Third Time’s the Charm

The school called Elizabeth’s mother after they caught her and a friend smoking in an unused classroom. Her mother didn’t lecture her about health or morality during their long walk home–she’d long ago exhausted everything there was to say–so Elizabeth assumed she was free to go to her room. One look back into her mother’s horn-rimmed stare halted her on the bottom step.

“How many times?”

“Only once.” Elizabeth immediately regretted the lie. “Twice.”

“Once is a whim.” Her mother held up a single finger. “Twice is a pattern.” She added another finger, and then a third. “Three times is a habit, and nobody breaks a habit.”

###

Years later, Elizabeth stepped off a bus at a country club in the Virginia suburbs. She wasn’t the only one who had arrived on the bus, but nobody else walked up the crushed marble path to the grand entrance. All the others shuffled to the servant door around the side. On her first visit, the concierge had insisted on directing her that way as well and, had Henri not been there to vouch for her, she might have spent a shift washing dishes.

This time, the concierge smiled and waved her in without bothering to check the invitation she withdrew from her purse. Elizabeth knew the route, down this hall and past the cafe, her footfalls vanishing in the fine carpet, until she reached Henri’s private smoking room.

He sat in a dark leather chair facing a fireplace. No fire burned, of course, not in the oppressive Potomac summer heat, but Elizabeth knew Henri liked to discard his butts below the andirons. His face crinkled into a smile at the sight of her, causing his bulldog jowls to jiggle and his bushy eyebrows to jut upwards. He reminded her of a grandfather, although he had assured her he had no children. Henri reached out and tapped the chair next to him. Elizabeth sat, clutching her purse tightly to her lap.

“I worried you would not come today.” He brought his cigarette back to his plump lips and took a long drag.

Elizabeth had not been sure she would return either. Things had changed since their first meeting, when Henri had returned her missing dog. She had been so grateful; she had no husband and few friends, especially not at work. Her dog was the center of her social life. She had invited Henri in for coffee. He represented a French defense company, he had explained when she asked about his accent, in town seeking NATO contracts. Their conversation had been pleasant but formal. At the end, he had handed her a hundred dollar bill and told her it was to fix up the fence, so her dog did not escape again.

“I need to ask you a question.” Elizabeth opened her purse. Henri leaned forward, his eyes fixated on her hands, but leaned back when he saw she had only withdrawn her cigarettes.

“I am as open as a book to you, my darling.” Henri retrieved his lighter. He struck a flame and held it out to her. “You may ask me anything.”

Despite their many conversations, Elizabeth knew very little about Henri. Their initial visit had been followed by more coffees around her kitchen table and more hundred dollar bills: for household repairs or groceries or medical expenses. While he had always been polite and attentive, he excelled at steering talk away from himself. She had noticed the only time he really lit up was when she mentioned her colleagues at the State Department.

“That day we first met.” Elizabeth paused to take a draw from her cigarette. “Did my dog really escape?”

“How do you mean? I returned him to you.”

At one of their kitchen table conversations, Henri had mentioned how useful it would be to know who worked with her. Some of her coworkers must hold great influence in the distribution of contracts, after all, and with that information, he could better direct his lobbying. Elizabeth had agreed to bring him a copy of a recent payroll ledger. Then, for the first time, he had asked her to join him at this country club rather than her kitchen table.

“Please don’t lie to me.” Elizabeth ashed her cigarette in the tray. “Did my dog escape, or did you let him out?”

At that first country club meeting, after Elizabeth had handed over the ledger, Henri had given her a Swiss bank account with a balance of five thousand dollars.

Henri did not answer her. After he had taken several long draws from his cigarette, Elizabeth asked more questions.

“What have you done with the documents I gave you? What company could think they are worth thousands of dollars?”

Still no answer.

“Are you really French? Do you have children? Grandchildren? Is your name Henri? Have you told me one true thing since we met?”

Henri flicked his butt into the fireplace. “Does it matter?”

“What? Of course it does.”

“My dear, look around you.” Henri waved his hand at the velvet-curtained window, at the golf course beyond, at Washington, at the whole United States. “Everything here is a transaction. Some are monetary, some are carnal, some are ideological. I have very much enjoyed your company while we do business, and I think you have enjoyed mine. The answers to your questions might upset our pleasant equilibrium. So, I ask again: does it matter? Or might I remain the French lobbyist who found your dog?”

Elizabeth reached into her purse again, this time withdrawing a tightly-folded packet of papers.

“I could set this on fire.” She held the packet in one hand and rolled her lit cigarette between the fingers on the other. If the two touched, what would Henri do? Jump from his chair or watch them burn?

“I don’t think you will.” He didn’t move.

“You’re right, my friend.” Elizabeth tossed the packet onto his lap. “You’ve become a habit. What should I get next?”

A Grain of Salt

None of us can hear Bartlett’s tour. Not over the roar of surf against the seawall; not beside the grinding turbines of the desalination plant; not through our sunsuits. I ask my neural implant to boost his volume. Her response sneaks between exasperation and insubordination. Hattie, I need all the bandwidth I have for our mission. You know, the reason we’re risking our lives?

The man next to me, a coastal commissioner, waves a hand and taps the side of his helmet. Bartlett fiddles with a control on his sunsuit. His motions are choppy, aggravated. There's more at stake here than an ordinary tour. If his company can sell the Coastal Commission on his new desalination method they'll build these plants across California. Trillions and trillions of dollars in contracts. At last, he hits the correct button and one of the communication drones swooping around the complex breaks formation to hover over our heads. Full bars.

“That’s better.” Bartlett’s voice crackles through my implant. “I forget how poor reception is close to the plant. Our desalination method can interfere with reception. A consequence of being years ahead of the competition.”

A broadcast of Bartlett’s face peeks in the corner of my vision. He doesn’t look anything like his hundred and fifty years. The hair I can see under the sunsuit’s helmet is the same jet-black color as pictures of him from the aughts. A few creases radiate from his eyes and mouth, the only outward sign of age. His doctors earned their fortunes. They had given him enough aging to imply wisdom but not frailty. Baerlett looked every bit a healthy, virile man, an experienced captain of industry whose company tunneled a canal underground from the San Joaquin headwaters to Los Angeles. A man who could appear to deserve a life three times longer than the national average.

“Not so long ago this was a tourist paradise.” Bartlett gestures at the crumbling cliffs and thrashing water. “I loved going to the beach. Surfing, sandcastles, tanning.” His blue eyes appear to connect with mine even though I’m not broadcasting an image. His lips curl into a predatory smile. “Beautiful women.”

My hand falls to the holdout hidden on my sunsuit. The temptation is strong, but the gun has only one shot. For emergencies. For the mission. I pull my hand back and follow the crowd of commissioners and journalists into the bowels of the desalination plant. Bartlett guides us past one tube after another, an incomprehensible maze of water flowing in every direction. The complexity is mind-numbing, reassuring. Don’t worry, it wants to say. Engineers have this under control. Every problem engineering has caused can have an engineering solution. Flooding? Seawall. Toxic oceans and dying farmlands? Vat-grown nutrients. Scorching UV? Sunsuits. Vanishing water tables? Desalination.

Bartlett’s voice flows around my thoughts like a dull mountain stream. Every now and then an eddy swirls into my consciousness, its statistics spinning among trapped leaves. San Diego’s aquifer recharge rate, thanks to his plant, up 4.2%. Tijuana, which hadn’t the foresight–or the money–to pursue desalination, down 15.8%. Now managed retreat from the estuary is their only option, and Bartlett is the managed retreat expert.

You don’t want to ask how, my implant crows, but I got in.

Spreadsheets swarm across my vision to the point where enhanced reality blocks out normal reality and I stumble into one of the criss-crossing pipes. The commissioner from earlier steadies me while my implant apologizes and minimizes most of the clutter.

“Are you feeling well?” The commissioner keys into a private channel. I share video and his face pops up superimposed over the spreadsheets. He is an older man, though his face hasn’t been hidden by longevity treatments like Bartlett’s. A puffy white beard obscures deep acne scars and his gravelly voice implies a long history of gelly use. His dark eyes, curious and empathetic, remind me of my Aunt Casie, who first inspired me to try my hand at journalism.

“Fine.” I stick out a hand. “My implant got excited and spammed my vision. Hattie Jackson.”

He shakes my hand. “Jude Caldwell. You have an eco-newslog, don’t you? I saw your piece on the Tijuana Estuary extinctions. It was good work.” He pauses. “Important work.”

I blush and let Commissioner Caldwell lead me along the corridor. My implant inserts herself over Bartlett’s droning. She’s found no more than what we expected but the confirmation of our suspicions thrills me. All the pieces fit: Bartlett’s desalination plant, twenty times more effective than any other; his tunneling company, who created the San Joaquin subcanal; the sudden spike in Tijuana’s water depletion rate. Bartlett wasn’t making the Pacific drinkable–he was stealing water under the border.

