentucky Fried Chicken. They had concrete block enclosures and bushes around their Dumpsters. There was even a locked gate on Kentucky Fried Chicken’s, but it didn’t stop Lonnie. She made a big deal of waiting until no one was around before we crept up on them. “Warrior practice,” she whispered. “We could get arrested for this. You keep watch.”

So I stood guard while she went Dumpster diving. She emerged smelling like grease with bags full of chicken bones and half-eaten biscuits and a couple cartons of gravy. It amazed me how fast she filled up bags with stuff other people had thrown away. At Burger King, she got parts of hamburgers and fries. “What are you going to do with that stuff?” I asked Lonnie as we walked away. I was half afraid she’d say that she and her mom were going to eat it for dinner.

“Just wait. I’ll show you,” she promised. She grinned when she said it, like she was proud of what she carried.

“I’ve got to get home soon,” I told her. “Mom sometimes calls me back and I didn’t say I was going out. I’m supposed to be doing homework.”

“Don’t sweat it, sister. This won’t take long, and I really want you to see it. Come on.” She lurched along faster.

She lived on the other side of the main road and back two blocks off the strip. The sun goes down early in October. Lights were on inside the apartments. The building sign said Oakview Manor, but there were no oaks, no trees at all. Some boys were hanging out in the littered parking lot behind the building, smoking cigarettes and perching cool on top of a junk car. One called out as we walked by, “Hey, baby, wanna suck my weenie?” I was grossed out, but Lonnie acted like he didn’t exist. The boys laughed behind us, and one said something about “Scarface.” She kept walking, so I did too.

At the other end of the parking lot, three battered Dumpsters stank in a row. Beyond them was a vacant lot full of blackberry brambles and junk. Old tires and part of a chair stuck out of the brambles. The frame of a junk pickup truck was just visible through the sagging, wet vines. Lonnie sat down on the damp curb and tore open the bags. She spread the food out like it was a picnic, tearing the chicken and burgers to pieces with her fingers and then breaking up the biscuits on top of a bag and dumping the congealed gravy out on them. “For the little ones,” she told me quietly. She looked around at the bushes expectantly, then frowned. “Stand back. They’re shy of everyone but me.”

I backed up. I had guessed it would be cats and I was right. What was shocking was how many. “Kitty, kitty,” Lonnie called. Not loudly. But here came cats of every color and size and age, tattered veterans with ragged ears and sticky-eyed kittens trailing after their mothers. Blacks and calicoes, long-haired cats so matted they looked like dirty bath mats, and an elegant Siamese with only one ear emerged from that briar patch. An orange momma cat and her three black-and-white babies came singing. They converged on Lonnie and the food, crowding until they looked like a patchwork quilt of cat fur.

They were not delicate eaters. They made smacky noises and kitty ummm noises. They crunched bones and lapped gravy noisily. There were warning rumbles as felines jockeyed for position, but surprisingly little outright snarling or smacking. Instead, the overwhelming sound was purring.

Lonnie enthroned on the curb in the midst of her loyal subjects smiled down upon them. She judiciously moved round-bellied kittens to one side to let newcomers have a chance at the gravy and biscuits. As she reached down among the cats, the older felines offered her homage and fealty, pausing in their dining to rub their heads along her arms. Some even stood upright on their hind legs to embrace her. As the food diminished, I thought the cats would leave. Instead they simply turned more attention upon Lonnie. Her lap filled up with squirming kittens, while others clawed pleadingly at her legs. A huge orange tom suddenly leaped up to land as softly as a falling leaf on her shoulders. He draped himself there like a royal mantle, and his huge rusty purr vibrated the air. Lonnie preened. Pleasure and pride transformed her face. “See,” she called to me. “Queen of the Strays. I told you.” She opened her arms wide to indicate her swarm, and cats instantly reared up to bump their heads against her outstretched hands.

“Oh, yeah? Well, you’re gonna be Queen of the Ass-Kicked if you don’t get up here with my stuff!” The voice came from a third-floor window. To someone in the room behind him, the man said, “Stupid little cunt is down there fucking around with those cats again.”

The light went out of Lonnie’s face. She stared up at him. He glared back. He was a young man with dark, curly hair, his T-shirt tight on his muscular chest. A woman walked by behind him. I looked back at Lonnie. She had a sickly smile. With a pretense of brightness in her voice she called up, “Hey, Carl! Tell Mom to look out here, she should see all my cats!”

Carl’s face darkened. “Your mom don’t got time for that shit, and neither do you! Stupid fucking cats. No, don’t you encourage . . .” He turned from the window, drawing back a fist at someone and speaking angrily. Lonnie’s mom, I thought. He was threatening Lonnie’s mom. We couldn’t hear what he said. Lonnie stared up at the window, not with fear, but something darker. Carl leaned out again. “Get up here with my stuff!”

Lonnie stood up, the cats melting away around her, trickling away into the shadows. A lone cat stayed, a big striper, winding and bumping against her legs. She didn’t seem to feel him. Shame burned in her eyes when her eyes grazed me. This was not how she wanted me to see her. She reached up to grip the little doll strung around her neck. Her eyes suddenly blazed. She squared herself. “I didn’t go get your stuff.” She put her fists on her hips defiantly. “I forgot,” she said in a snotty voice.

Carl’s scowl deepened. “You forgot? Yeah, right. Well, you forget dinner or coming in until you get it, Lonnie. And it better not be short, or I’ll throw you outta this window. Get going, now!” He slammed the window shut. Across the parking lot, the boys laughed.

She stood a moment, then stuffed her hands in her pockets and walked away. The striper cat sat down with an unhappy meow. I hurried to catch up with her. It was getting really dark. Mom was going to kill me. “Lonnie?”

She didn’t look back. “I got to go,” she said in a thick voice.

I ran after her. “Lonnie! Lonnie, your cats are really something. You really are the Queen of the Strays.”

“Yeah,” she said flatly. She wouldn’t look at me. “I got to go. See you around.” She lengthened her stride, limping hastily away.

“Okay, I’ll look for you at school tomorrow.”

She didn’t answer. Darkness swallowed her. Rain began to fall.

Before I got home, the headlights of the cars were reflecting off the puddles in the streets. I hurried upstairs, praying that Mom wouldn’t be home yet. She wasn’t. I hung up my dripping coat, kicked off my wet sneakers, and raced into the kitchen. The phone machine was flashing. Six messages. I was toast.

I was cleaning up sugar and listening to Mom’s frantic, “Mandy? Are you there? Mandy, pick up!” when I heard her key in the front door. I was still standing in the kitchen looking guilty when she found me.

She looked me up and down. The lower half of my jeans and my socks were sopping. “Where have you been?”

I could have lied and said I was at the library, but Mom and I don’t do that to each other. And I needed to tell someone about Lonnie. So I told her everything, from the one-boobed Barbie to the cat-carpet and Carl. Her face got tight, and I knew she didn’t like what she was hearing. But she listened, while we fixed dinner. We didn’t have to talk about dinner. Wednesday was spaghetti. I chopped mushrooms and peppers, she chopped the onions and smashed the garlic. She put the water to boil for the pasta, I sawed the frozen French bread open and spread it with margarine.

By the time everything was ready, she had heard all about Lonnie. Her first words were pretty hard on me. “I trust you to have good judgment, Mandy.”

“I don’t think I did anything wrong.”

“I didn’t say you did wrong. I said you used poor judgment. You let a stranger in while I was gone. You left without telling me where you were going or when you’d be back. If something bad had happened to you, I wouldn’t even have known where to start looking.”

“Why do you always assume something bad is going to happen? When am I supposed to have friends over? I can’t have them in while you’re gone, and I can’t go out with them. What am I supposed to do, just come home and be alone all day?”

“You can have friends over,” my mom objected. “But I need to know something about people before we let them into our home. Mandy, just because a person is your own age and a girl doesn’t mean she can’t hurt you. Or that she won’t steal from us.”

“MOM!” I exploded, but she kept on talking.

“Lonnie is probably a nice kid who’s just had a hard time. But the people she knows may not be nice. If someone knew that I’m at work all day and you’re at school, they could rip us off. I certainly couldn’t afford to replace the stereo and the television and the microwave all at once. We’d just have to do without.”

“You haven’t even met Lonnie and you’re judging her!”

