52 Pick-Up

This story won the 2023 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize.

Dad always said I didn’t have to pay him back for everything, but I knew that was a huge lie, the way that beautiful people wearing long wool coats say, “Sorry, no cash,” when I asked them if they want to see a card trick.

“You haven’t even seen the trick yet,” Dad would protest in Chinese, breaking his cover as an elderly deaf-blind gentleman sitting three seats down the subway car, and I would have to stop shuffling and say, “Shhh, Dad,” except I didn’t want to blow our cover even more, so I would change course mid-word, say, “Shhh, dear sir.” But sometimes he would be so mad and say, “Let’s go, Sammy,” and drag me out of the train car.

He wore a yellow armband of old caution tape that we’d modified to say “DEAF-BLIND: PLEASE BE PATIENT.” On top of that, he had old drugstore glasses that we’d Sharpied black to look like sunglasses and a beanie pulled down over his ears.

“Why do you have to be deaf and blind?” I asked him every so often.

“That way, there’s no way people would think we’re related,” he said, swinging me onto our kitchen counter so that I could practice pulling cards from behind his ears. “And that’s what you want, right Sammy?”

“Don’t say it like that,” I scolded him. “You know people pay more if they think I’m on my own.”

He still insisted on coming to watch me perform every weekend morning until he needed to leave for work, and people were sometimes alarmed to see a man wearing a DEAF-BLIND: PLEASE BE PATIENT armband spring up at Grand Central to kiss me goodbye and transfer to another train. I always had to switch to another train too, partly because people were staring at me, partly because I was so nervous when he left that I would try to do a thumb fan but my hands would shake all my cards to the ground. I had to walk the whole tunnel to Times Square to calm down.

Dad hated that I did street performances, but he still thought everything I did was amazing; and, I reminded him constantly, I did it for him. I didn’t like it either, but these performances were the only realistic way that I was ever going to earn enough to pay Dad back. If I waited until I was of legal working age I would be indebted beyond recovery. Plus, with my round cheeks and short legs I could shave a few years off when people asked me how old I was, which would almost always make them fork over more.

But I had to be careful of how deeply to discount my age. “Where are your parents?” the tourists would ask when I went too young, reaching into their tight jeans for their phones and dredging up ticket stubs and hop-on hop-off brochures. I would help them collect those scraps, smile my roundest-cheeked smile and say, “Don’t worry, I’m meeting my dad in a few stops.”

“Oh, sorry, I don’t have any cash,” they’d say, meaning, so why doesn’t he take care of you, and I’d hold out my hand with their wallet in it and say, “Credit card is fine too,” meaning, he does, why else would I be here, and by the time they’d realize I was joking and the wallet trick was all part of this show, the whole row of passengers would be staring. And I would have to switch trains then, too.

But it was all worth it when I got home and shoved the bills and coins in an old deli container and stuffed the container in the back of the freezer so that I couldn’t reach it without a stool. I labeled it DAD’S MONEY: DON’T USE. The words had to do. Dad and I had once tried to stop ourselves from spending money by freezing it in a block of ice, but eventually we wanted cheung fen for dinner and instead of waiting for the money to thaw, we’d brought the ice cubes to the cart downstairs. The old lady cooking inside shook her head and put the cubes on the griddle where they hissed until the dollars unfurled. We all looked closely to confirm it wasn’t a trick.

~

I started out just singing on the subway because it was the easiest to practice. We didn’t have a radio but on hot nights the neighbors who loved 92.9 FM Oldies would open their windows, and Dad and I would sit on our fire escape and sing into bowls so the sound would echo toward us. I told Dad he should go inside and relax, but he insisted he needed to be there to cover my ears when there were inappropriate lyrics. I used to sing, Take me down to the paradise city, where the hmm hmm hmm and the girls are pretty, before I realized that Dad didn’t know enough English to properly censor songs. After that, I still let him sit next to me on hot weather music nights, but when he fell asleep mid-chorus I wouldn’t disturb him.

“Sammy, why didn’t you wake me up?” he demanded whenever he woke up on his own, because his legs had gone numb from sitting on the grate or he’d drooled a rope of saliva long enough to lower us to the ground.

“I tried, but you were so tired,” I explained. “And if you help me, it just means I have even more to repay you for.”

“Dummy,” he would chuckle, swatting me upside the head. “You don’t need to repay me.” But I thought about the grass is green and decided he had it wrong.

It was actually my cousin Julia who gave me the idea of switching to card tricks because that’s all we played in her backyard: 52-card pickup. Uncle had so many free decks from visiting Atlantic City all the time, though the cards all had holes punched through or clipped corners. Julia would count down from ten and then toss the desk up into the air, and we would both try to collect the most.  Back then I sang so much, both practicing and performing, that my diet was just Halls lozenges that Dad swiped from streetside stands for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and my cheeks were constantly chipmunked with one lozenge on each side. It meant that Julia and I had very boring conversations.

“Do you want to play this game my dad taught me?” she asked, and I nodded because I would have leaked Halls syrup if I opened my mouth.

“Do you like it?” she asked me after we played a few times, and I shook my head.

“Do you know any other games?” she asked. Here, too, I shook my head, sucking hard on the lozenges, so she threw the cards again.

Dad and I visited every few months because Uncle didn’t know how to care for Julia as Dad did for me. Instead, Uncle had a lot of women visitors who would help take care of him and Julia until they realized Uncle wasn’t going anywhere, in the worst way, and they would abandon him in disgust. Uncle made Julia help prolong the relationships by pretending to be very precocious, but even that didn’t keep them around. She was like that the first time I met her, when we rang the doorbell of their apartment and she opened the door with glasses on and a very yellowed copy of The Prince in her hand.

“Oh, right,” she said when she saw us. She replaced the book on the milk crate that they used as a shoe rack, and took off the glasses, rubbing her temples.

“Brother, come in,” called Uncle from inside the house, and Dad went into the kitchen, leaving me with Julia. The house smelled like cigarette smoke and grass clippings. She eyed the notebooks and pencil case that I was carrying and came closer, hungrily.

“Can I see?” she said, already reaching out.

Dad got the money for my school supplies that year by making his hands a gun and sticking up the bodega down the street. They didn’t give him any money but they did call some hotline that summoned two counselors who escorted him back to our apartment. When I opened the door for him he produced a wad of wrinkled twenties and a Starbucks gift card. “The counselors linked arms with me as we came back, one on each side,” he said. “Left counselor had dirtier pockets but more money.” I was so proud of him, but mentally wrote it down as another entry in my checkbook, which brought me to sixty-four more weekends of singing on the train. When we went into the kitchen Dad was already explaining this all to Uncle.

“You just need to commit,” Dad explained to Uncle, smacking his palm with the back of his other hand. Uncle, who looked like a faded, oily version of Dad, paled even more at the thought, but still set down his cigarette to try it.

“Put your hands like this,” said Dad, showing Uncle how to interlace all his fingers except the pointers, and aim them at an imaginary head. “Now say stick them up!” Uncle could do it for a few seconds, but when Julia pretended to be the frightened cashier, he would unlock his hands and wave them in the air, saying, “It’s not real, it’s just a trick.”

“I know,” Julia would say, rolling her eyes and opening the sliding door to the backyard. Uncle’s ashy face froze like a mask, angry red diamonds blooming on both cheeks.

“Pathetic,” she laughed to me later, as she snatched the six of clubs from under my scrabbling fingers. We played in the backyard because Julia hated the smell of smoke. “He’s not even trying.”

“Well,” I said, feeling guilty for some reason, “you aren’t really trying either.”

“At what?” asked Julia.

I told her about singing on the train and the Sharpied sunglasses and PLEASE BE PATIENT. She laughed even more.

“Getting even is for people you’ll never see again,” she said. “I read it in that book.”

“I’m not ‘getting even,’” I said. “What would you know about that anyway?” But it was too late; I was already imagining Dad running out the closing subway doors on his way to work and the train falling off the tracks. I sat there thinking for so long that she eventually waved her hand in front of my face and said, “Hello? Sammy?” She had collected the whole deck on her own. Through the sliding glass door we could see that a small woman with a short perm had joined Dad and Uncle, and I think I saw Julia flinch, but she tossed the cards again and we watched them wag and flutter in the air.

~

It was a good thing I got the idea to switch to cards because my voice had started to sound like a cat’s tongue. We didn’t see a doctor, but we described my symptoms to one of Uncle’s lovers who had health insurance, who went to a doctor complaining of a sore throat, and a few weeks later she said her doctor thought she might have vocal cord nodules. “Stop singing,” she said, in her own raspy voice, fried from too many menthols.

We looked it up. Dad hotspotted our laptop by leaning off of our fire escape with his cellphone in his hand, which would just barely connect to the free city wifi.

