A Little Ray Of Sunshine

by Lani Diane Rich

  “This will be what it will be,” she said. “If you send me to jail, then that just means there will be something for me to do there, someone I need to help. If you leave without me and go on to Colorado Springs, then maybe I’ll meet the person I’m supposed to help in the little diner next door. But” –she crossed her arms and watched me, smiling—“for the last couple of hours, you thought you were going back to Fletcher, right? How did that make you feel?”

  “It made me feel like I was being kidnapped.” I pointed my index finger at her. “You? Are insane. How does that make you feel?”

  She squinted in the bright daylight. “You’re at a crossroads here, EJ. You have the opportunity to make a choice. I’m going to get some coffee and doughnuts inside, and if you’re not here when I get back, I’ll understand. If the police come to arrest me, I’ll understand that, too. Still, I’m so glad we met. I don’t think I’ll forget you soon. You’re very...” She stared at me for a long time, as though searching for the right adjective, and I waited for something vague and uncondemning. Interesting. Unusual. Special.

  “...sad,” she said finally.

  I blinked, not sure how to respond. Sad? That was an insult, right? She wrapped her arms around me and gave me a hug, then released me and nodded to indicate the duffel bag and backpack sitting next to the truck.

  “Don’t run over my stuff,” she said on a wink, then turned and headed toward the mini-mart.

  “Oh, my God,” I muttered, racing to the side of the truck to stop the pump and hang up the nozzle. I wasn’t going to call the cops, I decided, but damned if I was going to let some crazy woman who fancied herself as one of God’s winged army drag me all the way to Oregon. I hopped into the driver’s seat and put my fingers to the keys in the ignition, then paused, cursed, and let my forehead drop against the steering wheel.

  I couldn’t leave her. She was totally certifiable, but mostly harmless, and completely helpless. There was no way I could abandon this woman at a gas station. She needed a hospital, or family, or something. At the very least, I had to bring her back to her car at Busey’s. I ground my teeth, reminding myself that she’d kidnapped me and thus had given up her rights to my assistance, but it was no good. Whether I liked it or not, she was mine until I could pawn her off on someone else. I closed my eyes, took a few deep breaths, then pulled the keys out of the ignition and tucked them in my pocket.

  “Hey, you’re still here,” she said, grinning as she held up a green and white doughnut bag. “I’m so glad. They have Krispy Kremes here, can you believe our luck?”

  I tossed her duffel bag into the Airstream and locked it, then handed her her backpack.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” I asked her. “If I wasn’t such a nice person, you’d be going to jail right now.”

  “Well, you’re supposed to go to Fletcher, and you weren’t going to go, so I did what I had to do. I knew you’d be mad, but you have to understand. This is what I was sent to do.”

  “To kidnap me? To inject yourself in my life, which is none of your business, by the way, and—” I paused and straightened. “How did you know I wasn’t going to go? I said last night I was going. I told Digs that I’d be there.”

  “Really?” She crinkled her nose. “Hmmm. He told me you weren’t going.”

  “But I told him I was.”

  “Well. I guess he didn’t believe you.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “That doesn’t give you the right to—”

  “I don’t have the right. I have the responsibility. The Universe directed me.”

  “Oh, hell,” I said. “Not this crap again.”

  “I came by this morning to check on you,” she said, “and this big guy from the lot across the way comes out of nowhere and asks me if we need help disconnecting the water, electric and sewer.”

  “That’s Burly and Unemployed,” I said. “He just wanted more beer.”

  “Then I came in to check on you, but you were passed out. And your keys were right on the counter next to a map with directions out west.”

  “To Colorado Springs,” I growled.

  Jess threw her hands up in the air. “Look, maybe the Universe has to hit you over the head with a brick before you hear Her talking, but I don’t need that.”

  I rubbed my hand over my face, trying to remember that I was dealing with a woman who’d anthropomorphized the Universe and made it a girl. She thought she was an angel. I could not expect her to be rational. I set my voice to calm, and spoke in strong, even tones.