“I’m not judging her. I’m trying to protect you.” Mom paused. “Mandy. There’s a lot of Lonnies in the world. As much as I’d like to, I can’t save them all. Sometimes, I feel like I can’t even protect you anymore. But I do my best. Even when it means . . .” She halted. Then she spoke gravely. “Mandy, if you hang out with Lonnie, people will treat you like Lonnie. Not that Lonnie deserves to be treated like she is; in fact, I’m sure she doesn’t. But I can’t protect Lonnie. All I can do is try to protect you.”

She was so serious that my anger evaporated. We sat at the little table in the kitchen with our dinner getting cold between us. I tried to remember the big table in our old dining room with the hardwood floor and the wallpaper. I couldn’t. “Mom?” I asked suddenly. “What is the difference between Lonnie and me?”

Mom was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Maybe the difference is me. Someone who cares fiercely about you.”

“Lonnie loves her mom, even if she did throw her out a window.”

“Lonnie may love her mom, but it doesn’t sound like her mom cares about her. It doesn’t sound like anyone does.”

“Only her cats,” I conceded. “And half of them are deaders.” And me, I thought. I care about her.

In the end, we made compromises. I could have Lonnie over if I told Mom she was there. Mom had to get Lonnie’s phone number, address, and her mom’s name. If we went out, it had to be somewhere like the library, not just to walk around. I had to call Mom before I went and when I got back. I had to stay out of Dumpsters. And I wasn’t allowed to go to Lonnie’s house.

“But why?” I ventured.

“Because,” Mom said darkly, and that was the end of that.

I looked for Lonnie at school the next day. I even went to the special-ed rooms. No Lonnie. Three days later, I found one cat-body outline, but I couldn’t tell if it was new or old because of all the rain. I was afraid to go to her building. Mom was right, it was a tough neighborhood. But on the fourth day, I screwed up my courage and took the long way home from school to walk through her neighborhood.

I saw her from half a block away. She was standing at the corner of a convenience store parking lot, her arms crossed on her chest. There were three boys facing her. Two were our age, one looked older. They had her bike.

It was so beat up I wouldn’t have recognized it, except for the Amazon Barbie. One of the boys sat on the bike possessively while the other two stood between Lonnie and the bike.

“I don’t care what he said,” Lonnie told them. “It’s my bike and I want it back.” She tried to circle, to get close enough to get her hands on the bike, but the two boys blocked her lazily.

“Your dad said we could have it.” The boy on the bike was cocky about it.

“Carl’s not my dad!” Lonnie declared furiously. “Get off my bike!”

“So what? He said we could have it for picking up his junk for him. Gave us ten bucks, too.” There was a sneer of laughter in the older boy’s voice.

I froze, watching them. They moved by a set of unspoken rules. Lonnie could not physically touch the boys, and they knew it. All they had to do to keep her from the bike was to stand between her and it. She moved back and forth, trying to get past them. She looked stupid and helpless and she knew it. A man walked up to them and stopped. My hopes rose.

“It’s a piece of shit bike anyway,” one of the boys declared laughingly as they blocked her yet again.

“Yeah. We’re gonna take it down to the lake and run it off the dock into the water.”

The light changed. The man crossed the street. It was as if he had not even seen Lonnie and the boys and the bike. He didn’t even look back.

“You better not!” Lonnie threatened helplessly. She darted once more at the bike. And collided with a boy.

“Hey!” he pushed her violently back. “Keep your hands off me, bitch!”

“Yeah, whore!”

Suddenly, in the physical contact, the rules of the game had changed. The boys pushed at her. Lonnie cowered back, and the one on the bike rode it up on her, pushing the wheel against her. Now instead of trying to grab her bike back, she was trying to back away from it. The other boys touched her. Her face. “God, you’re ugly!” Her chest. “She ain’t got no tits, just like her dolly! Your momma cut them off, too?” Her crotch. “Whoo, whoo, you like that, ho?”

Across the street, a bus stopped and two people got off. They walked away into the darkness. Cars drove by in the gathering dusk of the overcast October evening. No one paid any attention to Lonnie’s plight. Deep in my heart, I knew why. She was already broken, already damaged past repairing. If you can’t fix something, then don’t worry about hurting it even more. The boys knew that. She wasn’t worth saving from them. It was like jumping on the couch that already had broken springs. She was just a thing to practice on.

“Stop it, stop it!” She flailed at them wildly, trying to slap away the hands that darted in to touch her insultingly, pushing, poking, slapping her face. She had forgotten she was a warrior. She was just a girl, and that was a boy’s game. She couldn’t win it. Leaves in the gutter rustled by. I was so cold I was shaking. So cold. I should get home; I was cold and it was getting dark and my mom would be mad at me. One of the boys pushed her hard as the other one rammed her with the bike. She fell down on the sidewalk and suddenly they ringed her, the bike discarded on the pavement as they sneered down at her.

Some tribal memory of what came next reared its savage face from my subconscious.

“No!” I suddenly screamed. My voice came out shrill and childish. I flew toward them, gripping my book bag by its strap. A stupid weapon, my only weapon. “Get away from her, get away from her!” I uttered the word I knew Lonnie could never say. “Help! Help me, someone, they’re hurting her! Help! Get away from her!”

I waded into them, swinging my book bag, and they suddenly fell back. Abruptly their ugly faces turned confused and surprised. Like magic, they were only boys again, just teasing boys who always push you as far as they can, especially if the playground teacher isn’t around.

“Look out, it’s Wonder Woman!” one yelled, and a man who had come to the door of the 7-Eleven across the parking lot laughed out loud. They grabbed the bike and ran away, shouting insults at one another—You pussy! You wimp! You sissy!—as they ran. No one came to help as I took Lonnie’s hands and dragged her to her feet. The knee of her sweatpants was torn, and her backpack was muddy. There was mud on the side of her face, too.

“Are you hurt?” I asked her as she stood. I tried to hug her. She slapped my hands angrily away.

“They got my damn bike! Shit! Shit, shit, shit, why didn’t you grab the bike while it was laying there!” Her eyes blazed as she turned on me. I fell back in surprise before her anger.

“I was worried about you! The bike wasn’t that important!”

“That’s easy for you to say. A bike isn’t the only damn thing you’ve got!” She lifted her sleeve to wipe mud off her face. She might have wiped away tears as well. I stared at her, speechless. I thought I had been brave, almost heroic. She seemed to think I had been stupid. She glanced up from examining a bleeding scrape on her knee and knew she’d hurt me. She tried to explain. “Look, it’s like this. If we had gotten the bike, we would have won. Now I got all bruised up and I lost, too. So they’ll tease me with the bike again. I got to fight them all over again tomorrow.”

“I think it’s dumb to fight for that bike at all,” I said quietly. “You could really get hurt. The bike isn’t worth it.”

“Yeah,” she said sarcastically. “That’s what they teach us girls. Don’t get into fights over stuff. It’s not worth getting hurt over. So guys keep taking stuff from us, knowing we won’t fight. Those guys, if I don’t fight them to get my bike back, then they’ll take something else from me. And something more. They’ll keep on taking stuff from me until I have to fight back. Only by then it’ll be too late, because I’ll never have learned to fight, so whatever it is that I finally fight for, they’ll just take it from me anyway.”

Her logic was torturous, and I shied away from her conclusion.

“Like Carl,” she added bitterly. “I didn’t fight him at first. He moved in. He eats our food and uses our phone and leaves the house a mess. He took my home. He took my mom. Shit. He even took my bike and gave it to those guys. Now he thinks he can take anything he wants and I won’t fight. He’s probably right, too.”

“I know I probably can’t beat those boys,” she admitted a few minutes later as we walked slowly down the darkening street. “But I can make it cost them something to pick on me. They can hit me and knock me down, but they know I’m going to fight back, hit back. So maybe they’ll go find an easier target. I know, everyone says that if you avoid a bully or ignore him, he’ll go away. But that’s bullshit. They don’t. They just grow up and become your mom’s boyfriend. Dead cat.”

I don’t know how she saw it in the dark. Black fur in a black gutter, but she saw it. She opened her pack and took out her spray can and inscribed his neon orange memorial on the pavement. She scooped up his body carefully and set it at the base of a No Parking sign. “Still warm,” she said regretfully as she wiped her hands down her shirt. “Poor kitty.” Crouched over the body, it was like she spoke to the cat. “Carl gave them my bike. That’s like he gave them permission to pick on me, take stuff from me. Like I don’t matter any more than a dead cat in the gutter. Run over me and just keep going.” She smoothed the cat’s rumpled fur a last time. “God, I hate Carl,” she said quietly.

