Dead Echo

  *

  Patsy Jane Gilbert had been born on Christmas Day, 1971. At home, on the trailer’s linoleum dining room floor. Her mother, Jean, assisted only by her younger sister, Pauline, in the quick, unexpected delivery. Patsy’s father, “a student of some sort” from the university (or as far as he’d claimed the night he fucked her in the Rusty Nail’s parking lot) had not been seen since. Jean (though she didn’t like to admit it and in fact never did, even to herself) called him Ed though his real name had been John too. It hadn’t made any difference. He was just as gone.