The Porcupine Method, fiction by J. Danielle Dorn

If it weren't for the way Dawn cut mangoes, none of this would have happened.

We met at work. Some farm-to-table restaurant that started out small and expanded to a second location and before you knew it we had uniforms and a district manager. The place retained its independent restaurant essence, for a while. Most of us hated the corporate homogeneity that crept in like a cancer, and the only reason any of us who had been there from the beginning stayed was because the manager was too chickenshit to fire us.

Anyway.

It was the first place we ever kissed, on a slow night, Ricky cutting a person every hour at first, then every two, until dinner service was mostly done and everyone was restless. Nobody wanted to stay to close. I didn't mind. I had my regulars, and I always got out after the kitchen did anyway. Ricky let me pick what music to play on the iPod. I hated the curated soft rock playlist corporate wanted piped over the sound system and he knew it. At one point I went back into the kitchen and Dawn was there, going at a mango with a serrated knife.

As a general rule, I didn't talk to the kitchen staff. Not at that restaurant, and not at any of the others I had worked at before. They tended to be metalheads with criminal records and no social skills. The way Dawn was going at that mango, I couldn't help it.

Now, Dawn. She wore her hair tight on the sides and long on the top, bleached and dyed a pastel purple, tattoos up and down her arms. Everyone in the kitchen wore white jackets because corporate insisted, and caps or bandannas to cover their asses in case a customer found hair in their food. We were borrowing Dawn from another location because one of our line cooks was out with a collapsed lung, this was maybe the sixth or seventh night we'd worked together in two weeks. Obvious dyke. Like, obvious.

Me, not so much. I was what you'd call a lipstick lesbian. I had long hair, I wore makeup, I got manicures. Men thought their dick was going to be the one to cure me of my confusion, used that as a flirting tactic more times than I can count.

I asked Dawn what she was doing. I'd never seen anybody prep a mango the way she was prepping it. She must have thought I was flirting with her, because she smiled an endearing lopsided little smile as she popped out this perfect grid of cubes.

She goes, "Making mango-rita pulp for the bar."

I'm like, "Ugh, don't call it mango-rita."

She's like, "Stupid goddamn names they got here, right?"

"What're you gonna do," I say, and I shrug, trying to be cool. She holds up a cube for me to take. I was feeling bold, so I ate it right out of her hand. Her eyebrows go up, and she gives me this shit-eating grin and beckons me into the walk-in cooler so Ricky doesn't catch us.

Yeah, we were bored. But Dawn kept giving me pieces of mango, and I kept kissing the juice back into her mouth, until both of our lips were raw with the sugar and the acid and the cold. Levitated up out of our boredom by the other's energy. We sent texts to save each other's numbers in our phones and that should have been the end of it. She had to go back to Buffalo that night.

You know that song, Home is where I want to be but I guess I'm already there. That's what was playing when I stepped out of the fridge and went back to work.

So yeah, our relationship started over text message, sending each other silly memes, screenshots of the nonsense people were saying in our separate group chats, gossip from our separate locations. Flirting. A lot of flirting.

Restaurant people are easy to entertain and difficult to keep happy. Some of us are lifers. We can't function anywhere else in society. I started out washing dishes when my parents kicked me out. They were real nutty Jesus types, wanted to send me away to conversion therapy when they caught me necking with the pastor's daughter the summer before junior year. That was so long ago I never think about it anymore. I got my GED because they wouldn't let me into bartender school without it.

This isn't my life story, I swear.

Dawn was the best thing that ever happened to me. I can't hear that song without thinking of her, the leathery coffee-and-vanilla cologne she wore, how strong her arms were. How she couldn't watch a movie without making some smart-ass comment, how she wore her jeans low down on her slim hips, how she loved cooking at home even though she did it for forty hours a week at some crappy chain restaurant.

I miss her.

We moved to Florida because we could. We were happy there. It wasn't like we were running away from anything. We just wanted a change. Better weather. Better jobs. She knew a guy who could get her a sous chef position in an actual restaurant, and I could tend bar anywhere looking the way I did. Western New York was getting to be too depressing and if the entire country was going to be underwater in a few decades we at least wanted to be near the beach.

Then it happened.

She called the way she cut mangoes the hedgehog method because that's what her culinary school teacher had called it. I messed up a few times, called it the porcupine method, I must have figured the way the cubes stuck out from the rind when it was inside out looked more like a porcupine than a hedgehog. Dawn laughed, asked me what the hell I thought a hedgehog looked like.

I said, "I don't know. Like Sonic?"

"The video game Sonic?"

"Yeah. With like, the blue mohawk. Porcupines have quills that stick out all over the place."

"So do hedgehogs! Hedgehogs have spines! That's why it's called!"

"Whatever," I said. "Why don't you just call it crosshatch method and stop making out like I'm going to eat a cartoon animal."

"Oh my god, Titi, I hate you."

That's what we called it from then on. The porcupine method. Porcupine became a verb, our way of describing how we were going to handle a messy situation. I know it's silly. We were together a long time. I thought we were going to be together a long time.

The night she didn't come home, I wasn't expecting her until late anyhow. I worked weekends at a nightclub, where I made most of my money, and then during the week I poured wine and expensive whiskey at a country club. It was a Tuesday. Mike and Tyrone wanted to go out for beers after the kitchen closed. They needed to porcupine a personal problem Mike was having. That was fine. I trusted the three of them out together.

Then the cops showed up. They confirmed that Dawn lived there, then broke the news to me. Offered to drive me to the hospital. I was in shock. It was the first time I had ever been in the back of a police car. Not until weeks later did I wonder what the neighbors must have thought.

First time I had ever been to the emergency room, either. Back when I was still a baby bartender who didn't know shit about technique, I cut my thumb slicing limes. I went to urgent care and stopped using dull knives. Urgent care and the ER aren't the same at all. Everything was bright and noisy, contained chaos, and all I could think was Maybe they're wrong. Maybe the cops are wrong.

The social worker and the attending physician were there. Dawn's parents still lived in New York, and were on their way. Staff let me in to see Dawn's body. Her eyes were closed and her lips were blue and she would have been pissed to know she died with grown-out roots.

I didn't cry because I didn't believe what they were telling me. That Dawn had overdosed on heroin. That her friends had brought her straight to the ER when she didn't respond to the two doses of Narcan Mike sprayed up her nose.

Narcan is a drug that's supposed to reverse the effects of narcotic medication. Mike carried it on him because he had no intention of quitting using, because he knew so many people who had died of overdoses. They nod out, he told me later, nodding out happens a lot, but Dawn had stopped breathing. Later, after we found out the dope they'd been shooting up was laced with fentanyl.

I learned a lot about drugs after Dawn died. Like that fentanyl is a synthetic narcotic they give to cancer patients. It's up to a hundred times stronger than morphine. Sometimes dealers add it to heroin to increase heroin's potency and don't tell their customers, so people think they're getting regular heroin and overdose and die.

Her parents touched down at daybreak and took over planning for the funeral, packing up her things, settling all of her affairs. We weren't married. It wasn't like I had a legal right to do any of the things her parents were doing. I wasn't mad at Mike or Tyrone. I wanted to know where they got it from, that was all.

They didn't know what it meant to porcupine a situation. Nobody did. Not Dawn's parents, who didn't even look at me during the funeral. Not my manager at the country club, who approved five day's bereavement leave, or my manager at the nightclub, who tried to get me to find coverage for the weekend I was out and caved when I started sobbing into the phone. He said he'd take care of it.

It infuriated me, later, that the first time I cried during the whole aftermath of Dawn's math was on the phone to my manager at the nightclub.

I wanted to know where Mike got the laced heroin from. Call it part of the grieving process. Grappling to understand what had happened. Standing at the bar during the slow early hours of service at the country club, a TV playing Forensic Files in the background, like every other day that had come before. That was my life now. Before Dawn and After Dawn, like we had broken up. Half the people who poisoned other people on that show used antifreeze, toxicology reports always showed polyethylene glycol in the blood.

The nightclub kept me busy. I showed up for my shift looking normal, acting numb, the other bartender unable to provide much more than a firm hug to start the night and cocktail napkins when tears started snaking their way down my cheeks after everyone had left at four in the morning. I didn't have time to think there.

At the country club, I had time to think.

If I was going to deal with the person whose tainted heroin killed my girlfriend, I needed to think like a murderer. Like those people on the true crime shows who made every phone call and every long-distance trip like a police drone was right above their heads.

Mike went ahead and gave me his dealer's number in exchange for the number of the burner phone I bought from a gas station on the other side of town. He wouldn't give the dealer up to police, but he gave him up to me. All I wanted to do was see the guy, put a face to the act. We were at a dive bar Dawn and I liked to go to on our mutual nights off, that we brought friends to when we all needed to congregate. It had a patio out back where people could take their drinks to smoke a cigarette, and that's where Tyrone and I were when he pulled me aside.

In the early stages of our relationship, before we even moved in together, we quit smoking together. We put the money we would have spent on cigarettes into a savings account, promised not to touch it unless it was for something we both wanted. I bought a pack of cigarettes from the same gas station that sold me the burner. The first inhale of menthol burned on the way down, and my whole body lit up with greeting. Like a friend returning from prison, hesitant and grateful.

So Tyrone pulls me aside, six-foot-two bald-headed pot-smoking pacifist that he was, and tells me he knows what I'm going through. I believe him. I don't want his pain on top of mine.

"You've got that look in your eye," he says, "like you're already digging his grave. Dawn wouldn't want you locked up."

"I ain't getting locked up," I say, and that's the end of the conversation.

The dealer wanted to meet me with Mike there, and I figured that made sense. I didn't know how drug deals worked. My area was alcohol, and I knew how to deal with alcoholics. I didn't know how to deal with drug addicts. Same thing, at the end of the day.

At the country club, the old men smoked cigars inside because they were retired and because the owner didn't care, bitched about the laws that said they couldn't smoke wherever they wanted, bitched about laws in general, how it used to be you got pulled over for drinking and the cop would just escort you home. If alcohol was legal, everything else ought to be.

Like look at her, one of them said the day I met the dealer. She's slinging booze, but you don't see her getting thrown in jail like those black kids.