More conversationally, she added, “You know what really pisses me off? That Carl gave them my bike and some money for picking up his dope. He never gives me nothing for picking up his junk. I just have to do it. So that if someone gets caught with it, it’s me. He told my mom, if I get caught, they won’t do much, because I’m a kid.”

“But doesn’t your mom . . .” I began.

“Long as my mom gets her junk, she’ll believe whatever he says,” Lonnie said sadly. “Since Carl moved in, it’s like I’m mostly invisible. She doesn’t even yell at me anymore. The only time she talks to me is when I bring the junk home. She always thanks me. That’s the only reason I do it.” Her eyes swung to mine. “And I still talk to her. Carl’s always telling me to shut up, but I don’t. I tell her about my cats, I told her about you.” In a quieter voice she added, “I tell her she shouldn’t be tricking just to get money for junk. That’s how I fight him. Maybe I won’t win, but no one can say I didn’t fight.” She gave her one-shouldered shrug. “I won’t stop, either. Long as I keep fighting, he can’t say he won.”

When I got in, Mom was waiting for me. Her face was white. “I damn near called the cops,” she hissed at me. “You didn’t call me; I came straight home, there’s no sign of you . . .” Then she burst into tears.

I was stupid. I told her where I’d been and what had happened. When I was done, she just sat there on the couch with her face in her hands. She spoke through her fingers. “God, Mandy. You have no concept . . . look. Sweetie. You can’t get involved in this. You just can’t. Drugs and prostitution and abuse and . . . No. Mandy, you have to stay away from her. You must.”

“I can’t.” I was telling the truth. “I can’t just abandon her. Then she’d have no one! I have you, but she doesn’t have anyone but a bunch of stray cats.”

Mom got up and walked into her room without a word. That really shook me up. For a minute I thought that was it, that she was so mad she wasn’t even going to talk to me anymore. Then she came back with a little red tube in her hand.

“This is not a toy,” she told me severely, as if I had asked to play with it. “This is a serious weapon. Pepper spray. You point it like this, push this catch down, and then spray it. It will make anyone back off long enough for you to run away. Don’t stick around and try to fight, just get away. And use it only if you are really in danger. Never for a joke, never as a threat. If you have to, use it. Other than that, don’t even tell anyone you have it.”

“There’s two,” I said out loud as I took them.

“Give the other one to Lonnie,” she said. She walked to the window and peered out through the curtains. She talked to the night. “Show her how to use it. But after that, you are not allowed to see her anymore. Do you understand? This is as much as we can do for her. No more.”

I couldn’t argue with that voice, but I wondered if I would obey her. “Mom,” I asked quietly, “if you had been there tonight, if you had been me . . . would you have used it on those boys?”

“No. Boys your age are just . . . Well, maybe, yes. Yes.” She hesitated. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Mandy, I don’t know; I wasn’t there, and you weren’t the one being threatened . . . If Lonnie had just walked away, if she hadn’t challenged them . . .” Her voice trailed away. She didn’t know either. How could I know when to fight back if my own mom didn’t know? In a quieter voice she added, “I have to get us into a better place. I have to.”

I didn’t see Lonnie for a while. I took a different route home from school, used a different door into my building. I pretended that if I didn’t see her, I wasn’t avoiding her. I liked her, but her problems were just too scary. I tried not to think about her, but my hand kept finding the extra vial of pepper spray in my coat pocket. Then one afternoon at four o’clock, I turned off the TV and put on my coat. I wrote Mom a note. I left the apartment.

It was dark but at least it wasn’t raining. I walked fast, glad there were no boys hanging out around her building tonight. I wondered how I’d know which door was hers. I wondered if I’d have the guts to knock. But I didn’t have to. Lonnie knelt on the ground by the Dumpster. The single parking lot light illuminated at least a dozen orange outlines of cats on the pavement. As I watched, another one slowly formed on the ground in front of Lonnie. I went to her.

The area around the Dumpster was littered with sprawled cat bodies. A terrible noise was coming from Lonnie as she painted around them. Uh, huh, huh. The noise people make when they can’t cry. I was afraid to get too close to her. She crawled to the next cat and began outlining it.

“What happened?” I whispered into the darkness.

She looked up, startled. Even in the dimness, I could see she was broken. “I don’t know,” she choked out when she recognized me. “I don’t know. They weren’t hit by cars, they weren’t killed by dogs. They’re just dead. I just don’t know.” She sank down in defeat on the dirty pavement. “My strays. My loyal subjects.” Her hand rested on one dead cat like a benediction. Behind her, a small kitten mewed questioningly in the bushes. “I got nothing left,” she told me sadly. She shook her head. “I fought and I fought. But I still lost. In the end, it all got taken away.” She seemed to get smaller.

“Lonnie!” Carl called from the window. He leaned out, craning to see her. “Lonnie, you down there? You got my stuff?”

It was the wrong time to ask her that. She came to her feet like a puppet hauled up on its strings. “No!” she screeched back. “No, I don’t!” Then, in a plea for understanding, “Carl, my cats are dead! Something killed them.” Her voice broke on the words.

“Oh, no, really?” His voice shook. “That’s awful, Lonnie. That’s just terrible.” Then he laughed out loud, and I knew he’d been holding it back all along. “Well, maybe someone poisoned the fuckers so you’d quit wasting time on them. Quit sniveling and go get my stuff. Now!”

Her hands flew up to her face in horror. Speechless, she stared into the darkness beyond the Dumpsters. When she dropped her hands a moment later, her painty fingers had left fluorescent tabby-cat stripes on both her cheeks.

I couldn’t believe what happened next. She didn’t even look at me. She limped straight to the door of her building. She obediently went inside. Lonnie had stopped fighting.

The kitten found me. I felt her tiny claws in my sock. I picked her up. She was skinny and her little mouth opened hugely when she cried. “You’ve got the wrong person,” I told her. I set her down and walked away.

Then I heard the sound. Not a shout. A roar, like the roar of a lioness, wordless in her fury. It came from the window above. Carl yelled back but it was a startled shout, full of dismay. I couldn’t see much, but I saw her shadow crash into his, her fists pummeling at his face and chest. For an instant I thought that she could win. But it was still a boy’s game. I heard his answering roar of anger. He seized her by the upper arms, lifted her off her feet, and threw her.

She hit the window. The glass shattered, flying out like a cloud of diamonds. Lonnie fell with it, twisting and yowling.

I did a stupid thing. Somehow I had the pepper spray in my hand and I pointed it up at the window. Lonnie seemed to be falling forever. I saw Carl look out as she fell; I even saw the shock on his face, heard someone else in the room behind him scream.

Then I squeezed the button and enveloped myself in a cloud of pepper gas. Carl was too far away. Even finally knowing when to fight, I thought to myself, was not enough. People like Carl still won. Blinded and choking, I fell to my knees as Lonnie struck the ground. Broken glass rang in a brittle rain with her.

Everything in the world stopped. I didn’t kneel by her, I crumpled. I tried to touch her but I couldn’t. I wasn’t Lonnie, to touch death without fear. Then she lifted her head. She looked at me and her mouth opened. As if she moved a mountain, she turned her head. Her lips pulled back. With her last breath, she lifted her upper lip and snarled up at the window that framed Carl.

Summoned, the cats came. The queen’s loyal subjects poured forth to her call. Without a rustle of leaves, without a patter of paws, they came. Orange shapes flickered in the night. They came in a wave that became a tide. From the bushes in back of the Dumpster, from under cars, from the distant streets, from everywhere, they came. They flooded the parking lot. A score, a hundred, five hundred fluorescent orange silhouettes lit the night as they answered her call. I saw Carl stagger back from the window. Like living flames, the cats licked up the side of the building, over the sill, and through the broken glass. The rumble of their snarls were like a big truck idling. The parking lot was darker when the last one disappeared inside. The hissing and spitting and caterwauling from up there almost drowned his screams.

Mom’s headlights hit me just about the same time the cats poured out of the window again. Like molten gold or streaming honey, they flowed down the side of the building. They engulfed Lonnie and me. I felt the warmth of a hundred small bodies, the soft swipe of velvet paws as they rushed past and over me to get to her. I swear I saw them, and I swear I felt them.

They purred all over Lonnie, they marked her with their brows, they bumped her with their fluorescent noses. They nudged and they pleaded and they nagged, pushing at her body. They kneaded it with their paws demandingly, scores of little fluorescent paws pushing at her yielding flesh, making her smaller and more compact, re-creating her in a new and perfect image.