  “Okay. Look. Here’s how it’s gonna work. I will bring you wherever you need to go. Either back to Busey’s and your car or I can drop you off with family or friends or—and here’s my vote—a mental health institution. Angel’s choice.”

  “Really?” She beamed. “Anywhere I want to go?”

  I sighed in relief. No arguments. Happy expression. She clearly had a place in mind. This was going to work out just fine. Everything was going to be fine.

  “Yes,” I said. “I will take you wherever you need to go. Just tell me where, and who I’m dropping you off with.”

  She reached into her purse and withdrew a large white envelope, then handed it to me. I looked down at the elegant calligraphy, stunned. Leave it to Lilly Lorraine to have official invitations printed up even for a small courthouse wedding. I looked up at Jess, who was grinning so wide I had sympathetic cheek pains.

  “Digs invited me to be his date,” she chirped.

  I waved the invitation in the air. “When did he give you this?”

  “When I took out the trash, and he was leaving. We talked a little bit.” She giggled and hopped up on her heels. “I’m so excited. I’m going to Twinkie’s wedding!”

  She tossed the backpack over her shoulder and hopped into the passenger side of the truck. I walked around to the driver’s side and got in.

  “That was a dirty trick.” I turned the key in the ignition.

  “You said anywhere.”

  “I meant—”

  “But you said—”

  “Fine!” I clenched my fingers around the steering wheel. “Fine. I will take you with me to Colorado Springs—”

  Her eyebrows knit. “But the wedding’s in Oregon.”

  “—and I’ll put you on a plane to Portland from there.”

  “Oh, so we’re flying from—?”

  “No. You will be flying. I’ll be staying in Colorado Springs, investigating local dive bars where I can drink away all memory of this entire episode.”

  “But—”

  I held up my hand. “Some ground rules. One, no talk of the wedding.” She opened her mouth. I held my hand up higher. “Ah-ah-ah. No. Talk. No trying to convince me to go. No making me feel bad about lying to Digs. None of that. Do we have a deal, or am I leaving you here?”

  Jess’s eyes narrowed in thought for a moment. “I don’t know. What are the other ground rules?”

  “What?”

  “Well, ground rule one was no talking about the wedding, which related directly to everything you said after that, so I assume there’s a two. What’s the second ground rule?”

  I white-knuckled the steering wheel. “No counting my ground rules.”

  She smiled and held out her hand, and we shook on it. I started the truck, figuring that if the Universe told Jess to kill me in my sleep, it’d be my own damn fault anyway.

  In the middle of the night, in an RV park on the western edge of Ohio, I found myself staring up at the ceiling of my Airstream, unable to sleep. Jess was snoring lightly from the twin bunk at the back of the trailer, but after six years of RV park living, I was under no illusions about what I was capable of sleeping through. The snore of a deluded angel was not powerful enough to keep me up on its own.

  I threw my legs over the side of my bed and stuffed my feet into my sneakers, then quietly opened the door and slipped outside. I took a moment to stare up at the clear, black sky, peppered with stars, and breathe in the smoky fragrance of a distant c
ampfire in the warm summer air. It had been an RV park much like this one that had gotten me hooked on the things in the first place. Of course, most of the parks I’d lived in recent years had been nothing like this. Places like this were too far out in the middle of nowhere, and it was almost impossible to get any kind of viable employment within a reasonable distance, except during the occasional lucky summer when the park itself needed extra help. I glanced back at the private little nook where I’d parked the Airstream under the protective bulk of a giant willow tree, far enough away from any neighbors to provide a decent sense of privacy. I liked this park.

  Maybe, someday, I’d come back.

  In the distance, from the direction of the rec center, I could hear music playing, the sounds of people laughing, the erratic conk-plinks of two people playing Ping-Pong at the outdoor table. This was a family place, where moms and dads took their kids for long weekends and let them stay up late drinking sodas and feeding the jukebox. When I was twelve, Danny had taken Digs and Luke and me to a place like this for the summer while my mother did a TV movie-of-the-week for NBC and snared husband number three, a talent agent who, as it turned out, had no talent for agenting. But that’s another story. Anyway, Luke and I had piled our jukebox quarters together and gotten a pack of menthol cigarettes out of a vending machine, then walked down to the lake and tried to smoke them, to horrendous but predictable results. Eventually, we traded the remaining fifteen cigarettes to Digs in exchange for his silence and a pack of Bubblicious bubble gum.

