No use waiting for Liz like that, said Apple, watering the cacti with a small tin watering can. She just shows up when she wants to.

But Jenny didn’t move from the window. Apple put down the watering can.

Let me do your hair, she said. I invited the gang over for music night.

Jenny always wore her hair in two thick brown braids, but she let Apple wash it, comb it out, and rebraid it into one enormous French braid on the screened-in porch while the sun went behind the red cliffs. Apple’s sandy brown hair was chopped short as a boy’s.

On music nights, Apple’s friends, mostly aging hippies who’d retired to Sedona and a few of her coworkers from the nursing home, would come over to play folk songs. The leader was a forty-ish man named Otto who was in a band that sometimes played restaurants and hotels around Sedona. Otto and Apple and the others played guitars and harmonicas, sometimes a bongo or a tambourine. They played Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and always, always The Band. On these nights, Jenny was happy. She liked to sit in the circle with everyone else who was playing music, even though she didn’t play any instrument.

That night, Otto told the group about how his dad had taught him how to play guitar. An idea bloomed before Jenny’s eyes. It was the idea that talent could be passed down. It was the idea of being proud of doing the same thing as those that had come before you. Jenny’s mother was a secretary at an accounting firm. She didn’t have any hobbies. When she came home from work, before coming into the kitchen, she had often sat, for five or ten minutes in a big wooden chair in their hallway, with her coat and scarf still on.

After they’d drunk lots of red wine and smoked lots of dope, Jenny went up to the loft where she slept and listened to them play. They played “I Shall Be Released” and Jenny looked out the skylight at the wide Arizona sky. Jenny harbored certain opinions, unpopular with Apple and her friends below, about America. After high school, she had tried to enlist in the Army, but was denied because of a childhood accident with a slingshot that left her legally blind in her left eye. Below her they sang, I’d ring out Danger! I’d ring out Warning! I’d ring out love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land.

From between the hard covers of her notebook, Jenny took out the pamphlet for the Rainbow Family Gathering that an older family friend of hers from home had sent her shortly after she had moved to Sedona. The friend’s name was Nina Daniels and she’d left Staten Island to volunteer in a new government antipoverty program.

It’s called VISTA, Nina had said when they’d seen each other over holidays. Like a big view.

But Nina had stuck around after doing two years of big views, and hooked up with other transplanted young people to form a commune. Nina had enclosed the pamphlet and a picture of herself with a tall bearded husband and a newborn baby girl, leaning against a wood platform, along with a note:

This is right near where our commune is. A peace festival in the woods! It’ll be a blast!

Jenny had never been to West Virginia, but until recently, she’d never been to Arizona either. The words WELCOME HOME were scrawled across the top of the pamphlet in big orange block letters. Below that, was an excerpt from a hippie book she remembered kids at college reading, that said Let me remind you who you really are. You’re an Immortal Freedom Lover in service to Divine Love. The pamphlet showed a diagram of the Monongahela National Forest and some different routes people could take to get there. On the back cover was scrawled, May you always be all ways free. The Gathering was soon, just a month away now, in late June. But Jenny didn’t wanted to shake things up, had been happy and comfortable in Sedona with Apple. Plus she was broke, had spent all her savings on the bus ticket from New York. She put the pamphlet back in her notebook.

When Jenny woke up, she heard Apple clearing dishes and beer bottles and then she heard her stop, with a clatter, and slide open the glass front door.

Jenny looked down from the loft and saw a tall blonde woman whose hair was tied up in a bandana and who was toting a big green backpack hug Apple and say, I love you, but first things first. Jenny took in a breath of sadness, at all the shared history between these hugging women, all the things that Liz knew about Apple that she would never know. Then she climbed down the ladder.

After Liz had showered and put the contents of her backpack and the backpack itself in the wash, the three women drove to Sedona’s only all-night diner. Liz slid into the near side of the booth, and Jenny into the far side. Jenny was sure Apple would choose Liz, but to her surprise, Apple walked the extra steps and took the seat next to Jenny without hesitating.

Liz drew her arms up and rested them confidently on the vinyl booth as if putting them around two invisible people, and slouched down, letting her legs slide apart.

I can’t believe you’re still hitching, said Apple. Aren’t you scared?

It’s not like that, Liz said. It’s not like some movie where the hitchhiker dies. It’s just people, just people traveling around, just like you. Either they pick you up or they don’t. Besides, Liz said, taking a sip of coffee, the universe is fundamentally friendly. It will always take you exactly where you need to go, exactly when you need to get there.

Apple laughed. Oh, right. What’s that, some psycho-babble?

Call it what you want, said Liz, but I got your letter in San Francisco yesterday, and here I am today. Eight hundred miles. Two rides. She toasted Apple with her cup of black coffee.

Well, Apple said. I wouldn’t know how to do it. I wouldn’t know how to begin. Do you really stick your thumb out?

While they caught up about the years since college and talked about which friends had moved where and which had stayed in Iowa City, Jenny studied a middle-aged man in a nearby booth who looked like he might be a trucker. It was nearly two in the morning, and he and Liz were the only people in the place drinking coffee. He had a pudgy face with big, visible pores, and a slightly droopy mustache. On the table in front of him, he had placed a small black transistor radio. The way he leaned over it, bringing his ear down very close to the radio but not touching it reminded Jenny of her father who was the manager at an electronics factory that made radios. Last spring when Jenny had graduated high school and was trying to decide what she would do, she occasionally tried to ask her father questions as he puttered around the house in his socks after work. How many of the states have you been in out of fifty, not including layovers or drive-throughs? What (if any) is the difference between a buffalo and a bison? Why does a mandolin have eight strings, if it can make only four notes?

But her father would just turn on the radio, press his ear close to it, and say, let’s find out, as if all the answers to life’s questions would be found there, eventually.

*   *   *

The three women got into Apple’s green Cadillac, flat and wide as a boat, which had also been the grandmother’s, and which wheezed when Apple stepped on the accelerator. With the windows rolled up, Liz felt a deep sense of contentment. She’d been in San Francisco that morning and now she was in Sedona. She thought of the boy trucker who’d driven her all the way into Sedona and dropped her off just a mile from Apple’s house.

You guys should come hitching with me when I leave, Liz said, into the dark car.

Okay, said Jenny, from the backseat, so quickly she surprised even herself.

Apple kept her eyes straight on the road. It was so late, she realized. There was not another car on the road, and when she turned in at the entrance to their development, every single light was off.

Everyone else, every sane person, is at home asleep, Apple thought, and she was suddenly angry with Liz for busting open their quiet routine, and with Jenny, for being so willing to abandon it.

Inside, Apple switched on a single lamp in the living room.

As Apple and Liz got ready for bed, Jenny climbed to her loft bed and retrieved the pamphlet about the Gathering in West Virginia. She laid it on the coffee table and sat on the plastic covered sofa, looking at it. Liz came over and leaned over the back of the sofa to look too.

Huh, Liz said. I’ve heard those Rainbow Gatherings are a lot of fun. I’ve never been to West Virginia. If you don’t count drive-throughs.

I don’t, said Jenny.

Liz took the pamphlet and gave it to Apple. Could be just what you need, said Liz.

I don’t need anything, said Apple, but she held the pamphlet in her hand, and turned it over, reading the back.

May you always be all ways free.

*   *   *

In the morning, in the sun room, Liz and Jenny studied Liz’s trucker’s atlas. Apple stood at the sink doing dishes, watching them through the pass-through. Liz told Jenny how the odd highways go north-south and the even ones go east-west. Then she told Jenny about the best places to stand, what to wear, and gave her different points of view on the question of sign or no sign.

But really, women hitchhiking cross country, said Liz, I don’t think we’ll have any problems getting a ride.

Apple turned the water off and wiped her hands on her jeans. She got a pack of cigarettes from under one of her larger potted cacti, took one out, and leaned over the stove, lighting the cigarette on the front burner.

Shit, said Liz. Now it’s serious.

Apple shrugged.

For someone who’s not interested, you sure seem interested, said Liz.

Even if I was, I could never get the time off from work, Apple said. How long are we talking anyway?

Liz took the cigarette from Apple and took a long drag.

Jenny studied the map. It’s just over two thousand miles, said Jenny, from here to where the Gathering will be.

Figure four days to get there, just to be on the safe side, said Liz, giving the cigarette back to Apple, a week there, maybe more, four days back for you guys. Three weeks?

Jenny and Liz looked at Apple, who was leaning against a wall, smoking.

Apple was twenty-seven, which was starting to feel like it might as well be thirty. She basically liked her job at the nursing home. There was a resident called Tiny who was very large and who would talk only to her, telling her each day the same story of how he and his brother had built a log cabin with their own two hands, how it was the thing he was most proud of in the world. The other nurses had dark senses of humor like hers, and when the residents were hateful or spiteful or messy, there was whiskey in paper cones to take the edge off. But there was also the snotty doctor from Tucson who talked to her like she was a child, always telling her she was doing the wrong thing. There was also the break room, painted salmon, just a white collapsible table and a sink full of perpetually dirty coffee mugs with words like Cisplamin and Actpran printed on them and dirty spoons all with the same dark drop of coffee pooled in the head. And there was Greg, who’d told her there was no inch of her body that wasn’t like divine worship, and then asked for his VCR back.