The Queen of the Strays sat up groggily. She blinked her great amber eyes. She lifted a velvet paw to swipe at her tabby face. She stood and she stretched, showing me four sets of razor claws and four powerful legs attached to a lithe and perfect body.

“Lonnie?” I asked incredulously.

The cat shrugged one shoulder.

In the next instant, Lonnie was gone. The tidal wave of fluorescent cats retreated, and she padded off in the midst of them. The great orange glow surged into the blackberry tangle. Their light dwindled as they faded into the thorny jungle of vines. Then it winked out. Lonnie was gone and my mom was there going, “Oh, my God, my God. Get in the car, Mandy. Right now. Get in the car.”

I did. We were halfway home before I noticed the tiny black-and-white kitten that was stuck to my sock like a burr. When I put it in my lap, it curled up and began to purr.

I don’t know what Mom saw that night. She says I had pepper gas in my eyes and that I couldn’t have seen anything. The papers said that a junkie whore got mad at her pimp and cut him to ribbons with a razor. The papers never even mentioned Lonnie.

No one ever wonders what happens to strays when they disappear.

I hope her next eight lives are better than this one was.

Finis

Josh was working with a hammer and chisel, cutting out just enough wood from the oak posts to make the gate hinges set flush when the rental sedan came inching slowly up the drive. Its tires crunched softly over the gravel; other than that, it was near silent, the driver letting the car almost idle up the lane. Arizona plates. Well, someone had driven a long ways to visit Mrs. Reid. Josh watched it for a moment, then went back to his work. Her guest was none of his beeswax; the visitor would be for the home owner, not him. He was just the handyman, finishing up the final work on her yard project, just as he was the handyman for a couple dozen other owners of rural cottages.

But of them all, Mrs. Reid was the oddest. Strange lady. The little cottage at the end of the winding lane looked almost exactly as it had when she’d bought it. Usually, when some rich lady bought up one of the cottages, the first thing they did was gingerbread it up. Fresh paint, a patio, a hot tub, and a privacy fence. Those were the standard changes he made for new clients. But not Mrs. Reid. He picked up a Yankee screwdriver, inserted a small bit, and jacked two pilot holes into the post. The only real changes she’d wanted him to make were out here in the yard. But that was none of his beeswax either. The customer got to say what she wanted done and how she wanted it done. No matter how strange the requests. He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his cuff and then tried the hinge in its place. Perfect. He’d have it done by dark.

He was reaching for the screws and screwdriver when the man spoke behind him, startling him. “I’m looking for a woman named Doria. She goes by Doria Simmons. Does she live here?” He had a deep voice, and the softness of his words seemed intentional. The slight sibilance sounded like bad-fitting dentures.

Josh turned to look up at him. The short, stocky man standing over him had gotten out of his car quietly, not even shutting the door behind him. He was an old man, at least in his seventies and more likely in his eighties. The coarse curls of his hair had gone to gray, and there were deep furrows in his brow. A small silver cross on a silver chain rested snugly at the hollow of his throat. It looked odd on a man of his size and years. He lugged a heavy canvas satchel like a workman’s tool bag, but he didn’t have the physique of a man who worked with tools anymore. His shoulders were rounded, curling in toward his chest, and the veins and tendons stood out beneath the age spots on his hands. He just looked old, old and tired. But he also looked determined, in a mean old man sort of way that put Josh’s hackles up without him even thinking about it.

Josh shook his head. “No sir. This is Mrs. Agatha Reid’s cottage. She only moved in a couple months ago. Maybe someone named Simmons lived here before. I wouldn’t know. People who buy these little cottages off the beaten track usually like to keep to themselves. It’s not my place to ask a lot of questions, you know. I’m just the handyman.”

The man’s eyes had narrowed at the woman’s name, a wince almost of pain. It deepened the lines around his mouth and the ones in his brow. “Reid? She’s using the name Reid?”

“That’s the lady that lives here, yes sir. I don’t know about her ‘using’ that name. It’s the only name I know her by.” Josh positioned the hinge, licked the point of the screw, set the point of it into the pilot hole, and then pushed it in with the screwdriver. He leaned against it, pushing hard as the screw bit into the wood. Josh had expected the man to leave. Instead, he stepped closer.

“The woman I’m looking for used to be married to a man named Reid. Adam Reid. She might still be using his name.”

“Well, she told me she was widowed. So Reid might have been her married name. She never told me her husband’s name. I think it still makes her sad to talk about him.” He positioned another screw and began working it in.

The man didn’t reply directly to that. Instead, he leaned over Josh in a way that the handyman resented. He hated working under someone’s scrutiny. That had been one pleasant thing about his job. Mrs. Reid slept days and worked nights. He’d only seen her when she’d given him the carefully written directions for what she wanted done, and the times when she’d given him money for his work and to buy materials. Nice working for a person who didn’t ride him all the time. Even nicer working for someone who paid cash up front.

Now the old man spoke his opinion. “That’s a pretty fancy gate you’re putting up there. Lots of ornamental crosses in the ironwork. But what’s that shiny stuff threaded all through the scrollwork?”

“Lady wanted it done that way. Mrs. Reid wanted all the iron pickets topped with crosses, and the gate to match.” Josh answered reluctantly. It wasn’t good business to talk about his customer’s foibles. Folks who moved this far away from even a little town like McKenna usually valued their privacy. And he valued their business. There wasn’t much else going in McKenna for a jack-of-all-trades.

“That wire looks like it’s real silver.” The old man leaned closer, peering at the wire without touching it. Then he turned his head slowly, following the gleam of the silver wire as it snaked the full length of the fence. It was real silver wire, ordered through the jeweler in town. Mrs. Reid had told Josh to run it in and out of the close-set pickets for the full perimeter of the fence. He’d thought it a terrible waste of her money and told her so. He’d warned her that someone might just see and decide to help themselves to it. She’d insisted, and the customer was always right. He’d done as she’d asked. He just hoped that it would make the young woman feel a bit safer. She was a pale, sickly sort to begin with, and her eyes were all full of sorrow, as if she were pining away.

“And is that garlic planted all along the fence?”

“Yes sir.” Josh was feeling more than a bit irritated and less inclined to talk by the minute. He’d promised Mrs. Reid that the gate would be ready by tonight. She’d been looking forward to the completion of this project for weeks. A substantial bonus was riding on it, and this fellow was delaying him.

Now the man had stepped back to regard all of Josh’s careful handiwork. As the old man’s gaze traveled along the fence, his hand touched the silver cross at his throat. “Crosses worked into the ironwork of the gates, and each wooden picket is a cross at the top. And Saint-John’s-wort and wolfsbane planted all along the outside of the fence.”

“Yes sir. That’s what the lady wanted done and so I did it. You and I might think it’s a bit silly, but it’s her fence and her yard, so she has the right to have it as she wants.” Josh stood slowly, stretched the kink out of his back, and then stooped to pick up the heavy iron gate. Real wrought iron and heavy as all get-out. She could have had one that looked just like it for a fraction of the cost. She’d insisted on cold iron.

“And what’s all that concrete there, that trough running through the yard.”

It stung to hear his handiwork called a trough. Josh answered slowly. “It’s a water feature. It’s not turned on yet; the owner didn’t want it started until all the rest of the work was done. She’ll have a little stream that encircles the house. She calls it a moat. She hasn’t decided yet if she wants stepping-stones or an ornamental bridge for crossing it. She hasn’t chosen the lilies for it either. I told her she might want to put koi in there. Be real pretty.”

“Yes. It would. Moving water is always pretty. Here. Let me give you a hand with that gate,” the old man offered, surprising Josh and making him feel a bit more kindly toward him. The visitor’s canvas satchel clanked heavily when he set it down. The old fellow was stronger than he looked. He helped lift the gate and then held it steady while Josh aligned the two halves of the hinges. “She say why she wanted all this stuff done?” the man asked him, his voice tight with the effort of holding the gate steady.

Josh didn’t want to answer him, but it seemed stingy to be rude while the fellow was still holding the gate in place for him. He took a breath and then spoke reluctantly. “She’s afraid of vampires.” The pin was being stubborn about dropping down into the hinge. He wriggled it hopefully, and it dropped a quarter inch. “All this stuff, the crosses and the silver, the garlic and wolfsbane, and all this stuff is supposed to keep vampires away. They can’t cross it, she says. You and I might think that’s silly, but she says her husband was killed by a vampire, and she’s never gotten over it. Never been able to forget it, never been able to forgive it.” The little holes for the pin were not lining up. Josh grunted as he tried to edge the pieces into a better alignment. “I think she’s a little bit crazy, but she pays me on time.”