Yeah well booze is legal now, the other one said. I was climbing up on the counter to pull down a new bottle of Glenlivet and replace the one they'd killed. Eighty years ago she'd've been thrown in jail for selling gin out of her bathtub. I made Mike swear he wouldn't tell the dealer I was Dawn's girl. He swore. Sitting in his banged-up Buick in the dealer's driveway, in the dark, in the moments before my moment of clarity. Mike swore, and then we got out of the car and rang the doorbell and Mike introduced me to the dealer.

When the dealer opened the door I thought we were at the wrong place. I was expecting a greasy little weasel, the sort of person who springs to mind when you hear the words Florida Man. Wardrobe consisting of wife-beaters and baggy jeans, prison tattoos, everything I knew about drug dealers I learned from watching TV.

This guy, though. He was handsome, and he knew he was handsome. Tall, blond hair, blue eyes, a jaw that could cut glass, obviously worked out. Probably wore suits to his 9-to-5, had an office with a high-rise view of downtown Miami. Fashionable facial hair. His name was Noah. I hated him the second I saw him.

And Mike kept his oath. He kept Dawn's name out of his mouth. He told Mike I was a friend of his, said we both worked in the restaurant business and I was just looking to buy some horse.

The whole time, Noah was eyeing me up. I felt his gaze slide over my calves, my thighs, I had worn yoga pants and running shoes and a sports bra in case we needed to bolt and I regretted that decision when I caught him assessing my breasts.

Of course I didn't use what I bought. I made out like I was going to, learned myself why people get addicted to the stuff. Noah asked Mike and me if we wanted to smoke it or shoot it, and Mike said he wanted to shoot it, so I shot it. Instant bliss in Noah's living room. I didn't want to feel bliss around Noah. Underneath the euphoria was fury.

As far as I knew, Dawn wasn't using when we were together. It must have been a one-time thing she did because Mike was doing it. Tyrone told me all she did when they were out together was smoke weed, and she never did it at work like some of the guys did, she only did it when they were out and someone else offered her some. Mike had dope on him, and Tyrone was smoking weed, and it was none of my business what she wanted to do with her body.

Her body, embalmed and entombed, gone from me even though she still lingered in the house. The smell of her on everything. I would feel her as soon as I walked in the door. I kept tripping over her big old size 11 shoes, her heavy slip-resistant orthopedic work boots, I left them in the entryway for weeks, lurking in the dark like they wanted to break my neck, help me join her in whatever waits for us after we're dead. Probably nothing. Dawn didn't believe in an afterlife.

Sometimes I thought she was behind me in the bathroom, in the steam after a shower, thought she would show up in the mirror as I was brushing my teeth. I felt her in the bed sheets even after I washed them. When I masturbated, I imagined it was her hands touching me, her tongue between my legs. And after I came, instead of crying, I laid there in the afterglow and imagined what I would do to get rid of Noah's body.

It took a lot of money. I picked up extra shifts at the country club, waved away my manager's concern. I lost weight, of course I lost weight, but in this country, starving looks good to people. The more my body consumed itself, the more people tipped me. My smile was forced and my eyes were tired and I spent the extra money on heroin. My manager kept checking to see if I was okay. Like he was going to save me from myself.

"You have my number," he would say after every shift, and I would keep my voice flat as I said, "Yes I do," and that was always the end of the conversation. I hate people with business degrees. They all think they're psychologists, and this one in particular thought his dick would ameliorate my grief.

Four Tuesday nights in a row, I went to Noah's house instead of the dive bar, Dawn's and my bar. I couldn't stand to be there without her. I couldn't stand to be at Noah's house alone either but I couldn't go with Mike. He needed to stay out of this. Every time I stepped inside I declined Noah's invitation to sit and take a shot, declined his offers of weed or pills. Once, I accepted his offer of a Bacardi Ice, and I watched him the entire time he was in the kitchen.

"Don't open it," I said, and he smiled like I'd told a joke.

"What," he asked, and twisted off the cap with his bare hand, "you think I'm going to roofie you?"

I took the bottle from him and said, "Better safe than raped, right?"

He tried to touch my hair, I'd flat-ironed it and sprayed it into behaving in the humidity, and normally I would have slapped his hand away. I needed him to keep selling me dope for this plan to work. So I let him. We shot the shit for a few minutes before he got around to weighing out the powder. I pretended to drink my drink as he worked, and we exchanged cash for stash, and I got the hell out of there.

Two paychecks later, nearly a month into my absent plan, I went to the grocery store. I was out of seltzer water, was living off of microwave popcorn and tortilla chips, crunchy carbs with enough salt to keep my blood pressure up, the occasional bag of salad. The thought that this could all go wrong, what if Noah figured out what I was going to do and shot me, I'd be just another dead girl in the trunk of a car, I would never eat another mango again. So I bought one. That was all I bought. I took it home and I cut it the way I'd seen Dawn do a hundred times, careful so I wouldn't read a mistake as a portent. I cried as I ate it. I wanted her back. I wanted her alive. I wanted to go back in time and beg her not to go out with Mike and Tyrone, invite myself along like a clingy girlfriend, keep her from shooting up. I was so angry.

I started cooking down the shit I bought from Noah, four weeks' worth of the drug that killed Dawn in a single night. Did it the way I'd watched him the night he shot it into my arm, filled every syringe I'd picked up from the drugstore and capped it when it was full. I packed them into a makeup bag I planned to throw away, slipped it into the purse I planned to throw away, and sent Noah a text on the phone I planned to throw away, asking if I could come by later that night.

He replied saying he was looking forward to it, added a winky face.

I couldn't fucking stand him. I knew what I was about to do was wrong. I didn't care.

Instead of styling my hair I corralled it under a wig, did my makeup the way young women, still girls some of them, did it in YouTube tutorials. Every time I went over there, I made up my face heavier than the time before. Still recognizable by degrees, but different from a distance. It was hard to keep the powder from melting off my face in the muggy heat. I managed to pull it off.

His jeans tightened the second he opened the door for me. His cologne smelled good and he had obviously showered just before I arrived. My body locked down, every orifice protesting what I was forcing myself to do. If he had approached me at a bar I would have told him to go fuck himself. I had never so much as touched a man before, never experimented with the boys in high school because I knew better. Straight boys don't have to experiment before they accept their sexuality, so I figured I didn't have to either.

One time a customer back in New York grabbed my ass, so I'd grabbed his hand and broken his wrist. Ricky pressed charges against the guy and gave me a raise. I think he was afraid I'd sue the company.

While Noah was distracted fondling my breasts through the bra I planned to throw away, I started uncapping a syringe with my free hand. I had practiced at home when it was still empty, and Noah didn't notice the hand that wasn't on his crotch was coming towards his shoulder. It jabbed through his shirt and into the muscle holding his shoulder to his neck, thick meat that would absorb the drug. He yelled "Ow!" like a mosquito had got him, slapped at the spot, and his carrying on gave me the time to grab the second syringe and hit him again in a different spot. My entire arm shook with rage and effort as I pressed the plunger deep as it would go and reached for another. By the time I got the third syringe in him, he was nodding out.

No, I did not lose count. I counted every single one. Every single one, I thought of Dawn.

I thought of the way her face looked in the morning, sleep granting her a simpler serenity than the heroin had left her with, I saw the way her body filled the stretcher in the trauma ward, how the doctors hadn't gotten around to peeling the electrodes off her chest, how there was a band around her wrist even though they were admitting her to the morgue. How she would laugh at the way I shrieked every time we went to the ocean and a wave would slap me. We didn't have ocean waves in New York. Lake Ontario wasn't the same. People dumped bodies in it all the time.

When I ran out of syringes, when he was limp on the couch with a dead erection and no pulse, I collected them.

One of the needles had snapped off during his brief struggle, and I dug it out of his skin. If it weren't for the fact it would leave DNA in my wake, I would have spat on him. For a moment I sat with his corpse, considered stabbing him in the eye. It would feel good, I thought, to just hit him, pummel him until even his mother wouldn't recognize him.

Heroin felt good too. Dawn had felt good. Her laugh, her jokes, the way she cut fucking mangoes. He took her from me, and leaving him dead on the couch didn't bring her back.

I wish I could tell you her ghost was perturbed by what I had done, or placated. One or the other. The house was empty when I returned home, and I did not trip over her shoes. I showered without sensing her in the steam, and I went to bed without feeling her in the sheets. My alarm woke me. I wanted to stay in bed, wanted to die now that I had gotten rid of Noah.

As I was getting ready for my shift at the country club, I waited for the cops to show up. They didn't. So I came to work like it was any other Wednesday. Now I'm here.

If I had just left her alone that night, I'm thinking to myself, washing dishes in the bar sink and waiting for my regulars to come trickling in. If we had never known each other at all.

If I have to go the rest of my life carrying this secret instead of her spirit.

My customers start trickling in, and that fucking song starts playing.

J. Danielle Dorn is a military brat and former mental health paraprofessional from Rochester, NY. Kirkus Reviews named their debut novel, Devil's Call, a 'Must-Read Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Book' in 2017, and their short fiction appears in Trigger Warning: Body Horror, from Madness Heart Press. They currently live with their adopted cat and a self-perpetuating pile of to-be-read books.

After Ed Glasgow's House Was Sold, fiction by Stefan Kiesbye

She had very white skin, and her husband was a captain on a freighter crisscrossing Lake Superior. They moved in next door, after Ed Glasgow's house had stood empty for nearly a year. They were new to Severe, unaware of its history and unaware of their neighbors until I dropped off a pie one afternoon. She opened the door and thanked me, but neither did she invite me in, nor did I want to impose. I needed to get going, I told her and walked back to my truck. She returned my wave and kept standing on her porch, holding the pie as though it gave off a strange stench.

By spring she was pregnant and it was showing. She looked different then, as though she might be sliding out of her skin at any moment. There was a slowness to her movements, and she started to smile when I drove by her house on the way to the hardware store. Her name was Ruth, and her hair was not the prettiest brown. She had large, white teeth.

