Roni was great with a plan. She didn’t know caution or danger, only what had to be done.  She’d toss her hair over her shoulder and get her hands dirty. And by the looks of the mess she’d gotten herself, and us into, I’d say dirty was exactly the word for what she’d done. She’d put on that high, never-care giggle of hers and work her way out of it. Her technique worked on Mick and me, worked on her folks and Cal. It even worked on Tate to a degree.

I think that’s what killed her. Something she couldn’t flip her hair out of the way of and something she couldn’t giggle her way from under.

“Dunc?” Mickey was across the room flipping the pages. “There’s a room.”

“A what?”

“Room.”

I stepped closer to him, knowing I’d need to lean over his shoulder so he could show me. Words never came to Mickey for explaining some things. It was a room to him and any other word was wrong for it. Just the one word. The right one and that was all.

“See here,” he pointed at a tiny square. “See.”

I shook my head.

“Look again.” He persisted.

“Under the eyes?” I asked.

“Yep. We gotta get in that bathroom.”

My exasperation with him, with all of this shit, must have shown on my face. I couldn’t even form the words. And there was Roni in my head, flipping the raven’s wing of hair out of her face and giggling.

I almost wanted to giggle with her. Mickey didn’t get much credit for being smart from too many people, but the truth was the more cryptic the more he understood it. These words in this ledger are simple, little puzzles to him. He just had to put them together. He’d always been able to do that. Broken down into small pieces, Mickey would get just about anything. It was the big picture that was simply too much for him to handle.

“Well we can’t just waltz in there,” I said, still not knowing what under the eyes had to do with a room, but certain he would eventually tell me when he was able to put more words to the thought and spit them out in one big lump rather than one at a time.

I got behind the wheel, fielding Mickey’s questions about why we had to go back to my mom’s.

“Because she can get into the bathroom at The Hive. We can’t.”

“But Dunc. Why would she go to The Hive? She never goes there. Won’t that be suspicious?”

“Because my dad knows people there and they could go together. He’ll do this for me. I know he will.” My dad wanted back in my life and I knew he’d see this as the chance.

Mickey squirmed in his seat like he had to take a piss, and pulled his collar up around him against the cool of the car. Mickey could whine without uttering a word. All of his body language did it for him. He fingered the bruise my mother had left on him once again and looked some kind of pathetic riding next to me, pouting.

“Roni would know what to do.” He kept right on squirming.

I took this as a scolding from him; that on some level Mick was losing his faith in me to solve this. So while I wanted to tell him that she wasn’t as smart as she thought she was, or we wouldn’t be doing any of this shit, I just took the jab quietly. He might have been right. I was losing faith in me too, but Roni’s way sure as hell hadn’t worked a year ago.

My God, did I miss her though.  For all her madness she lightened me up, gave me small hopes, included Mick and me in her big dreams. Inside I always knew they wouldn’t work out, but she could suspend my disbelief better than anyone. My disbelief hung on those electric wires right next to all her other wishes – up and out of the way when she was around.

“Wait in the car,” I told Mickey when we pulled up to the house. We didn’t need a Mom versus Mickey scene; we just needed to get this done.

I went in and wasted no time with the psycho family reunion shit. Despite my mother’s efforts to twist and manipulate it into some success on her part, Dad managed to control her long enough so I could tell them what I needed from them.

“You sure are going through a lot of trouble, Boy,” Mom said.

“Wouldn’t you if someone was trying to kill you?” I spit the words at her.

My father stood in the doorway between kitchen and family room. “Your mother would probably just thank them and ask them to hurry and get it over with.”

He had a point.

He stepped forward though and said, “Let’s do this tonight.”

I pulled the ledger from the inside pocket of my coat and walked to the kitchen table. Moving aside an empty vodka bottle, a full ashtray and the rest of the everyday clutter of a drunken housewife, I lay it out for them to see.

Mom swayed over as though she was reluctant, spewing the same negative crap she always did, then became mildly interested, and finally she was reading over my shoulder as I pointed out the clues Mickey’d found.

“Under the eyes,” she said with some recognition in her voice.

“You know what that means?” I was stunned.

“Sure. There’s a linen closet in the women’s bathroom. They keep cleaning supplies and stuff in it.”

“The eyes,” I prompted. Fuck! Is this like pulling teeth or what?

“A poster. Two big eyes are watching the women in the bathroom all the time. It’s always been sort of a joke, Peeping Tom sees all. See? And the poster’s on that door.”

“Ok, so I guess when we go later, you need to go in that closet. For some reason Mickey says it’s a room. So maybe see if it has a panel that opens up to something else, or…I don’t know.” I shook my head, shaking loose the idea that it all seemed a little too far-fetched, and skeptical to me. I wasn’t able to handle a stretch like a secret panel in a linen closet in a dive bar’s women’s bathroom.

“And look for what? You think the murderer is hiding in the broom closet or something?” She snorted like I was the obtuse one, sloshed a bit of vodka to the floor and leaned into Dad, obviously for balance, though she tried to play it off as affection.

“Jesus, Mom. Do you recall ever being clever in your whole life? If you do, draw on that experience and try real hard to do it again.”

“Easy, Duncan,” Dad said, resting a hand on my shoulder, “I’ll have her sober enough to do this by later tonight. I will.”

He pulled the drink from her hand, sat her firmly in a chair and grabbed her by the chin.

“We’ve suspected that there’s not a maternal bone in your body for years. But, you better try to find one and get hold of it, cuz your son is going to die if you fuck this up. Do you understand?”

Her eyes filled up at first and I thought she might cry. I was struck stupid at the sight of them. He, the freshly paroled con, and she, the pathetic drunk. These were my parents, my role models, and tonight, my accomplices. What the hell was I doing?

Mom broke the spell and instead of crying she chuckled. “I can handle it,” she slurred, as she reached for his crotch, got a handful and said, “I’ll use this bone.”

His hand went up high above his head, meaning to bring it down and slap her, and at that she cackled like a fool.

“Be serious you raving bitch!” He deflated though, before the urge to strike was too overpowering. He lowered his hand and shook it off, closing his eyes and sucking in a deep breath.

I grabbed the book from the table and turned to walk out of the house and their fucked-up lives forever when she yelled to me, “Oh baby, come back. I was just making a joke to lighten the mood.”

“Not everything needs to be lightened,” Dad said.

“Get your shit together, both of you.” I pointed at both of them, and while I looked Dad straight in the eyes and he looked back solidly, Mom swayed to some brain music she’d found to escape to and looked away. “And be ready if you’re going to help me. If you don’t think you can, then tell me right now so I can do this another way.”

Mom tugged her kimono and pushed her wild hair from her face; Dad glared at her.

“Don’t you dare ruin this,” he said it in a low scratched whisper, through clinched teeth. Some inkling of paternal love possibly surfacing for the first time since I was a toddler.

When I got back to the car Mickey was slumped and rocking.

“They’re in,” I said. “We’re good to go tonight at eleven.”

He just kept rocking.

“Mick?”

He looked up at me then, “Dunc. I really gotta pee.”

I laughed big and loud for the first time in many months.

“Why you laughing like that?” He asked, looking at me like I’d come unhinged.

“Cuz I thought you looked like you had to pee earlier, but that you were just nervous and whiny.” I laughed harder and couldn’t stop. Tears filled my eyes. My sides hurt. I couldn’t take a breath in.

“Duncan?”

I just kept laughing. I really did come unhinged. For all the times the tears wouldn’t come with grief, they seemed to have found their escape through laughter. The uncontrollable seizure I found myself in scared the hell out of me. I laughed and cried and seized, my face wet with tears, my body full of anguish and nameless emotions pouring out. The butterflies escaped from me. I gasped and got scared that it might not ever end, this massive purge of fear and hate and love and grief, tears and laughter of things lost and found, and all the bubbles I’d created to contain them bursting and flying out of me at once.

Through gasps for air when the barrage started to ease, I told Mickey that no one was around and he could just pee next to the car.

Then we went to make the rest of the plans. My disbelief firmly hanging from wire somewhere in Roni’s world for the duration of the night. I needed her hope to get through this, because my trust and faith resided, by necessity, in three of the screwiest people I have ever known.

As we sat in the car, I wondered what we should do first. Part of me wanted to race to the store to ask Larson about the ledger. I knew he’d be the perfect one to decipher what the numbers in it had to say to us. But I had to put some time between finding the ledger and knowing its contents. I was still too angry with Roni…and not quite ready to know the truth.

Besides, the fireflies may have returned to Mickey but I felt a whole swarm of butterflies aching in my belly over this new discovery. And when the butterflies are fluttering I tend to be a bit too rash. I didn’t want to go to Larson guns blazing. A little more cleaning would probably serve to calm me down. We had another house to attend to.

As we pulled away from Mickey’s place, I took one last look at the mystery vehicle at the curb. I wondered if I was just being paranoid about it.

“Do you think somebody bad owns that car, Dunc?” Mickey asked. I swivelled so quickly that he jumped in his seat. “What?”

“Stop reading my mind, is what.”

“Well. There’s never any strange cars parked on this street. It’s all old people without visitors here. You know that.”

“I was just thinking that, myself,” I said. “It kind of sticks out here like a pickle at an ice cream party. I don’t like it, Mickey. But why would someone trash your house and then leave the car right there in the open? It’s too easy.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Unless it’s stolen maybe.”

***

As we walked through the front door, my first thought was about the police. I couldn’t believe they were leaving us alone, even though they knew both of our houses had been broken into. I found it rather odd that they weren’t on us like glue, tracking our every move. 

“If Roni hid something here, where do you think it’d be, Duncan?” Mickey asked as I absentmindedly tossed my keys where the front hall table usually sat. They hit the wall and slid down behind a pile of shoes that were flung from the closet. Mickey bent to retrieve them and tossed them in his pocket.

I looked around at the whirlwind of chaos and laughed. “Do you think there’s any possible way that whatever it was wasn’t found? Mickey. Look around you. There’s not a doilie unturned. If Roni hid something here, they found it.”

“Well, maybe you have a hidey hole like the one in my floor? Do you?”

“If I do, I don’t know about it,” I said as we entered the kitchen. “Look at this mess. They even unwrapped the freezer meat.”

“It’s starting to stink up the place.”

“Yep,” I said, trying to stop the gag in my throat from coming up. If the meat had thawed and started to turn, they must have broken in to my place a day or so earlier, while I was still fading in and out of consciousness in the hospital. And yet they waited until that day to ransack Mickey’s place.

“Where do we start?”

I went to the cupboard under the sink and grabbed out a large garbage bag and some yellow gloves. “I’m starting with the meat. The sooner we get this out of here the better.”

“Good idea, Dunc.”

“That’s why I get paid the big bucks.”

“I’ll go upstairs and start there,” he said. Mickey has a weak stomach and the smell was obviously getting to him. He looked a little green around the gills. “I’ll pick up your clothes and stuff.”

***

Two garbage bags later and the kitchen was beginning to look more like its old self. The whole time I toiled I was aware of the lack of noise coming from upstairs. After tossing the second bag out the back door I decided to pay Mickey a visit.

He was sprawled across the mattress, which was half on and half off the box-spring. He was buried deep in the Hive ledger and he wore the scrounged up concentration face that always seemed so painful on Mickey.

“Whatcha doing, bud?” I asked. I tried to sit down on the edge of the mattress, but it shifted like a tanking yacht so I jumped back to my feet.

“Anything. Take it. Follow the. Under the big one. The list. Don’t tell. Deeper.” He mumbled random words and appeared to be lost in thought, unaware of my presence.

“Hey. Mickey!”

He jumped and the listing mattress tossed him to the floor.

“Duncan. I forgot you were here.”

“No doubt. You were lost to the world, Mick.” I gestured toward the ledger, which had fallen from his hold and rolled back up into a tube. “Whatcha doing?”

He blushed pure red and rose to his feet, apologetic. “Just looking.”

“What were you saying, though? Sounded like you were doing a lot of talking.”

“Well, nothing. Only. Only it’s filled with words too, Dunc. Like one of those puzzle things where you have to find all the words.”

I stared at the ledger, my pulse quickening.

“And put them together like. To figure out the secret message. Like a movie star’s name or something. Only it’s a lot bigger, Dunc. Like a story.”

I sat on the floor, picked up the ledger and started scanning its pages. Tiny words where there should be numbers. Everywhere. Placed randomly throughout the pages.

“…and when I got to the part about the ladies’ room. Well, that’s when you scared me.”

“What?”

“The ladies’ room. All the other stuff was all jumbled. But then the part about the bees. I got that, Dunc. I figured that part out myself. The bees were easy.”

