there in a plastic safety device on the dog food. What was she even trying to protect him from? She hadn’t noticed any of the dog food scattered across the concrete floor, or that raccoons had likely been in her garage. Her recycling was chewed up and torn. There were scat pellets. So then she did feel something. Not disappointment, rage, or aggression having anything to do with her father’s being so exhaustingly who he was. No. She was infuriated that the garage door had been open all night and that wild animals got into her dog’s food.
She walked around the car to the big bucket of dog food and started rocking her son. He fell asleep fairly easily. She moved him off the dog food container and put him in the middle of the hood of her car. She got a blue-handled broom and dustpan to clean up what she could. She sprayed urine remover in all the places she found scat.
Her mother texted her back about what had happened with her father last night.
Roni read her mother’s explanation but did not respond. Instead, she texted her husband to say that she was going to miss his friend’s train. She gave no explanation to her husband, just told him to text his friend and let him know.
Her husband was livid and responded right away. He said, no, he wasn’t going to text his friend, that she just needed to go and pick him up, that there was no reason for her to be late, she was just sitting around all day, and that it’s not like his friend can just call a taxi—it’d cost a fortune if any ghetto cab even did show up. Her husband’s follow-up text said that he never should have given her any responsibility and that he knew she didn’t like his even having friends but that she had no right to leave the poor guy hanging.
She did not cry. She did not call her husband at work to scream at him about her father’s lying passed out drunk in the backseat of her car. What would be the point? He’d already worked a double. So she did not throw her phone down and stamp on it. She did not call her friend to get the name of that divorce lawyer.
She absorbed what she could and did nothing.
After twenty-nine years of listening to all her mother’s excuses she was not about to explain anything about this to her husband. She was too sick of all the reasons why. She did not respond to her husband at all. She just looked at her son on the hood of the car to be sure he’d be okay there for another minute and disappeared into the house. She returned with a plastic cup of water, walked around to the rear passenger door, and threw the water in her father’s face.
He blinked. He spit. She was patient and maybe a little afraid when she told her dad to just pull his feet into the car because they had to go to the train station. He reluctantly did it.
Roni took her son off the hood of the car and put his car seat into the carrier base in the backseat next to her father. She didn’t want her son so close to her father right at that moment but she had no other choice. She was just glad that her child was encased in plastic, that her father was not quite conscious, and that she’d be picking up her husband’s friend in a minute. She might not remember exactly how he and Brandon met but she knew he was a big guy trained for mortal combat.
Knowing that helped her breathe.
She got into the driver’s seat and adjusted her mirrors. Her father only momentarily met her gaze in the rearview mirror before he tilted his head back and put his hands on his forehead.
Roni said nothing.
She put the key in the ignition and turned it.
Nothing happened.
The car wouldn’t start: the battery had run down with the dome light shining all night.
She texted her mom to ask if she could go get her husband’s friend at the train station. Her mom immediately responded to say she couldn’t because she was almost at work already and plus she didn’t understand why her daughter was always so unfeeling about everything that happened and never cared what her mother was going through. Roni should really not give her any more stress right when she was so emotional after the events of the previous evening, and even if she might have maybe considered doing a favor for Roni, even if she were perhaps available for another twenty minutes, she wouldn’t do anything right then because she was so mad at Roni for not even responding to her explanation in the other text.
Roni deleted the text message from her mother and got her son and his carrier out of the car. She left her dad rolling around in the backseat and walked to the house next door. She wished she had grabbed the diaper bag or at least a blanket. She wanted to be more prepared. But it was too late. She rang the doorbell.
Her neighbor answered. Roni extended her son’s carrier and said, “Can I borrow your car for a half-hour? I’ll fill up your tank.” Her neighbor didn’t say a word. She reached for the baby carrier, dug into her pocket, and handed Roni the keys.
SMALL TOWN
Suicide’s unthinkable but around six thirty on a winter night in 1994 the redheaded woman stood against a low building covered with dingy white siding. She had on the suit she’d worn to a job interview she’d never gotten a call back about and smoked her cigarette behind a holly bush because she didn’t want to be hit by the door that swung open periodically. Her discount heels sank down into the slushy bark mulch. Her head tilted back against a black oval sign that read Devalle Funeral Home in tasteful gold script. The sign was lit by a solar-powered fluorescent landscaping light full of dead bugs from the summer.
The winter sun must not have fully charged the power cell during the day so its flickering bluish light illuminated her hair. She was tired but not too tired to notice the sign behind her head, to remember the building’s purpose, and to realize people were staring at her. She took two steps forward. Her shadow grew tall and black against the siding. She was conscious of the eyes upon her but not of the enormous shadow shifting and flickering behind her. The mourners turned away, afraid of the towering, swaying silhouette. The redhead couldn’t understand why they refused to acknowledge her. She knew every one of them. So she summoned a defensive pride and smiled at each of the people she thought judged her for smoking, or for standing in the bushes, or for sinking into the mulch, or for leaning her head against the fancy sign, or for not going inside right away to pay her respects, or whatever their reasons were. She had no reason to be guilty. She was waiting for her friend. So with spiteful clenched lips she nodded to those who refused to look at her as if to say, “And what makes my life your business?”
It's hard to feel absolutely comfortable in a small town.
There’s not a large degree of discomfort. After living there for a lifetime a person might not notice any uneasy feeling at all but there is a small amount of tension, like the constant hum in an electric wire or the inescapable buzzing of a ceiling fan that needs repair. It's a uniform, predictable, smooth tension. It must come from the nature of the people. Different figures carved from the same stone, all trying to discern themselves from each other, like kitchen magnets that won't stick together.
And the red-haired woman felt that tension acutely while she waited for her friend. Her hands were bony and freezing in the wind, and even though her heels sank into the muck that February had made of the summer landscaping she didn’t want to wait on the sidewalk amidst the influx of mourners. People wearing dark coats passed her. Each one went ahead, stamped his or her feet on the Astroturf step, and held the glass door for the next person.
She was unconscious of the shadow, but it kept happening that as the mourners approached the funeral home they saw the enigmatic figure as a presence to be reckoned with. They passed her without looking. They gripped their children's shoulders. Unconsciously the men placed themselves between her and their loved ones: protective, afraid. The shadow stretched up the building and wrapped itself around the gutter. It was a reminder of the size of death and the reason they had come. They bowed their heads in reverence for the unknown. Her shadow swayed back and forth in the cold, smoking and waiting for a friend. To the passersby the motion signified an impatience with life and a cool expectation of their similar fate. Consciousness is exhausted by February. They did no
t think all of these things, but the woman's tracing brought tears to their eyes as they passed. The redheaded woman stood aloof, smoking her cigarette, and waiting for someone of these supposed friends to at least say hello. Her “Hello, Irene,” crashed useless against the sidewalk.
An old red Chevy truck approached. Graceful curves of slush sprayed out from the wheels, and halfhearted flurries dove past the headlights. The truck came to a treacherous stop and leaned against the curb, exhausted. The passenger asked the driver, probably again, to escort her in. He reached across her and pushed the door open. It scraped the curb, sticking in the grassy mud. A fat woman backed out of the truck and stood on the curb. With her weight removed, the door rose from the mud. She still spoke to the driver. He nodded. The fat woman shut the door and checked her makeup in the side mirror before the old truck pulled away. She smacked the fender in disgust. She hadn’t finished primping before her husband drove off. But. He didn’t stop. She made her way carefully along the curb to the sidewalk.
The red-haired woman moved away from her post between the landscaping light and the sign it lit. The shadow shrank down the wall and disappeared. People on the sidewalk smiled and nodded as she