  I turned and walked back to my truck. I pulled open the passenger-side door and reached underneath the seat to withdraw the wooden stationery box I’d bought at a paper crafts fair not long after I left Fletcher. It was squat and wide, allowing it to double as a writing surface for people like me who had no room in their lives for a real desk. The sides were accented with dried daisies that had been glued on then shellacked within an inch of their lives. Nested inside was a shallow, flat drawer that held my pens, stationery paper and envelopes. I crawled into the seat and set it on my lap, then flipped the top off and pulled out a sheet and a pen. I set the top back on, situated the box on my lap, flicked on the cab light and started to write.

  Dear Luke,

  I stared up at the dim cab light, thinking carefully about what I wanted to write next. Finally hitting on just the right thing, I smiled and put pen to paper.

  A duck walks into a bar and orders a beer.

  “We don’t serve ducks,” the bartender says.

  “Yes, but I’m special,” the duck says. “I can sing.” And the duck belts out a perfect aria.

  “Oh, he’s cute,” the blonde sitting at the next stool says. “Give him the beer.”

  “No,” the bartender says. “We don’t serve singing ducks.” And he throws the duck out.

  The next day, the duck comes back and orders a beer.

  “Forget it,” the bartender says. “We don’t serve ducks.”

  “Yes, but I’m special,” the duck says. “I can dance.” And the duck waddles over to the blonde and dances with her, twirling her in her seat with his wing, then goes back to his spot at the bar when the song ends.

  “Oh, how sweet!” the blonde says, laughing. “Come on, give him a beer.”

  “We don’t serve dancing ducks, either,” the bartender says, and throws the duck out.

  The next day, the duck comes back and orders a beer.

  “I told you,” the bartender says, “we don’t serve ducks.”

  “But I’m special,” the duck says, “I can—”

  The bartender picks him up and throws him out.

  “Fucking duck,” he mutters as he comes back to the bar.

  The blonde gasps. “Who told you?”

  I read it over again and laughed to myself. Luke had always had a soft spot for bad duck jokes.

  I signed my name at the bottom, folded up the paper, and tucked it inside an envelope. I wrote Luke Greene on the outside, then lifted up the panel and set the envelope inside, with some fifty of its unsent brothers. I tucked the box back under the seat, flicked off the cab light and went back into the Airstream, where I continued to toss and turn until the sun rose.

  I have been married seven times, and am so glad to be on my last one! Glenn is everything I’ve ever wanted or needed in a friend and companion. He is my light and my hope, my compass, my best friend. I am his world, and he is mine, and we need nothing else besides each other. It is such a blessing to be so fulfilled by one person that, even if everyone else on the planet were to disappear, you wouldn’t really mourn them.

  -- Lilly Lorraine, quoted in “The Real Lives of Forgotten Child Stars.” Author: Rebecca Wade, Women’s Day, 12 March 1997

  Four

  I don’t remember when Luke and I started communicating through jokes, but then I don’t remember a lot of specific moments between us. I remember our first kiss—age thirteen, broad daylight, in the middle of Danny’s pool, after which Luke dunked me under and we never spoke of it again—but most of the other stuff happened so naturally that it just seemed like it had always been that way. I can’t say when I fell in love with Luke because I can’t remember ever not being in love with Luke. It’s the same with the jokes. They started during one of the many summers I spent there, sometime between that first kiss/dunk and when I went away to college out east. I remember being upset about something—a boy, a fight with a friend, I don’t know—and Luke told me a joke that involved a penguin and a bow tie and ever since, whenever we had any kind of remotely serious talk, we told jokes. It was just something we did.