I desperately flipped pages, scanned line after line of numbers. Nothing was coherent.

“What about the bees, Mickey? What the hell. What are you talking about?” I didn’t realize that my voice was rising with each word. I didn’t notice that I was screaming in his face and that he was cowering further and further away with each word. Until he was back down on the mattress, pressing himself into it and attempting to disappear from what he thought was my anger.

“I’m sorry, Dunc,” he moaned, flinching away from my hostility. “I’m sorry.”

“No. Don’t be sorry. Don’t be sorry. Just tell me what you mean about the bees. I’m not angry, Mickey. I’m just excited. I’m sorry. But you have to tell me what you mean about the bees.”

“The hive.”

He said it as though it would all come clear to me. Like two words would bring the whole picture into focus.

“Mickey. Jesus. Don’t be cryptic. Tell me.”

He grabbed the rolled up ledger from my fist. It was only then that I realized I had been holding it over his head like a weapon. I tried to give myself time to breathe…to calm down. Mickey opened the book and scanned his way through it until he found the part he had been referring to. He handed it up to me, a peace offering.

In the ladies’. This was followed with a thick barrage of numbers. Where the bees buzz. And another assault of numbers. Under their eyes. And at the bottom of the page, after columns and columns of numbers. Everything.

“Everything, what?” I asked. Mickey relaxed slightly and rose from the mattress.

“Everything, Dunc.” He said. “Everything we need to know. All the secrets. They’re hidden in the ladies’ room at the Hive. She hid something there. And she wanted me to know it.”

His fear now turned to pride and he puffed himself up by the strength of this newfound knowledge.

“Oh my God. But wait. Would she make it so obvious? Anybody who found this would be able to figure that out. It’s too simple, Mickey.”

“Maybe she knew I was the only one who knew about the hole in the floor. Maybe—”

“Yeah. But that doesn’t explain why she would hide something at my house.”

I tossed him the ledger and righted the mattress onto the box-spring. I was just about to pick up an overturned dresser when he grabbed my arm.

“But maybe she didn’t.”

“Maybe she didn’t what? Help me with this,” I said. He grabbed an end and together we hauled the dresser back into place.

“Hide something in your place. Maybe she didn’t have to.”

I shook my head. “Nope. She did a weird thing once, Mick. She went into the house once. That Fourth of July. We had a cookout. Everybody was there. Remember? She went into the house for a shirt, but came out without one. I thought of that a while ago. Maybe she was hiding something then.”

He shrugged. I could see his wheels spinning. “Maybe she just wanted it to look that way?”

“Why would she do that?” I asked. But even before the question was out, the answer popped into my head like a sore. And with it, I felt some of the butterflies releasing. “Because somebody who was at that cookout was a somebody who was involved in whatever it was Roni was involved in!”

I struck my forehead to complete the Eureka moment. Mickey’s face lit up. “And she was only throwing them off the scent, Dunc. What she really wanted to do was make them think it. So they wouldn’t find the hole in my closet floor.”

“Ha! Yeah, Mickey. So they wouldn’t find the hole in your closet floor. I wonder if this means that the ledger doesn’t mean anything at all?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know numbers, Dunc. They make me all fuzzy and stuff. That’s why the words stuck out so much.”

“Well, let’s finish cleaning this mess. Then we have to see Larson. Just in case.” I rolled the ledger up and put it in my back pocket. “And maybe you can go through the rest of the words and see if there’s anything else in it that makes sense.”

Mickey beamed with the pride of one who is needed. “Sure thing. I can do that.”

“Great Mick. Then, when you’re done doing that, maybe you can figure out a way for us to sneak into the Hive without landing in the back of Cal’s cruiser.”

“That would be bad, Dunc. That would be the worst thing.”

I allowed his simple but accurate words to linger there, hang in the air about us as we set to our task of righting the rest of the house. There was nothing more to add to them. That was the pickle we were in. We had come to the point where we would have to break the law in order to figure things out.

And though Cal could possibly and finally have his mind put to rest through the outcome of our crime, he’d be the first to throw the book at us. He’d have the key for our cells thrown away long before he’d ever think to ask us why we did it.

            He started to cry just steps from my mother’s door.

            “Mick,” I said, but didn’t have more words, so opted to squeeze his shoulder instead. My head was a jar full of fireflies, all sparking and buzzing. I was dizzy and started to feel sick.

            Mickey sniffed and wiped his sleeve across his face leaving a trail of tears and snot that he transferred with a swipe to the back of his jeans. “Why’d they do that, Duncan?”

            I wasn’t sure if he meant my parents or the people that trashed his house. I didn’t have an answer. Seeing my father, hearing his words, watching my mother’s sick display had robbed me of all of my sense. What I really wanted to know, though, was why Rhonda did it.

            She filled our heads with hope of getting out of Rushville, only to abandon us at a train station, holding the bag and cleaning up her damn mess – and what a fine mess it had turned into.

            I got in the car and when Mickey got in next to me, red cheeked and puffy, I felt even more alone. I could have lived with her doing this to me, but there was no good reason to get Mickey involved.

            I guess she couldn’t help herself. She liked being the porch light and having us be her hovering moths. We made her the center of our universe, and who was she to stop us?

            I started the car. It rumbled to life and I turned the knob of the radio to silence the announcer. Gripping the steering wheel, all I could do was sit there and stare out the window. As urgent as our situation was, needing to get to Mickey’s house, finding out who was behind it all before they got to us, all I could think about was Roni. She wasn’t who we thought she was. As much as I hated that my father could have been right, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was. We didn’t know her at all. I punched the center of the wheel and shook the ache away while Mickey watched doe-eyed.

            “Did Roni ever give you anything? Leave something at your house? Did she leave something that someone bad would have wanted?” I thought about her game, saying she left something at my place all that time ago and wondered if she’d done the same to him.

            “She never came over. Once or twice maybe, ever.”

            “Think Mickey. Did she leave anything?”

            He looked wounded. I was disgusted with them both, and I pulled away from the curb and headed to his house.

            “Where’s Mae?”

            “Aunt Mae?” He asked, still in some stupor I couldn’t figure out.

            “No. Mae West.”

            He looked confused.

            “Yes, Aunt Mae. Where is she?”

            “I. I don’t know. I haven’t seen her. That’s weird, Duncan.” He fidgeted, “Oh man. I haven’t seen her. I don’t know where she is. Duncan. Holy shit. I don’t know. Oh man. Oh.”

            “Mick.”

            “Oh shit, man. Oh shit.”

            “Mick!”

            He grabbed his hair and pulled. Punched the dashboard and rocked in his seat saying “Oh shit” over and over.

            “That bitch. Look what she’s done to you.”

            He stopped. “Mae?”

            “No. Rhonda. This is all her fault.”

            He was stricken with terror then. I’d never said a bad word about Roni. Not when she dated that creep, Paul, not on the numerous occasions she stood us up unexplained and strolled in all innocent and apologetic, but obviously lying. Not even when she left us at the train station. I didn’t curse her name when her brother tried to blame me for her death, for the fire, or any of the other crap that had gone down in the last year.

            I pulled to a stoplight, two blocks from Mickey’s place and put the car in park. I leaned against the headrest and covered my eyes with my palms. My father’s words kept jingling in the jar like pennies saved. I didn’t know her at all, and now we were in this mess of shit.

            “Dunc.”

            I ignored him. I was dizzy and sick. I was hurt. Angry. Betrayed. Pissed. I rubbed my hands against my eyelids until my eyeballs ached and dug my fingers until I thought my scalp would bleed.

            “Dunc.” He said more seriously.

            I’d had it with him, too, my inherited responsibility then felt the sledgehammer of guilt for thinking it.

            Roni got herself mixed up with the wrong people and dragged us down with her. We meant nothing to her. I was ill thinking of my mom and dad together again, the things he said about Roni. How true it all sounded. I was in the middle of some sick moment of truth, some vile and disgusting snapshot of how screwed up our lives were because of her. Stuck in this truth where the man behind the curtain is revealed in our trashy small town version of Oz.

            “Duncan!”

            “For the love of Christ, Mickey! What?”

            “Look at the house.”

            I pulled my hands away and he pointed. “At the house,” he said again.

            Two cars in front of the house, a police car and a brown sedan.

            “What do we do?”

            “I have no idea.” I rolled the window down for air. I needed to think. Fireflies. The fireflies in my head. The penny-saved thoughts, all jingling and flashing, metallic and buzzing in my head. Porch light. Roni.

            “Well we can’t go there, I don’t think,” I said and closed my eyes to the unraveling world.

            “We have to.”

            “Ok. I know. Just give me a minute to think.”

            He squirmed in his seat then slumped down so he couldn’t be seen.

            He was hunched down in the foot well, too big for the space. He looked like an oversized pillow shoved into a too small pillow case. “What are you doing?”

            “Cop’s lookin’ this way.”

            “And you think hiding in the foot well makes my car disappear? Get up.”

            I rolled the car through the stop sign and two blocks up, pulled in behind the sedan.

            “When you get out, pretend you haven’t been here and have no idea what’s happening. Do you understand?”

            He nodded, and stepped out of the car, rubbing his hands on his thighs as he walked up to the officer.

            “What’s happening here?” he asked, cooler in tone than I had expected.

            “Do you live here?”

            “Yes, sir. Is something wrong?”

            I approached Mickey’s side, the officer looked at me and recognition crossed his face. “You’re Duncan Manning.”

            I nodded.

            The officer looked back at Mickey. “I’m Reggie Sullivan. Your house has been vandalized, young man.”

            “Is my aunt ok?” Mickey asked.

            “Your aunt?”

            “Yes, sir. I live with my aunt. This is her house. Is she ok?”

            “I haven’t seen her. We got a call from a neighbor. Was your aunt supposed to be here?”

            “I-I thought so.” A question rose in his voice, on the brink of panic. “Can I go inside?”

             Sullivan swung his arm wide toward the door; Mickey stepped forward, up the steps and into the open door.

            “So Duncan,” he said once we were alone, “you had a little arson problem a few days ago, and we got the call about a similar break-in at your house. I thought you were still in the hospital. We sent a squad car there to talk to you about your house.”

            I nodded to let him know I was aware of my own house.

            “Have you seen your place? It’s a real mess but it doesn’t look like anything is gone. You need to do an inventory if you haven’t yet.”

            All I could do was stare at him.

            “And your friend, here. Do you want to speculate what might be the cause here?”

            “I wish I knew.”

            Mickey came out.

            “Anything missing?” Sullivan asked.

            “Nothing that I can see.” He answered.

            Mickey walked to my left side and faced Sullivan. “So what do we do now?”

 Sullivan said. “With nothing missing and nothing broken, just messed up and thrown around, I don’t really know what we can do here. No door damage. The neighbor that called in,” he checked his notes, “a Mr. Parks said he just saw the door wide open, went to check if everything was okay, then called.”

            “What about Aunt Mae?”

            “If she doesn’t turn up in the next day or so, and after you’ve talked to her friends and any other relatives, call us at the station and file a missing person’s report.”

            “With this mess of crime surrounding you guys, eventually you’re going to need to tell us what motivation someone would have to target you. Think about that and call me if you think of anything.” He handed me a card with his name and number.

            I almost told him to question Cal Eastwood. It was on the tip of my tongue. I almost told him to investigate Tate and that shithole, Hive, but couldn’t. The only information I could give about either of them was a hunch and a prison tale from an ex-con. All I could think about was what my dad said about Roni, and some sick part of me wanted to find out for myself – a sick satisfaction in figuring out what she’d got us into and getting ourselves out of it. And I didn’t know what the motivation was. I had no idea what she’d led us into and before I went talking to cops about it, I had to know what it was.

            As the officer opened his car door, I yelled to him, “Do you know who this car belongs to?”

            He stopped and stepped back to me. “This car? It’s not familiar to you? Doesn’t normally park on this street?”

            “No it doesn’t.” Mickey answered.

            “Well let’s have a look.”

            He wrote down the plate number, peeked in the window and said if he came up with anything on it, he’d let Mickey know then reminded me to call if I thought of anything. I wanted to yell to him as he drove away, “Rhonda Eastwood. It’s all about Rhonda Eastwood. You find out who killed her and you’ll find out who’s doing this to us.” But the words didn’t come. They just buzzed around in my head – dizzy fireflies, trying to make light.

            After Sullivan drove away, Mickey went inside and waited at the threshold for me to follow. “Can you help me?”

            “Sure,” I said.

            Mickey grabbed trash bags from under the sink and we began to fill them with the debris spread around the house. We put cushions back on the couch and righted overturned tables and chairs.