“That brings us to the end of our tour. Please, make yourselves at home.” Bartlett has led us to a wide concrete balcony overlooking violent gray waters. The twenty or so people break into small groups. They converse while connecting their sunsuits to nutrient plugs. Way out to sea, a million-ton Pacifimax freighter eclipses the dusty brown sunset. I see Commissioner Caldwell standing alone, hands on the railing, watching the ship.

Connect me to him, I tell my implant. Maximum security line.

What? Why?

I may never get this chance again. I edge around a heavy-set woman who appears to be in a vigorous argument with her own neural implant. Caldwell is someone with real power. Someone who can stop Bartlett now that we have real evidence. If I try to call his office, though, I’ll never get past his PR team.

I don’t think–

Just connect me.

The implant doesn’t reply. She never does when she’s sulking. I stop next to Caldwell and his face pops into my vision. The edges of his smile crinkle into his Aunt Casie eyes, quite a contrast with the blank silver screen of his sunsuit. He starts to make small talk but I don’t have time for that.

“This plant is a fraud.” I point at the Rube Goldberg mess of pipes. “Bartlett isn’t desalinating water. He’s stealing from Tijuana’s aquifer. I have evidence that he tunneled a line to–”

I pause because Caldwell’s friendly smile has disappeared. His Aunt Casie eyes droop into a disappointed furrow, an expression familiar from my days throwing balls through the protective window or stepping on prize petunias. His real body, his sunsuit, holds a hand to its forehead.

“Oh, Ms. Jackson, I wish you hadn’t said that.”

I feel a hand on my shoulder. It’s a security guard in a corporate sunsuit. His other hand is resting on his sidearm.

“Mr. Bartlett is one of the Coastal Commission’s most important partners.” Caldwell turns off his video.

The guard drags me backwards as if I weigh nothing. No doubt Bartlett can afford the best upgrades for his personal security. I kick and scream and try to get the attention of the others. Nobody, not the commissioners, not the journalists, not even Bartlett, pays any attention. They’re all in on this, one way or another. A nice house with a UV shield; a session of longevity treatments; a lead for a juicy story. Everyone knows their reward from this dance and the steps they need to get there. Everyone except me.

The guard throws me into a long, tall enclosure behind the balcony. It’s open at the top, but there’s a hundred feet of sheer concrete wall between me and the sky. Even then I can see barbed wire. My implant points out dozens of security cameras, all focused on me.

Do you have a connection? I ask my implant. Can you publish the story?

Of course not. I tried to warn you. Even somebody nice will be paid off. Everyone is. Hopefully after they kill you they’ll implant me into someone smarter.

You’re not helping. I run a hand along my sunsuit, feeling the comforting groove of the holdout.

You get one shot with that thing, says my implant. What are you going to do if there are two guards when they come back?

I’m not planning to shoot at guards. I look into the sliver of dusty sky beyond the barbed wire. Communication drones buzz back and forth. Ready?

You really think you can shoot one of those down?

With your help. I concentrate and track the flightpath of a drone. Get ready to upload the story. We’ll only have a connection for a moment.

You get ready. My implant brings up telemetry. Adjust left one degree. There. Track. On my mark. Now. Fire.

###

7.13.68 17:44:03 BREAKING UPLOAD: Bartlett Corporation stealing water from south of the border. Millions stand to be displaced. [4,751 views]

7.13.68 17:44:07 BREAKING UPLOAD: ‘Mountain’ Calc Rosstern reportedly upset with Tati Valentine. Could the Slugjab duo break up the band? [8,751,433 views]

7.13.68 17:44:21 BREAKING UPLOAD: Production delays on Ocelotman 3 set threaten Christmas release date. [14,591,381 views]

###

9.22.68 21:19:33 BREAKING UPLOAD: New audio from Applecross stage reveals an angry Robert Burley blowing his top! [4,553,648 views]

9.22.68 21:19:38 BREAKING UPLOAD: Body of journalist found in Mojave desert. Police have no leads. [1,214 views]

9.22.68 21:19:41 BREAKING–

THE END

Unorthodox Collaboration

Francesca Cattaneo stood, as they were supposed to, behind the red line at the helipad and wished an excruciating death on Kevin Pink, her colleague and rival. One of his immaculately polished loafers crested over the line, a head start as infuriating as the one he’d taken in Aspen. If only Kevin, ignoring this boundary as he ignored all others, would be swept into the rotor or blasted from the roof. Then Francesca could step forward alone and present the report–her report–to Mr. Graves.

As Executive Vice President of Shareholder Enhancement, solving the problem of the plant in Schenectady and its sudden profitability drop had been her team’s responsibility. Francesca had fumed when Mr. Graves insisted Kevin, the Executive Vice President of Value and Quality, collaborate with her. She had only been mollified when Mr. Graves accepted her suggestion to brainstorm at the corporate lodge in Aspen.

High above the skyscraper roof, chopper blades blasted in the evening sky. Francesca gripped her portfolio more tightly and edged onto the heavy red line. Death might not be such a terrible trade if she could beat Kevin.

What a stupid name for an executive, anyway. Real vice presidents had names like Everett or Sebastian or Julian, as if they were adults, not a fourth grader dribbling orange juice down his shirt. Kevin also looked nothing like an executive, with a shock of brown hair that would almost certainly go gray, not silver. His eyes, a common brown, not steel or green or flashing, sat too far apart on his head. Then there was his smile: that witless smirk Francesca had first seen during their ill-fated collaboration in Aspen.

No great rush of air flooded down upon them. The helicopter thudding above, emblazoned with the NYPD logo, flew past and vanished into the night. Then, as a final insult, the overhead lights at the helipad clicked off.

“Go hit the switch.” Kevin looked at her but made no move to do so himself.

“There’s a motion sensor.” Francesca raised one hand and snapped her fingers.

Nothing happened. Francesca snapped again, then waved both her hands over her head. The darkness seemed to laugh at her, or perhaps that was Kevin.

“Fine. I’ll go hit the switch.” The lights clicked back on the moment Kevin took a step. “Never mind. There’s a motion sensor.”

This was feeling more and more like that night in Aspen when, long after everyone else had fallen asleep, they had poured over reams of consultant reports from the Schenectady plant. Despite Kevin’s blithe confidence, none of it made any sense to her. Francesca had already rightsized the floor workers, instituted new KPIs for all remaining headcounts, externalized the production lines, and brought in consultants to reconfigure their core competencies. Somehow profitability continued to fall. During their argument, Francesca had even stooped to waking her assistant Helen and showing her the documents, trying to prove a point about being out of the loop.

“What’s this number?” Helen had pointed to something far off the main spreadsheets. “It seems to be rising exponentially.”

Francesca had scolded her for even looking; obviously executive compensation and contractor expenses weren’t the issue. Once they’d shoved Helen out of the room and gotten back to real work, Francesca had a sudden revelation. Her gaze snapped between the report and Kevin’s far-too-wide T-zone and she realized that they would have to outsource the entire plant: not just the production line but the sales force and technical support and everyone else.

Something about that realization, something about the vast gulf of Kevin’s shiny forehead, something about the free martinis at the lodge bar: it all combined to overpower Francesca. In her excitement about the value they would create for shareholders, she had reached out and grabbed hold of Kevin’s share through his pants. Much to Francesca’s shock, he seemed to agree this unorthodox collaboration created a win-win scenario.

But, while she had moved the needle and helped him issue a new stream of revenue, somehow they never managed to circle back and drill down on her low-hanging fruit. After waking up alone the next morning, Francesca had discovered Kevin and his team had flown to New York. She had only been saved by Mr. Graves’s weekly uninterruptible-for-any-reason Hamptons retreat.

So here Francesca waited, toes on the red line, for the opportunity of her career, and she wouldn’t be stopped by that giant-browed, inexplicably sexy toad. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Kevin and couldn’t bring herself to look away, a paradox only resolved when the motion sensor again determined no human life was present on the helipad.

###

Edmund Holloway Graves slammed into the lobby through the front door, having stepped out of a car and walked across the street like a peasant. His brushy mustache bristled with indignation. How dare the mayor issue a no-fly order the day of his return from the Hamptons. Heightened terror alerts were meant for the hoi polloi, not for titans of industry.

His tempestuous progress toward the elevators was only arrested when a small woman, her graying hair done up in a bun ten years out of fashion, tip-toed in front of him. She clutched a black binder to her chest. The others in the lobby gasped, for they knew no mere paperwork could save her from his wrath.

Mr. Graves drew himself up to his full five feet and seven inches. “What is the meaning of this?”

“Please, Mr. Graves, sir,” started Helen, a good enough supplication that he refrained from immediately smiting her. “I work with Ms. Cattaneo.” She ruffled through the papers in her binder and withdrew a sheet showing the expenses of flying one hundred and fifty-seven people to Aspen. “I think I may have an idea on how to increase profitability.”

Mr. Graves examined the paper for several long seconds. Then he twitched his mustache and two security guards, one under each arm, escorted Helen out of the building.