“She told you all that?” The man gasped out the words. Evidently holding up the wrought-iron gate was a harder task for him than Josh had thought.

“Yeah. Lift a little more, I nearly got the hinges lined up. She said it happened a long time ago, but it couldn’t have been that long. She doesn’t look any older than my kid sister, and she’s just twenty-two. That’s one pin in, just let me get the second one. Mrs. Reid said she loved her husband more than life itself, more than she loved herself. Kind of funny. She’s said that to me about six times now. That she wishes she’d realized sooner that she loved him more than life itself. That it would have changed everything.”

The stranger lost his grip on the gate for a second, but it was all right. Josh had just slid the pin into place. “You can let go now,” he told the man.

The old man did, and then he turned abruptly away. He coughed a couple of times and then pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. “She in there now, you think?”

“Oh, sure. She works at night, sleeps days. I think she’s a writer or something. She told me that on the phone first time she called me. ‘Hope you don’t mind me calling so late, but I’m a night person,’ she said. I suspect she doesn’t sleep well at night. Too afraid of the vampires.” He shook his head in sympathy for the woman. “Well. Just about done here. Only thing left to do is set the stop for the gate, and then start her water flowing. Should be done just about sunset. Then I’ll get my pay and be gone.”

The old man turned, wiped his face with his handkerchief, and then turned back to him. The lines on his face seemed deeper. He cleared his throat. “So she’ll be coming out to pay you tonight?”

“Like clockwork. Every Thursday, right about sundown. Always pays cash, and last time, there were three old silver certificates mixed in with the regular bills. I showed them to her and told her that they were worth more than the others, that she should sell them to a coin collector or something. She just laughed and said money was just paper to her and that I could do whatever I wanted with them. She’s a nice lady.”

The old man cleared his throat again. “I might just stand here and wait with you for her to come out. That okay with you?”

“Sure. I don’t mind. Long as you don’t mind me finishing up my chore here.” He was getting more and more uncomfortable with the man’s questions. He decided to take a direct approach. “Look, Mister, if you’re a visitor, you can go knock on her door. I’m not the watchman or anything like that. I’m just the local handyman, doing odd jobs. She might already be awake.”

“I think I’ll just wait here with you, if it’s all the same to you. It’s a pleasure to watch a workman finish a task. Always good to see a job finished. Especially one that’s been a long time in the works.” A thin smile came to the old man’s face.

Well, he was an odd duck. “Fine with me.” Josh shrugged. There wasn’t much left for him to do. He had a piece of iron pipe to pound into the ground, and then a sack of dry Redi-Mix and just enough water in a jerrican to finish up the job. Once the pipe was set in the ground, the catch for the gate would drop into it and hold it shut until someone lifted the latch. He’d already wrapped the latch handle in silver wire like she’d requested. He’d done that job on his workbench the night before, trying to lay the coils smooth and flat. He’d done a pretty good job, he thought. The silver looked nice against the black of the wrought iron.

The man was mostly quiet as he watched Josh work. Once he took out a pocket watch and consulted it, and then glanced up at the sky. “Going to be dark soon,” he commented, and Josh nodded. He troweled the concrete flat and checked his work with a level. “That’s done,” he said, and with a grunt and a groan, he got to his feet. As he packed up his tools and tidied away the empty Redi-Mix bag, the lights in the cottage came on. “And just in time,” he added.

The stranger didn’t say a word. He just stood, staring toward the house, so silent he seemed to be holding his breath. His right hand stole into his coat pocket. He stared at the cottage door, and when the porch light came on, he gave a small gasp. A moment later, the door opened and Mrs. Reid stood framed in it. The porch light lit her as if it were a spotlight on a stage. She was dressed, as she always was, in what Josh had come to think of as her mourning dress. It was a simple shirtwaist dress, like something his mother might have worn in her youth, in a sensible dark fabric. Her hair framed her brow in two smooth dark wings that were pulled back into a loose bun at the back of her neck. Her makeup was perfect, but dated, as if she’d copied it from an old magazine. She looked at the both of them and did not speak.

“Evening, Mrs. Reid. I’m just finishing up here,” he said, when the silence seemed to stretch a bit too long.

“And just when you said you would,” she replied. Her voice was pleasant and husky and her words articulated. Her eyes moved from him to the stranger. Josh waited for the man to say something. When he didn’t, he filled in.

“I try to make my estimates as exact as I can. And when you’ve been a handyman as long as I have, well, you get a fair idea of how long a job should take. Now, this cement is still wet, so try to use the gate latch as little as possible until it’s set.”

“I won’t use it at all,” she promised promptly. But she seemed to aim her words at the man next to him. The stranger spoke suddenly.

“I got a letter. All these years of trying to track you down, and suddenly a letter comes and tells me exactly where you are. I should have known it came from you.”

She nodded slowly.

“So, all those years, did you know where I was?”

Her lips moved very slightly, stretching almost into a smile. “I did. Of course I did.”

“You did.” Josh heard the man swallow. “So. ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ Was that it?”

“Something like that. And you’ve been both, haven’t you, Raymond?”

“Many more years as the one than the other,” he said, and his wariness came more harshly into his voice.

“That’s true. Only a few years of being a friend. Back at the beginning.” She said the words, and the man’s confirming silence flowed up to drown the conversation.

Josh felt uncomfortable. He wasn’t sure what he was witnessing, but knew he didn’t want to know. He put the last of his tools into his toolbox, shut it, and latched it. Mrs. Reid had been a good customer, and he knew he couldn’t just stand by if the stranger became rude or aggressive. He spoke into their silence, his voice too loud and his affability sounding false. “Well, if you’re satisfied, Mrs. Reid, I’ll call it a day and head for home. Got a cat to feed, you know.” He glanced at the man and added, “Unless there’s something else you need before I go. Anything else you want me to do?”

She looked at the man before she brought her gaze back to him. “No, Josh, I think you’ve done everything I need. I’m satisfied.” She looked at the stranger again and added, “How about you, Raymond? Are you satisfied?”

The man was quiet for a moment and then said, “I think I am. But I don’t understand why.”

“You don’t understand why you are satisfied? Come, Raymond. I thought this was what you longed for, all these years.”

“It might be. But what I don’t understand is why you are doing it? And why you sent me a letter. Unless you wanted to me to witness it?” The last words came slowly, even more reluctantly from him.

She lifted one slim shoulder in an elegant shrug. “Because it finishes it, I suppose. Because I thought it would give you pleasure. Give you, perhaps, a sense of something finished.”

She stepped off the porch then and came down the path. The stranger made a small sound in his throat. But Josh carefully unlatched the gate and went to meet her. He’d recognized the fat envelope she carried. It would be the final payment for his work, in cash, just like before. As he took it from her, she smiled and then her mouth worked oddly, as if there were something she wanted to say. She swallowed hard and turned away from him abruptly. As she walked back toward her house, she spoke without looking back at him. She crossed the dry moat and stopped briefly on the other side. No bridge, she’d specified. Strange, but that was what the customer wanted, so that was how he’d built it. “Turn on the water for me, so the stream runs, before you leave. And shut the gate behind you when you go, will you?”

“Of course.” He was a bit hurt by her abruptness but decided it probably had something to do with the stranger at the gate. The man hadn’t even tried to come in, hadn’t even greeted her, really. And she hadn’t asked him in. Must be some very bad history between them, he decided, and resolved he’d see the stranger on his way before he left. He left the path and knelt in the dirt to find the spigot for the stream. He’d set it into the ground, along with the switch for the pump. It was only accessible from this side. She’d have to cross the running water if she wanted to turn it off. He’d pointed that out to her once, to be sure she understood. She’d just looked at him and then said quietly, “That’s part of the plan. Build it that way, please.”

And he had.

He opened the fiberglass hatch on the protective box and reached in to turn open the valve and then flick on the pump. Within minutes, the pipe hissed. He heard the gurgling as water filled the race. When the water reached the level, he heard the auto shutoff kick in, and then the quiet hum of the pump that would keep the water circulating. “Works perfectly,” he said in satisfaction. He stood up and was surprised to see that Mrs. Reid was still standing on the porch, watching him. He could not read the emotion on her face. Regret? Resignation?