I’ve never seen the ocean, said Apple. Could we go to the ocean first?

Definitely, said Liz. We can go anywhere you want.

Okay, said Apple, her body buzzing from the nicotine. Okay.

Liz gathered her hair into her cap and spat again onto a spot of floodlit asphalt trying to get the slightly salty carsick taste out of her mouth and shake off the feeling of failure that choosing a bad ride gave her. In Barstow, she’d chosen a new-looking black Volkswagen sedan containing two chatty newlyweds who were going to the Grand Canyon and could take her as far as Flagstaff, but after the wife realized she’d forgotten her curling iron and insisted on going back for it, they had deposited Liz at this dinky filling station in Newberry Springs without so much as a sorry.

You can get a ride from here, right?

Sure, Liz had said. Sure.

It wasn’t so much about time as it was about miles. Apple’s letter had only reached her the day before on her friend’s wrought-iron balcony in San Francisco, where she had sat in the sun grinding coffee from the good grocery store with a hand grinder. But Liz took a certain pride in each ride being worth a certain amount of miles, ideally not less than three hundred, and to end up here, just twenty miles east of where the couple had picked her up, was unacceptable.

Liz sat down on the curb in front of the entrance to the filling station’s store. July, but it got cold at night in the desert, and the sweat that had collected underneath the mass of her hair in her cap and run down the front of her short-sleeved men’s undershirt was drying now and making her shiver. She was hungry. Her friend in San Francisco had a hand coffee grinder but no food and no washing machine, and they’d spent most of the twenty-eight days Liz was there drinking coffee and eating cheese cubes at photography openings on Haight Street for people they only sort of knew. In the abstract sense, Liz had plenty of money, but it was money that she couldn’t touch unless a man in a too-tight suit in Massachusetts said she could, and even then, to get it took advance planning, took phone calls and decision-making about whether to keep Coca-Cola or sell Hammertown Leather Goods, questions about which Liz cared not at all. Often, she genuinely forgot the money was there.

I’m tired, she thought, noticing that this feeling was happening more and more, a real sluggishness in her, right down to the bone. Her first ride, from a truck stop just outside Oakland, to Barstow, had been good, four hundred and three miles, but the trucker had gotten tired and stopped for a nap. She’d offered to drive for a while – had done it before, once outside San Antonio for a driver who’d added too much gin to his juice and was afraid his company would give him the axe, and again on her way from Montreal to her grandmother’s funeral in Bridgeport (which she’d missed anyway) but this trucker just scoffed and told her, Not in this life.

On the curb in Newberry Springs, Liz watched the off ramp from I-40. Her only chance was a sloppy trucker who’d been too lazy or forgetful or bold to stop in Barstow but who had come around to realize that this filling station was the last thing before the Mojave. Or a lost car who’d meant to go on 15 to Vegas, and would stop at the filling station to turn around and head back west, in which case she could go back to Barstow and try again.

Just then, beyond the illuminated pumps, she saw the glint of the silver head of an eighteen-wheeler that was slowly inching forward in the darkness of the parking lot. The truck came to a slow stop, then the cab door opened and the cab light went on. The driver hopped down, leaving the light on, the door open, and the engine idling.

He’s green, Liz thought.

The driver strode towards where she sat on the curb, and he looked at her, the way a younger man looks at an older woman, a little desiring, a little afraid, and then went into the store. He was really young, maybe eighteen. Liz took her cap off and let her long hair tumble down, put a hand in her hair at the crown and loosened it a bit. She stood, lifted her pack, and walked over to where the truck was idling. From the way the tires were riding, she could tell the boy was on a Deadhead trip, that he wouldn’t be in a hurry.

Hey, said the boy, frowning, when he came out of the store and saw her leaning against the container.

You’re on a Deadhead trip, said Liz.

So? said the boy.

So maybe you want some company. Where you headed?

Where are you headed? asked the boy, hoisting up his bag of soda and chips against his small chest.

I asked you first, said Liz.

Albuquerque.

That’s right on my way. I’ll be no trouble at all.

I don’t know. The company says not to.

Liz told him a story, about a man on a Deadhead trip, heading back after dropping off a load of refrigerators, who’d picked up a hitchhiker and found true love.

You’re saying you’re my true love? The boy was smiling a little.

Liz knew she was pretty. She was tall and thinner than she’d ever been from her diet of coffee and cheese cubes. She tossed her hair over her shoulder. In the backlighting, the boy saw now, the edges of her hair glowing.

Man, she said to the boy, you’re just gonna have to give me a ride and find out.

The boy drove through the night and Liz talked. She talked about all the places she’d been. She told the boy about Old Faithful and Nashville and Bourbon Street. The boy said he’d never seen any of those things, but had she hitched on 70 before? The way, if you drive the stretch from Hays, Kansas, into Denver at sunset, it looks like you’re driving straight into the sun because the sky is so wide?

She had, last year, and got silent at the memory. She was an East Coast kid, and when you’re an East Coast kid, and cross, at twenty-four, into the West, it’s not a thing that will ever leave you.

*    *   *

Jenny drew back the light curtains and looked out the window onto the quiet cul de sac. Jenny was worried that when Liz arrived, things would change between her and Apple. They had been a kind of family, just Jenny and Apple in Apple’s small ranch house filled with light and cacti. Then Apple’s boyfriend Greg had dumped her. Apple had spent three days at home in her scrubs and then written to Liz, who was a drifter and a free spirit and whose name Jenny had heard many times before from her older sister’s stories of sharing an apartment with Apple and Liz while the three of them were students at the University of Iowa.

Jenny was from Staten Island, grew up Irish, watching the Statue of Liberty from the ferry. She had left a big public university in upstate New York after a semester. Her apartment had been small and cold and a professor had written, in the margin of her research paper on President Carter, this paper is exhaustive and exhausting. She’d caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror, in the bathroom at a party, while a boy kissed the side of her neck, and she’d told herself, go. Jenny’s sister told her that Apple was living in Sedona, and that despite the fact that she worked at an old folks home, Apple was “an adventure.” Jenny had an image in her mind of the Southwest. She was thinking of Frida Kahlo. She was thinking of the women who sold silver bracelets at the craft fairs in upstate New York, their arms heavy with turquoise. She wrote to Apple over Thanksgiving, and by New Year’s Eve she was packed. What she couldn’t carry, she put on the curb, except for her typewriter which she spent her last dollars to ship. As 1979 became 1980, Jenny lurched forward on a Greyhound bus. She wrote in her journal for a while, then turned her overhead light off and watched the road, watching the state welcome signs fall one after another like a deck of cards.

Jenny and Apple had planted a garden in the back of Apple’s house; tomatoes, corn, squash that never came up, lettuce. They had watched movies on Apple’s VCR, a gift from Greg, and documentaries about self-sufficient living and interviews with couples who had gone back to the land. They had read Mother Earth News together. Jenny had gotten a job at an organic grocery store and brought home the slightly bruised fruits and day-old pastries. They had dabbled in canning and pickling, trying to apply the skills they’d learned from a preservation class at the local community center, and brought food to an old lady at the back of their cul de sac in exchange for bread making lessons.

At night, in front of a fire, one would read out loud and the other would knit and then they would switch. Jenny would read Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry to Apple, and Apple tried to picture all those different kinds of bird — a Canadian goose, a blue heron — but couldn’t get the sandpipers of the Iowa prairies from childhood bird watching trips out of her mind. From the suburbs of Iowa City, Apple had moved into the city proper where she was supposedly studying Anthropology, but was actually following flyers to meetings of the Women’s Liberation Front and a group of activists coordinating actions for the United Farm Workers. She’d taken the long way through school, eventually dropping out and supporting herself by cutting hair, then finally re-enrolling, and being assigned Liz and Jenny’s sister as suitemates. She’d been a junkie the whole time she was in Iowa City. Heroin took Apple somewhere where she could go and shut the door against all the things that could not, would not, change. Liz had sometimes gotten high with her, but Liz could brush her knees off and go for a run or go to class and leave the drugs behind. Apple could not do a thing halfway, and long after Liz and Jenny’s sister had moved on to start their lives, Apple stayed behind in Iowa City, to attend consciousness raising groups and shoot heroin. A year ago her grandmother had died and when, at the funeral, the lawyer read off that the old woman had left her house in Sedona to Apple, she cried, not from the loss of her grandmother, but out of gratitude. Sedona, she thought. Sedona.

Apple liked the idea of playing host to her friend’s kid sister, liked watching Jenny paw through her tapes, liked stirring tomato sauce as Jenny played and rewound the same Janis Joplin song again and again or came in raving about how she’d discovered the Tex-Mex restaurant in the center of town where Apple been buying breakfast burritos for years on her way to work. Apple felt at once, beyond Jenny, and behind her, constantly playing catch up with the breakneck speed at which the wheels in Jenny’s brain seemed to crank. Apple told Jenny that her days of being an adventure were behind her, but sometimes on the evenings before she had to work the night shift at the nursing home, she would call up a man who would come over in a green van and trade her amphetamines for cuttings of her cacti.

