Don’t you remember me? I asked him.
He scrunched up his nose. Remember you, he said. Remember what? That’s four dollars.
Absentmindedly, I ran my index finger down the silver blade of the ax, and even though it had been hanging up high, unsharpened and ignored, the edge cut right through the skin. Blood blossomed forth, a rose.
Oh no, he said. Look at that. Let me get you a tissue.
It’s okay, I said. I gave him a ten, backing away. I used to live next door to you, I said. Mona Gray. Left side. You remember that, right? I was your math student, I said. Your star pupil.
He handed over the change and looked at me, reaching for a tissue, half off his stool.
What are you planning to do with that ax? he said.
What’s your number today, Mr. Jones? I asked.
He blinked, surprised. I took another step back and he reached beneath his shirt, obedient, and through the collar pulled out a small precise 12, made of wax, about the size of a tennis ball, hanging on a string and gleaming dully in the lamplight.
12, I said.
i!z, he said. Thanks for asking. Not so great, I said.
No, he said, not especially.
His face had opened up now, since I’d asked to see it, clean, wide, as if I’d turned a key and walked directly into his body.
But I did the opposite instead-backed away from him more, that eagerness in his face, edging toward the door. I could feel the sunlight behind me, waiting, the step into dryness. I bit off the end of the licorice rope.
He was off his stool now, staring at my finger, bleeding all over the blade. The uz bounced around his neck but I was out of the store, entrance bell singing my exit; outside, the light was white and the park sprinklers had been turned off, leaving fleeting tiaras of dew on the air.
Coiling the licorice around my wrist, I held the plant food in one hand and the ax high and blinding in the other. The stem waggled in my grip.
Will you look at this! I said out loud to the world. Just what I’ve always wanted! I said.
In the street, two orange cones had tipped over, vivid and isosceles. The coffee shop was still crowded with people. My parents’ car was gone.
I used the ax first to circle the air around my head, then to brush against the bark of trees, then to lean on like a walking stick. I loved my new present, but I didn’t like being around marathons, and I didn’t like that Mr. Jones hadn’t remembered me, and I wasn’t sure how to manage going to school in the morning with kids who would cough at will and like it. I did the walk to my parents’ house slowly, eating licorice, sucking on my bloody finger, passing abandoned folding chairs set up by the side of the road. Families stood outside on their lawns, talking, drinking iced tea. It was just past eleven o’clock. The streets were calm with Sunday.
I walked by the flowery house where John Beeze lived with his mother, the butcher, and the green public house that no one could stay in because the pipes were damaged by a root. Kids liked to play there when it was raining. More than one town member had been conceived in its back rooms.
Bikes lay flat on lawns, wheels spinning.
The plant food sifted and shifted in my hand, and I leaned on the ax, blade lilting out like a song, and debated where to put it once I got home. Bedroom? Windowpane? Closet? Someone let out another sports yell, several blocks away.
I rounded the corner. I was now about seven houses from where my parents lived.
All these homes I knew very well. I had known all my neighbors growing up. Mr. Jones still lived on my parents’ right side, but on the left had lived an old woman named Mrs. Finch. For years she baked terrible cakes and brought them to her neighbors on birthdays, never missing a year, waiting at the door while we took a bite and nodded and smiled over the awful sour salt glob in our mouths.
I approached her house, balancing that ax head on my shoe. Mrs.
Finch was important to me. Not because I knew her that well, or because of the cakes, which were awful. She’d stopped baking in her later years, and become a sickly lady with a cane, a walker, and a wheelchair, all three, so it wasn’t a huge surprise to anyone when she died. I was twelve then, and two of my grandparents had died by that point so I wasn’t totally unfamiliar with death, particularly the deaths of old people.
The remarkable thing had happened the day before she died. I had been riding past her house on my bike, back and forth on the sidewalk, too scared to dip into the street and head downtown. I stayed on the sidewalk even though people on foot gave me dirty looks. Whenever I rode my bike, I felt one second away from flying over the handlebars: dizzy, then dizzier, then dead.
As I rode by, I spied on Mrs. Finch’s lawn a piece of butcher paper wrapped around her front-lawn tree, and written on the butcher paper had been a number, in black block ink. The number was 84 — I remember looking at it and wondering why her address was so much shorter than ours, and why she’d stuck it on her tree, or if Mr. Jones had put it there in a really good mood, and then I decided that it wasn’t her address or Mr. Jones at all, and spent a good minute or so thinking about that, why was it there? rambling along in my own head, pedaling down, knocking on tree trunks, thinking thoughts I never would have thought of again, thoughts meant to be unremembered, if it hadn’t been that she died the next week and in the obituary it said she was 84 years old.
I looked at that typeface on the newspaper and the butcher paper number lit up in my head.
There was a beauty and an order that I liked. I found it peculiar, but I also found it perfect.
I tore that obituary out of the newspaper, and saved it. I placed it in the drawer of my wood nightstand set aside for unusual items, where it shared space with a tiny plastic running man, a gum wrap per in Spanish, and the one warped page of my aunt’s lingerie catalog that I hadn’t been able to throw out.
Birthdays passed and no one got a sour salt cake anymore. I forgot all about the 84 until the whole thing happened again, and this time it was much worse.
Across from Mrs. Finch was a big friendly yellow house. Right now someone else lived there, some family with eleven cats, but when I was growing up, that was where the Stuarts lived. They were really nice, tall people, even though they didn’t like the horn on my bike and got irritable when once on an impulse I picked one of their prime golden roses for my hair. They’d had three kids around my age, and a new one, a brand-new baby, pink and fleshy on the blanket, with curling fingers.
I was thirteen years old, biking up the sidewalk one afternoon, when I saw a flag flying on the Stuarts’ lawn. It was a flag with a circle on it, one big black o. I remember supposing they were some weird religion that worshipped o’s. I spent a good minute thinking about them, about what that meant, about tires, about rings, about lunar eclipse.
I had a flash of worry before I went to sleep, but so swift I never would’ve remembered that either.
A week later, their baby died. It was in its crib and Mrs. Stuart left the room and when she came back the baby wasn’t breathing anymore. Just like that. She brought it into the world; it took off. Didn’t like it. Left. Mrs. Stuart shook it many times, she apparently never really GOT it; she just stared and questioned, asked questions to the baby: Are you okay? What is going on?
Baby? She was nothing but question marks and she couldn’t grasp it, but I did; I got it. I remembered the o.
Could I have warned them? What to say? I quit riding my bike and retired it to the side wall of the garage. Cars lined up in front of the Stuarts’ house and people walked to their door, hugging casserole dishes close to the heart, food warm through the glass, dampening their shirts. The o flag flipped and waved in my head.
I did not know how to make a casserole and I never spoke with the Stuarts again. I did, however, bring them a replacement rose, for the one I’d clipped months before; I bought a long-stemmed red at the store and stuck it, like a pole, next to their rosebush. A sentry rose. To watch out for pickers. After a few months, the Stuarts and their three alive children moved away, I think to Florida.