When he glanced at the gate, the stranger was still standing there. His face was a complete contrast to the widow’s. The satisfaction was unmistakable. Josh felt a surge of revulsion for the fellow. What was the matter with the man? She was just a woman alone in the world, obviously consumed with her grief for her husband and beset with an irrational fear. The stranger stared at her as she stood alone, backlit by her porch light, as if his eyes could never drink enough of the sight. With both hands, he gripped the iron gate. The moment Josh stepped through it, he said, through gritted teeth, “Please, allow me.” And he shut it with a clash of iron against iron that abruptly sounded to Josh like a weapon clashed against a shield. Behind him, he was startled to hear Mrs. Reid give a low moan.

When he turned to look at her, she was staring at them both, her face white and both her hands clasped over her mouth.

The stranger spoke, his voice gentle and his words harsh. “I hope it takes a long time, Doria.”

She spoke through her muffling hands. “I loved him, Raymond. I loved your brother just as much as you did. I was clumsy. He was my first and it didn’t end for him the way I’d planned it would. But I loved him. Loved him more than life itself.” Her voice shook.

“And you call what you have now a life?” Raymond suddenly roared at her.

Her voice trembled as she replied. “No, Raymond. No, I don’t. It’s not life. And I don’t want it anymore. Without Adam, it’s not worth having. It took me years to realize that, and even longer to figure out what to do about it. But now I have. And I’ve given you the last thing that I have to give to anyone. Satisfaction.”

“Damn right you have. Satisfaction.” The man’s voice was thick with it, cold with righteousness.

It was too much. He couldn’t leave her standing there with this man threatening her from outside her gate. “Look, you, whoever you are, you’re frightening her. I think you’d better leave.”

“I’ll be glad to. But I haven’t frightened her. She’s done that to herself. There’s just one more thing I want to do for her before I go.” With both his hands, he unfastened the silver chain and the tiny crucifix it bore from around his neck. He watched Mrs. Reid as he slowly wrapped it around the gate catch and then fastened it.

“That’s not going to work,” Josh pointed out quietly to him. “She’ll have to undo it each time she wants to open the gate. I understand you think it might keep vampires out, but . . .”

“It will work just fine,” Raymond Reid said as he picked up his canvas satchel. He looked older than he had a few moments before. As if he’d finished some task and no longer needed to force a vitality he didn’t have. “Son, she won’t be opening that gate. And she didn’t have you build all this to keep vampires out.”

Raymond gave a final glance to the lone figure standing so still on the porch. He bent to pick up the canvas satchel. The top had come open and a mallet had fallen out of it. Laboriously, he picked it up and put it back inside. He turned his back on both of them and walked toward his rental car. He didn’t turn his head as he spoke. “It’s to keep a vampire in.”

Drum Machine

The client leaned forward across the desk and all but hissed at me, “I have a right to the child of my choice.”

I smiled at her warmly, reassuringly, and read my line from the prompter. “That’s not precisely correct, Mrs. Daw. You have the right to a child. That’s very clear.” I tapped the notarized slip from her husband, ceding his population replacement right to her. “And you have the right to a choice. The Constitution guarantees you that.”

She thrust her already prominent chin at me. “Then I want my choice. Another EagleScout12.” She smiled exultantly. “Derek is almost six now, and he has been the perfect choice for my husband and me. When we decided we wanted another child, we decided, well, why take a chance? Get one we know we’ll like.”

I leaned back in my chair and blinked my eyes twice quickly to call up the next screen. I chose the conciliatory option. “I’m sure, on the face of it, that seemed logical to both of you. But consider the reality, Mrs. Daw. You would essentially be raising identical twins, born six years apart, into the same environment. Same nature, same nurture. Where’s the variety in that? You’d be defeating our entire Genetic Variety Preservation program. Even if you can’t choose an EagleScout12 again, that doesn’t mean your next child won’t be just as perfect for you as your first one was. That’s the whole purpose of our counseling, Mrs. Daw. The embryo options that the program has chosen are selected to be compatible with you and Mr. Daw. And, I might add, with Derek.”

Her eyes widened somewhat. “Could that be why we’re not offered another EagleScout12? Because he might not be compatible with Derek?”

I smiled and shrugged. “I suppose that could be so.” Actually, that particular embryo had been discontinued, but that was not something the client needed to know. They always asked why. Not even I had access to that information. “I’m just a Social Interface, ma’am, not a biologist. But I wonder if you haven’t hit on the very reason.” I eyed the timer in the bottom left quarter of my goggle-screen, but my smile never faltered.

She had taken up almost seventeen minutes of my time, over twice the normal allotment, trying to nag an approval out of me. When she had first sat down in my cubicle, I had popped her disk into my machine and tapped in the latest information. She hadn’t liked the choices we’d offered, but her request for another EagleScout12 had come up with a solid Denied. But you don’t flatly tell the applicant that. If that was all there was to my job, I wouldn’t have a job. The computer could do it. As a Social Interface, class 7, it’s up to me to select the right words and tones and mannerisms from the suggested dialogue on my screen. Mrs. Daw was a tough one, but in the next three minutes, I managed to send her on her way. She had even looked happy with her new selection, a female DutchDoll7. She strode away, clutching the appointment slip that would let her fetus be implanted tomorrow.

I was forty-five minutes from the end of my shift. Three, maybe four more people to counsel and I was through for the day. I was ready to go home. I rocked back in my chair in my cubicle and heard my spine crackle. Then I straightened up and pushed the “next client” button.

I work for the state in Reproductive Permits. My position is Social Interface. I’ve been there about seven years now, and I like to think that I’m good at what I do. It wasn’t a job I would have chosen for myself, but the state aptitude test rated me high for Social Interface duties. The woman in the Aptitude offices who told me about the job opportunities in the field was a Social Interface herself. There was something about her voice when she told me that she just knew I’d be right for the job. I couldn’t help but believe her. And over the years, I’ve come to be like her. People come to me, and they listen to me, and they go away believing me. I make them contented with their choice. There’s satisfaction in that. It’s proof that I’m good at what I do. Everyone deserves to believe that he’s good at what he does. I got little of that in my previous job.

Out in the waiting room, I saw my next applicant stand up. She clutched a slip of paper in her hand as she looked down the row of Social Interface cubicles. In her other hand, she carried a canvas shopping bag. She came straight for me. She wasn’t looking at me; she was looking up at the number flashing green over my cubicle. But I saw her face, and despite her sunglasses and all the harsh years since I’d last seen her, I recognized her.

I should have red-lighted right then. There’s no regulation that says we can’t counsel people we know, but we all know it’s frowned on. It’s not like a Social Interface can change the computer’s decision, but maybe that’s why it’s best for an applicant to hear it from a stranger. It’s less personal that way. Many people don’t want their friends to know they’ve been turned down for their first or second or even third choice. Everyone would like the neighbors to think that the child you gave birth to was your dream kid from the start.

I didn’t red-light. Instead, I sat there, watching Cecily rush toward me like shrapnel from the past. The Blonde Banshee, Cliff had called her. That was when he wasn’t calling her Cecily the Willing. How two people could love and hate each other so much, I still don’t know. Being around them was like escorting a bomb. They could explode in any setting, in restaurants, on trains, even onstage. Public mayhem never bothered either of them. I’d seen Cecily overturn a table on the whole band for the sake of dumping an expensive dinner in Cliff’s lap. But I’d also seen her beatific smile the time I nearly broke my neck falling over their coupled bodies in a hotel stairwell at two in the morning in Vancouver.

“No limits, Chesterton,” Cliff had told me later. “No limits to what we can make each other feel. It’s the magic. What good is a woman who can only make you love her? That’s only half the passion, man. Only half.”

He made it sound so logical that while he was talking, I believed it. Cliff was like that. He would have made a good Social Interface himself, if he’d lived long enough to hold down a real job. He killed himself when he was twenty-seven. He knew what people would say about that. He even left it as his death note. “All the real ones check out at twenty-seven,” he wrote. And that was it.

By the time he reached that point, I didn’t really know him anymore. The band had fallen apart three or four years before then. His death was something I read about in the newspaper, a scrap of news in a column full of celebrity notes. Cliff Wangle, former drummer for the Coolie Fish, Oberon’s Jest, Hazardous Waste, and most recently with the Flat Plats, died of an overdose at twenty-seven. That was it. I read about it over my breakfast cereal and thought, Well, that’s it, it’s really over now. We had shared a year and a half of almost being famous. The Flat Plats had had one commercial CD release, with one Top Ten song and one in the high teens. We had barely tasted our success before the cup was dashed away from us. Cliff was the one who had done the smashing.

