by Haven Kimmel
Years ago when Poppy was still alive, Cassie had asked him where he’d hide a bit of cash, household expense money, she’d called it, and he said the last place he’d look if he was a burglar was in the kitty litter, so they’d devised a two-tiered scheme in the litter box, with the money sealed in freezer bags at the bottom, under a separate pan. Miss Mittens hadn’t used a litter box in many years, preferring to employ the flower gardens Laura painstakingly planted. Cassie walked out in the mudroom and removed the bag, quickly counting the bills. This was the money Belle knew about and drew from to pay their bills and buy groceries. They were down to just over thirty-eight hundred, and there was no way to know what Laura’s hospital bills would be. She’d been a patient for only three days, but Cassie had lost track of whether her mother had health insurance. There was another five thousand under the false bottom of a dresser drawer in Cassie’s room, which she reserved for a stake, and another seven thousand wrapped with venison in the freezer. If Cassie went to New Orleans and didn’t make it back, the money wasn’t much for Belle to live on until she figured out something else. Her food would have to be delivered, someone (undoubtedly Edwin) would have to carry her manuscripts to the post office and pick up her packages. She had a small income from editing, but the only thing that would save her without Cassie was if Belle could be legally declared unable to work and could begin receiving government benefits and Medicare, and who would verify what was wrong with her when Cassie couldn’t get Belle to leave the house so someone could verify that she couldn’t leave the house? Cassie would do anything, she had already done things she couldn’t have predicted to save her family, but it seemed beyond her to do that one, to voluntarily cast herself into the jaws of bureaucracy. No one in the world wanted to save Belle, no one but Cassie, alone now in rural Indiana, and if she placed their lives in the hands of the government, they would be beaten as if with whips. Cassie had not ever, in her adult life, paid an income tax, and how to explain that one?
At three-forty Miss Mittens, whose radar was uncanny, began scratching at the back door. Cassie jumped, then realized she’d been dreaming. She opened the back door and scratched the old cat on top of her bony skull; Miss Mittens purred and wound between Cassie’s legs as she opened a can of cat food and placed the whole thing on the floor, bypassing the food dish. She looked at the cat, at the floor, at the door, then propped the door open with a boot. As Cassie passed the kitchen table on her way to bed, she gathered up the letter, the journals, the plane tickets, leaving the constructed sentence as it was, so Belle would see it in the morning. She picked up a piece of yellow notebook paper Belle and Laura had been passing around for a few months, on which they debated which historical suicide they’d undo if given the option. Their first choice had changed a number of times, from Sylvia Plath to Dorothy Parker to Cleopatra (back again to Plath), with notes about the song “Gloomy Sunday,” until Cassie had picked up the list and written Elvis Presley. Next to his name Laura had written, Yes, that’s perfect. And Belle had engraved with her Eversharp, He’s not actually a suicide. But later they’d discussed it and agreed: there are lots of ways to kill yourself; it just takes time.
She slept like a person falling down a hole, and woke at ten the next morning. Brutal, cherished Laura was not now and would never be again standing at the kitchen window waiting for her daughters to get up; no coffee made, no smoke hovering in the air like Saint Teresa. Cassie dressed quickly in a thermal shirt, a flannel shirt, jeans, and boots, then headed into the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth and hair, surprised to find she still recognized herself.
In the kitchen Belle was sitting at the table, going over a manuscript. The sentence from the night before was nowhere to be seen. “You left the door open last night, and when I got up the house was about seven degrees. The furnace has been running for its life for the past three hours, I made coffee,” she said without looking up.
Cassie stopped halfway to the stove, having smelled coffee without fully realizing it. “Thanks.”
“Well, thank me after you’ve had a cup. I was winging it.”
The first two cups in the cabinet were Laura’s, Fiestaware in pink and green, not the radioactive colors. Cassie moved them aside and took out a battered piece of stoneware, dark brown with a lighter brown rim. They owned a whole set of these dishes, a wedding gift to Laura and Jimmy; they were ugly, and sacred as a relic.