Pamela and I had lived on Mackinac Lane for nearly seven years. She hadn't wanted to raise kids in town. She was queer about it, as though Severe were a large city with police sirens tearing up the night and arsonists stealing into backyards. She said our children needed space, they needed to play in the woods. They should come home covered in dirt and burrs, and they should have a dog and a swing set in back and a treehouse. At night she would give them a bath and look for ticks on their lithe bodies. She loved the smell of baby shampoo. We'd bought twelve acres of woods in the back of our home, but after those seven years we still had no children to fill the air with screams and come home with bruises, and dirt, and pine needles stuck to their clothes.

We got married the year after we both graduated from high school. She'd been the kinky one, the one who had slept with several members of the baseball team by the time she set her eyes on me. What they saw the first time she even recognized I was alive I never asked her, and she was wise enough not to tell. But soon after we started going steady, she began to teach me what she had been taught. I had never been with another woman. Not in that way, not so completely. Pamela proved to be a stern teacher.

My dad had lost everything he’d worked for all his life, save for the hardware store. He’d had big plans for Severe, had invested all his money to connect the town with the larger world. But Severe had held its course, the one it had always taken. Pete Sr. died of a stroke the year after the wedding, and for some years we lived in a small house on Teague Street. Pamela wanted to move away -- to Ann Arbor, or to Wisconsin, where her cousin was a teacher. She said, “Pete, I’ve slept with half the boys here; do you really want to sell them lawn mowers and nails and attend their weddings?” But we stayed because we had a life in Severe, and other places didn't know, and had no memory of, our families and who we were.

Pamela and I made love for hours most every night. We did it in every room of the new house on Mackinac Lane, checking them off one by one. On a summer night, she made me chase her into the woods and tie her to a tree. She arrived unannounced at the store and took my hand and led me to the backroom and opened her winter coat to show me she was wearing nothing but her boots. “Make sure it’s a boy,” she said, or she’d cup my balls, squeeze them and scream, “Twins.” We would have three children, each of their names starting with 'P.' We made a list: Peggy, Peter, Patsy, Preston, Patrick, Patricia, Paige, Priscilla, Phoebe. We loved each other. We really did. Once she had decided on me, she never looked at anyone else. But I was gone most of the day.

***

Ruth worked in her yard during our short spring in Severe. Ed's old brown truck had disappeared from the front yard, and so had his gutted Camaros. The man had died without a will, and apparently without any living relatives. Karen Brand, the realtor, only shrugged when I asked her who would receive the money from the sale. She’d told me more than once that the property was a bargain, and once our neighbors moved in, Pamela chided me for not making up my mind sooner. But the truth was, I couldn’t do it. In my mind, it was still Ed’s house. I had liked him. The way you might admire a raccoon or a bear. You didn’t invite them into your home, but there was something endearing about them. Nothing I could articulate or talk about with my customers at the store, but real nonetheless. I believe he buried guns and ammunition in the field behind his house.

Times when Ruth’s husband stayed home, his black Impala was parked where once the truck with the giant flames had stood. There was no sense in stopping in front of the house for a chat on those days, but I slowed to crawl to just get a glimpse of Ruth kneeling in a flowerbed or drinking iced tea on the front steps.

Ruth had long fingers. When she was alone, and I stopped on my way to work, she would grab the window frame of my truck and peer in; her lips parted as though a silly question was forming in her mind. Those lips were sharply cut and full. She held on to that window frame and talked about how humid the days were, how slow she was these days, how cumbersome and painful her movements had become. “I look like a giant pear,” she said. “I just don’t want anyone to look at me.” She said, “I can’t see my feet anymore.” More than once she furrowed her brow and asked me how I had burned my arms, what the scars meant. Each time she approached the open window, I offered her a ride into town and she declined most days. For the first time I could make out the shape below her dress below her dress. Ruth’s elbows were sharp, her knees protruding. Maybe I had wanted children even more than Pamela.

***

I had committed the mistake of a man who is too sure of himself and his place in the world. Maybe I lacked the imagination to anticipate the horrors of living past ‘Just Got Married.’ Our house on Mackinac Lane had five bedrooms, and when we painted the place, I mixed a light-green color and ordered a crib and big yellow stars to attach above it. It didn't matter to me, boy or girl. After I finished decorating, Pamela and I made love in that room, too, against the wall, the paint smell still overpowering, and she called me Daddy.

Having the large house to ourselves made Pamela restless; the quiet ate at her like moths eat a winter coat. There’s plenty left, but it’s not quite what you wanted or what you’d choose to wear. She was still beautiful, though, she was. And yet, every morning I didn't see the black Impala parked in front of Glasgow's house, I stopped and talked to Ruth. I left the house earlier and earlier so I could talk to Ruth for an extra ten or fifteen minutes. On my way back I stopped again, to drop off some flowers she could plant, a small tree perhaps, or I gifted her a watering can that was only lightly dinged. I tried to sound as though I didn't enjoy getting out of the truck and leaning against the hood, talking. Sometimes I lingered, complimented her garden, told her a joke I heard at the store. But I never touched her. Not once.

She wore loose dresses that summer, and by the afternoon dark spots appeared in the front and back. She wore large, floppy hats, and she complained that she was always thirsty. She could drink Lake Superior empty, she said and laughed at her own silliness. To me, she grew more arresting every day. But she didn't always look pretty -- her face would be red, her limbs swollen. Her sweaty skin could barely contain her.

***

At the end of October, she was gone for two weeks and then for two weeks more. She reappeared with a baby carriage on Mackinac Lane, but most often she would carry her girl in a sling. Snow was covering the ground soon, and on days she ventured outside, Ruth wore a long down coat and moon boots. Her face was red from the cold and she waved hello every time I passed her. It would have been natural to invite her and her husband to dinner -- we lived only two-hundred yards apart, and we were close in age. But maybe we had missed the right time to become friends, or maybe Pamela just wasn’t interested. Despite asking about our neighbors, she never asked to meet them. She had ignored Ed when he was alive, and she ignored Ruth. So how could I take a first step? It wasn’t my place. And how could I prepare dinner for our neighbors and sit across from Ruth without giving my feelings for her away? I trembled at the thought of her stepping into our house and taking off her coat.

***

I dropped off rock salt in the time before Christmas. I gave her a stupid plastic tree with the lights installed. I told her one of the salesmen had dropped it off, free of charge. Did she ever look at me with suspicion? Did she tell her husband over dinner that their neighbor came by the house way more often than seemed neighborly? She smiled so much each time I stopped by, I didn’t have the heart to ignore her. I was acting ridiculously and without any shame.

In January, after the black Impala had been gone for several days, I waited in front of Ruth’s house until I saw her return from a walk, her girl strapped to her chest, with a woolen hat and a puffy one-piece suit. I'd waited for over thirty minutes, and my coffee mug was empty.

After I spotted her, I put the truck in gear and rolled down the window. "How are the two of you?" I asked. The girl babbled and made Ruth laugh happily. She wore a green hat, her full lips were cracked. "Let me give you a ride,” I suggested. “You should get out every now and then.”

A few minutes later she had changed into a long, woolen coat and leather boots. The girl sat in her lap; Ruth's hand were folded in front of her stomach. The vents worked on full, and the cabin was so warm that on our way into town she opened her coat. In the footwell she had a bag with a bottle and wipes and Pampers. This was Ruth's first full winter in Severe. She said, "I have cabin fever. There's only my little bug and myself."

I nodded. "All I remember are winters." This was no lie. Summers were hazy as daydreams you had as a teenager. There seemed to be world out there, but you couldn't quite grasp it yet. You hadn’t seen enough to put the tiny pieces your imagination grasped at together. You squinted, but the images escaped you every time. But our winters were solid, you could never mistake them for anything else. They forced you to quit dreaming and focus on the next step in front of you.

When I didn't stop outside the hardware store, she turned to me, lips open without forming words yet. I said, "I just need to swing by our warehouse and pick up some shovels." We drove through town and took a right on Longshore. All year round, the warehouse held the doors and windows we stocked but lacked space to display in the store. In the summer we shelved leftover rock salt and snow blowers, but at this time in January, only a few lawnmowers, sheds, and potting soil lined the walls.

I said, "Just a minute," and went inside and the blue tarp lay spread on the ground. My hands were shaky and I bit into a pointer and thumb to quieten them. My nails dug into my scars until they bled.

I remembered to smile at Ruth when I approached the truck again. I nearly ran towards her, before pulling the passenger door open. "Let me show you," I huffed. She wouldn't get out. She didn't make a sound and forced me to grab her arm and pull her from the seat. She never let go of the girl, even when I dragged her into the warehouse. I knew what she was thinking and I hated her for thinking something so stupid.

"Pete." She was crying now, her eyes already red and begging. “Pete. Don’t,” she stammered. It was Pamela who struck her with a shovel. After the second time, Ruth went down hard, but Pamela didn't stop. I scooped up the girl and lifted her into the air as though she were about to take flight. "My bug," I said.

***

Ruth's husband put up the house for sale in April, after he’d given up waiting for his wife’s return. Women left her husbands all the time. He blamed himself for being absent so often, and I only nodded when he told me. I’d spotted him in the yard and stopped. He asked me inside. I said I needed to get home, but then followed him up the porch steps, through the open door and into the kitchen. When he asked, I repeated what I had told the Sheriff the week after Ruth had disappeared — that I had dropped her off in town and that she’d carried an overnight bag and asked about the next Greyhound. Nobody had seen her after that. Not even a coat or hat was ever found. No card or letter arrived, and when his phone rang, it was never her voice at the other end of the line. “Maybe she doesn’t want to be found just yet,” I suggested. “Maybe she panicked.” I took the whiskey he offered, and we clinked glasses and he made an insufferable toast. “You shouldn’t say that about her,” I said. “She’ll contact you when the time is right, I’m sure.” He was gone several days later, and Karen installed the ‘For Sale’ sign again. I wasn’t interested this time either, even though it must have been a bargain.

Pamela didn't leave our house for a while. "She isn't well," I told people in town. "We think it might be morning sickness." I blushed each time I said this.

Stefan Kiesbye is the author of six novels, among them Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone, The Staked Plains," and Knives, Forks, Scissors, Flames." He teaches creative writing at Sonoma State University in the North Bay Area.