“I’m no doctor, but Dad is a genius in other ways,” he had bragged when he figured this out. He was always beet-faced and white-knuckled with his eyes closed and I worried that when all the blood had finally gone to his head he would let go and fall into the street.

Once we learned that singing had knotted the strings in my neck, I snuck a deck of cards from Uncle’s stash and watched instructional videos at double speed and memorized them by repeating the words to myself to relieve him of internet reception duty as quickly as possible. For him, because I didn’t want him to fall into the street, but for me as well, because this was yet another service he provided me. And for the landlord, who would slip threatening notes under our door saying that we had to stop our hazardous behaviors.

“How’s my girl,” said Dad when he came in from the fire escape, and I said, tongue caught between my teeth as I practiced my pinky break over and over, “Very indebted, Dad, very behind on my bills.”

“You’re a child,” Dad laughed. “You have no bills.” As if that wasn’t my exact problem.

I practiced until my wrists were sore and then steamed them over the rice cooker to relax them, but my tricks always felt flat, somehow. I would fan the cards, ask Dad to pick one, take the card back, bring it to the top of the deck. “Is it the eight of clubs?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Dad, solemnly from his chair, as if swearing an oath.

“You don’t seem excited,” I said. “I found your card.”

“I knew you would find it,” he said. “You’re my amazing girl.”

“That’s not the point,” I told him, throwing the deck across the room in frustration, and in a few hours I would find the deck re-stacked, in order, clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. I had explained to him before that I didn’t want the cards ordered, that I would just need to reshuffle them so that people didn’t think I had somehow organized the deck to help me find their card. He’d tapped my forehead and said he wanted to make sure he had picked up every card.

“It’s easy to miscount,” he’d said, “but it’s hard to miss the order of things.”

When I asked Julia about the card pickup game the next time we visited, she laughed in my face. “That’s such kid stuff,” she said, tossing the deck of cards back to me, messily so that I only caught about half and had to scramble for the others.

“Why then?” I asked. But she was already stalking down to the kitchen and asking Uncle where her bookbag had gone.

“I don’t know,” said Uncle, busy stroking his new lady’s hair. She had tattooed eyebrows and very red glasses. Julia stopped short once she saw that they were both smoking indoors. She’d told me that he used to leave the house to smoke to try to protect her baby lungs, and he would walk all the way to the city and back smoking an entire pack. At some point he’d gotten tired of leaving.

“I said I don’t know,” said Uncle, looking up and seeing Julia still there. “What else?”

She just stared, which made Uncle look down at the cigarette in his hand and then wave dismissively at her, but she was already opening the sliding door and disappearing into the backyard. I thought she sounded like she was about to cry, but when I caught up to her she was sucking air like crazy and I realized she’d been holding her breath.

“Want to see a card trick?” I asked after a minute of her gasping, not knowing what else to say.

“What are you talking about?” said Julia in a carefully normal voice, and I started explaining the card tricks and fire escape to Julia, and she narrowed her eyes and snorted.

“You’re still on that?” She left me holding the pack of cards in the middle of the grass and went to sit on the concrete steps by the house. I went back inside.

She did eventually play with me that evening, as the sun started oozing all over the backyard. I found her squatting over a patch of grass, her head almost between her knees, her shadow dribbling long across the grass. When I got closer I saw she was arranging a handful of periwinkle stems and puffball dandelions around a dead bumblebee.

“What,” she said, looking up when my noodle of a shadow licked over her. It was less a question and more a greeting. She glared at me for a second before continuing to knit her daisy chain, which snaked around her feet.

“That’s such kid stuff!” I crowed, towering over her.

“No, it’s not,” said Julia. “I’m decorating his grave.”

“What,” I said, echoing her. I waited for her to explain but she kept arranging her pile of flowers.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s the game?”

“Not a game,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. Then she ordered me to collect more dandelions and more of those weeds that dripped white sap when we broke the stems, which I did because it seemed so important to her. She piled them up until no one would’ve known that there was a bee inside.

“Now we pay our respects to our dearly departed, but we do not cry,” she said in a voice that said she had read more books than me. She squatted down and nudged the back of my knees so that I would do the same. After a minute of squatting my toes were numb and my knees were screaming, but Julia did these deep breaths with her eyes closed. Her exhales ruffled the grass and made the tufted seeds twirl on the dandelion head.

“Hello? Julia?” I said, but she didn’t open her eyes. I knew it was on purpose because she swatted in my direction. “What are you doing?” I asked, louder, but then she just started ignoring me. By the time she was done praying or whatever I was sitting on the grass just studying her legs, which were plumper than mine: the tendons in her ankles ropy, her calves and thighs squeezed tightly against each other like unopened hot dog buns. She stood up and shook her head at me, looming against the sky from my place in the grass.            

“I got tired,” I protested.

“Yeah,” she said, shaking out her legs. “Who’s not trying now.”

~

“How did you get Sammy to fear you?” Uncle asked Dad. A few months later he was smoking indoors again, so Julia was outside even though it was raining. She stood against a section of the under the eaves, but the rain was light enough to blow at a slant, so she was rain-dark all down her front anyway. I was crouching by the open sliding door, nose poked out so I could breathe clean air, too.

“Sammy doesn’t fear me,” Dad said. I heard the clink of a teapot lid and then the hollow knocking that meant Uncle was taking out a new cigarette. “Sammy thinks that she’s indebted to me somehow.”

“Same thing,” said Uncle, coughing lightly. “How do I get Julia to think that?”

Dad was quiet for so long that I thought he’d left somehow without me hearing. “I don’t think you want that,” he said eventually.

“Don’t I?” said Uncle. They were quiet for a few more minutes and I turned Dad’s sentence over in my head. Why wouldn’t Uncle want that? I ran through all the ways in which Julia and Uncle owed each other: Julia, beholden to Uncle for his card packs and tolerance for her sour spells; Uncle, beholden to Julia for making her stay outside all the time and wearing glasses that made her head hurt. They were much closer to even than Dad and I were, I thought, but because neither of them made any attempts to resolve their debts, I would likely repay Dad first.

“Remember when we were young boys, waiting for Ba to come home from work, and you threw a rock into the window trying to hit me?” Dad asked.

“You threw it at me,” said Uncle, and they both laughed. From the sound of it, Dad smacked Uncle across the chest, or maybe the other way around. I had a sudden vision of Dad and Uncle sweaty and skinny in dust-stained shirts, chasing each other around a rock-lined backyard.

“He cleaned up the glass himself,” said Dad. “Straightened up the whole room. Didn’t even say anything to us. And then he slept in the living room because he said the wind would stunt our growth.”

They didn’t say anything for a long time, and my legs started to fall asleep again. I tried to stretch them one at a time but my ankles gave out and I thudded onto my back.

“Sammy,” said Dad, walking around the kitchen island to discover me. “Why are you hiding here?”

“I’m not hiding,” I said, offended that he thought I would trick him, and I slipped outside to stand beside Julia.

Julia and I stood silently until I decided to pick a fight, because I was in a bad mood from listening to Dad and Uncle, and because I was suddenly sick of Julia acting better than me, like she deserved what she had. Of course I started by telling her that she never tried being nice to Uncle, no wonder he hated her, that I would be so angry if I were him.

“I heard him say that he wanted you to be more like me,” I said, leaving out the part where Dad said that Uncle wouldn’t want that.

“At least my Dad doesn’t force me to beg on the subway,” said Julia, barely looking at me. She kept shredding pieces of crabgrass between her fingers, like sticks of string cheese, and the wet strands clung to her fingers.

“I’m not begging,” I said, too late, flabbergasted at how wrong she had it. My mouth flapped for words for so long that I swallowed some rain. “I’m working. I need to be there.”

“Whatever,” said Julia. She made a face and wound her hands around each other a couple times, and then bowed weirdly and looked up at me with puppy eyes. “Let me show you a card trick,” she whined, “don’t you want to see a card trick?” She shook her hands and some grass fell off like confetti. “You think that’s what normal kids do?”

On the bus home, I almost told Dad what Julia said. I always told him everything, to avoid keeping anything from him that would be valuable. But I didn’t want to ask him

“Would you be mad if I stopped doing card tricks,” I whispered in his ear.

“No,” he whispered back. “I would be happy.” At this I rolled my eyes and hummed the paradise city song.

~

A few months later, Dad came back from work and told me the news: Uncle had gone for a walk again, but he hadn’t come back for a week now. We found out because Julia had waited to be picked up from school until it was dark and then slept on one of the couches in the principal’s office. As he told me about Julia, Dad had his bare feet in the dishwasher which had just finished running, so all the steam washed around his heels. He had been laid off last month, so he was temporarily working as a loader at a warehouse, where he said the conveyor belts moved faster than our wifi.