            Two hours later, the house looked like it should again. Mickey went to his room to get a bag of things because he didn’t want to stay in the house alone. He said he’d come to my place and we could do the clean-up there. I waited in the kitchen for Mickey to come out.

            “Duncan! Come here.” His voice rose with excitement.

            He was crouched on the floor in his closet. “A box.” He’d excavated it from the floorboard. When we were younger, Mickey used to hide stuff, mostly a stash of magazines, a bottle of whiskey, and snapshots he didn’t want lying around for Mae to find under a loose floorboard in his closet. Most of the time he would forget stuff or lose something and only remembered it later. He’d dig in the floorboard and retrieve it. This was one of those times.

            My heart raced. “What’s in it, Mickey?”

            “Some pictures of us and Roni and”

            I cut him off. “I don’t want to see them. I’m too mad at her right now.”

            “Well you shouldn’t be. She was our friend. She loved us. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

            But she had and I knew it.

            “When I was getting my duffle bag from my closet, I got in the floor. I just remembered the box, and the stuff in it. So I got it. I got the box and knew you’d be so happy when I remembered it. Cuz I also have a book.”

            “A book? What book? Did she leave it there? Let me see it!”

            He pulled the dusty lid from the red Nike box and handed me a book, curled and rubber-banded into a tube and stretched it toward me. “Roni gave it to me and told me to keep it safe. It has a bunch of numbers in it and I didn’t know what it was. That was a long time ago. I stuffed it in the floor. I never even remembered I had anything in the floor this time. I thought it was empty, but figured I better look, cuz you’d be mad if I forgot, and there it was!”

            I pulled the rubber band from it and the book fell open. “It’s a ledger from the Hive. I don’t even know how to read this thing. Let’s take it to Larson at the store. He does ledger stuff all the time. He can help us.”

            Mick’s pride lit up his face and he reminded me again of the fireflies. The buzzing, dizzy feeling in my head. “You have my fireflies,” I said.

            “Your fireflies?”

            “Don’t you remember when we were little? All the fireflies in the neighborhood would be in your yard. They all followed you. It was the weirdest thing. We all chased fireflies, but they were all attracted to you. You didn’t have to chase them, they wanted to be by you. Remember?”

            “Uh huh.” He sat on the floor and started tying his shoe. I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say, and he wasn’t really listening, but I kept talking.

            “Well all day today I’ve had fireflies scrambling in my head, making me dizzy and sort of sick. They wanted out because they wanted to be by you, and look, you’re all lit up. I think they found you again.”

            “What does that mean?’

            “I don’t really know. I just know I feel better, and you look more like you are supposed to look. You’re bright again.”

            He pushed himself off the floor and clapped my shoulder. He took the box from the bed and shoved it in his duffle, I think hopeful I would come around and want to see the pictures in the box. “You ready to go?”

            “Yep. Let’s go.”

“Well. Would you look at what the cat threw up,” my mother said as she opened the door. “As I live and breathe.”

A fuchsia plastic martini glass swayed theatrically in an outstretched hand while a cigarette dangled from the other. I could hear music coming from the back of the house. Ella Fitzgerald. The Ella usually didn’t come out until the bottle was about halfway polished. I knew it was going to be an interesting visit. I smiled.

“Entre-vous, my burnt little Injun.” She moved aside to let me in, slopping what was most probably pure vodka onto the threadbare carpet in the tiny front hall. “To what do I owe this great honor?”

“Hello, Mother.” I entered the house and kept walking straight through on my way into the living room, talking as I walked. In order to keep on her good side, I made no mention of the booze or the fact that she was in a kimono in the middle of the afternoon. “They told me you came to see me in the hospital. I just wanted to ask you-”

“Honey, honey. Wait. Stop,” she pled, following me a bit too quickly down the narrow hallway.

I stopped in my tracks and turned to face her.

“What is it, Mother?”

“Well. I just thought we could talk in the kitchen.” She grabbed my arm and tried to lead me back to the kitchen at the front of the house. “I could fix you a drink. You look like you could use one. You sound as though you could use one.” She looked me up and down, feigning disgust.

“But the bar is in the living room.” I pointed.

“Yes, yes,” she said, frantically waving away the living room with her cigaretted hand, “but the vodka is in the kitchen. Come on, now. Don’t be a nuisance.”

“What’s wrong, Mom? You seem agitated.”

“Well, if you must know, nosey parker, I happen to be entertaining a guest at the moment. Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Oh.” I could feel myself blush. I needed no more coaxing. I was in the kitchen in seconds and she was right behind me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were…”

“Now you do. No bother. Now what are you here for, Duncan? I know it’s not to bring me flowers or Mother’s Day cards. What’s the scoop, poop?”

I flinched away from her questions and looked at her. It didn’t take much to see why Mickey didn’t like her. Even happily drunk, she was caustic. “Can we sit down for a sec?”

“Lead the way, Duncan. I hope it’s good, though.”

I grabbed a glass from the cupboard and sat down at the kitchen table. My mother sat across from me, sitting her cigarette inside the divot of a near full ashtray. I poured myself a few fingers of vodka, straight. It had been a rough few days. I was also hoping it would help my throat.

“What’s the skin and bones of your visit, my child?” she asked when I finished swilling down the vodka and didn’t move to say anything. “I mean, besides the celebration of your rebirth from the fire. I have a live one in the lair and you’re wasting valuable time.”

There it was. The first class attitude I had come to expect from her.

“Yeah. Like I said, they told me you were at the hospital,” I began. I looked at the vodka bottle and pondered what would happen if I took another drink. With almost no food in my belly, I knew I was risking a drunk. But every other indicator screamed, ‘do it’. I twisted off the cap and poured another couple shots.

“Well, did you see the papers?” she said. “My boy, it was a virtual media frenzy. You know nothing ever happens in this town but growin’ and cuttin’. Grass, Duncan. That’s our life here. You made page one; you and that fire. I had to make sure you were okay.”

“Yes. Well…did you happen to see anybody, Mom? Someone maybe a little big? Muscular? While you were there, did anybody else come to my room?”

“That idiot of yours was spread in a smile like a lunatic right there on the TV too. Looking like a rubbed penny.”

“Mom. Don’t call Mickey an idiot. I won’t sit here and listen to you-”

“The boy’s as slow as molasses and twice as thick.”

I drank down the rest of the vodka, slammed the glass down on the table and stood up. My mother gave me a ‘what did I do?’ look, but the damage was done. I had overstayed the amount of time I could tolerate being around her by a few minutes.

“Just answer the question, Mom,” I said. “Did you or did you not see a muscular guy in or around my room while you were there? It’s important.”

“Well, Duncan,” she said, looking guilty enough for me to worry about what was coming next. “There was this one person there.”

I sat back down and gripped my now empty glass. She knew who it was at the hospital and I knew I wasn’t going to like her answer. I held on to that glass with all my strength, waiting for the bottom to fall out of my day.

“Well, that look on your face isn’t helping anything, young man. You make me want to not tell you. I certainly don’t want to be the bearer of bad news on a day like today.”

“Mom,” I said, grinding my teeth as I spoke. “Speak now.”

“You’re making your mother very uncomfortable, Duncan.”

I spun in the direction of the voice and nearly fell off of my chair. Almost unconsciously, my hand went into my pocket and felt for Roni’s picture. It was fast becoming a security blanket of sorts. I had brought it out and placed it on the table in front of me before I realized what I was doing.

“Cat took your tongue for a run, did it?” my father said. His enormous frame swallowed the doorway. He had gone into prison big and came out bigger. Much bigger.

“That little lady there was no angel, you know. Let’s have a look.” He reached for the picture of Roni and it disappeared in his mitt. “Still harboring a bad one for a bad one, are ya?”

I grabbed it back from him, pushed my chair out and stood up.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I asked, attempting to keep my voice down and failing miserably. I swung on my heels. “What the hell is he doing here?”

“I told you to stay in the other room, you,” my mother said, wagging a finger from her martini holding hand at my father and causing the drink to spill over the kitchen table. “Duncan, really. I don’t know what you’re getting so excited for. Last time I looked, I was a grown woman. If I want your father here to visit, there’s nothing wrong with that. You really do have to learn to keep your opinions to yourself.”

“For Christ’s sake, Mother. The man’s vile.”

“I may be vile, but I’ve come here to help you out this time. There’s more to do in the clink than sit and rotate on my own Goddamn thumb. There’s a lot of information floating around in that dive, Duncan. Information you might be interested in if you can get over yourself for one Goddamn minute and hear me out.”

He pushed me back into my chair and I slunk down like a scolded child.

“Have yourself another drink, sweetie,” my mother said, pouring another couple of fingers of vodka into my glass. She grabbed another glass from the cupboard, half-filled it with vodka and set it at an empty spot at the table. “Here. You might as well take a seat and join us. I want to applaud you on your wonderful hiding abilities.”

My father sat down and took a swig of vodka. “For Christ’s sake,” he said, turning to me. “He’s a big boy. No need to play charades with him any longer. I’m staying with your mother, Duncan. There you have it.”

“You know,” I began. “I’d love to reminisce with the two of you. Really, I would. But the thought of spending another minute in this house just makes my skin crawl. If you have something to tell me about Roni, can you spit it out. I need to leave here before I go insane. Although, I can’t for the life of me imagine why you would have any.”

“A tart like that one gets talked about in the darkest of places, sonny-boy,” my mother said, stifling a laugh.

I stood up again, ready to leave.

“Wait now, boy. Think about it for a minute. You know as much as I do that the Hive is the biggest dive in town. Don’t you think them that drinks there would be the same that sleeps in the bunks up the hill? There’s always news from home in that hell, and ten-to-one it’s news from the Hive.”

He had a point. Now I had a vested interest and I was willing to sit long enough to hear him out. I decided it was time to stop pouring back the vodka though. I pushed back my glass and offered my father my undivided attention. This brought a slimy smile to his face. He folded his new massive arms across his chest and held court.

“That fat puke Tate was cleaning money through the Hive. And your little piece of girlie tail was helping him to do it.” He paused long enough to enjoy the look of shock that spread across my face. “Yep. She was keeping the books on the little side job he had with the big men up in Hannaford. Only, word around the pen was that your Roni was skimming some off the top for herself. Tate doesn’t like to spread the wealth, you see.”

“There is no way in hell that Tate is responsible for-”

“Hold it there, captain. I ain’t saying that Tate did your little darling. I’m guessing he had nothing to do with that. I’m just telling you what I know, and even that is speculation. I wasn’t even going to say anything until you landed a crispy critter in the county hospital. I put two and two together and figured it measured in at about four.”

I looked at my mother, who seemed oblivious to everything except for the martini glass in the one hand and the cigarette in the other. It was just as well. I didn’t want her chiming in with her vitriol against Roni. I got up to leave.

“I don’t know how this helps me, Dad,” I began. “So Roni was keeping books. What does that have to do with me? I already have my suspicions about the fire in my garage and it isn’t anybody from the Hive I’m looking at. It’s Cal that I want to speak to. He’s the only one in this town who has anything against me.”

“Are you sure of that, Duncan?” He winked at me.

Before I could answer, the doorbell went off. Startled, I jumped just enough for my father to notice and laugh.

“You always were a nervous little Nancy, Duncan,” he said. “I don’t know where you got that from, because you sure as hell didn’t get it from me.”

My mother came to and went to the door, leaving us in the kitchen alone.

“Well if it isn’t the simple hero!”

“Shit,” I mumbled, racing to the front door to try to stanch the insults before they overwhelmed Mickey and caused him to flee. “What the hell is he doing here?”

“What’s that, Sharpie?” my mother said in a mocking tone. “Get your fingers out of your mouth and stop mumbling, will you.”

“Is Duncan here?” Mickey squealed in a way that made me realize just how much I hated my mother. “I gotta see him. Is he here?”

He cowered in the doorway, looking three shades of pale. His whole body flinched away from my mother’s dominating pose.

“What is it, Mickey? What’s wrong?”

He had been crying.

“They messed up my house, Dunc. Everything’s all over the place. It’s all tored up like a hurricane hit.”

“Oh man. It’s okay. It’s okay.” I put an arm on his shoulder and he crumbled into me for just a split second…long enough for me to get my back up in preparation for the shot I figured my mother would send our way. But to her credit, she said nothing.

“We gotta go fix it, Duncan.”

“Okay. We will. Don’t worry about it. We’ll-”

“I hope this love parade is over soon, fellas,” she interrupted. She was never one to disappoint. I knew she couldn’t keep quiet. “I’d like to shut my door and get on with my life here.”

“I think we’re done here, anyway. Tell Dad good-bye.”