The Taste of Victory

The hardest part was shopping. Denise has the most awful taste. I scrolled through dozens of sites before I found a matching turquoise and orange plaid bag and got it delivered express to our hotel in Paris. The ordeal took not only my time but also my soul.

By comparison, stealing was easy.

Michael switched bags while Denise was at the end of the security queue. She looked one way. He swooped in the other. One ugly bag at her feet, a second one in his hand. Then it was my turn. Walk toward Michael, head down, phone in my right hand, left hand open, switch again. I hurried to the counter, checked the hideous bag, and took my flight. When we landed, I took my time disembarking so she would be well ahead of me.

Not that there was any reason to worry. Denise hadn’t checked any bags and, more importantly, she didn’t know me from Eve. Michael hadn’t introduced me to any of his, er, “associates.” When I asked why, he flashed that infuriating smirk of his and tapped the side of his head below his platinum blond mohawk. Because, Katherine, he had said, they might stop being associates and become marks.

I stopped at a coffee shop in the terminal. Window shopped at the duty free. Studied the departing flights. Even with all that when I arrived at the baggage carousel the luggage from our flight had only started arriving. A flustered-looking woman with three little children—two in a stroller, one strapped to her chest, and maybe a fourth on the way—retrieved a suitcase as tall as she was. A man in a suit and an obvious toupee picked up a large black roller. A young soldier grabbed his kit bag. A neon green backpack, tilted upside down and at a jaunty angle, went round and round without being claimed.

Then there was a pause. The mother and the businessman and the soldier left. The green backpack rode the carousel. I flicked my nails against my palm and tapped my toes. And, at last, the turquoise and orange bag tilted off a conveyor belt and down. I rushed forward and cradled it. Nothing seemed out of order.

At least, not until I turned around and, with my first step, bounced off a large, uniformed chest. I started to apologize and walk around but I was stopped, less by the cop’s extended arm and more by the sight of Denise behind him.

Shit.

“How do you explain this?” She waved the duplicate bag at me.

I looked at my identical bag.

“Uh, we both have great taste?” I hate lying.

“Arrest her!”

The cop sighed through his mustache. “Look, she’s telling me you stole her bag and replaced it with an identical one.”

“That’s insane.” I looked him directly in the sunglasses. “That sort of thing only happens in movies.”

“If you let me take a look in it—”

“Yeah.” Denise’s face distorted into a Cheshire grin. “If this is all a coincidence, you have nothing to hide.”

“Lady, you’re not helping.” The cop stepped between us.

Feeling defeated, I shrugged the bag off my shoulder and opened it. The cop took his penile-compensation-sized flashlight and peered in—only to immediately recoil. I smiled. Michael and I had figured any law enforcement were likely to be the repressed type and a pretty young woman with a bag full of sex toys would be the perfect way to drive them off.

“I, uh, that’s not what. I mean—um, you’re free to go.”

They must have heard Denise’s shriek all the way back in France. She called me every name under the sun and then invented a couple new ones for the cop.

“Why are you so convinced I stole your bag?” I asked when she stopped to pant a few breaths. “I don’t even know you.”

“Michael!” She pointed a finger in my face. “You must be Michael’s new girl. He got you to steal my stuff. You know he’s addic—”

She paused and looked at the cop, whose brow furrowed into his sunglasses.

“—addicted to. The. Um.”

“We should probably have a talk.” The cop took her by the arm and gestured at a door marked ‘Security.’

I snatched up the ugly duplicate bag and fled. Only once I was in my Uber did I pause to breathe. Then, as we were merging onto the freeway, I reached over the seat and grabbed the driver’s scalp. He screeched as I pulled his bad toupee off his head and there was an explosion of blond hair.

“Hey, what gives?” Michael swerved through three lanes with only two honks. “Are you trying to get us killed?”

“You absolute knob!” I waved the toupee in his face. “You knew she was going to get the cops the whole time.”

To my utter frustration, he smiled his little smirk.

“Sure. She always does. Did they arrest her this time?”

Now I was laughing too.

“I think so. Did you get the stuff?”

“Oh yeah.” Michael picked the small suitcase from the airport carousel off the passenger seat. I wrestled it into the back and pried it open. Inside was the original green and turquoise bag. I tore into that and found, wrapped in some truly terrible granny panties, a little brown bag. And, inside of that, well. I buried my face in the contents and took a deep, deep breath.

See, Denise was wrong. Michael isn’t the addict. I am.

I broke off a small corner of the cheese from the bag and laid it on my tongue. The forbidden flavor, rich and earthy, like nothing available in the States, coursed through me, sending endorphins shooting from one side of my brain to the other like fireworks.

Someday I will find the little farm outside Paris where Denise buys this unpasteurized cheese. Until then, I’ll keep shopping for ugly bags.

Family Portrait

The day we got back from the hospital was the first time dad let me come to the back of his studio. He clicked on the fan and opened a safe, the big one, the one with all the chemicals. He explained through his mask how, if he mixed the wrong ones, they would create deadly chlorine gas. Dad said if he told me to run, I should run, and don’t take time to think about him. It was a parent’s duty to make sure their children outlived them.

After the photo developed he led me to the front of the store. No customers that day, of course, not in person, but their pictures hung on every wall. Mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters smiling around a Christmas tree or posed with the family dog. I watched as my father framed the photograph, long experience guiding his fingers, his tongue stuck to his top lip as he concentrated. He hung the frame behind the counter and I stared at it even though I knew what I’d see. Me, front teeth missing and curly-haired, and mom, wisp-thin and pale, sitting on the couch, both of us laughing as I pushed her wig loose.

“There, you see, Claire?” Dad kissed me on the top of my head. I had never heard his voice crack before. “As long as someone’s picture is on the wall, they’re still with us.”

###

After he unlocked the door to the studio, the janitor slipped the master key onto his ring and stepped back. I walked past him and into my father’s studio. Even once the janitor turned on the lights it felt dark, darker than I could ever remember. There was no place on Earth I belonged more than the studio my parents had built, this temple to my father’s craft and my mother’s intelligence, yet as I walked to the counter I felt like an intruder.

“Lot of dust in here.”

The janitor’s grumbling profaned this sacred place. I ignored him and ran one finger along the frame of the photo, that photo, the one of me and mom that we developed twenty years ago. The right side of the frame was smoother than the left, worn down with finger oil, caressed again and again for years. The wood felt like mom’s skin from before the treatment, from when she would swing me in her strong arms and I would laugh and laugh until hiccups forced us to stop, her joy still ringing in my ears.

If only there was a picture of my father on the wall. I wanted to hear him too. It had been so hard, the two of us alone during that long first year after mom passed. We spent all our time filling scrapbooks with every photo we could find.

Pictures of mom as a baby, cooing at us from the page. Pictures of her at prom on the arm of Rocky what's-his-name, the quarterback, that jerk. We cut him out. Pictures of mom leaning against a railing with a waterfall behind her, their first road trip, her happiness flowing and tumbling through us like a river. Pictures of her at their wedding, bouquet in one hand, her long, brown hair done up like a movie star. Pictures of mom holding me to her chest, as if I could feel her arms around me still, as if I were sleeping against her and nothing since had happened.

I asked my dad once why he wasn’t in any of the pictures. He rubbed my head, mussed my hair, and told me his mug would have broken the lens. I had known he was teasing, I could always tell, and I informed him that answer was no fair. He said he was the one who took pictures. Every relationship had one person who took pictures and one who was in them. Then he leaned back and brought his camera up. I had smiled a missing-toothed grin back at him, click. Then I asked, since he wasn’t in the pictures, when he died would he be gone for real? I never got an answer.

I can feel mom in the studio, her presence stronger even than the janitor. I can feel some of the people in his sample photographs, some of those happy smiling mothers and fathers. I even feel one of the little girls, the one with red hair and braces and a dachshund that my dad had somehow coaxed into looking at the camera. They were here with me. Dad wasn’t.

“Jesus Christ!”

The janitor ran out from the dark room, sweating and stammering, keys jangling on his belt. He paused in the middle of the room, looked at me, looked through me, then kept running, a stream of profanities chasing him.

It was quiet now. No grumbling, no swearing, no hum of the ventilation fan. I walked to the back, knowing what I was likely to find and still drawn forward, one step after the other. Nothing so dramatic as a yellow cloud of gas, no, that had long dissipated, but dad had left the safe open and chemicals out. His body slumped against the wall across the room, a trail of coughed-up blood marking his path. A photograph, crinkled by his tight grip and only released after death, lay next to him. I smiled out from the picture, my husband behind me, my nose red against my white parka. I waved him forward in the picture, come on dad, put the camera away and ski with me, it’s an easy run. Everything will be fine.

He’d left a note on his desk, I noticed, perhaps written while he waited for the reaction. I reached to my shoulder and squeezed mom’s hand. I had pictures of us all at my house, I told her. We could be together there as soon as I forced myself to read his note, his one last, simple sentence.