It was my turn to lean off the fire escape so that he could search for jobs. I didn’t realize that the hardest part was locking my feet under a metal bar to make sure I wouldn’t accidentally fall off, how numb his feet must have gotten when I was learning my card tricks. But I got through it just by thinking about how much I still owed him. The time he jumped down into the subway tracks to retrieve the eight of diamonds that I’d accidentally dropped. The time we ran out of hot water so he poured warm water through a colander for my shower. The time he got a plate of free samples, but was turned away because they recognized him, so he used his pocket-knife to hack off half of his hair, got a second plate, and then hacked off the other half for a third. I thought of so much that I often started to cry, big sobs that made my body buck up off the railing. When he finally heard me and came to investigate, he declared that he would stop searching for jobs.

“No, no,” I begged. “Just tell me what you do.”

“I just close my eyes and wait,” he said. That night I recycled another note from the landlord that said that this was our LAST WARNING.

We picked up Julia and on the train I told her that she was going to live with us from now on. She picked at her food at the dinner table and used her phone data, which made me resent her even more. I made room for her in my bed, taking a string and running it down the middle of the mattress. When she saw that she laughed and immediately put her feet over it, and I stormed to the bathroom.

I came back after brushing my teeth with toothpaste that I bought for Dad, and I was running my tongue over my front teeth when I heard her breathing hard under the blanket.

“Julia? What’s wrong?” I asked, burrowing under the blanket to find her curled up facing away from me. Her breath stank, steaming up the whole blanket. It smelled like she hadn’t brushed her teeth in a while.

“What’s wrong?” she shot back, thickly. “Oh, nothing.”

I sat quietly for a few minutes, trying only to breathe when I absolutely had to. I thought about Uncle asking Dad how to get Julia to fear him, and how Dad and Uncle had smashed open a window but Grandpa had cleaned up the glass silently, with Dad and Uncle maybe sheepishly standing in the kitchen with their hands behind their backs, not offering to help but feeling as if they needed to stop what they were doing.

~

When we woke up the next morning Julia was gone, the rumpled dimple next to me barely warm. Dad and I ran outside to try to find her but couldn’t. The cheung fen lady said a girl came to buy a box of zhaliang with freezing cold quarters, and I almost screamed. I ran back up the stairs just to check what I already knew was true: the deli container lid was askew, and the insides were empty as they were when we’d drained it of its original wonton soup.

“Julia is a thief,” I fumed to Dad, and he pinched my ear sharply.

“Julia is your cousin,” he said. He stared at the empty container, and I almost waved my hands, trying to bring him back. But I waited instead, watching his eyes glaze over, the same way he looked at the sky when he was hotspotting me, the same way Julia looked at Uncle when he was smoking. We stood there until his eyes started to water, and then he said, “Oh, Sammy,” like he was choking, and reached out and squeezed my hand.

Julia called from an unknown number a week later. I was filming myself for practice, trying to stop wrinkling my eyebrows and holding my breath whenever I did the double-lift, and when the phone rang I ran outside so that we could call over wifi, another of Dad’s tricks to save on a phone bill. I leaned all the way off the fire escape, which the landlord had blocked off with caution tape a few days before, and turned the phone on speaker so that I could hold it closer to the reception spot.

“Tell your dad that I’m okay,” she said, staticky and faraway, my arm and her voice waggling high above the street. “And also that I borrowed the cash he’s storing in the freezer to print some ‘Reward: Missing Person’ fliers.”

“The cash I’m storing!” I shout into the phone, nearly slipping my foot from the railing. “Where are you going?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, and I could hear the smirk in her voice.               

She said see you later and I was too late to answer because I was trying to remember what she said that one afternoon, how small the bee was in comparison to the pile of flowers, how Julia breathed so hard it started to bald the dandelion puffs that we’d stuck in the roof of the crypt like little fairy globes, how when I looked outside the next morning, the pile was scattered all over the garden like confetti, the bee nowhere to be seen. Julia was already outside with her hands on her hips, like she’d volunteered to clean up a party to which she hadn’t been invited. And I knew, remembering the sturdiness of her legs and the way our whole family spent so much time staring into the distance, that she could be out there waiting for so, so long, just looking at nothing forever.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 1. Click here to explore other stories from this issue.

A Love Note

Our arrangement was simple enough. I was with Gloria the first and third weekends of the month; Ollie and Gloria were together the second and fourth weekends. Weeknights were infrequent and scheduled ad hoc. Gloria and I had regular dates at a few bars, with an occasional wedding when called upon. Ollie and Gloria mainly frequented American Legion halls and maybe some family gatherings, as far as I knew. Nothing fancy, but enough to keep us all interested. 

We settled into our routine with a regularity that made it difficult to remember our previous, more independent, lives. Of course, there were bumps in the road: Ollie occasionally wanted Gloria on one of my weekends or we had a conflict around a holiday, but not often, and we always navigated any obstacles smoothly. It seemed as if we could go on like this forever. 

It probably helped that Ollie and I had been longtime friends before Gloria came on the scene. We had known each other practically our whole lives, growing up in a small town in North Dakota. We ate barely edible school lunches together and had sleepovers in elementary school. We navigated the complexities of middle school at each other’s sides. We even sat next to each other in the high school band, with Ollie on the tenor sax and me on trumpet, our instruments mirroring our stature in the class photo. We lost touch for a time after high school, but we never stopped being friends. 

Now, many years later, after separately moving to Minneapolis, we had become reacquainted through the small world of gig musicians. Our friendship picked up where we left off, easy-going and without drama, close in the sense of men who have no desire to talk to each other of difficult things. We maintained our connection by watching sports on television, or by drinking cheap beers around a bar while talking about sports we had watched on television. True to form, we did not discuss details of our time with Gloria or really anything related to Gloria, other than changes to our schedule.

All of which led to my confusion at lunch one day when Ollie asked, “Don’t you think it’s time one of us moved on from Gloria?”

The question hit like a gut punch, made worse by his breezy inflection that implied, in his mind at least, the matter already had been settled and I’d be the one moving on. 

“What do ya mean? End it . . . just like that? I don’t under—” 

“I don’t think there’s a formal process for this sort of thing.” 

“That’s not what I . . . I mean, how do we decide who ‘moves on?’”

Ollie did not respond, so I filled the silence: “Anyway, I like sharing. That way we can both look after her.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Ollie said. “I just think it’s time for a change, that’s all . . . it’s not like we’ll stop being friends if we don’t share Gloria.” 

That was it. I jerked our conversation to more comfortable ground. First, baseball—“Do you think the Twins will make a move at the trade deadline?”—and then, music—“Have you seen any jazz at the Dakota lately?”—talking rapidly and more than usual, afraid of what Ollie might say to fill any gaps in the conversation. 

As is often the case, the end of this whole affair was not immediate. Gloria and I had a number of beautiful weekends together. I remember one night at a German American bar where it seemed we could do no wrong. We swayed in harmony on the dance floor to the Snow Waltz, kicked up our feet a bit to the Tipsy Polka, and even tried a tango. The night seemed to last forever and pass in an instant, as only the most memorable times do. Of course, Ollie had his time with Gloria too. And, of course, I continued to remain in the dark about where they went together.

Everything seemed back to normal, yet I could not shake the feeling that we were all on borrowed time together. Toward the end, I found myself holding Gloria more tightly, moving together for an extra song or two, under the harsh glare of the overhead lights and the occasional wary glances from staff as they scrubbed the glassware and did a cursory wipe of the bar and tables at closing time. 

Of course, I regret my inaction in the moment. Looking back, I had plenty of opportunities to avoid the disaster that ensued. I should have been proactive. I should have fought for Gloria like a true literary hero. I am not one to blaze my own path, though, and there are not many love stories involving our triangle of two musicians and an instrument. You see, Gloria is not a woman; she was—she still is—an accordion.  

It is possible this revelation may mitigate your empathy for my tale of heartbreak. If that is your reaction, I feel nothing but pity for you. On the contrary, as only the lucky souls who have held an accordion can attest, it makes my account more profound. 

Unless you have played your own accordion—actually hugged one to your chest as you felt her breath move in and out, matching the rhythm of your heartbeat—I can’t expect you to understand the relationship an accordionist has with his instrument. The way other instruments are played—the pursed-lip kiss of a trombone, the soggy taste of a saxophone, the plunking of cold piano keys, the violent banging of a drum—make them simply inanimate objects in your hand. 

An accordion, on the other hand, comes alive as you gently massage her keys, warmed by your own hands during an hours-long embrace in which she continuously changes form, gracefully expanding and contracting. Like any desirable woman, an accordion is both welcoming and independent, granting you the opportunity to join your voice with her melodic tones or to simply enjoy her sweet music. 