“Tell him yourself,” he said. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen. “Don’t you want to hear the rest of the story? I didn’t come to the hospital to tell you about a little ledger full of dirty money, Duncan. There is more.”

“Later, Dad. We have to go.”

“His little simpleton is upset,” my mother said. “Can’t you tell they-”

I turned so violently in her direction that I cut her words off mid-flow. I think that was the closest I had ever come to hitting my own mother. Without another word, I tugged Mickey by the arm and led him to the car. Seconds later the front door slammed shut and my visit home was officially over.

            I watched every car pass with increasing paranoia. The cold breeze against my bare legs heightened my self-awareness as I wondered if I was being watched, perhaps even hunted. Sitting there so conspicuously in my hospital gown and coat, I may as well have had a bull’s eye painted on my back. The road showed no sign of Mickey, and without a watch, I had lost track of time.

     Each person I saw became a suspect. A thin woman pushing a stroller seemed least likely, but as she eyed me with her own curiosity, my agitation made me feel as though I looked guilty, therefore I felt it.

     My mind skipped like a tape that had been rewound too many times as I tried to piece together what had happened. My last full memory was the pictures; the last scraps I had of Roni were in that garage.

     I had written my name on that cushion because she would slink into the seat by the armrest whenever I stood up. She laughed when I penned my name to it. I bounded onto the cushion with both feet, marker in hand, “Out of my way woman!”

     Her photos lived in a box on a shelf. I had removed them from the house to get them out of sight. Signs of her were everywhere and allowed my grief to get a choke hold. I wanted them gone from view. The garage seemed to be where her memory lived the strongest anyway. Who would have known that later I would spend so much time there to be closer to her? I should have kept them in the house. If I had, they would not have been cooked to gray ash.

     The garage also housed her Christmas ornaments; the ones we always used to decorate her stolen trees. When she first moved from her parents’ house to her own apartment, she could not afford a Christmas tree. We got one for her that Christmas and had every year since. This year she didn’t get one, and that tree ended up gray ash just like the pictures. I wished I hadn’t made that bonfire Christmas morning, that there was still something somewhere of her. The handsaw Mickey never seemed to remember was resting on the workbench, where I’d left it Christmas morning. I laughed to myself as I wondered why I hadn’t used it to smash the window. I would have saved myself a lot of blood and pain if I had. It had simply not occurred to me. Nothing occurred to me that day; not how to save myself, not to grab the photos. Hindsight may be 20/20, but it is also cruel.

     As I fast-forwarded the tape, scratchy fades and blurs of smoke, and Mickey came to focus, but only briefly before the memory of cold snow on blisters, and blood frozen to my elbow emerged then vanished to be replaced again with Roni.    The raven hair, the smell of shampoo and too-sweet lip gloss, the way she touched my cheek to draw me to her for a gentle peck of a kiss. She was the wish-hanger who lived somewhere above the Earth and was willing to jump from a cliff if it would allow her to feel the breeze like never before.

     I remember thinking only of her and all the pieces of her that disappeared with my old garage. Then fast forward to the present, the strange visitor, my mother looking like death, and how each person bore a hole through me with stares as they passed by. I wondered which one of them was the failed assassin, and if any of them were Roni’s successful one. Maybe my arsonist/assassin and her killer were the same, and if this was true, I would have to find out what we had both done to deserve death. And I would have to live with the guilt that I had survived while she could not escape it.

     An old man, hair grayed at his temples under a crumpled fedora, shuffled past. He slowed to stare at me with apprehension. His path arced when he neared me as though he feared I’d jump from my seat and attack him if he got too close. How deranged I must have looked. My appearance, while I hadn’t seen a mirror, was apparent in his raised caterpillar eyebrows and slack jaw. I raked my hair with my hand to tame what I assumed was a wild mess.

     When he got past me, he shuffled faster with his eyes trained on me continuously, and made his way into a phone booth.

     I rewound the tape again to the big men I had known in my life. The Martin brothers were certainly large, but Robbie and David only traveled as a set, never alone that I had ever seen. Tate was a Fat Albert, not an Arnold.

     The nurse would have known Cal as a police officer and I wouldn’t have the need to play this guessing game if it were him. For a moment I wondered if Cal had tried to off me for his notion that I had something to do with Roni’s death – one more thing to investigate.

     My father was a large man, but I hadn’t seen him in years. Last I heard he was still serving his sentence in the state penitentiary for a botched burglary. Fine role model. When Cal said my mother was a drunk and my father a criminal, he wasn’t lying. I couldn’t deny it, though I still believed that I was different than they were.

     My grandmother used to say that the apple fell from the tree but rolled down the hill and across the road. I wanted desperately to believe her and Roni helped me to by telling me that Mickey would be my redemption. Mickey made me have to be a better person.

     This Arnold-big man seemed to visit in close proximity to when my mom visited. I wondered if she would have maybe seen this person either coming or going. Once Mickey got back I’d have to pay her a visit, though nothing could be further from what I wanted to do.

     She was never as happy as when I moved out of her basement; my father was already gone and she was free, having divorced him when he got sent up.

     I was the child that forced her to be an adult. She resented me for tying her to a home and a husband that she did not want or love. Her visit, I am certain, was because of the publicity.

     That I had to see her at all clinched my insides into fists. The idea of walking into that dingy house, stained with cigarette smoke and overwrought with the stench of unwashed dishes sickened me. The smoke alone was more than I could even consider as each breath was like swallowing broken glass. But if she knew something, I had to find out what. As much as I didn’t like living without Roni, I wasn’t ready to die, in a garage or otherwise.

     Mickey would refuse to go with me to Mom’s. My mother’s wrongs against me were primarily those of neglect; she ignored my very existence whenever possible, particularly after my dad got sent away. It was easier to lose me once Dad wasn’t there. To Mickey, however, her wrongs were much more hateful, and he, much less capable of ignoring or forgetting them.

     Once he was wounded severely enough, Mickey would finger the bruise anew every time he was reminded of it – reliving the pain and refocusing the blame. If he walked into that house he would poke and prod himself to find the sore spots and reclaim the ache and anger she had left. He would feel them all over again then sulk about it for days.    

     Once when he had come over to pick me up for work, she answered the door and spewed some horrible vodka-soaked words about him being unwanted.

     “You again?” she slurred. “You’re comin’ here an awful lot lately.” She walked to the sofa and sat.

     “You know what I heard?  You were raised by your granny cuz your momma didn’t want a retard for a kid, then she run off with some man and never came back. Can’t say I blame her. We don’t wantcha either. Go on. Duncan will have to so-sociate with you outside of my house.  You hear me? Go on. Get out. Go back to your granny. Oh, that’s right, she’s dead.”

     She cackled a laugh that spurred her on and she opened her mouth to spew some more when I ran up the stairs and told her to shut up. I dragged Mickey away.

     He didn’t speak for an hour then just kept repeating, “You don’t want me either? My aunt doesn’t want me. My Gram was the only one, now she’s gone.” He cried until his face had gone red, swiping at the tears, frustrated at their defiance to fall when he wanted them to stop.

     I had to baby him for weeks afterwards to convince him that I still wanted him and that I was his family now. He stayed with me nearly every night those first couple of weeks, sneaking him into the basement when my mom was asleep after our shift ended at IGA, and out again when she was out of the house. But his aunt said she needed him to help her around the house and wanted him to come home. Mostly I think she wanted his income. She would send him out for groceries and to pay her utilities and sometimes even the mortgage without ever giving him a dime to cover the expense and she had him paying rent for his room.

     My mother was a horrible woman when she was piss-drunk. I could forgive her what she’d done to me, and even appreciated that she ignored my existence but I struggled with ever speaking to her again after what she did to him.

     I didn’t want to go to her house any more than Mickey would want to but I had to go.

     Mickey ran to me, out of breath.

     “Hey Duncan. I’m back.”

     “So I see, Mr. Obvious.”

     His cheeks flushed, “I parked over there where no other cars were around so I wouldn’t hit anybody.”

     He leaned down and rested his hands on his knees trying to catch his breath. I stood to go with him.

     “Wait,” he said. “When I went in to your house,” he huffed for breath.

     “Take your time, Mick. What’s wrong?”

     “When I went to your house, Dunc, the door was already open and all kinds of stuff was thrown all over. I grabbed some clothes but forgot ‘em. I wanted to get out as fast as I could.”

     I cupped his elbow, looked to the hospital where someone was pointing toward us and told Mickey to run.

     My plans to see my mother would have to wait until later. I had to see my house.

     When we got there we walked into a disaster area.

     My sofa was overturned, each shelf, drawer and cabinet had been gone through and their contents vomited onto the carpet. My bedroom had been ransacked as well; my closet was emptied onto my bed and floor.

     I could only stare in surreal disbelief and did not know where to begin the cleaning effort.

     Mickey picked up my clothes from the arm of the recliner by the door and thrust them into my arms. I stared at them unsure what I was supposed to do with them.

     “Put ‘em on,” Mickey said.

     I went into the bathroom, dropped my coat to the floor and took off the hospital gown. I examined my back in the mirror, then washed my face, and ran a wet comb through my hair. Once I was dressed I snapped the hospital ID bracelet from my wrist and walked to the kitchen.

     Mickey sat on a chair at the table, ghostly white.

     “What is it?” Because what more could have happened in so short a time?

     He lifted something from the table and stretched it toward me. It was a picture of Roni.

     “It must not have made it to the garage with the others,” I said.

     “I didn’t want to see it,” Mickey said. “It makes me too sad.”

     “Me too.” But I only mumbled the words.

     It was a picture taken in the back yard. Summer time. We had cooked out on the grill for the fourth of July. She was in a bikini top and cut-off denim shorts. Her hair was pulled back to a ponytail. Her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, but I knew from the size of her smile that her eyes would have been squinted. She held a bottle of beer to the camera in a toast.

     Behind her in the photo, Mickey was watching her. His head fell to one side and I imagined that when he saw the picture in the mess on the floor, he remembered seeing her tanned skin and the thin blue tie of her bikini top, the indention of her spine and the curve of her hip above her shorts. No wonder he didn’t want to see it.

     That day the grocery store was closed. Dean and Tom came by for a few drinks, and a couple of the waitresses from The Hive stopped by for drinks after we had eaten.

     Roni got to my house first, helped set up, sliced tomatoes, shucked corn, and opened containers of pasta and potato salads.

     We worked in tandem. I prepared the meat for the grill, got the fire going, iced the beer and two-dollar wine. She rolled past me to get to the fridge and slipped a hand around my waist for a slight squeeze.

     I turned and brushed my hand down her bare back as she walked away.

     Rushville always put on a good fireworks show and we could see them from the back yard. As darkness approached and mosquitoes started to swarm, she asked for a shirt.

     “Middle drawer. You know where they are.”

     She did the strangest thing then. She walked around to the front of the house instead of going in the back door. She returned without a t-shirt moments later, claimed to have gotten sidetracked then walked into the house to get it.

     Our friends started to leave around midnight, a few hanging on until two with a pick-up card game at the kitchen table. I told Roni she could stay the night. Mickey was staying, too. But she insisted she needed to go and promised to return the shirt.

     She said her good-bye with a tight squeeze around Mickey’s soft middle. He held her like a child would a kitten, resting his head against her dark hair and giving her a gentle stroke. She purred.

     She gave me a playful wink, touched my cheek and instead of planting the slight peck of a kiss I usually got, she pulled my ear to her lips.

     “A little game, Duncan. I left something for you. I’m not going to tell you where, or what, or even why. It’s a secret I need you to keep.”

     The card game rolled on.

     “Ante up, Manning”

     “Go on and play,” she said.

     By the time the game was over, I had forgotten all about her secret I was supposed to keep. She never spoke of it again. Until I stared at that picture, it wasn’t even a memory. She was always saying off-the-wall things. It had meant nothing to me at the time. Remembering it now gave me a chill. Something was going on with her way back then and I didn’t even see it.

     Someone else knew about her secret, I was certain. The same person that went on a treasure hunt through my house, most likely.

     I stared at the picture for a while longer, pressed it to my chest then shoved it in my coat pocket. A remnant of my girl had been found. I would not lose this one. I could keep her with me always.

     “Let’s go.” I said to Mickey.

     “What about this mess?”

     “Later” I said, already walking to the door.

     He trailed behind me. “I can’t go out there!” He ducked back.

     “What is wrong with you?”

     “TV truck. I already talked to them once. I’m no hero. I hate being on the TV. They say stupid stuff about me being brave, and then show me saying something dumb. I hate them. Please don’t make me go out there.”

     “Go out the back door and run to your aunt’s house. I have to go somewhere by myself.”