Something I Can Never Have, fiction by Tom Andes

When Brady first realized his wife Amanda was making hay with his work buddy Patterson, Brady was with Patterson and their other friend Frank, and they sat talking over the jukebox in Molly’s at the Market, a dive they frequented on Decatur Street when they were in New Orleans on business for Bayer. The waitress looked tired, the same weariness Brady had seen in Amanda the morning he’d left Bossier City. She’d stood in the doorway with their daughter Katie, something in his wife’s face he couldn’t read. Now—with a tock like a Louisville Slugger slapping a Wilson baseball over the Green Monster, the leftfield wall at Fenway—when Brady caught a whiff of Patterson’s cologne, he knew. A few weeks ago she’d come home smelling of cheap Ax body spray: the same scent Patterson, next to him blowing smoke rings, wore tonight.

Brady twisted the thin gold wedding ring on his finger, staring at the other rings, cigarette burns that marred the varnished tabletop, that smooth façade. When the waitress set his Tin Roof Juke Joint IPA in front of him, he murmured his thanks. No doubt, she’d been propositioned by a hundred drunken guys from out of town, and she must hate tourists like them: the buttoned-down suburbanites who went to Bourbon Burlesque, yet, for all that, were hopeless squares, registered Republicans with boats in their yards.

She touched his wrist. “It’s Mary, if you need anything.”

Patterson started before she’d even walked away. “Looks like Brady sees something he likes.” He dropped his hand on Brady’s back, like they were still best buds. Frank laughed, a barking sound, and Brady felt sick at the prospect of ending up like that: a graying cuckold, trapped in middle management at 50. According to the rumor mill around the office, and Patterson had confessed as much to Brady one night, Patterson had nailed Frank’s ex-wife, too.

Rage burned through Brady like flame through a stack of old Sports Illustrated magazines, from his guts to the top of his head. He fought the reflex to elbow the traitor in the chin, imagined shattering his trachea, Patterson clutching his neck and wheezing while he fell across the room, knocking over tables like bowling pins. Brady forced a grin at his coworkers, the people he’d have called his two best friends. In town for a conference to learn the new accounting software, and he swore that by the time they went home on Sunday, he was going to confront Patterson. Would he have the balls?

“Don’t touch me,” he said, and Patterson laughed. Frank did, too. Probably glad Patterson wasn’t picking on him for a change. Blood rushed to Brady’s face. Only Patterson’s hand moored Brady to his stool. It was August, hot. Inside his collar, sweat stung the razor burn on his neck. Mary brought a second round. Bad skin, like she’d had acne when she was a kid. She covered it with too much base. Still, something about her made Brady feel safe, like he’d be a different person—happier, less boring, not the kind of guy whose wife would pork his best friend—if he could’ve gone home with her. Crooked glasses. Her cheeks dimpled, the neckline of her dress plunging down to the freckled tops of her breasts. Maybe 25—not that you could be sure in this light. She moved between tables, greeting the customers as if they were friends.

Brady took a pull from his Tin Roof, slurping foam from his lip. The jukebox played a Nine Inch Nails song he remembered from Milford High back in New Hampshire—that slow one with the piano from Pretty Hate Machine, “Something I Can Never Have,” which he’d listened to on repeat with his first girlfriend, Shelly Clevinger, hot and heavy with her in the back of the old man’s Chrysler Town and Country. You make it all go away went the song, but what would kill the pain of betrayal—Amanda’s, or Patterson’s?

“Faggot,” Frank said, but he wasn’t talking to anyone. “Limp-wristed fanny-lancer.”

Hadn’t smoked in 21 days, but Brady had a wicked craving, like always when he was getting his drink on, so he reached for one of Frank’s Marlboros and his Bic. Dizzy after the first few drags, and he smelled Patterson’s cologne, same as he had on Amanda, he was sure of it. Helping himself to one of Frank’s cigarettes, Patterson exhaled, holding the butt at a distance from himself, as if inspecting it—so in control, Brady wanted to cold cock him.

“I’ve always been able to put it down,” Patterson said—needling Brady, trying to get him riled, and succeeding at it. “I’ve never understood people who actually have to quit.”

The son of a bitch. Ten years Brady had known Patterson, since moving to Bossier City to take a position in accounts receivable at the North Louisiana plant, and most of that time, even if Brady should’ve known better, he’d trusted Patterson, despite the fact he skimmed from the petty cash at work, inflated his expense account, and had banged Frank’s wife, too. Easy to give him a pass on that stuff because he was a wild man, the kind of dude you wanted to hang with because he made everything in that hick town where they lived fun, the smartest guy in the room, and he’d never done Brady dirt because they were buddies—never, at least, until now.

“Maybe you should lay off.” Brady caught a buzz from the butt. His scalp tingled. His guts churned, like he had to shit.

“They say it’s a genetic thing, the addictive personality.” Patterson spoke in a deep voice, like he thought he was on the radio. “Guess it doesn’t run in my family.” His cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke—the hypocrite. Last time they came to New Orleans, he’d bought a bunch of coke from a guy he’d met in the john at Siberia, a heavy metal bar on St. Claude, and Brady had done it with him, sure—couldn’t take the high ground about that. “Might not have another one all year,” Patterson said.

Brady couldn’t stand being provoked anymore, and his stomach was clenching from the nicotine buzz, like he was going to have diarrhea, so he fled the table. Festooned with Saints paraphernalia, the hallway to the restroom was barely wide enough for two people to pass. He pushed open the door to the men’s, smelling the urinal cake. Tried the stall, but it was locked. He was going to crap himself, but the moment passed, and he pissed in the porcelain basin. Chilled, his face slick with sweat, he propped himself up against the wall and closed his eyes. That spring, Amanda had come home with a bruise on her thigh—the elliptical machine at the Anytime Fitness where she went on Stockwell Road, she’d told him. Over the last few months, when she did let him screw her, she smelled different, like her odor had changed. Now, he imagined he could smell Patterson had been inside her.

“The fuck took you so long?” Back at the table, Frank scrunched up his face, trying to give as good as he got, but the sight of him was like a vision of Brady’s doom, rushing at him like a freight train barreling down a long tunnel. Frank stood under a poster of James Booker playing the piano at Montreux. When they moved to Louisiana, Brady and Amanda had gone to the festivals—the Festivals Acadiens in Lafayette, Jazz Fest in New Orleans—but they’d had Katie, who was in the fourth grade with Patterson’s kid Eva at Southfield School, and Amanda had decided she hated it here. A year and a half of couples counseling, and she’d done this.

Holding a pint of beer as if he gripped a chalice, Patterson burped. He stood five-five, his head level with Brady’s chest. Why would Amanda have wanted to spread her legs for a guy she towered over in heels? Brady felt numb.

“What do we say, men?” Glancing at Frank, Patterson smirked, and Brady smiled back at him, the two of them ganging up—like always—on poor, pitiful Frank, who really was a loser, if he was still buddies with the guy who’d fucked his ex-wife. Sports Center played on the television, and one of the Tigers drove a Josh Beckett fastball into right centerfield. Brady had left New England years ago, but he still rooted for the Sox, loyalty being in short supply. Not that he felt any to Frank.

Outside the bar, Patterson said, “You should have asked for her number.”

“Like what,” Brady asked, “It would make you feel better if I got laid?”

He wanted to hear from Patterson’s mouth that he was slipping Brady’s wife the sausage.

They walked against traffic on Decatur, Frank stumbling down the sidewalk. Brady could’ve lived his whole life here, started over with Mary from the bar, never gone back to The Orchard, the subdivision where they lived in Bossier City, and maybe that would’ve showed Amanda. He’d given her everything: had 2400 square feet, a Bass Tracker on a trailer in the yard. But when he thought of coaching Katie’s Dixie League softball team, the sun filtering through the leaves of the trees in Walbrook Park, he couldn’t imagine letting go of his daughter.

“Might make you feel better,” Patterson said, “about whatever’s making you act like such a big, wet pussy.”

Should’ve known he wouldn’t feel bad. Guys like him got away with everything.


Upstairs at the Dragon’s Den—pressed tin walls and hipsters crowded around the bar—Brady sprang for the first round: three shots of Jack, Budweiser back. Frank gulped bourbon, dribbling it down his chin. Brady felt sick just looking at him, like that was what he’d be when Amanda took Katie and left: bitter, broken-down, and pathetic. Not that Patterson would bail on his wife Sue, who’d been putting up with his shit for years.

No, laying pipe to Brady’s wife was just fun for Patterson.

“How much cash do you have?” Patterson felt his pockets, and Brady knew what his friend wanted: sooner or later, Patterson would go looking for blow, and they’d be out till dawn.

“Enough.” Brady hesitated. Understood from long experience what was coming next, the night’s inevitable trajectory, the three of them rolling till the sun came up, like they did every time they were here: cutting loose, doing things they’d never do at home—cocaine, strip clubs like the Lily Pad in New Orleans East, Patterson the ringleader, egging them on. Brady hated himself every time, and even if he looked but didn’t touch, he knew it meant he had no leg to stand on with Amanda. But out of whatever loyalty he felt to Patterson, because it was easier to go along, and because Brady wanted to confront the dude tonight, he did it: he gave Patterson his wallet.

Patterson consolidated their bills into a single roll, which he tucked into his hip pocket. When he handed Brady’s wallet back, he’d left Brady a twenty. Felt like a slap in the face.

“Thanks,” Brady said, but the sarcasm was lost on Patterson.

“Played shortstop for Florida State.” Patterson gripped Brady’s shoulder—hard. He was still in good shape—strong upper arms, pecs showing under his white dress shirt—so despite the fact Brady had 20 pounds and a good few inches reach on Patterson, he’d probably wipe the floor with Brady in a fair fight. “Blew out my left knee, sliding home—big play, top of the ninth. Kept me from going pro, you want the truth. I was already talking to scouts from the Yankees.”

Half in the bag, washed up, and bragging—like Brady hadn’t heard it before. That bit about the Yankees a shot, since Brady was a Sox fan. Cheap, sure, but if it came to a fistfight, he was going for that knee.