I’m not ashamed to admit that I remember my first time with Gloria as vividly as I remember my “first time.” When I first held her, I knew we were made for each other and that her music would be the sweetest I could ever hope to play. When I looped in Ollie to help pay for Gloria, I assumed he would feel the same way. I guess I cannot expect most people to understand the connection that I felt with Gloria, but Ollie, he should have known. We were a part of a small but vibrant community of accordion players enjoying a renaissance of sorts—at least in our small part of the world—driven by the improbable convergence of the elderly yearning for tradition and young people embracing the retro irony of a good polka or waltz. 

Perhaps none of that matters now. What does matter is that I called Ollie one Friday morning to arrange a time to pick up Gloria. I asked when I could stop by, and I was answered by a long pause. Finally, Ollie said the five words that always presage doom: “You had better sit down.”

“What is it?” I asked. 

“I don’t have the accordion.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t have Gloria. I haven’t seen her since yesterday.” 

“Yesterday? When were you planning to tell me?”

“I was hoping to find it.”

It. A subtle, yet significant, shift in terminology, like switching to the past tense when discussing a person who is chronically ill or gone missing.  

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so Ollie continued, “I had the accordion in my car when I stopped by the grocery store, and when I got home it wasn’t in there. I must have taken it out of the trunk to make room for my grocery bags and forgot to put it back in.”

I was stunned. I couldn’t process my life without Gloria. I knew that I could scrape together enough money to buy another used accordion, as I eventually did, but it was Gloria I wanted. Anyway, what was she doing in the trunk? And dammit, she’s not an “it.”

With no idea how to respond, I started peppering Ollie with obvious suggestions. “Did you go back to the store parking lot? Did you check inside the store to see if anyone turned it in? Did you ask any of the other customers?” 

We did our due diligence, of course. Ollie and I returned to the store together, and at least in my case separately on numerous occasions, to see if anyone had turned in Gloria. I walked through the parking lot nearly every day, hoping to catch a glimpse of Gloria next to a parked car. The store employees grew to know me, although the recognition that showed on their faces as I approached the customer service counter gradually evolved from welcoming to exasperated as the days passed. After a time, I started shopping at another grocery store to avoid reminders of Gloria’s absence in my life. 

We even stopped by the local police station for help, where we were politely informed that, based on the facts, the accordion was considered abandoned, such that there was “no potential violation of the criminal code requiring investigative action.” When I took it upon myself to seek surveillance video from the parking lot a city official efficiently closed the bureaucratic loop by requiring a search warrant to view any footage.

While pursuing the dead end of police assistance, we sought help from our community. We took refuge in the new town square and posted notices on Facebook and our neighborhood social networking site next to announcements of lost pets, yard sales, and complaints about neighbors not picking up after their dogs. We tweeted about our plight and scoured Craigslist multiple times a day for a post listing our beloved Gloria for sale, presumably at much-too-low of an asking price.

Leaving no stone unturned, and having no success with our online posts, we appealed to our actual town square. We tacked up handwritten signs around our neighborhood anywhere we could, including a Starbucks, a bookstore, a diner, a liquor store, and the grocery store where Ollie last had Gloria:

LOST ACCORDION!!!

Reward for Return!! Two free performances of your choosing!!

Last seen Thursday afternoon in the Lunds parking lot. 

The accordion was in a soft backpack case, root beer brown color, torn on one edge.

If found, please call Ollie (612-xxx-xxxx) or Pete (612-xxx-xxxx)

No Questions Asked! Just a Reward!!!

Even as we went to all this effort, we knew none of this would work. We had a sense of obligation, but never a feeling of hope. It was obvious, at least to me, that Gloria was gone forever; anyone lucky enough to have her now would be a fool to give her up. Knowing that, I moved on eventually, at least in the way that we all convince ourselves to go forward after suffering a loss. I suppose I even stopped thinking about her as much, although it was harder when I played at some of our old spots. 

Around this time, after I had remade my life without Gloria, I was on a long winter walk one evening and ducked into a small corner bar to warm up and have a whiskey. I heard her before I saw her. Her sound was unmistakably pure. I looked past the bar muddled with aging regulars sitting next to young hipsters and saw Gloria in the hands of another musician. He was about my age, and he was seated comfortably on a small stage in the corner of the room. My first impulse was to rush toward her and wrestle her away from the man holding her, but something about the music made me stop. I had never heard such lyrical sounds from her or from any accordion for that matter. I sat near the door and listened transfixed. 

When the set finally ended, I approached the other musician warily. “You sound great,” I said, cringing at the sound of my rising inflection. “I play as well . . . I really enjoyed your music.”

“Thanks,” he answered. He was sipping on a bottle of Grain Belt, his other arm draped over Gloria as she rested on his lap. “Oh, I’m Bill.”

“Pete,” I said with a nod. I longed to reach out and touch Gloria. Bill set his beer down on a side table and we shook hands. “That’s a beautiful accordion. Where did you get her?”

“I bought it a few weeks ago . . . at that music shop on Lake Street. It was used but had clearly been well cared for.”

“I don’t—” 

A group of young women brushed past me, each holding a rum and coke that was clearly not their first of the evening. They crowded around Bill and Gloria for a selfie. Bill shrugged his shoulders as they retreated to their table to post their photo. 

 “I was going to say . . . I don’t think I’ve seen you playing before.”

“Probably not. I just moved here from Wisconsin a few months back. I’m substitute teaching now . . . but I’m trying to get a full-time music job at one of the elementary schools. Since substitute’s pay is for crap, I decided to supplement my income by playing some accordion again. I haven’t played in a while, but it’s helping pay the rent for me and my boy.” He looked down. “Times have been leaner since my wife left us.”

I paused. I thought about telling him the whole story and demanding that he return Gloria, perhaps selling my own accordion to pay him off or working out some sort of trade. But then I remembered the beautiful music Gloria made as I listened to her that evening. It was clear that he needed Gloria more than I did, and perhaps, she needed him to reach her full potential. As if by Divine Providence, at that moment I heard Sting singing over the bar’s speakers, “If you love someone, set them free . . . Free, free, set them free . . . .” Dammit. Sting was right. 

I pulled out a five-dollar bill and stuffed it into Bill’s tip jar. “From one musician to another.” He tipped his beer in my direction as thanks. “Good luck landing that teaching job. And take care of that beautiful instrument, will ya?” 

With that, I took a last look at Gloria. I impulsively reached out my hand to feel her smooth wood case before I turned and quickly walked out of the bar. As I stepped outside to walk home, I paused to breathe in the crisp winter air, my mind as peaceful as the night sky filled with falling snow.

The Spin

you are a gyrating top, all giddy sin

I am nothing more than

evasive abstractions, void in the concrete

the means to influence an audience

selecting facts to suit your argument

the perceptions, the conclusions

whether truth or lies

are effected by my scaffolding

loading language with luggage

I am not here to manipulate

common sense, prejudice, stereotypes

with rational argument

engulf the public with feeling

and propagate

the pull of emotional response

conforming views that comfort

smother all contradictors

people will believe anything

cover them with calumny

tell them often enough

one-sided messages

tell them emphatically

delivered by all media

I will change their understanding

The New House

In the old house, the swarms of flies

you sent clouded the bathroom mirror

and swam in the puddles of wine

on my nightstand. A spider left

a red painful rash on my right calf

after I rocked in the pink recliner

which used to sit in our daughter’s

nursery. The silverfish, hiding beneath

the white laundry basket, set

my skin afire, so I moved away.

This house is newer and bigger.

No more pests.

Two months pass and I finally relax—

I’m a new woman without you.

Poised at the keyboard, ready

to write, a fly bounces along

the ceiling fan’s blades. Its fat body

drunk on your spirit. I exit the office

and spend the day in the kitchen.

I’ll never see that fly again.

Seven days later a brittle spider 

corpse waits in the closet corner. 

All your tricks are meaningless. 

You can’t speak to me.  

Self-Portrait as Shakuhachi

How easy to let air 

slide through oneself.

Or, being air, 

complete those brief 

tasks, a song of many 

whispers weaving through 

tall grass, sculpting regrets 

from that caressed cheek, 

beyond dance and speech, 

where words go for comfort

and nothing contains us.

Not joy, not contrition. 

Neither hope nor peace. 

Not even love.How easy to let air 

slide through oneself.

Or, being air, 

complete those brief 

tasks, a song of many 

whispers weaving through 

tall grass, sculpting regrets 

from that caressed cheek, 

beyond dance and speech, 

where words go for comfort

and nothing contains us.

Not joy, not contrition. 

Neither hope nor peace. 

Not even love.

The Boxer

When you step over the ropes, old hands

say you should be prepared to die.