     “By yourself?” His insecurity clung to the words. “You need me to protect you, don’t you? Someone’s trying to hurt you. I don’t want you to be alone.”

     “I’ll be okay. I’m just going to my mom’s.”

     He shook his head gravely, then slipped out and bolted through the back yard.

     What Roni hid in my house may still be here, or the people who broke in got it. Or maybe she’d taken it with her some other time. I wondered if it was the same thing that was in her plastic container.

     The TV truck was gone.

     I patted my pocket, feeling for her photo and walked out the door.

“You were about this close to intubation, Mister,” the on duty nurse said, waking me from a shallow sleep. She held up a pinch to demonstrate how close I had come to getting a tube shoved down my throat. Her words felt like an admonition; as if I had intentionally locked myself into a burning garage. Tube or no tube, it felt like my lungs were dryer than death and twice as ugly. I offered her a mischievous smile to make up for my perceived sins.

“Your friend saved your life, you know,” she continued, adjusting the nose tube that shot a steady cold stream of air into me. I squinted to read her nameplate. Thelma Reynolds. I hadn’t yet decided if she was kind or mean. Her words said nice, but the harsh bun of grey-streaked black hair pulled to the back of her head and the frown creases around her mouth said otherwise.

“If he hadn’t hauled you out of that garage, I’d be talking to an empty bed right now. Just as well he did… they think I’m crazy enough around here as it is. No need they see me shoutin’ curses at empty sheets and half-fluffed pillows.”

I smiled and looked to the chair at my bedside. “Where’s-”

“Now don’t get yourself back on the talk circuit just yet, Mr. Wiseguy. You’ll need to save your lungs the anguish.” She stood back and looked me over. “There. That’s better. I don’t know how those things go all askew. How’s that for fresh air?”

With her thick arms crossed, her obscenely ample bosom became even more pronounced. I raised my eyebrows in reply, afraid to open my mouth to speak again.

“You’ll be getting a masked treatment in just a few that’ll put you into your second life. Now if you were a cat, that’d be a good thing. I don’t have to tell you that you’re not. After this treatment, it’ll be good as rain if you stayed away from burning buildings for a very long time. Always would be your best bet.

“I don’t have to tell you this, either. But I’m gonna anyway. I always give the most advice to those who can’t argue or escape. Unless you’re asbestos or Satan, it’s best not to be caught dancing in flames. We can only clean your lungs so many times, Mister.”

Again, I felt admonished. I looked to the chair where Mickey had been the last time I was conscious.

“Him? I sent that one home,” she said. “No place for him to be, sittin’ waiting for you to stir. How are those burns treatin’ you?” She unfolded her arms and moved to roll me onto my side.

It was the first time I felt the pain since it happened. As soon as she had made me aware of it, though, it was the only thing I could think of… even from within the medicated cloud I found myself in.

“These dressings will stay on until the next shift change,” Nurse Reynolds said. She tsked a couple times while inspecting my back; touched a few raw undressed places, causing me to wince and pull back.

“That really hur-”

“Ut tut tut. I told you not to speak. It’s gonna hurt. They’re burns. That’s what they do.” She lowered me gently back in place. “Nothing too too bad, though. Now the papers are gonna want to talk to you, too, like they spoke to that Mickey fella.”

It was so hard to keep track of the conversation. I couldn’t tell if it was because of the medication dripping through my intravenous, or the manic way Thelma Reynolds chose to carry on a conversation.

“Your friend was interviewed yesterday by the Tribune,” she said. I gave her a look of bewilderment. “He did save your life, you know. You were locked into that garage good and tight. Someone out there doesn’t think much of you; that’s for sure. They’d sooner cook ya, as look at ya.”

I scribbled furiously into my hand with a non-existent pen, hoping she would understand the international sign for give me a pen and paper.

“Well, they just happen to be right here.” She opened the top drawer in the bedside table and handed me what I needed. “Make it quick, though. There’s more than you here.”

What day is it? Is Mickey hurt? Do they know what happened?

“Well, you’ve been a guest at the hospital for two days now.” Her index finger went over the list one item at a time. “Your friend is fine. He cut himself on the hand… two stitches-nowhere near as bad as your gashes-and burned his elbow. Just a minor burn. I’m not much of a detective, so I can only speculate. You made somebody mad enough to cook you.”

I brought the pen back to the paper, but she decided to keep on going.

“Your mother was here just a little while ago. If you don’t mind me saying, she didn’t look marathon ready. I was tempted to wake you and tell you to make room for her.

“Only one more visitor while you were sleeping. A big one.”

“What did he look-”

“Do I honestly have to knot a grown man’s tongue?”

I jotted fat? down on the paper and raised my eyebrows in response, prompting her to answer the question.

“Well, he was more Arnold big than Fat Albert big. He said he’d be back later when you were awake. Now I have to go. Rounds don’t stop at you; despite the fact that you’re the biggest news this town has had in months.”

As she was walking out, I quickly jotted down a final reply and tapped the pen rapidly against the pad to get her attention.

Thank you.

“Wasn’t a bother,” she said on her way out the door. “I do have to tell you though. Those vows of silence… they’re Thelma’s orders, not the doctor’s. I’ve been doing this for a long time though, so I know what shakes. You best keep to no-speak for the time being.”

She was gone before I could protest. I looked around uneasily, wracking my brain to come up with who it could have been who paid me a visit while I was out. It was obvious I had to leave. I examined myself and couldn’t see any reason why I had to stay. My back was a blister of heat; my head a fog of thoughts; my hand and arm wrapped and throbbing; and my throat and lungs a gravel mess, but I figured it would be best if I took my chances and took a stroll.

Leaving a hospital in the middle of the afternoon was a lot easier than I expected it would be. I hauled my coat on and merely slipped to the stairwell, made my way down the four flights and let myself out. It was moving on from there that would have proven difficult had Mickey not been sitting on a bench in the adjacent park.

Though he looked forlorn to the point of miserable, I was relieved to see him sitting there. I knew that a man in next to nothing but a coat would somehow be less conspicuous if he was with somebody. Besides that, it was a good time to thank him for being at the right place at the right time.

“Duncan,” he said as he spotted me crossing the road. “You should be inside. You should-”

“Don’t worry about that,” I interrupted. My throat screamed in protest and I suddenly knew that Thelma Reynolds was a very smart woman. “How long have you been here? Did you see any big guys coming or going this morning?”

“Nope. But you should be-”

“Mickey. No. Someone was here to see me. Someone big. The nurse told me he was there when I was sleeping. I don’t know who it was and I don’t want to find out. You have to go get the car, buddy.”

I saw the look of terror in his face and quickly recalled the last time I allowed him to take the wheel. We had ended up in the ditch by Coreman’s Creek and I needed a tow truck to haul me out. Instead of calling myself an ass for allowing him to drive, I screamed bloody murder at Mickey for being dumb enough to land in the ditch.

“You’ll be fine. There’s no mud on city streets. Just zip home, get the keys and drive it over. I’ll take over from there.”

“Oh, Duncan,” he moaned. “I’d rather not. I have to work soon, anyway.”

“I’m not sure what time it is, but it looks like hours before your shift starts, Mickey. Don’t tell me you’re going to leave me here in a hospital gown and a coat. I need you now. I need you to help me.”

He stood and pace for half a minute, knowing he was going to do as I asked but not wanting to in a very big way.

“Okay. But if I get caught-”

“You won’t get caught. Nobody’s looking-”

“Cal’s been all over me the last two days, Duncan. All over me.” He noticed the look of panic on my face. “Don’t worry. I didn’t tell him a thing. He’s getting pretty angry though. I thought he was gonna hit me, he was so mad this morning.”

I sat down on the bench he had vacated.

“Don’t worry. We have nothing to hide. It’s not like we did anything. We have to remember that. We’re innocent.” Though I had never felt more guilty of a thing in my entire life. I felt like it was me who took the life out of Roni and left her in that field. And I was almost certain that somebody out there was going to sooner or later make it look like I had.

“I’ll be right back. Stay right here. Promise. Promise me you’ll stay right here.”

“I promise. I’ll be glued to this spot.” He looked leery, as though he thought I would dart the moment his back was turned. “Bring me a change of clothes too, would ya Mick. The key’s under the step where I showed you.”

“I don’t like this,” he said as he walked off in the direction of my house. “I don’t like it one bit.”

As soon as he was out of sight I realized I hadn’t thanked him for pulling me out of the garage. It would have to wait.

I felt apprehensive. I was sure that I stuck out like a tiger in a fishbowl. I got up and walked further into the park and found a bench under an elm. I felt slightly less conspicuous there. I nervously awaited Mickey’s arrival while I prayed for the miracle that would get him there in one piece.

     A broken spring in my cushion poked at me, but I preferred the pain of my idleness to movement.  I told myself I wanted to feel it because I wanted to feel something, though I squirmed against it to get comfortable.  The stack of pictures rested on the cushion beside me, and with every drink from my beer can, I attached another memory to each still life. When I got to the picture of the three of us, I was well into the six-pack. The cans I’d thrown toward the trashcan were scattered about the garage – I missed every shot.

     Roni posed for the camera. Her arms wrapped over the shoulders of Mickey and me. I was looking at her with some sort of adoration and worship which creased the corners of my eyes and parted my lips. I liked to believe it was a picture that proved how much I loved her. Mickey had his chest puffed out – some big, proud moment. He looked at both of us. In whatever way we were individuals, it showed, but the way we were three was most evident from Mickey’s expression.

     When I looked at the picture I saw that Roni loved herself more than she loved us.  I didn’t hold it against her because how could she not? I saw that I loved her more than I loved anyone or anything else.  And I saw that Mickey, looking at the two of us, loved how we were three. He looked at us as though Roni and I were his very own couple.

     I threw my fifth empty can and bounced it off the rim, opened another and stared at Roni. Some quiet part of her was ready to pounce when that picture was taken. I could see it in the photo, though I couldn’t see it before.

     She broke us when she walked into that train station carrying a thrown-together bag of her things, her container of rainy day money, and our dreams of getting out of Rushville.

     As many times as I thought through the scene, I could never make sense of how it all came together. She always talked about getting out. What made that night different? Maybe I was looking at the good of her so much that I blinded myself to the warning signs that something was wrong.

     I ran my fingers over the slick surface of the photo, around the edge of her face, and remembered the apologetic and relieved look she gave over her shoulder to us where we stood by the open trunk.  I was holding Mickey’s arm to keep him from running to her. Something in her gaze seemed to crush under the weight of his outburst and she turned away, never to look back.

     She had left me with the pieces of a tangled up Mickey, my own heartbreak, and what would soon be the guilt of not running after her.

     From the moment Mickey panicked, “What just happened? Where’s she going? We have to go, Duncan! She can’t go without us. Why are you just standing there?” until four days later when Mickey and I arrived back in town to the devastating news of her death, all I could think about was what I was going to do next and how I was going to make it without her.

     It had been all down hill since.  Mickey wanted to go to Roni’s haunts and pretend she still existed. I wanted to wallow in her cruel absence. The void was pure misery, especially on days like this, where I hid from the world and drank away the pain, only to replace it with a broken sofa spring digging into the middle of my back.

     I tried to dull her absence by creating my own.

     I heard a thump outside and assumed it was Mickey. He always knew where to find me.

     “I’m in here,” I yelled, but when the door didn’t open, I disregarded the noise as something random – a branch in a breeze or an animal scurrying.

     I closed my eyes and thought over the details one more time. She never made it on the train. Her ticket was purchased, but she never boarded.

     When she was found, she still had her bag of clothes, but the plastic container was gone. I wondered again what was in the container. Was it just money or a secret that needed keeping? If it was money, where did she get it and who had taken it?

     The four days Mickey and I were gone were the days we searched. We drove from the station and stopped at the Hive for a drink. That’s when we decided to go back and find out where she had gone. The man at the ticket counter remembered her and told us she bought a ticket for Memphis. We drove after her.

     “Mick, she had to get away, but what if she needs us? We should go.”

     We spent three days in Memphis searching high and low for her, only to return home and find out she never boarded.

     Her body was found in a field twenty miles from Rushville. The man at the station didn’t recall anyone else in the station. When he spoke to the police, he only recalled our return to find her. We were the faces he remembered, and then we had to explain our four day absence.

     The alibis we had of people in Memphis who saw us, people at the gas station in town before we left, and Mr. Wilson, a regular at The Hive, were enough to keep us from further suspicion in the eyes of the law, though Cal had a different take.

     I slipped into an alcohol-sleep, and in the dream that followed I could still see her waving. The last moment we would see her.