Belle’s face this morning was fine-lined, with a faint yellow tint; her eyes were puffy, and the skin around her nose was irritated. For years she had worn Laura’s clothes, saying she had no interest in shopping or developing a personal style, but it was harrowing to see her in them now: Laura’s green blouse and narrow black pants, her flat black shoes. Belle didn’t say, and no one else said, that she didn’t buy clothes because she never left the house, would never leave. She had retreated from the Wide World and come back to the kitchen table, and worked there every day, so what were clothes to her? “What’s this?” Cassie asked, pointing to the manuscript Belle was correcting.
“It’s a chapter of Peggy’s dissertation on ancient Athenian festivals. This one concerns the Munichion, which was dedicated to Artemis.”
The coffee was too strong—it caused Cassie’s tongue to curl—but she drank it anyway. “Good?”
“It depends on how you feel about the sacrifice of she-goats dressed up like young girls. I frankly think it’s a good idea. And there were cakes covered with candles: imagine that. But the sentences are bland. I can’t help but rewrite it as Roberto Calasso would have.” Belle ran her hands, shaking, through her brittle hair, going gray.
“You want something to eat?” Cassie asked.
“I ate already. Are you going to Bud’s?”
“In a minute. What did you eat?”
“Toast.”
“I don’t see a plate.”
Belle looked up, staring at Cassie for a moment with no expression. “I ate it over the sink.”
Cassie stared back, said nothing.
“Don’t think for a moment that you’re going to start telling me where and when to eat, I won’t have it.”
The coffee seemed to be getting thicker as Cassie neared the bottom of the cup. She swirled the dregs around, trying to see the future, but she’d never understood the concept.
“Even Laura never hassled me about eating, I don’t know where you get off.”
Cassie rinsed out the cup and placed it in the dishwasher, then started making a sandwich to take with her.
“Peggy misplaces modifiers right and left, and within a few months she’ll be called doctor. Dr. Mosley. I can hardly stand it. And another thing is I could say plenty about how you live your life, but I keep my own counsel, so why don’t you do the same.”
Cassie took a small carton of orange juice out of the refrigerator, stepped into the mudroom for her backpack and her coat.
“Are you driving into town?” Belle picked at the scabs on her forearm.
“I’ll ride my bike.”
“Cass, it’s cold outside. I nearly froze just picking up the paper this morning, and don’t say it’s because I’ve got no insulation, if I hear that one more time.”
Cassie pulled on her black wool cap and gloves, opened the closet where she kept her cue. The leather case fit against her back like a quiver of arrows. She searched in her pockets for her sunglasses, then wheeled her bike out of the corner and propped open the back door. Miss Mittens ran in, turned around, ran out again.
Belle walked out onto the porch. “Why don’t you go ahead and take your truck?”
The back wheel of the bike bounced down the two cement steps. “Thanks for the coffee, Belle.” Cassie strapped her pack onto the back of the bike, pulled her right sock up over her pant leg, and climbed on. Belle sighed and closed the door as Cassie rode away; Miss Mittens clawed at the welcome mat. How were they to know how to live? Who would tell them?
Cassie passed the fencerow on her right, where sometimes a hawk circled
, and the pond surrounded by cattails a little farther up. It was too cold to ride the four miles into downtown Roseville. On either side of the road, mobile homes and double-wides sat tucked away in the tree stands farmers left when the land was originally cleared; at night the trailers twinkled like narrow gift boxes, and there were more every year. Large tracts of land went up for sale in five-acre increments, and within a year ten to fifteen mobile homes and their inevitable accessories—plastic flowers and wooden cutouts of overweight women bent over weeding, garden gnomes and small plaster donkeys—dotted what had been a soybean field.