A lifetime spent coming

to that moment…

jabbing,

bobbing,

weaving,

feinting,

clinching,

rope-a-dope in a pinch

absorbing all the blows,

the pretense that they never hurt,

eyes glaring the lie—

“Is that all you got?” with

arms flopped at your sides,

a heart about to burst, stomach

knotted in fear, legs that

want to turn traitor. Yet

you wobble on. Corner men

splash water on your face,

styptic and vaseline for the gashes,

a snort of ammonia, catch

your breath and out you go.

For, once down,

a count of ten

is all you get,

a blurry glimpse

into the fleeting void.

Photo Shoot, Roseland Park Cemetery, July 1985

The photos arrived, tucked inside your letter with its paragraphs
of charm as preamble for the main point, dagger-honed,
that stabbed me by surprise. You’d made an effort

to tiptoe around the graves, you said, and not disturb
the dead—as you’d been taught—while Jade and I 
traipsed upon the grassy mounds. We laid our lissome

bodies down, entwined long limbs, and posed while you 
fiddled with the focus on your new Canon and subdued
the stirring in your khaki pants. Lovers, closeted

even from our close friends, we took advantage
of the chance to ham it up, to touch. Like me, she wore 
black: leather gloves, my fedora, and a camisole stark 

against her pale arms and sharp collarbones. She’d brought
fancy silver cutlery and her handgun, which I triple-checked
to assure the chambers were bullet-free before I cocked

my head and pressed my temple to its snubbed nose—
Behind me, a granite family marker slumped, engraved
with my last name, and behind it, Jade draped

her thick cascade of hip-length hair across the tombstone.
That’s perfect, you praised, and sank to one knee 
to take aim. At yet another grave, she straddled me,

pretended to plunge a knife into my jugular vein
as I arched back, feigning agony. Your gat-toothed grin
lurked in the shadow of the lens. The day was sunny,

but you’d misjudged the aperture or shutter speed,
and the photos came out underexposed, in grainy shades
of green and black, our skin a phantom pallor—

a success of a mistake, a complement to the grim
backdrop. As for your after-the-fact admission 
of prim disapproval, you hypocrite, my friend:

the locale was your suggestion, the photo shoot a fantasy 
you bashfully confessed. And while we were game—
game as in happy to indulge, game as in the target of your hunt—

your letter keeps us in your crosshairs a different way.
I note you failed to specify which pictures you blew up 
to mount like trophies for prominent display.

Van the Tree Man

When Tom Blake was a young insurance agent in downtown Cincinnati, he worked for his Uncle Walt at the Walt Blake Agency, a well-known but decrepit local fixture. Walt and his long-dead partner, Fred Prendergast, offered general liability insurance to all comers, but their mainstay dominated the surety bond business for bail, appeals, and judicial orders. Their second-story office was at Ninth and Main, above the B/G Restaurant, a local greasy spoon catering to the courthouse breakfast- and lunch-time crowd. Fred’s great uncle, Pat Prendergast, had been Clerk of Courts before a clean government campaign flushed him out. There was no one in the courthouse with a dirty little secret or bad habit that Pat had not passed on to Fred and Walt. If a bond could be had, or a release contrived, Fred and Walt knew how to get it. 

After a couple of years learning the business, Tom saw a long dark future ahead, a rocky, if lucrative, road of peddling insurance policies to the fearful and cautious. He’d be writing bonds for those brushing up against the court system—criminals, and others, who couldn’t handle their problems and needed a lawyer or the courts to do it for them. He saw money dotting the trail but wondered about the psychic cost. Perhaps the law would be as lucrative as insurance but allow him to do both good and well. And so, he was considering taking the LSAT and going to law school. His good-natured wife, Laura, who sported an Ivy League law degree, was taking a break raising their two children. As she struggled to acclimate to Midwestern life, she encouraged Tom to achieve the goals she had willingly given up for the family.

Tom was reluctant to say that Fred and Walt had misused their knowledge of the dark ways of the courthouse. It was all grist for the philosophical mill they ran at The Brothers Three, a disreputable neon sewer up Court Street that they had frequented together most afternoons after work. When Fred died too young of a heart attack, Walt, a confirmed bachelor, silently but resolutely dropped Fred’s name from the masthead. He increased his hours at the “Three,” as its habitués called it, and changed no other habits. 

After Fred fled the scene, Walt became a solitary drinker, so Tom was puzzled when Walt asked him to join him at the Three one Friday afternoon in mid-December. 

“You’ve been working too hard, Tom,” said Walt. “There’s someone you ought to meet. A good lawyer. You need to see what practicing law with a good lawyer is really like. We might even sell him a bond.” 

When Tom arrived that Friday at the Three, Walt was already deep in drink and conversation with the interesting specimen/prospect. The bar fronted on the rear wall, with the usual array of quarts of brown bourbons and Scotch, greenish gin, blue vodka, and other spirits spigotted and ready to pour. On the bar itself sat jars of inedibles—pickled eggs, pigs’ feet, and garlic pickles of grayish hue. In the middle of the room were a few forlorn Formica-topped tables, and on the sides darkly-upholstered booths, the leather seats leaking poisonous fibers from incipient crevasses. In a corner booth sat Walt in his threadbare but serviceable Harris-tweed sport coat and horn-rimmed specs. On the table lay a scattered assortment of Walt’s Manhattan glasses, peanut shells, and the visitor’s beer steins. Across from Walt, sat a handsome, slightly paunchy lawyer, glistening black hair brushed straight back from a high forehead, a red and blue repp necktie accenting his sharp pinstripe navy blue three-piece suit, much in need of dry cleaning, and scuffed, dirty Bass Weejuns. He ushered Tom a space next to him on the banquette.

This was Paul Martino, a barrister of some repute with a catch-as-catch-can practice. Tom had noticed that Paul occasionally made the inside pages of the local papers. He had a penchant for the notorious. Tom recalled that Paul had used his legal acumen to get a local lady-of-the-night off a prostitution charge. When the undercover cop posing as a john solicited the girl’s services and arrested her for prostitution, she retained the services of the Law Offices of Paul Martino, as had many of her sisters before. When the case came to trial, the cop forthrightly and truthfully testified that the enterprising miss had asked him if he wanted a “three-way.” A local jury was sure to know that Cincinnati chili is served five ways—plain, with spaghetti, with spaghetti and cheese, with all that and beans, and finally, all topped with chopped onions. Paul created reasonable doubt by getting the cop to admit that she might well have been inviting him to share a late-night snack at a nearby Cincinnati chili parlor. The jury bought the theory and the girl walked. 

Tom was not surprised to see that Martino was down at heel and handling some rough-and-tumble civil litigation, as such celebrated matters as the Cincinnati Chili case are not only not especially profitable, but also rare. This time Paul was moving for a temporary restraining order in a civil suit and so would need a bond to secure any order he obtained. As Paul told his story, Tom sensed that the stars were not in perfect alignment. Paul’s client was a working man, an enterprising fellow who labored for a major tree-trimming service. The client had his own black-market tree-trimming business, shunting what business he could from his national employer to his own local concern, run under the euphonious name, Van the Tree Man. 

Van’s plans for the spring cutting season centered on upgrading his rolling stock. Needing cash to make the down payment on a truck more reliable than the 1950s Dodge he was driving, Van had sold the Dodge to George Childress, a small-time contractor who remodeled kitchens, bathrooms, and anything else he could put a claw hammer and crowbar to in the poorer suburbs. Childress was an African American who would later make his fortune fronting for larger concerns on minority set-aside projects. Childress died a gentleman farmer years later on a sprawling, hilly spread south of Georgetown, Ohio. There he raised prize show cattle—fat, glossy, curried-and-combed Black Angus and Scottish Belted Galloways. At the time of our story, however, the playing field was all too level, and Childress would pick up anything that was, as Shakespeare said, neither too hot nor too heavy to carry away. Like many small contractors, he was perpetually short of cash, using funds from one job to pay off overdue obligations on jobs two or three back. 

As Paul explained in detail, Van was a bluff country boy from the Eastern Kentucky hills, not nearly so sophisticated as City Boy George. Van the Tree Man had foolishly exchanged a perfectly good title to his truck for a perfectly bad check from Childress Construction. George had the truck, and title to it. Van had neither truck nor any money to show for his pains. With motor vehicles in our state, title is everything. Van wanted no further part of business with Childress. He just wanted his truck back. 

~

Laura and Tom liked to talk at the dinner table, linger there if the kids were quiet, or come back if the kids were fractious and needed bedding down. It was a chance for Laura to instruct Tom in the finer points of the law. That night Van the Tree Man was the subject matter. As Laura explained to Tom, unwinding the truck “sale” would be a major undertaking, involving suit, for George was not about to simply surrender the title. Lawsuits can take a long time. Van could not afford to be off the black-market tree-trimming business for two or more years.