     We were out of town and still unaware that we had lost her for good. We were not allowed to attend her funeral. Because our names had not yet been cleared with alibis, the family requested we not attend. And we never got our good-bye, only the spastic grope of desperation as she walked out of our lives. We never got to see the worry on her face fade.

     I awoke gasping and gagging to breathe.  The smoke was an overpowering wall of haze. I choked, and ran toward the side door closest to where I was sitting at the back of the garage. My drunkenness slowed my reaction and the confusion of the fire overcame any semblance of clear thinking. My vision failed in the gathering gray of the smoke pouring in, but I saw a flash of orange when a ceiling beam caught flame and the panic set in fully. I fumbled over the door and pulled the doorknob. It wouldn’t even turn.

     I pulled my t-shirt over my nose and felt my way along the wall, dragging my hands over the shelves to my left to feel my way. Tools clinked to the floor as my hands shuffled across them. The rush and crackle of the flames grew more insistent.

     At the end of the shelves were the workbench and the window above it. As I pulled my shirt off, the heat scorched my skin. I wrapped the shirt around my hand and smashed it into the glass.

     When a shard stabbed me through the wrapped cloth, I realized there was no escape over the jagged edges of glass still poking up from the frame. And the fire raged more fiercely with the air I’d allowed in.

     The flame swirled furiously in the beams above my head; licking upward, it devoured the wooden structure of the ceiling. I feared a collapse as the smoke funneled out the window. It, too, was nearly consumed.

     It was only a matter of time before gasoline and other flammables would explode, and me with them. The billowing smoke burned my eyes and throat. I scrambled to the front of the garage, fumbling in the heat and smoke for the release to raise the car entrance door.  My hand rested on the hot metal of the latch; blisters formed instantly.

     I twisted the latch but the door wouldn’t budge. I would have to exit over the broken glass of the window and hoped the frame would hold long enough.

    Then I heard Mickey yell from the back of the garage, “Duncan, are you in here?”

     “I’m over here,” I yelled back to him.

     “Keep talking so I can find you.”

     My throat burned with every word, “the door latch. I’m by the latch.” I coughed to the point that I thought I would vomit.

     I fell to my knees where I could breathe easier, and started to crawl toward his voice, sharp pain shot up my arm from the cut on my wrist. Blood pooled each time my palm pressed to the concrete floor. Ash and red hot embers began to fall from the ceiling landing on my bare back; I writhed against the pain but kept crawling, feeling the sticky warmth of blood under my hand.

     Mickey gripped my shoulder. I wheezed as he pulled me to my feet and carried me through the garage to get me out the side door.

     Sirens screamed toward us as he plopped me onto the frozen lawn. He took off his coat and wrapped it over my shoulders. We watched the garage burn beyond salvage.

     “What the hell happened?” he asked. He bent down with his hands on his knees heaving air into his exhausted and smoke-filled lungs.

     “I have no idea. I heard a noise outside and thought it was you, the next thing I know the whole ceiling is in flames.”

     Mickey held up a shovel. “This was stuck in the dirt and the handle was lodged under the doorknob.”

     The fire department showed up just as two small explosions burst from inside the now-consumed structure.

     I lay down on the lawn, chest and throat raw from smoke inhalation, and cradled my injured arm over my chest.

     I could only assume that someone believed I knew too much. I was prone to an active imagination. The one who murdered Rhonda was attempting to murder me, I thought.

     A dull beep spidered into my consciousness as I slept and I struggled against its persistence to wake me. Once I opened my eyes, the soft gray tone of the hospital room eased me into reality.

     Mickey was curled in the bedside chair, flopped to one side with his neck impossibly kinked to his shoulder.

     I cleared my throat and he jumped, rubbed his neck, wiped a bit of drool from the corner of his mouth and smiled.

     “You’re awake!”

     “Hey buddy,” I said with a raspy ache in my throat.

     “Someone tried to kill you, Duncan.” He stood and approached the bed. “They destroyed your garage.” He rubbed a hand over his hair and looked afraid with the wide eyes and high, wrinkled brow of a child.

     I nodded and closed my eyes as I swallowed hard, grimacing with the pain.

     All I could think about were the pictures of Roni I would never see again.

My first inclination was to head for the graveyard, but I knocked that idea down as soon as it appeared. That was something I would have done. I had to think like Mickey. He wasn’t exactly enamored with graveyards. He still had a child-like fear of those places, as evidenced by the way he superstitiously held his breath whenever we drove past them.

My biggest fear was that Cal had stuck around and led him away from the store to mine his brain for more of whatever it was he was looking for. Mickey was easily led; the perfect victim for someone as adept at intimidation as Cal.

I headed to my house, thinking Mickey might be out on the front porch waiting for me to appear and rescue him from himself. I only got about halfway there when I noticed a bundled figure sitting on the curb across the parking lot from The Hive. Even with his back to the road, I knew it was Mickey. The parka hood, fur-trimmed, pulled to a tight ‘o’ and the slow rhythmic rocking forward and back; it had to be him. I threw my left signal on and pulled into the Hive lot.

As I inched the car up to where he was rocking, the ‘o’ of his hood slowly rose… but I could not see the darkness inside. I only knew that he was seeing me.

His hand slowly lifted to a wave as I put the car in park-leaving it running-and jumped out into the cold.

“Hey, Am,” Mickey said. His voice came out with a muffled gush of air that dangled in front of him a moment before dissipating in the cold. He loosened his hood and revealed his face to the headlights’ glare.

He had been crying.

“Hey, Mick. We’re not at work now,” I said, patting his shoulder and taking a seat on the curb beside him. “You don’t have to call me Am. We’re friends now.”

“Well, yeah. But not really. I’m on the clock still, Duncan. I’m sorry I didn’t stay.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m just relieved to see Cal didn’t trap you somewhere and give you what for for not telling him whatever it is he imagines we know.”

“Well he didn’t. I came here on my own. I was just thinking, that’s all.”

I put my hand on his arm and gave it a squeeze. This seemed to slow the pendulum motion his body had locked itself into. I only let go when his rocking had come to a complete stop.

Not sure what to say, I chose to go with nothing. We sat in the glare of the headlights for a few minutes just watching the white tunnels of breath escaping with our exhalations.

“Why don’t we go inside for a drink before we head back to work?” I suggested. Mickey startled back to himself, giving his head a shake to clear the fog. “We will have to get back soon, though… but we can stay a few more minutes anyway. Dean’s taking care of things for now, but you know how he gets.”

“Sure, Dunc,” he said. “Sounds good. I like being inside. It’s like we’re closer to her in there.”

“Yeah. I know what you mean, bud.” But I didn’t. Not really. To me it felt like we were walking in a ghost house whenever we entered The Hive. Roni was everywhere. I wondered if she had touched the glass that held my beer, wiped down the stool I perched myself on, lingered in the hallway I walked to reach the men’s room. The whole Hive experience had become excruciatingly painful for me. For Mickey, it was like coming home. For him, The Hive was the true final resting place for Rhonda Eastwood; somewhere he could go to pay his respects.

I got up and killed the engine on the car and locked it up. As we walked to the front door, I noticed for the first time just how bone-cold it was outside. “You can’t sit on pavement like that when it’s this cold, Mickey. You’re libel to get piles doing that.”

Mickey held the door open for me, ignoring the comment I had hoped would serve to lighten his mood.

The darkness of the Hive reached out and pulled us in. Never did a bar have a more apt name. The Hive was dark and hectic. I always had the sense there was so much going on I wasn’t quite privy to and I was acutely aware of its manic insect hum. I was not comfortable there when Roni was present and I hadn’t warmed up to it at all in her absence. There was also the distinct impression that such good friends of Rhonda’s were not welcome.

I followed Mickey to where I knew he would go. Our table was in the corner behind the pool table. We spent many hours there watching patrons shooting pool while waiting for Roni’s shift to end.

Mickey slipped into the chair against the wall. This was his normal chair too. In the corner he could watch for Roni to make her appearance. I pulled out the chair across the table from him and sat down.

“We’ll have one quick drink,” I said. “Then it’s back to the grindstone.”

“Sure, Duncan.”

I took my coat off and hung it on the pool cue rack beside the table. This was a signal for Mickey, who seemed to be operating on auto-pilot. He chose only to toss his hood back off of his head, though. He was only half-willing to leave the cocoon and join me in the Hive. The coat would stay on.

It was extremely rare that nobody was shooting pool and I had half a mind to just take up a cue and start playing myself. It would have lifted Mickey from his funk, but the fact that Dean was left in charge at the store niggled my thoughts like a canker. I stared into the two pools of light shining on the table’s purple felt surface instead, waiting for Mickey to make sense of whatever it was he was worrying on and spit it out.

Tate himself came over to take our order. Tate was the owner, a pessimistic piece of misery who looked the same as long as I’ve known him. When we were growing up together, he was Ryan. Somewhere in high school Ryan slipped away and he has been stuck with his last name ever since.

“What can I get ya?” he asked, not even attempting to hide his contempt. He carried a germ laden J-Cloth and swiped a single swath through the center of the table with it, dropping down two cardboard coasters along the way.

“Two draughts, Tate,” I said. I snipped a smile short when he turned abruptly and headed back to the bar.

“He’s a fat fuck, Duncan.”

I pulled my head back and raised my eyebrows, taking Mickey’s unexpected comment in. He smiled and unzipped his parka.

“Yeah. No kiddin’. I never did like that guy.”

“Roni used to call him a pencil dicked hellcat,” he said. “Said he was always hitting on her and causing her grief. Said he was so fat he couldn’t find it to pee.”

I laughed and looked back toward the pool table. It was calling out to us… getting louder as Mickey’s mood improved.

“I suppose she’s probably right about that,” I said. Tate was grossly overweight. With his graying hair and climbing widow’s peak he looked easily ten years older than us. He was three days younger than me. It used to piss him off that my birthday was celebrated first in school. “I certainly wouldn’t wanna go looking for anything under that pile of rubble he calls a gut.”

Despite the fact that his eyes were darting around the bar scanning longingly for the ghost of a girl who would never show, all was finally right with the world. Mickey laughed. It seemed he finally shook the cloud that Cal had dropped on him.

“Howsabout a game of pool?” I asked, forgetting myself. It was sink or swim time. Every day the manager in me struggled against my natural inclination towards mediocrity and slackerdom.

“We have to get back to the store after this beer. This place’ll be closing soon anyway.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Maybe you should be the manager. God knows my heart ain’t in it.”

Tate pressed in between our conversation and plopped two mugs of beer on the previously dropped coasters, spilling foam from each with the force of their landings.

“Two draughts. That’ll be six, eighty-five.”

The beer at The Hive was no longer free for Rhonda’s freeloading friends. I reached into my pocket and paid the man, smiling at the ridiculous vision Mickey had just gifted me. I hoped Tate wouldn’t mistake the smile for a kindness.

“Maybe I’ll just shoot a few into the corner pocket while you’re drinking your beer, Duncan,” Mickey said. He slid out of his chair, grabbed a cue and the triangle and began his short journey around the table emptying its pockets of balls. The noise of balls being dropped and rolled and dragged across the surface of the table followed.

I took comfort in the tap of the cue on the white ball and the clack of the break. Sipping my beer, I felt lulled and sated by Mickey’s noisemaking. It was easy for me to slip back into a time when we did this every night. We’d come and have a beer on our lunch-hour, maybe a plate of the Hive’s piss-poor fries on the side, get a few words in with Roni as she’d move through the bar like a queen on a mission.

Roni did do the books for the Hive, but she really did so much more. It was as though she ran the place. Tate wouldn’t know his arse from a cupcake. Roni was the best thing that ever happened to him. I could not figure out what went wrong. It was like all the pieces were sitting right in front of me, but I had no way of knowing how they fit together.

I certainly felt the hatred oozing out of Tate’s pores whenever Mickey and I slipped into the bar, but I couldn’t tell Mickey we weren’t going back. He loved being in the place where Roni had spent most of her time. It gave him peace. Taking that away from him would have destroyed him. Besides, her conscience had already warned me in no uncertain terms that she’d hide me if I ever stopped him from going to the Hive.

Another sip, another clink of ball against ball and the soft thunk of a pocket being filled was all it took for me to slip back completely.

***

There was something disarming in the way Rhonda acted while I was packing a few things at my place. I tried to imagine that it was simply the adrenaline of flight, her excitement in busting away from a town she always hated, but it was more than that. Her sudden impatience with me, and her insistence that Mickey wait in the car out of the way, made it feel like it was her journey. Not ours. She dismissed all my questions about things we would need with a quick, “It doesn’t matter”.

“Okay, Roni,” I said once we were back on the road. “What’s this really about?”