No parent should outlive their child.

Sketched on the Wrong Page

On Saturday, Cora found Anson standing in the butcher shop and tracing one finger back and forth across the glass above the steaks. When she walked in and said good morning, Anson’s brown eyes widened as if he were a prisoner granted a sudden reprieve, as if he was rediscovering a world long thought lost. His fingers, gaunt and grease-stained from years at the plant, pulled back from their relentless march across the glass and folded into one another, mashing and reforming in a chaotic, anxious pattern.

“Planning to grill tonight?” Cora gestured at the steak display. “The smell over the fence always drives Ben wild.”

Anson shook his head. “Not tonight. Not for a while.” He looked down at his fingers and seemed unable to stop their gesticulation.

Cora knew she ought to say something, perhaps apologize, but she had never been any good at broaching difficult subjects. Instead, she held motionless, her basket frozen in front of her, as if her stillness might quiet his stammering hands. At last, Anson looked up.

“I haven’t told Liz yet. I don’t know how I will. Is Ben–?” He trailed off, unable to finish the question, then jammed his hands into his pockets.

The butcher emerged, carrying the roast Cora had ordered wrapped in brown paper. Its extravagance answered Anson’s unfinished question: Ben was shipping out to the new plant. The company could replace grease-stained mechanics overseas easier than they could smooth-talking managers. Cora hadn’t been the one who relocated the plant, hadn’t been the one who laid everyone off, and yet she felt as if the bills she handed the butcher came from thirty pieces of silver.

“Anson, I’m so sorry.”

“You're sorry. Ben's sorry. The company is sorry.” Anson returned his fingers to the glass between him and the steaks. “I feel like everyone's sorry except me.”

###

When Cora got home, she found her husband working on the lawn mower. Ben never could find enough machines to fix, she thought, not since he’d transitioned off the floor at the plant. He slaked his thirst by taking apart things that had been working fine and Cora could never tell whether or not his attention had improved them. He looked up from a disassembled motor as she walked by.

“Cormac ran off with his friends.” Ben didn’t move from the garage, didn’t rush to kiss her like he once had. “He promised to be back by dinner. Gwen is in her room.”

Cora thanked him, even if she wanted to tell him keeping track of his own children was no great accomplishment, and he returned to his tinkering. No asking after her morning, no acknowledgement of his upcoming move, no professment of love, no anything. She went to prepare the roast alone by the kitchen window. From there, Cora watched their neighbor’s laundry swaying on the line, Anson’s work clothes strung out for the next week, those five shirts blissfully unaware that her husband had shipped the job away.

###

Sunday’s temperature crept up to triple digits so Ben packed the kids off to the pool. Cora stayed home to clean and, as she took a trash bag to the bin, she noticed Anson sitting on the porch steps, a beer held between his knees, staring at an oil stain on the cracked cement. Cora watched him for more than a minute. He didn’t bring the bottle up to his lips. She left the bag on the porch and retrieved a beer from her fridge. Anson didn’t react when she sat next to him on the steps.

“I thought you might like a cold one.” Cora offered him the new bottle.

“Mine’s full.” Anson shook his bottle, which sloshed full of liquid. “If I were drunk I could live with myself, but I’m stone sober.” Anson took a sip, grimaced, then dropped the beer on the ground and leaned forward, staring at it. “Liz took the kids to her mother’s house.”

“I’m sorry.” Cora knew again, like she had at the butcher’s, that it was the wrong thing to say. How could she be sorry when his misfortune paid for her family’s private school and an electric dishwasher?

“This isn’t how a man’s supposed to act.” Anson buried his head between his grease-stained hands. “He’s supposed to be strong. He’s supposed to know what to do. He certainly isn’t supposed to cry in front of his wife, in front of his kids.”

Anson was crying now. Cora couldn’t express her sympathy again, not when he knew as well as she did it could never be truly sincere.

“Ben’s lucky, you know?” He lifted his head, showing the tracks where big tears had rolled into his unshaven stubble. “Not because he’s getting shipped out to the new plant. Because he has you. Someone who won’t laugh even when a man acts like this.”

“There are ways a woman is supposed to act, too.” Cora took a deep drink from the bottle she’d brought. The silence after was unbearable, so she stumbled out more words, more than she had ever dared to let someone hear. “She’s supposed to be loving, even when she isn’t loved. She’s supposed to believe, even when she’s lied to. She’s supposed to support her husband, even when he’s a horse’s ass.”

As she spoke, Cora found herself drawn toward Anson’s face. His big brown eyes, wet along the edges, blinked once, twice, while his jaw worked like he wanted to say something but couldn’t quite work out what it was. Cora didn’t know what to say either, but expressing herself had felt good, as if she were now free of all the lies, and so, at a loss for words, she kissed him. She brought her hand up to caress the bristles on his cheek, felt his fingers brush against her knee, closed her eyes as they hung in a liminal space, their lips trembling against each other, neither commiting nor rejecting, for what seemed an eternity but must have been only a few seconds. Then Anson pulled back and Cora opened her eyes and the moment passed.

“I–I’m sorry.” It was his turn to say it.

Cora didn’t wait to hear which part he regretted. She fled across the baking hot lawn, past the open windows of their other neighbors, who until now hadn’t crossed her mind, and into the house a scab had built.

###

Cormac and Gwen refused to go to bed that night, like they knew their mother had momentous and terrible news and hoped to delay her. Cormac sat in the bath long after the pool’s chlorine rinsed off, his already pink and pruned skin contorting into a peach seed, and Gwen insisted on story after story, always about a heroic knight rescuing a distressed damsel. They were an hour past their bedtime when Cora finally closed their bedroom door.

She had hoped Ben might be asleep when she walked in. It would be easier to justify delay, another day, another week, another year, but he was awake in bed. He looked at her over the top of his Mandarin-English dictionary and, for a moment, he looked like he had when they met all those years ago.

He had been so easy to love then, a smile and a promise and a twirl on the dance floor, back when they had no children and the future stretched before them, a vast and unknowable notebook waiting to be sketched with their happy memories. Cora made herself remember how he instead filled their story with broken friendships, with ambition and professional cruelty, with columns of numbers rather than people. Every coworker they’d hosted, every wife she’d befriended, they were expendable stepping stones for him, and, other than Anson, no one from those days still talked to her.

She couldn’t look at Ben, not in this instant, so she stared out the window and across the lawn, to where she saw one light turned on in the next-door house, one window open, one silhouette leaning against the frame. She might have ruined that friendship on her own, but that it was even there for her to ruin proved there was still loyalty in the world even if she had become so far removed that she couldn’t remember how it felt.

“This isn’t working. We’re not working.”

Ben reached for a bookmark, which had been precisely stationed on the nightstand, and folded the dictionary in his lap. He took off his glasses and set them on top. A frown formed and he nodded slowly, as if she had said everything he was thinking.

“I know.”

She hugged him and he patted her on the back. It wasn’t the hug of a husband and wife, they both knew that, not anymore, but it comforted her nonetheless; a final admission, the conclusion of one chapter and, at last, they could head out in their different ways, two ships on divergent courses, and write another.

The End

Rancho Valdez

Rancho Valdez is a census-designated place (CDP) in San Raimundo County, California. The population was 2,764 as of the 2000 census. It is located on a broad mesa between an interstate freeway and the US-Mexican border. Primarily a bedroom community, the largest employers include the Zenith-Valdez School District, the Valdez Canyon Water District, and Gellman Health Partners.

HISTORY

The area now known as Rancho Valdez was originally inhabited by semi-nomadic bands of indigenous Americans who estabished seasonal villages as they moved between upland and coastal areas.

During the Mexican colonial era, 14,650 acres comprising much of modern Rancho Valdez and the surrounding canyons were given as a land grant and worked primarily as a cattle and horse ranch. The name of the modern town descends from this time.

Some 3,000 acres of this was purchased by Orpheus Clampton in 1883 and organized as the Valdez Canyon Agricultural District. A lawsuit between the District and the heirs of the Valdez land grant hinged on a clause in the sale contract which had not been translated properly into Spanish in the copy of the deed of sale signed by the Valdez family. A judge in Zenith decided in favor of the Valdez Canyon Agricultural District, adding another 10,000 acres to the company's holdings and leaving the rancho with only the land surrounding the main hacienda.

Cattle ranching, primarily for meat, dominated the local economy until the construction of freeway between San Raimundo and Berrendo in 1954, when a gravel quarry in the canyon between Rancho Valdez and Zenith became the largest employer. The quarry would continue to provide the backbone of the local economy until its closure in 1996.

Construction dominated the next phase of Rancho Valdez, as bedroom communities pushed farther east from San Raimundo. Easy water availability at the Valdez Canyon Reservoir and flat land for building on the mesa allowed for thousands of new homes, mostly constructed between 1998 and 2007. 

