“It’s going to just be the two of us,” she said. She put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “Just you and me, Roger. Can you believe that?”
I couldn’t believe anything then, and I knew she couldn’t either. It was that sort of day, a day that felt like it should belong to someone else, the way so much of my life would seem from that point on. It would be a long, long time before I’d let myself trust anyone who said they loved me.
That night I couldn’t say I loved my mother, or Bill, or my father, who had gone without saying a word to me. I could only say that I felt sorry for them — sorry for all the trouble they’d found — and I felt sorry for Connie, who didn’t deserve to be on the other side of that trouble. It would be a while before I’d be able to say that I didn’t deserve it either.
“You’ve always been nice to me,” Connie said to me that evening when we sat on her bed, not saying much at all, waiting for her grandparents to come.
She wasn’t crying, as she’d eventually done on the night her mother died. She was sitting with her legs crossed under her on the bed, rocking back and forth, and she let me put my arm around her waist, and then she laid her head over on my shoulder, and we sat there for the longest time, not saying a word.
The Philco radio sat on the table by her bed, but we didn’t turn it on. She had a bulletin board on the wall above her desk, and from where we sat I could see it was covered with things I’d never known had meant that much to her — a wrapper from a Hershey bar I’d bought for her once when we were out and she was hungry, a book of matches that we’d used to light a candle on our blanket at my grandparents’ farm, the plastic rings from the candy pacifiers we liked. Just little things like that. Nothing that mattered at all, but they did to her, and now, given what was about to happen, they did to me too.
“They won’t let me live here anymore,” she said.
I told her Indianapolis was only three hours away. “Not far at all,” I said.
“Not too far,” she said.
The sun was going down and the light in the room was fading. Through the window I could see lights going on in the houses on down the street. I couldn’t see my own house on the other side, and I was glad for that. We sat there in the twilight, not saying a word. She let me hold her, and I smelled the strawberry shampoo in her hair and the fresh nail polish on her toes, and there was nothing really we could say because we were in a world now that wasn’t ours. It was run by people like my parents and her grandparents and Bill, who sat in jail waiting for what would come to him.
“You’ll come see me?” she finally said.
I told her I would.
“I won’t forget you.” She tilted her head and kissed my cheek. Then she settled her head back on my shoulder and I felt her eyelashes brush my neck. “And I won’t blame you for any of this. Never. Not ever.”
Then we sat there, and finally we lay down on the bed. She turned her face to the wall, and I slipped my arm around her and fit my legs up against hers. She let herself cry a little then, and I told her everything would be all right. I’m not sure I believed it, but soon she stopped crying and then she said, “I wish we were the only people in the world right now.”
“I wish that too,” I told her, and it was true. I did.
We stayed like that a good long while. Maybe we even drifted off to sleep. Then headlights swept across the wall, and we heard a car door slam shut outside and frantic steps on the porch and her grandmother’s voice calling, “Connie, oh Connie, oh my precious girl.”
“Shh,” Connie said. “Don’t move.”
And we had that instant longer — that instant alone — at the end of a story that was never meant to be ours.
She was in my arms and then she wasn’t. Her grandmother was there, and I let her go. Connie Timms.
I walked out of her house and stood on the porch. I looked across the way to my own house, where a single light was on, and I saw my mother’s shadow move across the closed drapes. I thought how strange it was that I lived in that house, how strange it was that my uncle had killed a man and my mother and father, as I would soon learn, were at the end.
Connie’s grandfather, a short man with a big chest and a blue sport coat, came up the steps.
“Who are you?” he said.
“No one,” I told him.
“Young man, I asked you who you were.”
I just shook my head, already moving down the steps. There was too much to say, and I didn’t know how to say it.
“Come back here,” he said.
But I kept moving. I still think I should have had a choice, but I was sixteen. What else could I do? I went home.
James Mathews
Many dogs have died here
From Iron Horse Literary Review
On the afternoon I met my new neighbor, a woman others in the cul-de-sac would dub “Ramba,” I wasn’t looking for trouble. In fact, I wasn’t looking for anything other than to enter my first full month of retirement with a small military pension and dreams of a hop to Florida or Hawaii once a year until my expiration date arrived. My immediate goal was a peaceful night of sipping Stella Artois, catching up on baseball scores, and making a list of things I needed to do to the lawn the next day.
I had just taken a seat in my favorite club chair when the knocking started. I muted the television and glowered at the clock on the wall. I wondered whether to just wait it out. But the knocking continued and grew more insistent. I finally shot up, galloped across the room, and flung open the door in a way I hoped would signal deep emotional instability, which I imagined to be a staple of retirement.
“I’m your new neighbor,” the woman announced through a smile of perfectly aligned and pampered teeth, “and I was wondering if you knew how to change a flat tire?”
I stared with disbelief at the woman, who seemed oblivious to the fact that I was irritated. She was young, upper twenties tops. Her complexion was fever-pale, her red hair pulled back and tied off in a ponytail or braid, and her big, goofy smile was more an event than an expression. She wore faded jeans and an olive-drab T-shirt. The shirt was standard grunt issue, although I would never have associated her with the military except for the way she was standing, at parade rest, hands behind her back, rocking slightly on her heels, waiting for me to answer her idiotic question. Somewhere on the other side of the neighborhood, a lawnmower started up on the first pull.
“Call a mechanic,” I told her. And for good measure: “Which is what you should have done when you first got the flat.”
“Oh, it’s not my car,” she said. “It’s yours.”
I blinked a few times and stuttered stupidly, “Excuse me?”
“That’s right,” she said, and from behind her back she produced a Buck knife the size of a billy club. “It’s how I’ve introduced myself to all the neighbors. So that you each know I’m serious. And that I’m not going anywhere.”
Her smile was gone now, traceless on her pale skin, as if it had been wiped from her face by the glimmer of the steel knife. I retreated a step and swallowed hard, fully expecting her to move toward me. Instead she executed a textbook about-face and stalked down the walkway and across the lawn, the blade swinging side to side like a machete hacking through an imaginary jungle.
She’d gotten to my tire all right, one of the $229-a-pop Michelin 3000 Weather Breakers on the right front side of my Ford pickup. I had parked ass-end in, with the grille facing the cul-de-sac, and it appeared as if, on her way up the sidewalk to introduce herself, she’d taken the blade and carved a clean line through the top of the treading. This wasn’t going to be a patch job.