“What do you mean? Adventure. Escape. Getting out of this little town before it sucks us under. Before we disappear. Can’t you feel it happening, Duncan? Can’t you feel the fading?”

I wasn’t buying it. The look of desperation that crept into her face earlier was now holding court over the landscape of her features. The panic in her heart was visibly recognizable in her near panting, and the shimmer of sweat covering her forehead and arms. There was more to this thing than adventure.

“Bullshit,” I said.

“What? Can’t a girl have fun? It’s not just a man’s world, you know. We can break out every now and again too.” Her smile, with the dashboard lights illuminating her manic face, was more frightening than convincing.

“I don’t have anything,” Mickey said from the backseat. “Why don’t I have anything?”

“What, sweetie?” Roni asked, pleased by the intrusion. She turned to face him, offering him another of her shocking new smiles.

“Well, we didn’t go to my place. I didn’t pack any clothes. I’ll need stuff too.”

She swung around to look at me, looking for help getting out of the corner she had put herself in. I averted my eyes to the road, pretending I hadn’t seen her shift.

“I have money, Mickey,” she said. “Enough to buy you a couple of things. We have to get to the train station or we’ll miss the next train. Miss that, and we may not leave.”

“Why not take the car?”

“Yeah, Roni? Why not the car? What’s with taking the train? Whenever we get to wherever it is it’ll take us, how the hell are we gonna get anywhere? We’ll need a car.”

“The train’ll take us further. And we can sleep. It makes sense if you think about it.”

She interrupted Mickey’s next question with a blast from the radio. CCR took us the rest of the way to the station while my attention oscillated between the road and the nervous foot tapping and fidgeting going on in the seat beside me.

We pulled into the station and parked next to the main building. It was all I could do to beat Roni to the trunk.

When the trunk popped open and I reached in to grab my bag, Roni clenched my wrist. I stopped what I was doing and looked at her, knowing the other shoe was about to drop.

“Wait,” she said.

I tried to yank my wrist free, but she held firm forcing me to look at her.

“What’s going on here, Roni?”

“Drunk courage.”

“What-”

“I needed to play you and Mickey into the mix to get me this far. I was scared, Duncan. I needed you to think you were coming with me.”

“We are coming with you.”

“No. No you’re not.” She finally released her grip and reached in to grab her own bulging suitcase.

Mickey had joined us at the back of the car but remained quiet. He often watched the two of us like a hawk to see how tense situations would play out before adding his own two cents. Not being one to take sides, I think he was always quietly hopeful our arguments would never come to the point where he would have to.

“I’m not going to let you leave here without us, Roni.”

“Come on, Duncan. You want to leave here as much as you want a turkey on Tuesday. You were just playing along to hear the sound of your own voice.”

“This isn’t about seeing the world, is it Roni?”

She dropped her suitcase to the ground with a thud. Before I knew what was happening, she had me in a panicked embrace. Her hands then grabbed my head and her mouth found my nose, my cheeks… my mouth.

When she finally found my ears she held me closer and whispered, “Don’t make a scene, Duncan. You’ll only upset Mickey. You have to let me go. I have no choice. You have to.”

My eyes roamed and locked on Mickey. He was watching us like someone on the verge of a breakdown. I didn’t think it was possible for him to be more upset than he already appeared, but I had to listen to her. She had once again manipulated me into a corner; something Rhonda Eastwood was incredibly good at accomplishing.

Her mouth came back to mine and she whispered the same warning again, her hot breath filling my lungs as she spoke the words.

“You guys are scaring me,” Mickey finally said.

She released me and opened her arms to Mickey. As he fell in, I picked up her suitcase and headed for the front doors of the station. I had already relented to her will. She was getting on the train and we were staying behind. She would tell me what was going on in her own sweet time. And like a puppy lost, I would wait for that time to arrive.

***

“Hey, idiot,” Tate said, startling me from my reverie. “I think it’s time you let somebody else use that table. You’re only fooling around. These boys want to have a real game.”

He was flanked by the Martin brothers, Robbie and David. They were regulars at the Hive. Roni called them Trouble and More Trouble. They were a couple of muscle-bound simpletons I never gave the time of day. They smiled at Mickey, arms folded, waiting for him to cower under and walk away from the pool table.

“There aren’t any idiots here, Tate,” I said, rising out of my chair. “No need to speak to him like that.”

“And there’s really no need for the two of you to keep haunting this place now that Roni ain’t in it, either, Duncan. How’s about the two of you call it a night now? I’ve been a good host. I brought your beer. I let the thin genius there scratch up just about as much of my table as I can take. How about you just get your asses on back to the IGA and stock some shelves now.”

I moved toward him, balled fists at my sides. He took a step back at the same time the brothers Martin took a step forward, smirking their ill will in my direction.

“It’s okay, Dunc,” Mickey said, sliding the pool cue across the surface of the table. “I was finished anyway. We’ll go, Tate.”

“That’s very good of you, moron,” Tate replied. “I’ll tell Roni you stopped by.”

Mickey gasped and a dark anger crossed his features. I thought he would pounce on Tate, but he seemed to recompose himself on the spot. He grabbed his coat.

“Come on, Duncan,” he said, ignoring the three of them completely. He put his parka on and started walking towards the door. “We better get back to the IGA like he says.”

The Martins stopped their posturing and began to set the pool table up for a game, not once opening their mouths to speak.

“I don’t like you, Tate,” I said, making sure I was quiet enough so that Mickey couldn’t hear me. “And Roni didn’t like you either. She didn’t like you a lot, Tate. She warned me about you. I wouldn’t even come to this rat trap if it wasn’t for Mickey. He wants to be close to where Roni used to spend her time, but he doesn’t know how much she loathed the time she spent here.”

“Well don’t do me any favors, Duncan,” he replied. “Tell him not to come back and we’ll all be happy.”

“We’ll be back as long as Mickey wants to keep coming. And you are not going to stop us.” I leaned in close enough to smell his stale breath. “I’ll tell Roni you said hi. How’s that?”

He flinched. I saw it just before he regained his composure. He was just as uncomfortable with ghosts as I was. It made me wonder what it was Roni was keeping from me the night she boarded that train. The Hive was involved in that night. I sensed it like you sense someone watching you. You just know where to look… and when you do, there they are… looking like the cat that ate the rat. And as soon as I mentioned Roni’s name, it sure looked like a rat that Tate choked to swallow.

            I heard a crash three aisles over and went to investigate.

      “Shit!” Mickey cursed and chased the red cans like chickens around a coup. They rolled the length of the aisle in all directions. Mickey spun with them, as though he thought if he stopped them fast enough, he could undo their falling. That instinct to catch something before it falls had kicked in, only too late. And he was unsure where to even start picking them up.

     “Shit again,” he said in a near-whisper, to himself and finally stood still.

     “Mick, what’re you doing?” I stood at the end-cap with my hands on my head, smiling at my goofy friend.

     “Oh hey, Dunc. I was just stocking this and tipped the box of Spaghettios. Help me?”

     I laughed, “I’m just headed to the back. The frozen food truck is here.”

     His posture sagged, “Oh. Okay, Am.”

     Mickey took to calling me “Am” at work, ever since I got the Assistant Manager job at IGA. He used it to distinguish between his friend, Duncan, talking to him, and his shift manager talking to him. It’s how he kept the two of me straight.

     He thought he was clever, and I didn’t discourage him. Rhonda liked that he gave me a nickname. With her, “Oh Mickey, it’s perfect for him,” I was stuck with it.

     Since her death, she had become a new conscience in my head. My own, not so refined or defined, had been pushed aside, and a very distinct Roni set of values had transplanted in its place. I let him call me “Am” because she liked it when she was living. Now that she was gone, her conscience told mine it was the right thing to do, even if I thought it was silly. If I didn’t let him, her conscience would put mine in a guilt choke-hold. My own conscience still hadn’t recovered from the Christmas tree bonfire debacle. She slapped me around good for that one.

     Mickey started to pick up the cans and I walked away, satisfied that he could handle it.

            Stocking shelves at the IGA was a part-time job in high school that turned into a full-time job after graduation so I could sock money away for college. After a couple years of working, I realized I had no interest in more school. Mickey wasn’t going and neither was Rhonda. She started as a cashier with us at IGA. Then she got a better paying job for Tate, keeping the books for his restaurant and bar, The Hive. That Mickey and Rhonda were still in town was reason enough for me to stay, too. We were a package deal.

     Rushville is a small town. There aren’t many jobs, so I stayed on at the IGA and used the money for rent so I could move out from my mom’s basement.

     After three years of stocking shelves, they put me on third shift. The shipments would come in and we could stock the shelves through the night when we wouldn’t be in the way of the customers. Mr. Larson promoted me to assistant manager and it seemed it was going to be my career, rather than the stop-through I had intended it to be.

     I pushed through the metal doors and helped the driver unload the truck. Dean came back from stocking the deli and helped me sort the pallets.

     “Ok, looks good,” I said.

     Dean pulled the pallets into the freezer, leaving the product, still to be stocked, accessible for stocking later and I walked to the floor to check on Mickey.

     A stray Spaghettios can had rolled against the butcher’s case and I leaned down to pick it up. That’s when I heard the voices, and stopped mid-stoop, to listen.

     “I don’t know,” Mickey said. There was a terror in his voice.

     “Now, Mickey, I know that’s not true. Why don’t you just tell me everything you do know?”

     “But…we already told ya everything. I swear.” Mickey stammered and sounded as though he may cry. I pictured his full face gone red, his eyes wet.

     “I don’t mean to scare you. I don’t think you did anything wrong, buddy, but Roni deserves to have the people responsible for her death pay for it.”

     Cal, the bastard.

     I realized I was still hunched over an aisle away and stood, took a deep breath, and approached their aisle.

     “Roni deserves it, Mickey. If Duncan did something to her, we need to put him in jail.”

     “No,” Mickey said, “Duncan didn’t do anything. Roni just…”

     “Hi Cal,” I interrupted.

     Mickey was backed up against the shelves, grasping a box of Instant Spuds to his chest, his knuckles whitened by his grip, face red and pained.

     Cal stood over him. He was taller than Mickey by a few inches. He used his extra height to bare down over Mickey, who was shrinking to the floor.

     I walked to them, and rested my hand on Mickey’s shoulder. I felt him relax in my grip. Cal stepped back and I eased Mickey to me. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Get away from him.”

     “I was just leaving,” he said. “I’ll talk to you again soon, Mickey. I know you have something to tell me.” He rested his hand on his holster, tapped his fingers against the black leather, then turned on his heels and walked away.

     Mickey sniffled, still clutching the box of spuds.

     “What did he say to you?” I rested my hands on his shoulders and made him look me in the eye.

     “Just about Roni and you. He wanted to know about the night…” he had never been able to say the night she died, so rephrased, “that night last year.”

     “And you told him…?”

     “I told him nothin’, Dunc. I swear.” He looked panicked all over again. He stared hard into my eyes, pleading with me to be convinced he’d done nothing wrong. “At least I don’t think I did. Shit, I can’t remember. He scared the hell out of me.” He smacked his forehead, punishing himself.

     “Okay, buddy, okay. Calm down. I’m not blaming you. He shook you up pretty good, why don’t you go on break.”

     He relaxed. “It was just like that night, Duncan. Just like that night when he was yelling at us at her house. Remember? It freaked me out.”

     “I know.” I squeezed his shoulders then dropped my hands. “Go on break.” Then I started stocking the shelves.

     That night last year. It wriggled in my brain all over again. I pushed it away as I pulled the boxes of E-Z Potatoes to the front of the shelf. Damn Cal. He didn’t like us when Roni was alive; he hated us now.

     Grief takes many forms. Mickey clung to me in his grief. Feeling like he could keep Rhonda near if he kept me near.

     I spent hours staring at pictures, drinking too much, reeling from her absence, talking to the conscience she’d transplanted in my head. I took care of Mickey for her and he had grown to depend on me being both Roni and Duncan. I let memories of her consume me.

     Even in defending Mickey tonight, with Cal’s threats hovering over him, he looked at me like he had looked at her so many times. She was his big defender. She was the one who had taken care of him. I was a sad surrogate in her place.

     Cal turned his grief to hate and had spent the last year making certain we knew it was all aimed at us because we were the last people to see her alive.

***

     Rhonda sat up and the wing of tangled hair more resembled a nest. She untangled and straightened it the best she could and pulled her feet from my lap. Mickey readjusted in his seat to make room for her to sit.

     If you’re serious, then let’s go,” she said. “Right now.”

     Mickey smiled but the uncertainty did not leave his face.

     I said, “Okay, then.” We drove to her house.