Maile Meloy chose her as the winner of Cutbank’s 2013 Montana Prize for Fiction, and Ander Monson named her runner-up winner of Gulf Coast’s 2012 Donald Barthelme Award for Short Prose.

She is also the author of the chapbook “Purple Heart Highway” (Finishing Line Press) which was nominated for a Library of Virginia award.

She lives in Charlottesville where she is a Henry Hoyns/Poe Faulkner fellow working on a collection of stories tied to southern West Virginia.

Visit her online at www.emma-eisenberg.com.

A few years ago, my cousin Francis was on trial for a sex-murder.  They went after the wrong guy, and he knew it and told the jury so, said, “It wasn’t me,” and they let him go.

The newspaper, which had run the story IS LOCAL BOY A PSYCHOTIC PERV? with the line underneath By all accounts, yes, had to run JURY OF PEERS DOESN’T THINK LOCAL BOY DID IT. But we still do. Next to it, they had a little boxed-in feature with bullet-point instructions: “Women! Be Prepared: How to rape-proof yourselves.” Things like, “Change your locks every six months—you never know who has your key. Your gardener? Your maid? Your plumber? Your violent ex-husband? ‘That’ guy?” Even CNN.com was excited for a minute. “Rape and murder shocks close-knit community.” Aunt Cathy, who is Francis’ mom, saw the CNN article and called from Colorado where she is living with her boyfriend. She left a message on Grandma’s answering machine: “What’s going on, Mom? Is he turning into his father?” I don’t know if Grandma called her back or what she would have said.

The articles in the local paper were written by the newspaper owner’s son, Tony Morales, who has hated Francis since high school. Grandma says there’s something wrong with journalism today, but I think it’s also the town that has the problem. Like last week, ALLEGED BUSSTOP FLASHER ACTUALLY WEARING WOMAN’S ONE-PIECE SWIMSUIT. Police still won’t arrest him.

Then Jack. Jack and Francis, best friends since whatever grade it was in elementary school, and they get in a big fight after the trial, and Jack goes to the hospital and Francis gets arrested, sentenced and let out early when a judge rules that over-crowded prisons are a violation of Constitutional rights. BLEEDING HEART SETS MURDERERS AMONG US.

Francis is not allowed more than five miles away from Grandma’s house. I don’t know how long it’s supposed to last, but it better end soon. He gets up, watches television, maybe helps around the house, watches more television, doesn’t start in on the beer until the afternoon because Grandma doesn’t like people who start drinking in the morning, more television, runs errands with Grandma if they’re within the five-mile radius, and is usually drinking and watching television by the time I get home from work, usually a James Bond movie on that channel that is never not showing a James Bond movie, and it’s usually one of the Roger Moore ones, which he doesn’t even like.

I’m not done walking in through the door and Francis comes up. He’s got a bottle in his hand. He is starting to get a beer gut. When we were in high school, Cousin Billy lived with Grandma for a few years before he finally joined the Army, and he left with a beer gut, too. That’s what Grandma’s house does to you, it turns you into Cousin Billy. Francis is even wearing one of Billy’s shirts. DREAM THEATER. How does a kid who grew up wearing T-shirts that say Blatz and Filth end up there?  When I say, “That isn’t your shirt, is it?” Francis looks down at it and says, “Well, it fits me.”

I start moving towards the dining room, and Francis says, “I went to Vons today with Grandma and there was some old lady and do you know what the old lady did?”

I push past him and put my bag down on the table and say, “What?”

“She hit Grandma.  Hit her!”

I can hear Grandma in the kitchen. “What’s for dinner?”

Francis says, “This is serious.” He drinks some of the beer. It’s Bass and I say, “What’s the big occasion?” and point at the bottle. He usually gets whatever is cheap. He’d get 40s but Grandma doesn’t like people who drink 40s.  You can take that to mean bums, by which she means black people, mostly.

He looks at it. “When I asked Grandma for money to buy some beer, she only had a twenty in her wallet. So the big occasion is that I don’t have to drink piss-water today, but I think the big issue here,” and he takes a deep breath, “is that you aren’t taking me seriously. Grandma got attacked.”

“Old people don’t hit each other.”

“We went to Vons and there was some old lady and they had to play chicken in the doorway because they both had walkers. And you know how the door only opens halfway, the sliding one, plus the rack of flyers is in the way, with the coupons? And they both couldn’t go through, so Grandma let the old bitch pass first and says, ‘You got the same problem I do, haha,’ and the other old lady goes, ‘I don’t get any problems, ‘sides you gettin’ in my way,’ and then she hits Grandma with her walker.”  He glares at me like I had been there, too, and hadn’t done anything about it.

I ask if Grandma is okay and he says, “She was crying when we got back. She calmed down, but I sure didn’t know what to do with her for awhile. I think she came face-to-face with her mortality.”

“Fran,” I say. “Shut up.”

Grandma is dumping cooked pasta into a colander in the sink. She’s holding the pot with two hands and she looks like she’s going to fall in after it. I say to her, “I heard you got in a street fight.”

She clunks the pot down and says, “I did no such thing.” She tells me her version of the story. It’s more or less the same as Francis’, except the other old woman says, “I do not have any problems except that you were in my way,” and then, the way she describes it, kind of bats at Grandma’s walker with her walker because she can’t lift it high enough to actually hit Grandma proper.

“Francis says you were crying.”

She tells me that it’s not my business, but yes, she was upset and it was embarrassing, and we leave it at that.

She tells me that she spoke to Officer Grady, and he’s going to try to get Francie into the sheriff’s work program. She says that when it happens not to tell Francie that it was her idea because she doesn’t want Francie to think she’s trying to get rid of him, but he’s starting to drive her crazy, and she thinks he’s going crazy himself.

“He’s always been crazy,” I say.

“Don’t talk about your family like that.” She gets out a glass baking dish. “That reminds me.  Your Aunt Carol called.” Aunt Carol is Billy’s mom. “She’s going to get that lap-band thing.” A month ago, somebody bought out all the signs along the highway, except for the faded Indian Joe’s one that has been saying for years about how they sell healing crystals and beef jerky, and put up ads that say DIETS FAIL! LAPBAND WORKS!  “If she asks you for money, don’t give it to her.”

“Okay.”

“It’s her health, not yours. So if she asks you. . .”

“I’ll say no,” I say. Even though it means she’ll take the money from Billy instead. “What’re you making?”

“Pasta bake. I have my reading club tonight. You and Francis can have the tuna bake from last week. It’s in the red container.”

I start washing the dishes in the sink. The dish liquid is supposed to smell like lemons. It smells like Lemonheads. Grandma’s kitchen is lemon-themed. Lemon magnets, lemon napkin holder, lemon ceramic jars for the flour and the sugar and the oatmeal, lemon print curtains for the window over the sink. Past the curtains, the sun is finishing up going down and I can see the top of the neighbors’ heads over the bushes. One of the teenage daughters is arguing in the driveway with her mother, and their dumb little dog is barking.

Grandma is back to talking about Francis. “It’s not that I want him to pick up trash by the freeway,” she is saying. “Nobody wants that. But he won’t even leave the house. He just sits there and gets in the way. It’s just like when Billy was here. Except when he isn’t watching TV, Francie keeps trying to help. Billy never did that. That at least seemed normal. He needs a hobby. And not just any hobby. Do you know he asked me what book I was reading for the book club? Can you imagine bringing him with me? A boy his age has no reason to be interested in our books or want to sit around with us talking about them.” This last part sounds like a dodge to me. I’ve never figured out what books they read for their club and I’ve never actually seen Grandma sit down and read a book; I guess Francis couldn’t get the information out, either.

Billy didn’t do anything because he was lazy, which is why we were all surprised he got his ass off the couch, much less out the door and then drove it all the way over to the next town’s recruiting center to enlist. Francis stopped going outside because people kept recognizing him from the paper — Tony Morales wins one again — and phoning in tips that the Kitty Garrison rapist/killer had escaped from jail. Forgetting that they never found the real Kitty Garrison rapist/killer, that they never really proved that Kitty was even raped and that, in the end, Francis was only on trial for murder.

There was one guy, though, who asked for Francis’ autograph and even paid $10 for it when Francis told the guy that he charged for them.  That guy probably sits at home all day long listening to GG Allin while bidding on John Wayne Gacy paintings on eBay. I don’t see why Francis had to give him an autograph and encourage that sort of behavior, and I hope he doesn’t live near us. I hope someone like that doesn’t live near anybody.

Part Two

When I come out of the kitchen, Francis steers me into the living room. The television is on but it’s not a James Bond movie, it’s one of the MTV stations that only plays hip-hop and R&B. Francis turns the volume up and motions for me to sit down on the couch next to him.

“So here’s how it’s gonna go down.”