DEMOGRAPHICS

Population (1990 census): 431

Population (2000 census): 2,764 (+641%)

Population (2008 estimate): 4,278 (+155%)

Smoke and Mirrors

Alice told herself she would start dating again once her daughter moved out. It was a pleasant dream because it was a remote dream. Nothing about it required her immediate attention, not when there were pictures to hang on the refrigerator and talent shows to attend. Even after kickball ended and crushes started, when unicorn posters morphed into boy bands and pigtails were cut short and dyed black, an empty nest seemed too distant to worry about.

Then Cecelia was ensconced in a dorm at State and Alice ran out of excuses. Two days later, she found herself outside her favorite bar with the profile of a man named Jim on her cell phone. Her dream's arrival made her question whether she wanted to live it.

Alice found herself envying Miles, the bar’s lumpy bouncer, who slouched against the doorframe with a cigarette in his mouth. Although the autumn weather was turning cold, he wore a black tank top which displayed his cheap tattoos, their ink turning blue and their images flabbed out of focus.

“I thought you weren’t allowed to smoke this close to the door,” she said.

“The state of California says one thing and my boss says another. Only one of them cuts my check.” He held out his pack, a single cigarette extended towards her. “Want to bum?”

“Absolutely.” Alice allowed him to light it for her.

“Where are the girls tonight?”

“Who knows?” Alice took a long drag, savoring the heat as much as the nicotine. Just a few minutes and she would go in, she told herself.

“You seem down.”

“I’m meeting someone.”

“And what? She ran over your cat?”

“A male someone,” said Alice. “For the first time since Nick got locked up.”

“He sounded like a real son of a bitch,” said Miles, ashing his cigarette.

There was the problem, Alice thought. She’d only ever been with one man, and he was a son of a bitch. Alice and Nick, the yearbook had shouted, the couple most likely to live happily ever after. They married straight out of high school and she was pregnant a year later. Nick took a job on a road crew and she went to work as a secretary. A year later, Nick started vanishing after his shift. He’d come home late with puncture marks in his arms and Alice would go to work the next day with a new bruise.

She tried to leave, tried three times, but her mother died, her father wouldn’t have anything to do with her, and her siblings all moved out of state. She couldn’t get it to stick, just kept collecting one broken bone and one apology after another. At last, Nick was arrested breaking into some mansion on the coast. He went away. The divorce stuck. Nick popped in and out of prison, never on the streets long enough to interfere with their life.

Jim was different, she told herself, a software engineer with carpal tunnel syndrome and a love of Indian food. She was different too. She wasn’t some dewy-eyed high schooler convinced she could find true love. Alice was a survivor, a kick-ass single mom who created a real life for her and her daughter. She could do anything she put her mind to, including an internet date. Even if it would be her first in eighteen years.

“Thanks for the smoke,” Alice said, putting her cigarette out in Miles’ ashtray. “Time to face the firing squad.” She pulled her bag to her shoulder, steeled herself, and took a step toward the door.

“Wait just a minute,” said Miles, slamming his arm across her path. His expression turned stern, the same face he made when he was ejecting a rowdy customer. “I’m going to need to see some ID, young lady.”

Alice called him a pig and a fascist, but the two of them couldn’t hold the charade for long. They both broke down giggling. Miles opened the door for her, the motion stretching the tattoo on his shoulder far enough that Alice could see it was a cartoon moose. She took a deep breath. She hoped Jim would make her laugh too.

###

Jim wasn’t funny. He was also considerably more bald than his profile picture, ten years out of date, had implied.

Neil’s profile said he was single. The wedding band falling out of his pants pocket had a different story.

Geoff seemed quite normal. Alice had a soft spot for a British accent and he made her laugh. She agreed to see him again, and then once more. He proposed on the third date. Turned out his visa paperwork wasn’t quite as in order as he had said.

Jaimie whispered sweet nothings into her ear over email and only lewd suggestions in person.

Anibal, a forty-year-old accountant with a 403B, turned out to be Cecelia’s age and living in his mother’s spare room.

Lionel didn’t realize she smoked. Alice, thinking back to creating her profile while Lionel shouted in her face about lung cancer, realized she hadn’t ticked the smoker box. Then Miles wrapped his meaty hands around Lionel’s shoulders and ushered him toward the door.

###

Alice forced herself to go on one last date before Cecelia came home for winter break. She and Eric had been messaging for weeks, part of a careful plot to weed out any deception. She knew the names of his kids. She knew the name of his ex, whose Facebook privacy settings were lax enough to confirm they were actually divorced. This time, Alice would not be mislead.

The weather had taken a brisk turn and she was surprised to see it had gotten to Miles. He wore a garish green-and-red Christmas sweater with the moose from his tattoo clumsily stitched across the front. When he saw her coming, he tapped a cigarette out and offered it to her. Alice waved it off. She wanted to be her best for Eric.

“What’s with the sweater?” she asked. “Present from an aunt who doesn’t like you?”

“Fresh from my workshop,” Miles said. He grabbed onto either side and stretched it flat for her to see. The sweater nearly fell apart from exertion as the yarn strained against its loose stitches.

“You knit?”

“Surprised?”

“Everyone has a secret life,” said Alice, waving her hand at the door.

“Who is it this time?” Miles took a long drag and exhaled slowly. The smoke, heavy in the cold air, swirled around his head.

“I’ve done my research. Tall, handsome, not married, responsible. I think this one might take.”

“Best of luck.” Miles held the door open.

###

An hour later, Miles held the door open again as Eric walked out. Alice moved to the bar and ordered a scotch. After that ordeal, she needed to nurse something with a bit of a kick.

There was nothing wrong with Eric. Nothing hidden, nothing secret, nothing save his complete disinterest in her. They had started with small talk and never moved on. He was polite, well-spoken, and, as quickly became obvious, bored. After an hour, he had stood, shaken her hand like it was a client meeting, and left.

As Alice’s second scotch wound down and the bartender started to cough into her hand, Miles sat on the stool next to her.

“Closing time,” he said.

“I know.”

“Looks like it didn’t work out.”

“This one was supposed to be different,” Alice said. “I did my research. There was nothing wrong with him.”

“That’s where you’re mistaken,” said Miles. “There was something very wrong with him. I didn’t say because I didn’t want to ruin your date.”

“Yeah, what was it? Does he shoot heroin? Is he under investigation by the SEC? Did a judge order him chemically castrated?”

“Nope,” said Miles, resting a hand on her shoulder. “His problem was he’s not good enough for you.”

Alice tried to laugh, but the humor choked into a half-sob in her throat. She thought she didn’t want to cry in front of Miles, but when she turned to look at him--his eyes furrowed, his mouth a slight frown--she realized she’d never wanted to do anything more.

###

“You’re sleeping with the bouncer? Why?” asked Cecelia. She slammed the refrigerator shut, took two steps, then paused to contemplate. “More importantly, how?”

“I’m dating him,” said Alice. She held out her glass. Cecelia poured some wine.

“So you’re not sleeping with him? He can't get it up, can he?”

“Not as far as my daughter needs to know.” Alice tried to be annoyed at the sexual renaissance Cecelia was experiencing at college, but she didn’t have much capacity for that sort of thing anymore. Something about breaking the nest had evaporated all her helicopter instincts, it seemed.

“But he’s old. And fat.”

“I’m old and fat too.”

“Yeah, but not like the bouncer.”

“Stop that. He has a name,” said Alice. “I was hoping you’d be happy for me. Miles is sweet. He knits his own sweaters. He doesn’t lie to me. And he’s the first guy I’ve been with since your father.”

“That reminds me.” Cecelia stopped prancing and straighted her blouse. “Dad’s out again. He called me yesterday. He wants to see you.”

Alice groaned and shook her head. Nobody could ruin her holiday spirit like Nick.

“I know, mom, I know. Please?”

“I told him I never wanted to see him again.”

“He sounds different,” said Cecelia. “Like he found religion or something. Just one meeting. It could be my Christmas present.”

“Fine,” said Alice, “but only if it’s somewhere public.”

###

Miles was wearing another terrible sweater, this one cotton-candy pink with a big orange square across the chest. Alice declared it a second masterpiece as she accepted first a kiss and then a cigarette.

“Who is it this time?” he asked.

“Some big idiot,” said Alice. She looked him up and down. “With an ugly sweater.”

They both laughed. Miles put out his arm and tucked her in, huddling her in close. She enjoyed his softness, his closeness, his warmth, despite the itchy yarn.

“I wish I was here just to see you,” she said after a minute. “I promised my daughter I’d meet Nick. I wanted to do it somewhere familiar.”

“What?” said Miles. For the first time since they’d met, Alice heard a note of fear in his voice.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “You don’t have to talk to him. You don’t even have to meet him.”

Miles’s arms fell away. He looked up the street, as if plotting an escape, then down the other way. He twitched slightly and shook his head. Alice followed his gaze and saw Nick walking up.

“Baby, it’s been too long,” said Nick. His grin was too large for his goatee. He opened his arms and strode toward Alice, who ducked out of the way. “What, you won’t hug me?”