“They sell cigarettes up here?” Katie would be disappointed, but he’d already slipped off the tobacco wagon. Been craving another butt since he’d finished the last one. The light glinting on Mary the waitress’s glasses—maybe he would walk back there and get her number. He’d never cheated, but Patterson was right: might make Brady feel better.

“Frank doesn’t mind if you have one of his, do you, old boy?” Patterson patted down Frank’s shirt.

“Give me a cigarette.” Brady had to ask twice before Frank handed him the crumpled pack of Marlboros. That silver band on Patterson’s ring finger—dude did whatever he wanted.

The lights above the bar glowed green in a drink. Brady knew well enough to trust his intuition when it came to certain things, such as the way Amanda had said goodbye to Patterson leaving a party at the district manager’s place that spring. Staying too long at the door, at the top of the steps in front of one of the sprawling brick houses on King’s Highway in Shreveport, she’d turned to Patterson. Wearing her black leather jacket, her blond hair cropped to shoulder length, she’d looked into his eyes, and it only struck Brady later, while she snored beside him in the Escalade on the way home, that he’d forgotten what she looked like when she flirted. Didn’t know what killed him more, her wanting his friend, or no longer wanting Brady himself.

Taking another drag of his cigarette, he wrapped his fist around his bottle of Budweiser. Over the last decade, the three of them had come to resemble a tribe. None of them from the South. Depending on the company, Patterson claimed Florida, but by his own admission, he’d grown up in the “Jewish” part of the state, “Manhattan with beaches.” They went to dinner parties across the bridge in Shreveport, and they tried all the ethnic places in town: the Pho Bowl, India’s Restaurant. Drove to New Orleans when they needed a cultural fix—music at Tipitina’s, the World War II Museum or a day at Audubon Zoo with the kids—while like the wolf in their midst, Patterson bedded their wives, knocking them off, Frank’s and Brady’s.

Yesterday, Brady would’ve said he was happy with his life. He’d have taken a mortal sin over this soap opera—something that mattered, a transgression worth suffering for.

“You long-dicking my wife?” Brady asked Patterson, who nearly choked on his Budweiser. Frank laughed.

“Jesus, dude.” Patterson wiped foam from his chin. “Who do you think I am?”

But at long last, Brady knew who Patterson was, and what he’d done. “She was gagging for it,” he’d said, mock contrite, the night he’d confessed to nailing Frank’s ex, who’d still been wearing her ring when Patterson had done her. “Tore that pussy up,” he’d said, and as horrified as Brady had been, he’d thought that could only happen because Frank was weak. Brady couldn’t believe he’d been so naïve about friendship, about love.

“You’re my best bud.” Brady slapped Patterson’s shoulder: hard knots of muscle.

Back in Patterson’s good graces, Frank pointed at Brady. “Fucking homo.”

br> Just to show them both he had the guts, Brady walked back to Molly’s. The crowd had thinned. Mary the waitress leaned against the bar. “Hey,” she said, like she’d been expecting him.

When he asked for her number, she looked like she hadn’t understood, and when he repeated himself, she laughed. To his surprise, as though she were in too much hurry to say no, she scrawled something on a pad, tearing the sheet off. The purple ink smeared, but the digits were legible. When she grinned, silver flashed in her mouth—a spike like a tiny barbell through her tongue.

“I have to get back to work.” She hoisted a tray, blinking behind smudged lenses. “But if you’re going to ask me out, you could tell me your name.” Brady realized on the way to the door that he hadn’t even taken his ring off. If she’d noticed, she didn’t seem to mind.

Waiting outside with Frank, Patterson nodded his approval. Their last visit to New Orleans, at dawn, he’d gone to a massage parlor, the Hollywood Spa, but Brady had sworn he’d never go with whores, not like Patterson did, though he had a way of making you break your resolutions. Always brought out the worst in a person, like when he made Brady gang up on Frank, like he wanted you to be as bad as he was, dragging you down to his level. That was Patterson’s particular genius.

“It’s not cheating if she doesn’t find out about it, old man.” Patterson knocked on Brady’s sternum. Brady felt exhilarated after getting the girl’s number. He’d made a good faith effort to save their marriage—that therapist, leading Katie’s Brownie Girl Scout troupe, for Christ’s sake—and apart from ogling the merchandise at a couple tittie bars, which didn’t count, anyway, he’d kept his vows. Maybe now he’d do whatever he wanted, just like Patterson did.

“You don’t have to lie to me about Amanda.” Couldn’t have forgiven Patterson, but Brady had to know if his best friend was screwing his wife. “Dude.” Patterson put his hand on Brady’s shoulder. Unsteady, he leaned against Brady. “There’s nothing going on with me and your old lady.” Next to him, Frank was propping himself up on an iron post. Brady caught another whiff of Patterson’s cologne, like sex and acne.

“Tell me the truth.” His voice cracked. As many times as he’d asked, Amanda said she didn’t want another kid. Said it would ruin her figure, but who she was trying to impress, if not her lawfully wedded husband? Brady told his wife he would’ve loved her if she’d put on three hundred pounds, and he didn’t care about any damn stretch marks, but that just pissed her off.

Patterson snorted, laughing. Close enough to kiss. “What would you do, anyway?”


An hour later, when it started raining, they went into Checkpoint Charlie’s, a biker bar on the edge of the Quarter. Patterson bought a round of Turbodog drafts in sweaty plastic cups. Frank drifted off, sputtering in the opposite corner of the booth. Place still had the AC cranked, so the temperature dropped. Frank held a beer in one hand, a cigarette between the fingers of the other. His chin fell, touching his collar, and he snored. Pathetic. Brady reached across the table and took the cigarette from between Frank’s fingers. Keep him from burning the damn place down. Patterson wasn’t having any luck trying to find someone to sell them coke. “No one’s holding,” he said, and Brady felt relieved. Better they called it a night and went back to the Sheraton. But he didn’t want to throw in the towel. Still hadn’t laid down the law for Patterson.

As if at a signal they’d agreed upon beforehand, Patterson stood, putting his finger to his lips, and Brady climbed out of the booth. Just to be a dick, he left a business card, propping it against the wooden buttons on the wrist of Frank’s jacket. In his rumpled tweed, Frank looked like a priest. With Patterson laughing beside him, Brady slid the plastic cup of beer back into Frank’s hand. Wouldn’t that be a joke when he woke up and didn’t know where his buddies were. Served him right for being weak.

At the bar door, a wet blast of warm air hit them. In less than 15 minutes, the clouds had spent themselves, and the sky seemed scoured clean.

On Rampart, the bars had closed—doors shuttered, neon signs dead in the windows. Through a brick archway and a wrought iron gate, folding chairs were arranged around a fountain in a garden that smelled of night-blooming jasmine, the view in half-obscured by the leaves of banana trees, like a glimpse of a life Brady would never have. “I can’t believe you dragged us here for this,” Amanda, depressed after Katie’s birth, had started telling him, two years after they’d moved to Bossier City—like the place was so terrible: good schools, no crime, but she wanted more for herself than cutting hair at Joseph Guin, the salon where she worked in Shreveport, and he couldn’t blame her for that. “Sooner or later, I’ll be promoted, and we can leave,” he kept saying, but it was like he knew he’d gone as far as he was going to in his life.

Across from Armstrong Park, Patterson stopped. The sign in front of the entrance lit up like a Ferris wheel. The gates were chained.

“We have two hundred and fifty bucks.” Patterson cleared his throat, tugging at his collar. “That’s enough for an eight ball, or maybe somebody can sell us some freebase.”

And though he had to be out of his mind to go wandering through downtown New Orleans on a Friday night in August looking for someone to sell him drugs, Brady saw his chance, and he said sure.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

Okay. He’d follow Patterson. And finally, they’d be alone. And Brady would get the answers he wanted.

They turned the corner by the police station and started up Basin.

“Where’re we going, man?” Brady asked, but Patterson told him to shut up.

Walking up Orleans, Brady worried that they’d be mugged, held up at gunpoint before he could act, before he could confront Patterson as Brady had sworn to himself he was going to do when he’d smelled his cologne earlier. But the streets were deserted. On the other side of an overpass, they emerged onto a row of tumbledown houses with boarded up storefronts, across from tall brick buildings: the projects, Christ, Patterson—but they were empty since the storm, Hurricane Katrina, five years ago, half-demolished, plywood nailed across doors and windows.

“Fuck.” Patterson held his side. Seemed pissed no one was around.

They followed the overpass, the I-10, on Claiborne. Above them, cars hurtled past, the early traffic sparse. Up the street, a blue sign was dark in front of the Circle Food Store, the place closed, the gates pulled down over the doors. A whiff of fried food from one of the late night places on St. Bernard nearly turned Brady’s stomach.

“Hey, what’s this?” Patterson dropped into a squat, picking up a shattered vial. On hands and knees, he sorted through the pebbles on the ground, picking one up and tasting it, spitting it out—the idiot, as if someone might’ve dropped a rock of crack. He didn’t seem human, and Brady imagined him giving it to Amanda, hips thrusting like a dog’s between her thighs.

Between the cement pillars that supported the overpass, a length of chain link fenced off a muddy enclosure where empty cans and bottles had been tossed. Rubble, as if from a construction site, too, and Brady thought of that Nine Inch Nails song from the bar, “Something I Can Never Have,” and the piano over the refrain: everything he’d wanted to be but wasn’t, mounting Shelly Clevinger in the back of his old man’s car. Until he’d smelled Patterson’s cologne earlier tonight, Brady thought he’d had the life he wanted: a family. Love.

From the pile of rubble under the overpass, Brady picked up a loose piece of rebar with cement crusted to the end of it. Looked like the stick after you eat a Tootsie Pop, except it was the size of a baseball bat and weighed 20 pounds. What if he hit Patterson once, just once, and got the drop on him, so he would have the upper hand? Couldn’t take him in a fair fight, so Brady deserved a handicap, didn’t he? He wanted to make Patterson answer a few questions. Brady wanted to know from Patterson’s mouth the truth, that he’d been giving it to Amanda.

Coming up behind Patterson, Brady lifted the piece of rebar in two hands. Off balance, or he probably would’ve killed Patterson, Brady hit Patterson on the back of the head. With an oomph, he fell forward, collapsing onto his stomach. Under the flickering streetlights, dark spattered the piece of metal in Brady’s hands. Blood. Had he done that? Didn’t seem possible.