Problems. Yet another: George was unreachable. His office had neither answering machine nor occupant. Correspondence elicited no response. It looked to be a bleak Christmas indeed for Van the Tree Man. But as Tom related to Laura, Paul had a plan to short-circuit the system. As MacArthur had promised that the boys would be home from Korea by Christmas 1950, Paul stated flatly that the truck would be back under Van the Tree Man’s Christmas tree, figuratively speaking. Paul would seek a temporary restraining order to force Childress to give the truck back immediately. 

Laura noticed a sizable flaw in Paul’s plan. As she explained to Tom, a TRO is a time-honored procedure, designed to maintain the status quo by order of court on an emergency basis, without taking testimony or receiving other evidence. Even Tom understood “status quo”: George Childress had the truck. Without a trial or full-fledged hearing, no reasonable judge would enter an order unscrambling the sales contract into which Van the Tree Man had freely, if not brightly, entered. 

Laura also wondered how The Walt Blake Agency would find Martino the bond needed to secure the TRO. Getting the bond would not be easy. Van would not have a strong balance sheet. However, as Laura reminded him, Tom had been working at the Agency long enough to know that things there did not always go by the book. He knew that Martino and Uncle Walt had ways into the Courthouse other than the front door. Genial Uncle Walt had promised that the bond would be forthcoming. 

A few days later, Tom saw Martino hustling out of Walt’s musty office, a sheaf of creased and rumpled papers under his arm. Vaulting down the stairs, Paul headed for the courthouse. Tom stuck his head into Walt’s office, files piled on every flat surface. That day, like all days, the aroma of cooking bacon and stale grease from the deep fryer wafted up through the porous floor from the B/G below. 

Walt told him the chase was on. Paul was off to file for his TRO against Childress Construction and George Childress personally. By a stroke of good fortune, the strait-laced, not overly receptive jurist who was that month’s equity judge was off to Florida for the holidays. Coming off the bench on to the bench was veteran Judge Eugene “Clean Gene” Weskamper, a brawny former footballer who had played pulling guard on the star-laden high school teams on which Walt himself had been a plucky, quick, if undersized, halfback. Had it not been for beefy Weskamper, Walt Blake might well have spent his adult life in a wheelchair. 

“I would love to see how Weskamper got this assignment,” Laura said sarcastically to Tom that night. “Does Walt have an open line to Clean Gene’s office?” She had long sensed that Uncle Walt’s perfunctory attendance at church on Easter and some Christmases was not enough to earn the divine intervention by which so many of Walt’s clients drew Weskamper as their judge. 

Business was slow. There was snow and more snow and then a hard freeze the week before Christmas. Tom accompanied Walt to The Three for a slight libation that Monday. The day of days was the following Sunday. As the two Blakes silently sipped their drinks, downcast counselor Martino entered, somberly kicking slush and snow off his sodden Weejuns. Things were not going well. Van the Tree Man was turning ugly. While Van’s meager retainer had long since been exhausted, this didn’t keep Van from querulously demanding results. 

When Paul had ticked off all he was doing to run Childress to ground, Van had testily told him, “Paul, you just forgot one thing.” 

“What?” 

“He’s got my truck.” 

Van could be marginally good humored, but Paul could barely stomach the irate phone calls he was getting at odd hours from Van’s hard-bitten, humorless, more than a little bit country wife. Paul had not reckoned on one other crucial item: He still couldn’t find Childress. This was a shame, for, to Tom’s surprise, Clean Gene Weskamper had granted Paul’s TRO prohibiting further transfer of the truck. 

 Laura was not so surprised. In those days many TROs were granted ex parte, that is, with only one side, the party asking for the order, appearing before the court. The lawyer’s custom then was to either neglect to inform the other party at all of this application or have his secretary call opposing counsel fifteen minutes after he had hot-footed out the door, relating that the boss was on his way to the courthouse. Of course, such quasi-unethical customs no longer obtain in our perfect world, 

Like many judges then and now, Weskamper had come up through the system, first serving as a prosecutor and then moving on to the bench when there was an opening. These judges were adept at criminal practice, but as former prosecutors, they found civil practice like this foreign, and paid little attention to it, or did it badly. Martino knew that while he could not get even the pliant Weskamper to order return of the truck on the facts before him, he could easily convince the old prosecutor, who knew a criminal even before he saw him, that sneaky Childress could well sell the truck and abscond with the proceeds. And so, he would need an interim order banning sale of the truck by Childress. And this, on the basis of no testimony, other evidence whatsoever, and preferably without hearing from Childress or his counsel. As Laura remarked, “If Weskamper believes that, he probably believes in Santa Claus too.” 

But who did know where the truck might be? How could Martino get George Childress’s attention? Paul had one last arrow in his quiver. He knew that Weskamper loved to have impromptu hearings, and Paul intended to schedule one, ordering Childress to appear with the title of the truck the following morning to demonstrate that the status was still quo. If he didn’t show, and he wouldn’t, gullible Weskamper would almost certainly find Childress in contempt and issue a bench warrant for his arrest. If Paul could find him, he could start to turn the screws by serving the bench warrant, providing for his immediate arrest.

Laura had heard enough. “Tom, these guys are playing with a marked deck. No judge anywhere would find a litigant in contempt on such a trumped-up charge. Who are these people?”

Wednesday about eleven, Martino appeared in the agency office. Could he use the phone? The pipes had burst at his place overnight, and his office was subzero. He had just been to see the initially-miffed Duke Carver, Childress’s attorney, who wouldn’t help him find George, but somehow knew about the suit papers. Duke did let it slip that George might be temporarily holed up at the shop of a suburban electrician with whom he sometimes worked—Junior Miracle. When Tom registered disbelief in the existence of such a person, Paul observed laconically that you couldn’t make up names like that. At any rate, Paul was serving papers, he hoped, on Childress and Miracle. 

Childress had not shown up at court, and Weskamper was now more than ready to jail Childress for contempt, and his henchman Miracle for good measure. Paul was trying to reach the sheriff’s deputy who had the papers and tip him off about Miracle Electronics. He asked Tom to call Miracle’s shop and ask for George Childress. Paul was delicate about it, because he didn’t want to have to be a witness himself. Against his better judgment, Tom called. 

“Hello? Miracle ’Lectric, Junior speakin’.” 

“May I speak to George Childress?” 

“Fuck you.” Click. 

“Paul, he’s there.” 

With that, Paul phoned the sheriff. After the deputy’s initial lament over the Christmas carolers lilting in the background that they couldn’t find Childress and Miracle anywhere and Paul’s explaining very patiently just where Miracle Electronics was and who was there, he heard a final slurp of coffee, and the enlightened deputy was on the case. That afternoon at the Three, Uncle Walt gave Tom a progress report. Childress was in jail, with a hearing scheduled for Friday morning, December 23, before Weskamper. What about the not so aptly named Junior Miracle? The sheriff’s department was only willing to do so much, the deadpanned deputy had explained. Black Childress could spend a couple of nights in jail, but white Junior was properly released on his own recognizance. 

Why wait until Friday? Tom wanted to know. Walt explained. On Thursday, Paul would let Duke Carver know that if Childress didn’t produce the truck keys and title at the Friday morning hearing, he would spend Christmas weekend in the County Jail, and maybe even New Year’s Eve and Day. Childress liked the good life. He would see no merit in spending his holidays with the sheriff. 

“So,” said Laura that night after dinner. “We’ve got a racist sheriff’s department and a judge willing to extort the truck title from Childress in exchange for letting him out of jail on a very questionable contempt charge. Uncle Walt and his pals are playing fast and loose.”

Tom agreed that this was rough justice. Wanting to see it played out, he determined to attend the hearing in Weskamper’s room Friday at eleven. Late as always, he got there about quarter past, running down the echoing marble hallways of the empty courthouse. This close to the holiday the wheels of justice had ground to a halt, except in Clean Gene’s room. 

The cavernous room with twenty-five-foot ceilings contained only the Tree Man v. Childress players. He could see Weskamper through the open door of his office, judiciously reading the sports pages, spit-polished brogans up on his desk. His bailiff was slowly searching the drawers of his desk, one after the other, looking for some untold but assuredly essential article, not finding it and periodically slamming the offending drawer shut. The constable was quietly doing her nails, resolutely ignoring the citizens present. Childress’s counsel, Carver, was planted at one attorney desk, Martino at the other. Carver had just delivered the punch line of a private joke that had Martino guffawing like a hysterical hyena. 