I interrupt him, tell him what Grandma told me, that the other old lady didn’t hit Grandma, she hit Grandma’s walker, and he says, “It doesn’t matter. We’re going to do something about it.” When I don’t ask him what he has in mind, he says anyway, “We’re gonna rob the other old lady’s house.”

I say, “Give me a sec.” I go into the kitchen, which is now empty. I take down the gin and cut a lime and pour some tonic. The tonic is flat, but that’s okay, the point is I’m not drinking the gin by itself and I won’t get malaria. I go back out and I say to Francis, “You don’t even know she is.”

“Yeah, I do. I was at the store with Grandma, and then I followed the old lady home.”

I say, “Did you go past the five-mile thing?”

“No, she lives about two blocks away.”

There comes a knock on the door. Francis squirms a little and puts his beer down on the coffee table and I put my drink down and get up to answer the door. Figure I know who it is, if Francis has been wandering around following people, and sure enough, it’s Officer Grady, who says over my shoulder, “I just got a call from Mrs. T, Francis. Old lady who lives a coupla blocks down. I think you know her; she used to be in your grandmother’s reading group.” He waits but Francis doesn’t confirm or deny this. “She says she saw you peeking in her windows.  I quote: ‘Just like he probably did to that poor Kitty Garrison girl.’”

“Oh begorrah,” Francie says, rudely, I think, because Grady isn’t actually Irish, like from Ireland.

“I just came from her house, and I know there’s not a thing in there that anybody would want to be looking at the way she’s talking about, so could we please let the elderly of our community enjoy their autumnal years? In peace? Francis?”

“She doesn’t even know who I am.”

“Boy, everyone knows who you are.”

The television gets louder. It’s a part of a song about what presidents are on what denomination. Hamilton is on the ten.

“You promise not to go back?” Officer Grady says, louder than that.

The television says, “These are the dead presidents,” and then Francis says, “Yeah!” to Grady, and Grady says, “Hamilton was never president,” to me, but still has to say it pretty loudly over the music, and everything is just a little too much, too noisy, so I’m glad that it gets left at that and Officer Grady leaves to go fuck the mayor’s wife at the Rio Grande Motel.

“I hate cops,” Francis says. “They’re pigs.”

“Yep,” I say.

“And I want to point out that Hamilton is not a dead president because he was born on some resort island.  But before it was a resort.  So he couldn’t become president.”

“I can’t remember, Francis.”  I’m too busy picturing Francis hiding behind a telephone pole like a Looney Toons character, and this Mrs. T seeing him and calling 911, and it makes me suddenly very tired.

“Well, girls aren’t supposed to be very good at history, anyway.  How was work, by the way?”  I know not to answer the question, because if I start bitching about it he’ll stop listening.  But I have plenty to bitch about.  I work at a place on the highway under one of the DIETS FAIL! billboards called the Den of Venial Sins because the owner thought that was a clever one. He also thought it was a good one to hire two cocktail waitresses for each shift, even though the place is barely big enough to justify even one, and the customers let us know in the tips and the way they just get up and go order from the bar. One of my co-workers just got CUM DUMPSTER tattooed on the inside of her lip last weekend. So what else is there to say but, “It was fab.”

“Fab,” he says. “Cool. So tonight, I was thinking, we’d go to this Mrs. T’s house, whoever she is, and rearrange all the furniture so when she gets up in the middle of the night to change her adult diapers, she trips. Or maybe put her dentures in her mouth and beat her silly, until her teeth fall out. Or break her walker. Or break her knees.”

“Jesus, Francie. You can’t go around beating old ladies.”

“Why not?’

“Because they’re old ladies.”

“So?”

“Because it’s a fucking psycho thing to do, is why. I mean, how would you feel if someone beat Grandma?”

“Someone did beat Grandma.  That old lady.”

Part Three

I go to see Jack later that evening. He works nights at the diner during the week. I ask for a cup of coffee and Jack comes out from the kitchen, pours two cups, and leans his arms on the counter. “How’s tricks?” he asks.

“Rita got ‘cum dumpster’ tattooed on the inside of her lip.”

“Is that the Oriental one?”

“Yeah, Rita Song. From high school.”

“That’s classy.”

“Yeah.”

“You should get a new job. You could work here.”

“You guys aren’t hiring.”

“Yeah, I guess not,” he says.

I don’t say anything. He says, “How’s Francis?”

“I think he’s going crazy.” I pour a container of Irish Cream creamer into the coffee, like that will help it.

Jack shifts his weight and looks the other way down the counter, like he’s making sure the ketchup bottles are all still there. What he wants to hear is that Francis is doing fine, but Francis is not doing fine. Jack says, “He’s always been crazy.”

“It’s this place, this town.”

Jack shakes his head. “It was the trial.”

“It was before that. This place has been fucking him over from the start and now he wants to go and beat old ladies.”

“Oh, okay.” Jack finally relaxes. “That’s not crazy. That’s just Francis.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Sure it is,” Jack says.  “He always liked to hit back.”

Jack squeezes my arm as I leave.  From outside, I watch him through the window.  He goes back into the kitchen and I walk home.

*   *   *

Mrs. T’s lawn is surrounded by thick, waist-high bushes except for an opening for the paved path from the sidewalk to the door. By her front door is one of those wooden lawn ornaments that I have never really figured out because as far as I can tell, it is just somebody’s big rear end. I think the suggestion is that it is the bent over, bloomers-wearing rear end of someone who is gardening. It’s a pretty friendly decoration for someone who goes at other old people with her walker. We’re waiting for Mrs. T to go to bed. We can see into her kitchen to the right of the front door and the living room on the left. She has a huge television and for the last two hours she’s been up watching murder shows starring lady detectives, the same ones Grandma watches, and it’s already 3 a.m. I always thought old people went to bed early.

I’ve been staring into her kitchen because there’s someone at the table by the window who never moves. When I stare long enough I feel like maybe I can see the glint of an eye, gazing back at me, but I look away and then back again and all it is is a shape. Finally, Mrs. T walks in and turns on the lights, gets something out of the refrigerator, never looking at the person, and I realize it’s one of those blow-up people you use to get in the carpool lane.

Francis has been real quiet for some time, and I look over at him and see he’s asleep. I shake him awake. He says, “Whoa,” and is quiet for a bit and then says, “I just had the weirdest dream. We had to fight off the government, but it was okay, because our Japanese neighbors were well-armed, and they helped us. And it wasn’t our government, like what we have now. It was something else.”

“We don’t have Japanese neighbors.”

“Yeah, we’re fucked.”

“Yeah, I don’t think the Mormons or the Nguyens like us enough to help.”

“The Nyugens might do.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. The Vietnamese were on the Japs’ side during the war.”

“The Japs?” I say. “Since when did you call them ‘Japs’?”

“Since their sneaky sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.”

“You mean the one that happened before you were born?”

“Yeah, so?”

“I don’t know what we’re talking about, Francis.”

He’s starting to fidget, but it doesn’t seem the right moment to say, “Let’s do this tomorrow.” Francis says, “These bushes smell funny,” and I say, “When I pass by here on the way to work, there’s always some big white dog working on a hole.”

Francis says, “He’s probably burying something important.”

“Or dead,” I say.

Francis shakes his head. “Dogs don’t bury their dead.” I can’t tell if he’s trying to be funny or serious. Across the street, the sprinklers go on, swishing and ticking. I think that it would be just perfect if Mrs. T’s went on and got us all wet. The idea makes me feel chilly, and I drink some of the soda and gin I brought in an Arrowhead bottle. Francis says, “Gimme some,” and I say, “Let’s do this. We should do it now or I’m going home.”

We go around the back. I expect someone with a blow-up doll in the window would have a deadbolt or a chain, but she doesn’t and Francis gets the lock sprung easy. We go in and close the door behind us. Francis says in the dark, “So what’s the plan?” I walk into something that is cold and smooth, a washing machine, and when I step away I bang my shin against a sharp edge. “Fuck!” Francis hushes me up and I hiss, “You said the plan was vengeance.”

“Yeah, but how? Vengeance how?”

Maybe he’s lost his nerve or maybe he’s found his common sense. Either way, we’re standing in Mrs. T’s laundry room or pantry or whatever it is, waiting to get caught.  I reach down to rub my shin. “It’s your fault we’re here, so figure it out.”

He doesn’t get a chance. The door opens and I look up and it’s the silhouette of Mrs. T, black and featureless against a big rectangle of bright buttery light. She’s got her walker in front of her and she stares right at us, right at me. I feel like I’m back in high school and they’ve found us smoking in the bathroom, and because we flushed the cigarettes down the toilet right before they came, I’m the only one who gets in trouble because I was in the boys’ room and that’s all they can write any of us up on, so somehow it’s all my fault. Like now, like I’m the one who told Francis we should break into a house to harass a woman I’ve never even seen before and whatever might happen next will also be all because of me.