Down the street houses were shuttered, windows darkened. A hand-lettered sign said Boot Repair. No one was around. Could he get away with beating Patterson up?

“Tell me you’re banging my wife,” he said. Just once, Brady wanted to have something on Patterson—to win.

“Hell you’re doing?” Patterson raised his hand, as if to ward off another blow. Blood stained his teeth.

“You get away with everything.” Brady’s voice echoed, like the announcer in the “Pigs in Space” bit from The Muppet Show when he was a kid. “Get.” Patterson crawled a few feet.

“Tell me you fucked her, and we can both walk away from this.” Brady took a couple steps closer. “I just want to hear you say it, dude.”

Patterson seemed baffled, like he didn’t know why Brady would be upset. “Thought you were joking.” Patterson spat.

Beyond the gray shape of the overpass, moonlight filled the cloudbanks. Even as Brady lifted the bloodied rebar, he felt uncertain what to do. If he knocked Patterson senseless, Brady could go back to the Sheraton, and it would be his word against Patterson’s, if it came to that. But no: Brady had come here to do this, had been preparing for it all night, even if he hadn’t known it, not completely, or hadn’t been able to admit it to himself until now.

His hands shook. But when he realized what he was doing—when he saw that he was going to kill Patterson—he felt calm, flushed with adrenaline, like Big Papi, David Ortiz must feel when the first baseman stepped up to the plate with runners on the corners, the Sox down two in the bottom of the ninth. Brady seemed very far away from Katie and Amanda and all those things that should have kept him from doing what he was about to do. After all, those things that should’ve kept him from doing this were the same things Patterson was taking away.

Patterson reached for Brady’s ankle, and Brady brought the rebar down, hitting Patterson’s wrist. Patterson yelped, clutching his hand to his chest. “What’re you doing?” Like he was starting to get it, like he understood Brady wasn’t kidding.

Looking at his best buddy’s face, Brady nearly gave up and walked away, and when he swung the rebar this time, he did it to make Patterson turn away, to blank out those questioning eyes. He struck Patterson a glancing blow across the forehead, and he flashed to a night in college at Keene State, Amanda tipsy, drinking by a keg in a basement: Brady an Alpha Sigma, Amanda a Delta Pi, a couple of average people destined to have normal lives. Later that night, he’d helped her to the dorms, his coat wrapped around her shoulders, like he wanted to protect her, like a man did. That was what he was doing now.

“Looking out for what’s mine,” he said.

As Patterson struggled to his feet, Brady did what he’d always known he would do if he ever had to fight Patterson, who outmatched him in strength and skills, and who would’ve kicked Brady’s ass halfway to next Sunday if Brady so much as let Patterson stand. Brady aimed a homerun swing at the knee Patterson had blown out in college, and even if Brady had never been much of a jock, no college baseball star like Patterson, even if Brady rode the bench the one year he played junior varsity hockey at Milford, that did the trick. Cartilage snapped, bone splintered—heard that even over the sound of traffic—and the lower half of Patterson’s leg flopped from the joint at an unnatural angle, like a GI Joe action figure bent wrong, so Patterson toppled.

“Jesus.” Patterson screamed, and the sound echoed under the overpass. Clutching his knee, he rolled onto his back, and he managed one well-placed kick to Brady’s solar plexus, but Brady hardly felt it. As Patterson crab-walked across the gravel, Brady raised the rebar. This time, he threw it at Patterson’s face. It struck Patterson on the mouth and bounced to the dirt.

Bitch, Brady thought.

Patterson shrieked, covering his face. When he turned onto his stomach, blood dripped between his fingers. If he was turning tail, Brady had won, and he might’ve stopped. But Patterson still hadn’t told Brady what he wanted to know. And if Brady did let Patterson get away—what then? Wait for Patterson to find him, to call the cops?

Brady picked up the rebar. As moonlight touched the yellow sign in front of the Circle H Meat Market down the street, he stood above Patterson. Thought of Katie in her Brownie uniform.

“Tell me,” he said.

“Didn’t touch.” Patterson crawled a few feet, and stopped, like he saw there was no point.

“The fuck you didn’t.”

Patterson wheezed. “Not fault.”

Brady told him the world rewarded assholes, and that was the truth. Everybody loved a winner. But Patterson didn’t look so good now, did he, brother?

“Can’t kill me.” His voice softened, and it was pathetic, the worst to hear him beg. Brady hated Patterson more than ever for showing his belly. “Please don’t hit. Who’s going to take Sue and Eva?”

Patterson might’ve been crying.

“Tell me you fucked my wife,” Brady said, “and I’ll let it go.” Leaning closer, he caught another whiff of Ax, like a men’s locker room, and felt the same certainty he had hours ago in the bar. He knew, and it gutted him, but it also filled him with righteousness and rage.

“Tore pussy up.” That was Patterson’s last hurrah, like he’d wanted to go down swinging, or at least talking tough. Brady felt a pang, like he hadn’t really known the truth. But it wasn’t satisfying, considering he’d had to beat it out of Patterson, who might have been lying. And though Brady wanted to walk away, he knew what he had to do. He’d left himself no choice.

After the next blow, Patterson stopped moving.

“Who’s the limp dick now?” Brady raised the rebar and swung it, like he was chopping wood. Dripping sweat, he held the metal above his head. “This is for Frank.” Like he was getting back at Patterson for all the times he’d made Brady gang up on Frank, or for screwing Frank’s wife. Like Brady was killing a piece of himself, that part of him that had looked up to Patterson, and always followed his lead. That had wanted to be Patterson, even. That had let Patterson ruin his marriage.

One last time, Brady swung the rebar, hitting Patterson’s head, and he backed away from Patterson, letting his club fall to the side. When Brady wiped his brow, there was blood spatter on his sleeve.

“Take that.” He yelped, whooping, a sound of triumph, but there was no one to hear it, no witnesses, no cheering crowds to see that he’d won, that he’d beaten Patterson.

He squatted beside the body, rifling Patterson’s pockets. Took the wad of bills and Patterson’s wallet, the keys to his Suburban, which they’d driven down from Bossier City, and which they were supposed to drive home. Took his hotel keycard, and his gold-plated Rolex. His Blackberry. Make it look like he’d been mugged. Brady was going to tell anyone who asked—the cops, Frank, Patterson’s wife, or Amanda—that Patterson had wandered into the projects looking for drugs, and that was the last Brady had seen his friend. Brady pressed Patterson’s wrist, feeling for a pulse.

Patterson’s head looked like a deflated volleyball, a mess of blood matted like the rebar with clumps of his dyed black hair.

Amanda. Brady wanted to run to her, to hold her, to tell her and Katie everything was going to be okay.


Hours later, in Molly’s at the Market, Lyle Lovett played on the jukebox. Brady tapped his foot on the rung of his stool while he waited for the girl—Mary, working behind the bar now—to bring his Abita. A couple uniformed FedEx guys sat at the other end of the place. Brady had been wandering the city for hours. When Mary delivered his beer, she seemed frightened.

“Rough night?” she asked, and Brady said she didn’t know the half of it.

He took the wad of bills from his pocket and peeled off a twenty. Took Patterson’s wedding ring out of his pocket, and he yanked off his ring and left the pair of them—one silver, one gold—side by side on the bar. Figured he’d taught Patterson a lesson.

When she brought his change, she faced the bills. She bobbed up and down, too much energy for eight o’clock in the morning, chomping gum while she examined his face, his hands, and the rings on the bar. He wanted to confess, to tell her everything, but he wasn’t that stupid.

“Thanks,” Brady said. He imagined her apartment—dirty floors, bare walls, and a futon mattress. He wanted to see his daughter, but he couldn’t imagine going home to Amanda and that queen-sized Serta she’d defiled.

Mary’s eyes narrowed. “Bathrooms are that way, if you need to get cleaned up.”

He reached across the bar and took her hand. She started, overbite more evident as her smile faded. Looking into her green eyes, he slid the gold band he’d worn a dozen years onto the ring finger of her left hand.

“If this is a proposal, I’ll have to think about it.” Her hands shook. The corner of her glasses was taped. “You’re hardly the first customer to pop the question.”

Not interested. He’d struck out looking. Brady let go of her. The FedEx men sipped their beers. Brady had to piss. He left Patterson’s ring next to his beer. As he walked down the bar, one of the FedEx guys opened a cell phone.

Brady fumbled zipping up, wetting his fingers. In the mirror, blood streaked his face. Blood stained his oxford, his khakis, and his loafers. “Holy shit.” He looked like he’d walked through a slaughterhouse. No wonder Mary and the FedEx guys had been eyeballing him. His heart pumped, yet even as he looked for a way out, he stayed calm. He bent over the sink, splashing his face. Everything in his life was over.

In the bar, the jukebox played a song he remembered from college: Beck, “Devil’s Haircut.” Outside, people passed, the sun rising over Decatur. Next to Brady’s change, Mary had left a shot of clear liquor in a plastic cup. Tequila—a ploy to keep him around long enough for the cops to get there, she would say in her deposition.

Brady gulped it. One of the FedEx men was standing. On the bar, Mary had left Brady’s wedding ring. A text from Frank on his and Patterson’s phones: Fuck you both, it said. Butt pirates.

He took Patterson’s ring and left his next to his change, like they’d traded places. Waving at Mary, he made for the door. Though he knew it was absurd, if he could get back to the Sheraton, he’d be safe. One of the FedEx men, the more burly of the two, watched him. The other talked into his phone. One swarthy, one blond, in their uniforms, they looked like Ponch and Jon, the cops from CHiPs, that TV show about California highway patrolmen Brady’d loved in reruns as a kid.

“Hey,” one said, “buddy.”

Outside, the FedEx guys tailed Brady by a block. In front of Molly’s, Mary stood in the middle of the sidewalk, holding a baseball bat. Brady started running.

Tom Andes' writing has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2012, Witness, Guernica, Great Jones Street, Atticus Review, Mystery Tribune, Shotgun Honey, the Akashic Books Mondays Are Murder Flash Fiction Blog, and elsewhere. He lives in New Orleans, where he works as a freelance editor; teaches for the New Orleans Writers Workshop, which he cofounded; and moonlights as a country singer. His sporadically updated website is tomandes.com.