Perched nervously in the back row was the only civilian spectator besides Tom. She was a magnificent physical specimen, apparently in her early twenties, her pert bottom on the edge of one of the hideously uncomfortable pews that served as seating for taxpayers unfortunate enough to need the justice system. Below a gracefully oval face with bright brown eyes and full lips, her ample breasts blossomed like Christmas roses straining against the sheer crimson blouse covering but not hiding them. Her miniskirt was sure to give her pneumonia in such weather, despite a very tight three-quarter-length leather jacket, flared open at the top, that did nothing to hide long slender legs below. What was a looker like this doing here instead of at the bar at the local casino? 

Tom realized, as the girl nervously twirled a set of keys around her lacquered purple and gold nails that she was delivering the keys to Childress for turnover. A few minutes passed. A pudgy Sheriff’s deputy emerged from a door in the back wall. Hobbling after him in shackles was Childress. To Tom’s surprise, Childress was a wizened little man with sparse receding hair, graying at the temples, probably in his mid-sixties. With a cry of pain, the girl jumped up and clattered on her spike heels to console him. It being Christmas week, the Deputy did little to cool the tropical reunion. 

The tawdry drama played out. After Weskamper took the bench and called the case, the keys, like a relay race baton, passed from the girl to Childress, to Duke, to the court’s bailiff, to Paul. With that, Weskamper sonorously told Mr. Childress that he was purged of contempt. Eyeing the girl, he wished him a very Merry Christmas. The charming young lady—what did you say her name was, Duke?—could wait for Mr. Childress in the lobby of the Courthouse. It wouldn’t take more than an hour or so for Mr. Childress’s release papers to be processed. 

Tom walked out with Martino and Carver, who were off to the Three to discuss finer points of practice over holiday lunch. Carver gave Paul the truck title, told Paul where the truck was located and promised that Van would be greeted with no more than small arms fire when he went to retrieve it—during daylight hours, of course. As Tom peeled off to get back to the Agency, he heard the two barristers chuckling about Childress’s ability to attract good-looking women. Duke opined that he had never seen him with other than a prime specimen on his arm. The lawyers agreed that this was an admirable aspect of Childress’s character. 

That afternoon, Tom and Uncle Walt held a postmortem on the year at The Three before Tom went home to Laura and the kids and Walt repaired to his solitary apartment at a downtown high-rise condominium.

 Tom: “I never thought it would work out this way. How—”

 Walt: “Creative lawyering, Tommy. Martino knows his way around the block. It didn’t surprise me a bit.” 

Tom had a more proprietary question: ”How did Van the Tree Man come up with financials strong enough for us to approve the bond?”

 Uncle Walt shook his head, looked incredibly apologetic, and with a hint of a sly smile, confessed, “Tom, can you believe it, I promised Gene that I would look over the financials and walk over to the courthouse to sign the bond book if everything was in shape. I was so busy with Christmas preparations that I never got around to it. Gene must have figured everything had worked out …” 

~

Tom knows that Walt expected more approval of his memory lapse and Paul’s grand strategy than Tom gave him. Local-college grad Walt took great pride in being sharper than most of us, Ivy League lawyers like Laura included. Tom admits that this is when he decided law school was not for him and began to develop the disenchantment that led him to abandon both the insurance business and Cincinnati, the home of his forefathers. Then too, when Tom reported Walt’s memory lapse to Laura, she declared with unwonted vehemence that she was spending her last Christmas in Cincinnati and would not speak to Walt at family Christmas dinner. It was and she didn’t. 

Laura and Tom are happy out west. Santa Fe. Tom is house-husbanding and Laura is back practicing law. Somewhere it says that we are a nation of laws and not of men. Laura says that this just isn’t true.

Hard Candy

In the manuscript a middle-aged woman (single, childless)
looks after her crotchety father. He has shot someone,
but not to death, or maybe he took the buckshot to the gut.
Everything’s so Southern gothic: all the thriving plants
and humid swelter, old wooden houses with dilapidated steps

leading up to porches complete with creaking swings
and buckled plank floors that cover cool, dank spaces
where stray dogs and feral animals—opossums, say,
or raccoons—shelter from the heat or hide out overnight.
Fact is, it’s been decades, so I can’t recall the plot. What I read

was a work in progress, first third of a first draft, whose writer,
a close friend—a middle-aged woman (divorced, childless,
her parents deceased)—mailed it to me for critique. It was
good! I cared about the woman and her father and what
adventures might ensue, and the drama was dark

with humor, my favorite blend. But a doctor with a minor part
had paragraphs of detail and dialogue, a long scene better
clipped to exposition or dispensed with altogether.
Meanwhile, the father lacked dimension and description;
an ornery old cuss, he came across as plot device, not

major character. I made my critical notation and mailed
the manuscript back to my good friend. She had
the softest hands I’d ever touched, long legs, a coltish
stride, a guffaw for a laugh. We laughed a lot. I petsat
for her gray tabby tomcat—read Blood Meridian aloud,

beginning to end, while I lay back on her couch and Buster
purred and kneaded biscuits on my chest. She taped BandAids
over her nipples every day—she told me, didn’t show me.
She liked to stoke my lust. One day I climbed her ladder
to clean her gutters. Dirtied the cuffs of my bomber jacket

as I scooped mounds of leaves and cool, wet muck
and flung them to the ground. We went most everywhere
together. I always drove. When “Kashmir” came on the radio,
she cranked up the volume and grinded on the bucket seat,
that lucky thing. I wished it were me. Once at a party, she

sat wriggling in my lap and regaled my guests while I
thought about the live wires of her bare thighs touching
my own skin. She strung along three men I never met.
Nothing wrong with that. When our friend cheated
on his marriage and described the lesson he’d learned

about performing oral sex, we felt sorry for his wife—
not because he’d strayed, but because for thirty years
she’d suffered inept cunnilingus. How we laughed after.
We laughed and laughed. She cried when I confessed
my love for her. She loved me too, but not like that. Still,

I fantasized about laying her down in her sunny bedroom
and slowly peeling off the BandAids, swirling her nipples
like hard candy on my tongue, stroking her breasts
and belly with my face as I made my way down between
those long legs and proving I knew what to do. Did you see

what I did there? I gave each character the proper amount
of detail according to the size of their roles. That’s all I wanted
her to do when she revised her novel. When I fell in love
with someone else, my friend wept bitterly that I’d turned
away and everything was suddenly Melanie Melanie Melanie.

When I brought up her three paramours, she had to concede
hypocrisy. Anyway, I mailed back her manuscript with a long letter:
mostly praise, a lone suggestion for revision. If she ever finished
her novel, she never published it. I never heard from her again.
She closed the book on us, ended with a cliffhanger.

O is for Orangutan, C is for Cleopatra

In the span of fifty-five years, Grandma Clou had four or five husbands. Stories were swapped like trading cards. The plumber she married at sixteen; he was thirty-two. Then there was the second cousin she met at a BBQ. They eloped in the next state over when she found out she was pregnant. The baby never made it to term, something doctors would later attribute to genetic abnormalities. My grandfather was the most normal, which is probably why she stuck around long enough to give him two daughters. The last one we called Grandpa Charlie even though no one was ever sure if they got around to marrying.

Some she didn’t divorce. She just remarried without bothering, my Aunt Nikki confided to me. Nikki had ten years to my thirteen and wore low-cut jeans and glittery eyeshadow. She bought lacey thongs at Victoria’s Secret and promised to buy me my first when mom finally stopped buying the floral cotton multi-packs. Nikki dated a guy named Steve who drove a Mitsubishi Eclipse and once let me have a sip of his beer. I wanted to ask Nikki what Grandma Clou’s marital ambiguity made us, but I knew enough Shakespeare by then to answer my own question.

Grandma Clou lived in a foreign land where her identity as a serial bigamist was overshadowed by crumbling Dodge Darts, sun-bleached lawn gnomes, and boxes of something called Melba toast. At the Magnolia Retreat retirement home, it wasn’t out of the question to see a chihuahua clad in a Hawaiian t-shirt drag the newspaper into an apartment that exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke every time the door opened. I always felt like I was going on an expedition when I set foot on the cracked cement sidewalk and caught my first whiff of muscle rub and mothballs.

We made a game of each afternoon, Nikki and I, sitting on the red shag carpet of Grandma Clou’s apartment, flipping through thirty-year-old Encyclopedia Britannicas and stopping when we came to an entry that bore a resemblance to Grandma Clou as she sat hunched over in her upholstered rocking chair, breasts blending into her stomach and thighs. 

Nikki raised an eyebrow at me one Friday afternoon and pointed to a picture of an obese orangutan. Its torso was a boob shelf, its belly button barely visible as gravity dragged its stomach to the ground. Apparently, food was plentiful where it lived. Grandma Clou made do with the Melba toast and bowls of chicken and rice soup, but the effect was still the same. 

“At least she isn’t as hairy,” I whispered, flipping through the V volume. Vasectomy…Venice...Vulture.