“You!” she shrieks, and she hurls a can of food, and in that small space, with our eyes stinging while they adjust to the light, nobody has the time or space or the sense to move. It goes over my head and hits Francis between the eyes and he topples over with an angry shout. As he goes down, his head hits the edge of the plastic crate that I hit my shin on, and the crate tips over and the big jars inside spill out. I stare at him, his head in the overturned crate. I kneel down, shake him, look around.  Inside the scattered jars are round, dark red fleshy things that look like hearts.

I hear the old woman take a deep breath and start yelling, “You perverts! You sick, sick people! Watching me while I do my business! Getting dressed! Getting undressed! While I take my showers!  Trying to steal my underwear! I already called the police, you sick, sick people!” She started hitting me with her walker some time back, the lightweight metal springing off my neck and shoulders, then she gets tired and just pokes at me with it. I finally manage to get my voice above hers. “You killed him.”

Part Four

I’m half right. Francis says, “My head hurts, Jesus,” right as Officer Grady is knocking on the front door, and he pulls the both of us out into the front yard. He smells like cigarettes and Febreeze, like the Rio Grande Motel. He tells me to stay right there and he cuffs Francis and puts him in the back of the squad car. Then he comes back to me and says, “What the fuck is this?”

I shake my head.

“Is this yours?” he asks, holding up the Arrowhead bottle. “What are you, fifteen years old?”

“I recycle,” I say. “Reuse. Reduce.”

Mrs. T points a finger at me, at the police car. “They wanted to take my underwear.” She adds in a hiss, “And use it to arouse themselves. Those sick, sick people!”

Officer Grady is giving her a disbelieving look.  “You can’t tell me what you were doing in Mrs. Tremain’s laundry room?” he asks me. “Because if you don’t give me something, they’ll listen to her.”

I shake my head again. I’m thinking, dizzily, never talk to a cop. I say, “Getting underwear.”  He says, “Okay, get in, we’re going down to the station. I’m calling your grandmother.”

“We were going to sell it on eBay to perverts. You can use that against me.”

Grady opens the back door and says, “So get in,” and I start to get in, but then Grady says, “Wait,” in a sharp voice and hands me the Arrowhead bottle and pulls me back. I don’t think he means to but he does it by the hood of my sweater. I try to look in past him, but all I see is Francis, leaning his head against the window, which is exactly what I want to do, just push the pounding in my forehead against some cold, smooth glass, and Mrs. T starts yelling, “What?  Now you’re not arresting her?” and Grady is calling something in and I think, “Here’s my chance.” I drink the rest of the gin to get rid of the evidence.

*   *   *

We are at the hospital. Officer Grady watches the nurse who comes out and tells us, “Yeah. That’s it.”

“Oh Jesus,” Grandma says next to me. “Oh Jesus. Oh Joseph. Oh Mary. What will I tell his mother?”

“She killed him,” I say. “Tell her she killed him.”

The nurse says, “Actually, it wasn’t only getting hit in the front of the head; it was when he fell — that’s what you said, right? He fell? I’ve never heard of it happening so fast, though.”

“What happening so fast?” I ask. “Her killing him? Murdering someone? Murdering someone can happen fast. That’s what just happened.”

“Epidural hematoma,” the nurse says. She looks at me. “Have you heard of that?”

It doesn’t mean anything to me. Or rather, I don’t care what it is because the only important part of the definition is that it is the thing that killed Francis. So I say again, “She killed him,” loudly, and the nurse gives me a hard stare and says, “It’s what happens when you hit your head too hard in the right place. Lights out.”

I finally start to feel sick, because it isn’t just lights out; nobody can flip a switch and get that light bulb glowing again. He’s finished, but even that implies that, like a movie, you can watch it again, or like a book you can open it up again, and you can’t do any of those with Francis. I try to think how to explain this to the nurse, but she’s already walking away.

Mrs. T points at me and says to Grady, “Well, then, arrest her now. The boy has been punished. The rest is up to you. They’re sick! They are sick, sick people!”  The wrinkles on Mrs. T’s face are pinched up in little brown ridges, and her mouth is tight and sucked in. She has crusty dried stuff around her nostrils and eyes. I feel like I’ve never been this up-close to someone before, and I can’t stop staring.

Grandma hisses at her, “You be quiet, Ida Tremain.”

Mrs. T’s hands claw at the handle of her walker.

Part Five

We bury Francis in a hurry but not fast enough to beat the headlines. FRANCIS X. CASEY KILLED BY OLD LADY HERO.  Francis Casey really was a perv underneath it, and a long interview with Mrs. T about underwear-sniffers.

I see Tony Morales the day after the funeral. He’s at Venial Sins, and he still has the scar across his nose when Francis beat the shit out of him in high school. I say, “Good job, Tony. You one-upped a dead man.”  Then I walk right out of there and go to Jack’s place because I wouldn’t know what to do if Tony had replied. I want to pass out on Jack’s couch for a week if not a month, and I hope his dad isn’t there. His dad wanders through town every few months and sleeps on Jack’s couch and takes all of Jack’s money and when anybody asks him what he’s been up to, he screams something manic like “Secret work for Standard Oil!” and then laughs and says, “I’m just kidding.”  He ends most sentences with “I’m just kidding” while everybody feels uncomfortable since it’s not a good enough qualifying statement for the rest of the shit he’s saying.

But it’s not Jack’s dad I have to worry about, and later I have to remind myself that anyone with a dad like that is bound to be a fucking nut all on their own, somewhere deep inside. Jack opens the door. He’s not wearing a shirt, and I know he has no AC so it doesn’t suggest anything to me until I look past him and behind him in the living room in the shadows is Rita, spread out on the couch in her underwear. She gives me a nasty look and says, “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”  I say to her, “Yeah, I guess I am,” and then to Jack, “High-five, man.” He’s been wanting to fuck her since the tenth grade, back when she was too good for him, before she realized she wasn’t getting out of here just like the rest of us. I turn and walk down the steps.

“Hey, hey,” Jack calls. I hear the door shut and we’re out on the lawn, which is mostly loose dirt. “I had to look, you know?” I can’t think of anything to say. No, is what I should say. I don’t know, you know? I already saw it, when Rita came in last Monday and peeled her lip down and said, “Look what I got!”

Jack shoves his hands into his pockets, rocks back on his heels. “How was the funeral?”

“You should have come. You were his best friend.”

Jack frowns and his forehead wrinkles and he says, “He hasn’t spoken to me since Kitty.”

“No,” I say. “You haven’t spoken to him since that stupid fight.”

“We didn’t talk, then, either. He came over that night. I thought I’d get to tell him I was sorry. He just came at me. He never said a word.”

“What did you say?” I ask. “That night, when he came? Did you tell him what happened? Did you tell him what you were doing with her?” I still can’t say her name to him, it feels dangerous, like I’d finally be accusing him, even though he says her name, and says it easily.

Jack shakes his head and almost shrugs.

I say, “He would have fucking killed a fucking fatted calf for you.”

Jack opens his mouth to say something but I don’t even want to look at him anymore. Rita’s on the couch, Francis is dead, Jack’s opening his mouth like there’s a yawn he’s trying to keep down. I say, “He took one for you, I don’t care what was an accident and what wasn’t, or how rough she liked it, or wanted it.  That trial ruined him, and you can’t even come to his funeral? Even after you went to her funeral?” and Jack says to me, “Don’t do that. Don’t say that. I owe him. I know that. I tried to tell him that, that night, when we fought, and he didn’t let me.”

I say, “All you had to do was come by,” but I don’t know where I’m going with that, who I’m saying he should have come by for, and I say, “Never mind,” and I go back to work, where nobody missed me.

*   *   *

After Kitty died, I never lied about anything. It wasn’t because I swore I wouldn’t. It was because they never asked the right questions. Francis and Kitty had been on the rocks for weeks, mostly because Kitty was fucking Jack, and Francis was still trying to figure out what was going on behind his back in a way that wouldn’t mean losing his best friend. Not enough people, and nobody who was going to say anything, knew about Jack and Kitty for a fact, so they never matched up any DNA evidence that could have been in her or on her when she died. And it was her own belt around her neck, and we’d all just been at a party, a crowded and hot and horrible house party, so there was way too much forensics going on on that belt. Even though Francis found Jack afterwards and banged him up pretty badly, Jack never came around after that not because he was scared or mad about the fight, but because — or at least I like to think he felt this way — even a righteous beating didn’t cover the debt that Jack owed Francis for never saying a thing, never giving in during the trial, for letting it drag on while they dragged him through the mud.

But if I had said something, if I had said that I saw Jack and Kitty leaving the party together, and that I knew they’d been canoodling behind everyone’s backs for the past few weeks, maybe nobody would have ever forgiven me, but Francis would never have been on trial and nobody else would be dead.

*   *   *

A week or so later, the old lady’s body and her walker are found tangled in a cluster of weeds in the high-walled, white-concrete wash by the freeway. After they’ve carted the body away and taken a closer look, the headline reads MYSTERY HIT & RUN DRIVER DUMPS OLD LADY HERO’S BODY IN WASH. Town asks, what’s next?