Two Good Hands, fiction by Steve Liskow

“Not even to have two good hands.” Julia gives Aura Lee a glare that I can feel from across the room.

“Let the dead lie,” Belle agrees. She’s Aura Lee’s grandmother—Julia’s mother—but her eyes say she can kick my butt if I give her half a reason.

“But it’s an awesome song.” Aura Lee sits on the couch with her bare legs curled under her. Glasses of iced tea sweat on the coffee table, an old door with the knob removed.

“’Awesome.’” Belle lights a cigarette and belches smoke from her nostrils. “We send you to college and that’s the best you can do? ‘Awesome?’”

“You know what I mean.” Aura Lee hunches forward and I can see her sinking into the family dynamic, her at the bottom of the tree. “It would be perfect on the CD. But I don’t know all the words and I can’t find it anywhere. Plus we want to get the writing credits right.”

“Not going to happen.” Julia shakes a cigarette onto the table and puts it between her lips. She wears jeans and an old Jackson Browne tee, both faded to the color of gravel, but she’s still seriously hot. She’s Aura Lee’s mother, but she might still be pushing forty from this side.

“Why not?” Aura Lee’s chin inches forward. The three women look so much alike I can see the DNA flowing down the family tree. Same triangular faces, same green eyes, same wine-red hair, except Belle’s has a little gray. Varicose veins turn her lower legs into a barber pole.

“That was Luther’s song.” She lights Julia’s cigarette and Julia draws until the end glows like a new penny. She blows smoke toward the window. The wallpaper has a yellowish tinge and the whole room smells like an ashtray.

“I barely remember him,” Aura Lee says. “I thought maybe it would be a way to, you know, connect with him again.”

“You were learning to walk when he died,” Belle says. “Cancer. Went like that.” She snaps her fingers, the click filling the room.

“Cancer,” Aura Lee says. “You should quick smoking, Gram.”

“Yeah, and you should forget the damn song and go back to your books.”

“Classes are over,” Aura Lee says. “We get everything set up, we can record it all in a few days before the fall semester starts.”

Julia draws again and puts her cigarette in the ashtray. “You know how long cutting an album takes? Months.”

“Not now, the technology’s so much better. We’re talking about a week, max. The guy who runs an open mic off-campus has a decent studio. He’s already penciled us in for late July.”

Belle and Julia look at each other like they’ve just been offered a handful of beans.

“Um, excuse me?” They turn to me with shotgun eyes. They have to know Aura Lee and I hooked up last fall. We still have separate housing in the dorms, ‘cause you can’t move off-campus until you’re a junior.”

“Ms. Holden, you said your husband sang the song? Do you know where he heard it first?”

“Nope.” Belle crushes out her cigarette.

“But you still play, don’t you?” Her fingers still have calluses and I wonder where her guitar is. Ours are in my car. Maybe we should bring them in, try to loosen things up.

“Some.”

“And you sing, don’t you, Ms. Holden?” It registers for the first time that they’ve got the same last name.

“A little. I couldn’t play…”

Julia’s voice fades and she holds up her right hand, the one not holding her cigarette. A thumb and pinkie. It’s all that keeps her from being perfect. Her daughter’s still working on it, but she’s getting there.

“Born this way. Lucky they were making shoes with Velcro by the time I was learning to dress myself. Buttons are still a bitch, though.”

“I’m sorry.” It sounds stupid, but I can’t think of anything better.

“Not your fault.”

Aura Lee clears her throat. “Listen, can we play you our other songs? You know the older stuff, but I’m starting to write too, a little. And I really like ‘Pear Tree.’ It’s a terrific story, sounds like some of the old Appalachian ballads.”

The older women drag on their Marlboro lights. Aura Lee rolls her eyes.

“OK, can I at least show Ash around?” She glances toward the stairs. The whole downstairs isn’t much bigger than a suite in the dorms, and I wonder how big the bedrooms are. There have to be three of them, and I’m not sure that leaves room for a bathroom.

“Keep your door open,” Belle says. Aura Lee rolls her eyes again.

I follow her upstairs, the women watching me pretend I’m not checking out her ass. The stairs are so narrow I wonder how they got furniture up there unless they built it in the rooms. Aura Lee leads me into a room with one large window overlooking a field. She opens it wide for what little breeze it offers.

“They’ll think about it.” She flops on the bed and her top rides up so I see her belly-button ring. I wonder if the women know about that. Or her tattoo. She took her eyebrow piercing out before we came.

“Is that good or bad?” I’m only five-ten and I have to stoop with the low ceiling.

“We play some of our other stuff, they’ll hear how that song would work for us and change their minds.”

Aura Lee doesn’t have a great voice, but you can hear the truth in it, like she’s lived every word she sings, like she’s been nineteen forever and it never gets any better. We met at an open mic last fall and figured out right away we should team up, and now we get a gig once in a while. Twenty-five bucks and a burger, but it beats a finger in your eye.

“You didn’t mention your grandfather sang it.” I sit next to her on the single bed, the only thing that can fit in here. The dresser looks slightly heavier than cardboard. I wonder how her clothes don’t crush it.

“I only remember Gram and Ma singing it, but Ma never sang out. She always told me Gram and Gramps were pretty good.”

She points at a picture on the wall. A cheap wooden frame contains Belle and a man with a heavy jaw and light hair. The girl in front of them can’t be more than seven or eight, but I recognize Julia hiding her right hand behind her back. The man holds a pear in his hand, and the tree behind them spills shade across their faces.

Aura Lee goes to the window and I join her. A few hundred yards away, a split rail fence seems to be slowly dying, a small brook and a patch of woods beyond it. Between us and that fence, a blasted stump sticks up like a finger.

“That’s the tree in the picture,” she says. “It got hit by lightning when I was seven. Scared the shit out of me.”

The stump stands a hundred yards away. If it had been closer, the falling tree might have slammed through this wall.

“You look like your mom,” I say. Nothing gets past me twice.

“Yeah.” She stands. “Let’s check the attic.”

“There’s an attic?”

“Yeah, it’s probably stuffy as hell, but maybe there are more pictures. Gram and Gramp playing out, something like that.”

“They didn’t record anything, did they? You would’ve mentioned it.”

“You needed money and an agent back then. And they were doing Americana before it had a name. Nobody could’ve cared less.”

Turns out there is a bathroom, not much bigger than a phone booth, and outside it is a swinging trap door with steps that fold down. The heat spills out so thick my eyes tear up while I follow Aura Lee’s cut-offs up that ladder. The attic ceiling’s only about five feet tall, just enough so old clothes can hang on racks. Dresses and shirts under plastic wrappers, winter coats and boots. An old trunk that belongs in a pirate movie. Yellowed newspapers and magazines. I walk around a sticky strip dotted with dead flies.

“Hot damn.” Aura Lee points to a stack of old LPs and 45s.

“Bob Dylan,” she says. She digs deeper. “Pete Seeger, Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie, Kingston Trio, Burl Ives, Josh White, Chad Mitchell, Phil Ochs, Tim Buckley, Peter, Paul and Mary...”

She pulls a Dylan LP from its sleeve. “Great condition. Shit, you could get a few bucks for these.”

She reads the label on a box with an old tape reel.

“Library of Congress. Jesus, this is old stuff they were probably learning from.” She spreads more boxes on the floor. “Let’s see if ‘Pear Tree’ is on one of these.”

A couple of boxes are old bluegrass and I check them first. The song has that high lonesome feel, minor key creepy. No luck.

“Not that I see a tape recorder up here,” she says. “If we find the tape, we can take it back to school, someone must have an old reel-to-reel.”

Sweat drips down my back and my throat scratches from the dust. I’m ready to bag it when Aura Lee opens the trunk. Old bed linens on top, framed pictures under them, some with Julia holding a baby that has to be Aura Lee.

“Whoa.” She digs into the pile and pulls out a framed eight by ten. Her grandparents huddle next to a microphone with their eyes closed. The man holds a banjo and the woman plays a Martin guitar. The tuning pegs of another guitar hide behind the man’s knee, maybe the old Guild Aura Lee plays now, and a neon Schlitz sign glares red behind them.

“I wonder where this was taken. It’s gotta be a bar somewhere around here.”

“Doesn’t have to be around here,” I say, but she shakes her head.

“They never made enough to travel much. Didn’t get farther east than Ann Arbor or west than Muskegon. Don’t think they ever left the state.”

“They always lived around here?”

“Gram’s family did. Gramps came up from Kentucky to work in the auto plants back when we made our own cars.”

“Kentucky,” I say. “Maybe that’s where he learned the song.”

“Maybe.”

She pulls out more pictures and finds a shoebox. When she opens it, a bunch of cassettes stare up at us, labels with smudged pencil. A beat-to-shit cassette player lies under the box.

“When did CDs take over?” she asks. “Before we were born, I know that.”

“Eighties?” I say. “My father has some old tapes and vinyl, but mostly CDs.”

“So this is probably thirty years old, give or take.”

We put the other stuff back. Aura Lee goes down the ladder first and I hand the player and tapes down to her. Back in her room, I think she’s even more surprised than I am when the cassette player works. Tinny music comes out of the speaker, drums, bass, electric guitars.

“Someone’s out of tune,” she says. The tape seems to speed up and slow down, and I can’t decide whether it’s the player or if all the years up in that heat stretched the tape. We listen to a few minutes, then she ejects it and tries another one. That’s more electric stuff, and even worse than the first one.

“I wish we could read the labels,” she says. She pulls out one of the old reels. “If it’s one of these, we’re screwed. The tape looks like it’s melted together. We probably won’t be able to play it even if we can find someone with a reel-to-reel.”

Julia appears in the doorway, her eyes narrowed to green slits.

“What are you doing?” Aura Lee puts in another cassette without looking at her. “We found these up in the attic. We’re checking to see if one of them has the song.”

“They’re probably all junk.” Julia’s eyes remind me of a cat, even more than her daughter. When she looks at me again, I feel like a mouse.