“I didn’t even want to see you,” she said. “This was Cecelia’s idea.”

Nick’s smile wavered. His eyes shifted across her face and Alice saw a shadow of the old times. She wondered where he had been before he came here. Then he traced to Miles.

“Big M!” exclaimed Nick. “I didn’t expect to see you out! How’d you sweet talk the board?”

“You two know each other?” Alice’s surprise overtook her impulse to cold-shoulder her ex-husband.

“We were in Calipatria together, back--what? Sixteen? Seventeen? They say Big M busted some guy so bad the docs had to sew pieces back on. Hey, nice sweater.”

“It was a long time ago, Nick,” said Miles.

“You were in prison?” said Alice. “Together?”

She took one step back, then turned and ran. A block down, she bent over to take off her shoes. When she looked back, she saw Nick trying to follow her and Miles holding him. She took her shoes in her hands and kept running, her bare feet slapping at the cold concrete.

###

Miles called three times that evening. On the third call, Alice picked up. She yelled until he stopped apologizing, then told him never to call again.

Nick called as well. She told him the same thing. Nick called again. And again. And again. He stopped on the same day, surely by coincidence, that Alice saw a notice in the newspaper of an arrest three blocks from her apartment building.

A week stretched into a month, then two. Cecelia went back to school. Nick was arraigned and pled, vanishing into the world behind bars. Alice went out with her friends, always careful to avoid her favorite bar. Miles didn’t call.

The week before Cecelia was due to arrive home for Spring Break, Alice found herself wandering to the bar. She stopped a block away. The weather was turning warm and Miles had ditched his ugly sweaters for his wrinkled blue tattoos. He saw her. They held eye contact. Even across the street she could see him blinking. Slow and steady, like a moose. He didn’t wave or shout.

Alice walked up, her eyes on the ground.

“You didn’t call,” she said.

“You said not to.”

“I don’t like being lied to, Miles.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Why did you?”

Miles heaved himself onto a stool. He leaned his head against the building’s brick facade and gazed at the blue sky.

“I spend all my time these days trying to avoid people like your ex-husband. I used to spend all my time being a person like him.” Miles shook his head, rolling it back and forth against the bricks. “I do whatever I can to be better now. Yoga, karaoke, knitting. Anything that might make the past go away. No matter how many hobbies I collect, I can never be a new person. There are some stains you can’t take away.”

“We’ve all done things we should regret,” said Alice. She picked up Miles’s hand, feeling the calluses across his knuckles. “That’s the difference between you and Nick. He doesn’t regret a thing. He’s not trying to hide who he was because he doesn’t see anything wrong with it.”

“I love you, Alice.” Miles squeezed her hand. “That’s why I lied. I thought once you knew what I had done, you’d want nothing to do with me.”

“I know who you are. You’re the one who stopped calling me after I asked him to.”

“Would you like a smoke?” asked Miles, thumbing a cigarette clear of the pack with his free hand.

Alice nodded, but instead of accepting the smoke, she leaned in for a kiss.

Hiding Places

I knew management would come to me when he died. Next on the duty roster. They gave him a minute’s silence out of the morning meeting, then came the assignments. For management, one less name on a spreadsheet, one less check to cut. Retirement and heart attack: they see little difference. Soon there will be a new name, and they will need a cleaned, empty locker.

There’s no reason I should protest the assignment. We all do what we need to do for the promised land, the golden retirement. Just a few more years. He didn’t make it. I will.

His locker is against the back of the restaurant off the concourse, dead center in a long line. The advantage, he’d told me, of having both names start with a ‘J.’ Whether the order was alphabetical or reverse, first name or last, he’d always be in the middle. He liked to watch the first few people try something, in case they failed, but never wanted to be responsible for the final impression.

The locker’s handle is flesh-searing hot in the sun. I’ve been around long enough to expect this. I know to use my gloves. I remember a time, decades past, when I knew less but expected more, and a child threw up on the concourse. It was nasty stuff, slurpee and cotton candy, bright red with yellow lumps. The child had run while sick. They trailed puddles, left them behind planters, on seats, around and on the door to the restaurant. Management was screaming over the radio, clean it up, clean it up, nobody’s spending any money, as if we couldn’t see right in front of us.

He was calm, professional, jaded. He told me to get a broom from the closet behind the restrooms while he spread sawdust. I was new then. I didn’t realize he was nobody’s boss. I ran, management sobbing over the airwaves from my belt, and wrenched the closet door open. I didn’t look and instead grabbed a handful of black widow instead of the broom.

Lucky it didn't bite me. I've seen pictures of people with their arm swollen up purple like they're fruiting a plum. I threw it away. It hit the far wall in a jiggle of waving legs.I grabbed the broom and ran.

After we cleaned everything up and management had breathed into a paper bag, I told him about the spider. Oh, yeah, he said. That closet is lousy with them. Around here, every closet is. I asked him why he hadn’t warned me. He laughed in my face. Said it was a rite of passage. I didn’t know enough to be angry with him then. Yesterday, I would have screamed in his face. Today, I can’t.

I open his locker. There are no spiders inside. At least, no visible ones. The pile of trash underneath his spare uniforms would make a perfect hiding place, down among the candy wrappers and beer cans and fast food bags. The best idea would be to scoop the mess all into my trash bag at once and then hit the sticky walls with a hose. I’m paid by the hour, so instead I reach with my pickers and, like chopsticks for a single grain of rice, lift a Snickers wrapper. It’s as good a way to grind out my time as any other.

The pile dwindles. No unexpected visitors yet. I pull out an old paystub, its blue ink bleeding across the yellowed paper. I smile at the hourly rate. This was three raises ago. Nostalgic. I see he hadn’t withheld any money. He came to me three years back, asked me to look over his retirement paperwork. Two or three lost dreams ago, I’d taken some accounting courses at the community college. To his mind I was an expert. It didn’t need an expert to see that he’d be picking trash, cleaning vomit, and dodging spiders for the rest of his life. I told him this and he insisted I had run the numbers wrong. I told him to ask a professional if he didn’t trust me. He said he couldn’t afford one. Exactly.

My pickers select a beer can and pull it from the pile. It is ancient. I can’t tell what brand it is because the label has faded to white. We are not allowed to drink at work, never have been, which is why he did so often. He’d show up for work blitzed, slurring his words and unable to walk a straight line. Management would shove a picker and a trash cart at him because it was easier than finding someone else to do his job. If he’d been a belligerent drunk, rather than a melancholy one, I think things might have been different. A punched child, a broken window: that would have gotten him fired.

The beer can rattles as I move it into the trash bag. I freeze, then shake it again. Rattle.

The employee party, our first year working together, a few months after the black widow. Everyone else gathered in the concourse, one watered-down drink each, not enough food to go around. Me and him in the flower garden. It’s not there anymore. They paved it over and put up a roller coaster. That night, we drank beers, one after the other, and made love on a bench next to the roses and the artificial babbling brook. After, he picked up his pants and pulled a packet of cigarettes out of the pocket. We weren’t allowed to smoke at work either, which is why he did.

He had tapped one halfway out and offered it to me. I took it. He struck a match, lit mine first and then his. The DJ at the party was playing dance music. I couldn’t tell what the song was. Only the bass made it up to us, thumping through the bench and up my torso. I put my head on his shoulder, cigarette in hand. I didn’t smoke, not really, but I never told him that. He took a long drag and let it out, smoke curling around his mustache and hanging in the still air.

What was he thinking about? I asked him. He shook his head and held up his left hand. The one with the ring on it.

He was very proud of his wedding ring. He had designed them himself, one for him and one for his wife, given the instructions to the jewler. Twenty-four carat gold, like in the movies. All his spending money for three months. A good partner is hard to find, he said, you can’t afford to be cheap. Not if you wanted to keep them.

I was wearing my wedding ring too. Mine was silver in color, not in metal. I used my pinkie and thumb to slip it into my palm. I asked him if she knew about us. He said no, of course not, it would devastate her. He returned the question. No. Another long drag. He turned the ring over and over in his other hand. I put a hand on his leg. He flinched but didn’t move away.

He told me he was starting to feel cheap, like an alloy, and he didn’t like it. I told him I didn’t have any expectations. I knew what we were doing. I knew what people might think. He shook his head. That wasn’t it at all. He dropped the ring into the beer can. It rattled around. He threw it into the babbling brook. It bobbed past the boulders and vanished. He cried. I put my arm around his shoulder. It didn’t help. After a few minutes of sobbing, I got dressed and left.

Two weeks later, two weeks of dodging each other at work, he called me. He said things couldn’t go on the way they had been. I told him it wasn’t up to him anymore. He asked what I meant. I told him we were over. There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. Was he still there? He was. He’d been thinking through things, he said. He was getting a divorce. I called him an idiot and hung up.