Even after his death, even after all the years, it was still hard to forgive him for that. Aloysius had gone on to doing sound-track arrangements, and I still could pick out Mikey’s tenor in a lot of sampled backup stuff. I hadn’t had the heart to go on with music after the disappointment. I’d gotten a day job, a wife, and eventually a kid, a KewpieDoll male the first year they’d come out. He was seven now, and still cuter than hell, with curly hair and big dark eyes. I’d made it, I told myself as I watched Cecily zoom in on me. I’d succeeded. I was good at what I did, and I knew it. What more than that could a man ask?

She sat down in front of my desk. Our Interface desks and chairs are elevated just slightly, only an inch or two. Even so, she didn’t have to look up at me. But she didn’t look at me at all. She merely handed me her disk. I popped it into my machine. I didn’t have to open the confirmation port for her. She did that herself and expertly rolled her fingers across the glass. The reason for that flashed up immediately. She’d refused her reproductive choice nine times in the last four months. Of course, she would know the routine by now.

The computer immediately gave me a first option for terminating the interview.

The lines came up at the bottom of my screen specs. “I’m sorry, Ms. Kelvey, but you are well aware of your reproductive status at this time.” Firm tone recommended. That was the weighted suggestion.

Alternative. If applicant appears agitated, press any key for Security now.

Alternative. If applicant is calm and Social Interface judges it prudent, proceed as for normal interview.

Cecily looked determined, not agitated. If she had looked overwrought, believe me, I would have called Security. I’d seen Cecily in a temper and knew what she was capable of doing. She wasn’t angry, not yet. Both curiosity and nostalgia swayed me. From the way she looked at me, I didn’t think she’d recognized me. I didn’t think I had changed that much, but my screen spectacles are the bulky government-issue type, and I had them set at semiopaque. I double blinked to bring up the next screen. She saw it and waited silently.

The information surprised me. She’d completed a psychological evaluation followed by a personality reorganization class a year ago. Her obsessive/compulsive disorder was controlled with medication. Her preparenting scores were within the acceptable range. She had four preapproved fetus choices, all children selected from the “nondemanding” end of the spectrum. Her physical size had limited her to smaller infants for natural birth. Still. Four choices weren’t bad. I’d interviewed prospective parents who were limited to one or two options and still managed to send them away happy. Mentally, I earmarked a Cherub2 male as being her best bet. I’d steer her that way.

I smiled at her sunglasses and observed, “Well, Ms. Kelvey, does this visit mean you’ve reached a choice on your options?”

She took a breath. That brisk rise and fall of her small breasts that had always indicated she was going to take a stand with Cliff. Not a good sign. Her voice was as I remembered it, girlish and without depth. She’d wanted to do backup vocals for Flat Plats, had even bought an enhancer, but Cliff had refused her. “We’re retro,” he had reminded her harshly. “Real voices. Real instruments. Real people playing them.” The flung enhancer had given him a black eye.

“Not exactly.” Her voice jerked me back to the present. “This visit is so I can submit documentation as to why my request for a free conception should be granted.” She bent down to the canvas tote at her feet and began taking out papers. Some were folded, some yellowed at the edges. Papers. The information hadn’t even been scanned to disk. I accepted it from her hands the way you take wilted dandelions from a kid. It’s the intention. A tap set my specs to scan as I looked over her “documentation.”

None of it was biologically acceptable data. It was a weird spectrum of stuff, from old grade readouts from high school to IQ tests that documented Cliff’s brilliance. There was even a newspaper clipping that called him a “rock Mozart.” My heart sank as I realized what she was angling after. She didn’t want an approved fetal implant. She was going for an egg/sperm conception. In some parts of the world, they were still common, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why anyone would choose to take such monumental risks.

I obediently finished blinking the material into her reproductive request file. The nature of the entries might set off a red flag. The behavior of compiling such a pile of nonrelevant information was a definite earmark of obsession. She might find her prescriptions adjusted the next time she got her monthly implant. Cecily’s actions, I told myself, not mine. If it made trouble for her, she’d brought it on herself. I gave the sheaf of documents back to her. She held them and watched me hopefully.

“So.” I glanced at my timer. Three more minutes before I went into overtime with her. “Apparently you wish to conceive a random fetus with eggs from yourself and sperm from Cliff Wangle. You have his permission to do this?”

Her shades were so dark, I couldn’t tell if she met my gaze or not. “He’s dead. But before his death, he made a sperm deposit at a private facility. They were a birthday gift to me. As my property, they are mine to use as I wish.”

“That is true.”

“But I can’t schedule an insemination without a permit. That’s all I’m here for today. A permit.”

“One moment, please.” I swiveled back to my keyboard. A blink or two brought up her genetic rating on my specs. I had to key in Cliff’s SSN to do a search for his. Both were as I expected. Unacceptable. “I’m very sorry, Ms, Kelvey, but neither you nor your sperm donor is genetically qualified to reproduce. Fortunately, this does not mean that you cannot have a child. It is a woman’s right to choose, of course, and we have four possible choices for you.” I swiveled my monitor screen toward her and blinked to pull up a split screen of four adorable babies. One gurgled aloud and then sneezed endearingly. I damped the volume.

She took off her sunglasses and stared at me. The crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes reminded me of how many years had passed since I had last seen her. The flat anger in her blue eyes told me that my screen specs were no disguise at all.

“Cut the crap, Chesterton. I want a real baby, not a seed-catalog clone. I want Cliff’s baby. I know you can do this for me. Push the button and hand me a slip. That’s all you have to do.”

The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I knew I was subject to random monitoring. Some Interfaces believe we are constantly monitored. My instructors had always counseled me to behave as if we were. That was how one stayed at maximum efficiency. It was also how to keep your job. “I can’t do that, Cecily,” I said quietly. “There is some latitude in my job, but not near that much. If your health allows it . . .” I punched some keys and got a tentative okay. “ . . . by opting for a C-section delivery, one sometimes gains a few additional choices . . .” I punched a few more keys, then shook my head at the readouts on my specs. “But not in your case. Temperament can be more restrictive than physical biology.” I winked and the Cherub2 male expanded to fill the screen. “But this little fellow is a perfect match for you. Look at that curly hair, and those big blue eyes.”

“I don’t want curly hair, or big blue eyes. I don’t want perfect teeth and zero birth defects. I don’t want any of the features and benefits I’ve been hearing about for nine months. I want Cliff’s baby, Chesterton. And Cliff Wangle’s baby deserves to be born just as much as any of these gen-engineered ones. More so. You guarantee any of those four will have average intelligence? Well, Cliff’s baby would be a genius.”

“Cecily, you know better than that. We all do. An exceptional donor doesn’t guarantee an exceptional child.” I was smooth. I didn’t bother to challenge her assertion that Cliff was a genius. “I’m sure you’ve seen Cliff’s genetic profile, and your own. Manic-depressives tend to assort. Left to themselves, they mate with other manic-depressives, increasing the child’s chance of mental illness.” I let her connect the dots.

She leaned forward to hiss at me. “That’s stupid! How can something that is genetically determined be called an ‘illness’? My moodiness should be seen as within the range of normal human development. If it wasn’t, why the hell would there be so many of us? Society used to allow for us. Look at all the Byronic poets with ‘melancholy temperaments.’ Can you tell me it’s right to silence an unborn poet simply because he may be a bit moody?”

I’d read the same article. It’s part of my job as a Social Interface. I have to keep up with all the crackpot metaphysics of horoscopes, wonder diets, and “give birth under a crystal-hung pyramid” fads. The ones who argue for a random conception usually spout the old nonsense about a need to guarantee genetic diversity, as if new embryos weren’t licensed every month. In the long run, it’s about selfishness, not diversity. It was all about the belief that my genes were better than anyone else’s, the same basic concept that is behind prejudice, racism, and even genocide. It’s amazing what otherwise rational people will buy into when it comes to reproduction. In Cecily’s case, she had found scripture to support her obsession. She’d cling to it no matter what. For old time’s sake, I made one more effort.

“A bit moody is one thing. A history of suicide, social maladjustment, and public violence is another. Cecily, you can’t have Cliff’s baby. You can’t expect society to support you in a bad choice. Choose another.”

“I don’t want another.”