I don’t have a car and I’m pretty sure they’d have to find the car that did it before they can arrest anyone, but I’m still a little worried. I didn’t touch that old lady, but when they hit a dead end and start groping around, in the same way Francis was to Kitty, I’m the point B to the old lady-death’s point A, we’re the two and two that make four, because who else would they think of, who else could have loved Francis enough, or at least owed Francis enough, to take it out on the old lady.

We bury Francis in a hurry but not fast enough to beat the headlines. FRANCIS X. CASEY KILLED BY OLD LADY HERO.  Francis Casey really was a perv underneath it, and a long interview with Mrs. T about underwear-sniffers.

I see Tony Morales the day after the funeral. He’s at Venial Sins, and he still has the scar across his nose when Francis beat the shit out of him in high school. I say, “Good job, Tony. You one-upped a dead man.”  Then I walk right out of there and go to Jack’s place because I wouldn’t know what to do if Tony had replied. I want to pass out on Jack’s couch for a week if not a month, and I hope his dad isn’t there. His dad wanders through town every few months and sleeps on Jack’s couch and takes all of Jack’s money and when anybody asks him what he’s been up to, he screams something manic like “Secret work for Standard Oil!” and then laughs and says, “I’m just kidding.”  He ends most sentences with “I’m just kidding” while everybody feels uncomfortable since it’s not a good enough qualifying statement for the rest of the shit he’s saying.

But it’s not Jack’s dad I have to worry about, and later I have to remind myself that anyone with a dad like that is bound to be a fucking nut all on their own, somewhere deep inside. Jack opens the door. He’s not wearing a shirt, and I know he has no AC so it doesn’t suggest anything to me until I look past him and behind him in the living room in the shadows is Rita, spread out on the couch in her underwear. She gives me a nasty look and says, “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”  I say to her, “Yeah, I guess I am,” and then to Jack, “High-five, man.” He’s been wanting to fuck her since the tenth grade, back when she was too good for him, before she realized she wasn’t getting out of here just like the rest of us. I turn and walk down the steps.

“Hey, hey,” Jack calls. I hear the door shut and we’re out on the lawn, which is mostly loose dirt. “I had to look, you know?” I can’t think of anything to say. No, is what I should say. I don’t know, you know? I already saw it, when Rita came in last Monday and peeled her lip down and said, “Look what I got!”

Jack shoves his hands into his pockets, rocks back on his heels. “How was the funeral?”

“You should have come. You were his best friend.”

Jack frowns and his forehead wrinkles and he says, “He hasn’t spoken to me since Kitty.”

“No,” I say. “You haven’t spoken to him since that stupid fight.”

“We didn’t talk, then, either. He came over that night. I thought I’d get to tell him I was sorry. He just came at me. He never said a word.”

“What did you say?” I ask. “That night, when he came? Did you tell him what happened? Did you tell him what you were doing with her?” I still can’t say her name to him, it feels dangerous, like I’d finally be accusing him, even though he says her name, and says it easily.

Jack shakes his head and almost shrugs.

I say, “He would have fucking killed a fucking fatted calf for you.”

Jack opens his mouth to say something but I don’t even want to look at him anymore. Rita’s on the couch, Francis is dead, Jack’s opening his mouth like there’s a yawn he’s trying to keep down. I say, “He took one for you, I don’t care what was an accident and what wasn’t, or how rough she liked it, or wanted it.  That trial ruined him, and you can’t even come to his funeral? Even after you went to her funeral?” and Jack says to me, “Don’t do that. Don’t say that. I owe him. I know that. I tried to tell him that, that night, when we fought, and he didn’t let me.”

I say, “All you had to do was come by,” but I don’t know where I’m going with that, who I’m saying he should have come by for, and I say, “Never mind,” and I go back to work, where nobody missed me.

*   *   *

After Kitty died, I never lied about anything. It wasn’t because I swore I wouldn’t. It was because they never asked the right questions. Francis and Kitty had been on the rocks for weeks, mostly because Kitty was fucking Jack, and Francis was still trying to figure out what was going on behind his back in a way that wouldn’t mean losing his best friend. Not enough people, and nobody who was going to say anything, knew about Jack and Kitty for a fact, so they never matched up any DNA evidence that could have been in her or on her when she died. And it was her own belt around her neck, and we’d all just been at a party, a crowded and hot and horrible house party, so there was way too much forensics going on on that belt. Even though Francis found Jack afterwards and banged him up pretty badly, Jack never came around after that not because he was scared or mad about the fight, but because — or at least I like to think he felt this way — even a righteous beating didn’t cover the debt that Jack owed Francis for never saying a thing, never giving in during the trial, for letting it drag on while they dragged him through the mud.

But if I had said something, if I had said that I saw Jack and Kitty leaving the party together, and that I knew they’d been canoodling behind everyone’s backs for the past few weeks, maybe nobody would have ever forgiven me, but Francis would never have been on trial and nobody else would be dead.

*   *   *

A week or so later, the old lady’s body and her walker are found tangled in a cluster of weeds in the high-walled, white-concrete wash by the freeway. After they’ve carted the body away and taken a closer look, the headline reads MYSTERY HIT & RUN DRIVER DUMPS OLD LADY HERO’S BODY IN WASH. Town asks, what’s next?

I don’t have a car and I’m pretty sure they’d have to find the car that did it before they can arrest anyone, but I’m still a little worried. I didn’t touch that old lady, but when they hit a dead end and start groping around, in the same way Francis was to Kitty, I’m the point B to the old lady-death’s point A, we’re the two and two that make four, because who else would they think of, who else could have loved Francis enough, or at least owed Francis enough, to take it out on the old lady.

I’m half right. Francis says, “My head hurts, Jesus,” right as Officer Grady is knocking on the front door, and he pulls the both of us out into the front yard. He smells like cigarettes and Febreeze, like the Rio Grande Motel. He tells me to stay right there and he cuffs Francis and puts him in the back of the squad car. Then he comes back to me and says, “What the fuck is this?”

I shake my head.

“Is this yours?” he asks, holding up the Arrowhead bottle. “What are you, fifteen years old?”

“I recycle,” I say. “Reuse. Reduce.”

Mrs. T points a finger at me, at the police car. “They wanted to take my underwear.” She adds in a hiss, “And use it to arouse themselves. Those sick, sick people!”

Officer Grady is giving her a disbelieving look.  “You can’t tell me what you were doing in Mrs. Tremain’s laundry room?” he asks me. “Because if you don’t give me something, they’ll listen to her.”

I shake my head again. I’m thinking, dizzily, never talk to a cop. I say, “Getting underwear.”  He says, “Okay, get in, we’re going down to the station. I’m calling your grandmother.”

“We were going to sell it on eBay to perverts. You can use that against me.”

Grady opens the back door and says, “So get in,” and I start to get in, but then Grady says, “Wait,” in a sharp voice and hands me the Arrowhead bottle and pulls me back. I don’t think he means to but he does it by the hood of my sweater. I try to look in past him, but all I see is Francis, leaning his head against the window, which is exactly what I want to do, just push the pounding in my forehead against some cold, smooth glass, and Mrs. T starts yelling, “What?  Now you’re not arresting her?” and Grady is calling something in and I think, “Here’s my chance.” I drink the rest of the gin to get rid of the evidence.

*   *   *

We are at the hospital. Officer Grady watches the nurse who comes out and tells us, “Yeah. That’s it.”

“Oh Jesus,” Grandma says next to me. “Oh Jesus. Oh Joseph. Oh Mary. What will I tell his mother?”

“She killed him,” I say. “Tell her she killed him.”

The nurse says, “Actually, it wasn’t only getting hit in the front of the head; it was when he fell — that’s what you said, right? He fell? I’ve never heard of it happening so fast, though.”

“What happening so fast?” I ask. “Her killing him? Murdering someone? Murdering someone can happen fast. That’s what just happened.”

“Epidural hematoma,” the nurse says. She looks at me. “Have you heard of that?”

It doesn’t mean anything to me. Or rather, I don’t care what it is because the only important part of the definition is that it is the thing that killed Francis. So I say again, “She killed him,” loudly, and the nurse gives me a hard stare and says, “It’s what happens when you hit your head too hard in the right place. Lights out.”

I finally start to feel sick, because it isn’t just lights out; nobody can flip a switch and get that light bulb glowing again. He’s finished, but even that implies that, like a movie, you can watch it again, or like a book you can open it up again, and you can’t do any of those with Francis. I try to think how to explain this to the nurse, but she’s already walking away.

Mrs. T points at me and says to Grady, “Well, then, arrest her now. The boy has been punished. The rest is up to you. They’re sick! They are sick, sick people!”  The wrinkles on Mrs. T’s face are pinched up in little brown ridges, and her mouth is tight and sucked in. She has crusty dried stuff around her nostrils and eyes. I feel like I’ve never been this up-close to someone before, and I can’t stop staring.

Grandma hisses at her, “You be quiet, Ida Tremain.”

Mrs. T’s hands claw at the handle of her walker.