Aura Lee turns up the volume and we can hear that this tape is acoustic, so maybe we’re getting closer.

“Ash, why don’t you go get our guitars. We can try to figure out the chords.”

It’s ten degrees cooler out of that cramped room. I pop the trunk on my old Chevy and pull out our guitar cases, both covered with stickers from every open mic and coffee house we’ve played since last fall. Jackson, Ann Arbor, East Lansing…

When I step back in, Belle looks up from her cigarette.

“Is that Luther’s old Guild?” Her voice is softer than anything else she’s said.

“Well,” I say, “it’s what Aura Lee plays. If it was her grandfather’s first…”

Belle’s lips tighten. I maneuver the guitar cases up those tight stairs. Aura Lee’s still listening to the tapes and Julia’s still hovering over her.

“It’s Gram and Gramps,” Aura Lee says. “Crappy recording, probably live.”

Julia crosses her arms, her right hand underneath. “I think they wanted something live to send to the record companies. I don’t know if it’s one of these or not. Not that it matters, none of the record companies ever got back to them, I don’t think.”

“When was this tape made, Mom, do you remember?”

Julia shrugs. “Not exactly. Maybe 1990? Dad died in ninety-eight. You were only a little over a year old.”

The room goes silent except for the tinny version of “Long Black Veil” on the cassette player. Crowd noise drowns out the guitars. Aura Lee turns the cassette over and we hear more singing, but no crowd. Lots of stops and starts, with talking in between.

“Saw him pick her fruit.” That’s Belle. Julia’s eyes widen and Aura Lee turns up the volume.

A guitar plays a rhythm figure and a man sings the line.

“And only that ripe old pear tree

“Watched as he picked her fruit. Yeah, that’s better. I like that.”

Aura Lee looks at her mother, toward the stairs, and back at her mother.

“They wrote it? They wrote the song? Why didn’t you tell me?”

Julia hugs herself and shakes her head. Aura Lee turns off the tape and stands.

“Let’s take this downstairs.”

I lead the way because nobody can get by our guitar cases anyway. There’s a little more room in the living room, but Belle’s already lighting another cigarette. Her face shows she heard us upstairs.

“Gram.” Aura Lee puts the cassette player on the coffee table and looks for an outlet. “You and Gramps wrote the song, didn’t you?”

“How did you two decide you’re ready to do a record?” Belle doesn’t look at her.

Aura Lee glances at me. “We’ve been playing together since late last year, ten bucks here, twenty-five there, pass the hat a lot. Some guy asked us if we had CDs to sell, and we figured we could probably do that. We know a guy who has a studio, a couple of graphic artists from school…”

Julia appears at the foot of the stairs. Aura Lee looks at her, then back at her grandmother.

“Gram, why didn’t you tell me you and Gramps wrote the song?”

Belle shrugs. “We were just fooling around, stealing from lots of the old ballads we knew. We never meant to play it out, even if Luther lived. It’s not even finished.”

Aura Lee shakes her head. “Four or five verses, that’s pretty much a whole song.”

Julia sinks to the bottom step. All she needs is a flowing dress and long hair streaming behind her to look like a wronged maiden out of those same ballads.

I open my guitar case and find the pencil and paper I keep under the tuning pegs. Aura Lee takes her own guitar and sits on the couch next to the cassette player. When she strums a chord, both Julia and Belle seem to shrink.

“Standard tuning?” Aura Lee rewinds the tape a few seconds and turns up the volume. When the music comes up, I strum a few chords and find where it’s going.

“Yeah. And in ‘A’ minor.” We listen to the words and music, and I try to find the bass note as we go along. It’s not hard, especially since they keep stopping and starting to try different words.

“Under that ripe old pear tree,

“He swore he loved her true. “And only that ripe old pear tree

“Watched as he picked her fruit.”

Aura Lee looks at Belle. “The only verse I remembered, and I didn’t understand that line when I was little. Confused the hell out of me.”

Belle holds up the cigarette pack to Julia. When she nods, Belle lights a cigarette and walks it over to her.

“When she began to blossom,

“She told to me his name…She revealed to me, she let me know…what do you think?”

“Um…‘revealed’ sounds better. Maybe ‘man’ instead of name?”

“Gotta rhyme with ‘shame’ at the end.”

I put down my guitar and pick up my pencil. “Back it up and play it again.”

Belle puts her hand over Aura Lee’s.

“Don’t.”

“But Gram…”

“Please.” Julia’s voice barely carries across the room. The cigarette smoke wreathes her face.

We play through three verses, lots of stopping and starting again, which gives me plenty of time to write down the words. And the chords are baby simple, like hundreds of other old ballads. But now we know this one isn’t that old.

Julia stares at her partial hand and Belle’s eyes burn into the cassette player.

“Aura Lee,” she says. “Don’t do this. Please.”

“Gram…” Aura Lee plays the next verse.

“And give that ripe’ning child his name

“And share with them his wealth…his life…his pride…never mind, keep going…

“But he just sneered go ‘way old man

“I’m not your daughter’s first.”

“What a great line.” Even Aura Lee whispers. “But it’s so awful, too.”

Belle leans over and yanks the cord out of the outlet.

“Enough, God damn it, that’s enough.”

“Gram, what the hell…?” Aura Lee puts down her guitar and reaches over for the cord, but Belle jerks the other end out of the cassette player and throws it across the room.

“Enough, enough, enough.” She looks a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than a few minutes ago, and her eyes slash across us like a hawk’s talons.

“That song must never, never be sung. I thought we threw it away years ago when Luther… Give me that damn tape.”

“Not a chance.” Aura Lee pops the little door open and jams the cassette into her pocket.

Julia rolls into a ball on the bottom step, her knees drawn up to her chest, her hands covering her ears. Her shoulders twitch and her keening gives me goose bumps.

“Mom? What’s…” Aura Lee crosses the room and sinks next to her mother.

Belle steps between them and cradles Julia in her own arms with her back to her granddaughter.

That’s when I remember the pictures upstairs.

“Jesus.”

I go over and pull Aura Lee back onto the couch. “Wait a second,” I tell her. “Just be quiet for a few minutes.”

“But—”

“No,” I say. “Seriously. That stump in back of the house, the tree you said was hit by lightning, it was a pear tree, right?”

“Yeah, but…” I see her get it, too. “Oh, my God.”

We force ourselves to sit until Julia uncoils and looks at her daughter. For all she sees me, I might as well be on Mars.

“Mom.” All three women are about the same height, but when Aura Lee sways across the room in her cut-offs, she seems to be nine yards of legs. They tangle in a big hug, all arms and red hair and sniffling.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. They don’t hear me. I go over and pry Aura Lee loose long enough to find the cassette against her hip bone. The three of them sink to the bottom step in one big heap and I replace the cassette and plug the player in again even though I know what’s coming now. Aura Lee finally turns to her mother.

“This isn’t made up, is it?” Julia’s throat moves like she’s swallowing an earthquake. “Not all of it.” She wipes her nose on the back of her hand and lets out a sigh she seems to have been holding in for years.

“Son of a bitch wouldn’t marry a cripple. He didn’t want a child of his to inherit....”

Aura Lee’s eyes widen and I force myself to push “play” again. “Then rage filled up this father’s heart

“My child’s tears fed the flame…fueled the flame, do you think?” Luther’s voice, that same guitar figure.

“Go on, we’ll fix it later.” Belle’s voice.

“And now that wicked young man lies

“Where he laid my child’s good name.”

I write it down while one last chord hangs in the room. I hit “stop” and none of us look at each other.

I walk outside, around the house. The sun hammers my head and I wish I had a hat.

The stump is about three feet tall and a foot across, the outside jagged and blackened, and the center looks pulpy, like it’s rotting. I don’t know a pear tree from a flag pole, but judging from the diameter, this one must’ve been tall.

I walk around it in ever-widening circles. Nothing looks different, some tall grass, a few bare spots, a few rocks. It’s a field, for Christ’s sake, what else do you have in a field?

Aura Lee joins me, her mother’s eyes looking out of the younger face. I and pull her against my chest and feel her shaking.

Belle and Julia join us, leaning against each other like it’s all that keeps them upright.

“This side.” Belle’s shadow falls across the stump and reaches back toward the house, tiny in the distance. “Right here.”

Aura Lee’s fingers squeeze mine and I squeeze back in self-defense.

“Nobody ever found out?”

Belle looks at the stump, then at me holding her granddaughter.

“The whole family was mixed up in all sorts of…shenanigans. Nobody asked any questions because they wouldn’t want to know the answers. He might’ve just took off with money or…”

And now that wicked young man lies

Where he laid my child’s good name.

“Is he buried here, too?” Aura Lee’s voice breaks to little pieces in the breeze.

“Uh-huh.” Belle and Julia look so beautiful I know I’ll see them in my dreams for the rest of my life—and wake up screaming.

“Forget that song,” Julia says.

I’m still holding the paper with the words, now almost bruising my eyes.

“It’s a great song.”

And then I think about why it’s such a great song. It tells the truth, about how people love and care for each other and put themselves in danger doing it. I never knew Luther, but I see now that he was a hero. He’s not around to suffer, but Belle and Julia could go to jail, which won’t help anyone. All because of Aura Lee, and she wasn’t even born yet.

It really is a great song. But letting other people hear it…

I hold up the page so the women can see it, and tear it in half, then tear the halves again. Then again. One more time, the packet thick enough so I have to work at it. I open my fingers and let the wind carry the shreds away, ragged white moths floating across the field until I can’t see them anymore.

I kiss away the tears running down Aura Lee’s cheeks before I look at her mother again. “We’re all in this together now. Aren’t we?”

Aura Lee walks over and hugs her grandmother. Then her mother. Then she turns and holds out her hands to me, two good hands, the ones that play guitar, the ones that hold me tight.

Two good hands.

Steve Liskow’s stories have earned an Edgar nomination, Honorable Mention for the Al Blanchard Award (3 times), and the Black Orchid Novella Award (twice). Those stories appear in Tough, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, and several anthologies. Words of Love, his 15th novel, will appear late this year, and The Kids Are All Right was a finalist for the Shamus Award in 2015. He lives in Connecticut. Visit his website at www.steveliskow.com.