I cut the can open. It was the one. He’d saved it all these years, saved it for decades. I shake the ring into my hand. I’d always assumed he’d been ripped off, that the jeweler knew he wouldn’t see any difference. The ring I am holding is just as gorgeous, just as yellow, just as pure as that day he threw it down a brook. Not a fortune, not really, but probably a few hundred dollars melted down. Maybe more if his design is worth anything.

The ring slips into my chest pocket. A little step closer to retirement.

There is no more treasure to be found. Nothing but piles and piles of trash. I take an hour to bag it up, then another ten minutes running his uniforms to the wardrobe office. They will cut his nametag off and stitch a new one on. The attendant asks if my shirt is fitting properly. I don’t think about it before I touch my chest. There’s the ring. I shake my head. They ask if I’m feeling well. I nod, it’s a hot day, that’s all, excuse me please. Break, lunch, six more hours of patrolling the concourse, stabbing stray hot dogs and napkins and paper cups.

I don’t change out of my uniform shirt when I leave. I slide into my car still reeking of popcorn and face paint. My first stop will be a jewelry store, I figure. Then a pawn shop if they don’t offer to buy it. They might ask where I got the ring from. From a friend, I could say. That would be true. From a lover. That would be true as well, though the size might lead to awkward follow-up questions.

Only the weight of the ring alters my course. It feels as though it is dragging down the right half of my body, forcing me to take a turn where I don’t mean. But that’s not exactly it. I drive down one street after another as if on autopilot, until I end up at his house. He hasn’t lived in it since he called me. I think his wife, his ex-wife, might still be here.

The street is quiet, suburban. Nobody is outside. Not in this heat. I walk to the front door. There is no window. No camera. No way to see me. A line of cinderblocks marks an untended rose garden. I pick up the third brick in the row. It’s slightly different in color and much lighter, because it’s made out of plastic.

Look, he had said, the first time I came over. He had slid a tiny compartment open to show me the spare key. Isn’t that clever? And he really did think so.

I slide the compartment open. There’s a house spider hiding in there. I shake it out. No key. His wife, or whoever lives here now, they don’t think as highly of the false cinderblock as he had. I put his ring in the little hiding place. I should leave before anyone sees me, but I can’t quite bring myself to. I had been planning a good riddance. I would have told that to his face. To the hidden compartment, I can only muster a goodbye.

The Things We Throw Away

People love throwing their things away. Coke bottles, newspapers, rusting appliances, even the city’s retired cable car system. No need to repair, no need to update, just pitch them.

I was thrown away too.

The dump frightens other kids because the caretaker keeps Dobermanns. I understand dogs and they understand me, so when my old man ran me out I made a new home with them.

I knew something was wrong that day when I heard barking. I’d been walking home after a foraging expedition and, when I heard the noise, I dove into an overgrown ditch. A boy about my age sprinted down the road with the Dobermanns snarling at his heels. I followed along until the dogs were called off. The boy collapsed somewhere between panting and sobbing, his cheeks flushed and his forehead pale.

“Hey there.”

I emerged from the ditch. He took one look at me and curled away.

Some sight I must have been. I’ve been wearing the same shirt since I was thrown away, mending it with whatever I can find and washing it in the creek. And my face. No razors out here. I once tried to shave with a pocketknife; the infection put me down for a week. Now my scraggly teenage beard is interrupted on one cheek by a long white scar.

“Don’t be scared.” I squatted, hoping to be less overwhelming. “What’s your name?”

“B–b–bruce.” His stutter might be exhaustion or it might be nerves.

“I’m Lon.” I held out a hand. Bruce hesitated, then unfolded from his pill bug tuck and shook. His hand was soft and warm, like a freshly baked bagel. He didn’t let go, and I didn’t want to either, but that’s why my old man kicked me out. So I pulled back and gestured at the dump. “What are you doing out here?”

“Nothing.” Bruce looked down the road as if he might start running again. Then he added, much quieter, “I wanted to see the cable cars.”

That’s where I live. Old No. 37, formerly of the Main Street line, thrown away when they electrified the trolley. She keeps the rain out well enough.

“Hell, that’s easy enough. Come on.”

I led Bruce across the creek to where I had cut a passage in the chain link. The two Dobermanns were waiting there. When they saw Bruce they growled and he whimpered.

“He’s ok, fellas.” I reached into the bag I’d taken from the restaurant’s dumpster and pulled out a handful of steak fat. I gave it to Bruce. “Here. They won’t bark if you throw it to them.”

He hesitated, looking from me to the dogs to the dripping fat. Then he tossed it, an awkward, halting gesture. Throws like a girl, my old man would have said. In a flash both the fat and the menace in the dog’s eyes were gone.

“They’re softies once you get to know them.” I scratched one behind the ear.

He still hadn’t said much by the time we made it to my home. I was starting to think he might not say much ever when we rounded a corner and, past the piles of old magazines, filthy rags, chicken carcasses, x-ray photographs, and banana peels he saw the cable car for the first time. His eyes bugged out and he whooped in delight.

“Careful, careful,” I laughed. “The caretaker might hear.”

“Do you know what this is?” Bruce ran a hand along a pitted wooden handrail.

Yeah, No. 37, home. I knew that wasn’t the answer Bruce was looking for, so I didn’t say anything.

“A McAllister Model 1903.” He jumped aboard and looked around with religious awe. “The grip’s in perfect condition. They could run this today. Well, once they clear out all the trash.”

I nudged a foot at my mess and grunted.

“Oh, Lon.” Bruce snapped out of his reverie. “This is where you live, isn’t it?”

I was silent.

“I always say the wrong thing. I’m sorry.”

“What’s to be sorry about?” I looked at Bruce. His eyes were brown, I realized, deep and thoughtful like a calf’s. Then his gaze dropped and I continued. “I came here because my old man didn’t like me being different.”

“Sometimes I feel different too.”

I paused mid-step, one foot elevated and dangling, daring myself to believe.

“The others at school,” Bruce continued, “they don’t get why I like buses and trains and cable cars so much. They’re all obsessed with hot rods.”

“Oh.” My foot slipped down. I didn’t much care about public transportation, other than for a roof. It certainly wasn’t what I had been talking about.

Outside, the Dobermanns ran off.

“He’s starting his rounds early.” I grabbed Bruce by the arm. “We’ve got to go.”

It hadn’t taken the caretaker long to find my first camp. The dogs betrayed me by accident. They didn’t understand why one of their friends wanted to kill the other. He burned everything I left behind. I lived uncomfortable and wet in the woods for a week before slinking into No. 37, \ on the far side of the yard from before.

I dragged Bruce by the hand into the woods. We only stopped once the fence was completely out of sight.

“You should probably go home,” I said. “You don’t want this life.”

Bruce backed down the hill a few steps.

“Hey, Lon?”

“Yeah?”

“When you said you were different, you didn’t mean because you like cable cars, did you?”

I laughed. “No, Bruce, I didn’t.”

He nodded and got another few steps before he stopped.

“I have school tomorrow, but I can get away after class.” Bruce turned and I could see red in his cheeks. This wasn’t the same red as when he was exhausted, but rather a dimpled, freckly blush. “I’ll bring some of my brother’s old clothes. I think you’d look good if we clean you up smart.”

I smiled as he waved, then he turned and ran toward town. And, for the first time in months, I didn’t feel thrown away.

The Storm

My brother made a promise during my third-grade summer, on the moving day when our father got lost in a rainy rush-hour. Nothing moved fast, not the traffic nor our father, but we could all see what was coming. There's rhythm to a slow-motion disaster, like dark clouds building over the plains before a storm.

We crept down some highway or the other. Big drops tapped the roof. Our mother flipped through a Thomas Brothers more rapidly, more randomly. I slowed my breaths, only through the nose, not the mouth. The gas gauge twiddled down. My father's drumming on the steering wheel increased in both volume and tempo until his thunder cracked across the car.

Moron.

Illiterate.

Stupid fucking bitch.

It wasn't his first storm, or even his worst, but Dale and I remembered what our mother had said that day on the telephone with her sister when she thought we weren't listening. Next time he touches me, I'm leaving. Even if I can’t take the boys.

Dale wound his hand over mine and squeezed. He didn't need to say anything. Brothers know. We committed to always be together. No matter what.

He broke his promise.

###

Dale texted to tell me he’d be late. Traffic. I pulled up a map on my phone. All green, not a slowdown in sight. Ten years apart and now he wasn’t coming. I should have known. His wife didn’t want him to see me. It had taken my every effort to break him down. He could sneak away while she was working, I had suggested, and the kids were at school. I offered to drop by his place. No, he’d rather meet at a coffee shop. He must have thought it would be easier to blow me off here.

I should have expected Dale to lie. Our father was the only honest member of the family, and that was because he didn’t see anything wrong with his storms. The rest of us covered up for him, made his excuses, tricked people into seeing the tranquility they wanted. Lying was a sport for us, with everyone fishing to see who could land the biggest falsehood. My mother lied to her sister, to her parents, to herself. After she left, Dale and I lied to teachers, doctors, and schoolmates. We swore we’d never lie to each other. That was a lie, too.