“How do you know that?” Nikki asked thumbing through the O volume. Osteoporosis…Otis Redding…Ovum.

We both looked at Grandma Clou. Her rocking chair was a log upended on the jungle floor. She rocked back and forth, her balance perfect, and the log followed her movement without rebellion. Wiry hairs sprouted across her leathery skin. Like a fertile grassland, they trembled in the breeze she generated as she pitched herself forward and let the log take her back. She surveyed the field, not looking for threats so much as a stimulus great enough to tempt her from the log. A squelch broke the silence. Grandma Clou looked down toward her stomach. Bingo.

“Get your shoes on, girls,” she said, grunting her way out of the rocking chair.

We looked down at our feet, my jelly sandals, and Nikki’s skate shoes. We never took our shoes off at Grandma Clou’s owing to the high pile of her shag carpet and the fear of what we might find if the dust between fibers shifted enough to let us see.

Grandma Clou insisted she walk to the lunch counter two blocks away. Nikki groaned. Grandma Clou had a perfectly good wheelchair that a social worker had brought but refused to use it, even though I once saw a man with cerebral palsy beat her across a crosswalk. We each took a side and steered her between rusting lime-green lawn chairs and piles of dog poop. One of her neighbors, a man with a wisp of white hair underneath a brown-felt fisherman’s hat, sat on his porch, naked from the waist up. 

“What’s cookin’, Harry?” Grandma Clou shifted her weight to the right, an attempt at coquettishness that had Nikki pretending to retch on the grass.

He nodded. “Clou. Haven’t seen you around much.”

“You could see a lot more of me if you put on a shirt and joined us for lunch.”

Nikki and I groaned. The last thing we wanted to do was chaperon. 

But we needn’t have worried. Harry shook his head. “Already ate.”

“Next time then,” Grandma Clou said, as we dragged her away from Harry and his saggy chest. “I’m wearing him down,” Grandma Clou said as we helped her over a tree root that had erupted through the concrete sidewalk.

I kept my head down, afraid she’d see the incredulity written on my face. I studied her white orthopedic shoes and her brown polyester pants that hovered over the Velcro straps. Every time she lifted her leg, the hem of her pants rose just enough that I could see her sparse leg hairs, fully grown out, the skin underneath dry and cracked. She would be wearing Harry down until doomsday.

“Grandma, I don’t think Harry—”

Grandma Clou cut Nikki off. “Humph. Harry doesn’t know what he wants. Good thing he’s got me to show him.”

“Are you and Grandpa Charlie even divorced yet?”

I understood Nikki’s concern. A few months ago, we’d seen Grandpa Charlie slinking out of Grandma Clou’s apartment. He blushed when he asked us how we were doing and how school was. Nikki told him she’d graduated five years ago and informed him that his fly was undone.  Grandpa Charlie had said “Well, it was nice seeing you girls,” and hurried into his pickup truck, fumbling with the zipper on his jeans.

Grandma Clou waved Nikki’s question aside. “Who cares at my age?”

Nikki opened her mouth to protest, but Grandma Clou continued. “It’s just details, Nikki. No skin off anyone’s nose if a seventy-year-old lady needs more than one man to clean her clock. Amount of my life I’ve spent worrying about what people say is proper, what’s right and wrong. Do you know I once had a neighbor, Mrs. Johnson, or Phillips, something like that—head of the PTA, led the women’s bible study, you know the type—tell me I was bringing down the tone of the neighborhood when your mother’s dad and I fought the front lawn? We didn’t even throw anything at each other; it was just words. You should have seen the look on her face when I brought home Ray, the one after your grandpa. Her bottom lip stuck out like a dead fish.” 

Grandma Clou’s chuckling caused a phlegmy coughing fit, and I patted her on the back, afraid to pound and knock her off her orthopedics. She spit into a stained handkerchief that she stuffed back into her shirt pocket. The damp handkerchief was a bulge where her breasts probably hung forty years ago. 

“Men are like ice cream flavors,” Grandma Clou said, voice hoarse, “and damned if I don’t try each one before I die.” She pushed open the restaurant door with more force than I would have expected, mumbling something that sounded like “Mint chocolate chip…butter pecan…”

The three of us balanced on the chrome stools. Grandma Clou’s cheeks engulfed the stool so entirely there wasn’t a glint of chrome to be seen. Nikki ordered a chicken salad and diet coke. I ordered a half salad, soup, and chocolate milk because mom wouldn’t let me drink diet coke, even though Nikki always gave me a can when I was at her apartment. A frothy aspartame treat that would probably give me brain cancer one day, but it seemed too grown a treat to refuse. Grandma Clou ordered a double cheeseburger and a chocolate milkshake. She was supposed to be watching her cholesterol, but it was like she was in a private contest with herself, seeing how high she could get her LDL before her chest seized. I watched her down the entire meal, burger grease pooling in the space between her thumb and forefinger. She licked her lips and muffled a burp with the crook of her arm. I was caught between disgust and wonderment, disgust finally winning out when the aroma of her digestion drifted over to me.  

She flagged down the waiter and he brought our bill. Grandma Clou pulled two warm twenties out of her back pocket. When the waiter reached for them, she let her fingertips linger over his hand until his face turned red, and he looked to us for help. Neither of us tried to stop her. We had full bellies and had spent the entire afternoon attempting to stem Grandma Clou’s libido. He was on his own.

When he brought back change, Grandma Clou smiled. “Keep the change, honey.” She had a speck of lettuce between her teeth and wobbled as she dismounted the stool. The waiter looked down at the $1.35 and frowned. 

When we got back to Grandma Clou’s apartment, Nikki’s boyfriend was parked on the street, leaning against the hood of his Eclipse. “It’s past two,” he said, staring at Nikki.

Nikki hurried over to him, leaving me to balance Grandma Clou as the saturated fats hit her brain. Raised voices drifted over from the Eclipse and Nikki’s boyfriend tried to grab her arm. 

Grandma Clou bit her bottom lip. “Oh girl,” she said, and I knew she didn’t mean me.“You don’t have to go, Nikki,” she said when Nikki finally extricated herself and came to tell us goodbye.

I’m not sure Nikki heard her, because she was already halfway to the car. Her boyfriend gave Grandma Clou a suspicious look before peeling away from the curb. 

Grandma Clou was slower as we navigated the cracked concrete path. Harry, still sitting in his lawn chair and cradling a bottle of beer between his legs, looked up when we passed, but Grandma Clou didn’t notice. She trudged beside me until we were in her apartment, and she was once again ensconced in her recliner.   

“Gerald was my first husband,” she said when I brought her a glass of water and an aspirin. The orthopedics helped her balance, but they didn’t stop the gout flare-ups.

I sat down on the carpet, feeling exposed without Nikki there to act as a buffer. 

“Now I know what everyone says, but I was eighteen, not sixteen when we got married in the courthouse. He was older than me, but he had a good job and had managed to avoid the draft, which was more than could be said for all the boys my age who had signed up to be killed on some desert island in the middle of God-knows-where. It seemed a good idea at the time; I even convinced myself I loved him. But after the war, when his government contracts ended, he changed. One morning he came home reeking of beer and urine. When I asked him where he’d been all night, he grabbed me by the shoulders and started to shake me. He said he’d shake me until I stopped nagging and if that didn’t work, he’d find another way. I didn’t wait around to find out what that way would be. I took the train back to my folks. When he sobered up and came around, I was sitting on the porch with Dad’s shotgun across my lap. I’d rather kill someone than let them treat me like that.”

Grandma Clou downed the rest of her water and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She began rocking with more speed than before. Soon, she was generating a breeze that was not unwelcome in the warm apartment. I regarded her sagging middle, the dimples in her knees visible through the thin fabric of her pants. I could see the little hairs on her legs again, raised static-straight from her cracked skin. The orangutan from earlier was still there in the crease between her eyebrows and the way her breasts, stomach, and thighs seamlessly blended into each other.

But there was something else there, just under the surface, competing with the orangutan, and sometimes breaking through when Grandma Clou paused in her weather generation. At that moment, I couldn’t put my finger on it, so it remained as insubstantial as the breeze mingled with the scent of Grandma Clou’s lunch. But on a later Friday afternoon, sitting by myself on her floor since Nikki’s visits had become a relic of the past, I found it.

In the C volume under Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, I read about a woman who was much like Grandma Clou. Driven and unapologetic. Uncompromising, though callous. Always approaching every situation with hard-learned tenacity. A picture of a sculpture accompanying the article showed a woman with large eyes, nose, and brows. I studied the marble likeness searching for a resemblance to the woman rocking back and forth in front of me. Maybe it was there, in the set of her lips, in the way the right side was fractionally higher than the left, appraising.