I winced. I was sure the monitor would record those words and store it in her files. Her words would register her as refusing her choices. That counted as an abdication of her right to reproduce. The next time she came in to bully someone in Reproduction, she would find her options changed to a flat Choices Relinquished.

Perhaps she saw something in my face. She pushed back her chair. “Forget it, Chesterton. I shouldn’t even have bothered coming here. There are ways to get around this. I’ll have Cliff’s baby.”

I wondered what she was imagining. Did she have some of his sperm in an ice tray in her home freezer? Would she inject herself with a turkey baster? According to the netbloids, that happened every day. There were still random births. No system was perfect. But ours was close to it, because it now excluded the imperfect. I kept my voice level as I reminded her. “Ms. Kelvey, I suppose that is theoretically possible. But if you should become pregnant without a permit, all support benefits from the state will instantly cease, including your Basic Individual Maintenance. Neither you nor your child will ever be eligible for a housing allowance or medical benefits. Your child would be ineligible for citizenship.”

“That’s not fair!” she cried. The eternal objection of the citizen who wants only her own way.

“It is ultimately fair. Why should your neighbor’s taxes go to support a substandard child? Why should you be allowed to gamble genetically for the sake of your own ego? Suppose you give birth to an idiot, or someone with such a ‘melancholy temperament’ that he cannot become a productive member of society? Why should we have to extend health benefits to such a person, let alone continue to support him or her after you are dead? You are talking about a very selfish act, Cecily. I’m sure even you can see that.”

“Selfish act!” She leaned forward and hissed the word at me. A centimeter closer and she would have triggered the automatic security alarm. A cool part of my mind wondered if she knew that, if she had stopped just short of making a legally threatening move. She leaned back in her chair. She began stuffing her documents, willy-nilly, into her canvas tote. Furious words streamed from her as she thrust the papers in. “Selfish act, he says. Selfish act. From the king of the selfish acts.”

She stood up. She snatched her dark glasses off and for the first time in years, I looked into her pale blue eyes. They were rimmed red and were a degree too shiny. Whatever she was using wasn’t part of her monthly supplements. I had a duty to report that. But I just looked at her.

“You killed Cliff. When you destroyed the Flat Plats, you destroyed him. If you hadn’t betrayed him, he’d be alive today. And rich, and famous, and everyone would know what a genius he was. Women would be lined up around the block to get a Cliff Wangle baby. It’s all your fault, Chesterton. You were greedy and you were selfish. You had to go with the sure thing, didn’t you? You couldn’t take a chance, not on music, not on life. Well, look what it got you, just what the sure thing always gets you. A sure dose of nothing. Mediocrity.”

She stood up so suddenly that her chair crashed over behind her. She didn’t pause to right it. She shoved her sunglasses back onto her face and stormed out. As she went out the outer door, two security guards approached me. “Should we detain?” one asked me.

“I don’t think it’s necessary. I think she was able to vent her frustration at me. I don’t think she’s a danger to anyone at this time.”

“You sure?” the other one asked.

I knew my response would be logged and filed under “legal culpability.” If I were wrong, the security guards would be absolved of blame. I hedged my response.

“Reasonably sure,” I replied. I longed to push my “break” button and get out of my cubicle for fifteen minutes. But that would be an extra break right at the end of my shift, and it might prompt someone to scrutinize the transaction immediately before. Any break in a pattern was a cause for concern. I gave security a small wave to dismiss them, and green-lighted. Out in the waiting room, a young man’s face lit up with a smile and he hastened toward me.

The rest of the afternoon went well. I handled six more clients in record time, arranging good choices for all of them. After each happy customer, I offered myself a life choice affirmation. “I am good at my job. Because I am good at my job, I increase the satisfaction other people have in their lives.” I knew it was true, and every one of my last six clients thanked me, but somehow the affirmations didn’t work as well as they usually did.

My bus was late and filled up before I could get on, so I had to stand and wait for the next one. The early evening streets were filled with teens and twenties, some quietly studying palmscreens while they waited, others laughing and jostling and restless. I wondered who they would be ten years from now and wondered who they thought they were now. Sweet illusions of youth.

I thought back to my precareer days, when my whole life had been Basic Individual Maintenance, a Housing Allowance, and my music. I thought I had needed nothing more. I had been convinced that I was going to be rich and famous long before society mandated that I settle on a career choice. Mikey, Cliff, and I had lived together in an efficiency, using the extra HAs we saved to buy sound equipment. We had been at the crest of the retro-rock wave. We should have made it. Damn it, we had made it, until Cliff destroyed it. Cliff, not me. Cliff, who had to be wild and crazy for the sake of being wild and crazy. He always claimed it was for the music, but that was just crap. It was for the sake of Cliff Wangle. It had nothing to do with the sounds we made; he just wanted to be the star. He wanted to be worshipped as an old-fashioned rock bad boy.

We’d practice our set endlessly, but once we were onstage, there was no predicting what Cliff would do to us. A forty-five-second drum bridge might become a two-minute drum solo. It would throw the whole band into chaos. Mikey would improvise weird vocalizations to cover, and whatever guitar player we currently had would just about tear his fingers off trying to keep up. I’d usually get pissed and just stop playing until he was finished grandstanding and came back to the plan. Aloysius would use his bass as if it was a weapon, pointing it at Cliff and firing off chord after chord, always with this weird grin on his face. And the audience would go crazy, screaming and jumping, and Cliff would feed off it, drumming until the sweat flew from him. That was the title of our first commercial release: Spattered Sweat.

Blood Blisters, our second one, should have assured our careers. Instead, Cliff had axed it. He’d burned all the live masters, all our notes, everything he could get his hands on, in a fifty-gallon drum down on the beach one drunken evening after calling up our label and telling them that Flat Plats no longer existed. He said he’d sue the hell out of them if they tried to release Blood Blisters. And why? Simply because I had replaced one of his live wild man solos with a studio track we had done earlier. The label had loved it, our producer was wild about it, the decreased length made it a more commercially viable track, and the sound was cleaner—hell, even Mikey and Aloysius had grudgingly admitted it gave the rest of the band a chance to shine in their own right. The fans loved it; the prerelease teaser downloads from our site were incredible. Everyone who was anyone had agreed I’d made a wise choice for the band.

Everyone but Cliff.

He came back a month late from his “weekend” in Mexico with Cecily, listened to what was on the site, and exploded. I’d tried to reason with him, but we’d only gotten into the same old argument.

I couldn’t understand why he couldn’t play a piece live just the way we played it in the studio or at rehearsal. “Give the fans what they expect, what they paid for, not some unpredictable experimental . . .”

“Give them what they expect!” he’d roared. “Then it’s theirs, not ours, you idiot! And there’s no reason to play it again, if it comes out the same every damn time. Music isn’t supposed to be ‘right’; it’s supposed to be music. Alive. Growing and changing. If it doesn’t change, then how are you going to get from ‘right’ to ‘better’?”

I’d made one final try. “Isn’t it as likely to be ‘worse’ as ‘better’?” I’d asked him.

“Chesterton. That’s the chance you’ve got to take. That’s how you know you’re alive.”

And they all just stared at me. I knew then that I’d lost. I’d lost the moment that Cliff Wangle walked back into the room. When Cliff was there, none of the others could ever do things any way but his. It was just how they were. And that had been the end of the Flat Plats and my musical career.

The bus came and I got on it.

The apartment was dark when I opened the door. The note on the table said she’d taken the boy to the movies with his friends. Dinner was in the fridge.

But I didn’t eat. I went to the living room and took down my keyboard. I turned on the media wall and plugged it in. I set up for video, audio, body vibes, lights, the whole show. I pulled up Blood Blisters, the studio track that Cliff had despised. I helmeted in so the sound wouldn’t disturb the neighbors, and I turned it on. Then I played along with it, keyboard in my lap, hammering every note at precisely the right moment, exactly as we’d played it that day in the studio, proving to myself that I still had it. Then I hit reset and played it again. I sounded just as great. By the time I finished the third run through, I was dripping sweat. I leaned back and cranked up the audience roar I’d spliced in at the end. I lifted my arms and held them wide until it died off into white noise.

I took off the helmet and shook my sweaty hair loose. So much for you, Cliff Wangle. You’re dead and Chesterton is still as good as he ever was. So who’s the real musician now? I headed for the shower, grinning, triumphant. There’s nothing like knowing you can do it. I could have played it a hundred times, and each repetition would have been just as good as the first.