###

Dale started lying to me after he met Abby. He told me she liked me. I knew it wasn’t true. I’d overheard her gossiping with her friends. All of them liked Dale. None of them, especially not her, liked his creepy, pimply younger brother Jake.

Time passed. Abby graduated from Dale's high school girlfriend to his college girlfriend to his fiancée. They had a destination wedding on Maui. Dale offered me the position of best man because he knew I couldn’t afford the trip. I asked if he could front me for the plane ticket. I didn’t need a hotel, I said, I could find a bench to sleep under. He looked me right in the eye and told me money was too tight. He and Abby were already stretching their budget. They couldn’t afford it.

###

The barista kept looking at me. Their little shop was busy. Too busy for someone taking up a whole table on a small black coffee. I’d fit in better if I had a laptop, like the business-casual haircut in the corner booth. I checked my phone. Nothing. Another sip. The cup was empty. They might expect me to buy something else. I didn’t have the money.

The door jingled. Holy shit, he showed up. Dale looked the same a decade later. Tall, athletic, dark-haired, never quite at a full rest. He reminded me of our father: potential energy, raw and disconnected, waiting for an excuse to turn kinetic. He ordered. They gave him a little flag with a number. I hadn’t gotten a little flag, only a paper cup and a dirty look. I wasn’t sure what to say, not after ten years. Lucky for me, Dale was talking as he sat down.

“You have a lot of fucking nerve, Jake, after what you did.”

I lied to Dale a few times too.

###

It was never about money. Abby didn’t want me at her wedding. Fine. They were going to be an ocean away, their dog was boarded, the rest of the family was at the wedding. So I broke into their house. That wasn’t about money either.

I went in through the back. The suburbs have the nosiest fucking neighbors. Broke a window in their kitchen. I couldn’t see what I was doing and should have realized something was wrong. It didn’t break like anything I’d cracked before. I found out later it was a stained glass window Abby’s grandfather had hand-blown for her engagement. Nothing like the safety glass I was used to. I cut long gashes into both arms and my face crawling through.

I patched myself up with their paper towels and a roll of duct tape I found in the utility drawer. While I was bandaging, I got more and more pissed off. I lived in my car while my brother had a kitchen with a utility drawer and a custom stained glass window. And he wouldn't buy me one lousy ticket. He was the one who had broken our pact from that day in the traffic, not me.

Still, all I took was Abby’s jewelry. I had intended to turn the place over, but blood loss was making me woozy. I needed something to numb the pain. So I went to see Frank. He didn’t like me stopping by unannounced. I had to give him a whole fistful of Abby’s jewelry before he'd open the door. He let me clean up in his bathroom. When I came out, dressed in bandages like the Mummy, he was already cooking. We found a relatively intact vein and I let it carry me away.

I woke up the next morning in the backseat of my car. Frank had turned it over, of course, and taken almost everything. The only thing left was a gold broach that had fallen into the loose door compartment. Some drug lord, Frank. I had smuggled shit for him in there before. I left straight away to pawn the brooch. I might have made it, too, if it hadn’t been rush hour.

Abby had a cousin checking up on the house. They went by that morning. Dale called while I was still on the road and asked if I knew anything about it. I told him I didn’t, so sorry, that’s terrible, how’s the wedding going?

My lie lasted all of an hour. The cousin was the one who had given Abby the brooch and provided the police a complete description. When I went to fence it, still dressed up like the Invisible Man, the guy fingered me. Congratulations to you, the last honest pawnbroker. Dale bailed me out. He caught an early flight home. I knew he had the money for that ticket.

###

Dale’s voice hadn’t been loud, somewhere between a whisper and a growl, but everyone in the coffee shop knew shit was going down. I held my hands up.

“I was sick, man. I couldn’t help myself.”

“You were sick.” It didn’t sound so sincere in his voice. “Next you’ll be telling me it’s all mom’s fault.”

“I’m clean now.”

And everything was her fault. If we’d had a mother, maybe I could have stayed clean. Maybe I wouldn’t have turned into such a fuckup. I didn’t add any of this. It wouldn’t help, not right now.

“Let me guess. Ten years clean.”

Well, yeah. I didn’t reply. He scoffed and leaned back in his seat.

“So it wasn’t you. It was the State of California. Nice tattoo.”

I put a hand to my face, feeling along the blue lines there. I did what I had to do to survive.

“I’m sorry—”

I couldn’t even get the words out before he exploded, all that potential energy tipping into kinetic. No, I didn’t get to fucking say that, not after what I did. He only came to the coffee shop because I threatened to knock on his door if he didn’t. Abby had said if she ever saw me again she would shoot me dead in the street and she meant it. She had never been violent before, he said. I’d done this to them.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about the past. The first few years were tough. My face made an attractive target for fists. In between all the blows to the head, I started to see how cutting myself to pieces on broken glass wasn’t the tragedy: breaking a family heirloom was.

I wrote to Dale from prison, over and over again for years, trying to explain these revelations to him. I wrote about how sorry I was. I wrote about how his pain tormented me, about how it was breaking me. Asked him to give my love to Abby and his daughter. I don’t think he ever did. I was changing, I realized, but I’d already changed Dale.

My last hope was an in-person meeting once I got out. I thought I might be better able to explain things. It wasn't going perfect, that chat, not yet, but he was here. He was talking.

After Dale finished his rant, his fists balled like our father in the storm. I closed my eyes. It was easier that way, letting myself be blown with the wind. Beating a passive man wasn’t much fun. Most people won’t do it. Most people. 

There was a time when Frank got in deep with some scary characters and my debts became more urgent. He kicked me until I coughed up blood and told me if I didn’t get his money, he’d kill me.

Long seconds passed in the coffee shop. The sky cleared. I peeked an eye open. Dale’s fist unclenched and he slumped back in his seat. The young barista came with an oversized pink mug and a cheese Danish. The mug was filled with something sweet and steaming. She set them on the table and took the numbered flag away without a word. At the tables around us, conversation returned.

Dale didn’t eat his pastry or sip his drink. He sat across the table from me, spent but not resigned. I wondered whether he had said enough or if more thunder would be required before we could start the apology.

“Is Abby recovering?” I decided to test the waters, see if this was the calm or the eye.

“As much as anyone can.”

I thought of her speech at my sentencing hearing. She had asked the judge to put me away for as long as the law allowed. For what he’s done, she said, there is no forgiveness. Family, like the law, is a bond of trust. Jacob broke that bond. He’ll keep breaking it as long as he is allowed to walk around free.

“And the kids?”

Wrong move. We had been in the eye of the storm. I didn’t see his fist coming, not until it was connecting with my temple. Didn’t have time to close my eyes. I fell. The table came down on top of me. The mug shattered next to my head. Smelled like peppermint.

###

I showed up at Dale and Abby’s house a week before Christmas Eve, many years after my break-in. This time it wasn’t my fault I was bleeding. Frank had given me the beating of my life. Dale answered the door. When he saw it was me, he shooed the kids upstairs. Abby was out of town on business. Even so I wasn’t allowed in the house. I coughed some blood on his doorstep. Fine. He let me in, only tonight, I couldn’t stay. I was to go straight to the hospital in the morning. His kids weren’t allowed to talk to me, although they knew their fuckup Uncle Jake was around. I could hear them whispering behind the guest room door.

The next morning, as I was getting in my car across the street, Frank—or the people he was in with—found me. I had a piece in the secret door compartment. I pulled it out as they closed in. Fired once, didn’t look where. I didn’t think I hit anyone. They shot me six times and left me for dead.

It must have been Dale who called the ambulance.

He didn’t call it for me.

###

Dale gave me a kick, driving the cheese Danish into my chest. People around the coffee shop were shouting. They hadn’t ordered a beating with their frappuccinos.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to say—”

He kicked me again.

“No apologies. They won't bring him back. You're a traffic jam of fuckups, Jake, and we’re all stuck in it.”

Someone grabbed Dale and pulled him into an arm lock. He struggled to get back at me. I crawled up on my hands and knees.

“I don’t want a second chance. I don’t want to be in your life. I just want you to know I’m sorry.”

Dale shook off the arm lock and pushed through the crowd. He paused at the door and looked over his shoulder.

“You’re not sorry. Even if you were, I don’t accept. Don’t you understand? You can’t make this right. There’s nothing, nothing you can ever do.” He walked outside, made it two paces, then came back in. “If you come anywhere near our house or our daughter, Abby won’t shoot you. I’ll do it myself.”

Then he was gone. The storm passed. Someone helped me to my feet. Someone else turned the table rightside up. Another person ran outside to snap a picture of Dale’s car. There were always people willing to pick up after the storm, I realized, but nobody wanted to build the shelters, nobody wanted to pay for the levees, nobody wanted to fund the alarms.

I knew my brother was right. I couldn’t make up for what I’ve done.

But I could go see Frank.