I go to see Jack later that evening. He works nights at the diner during the week. I ask for a cup of coffee and Jack comes out from the kitchen, pours two cups, and leans his arms on the counter. “How’s tricks?” he asks.

“Rita got ‘cum dumpster’ tattooed on the inside of her lip.”

“Is that the Oriental one?”

“Yeah, Rita Song. From high school.”

“That’s classy.”

“Yeah.”

“You should get a new job. You could work here.”

“You guys aren’t hiring.”

“Yeah, I guess not,” he says.

I don’t say anything. He says, “How’s Francis?”

“I think he’s going crazy.” I pour a container of Irish Cream creamer into the coffee, like that will help it.

Jack shifts his weight and looks the other way down the counter, like he’s making sure the ketchup bottles are all still there. What he wants to hear is that Francis is doing fine, but Francis is not doing fine. Jack says, “He’s always been crazy.”

“It’s this place, this town.”

Jack shakes his head. “It was the trial.”

“It was before that. This place has been fucking him over from the start and now he wants to go and beat old ladies.”

“Oh, okay.” Jack finally relaxes. “That’s not crazy. That’s just Francis.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Sure it is,” Jack says.  “He always liked to hit back.”

Jack squeezes my arm as I leave.  From outside, I watch him through the window.  He goes back into the kitchen and I walk home.

*   *   *

Mrs. T’s lawn is surrounded by thick, waist-high bushes except for an opening for the paved path from the sidewalk to the door. By her front door is one of those wooden lawn ornaments that I have never really figured out because as far as I can tell, it is just somebody’s big rear end. I think the suggestion is that it is the bent over, bloomers-wearing rear end of someone who is gardening. It’s a pretty friendly decoration for someone who goes at other old people with her walker. We’re waiting for Mrs. T to go to bed. We can see into her kitchen to the right of the front door and the living room on the left. She has a huge television and for the last two hours she’s been up watching murder shows starring lady detectives, the same ones Grandma watches, and it’s already 3 a.m. I always thought old people went to bed early.

I’ve been staring into her kitchen because there’s someone at the table by the window who never moves. When I stare long enough I feel like maybe I can see the glint of an eye, gazing back at me, but I look away and then back again and all it is is a shape. Finally, Mrs. T walks in and turns on the lights, gets something out of the refrigerator, never looking at the person, and I realize it’s one of those blow-up people you use to get in the carpool lane.

Francis has been real quiet for some time, and I look over at him and see he’s asleep. I shake him awake. He says, “Whoa,” and is quiet for a bit and then says, “I just had the weirdest dream. We had to fight off the government, but it was okay, because our Japanese neighbors were well-armed, and they helped us. And it wasn’t our government, like what we have now. It was something else.”

“We don’t have Japanese neighbors.”

“Yeah, we’re fucked.”

“Yeah, I don’t think the Mormons or the Nguyens like us enough to help.”

“The Nyugens might do.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. The Vietnamese were on the Japs’ side during the war.”

“The Japs?” I say. “Since when did you call them ‘Japs’?”

“Since their sneaky sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.”

“You mean the one that happened before you were born?”

“Yeah, so?”

“I don’t know what we’re talking about, Francis.”

He’s starting to fidget, but it doesn’t seem the right moment to say, “Let’s do this tomorrow.” Francis says, “These bushes smell funny,” and I say, “When I pass by here on the way to work, there’s always some big white dog working on a hole.”

Francis says, “He’s probably burying something important.”

“Or dead,” I say.

Francis shakes his head. “Dogs don’t bury their dead.” I can’t tell if he’s trying to be funny or serious. Across the street, the sprinklers go on, swishing and ticking. I think that it would be just perfect if Mrs. T’s went on and got us all wet. The idea makes me feel chilly, and I drink some of the soda and gin I brought in an Arrowhead bottle. Francis says, “Gimme some,” and I say, “Let’s do this. We should do it now or I’m going home.”

We go around the back. I expect someone with a blow-up doll in the window would have a deadbolt or a chain, but she doesn’t and Francis gets the lock sprung easy. We go in and close the door behind us. Francis says in the dark, “So what’s the plan?” I walk into something that is cold and smooth, a washing machine, and when I step away I bang my shin against a sharp edge. “Fuck!” Francis hushes me up and I hiss, “You said the plan was vengeance.”

“Yeah, but how? Vengeance how?”

Maybe he’s lost his nerve or maybe he’s found his common sense. Either way, we’re standing in Mrs. T’s laundry room or pantry or whatever it is, waiting to get caught.  I reach down to rub my shin. “It’s your fault we’re here, so figure it out.”

He doesn’t get a chance. The door opens and I look up and it’s the silhouette of Mrs. T, black and featureless against a big rectangle of bright buttery light. She’s got her walker in front of her and she stares right at us, right at me. I feel like I’m back in high school and they’ve found us smoking in the bathroom, and because we flushed the cigarettes down the toilet right before they came, I’m the only one who gets in trouble because I was in the boys’ room and that’s all they can write any of us up on, so somehow it’s all my fault. Like now, like I’m the one who told Francis we should break into a house to harass a woman I’ve never even seen before and whatever might happen next will also be all because of me.

“You!” she shrieks, and she hurls a can of food, and in that small space, with our eyes stinging while they adjust to the light, nobody has the time or space or the sense to move. It goes over my head and hits Francis between the eyes and he topples over with an angry shout. As he goes down, his head hits the edge of the plastic crate that I hit my shin on, and the crate tips over and the big jars inside spill out. I stare at him, his head in the overturned crate. I kneel down, shake him, look around.  Inside the scattered jars are round, dark red fleshy things that look like hearts.

I hear the old woman take a deep breath and start yelling, “You perverts! You sick, sick people! Watching me while I do my business! Getting dressed! Getting undressed! While I take my showers!  Trying to steal my underwear! I already called the police, you sick, sick people!” She started hitting me with her walker some time back, the lightweight metal springing off my neck and shoulders, then she gets tired and just pokes at me with it. I finally manage to get my voice above hers. “You killed him.”

When I come out of the kitchen, Francis steers me into the living room. The television is on but it’s not a James Bond movie, it’s one of the MTV stations that only plays hip-hop and R&B. Francis turns the volume up and motions for me to sit down on the couch next to him.

“So here’s how it’s gonna go down.”

I interrupt him, tell him what Grandma told me, that the other old lady didn’t hit Grandma, she hit Grandma’s walker, and he says, “It doesn’t matter. We’re going to do something about it.” When I don’t ask him what he has in mind, he says anyway, “We’re gonna rob the other old lady’s house.”

I say, “Give me a sec.” I go into the kitchen, which is now empty. I take down the gin and cut a lime and pour some tonic. The tonic is flat, but that’s okay, the point is I’m not drinking the gin by itself and I won’t get malaria. I go back out and I say to Francis, “You don’t even know she is.”

“Yeah, I do. I was at the store with Grandma, and then I followed the old lady home.”

I say, “Did you go past the five-mile thing?”

“No, she lives about two blocks away.”

There comes a knock on the door. Francis squirms a little and puts his beer down on the coffee table and I put my drink down and get up to answer the door. Figure I know who it is, if Francis has been wandering around following people, and sure enough, it’s Officer Grady, who says over my shoulder, “I just got a call from Mrs. T, Francis. Old lady who lives a coupla blocks down. I think you know her; she used to be in your grandmother’s reading group.” He waits but Francis doesn’t confirm or deny this. “She says she saw you peeking in her windows.  I quote: ‘Just like he probably did to that poor Kitty Garrison girl.’”

“Oh begorrah,” Francie says, rudely, I think, because Grady isn’t actually Irish, like from Ireland.

“I just came from her house, and I know there’s not a thing in there that anybody would want to be looking at the way she’s talking about, so could we please let the elderly of our community enjoy their autumnal years? In peace? Francis?”

“She doesn’t even know who I am.”

“Boy, everyone knows who you are.”

The television gets louder. It’s a part of a song about what presidents are on what denomination. Hamilton is on the ten.

“You promise not to go back?” Officer Grady says, louder than that.

The television says, “These are the dead presidents,” and then Francis says, “Yeah!” to Grady, and Grady says, “Hamilton was never president,” to me, but still has to say it pretty loudly over the music, and everything is just a little too much, too noisy, so I’m glad that it gets left at that and Officer Grady leaves to go fuck the mayor’s wife at the Rio Grande Motel.

“I hate cops,” Francis says. “They’re pigs.”

“Yep,” I say.

“And I want to point out that Hamilton is not a dead president because he was born on some resort island.  But before it was a resort.  So he couldn’t become president.”

“I can’t remember, Francis.”  I’m too busy picturing Francis hiding behind a telephone pole like a Looney Toons character, and this Mrs. T seeing him and calling 911, and it makes me suddenly very tired.