  It was actually a joke that finally got us together. After college, I’d moved to an apartment in Fletcher just to be near Luke. Never did get up the nerve to tell him I was crazy in love with him, though. I was too scared he’d never see me as anything other than an old family friend. Or worse, a sister, the kiss in the pool notwithstanding. Well, about eight months of that torture was all I had in me to take, so when a friend asked me to move to New York City with her, I agreed. When I told Luke, he hugged me and wished me well and didn’t seem too sad to see me go. I cried for two days. Then, finally, the night before I was going to leave, the levee broke.

  “So, two guys walk into a bar,” Luke had said as he taped up the last box of kitchen stuff. It was late and we’d been packing all day, and I was giddy from the tension of all the things I’d been unable to say, so I started giggling immediately.

  “I’m not done yet,” Luke said, crawling over to sit next to me, our backs against the wall as we stared out at my empty apartment. He looked at me, smiling—Luke was never not smiling—and raised an eyebrow in mock irritation. “Can I continue?”

  “Yeah,” I said quietly, my heart pounding as I stared up at him, wondering how I was ever going to survive life without that smile. “Go ahead.”

  “Thank you. So, the first guy says, ‘Drinks are on me! I just asked the woman I love to marry me!’ And everyone cheers and claps him on the back.”

  And there, Luke stopped talking, his eyes locking on mine, making my breath rush out as my cheeks flamed hard.

  “And the second guy?” I prodded quietly.

  His eyes trailed down to my lips. “Hmmm?”

  “The second guy. In the bar. What did he say?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Luke let out a small chuckle, then his smile faded. “He said, ‘Good for you. The woman I love is moving across the country and I’m too much of a fucking coward to ask her not to go.’”

  My heart pounded painfully in my chest as I tried not to read this the wrong way, searching for the punch line that would make me feel like an idiot for even thinking Luke was trying to tell me something. Finally, I cleared my throat and said what I was thinking.

  “That’s not funny.”

  He reached up, took a strand of my hair in his fingers and shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

  That night, we had sex for the first time on the floor of my apartment, and the n
ext day, I called my friend to back out of New York. Later that week, we moved all my stuff into his apartment. And the rest, as they say, was history.

  Until I blew everything up in a life implosion so powerful that even six years later, the sharp edges of my personal impact crater were visible to everyone around me.

  My point is, if you were Jess, you’d be asking, right? What the hell happened, EJ? Why are you a misanthropic wreck? Why do you choose to live alone in a big tin can rather than near the people who love you?

  Of course you’d ask. Any sane person would be too overwhelmed with curiosity not to ask.

  Jess didn’t ask a thing. Three days we’d been on the road, and the endless barrage of questions I’d been expecting about Digs and Luke and Danny and my mother never came. For three days, I stared at endless lengths of highway pavement, forming my evasion tactics for when she finally did come at me, curiosity swinging, but she never engaged in anything more than idle chitchat. Waiting for the shoe to drop wore me down and finally, in a diner somewhere between Kansas City and the fifth ring of hell, I broke.

  “Okay,” I said. “Fine. You win. Ask me anything.”

  “Mmm?” she said, sipping her coffee.

  “No games. I’m too cranky, and too tired. We’re gonna be in Colorado Springs in another day or so, and then you’ll be going off to see my family, which is like sending a lamb to the slaughter, by the way. This is your last chance to be duly informed. I’m an open book; ask me anything.”

  “I don’t have any questions.” She paused. “Well, that’s not entirely true. I have questions, but I don’t like to ask direct questions unless I have to. That’s not how I work.” She poked at her pancakes, her expression dubious. “These are from a mix. What self-respecting diner owner charges five ninety-five for pancakes from a box?”

  “One with a firm grasp of basic capitalism,” I said. “So, how do you work?”

  “Mmm?” She dumped the fork and the pancake and smiled at me. “Oh, yeah. Well, I find that when I ask direct questions, people tend to directly lie, so mostly, I observe. I watch you and get a feel for what you’re about, and then when the opportunity comes where I can help, I do what I can. Like when I kidnapped you.”