     Mickey asked, “Where to?”

     Roni only laughed. The joy she felt presented itself as a glow that overwhelmed her face.

     I took the laugh to mean she didn’t even know where, but she was excited to be going… wherever it might have been.

     We pulled into her yard and filed out of the car. She dug keys from her pocket and slipped one into the lock, telling us to stay quiet with one slender finger to her lips. The glow had turned devious as her excitement grew.

     Once inside, she said, “I’ll be right back. Stay here.”

     We heard her banging around, then footsteps overhead. She was in the attic. More banging – drawers slamming. Mickey and I did not speak. My stomach had curdled though, and the sour taste of fear crept up. I felt like a coward; I was afraid of the unknown adventure she wanted for us.

     She bounded down the hall with a suitcase, tilting to one side as she carried it. The weight of it nearly toppled her and she bounced off the wall of the narrow hallway.

     She put it down by my feet.

     “We’ll get your stuff on the way out of town. I just have one more thing to get,” she said, and escaped to the kitchen, returning in seconds with a sealed plastic container. She held it up to us, “Rainy Day Fund.”

     Mickey picked up her suitcase while she turned off the light. I walked out the front door and held it open for them.

     Cal pulled up just as we had put her suitcase in the trunk. “What are you doing?”

     “We’re leaving,” She answered. The cool tone in her voice angered him.

     “With these idiots? Are you kidding me? You’re not going anywhere, Rhonda.”

     She approached him like a cat circling the legs of her owner. “Calvin.” She circled him. He stood still as she moved behind him and back to the front to face him. “Cal,” she said again. She was confident in her ability to shut him down.

     He didn’t move. ”This town is killing me slowly. There is nothing for me here. I have to get out. My friends are taking me.”

     He was not capable of saying anything to her in anger just then. A spell, I thought. The deep magic Roni had over everyone kept anger away.

     Instead, he looked to us. “You assholes. What have you done to my sister? Put some stupid idea in her head that she has to leave. What are you going to do to her when you get away from here? You don’t even have a plan. I swear to God, you are not taking my sister anywhere! Do you hear me?”

     He rushed up on Mickey and shoved him. “Hey Retard, do you hear me?”

     Mickey tumbled to the ground.

     I ran to his side. Cal kicked me in the ribs as I bent to Mickey.

     “And you, Manning. Total loser. Criminal for a dad, drunk for a mom. No good. If you think you are going to go anywhere with an Eastwood, you’re in for a rude awakening.” He kicked again, knocking the air from my lungs. I gasped, and Rhonda pounced.

     “Goddammit! Get away from them. Step away from my friends and go. It was my idea. I have to get out of here, now!” She swung at him with her purse. “These are the best friends I’ve ever had. They are my family now.”

     Cal cowered under her rage with his arms raised to protect his face.

     “Go, you ape!”

     Mickey and I dove into the car, leaving the door open for Rhonda. She swung again, smacking Cal on the side of his face with her purse before she jumped in the car and we drove off.

     Her urgency frightened me. This was not the wish-hanger of earlier that night. This was someone desperate. I hadn’t seen it before and I wondered what she was running from. She wasn’t just running to a freedom; she was also running from an enslavement. I worried, but took comfort that it would all be over soon. We would be gone.

     Rhonda said, “Your place. Then we’re driving to Springfield to the train station.”

     She turned to look in the rearview mirror, afraid her brother was in pursuit. When she saw that she was free of him, she rested her head on Mickey’s shoulder and made a soft apology for her brother.

     Mickey stared out the window and seemed to address the night sky, “I’m not a retard.”

     “I know, baby. I know. I’m so sorry,” Roni said.

     I wanted to answer, as well; I wanted to reassure him, too, but I could never make him feel as good as Rhonda could. She was Mickey’s defender. On that night, she was even mine. It meant more coming from her, I thought.

     In that dark moment as we drove away from her house, we shared a silence that made us more together than ever before. Not a silence of loneliness, fear, or even of discomfort. Our mutual silence bound us to the same moment and we each relished the first inklings of a new freedom. A freedom, first for Rhonda, and then for us.

***

     We all handle grief differently. I not only grieved the loss of Rhonda, I grieved the loss of the dream she thrust upon us; the dream we reluctantly held – the dream that took root like so many pines – the dream that had died with her.

     Thirty-five minutes had passed and the boxes were now empty. Mickey hadn’t returned.

     First, angry with him for taking such a long break, I stomped to the break room. But once I saw he was not there, I went to the back room.

     “Dean, have you seen Mickey?”

     “Nope.”

     I ran to the wide-open receiving dock door. “Mickey!” I yelled into the alley.

     No answer. My fear for him, and the sense that I had failed Rhonda by not being there for him, swarmed around me. I could only imagine that Cal had gotten a hold of him.

     I left the store in the care of Dean and went out into the cold February night in search of my friend, my surrogate responsibility. I went looking for Rhonda’s Mickey.

Waking up to our first Christmas without Rhonda was even harder than I had imagined it would be. With the bitter taste of our confrontation with Cal still burning a hole in my throat, I was in no mood to greet the morning without her.

As I sat up in bed, I remembered-and instantly regretted-the damage I had done to the rest of that bottle of whiskey after we left Roni’s graveside with our heads down and our tails between our legs.

We loved Roni like crazy. Bringing her a Christmas tree every year was just the tip of our Rhonda Eastwood obsession iceberg. Rhonda had come to define Mickey and me; form the people we had become. It was hard to be around such a free spirit as hers without having just a bit of that magic rub off on you, whether you wanted it to or not.

I should have gone with my gut when Roni voiced her desire to flee this shit-town, though. My gut told me I belonged in the small, in the forgotten, in the never going anywhere. But as I drove on, with Roni’s feet in my lap and her dreams in the air around us, something overtook my reason. Her desire to be anywhere, everywhere… it suddenly spoke to me. It bit me like a bear you can’t bite back but have to chase anyway, just to prove your courage.

If I would have kept my mouth shut, she’d maybe still be hanging wishes on those God-damned wires. There’s nothing wrong with wishin’ your life away and going nowhere with it. It’s when you cross that line and try to put those wishes into real… for losers like me, that’s when the trouble starts.

What hurts the most is that Roni had every faith in Mickey and me. She really believed we would take her to the everywhere she imagined. That was where Roni was most fallible, her Achilles heel. She was unable to see the losers before her whenever she looked at us.

But we didn’t kill Rhonda Eastwood. That was one piece of business Cal would eventually have to chew on and swallow hard.

We may have allowed her to dream, and maybe even dreamed right alongside her too, but Mickey and me… we didn’t have a thing to do with Roni’s dying. Like two idiot moths at a porch light, we were just wrapped up in something bigger than us and too stupid and blinded to realize it. Only problem with that analogy is the porch light went out first and the two stupid moths are left behind wondering why it’s so God-damned dark.

It took all my energy getting out of bed. I tried as best as I could, with just my two hands, to hold my head in place as I walked to the bedroom window and looked out at the blustery day forming beyond it.

I sank a little further when I saw the dead tree hanging askew from the side of the car, looking every bit the victim of a violent altercation with a wood chipper.

I didn’t have to wonder how far we dragged the carcass the night before. A trail of branches, needles and debris ran down the middle of the street and lead up the driveway to the car. The falling snow was quickly erasing all traces of foul play, though. Anyone on the lookout for a stolen pine tree would soon be out of luck.

I continued my futile attempts to keep the pounding headache at bay while I hauled myself into the clothes I had shucked off and left in a pile at the foot of my bed only a couple of hours before.

Each footfall I took reverberated the throbbing pain in my head, but I thought I’d better remove the tree from the side of the car before anybody noticed it. It hadn’t occurred to me that other, more civilized, people were too busy celebrating the season with loved ones to notice a mangled tree hanging from the side of their crazed neighbor’s car.

Mickey sat at the bottom landing of the stairs, bent back and staring upwards in his usual one-eye-open drunken sleep posture.

“Hey,” I said. I shook his shoulder on my way past.

“Handsaw?” he asked.

“You’re dreaming, fruit-loop.”

He startled upright and his hand went to his mouth to wipe away a trail of drool.

“What time is it?”

“Time to get up and bury that God awful tree. Or what’s left of it. What the hell did we do after we left the graveyard last night?”

Mickey stood up and hugged close to the wall for support. “Oh. I don’t feel so good, Dunc.” He put his hand over his mouth. His eyes rolled in his head, unable to anchor. “I think I have to use your wash-”

“Don’t you even think of getting sick in my hallway, Mickey. I’ll swat you with your own hand. Get your ass to the toilet now before it’s too late.”

I was in no state to hear the retching that was sure to follow, so I made a beeline for the garage door. With my coat flung over my shoulder, I embarked on my search for the garden shears. It was time to free our prisoner.

Leaving the shears and rope in the snow beside the car, I dragged what was left of the tree into the backyard. I began to pluck it apart branch by branch, the whole time struggling with the heady scent of pine and the way it tried to lure me back to the past.

Mickey’s reappearance, even in his hung-over state, was the ballast I needed to keep me in the present.

“What are ya breaking it up for, Duncan?” he whined. “We don’t have a tree ourselves.”

“Well, you can’t have this one neither. We tore it all to ape-shit last night, Mickey. Weren’t you there?”

He grabbed a bough from the ground and used it to swat at the falling snow. “I don’t see why we couldn’t keep it, anyway. It wasn’t that bad. What are you gonna do with all the pieces?”

“I thought we could have a bonfire. Maybe it’s time we started a new Christmas tradition, Mickey. What do you think?”

“I think it’s snowing like a bitch, Duncan. And I think maybe Cal Eastwood’s making you a bit crazy. I wanted a tree. And you went and ripped it to pieces. That was Rhonda’s tree.”

Mickey placed the bough on the pyre I had been building and turned and walked back to the house.

As much as I might have agreed with him, I tried my best to ignore his simple logic. I finished shredding the tree apart and returned to the garage for the gas can I kept with the lawnmower.

Soon the flames and smoke were rising against the storm and I knew I had to head back to the house. Whenever Mickey gets his feelings hurt you have to ease him back into happy. Somewhere along the road I had become both his tormentor and his touchstone. I knew he’d be inside waiting for me to cheer him up. And I knew I had to do it. With Roni gone, I was all the poor bastard had left.

But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was back in that car, in that time. Back dreaming about the way those wires swooped up and down between the telephone poles in that dreamy way they dance in motion. Back looking at that stretch of body as she lay across our laps.

***

Instead of returning my thoughts to the road like I should have, I shot Mickey a wink and a smile. Instead of letting Rhonda sleep the sweet sleep of wire wishers and daydreamers, screw-up Duncan gave her a great big poke in the belly.

As Robert Plant melted into Freddy Mercury, Rhonda awoke with a blast of that rich and heady laughter that was such an elixir for the both of us.

“Duncan, you ass-hole,” she said. “You scared me half to death.” But her renewed laughter belied her true feelings.

“I was just thinking, Roni. What if we did happen to see the world? What would be so wrong with taking a little peek?”

“Duncan Manning, you crazy bastard. You don’t have it in you,” she replied. Her eyes narrowed though. She was trying to read my expression and determine whether or not I was pulling her chain. Or perhaps she was attempting to gauge whether she needed to wait a little longer, or give the rod that final yank that set the hook.

Roni may have gone overboard on the free-spirit thing, but seeing her shine like that-seeing her light up Mickey the way she did-I just wanted to be hauled in with them.

“What makes you think I don’t want to see the world too?” I asked, poking her again as we drove on.

Her laughter carried us through the rest of the song.

“Are you guys sure?” Mickey asked, hanging his head out the window for a quick gulp of passing air. Coming back in, he looked past Roni and made sure he had my attention. “The world’s a hell of a big place, Duncan.”

“Not if you take it one step at a time, Mick.”

“It’ll be okay, Mickey baby,” Roni cooed. “We’ll take care of you. You trust us, don’t-cha?”

***

He did trust us, too. Mickey always did. He’d follow Roni and me off the face of the Earth if we ever found the right turn to get us there. Problem is we never knew what to do with that power. Roni was too busy dreaming of another place and I was too stupid to do anything even half-ways good with it.

I stumbled enough with Roni’s help. With her gone, I felt completely lost. It didn’t help that Mickey was still looking my way for answers. I guess he just never realized how many of the previous ones had actually come from Rhonda.

Standing in a blizzard on Christmas morning, watching a bonfire sink in upon itself, I knew I was failing him yet again. A good word was all he needed. I could have saved our first Rhonda-less Christmas for him, but I couldn’t drag myself away from the smell of pine and the lost wishes that scent encompassed.