“Well, girls aren’t supposed to be very good at history, anyway.  How was work, by the way?”  I know not to answer the question, because if I start bitching about it he’ll stop listening.  But I have plenty to bitch about.  I work at a place on the highway under one of the DIETS FAIL! billboards called the Den of Venial Sins because the owner thought that was a clever one. He also thought it was a good one to hire two cocktail waitresses for each shift, even though the place is barely big enough to justify even one, and the customers let us know in the tips and the way they just get up and go order from the bar. One of my co-workers just got CUM DUMPSTER tattooed on the inside of her lip last weekend. So what else is there to say but, “It was fab.”

“Fab,” he says. “Cool. So tonight, I was thinking, we’d go to this Mrs. T’s house, whoever she is, and rearrange all the furniture so when she gets up in the middle of the night to change her adult diapers, she trips. Or maybe put her dentures in her mouth and beat her silly, until her teeth fall out. Or break her walker. Or break her knees.”

“Jesus, Francie. You can’t go around beating old ladies.”

“Why not?’

“Because they’re old ladies.”

“So?”

“Because it’s a fucking psycho thing to do, is why. I mean, how would you feel if someone beat Grandma?”

“Someone did beat Grandma.  That old lady.”

A few years ago, my cousin Francis was on trial for a sex-murder.  They went after the wrong guy, and he knew it and told the jury so, said, “It wasn’t me,” and they let him go.

The newspaper, which had run the story IS LOCAL BOY A PSYCHOTIC PERV? with the line underneath By all accounts, yes, had to run JURY OF PEERS DOESN’T THINK LOCAL BOY DID IT. But we still do. Next to it, they had a little boxed-in feature with bullet-point instructions: “Women! Be Prepared: How to rape-proof yourselves.” Things like, “Change your locks every six months—you never know who has your key. Your gardener? Your maid? Your plumber? Your violent ex-husband? ‘That’ guy?” Even CNN.com was excited for a minute. “Rape and murder shocks close-knit community.” Aunt Cathy, who is Francis’ mom, saw the CNN article and called from Colorado where she is living with her boyfriend. She left a message on Grandma’s answering machine: “What’s going on, Mom? Is he turning into his father?” I don’t know if Grandma called her back or what she would have said.

The articles in the local paper were written by the newspaper owner’s son, Tony Morales, who has hated Francis since high school. Grandma says there’s something wrong with journalism today, but I think it’s also the town that has the problem. Like last week, ALLEGED BUSSTOP FLASHER ACTUALLY WEARING WOMAN’S ONE-PIECE SWIMSUIT. Police still won’t arrest him.

Then Jack. Jack and Francis, best friends since whatever grade it was in elementary school, and they get in a big fight after the trial, and Jack goes to the hospital and Francis gets arrested, sentenced and let out early when a judge rules that over-crowded prisons are a violation of Constitutional rights. BLEEDING HEART SETS MURDERERS AMONG US.

Francis is not allowed more than five miles away from Grandma’s house. I don’t know how long it’s supposed to last, but it better end soon. He gets up, watches television, maybe helps around the house, watches more television, doesn’t start in on the beer until the afternoon because Grandma doesn’t like people who start drinking in the morning, more television, runs errands with Grandma if they’re within the five-mile radius, and is usually drinking and watching television by the time I get home from work, usually a James Bond movie on that channel that is never not showing a James Bond movie, and it’s usually one of the Roger Moore ones, which he doesn’t even like.

I’m not done walking in through the door and Francis comes up. He’s got a bottle in his hand. He is starting to get a beer gut. When we were in high school, Cousin Billy lived with Grandma for a few years before he finally joined the Army, and he left with a beer gut, too. That’s what Grandma’s house does to you, it turns you into Cousin Billy. Francis is even wearing one of Billy’s shirts. DREAM THEATER. How does a kid who grew up wearing T-shirts that say Blatz and Filth end up there?  When I say, “That isn’t your shirt, is it?” Francis looks down at it and says, “Well, it fits me.”

I start moving towards the dining room, and Francis says, “I went to Vons today with Grandma and there was some old lady and do you know what the old lady did?”

I push past him and put my bag down on the table and say, “What?”

“She hit Grandma.  Hit her!”

I can hear Grandma in the kitchen. “What’s for dinner?”

Francis says, “This is serious.” He drinks some of the beer. It’s Bass and I say, “What’s the big occasion?” and point at the bottle. He usually gets whatever is cheap. He’d get 40s but Grandma doesn’t like people who drink 40s.  You can take that to mean bums, by which she means black people, mostly.

He looks at it. “When I asked Grandma for money to buy some beer, she only had a twenty in her wallet. So the big occasion is that I don’t have to drink piss-water today, but I think the big issue here,” and he takes a deep breath, “is that you aren’t taking me seriously. Grandma got attacked.”

“Old people don’t hit each other.”

“We went to Vons and there was some old lady and they had to play chicken in the doorway because they both had walkers. And you know how the door only opens halfway, the sliding one, plus the rack of flyers is in the way, with the coupons? And they both couldn’t go through, so Grandma let the old bitch pass first and says, ‘You got the same problem I do, haha,’ and the other old lady goes, ‘I don’t get any problems, ‘sides you gettin’ in my way,’ and then she hits Grandma with her walker.”  He glares at me like I had been there, too, and hadn’t done anything about it.

I ask if Grandma is okay and he says, “She was crying when we got back. She calmed down, but I sure didn’t know what to do with her for awhile. I think she came face-to-face with her mortality.”

“Fran,” I say. “Shut up.”

Grandma is dumping cooked pasta into a colander in the sink. She’s holding the pot with two hands and she looks like she’s going to fall in after it. I say to her, “I heard you got in a street fight.”

She clunks the pot down and says, “I did no such thing.” She tells me her version of the story. It’s more or less the same as Francis’, except the other old woman says, “I do not have any problems except that you were in my way,” and then, the way she describes it, kind of bats at Grandma’s walker with her walker because she can’t lift it high enough to actually hit Grandma proper.

“Francis says you were crying.”

She tells me that it’s not my business, but yes, she was upset and it was embarrassing, and we leave it at that.

She tells me that she spoke to Officer Grady, and he’s going to try to get Francie into the sheriff’s work program. She says that when it happens not to tell Francie that it was her idea because she doesn’t want Francie to think she’s trying to get rid of him, but he’s starting to drive her crazy, and she thinks he’s going crazy himself.

“He’s always been crazy,” I say.

“Don’t talk about your family like that.” She gets out a glass baking dish. “That reminds me.  Your Aunt Carol called.” Aunt Carol is Billy’s mom. “She’s going to get that lap-band thing.” A month ago, somebody bought out all the signs along the highway, except for the faded Indian Joe’s one that has been saying for years about how they sell healing crystals and beef jerky, and put up ads that say DIETS FAIL! LAPBAND WORKS!  “If she asks you for money, don’t give it to her.”

“Okay.”

“It’s her health, not yours. So if she asks you. . .”

“I’ll say no,” I say. Even though it means she’ll take the money from Billy instead. “What’re you making?”

“Pasta bake. I have my reading club tonight. You and Francis can have the tuna bake from last week. It’s in the red container.”

I start washing the dishes in the sink. The dish liquid is supposed to smell like lemons. It smells like Lemonheads. Grandma’s kitchen is lemon-themed. Lemon magnets, lemon napkin holder, lemon ceramic jars for the flour and the sugar and the oatmeal, lemon print curtains for the window over the sink. Past the curtains, the sun is finishing up going down and I can see the top of the neighbors’ heads over the bushes. One of the teenage daughters is arguing in the driveway with her mother, and their dumb little dog is barking.

Grandma is back to talking about Francis. “It’s not that I want him to pick up trash by the freeway,” she is saying. “Nobody wants that. But he won’t even leave the house. He just sits there and gets in the way. It’s just like when Billy was here. Except when he isn’t watching TV, Francie keeps trying to help. Billy never did that. That at least seemed normal. He needs a hobby. And not just any hobby. Do you know he asked me what book I was reading for the book club? Can you imagine bringing him with me? A boy his age has no reason to be interested in our books or want to sit around with us talking about them.” This last part sounds like a dodge to me. I’ve never figured out what books they read for their club and I’ve never actually seen Grandma sit down and read a book; I guess Francis couldn’t get the information out, either.

Billy didn’t do anything because he was lazy, which is why we were all surprised he got his ass off the couch, much less out the door and then drove it all the way over to the next town’s recruiting center to enlist. Francis stopped going outside because people kept recognizing him from the paper — Tony Morales wins one again — and phoning in tips that the Kitty Garrison rapist/killer had escaped from jail. Forgetting that they never found the real Kitty Garrison rapist/killer, that they never really proved that Kitty was even raped and that, in the end, Francis was only on trial for murder.

There was one guy, though, who asked for Francis’ autograph and even paid $10 for it when Francis told the guy that he charged for them.  That guy probably sits at home all day long listening to GG Allin while bidding on John Wayne Gacy paintings on eBay. I don’t see why Francis had to give him an autograph and encourage that sort of behavior, and I hope he doesn’t live near us. I hope someone like that doesn’t live near anybody.

She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, and received her undergraduate degree from Columbia University.

She lives in Pasadena.

Follow her on Twitter at @bridgetclerkin.