Cassie turned right on 300 West and sped up. The road had been repaved only last summer, so the Indiana winters had not yet destroyed it. She lowered her head and leaned into the miserable air, her legs beginning to come to life after the many motionless days. It was flatly too cold to be riding into town. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a handkerchief; her nose was running, her eyes were streaming tears behind her sunglasses, but the feeling she’d had earlier of her knees being made of old cork was fading. She breathed deeply, rode, thought of herself in motion, as she had when she was a child. Then there had been no limit to how far she could ride, not because she was stronger but because she thought differently. The trees and fields began to give way to businesses dotting the edge of the Price Dairy Road, a used-car dealership, a lawn-mower repair shop. The Granger School was in ruins. The gas station was still there; the florist’s shop now held a custom framer. April and May’s was still standing, although the sisters themselves were dead. Cassie remembered one of them sitting on the front porch of the house where they had been born and always lived, it might have been April or it might have been May, the way she sat on the front porch wearing a dress and red lipstick. The candy shop was now owned by two gay men who did well there. They had taken the pathos right out of the candy business, as Laura had said. Cassie passed Holzinger’s and approached the center of town. The mechanics and body shops that had dotted Railroad Street when she was a girl were gone; even a car wash had been abandoned, its fiberglass walls gradually buckling as volunteer trees grew up too close. It sat in a green pile, covered with last autumn’s leaves and young shoots of ivy. Only Uncle Bud’s remained on Main Street, with Howdy’s hanging on behind it. Cassie unlocked the steel back door, then rolled her bike up the steps. She pulled the string and turned on the light in the storage room, a corner of which was kept clear for her bike. She stowed her jacket and pack, carried her lunch and her cue up front.
Cassie had owned the cue fourteen years and handled it so gently that only the tip had been changed. Uncle Bud had given her the best advice, which was to treat it as if it were an original; no harm done if she was wrong. She screwed the parts together, felt again the brilliance of the balance. Jimmy loved things more because they bore a certain signature or earned him greater respect. If someone had told him that this very cue had been made by someone in Hopwood County in a garage in his spare time, Jimmy would have given it away without a second look. But what her father would have done with the cue, and who he would have lost it to had he not lost it to Cassie, no longer mattered. Because he’d lost it. She racked the balls and practiced for the next three hours.
Uncle Bud opened a Diet 7UP. He had recently been diagnosed with high blood pressure and high sugar, so he’d given up alcohol, caffeine, and regular soda. His life was miserable.
“Didn’t see Jimmy at your mom’s funeral,” he said, pushing an open bag of pretzels toward Cassie.
“Ha.”
“Anybody let him know she died?”
“Why would we?” Cassie took a drink of orange juice.
“Well, they were married. They had kids together.”
Cassie said nothing, unwrapped her sandwich.
“Just seems like maybe a person would want to know if his ex-wife died.”
“Are you trying to piss me off?”
“All I’m saying—”
“Seriously, are you trying to piss me off?”
“Cassie, knock it off. Sit back down and eat your sandwich.”
She sat down on the bar stool, heart pounding. Bud took a drink. Cassie took a drink.
“What about New Orleans?” he asked.
“What about it?”
“You going?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“What’s to think about?” Bud’s dark blue T-shirt was stretched taut over his broad shoulders and heavy stomach, and proclaimed, in white letters, FAIR WARNING.
“A lot of things.”
“Like? start your next sentence with Like.”
“Like are you trying to piss me off?”
Bud opened a second bag of pretzels. “Like maybe you don’t want to go without your mom, like maybe it would be too painful, maybe you’d feel a little like you were betraying her.”
Cassie said nothing, picked at her sandwich.
“Why don’t you cut your hair, Cassie? It’s so long it gets on the table when you play, it’s a distraction.”
“It’s a distraction to you. Don’t tell me to cut my hair.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Dude, stop crossing me.”
“Dude. Listen to you, a grown woman talking like that, you sound like Leroy Buell, for pity’s sake. Grow up.”
Cassie said nothing.
“I’m also thinking,” Bud said, spitting some pretzel salt Cassie’s way, “that you have good reasons to go to Louisiana, maybe you recognize them, maybe you don’t.”
“Yeah? Name one.”
Bud rocked back on his heels, then crossed his arms over his chest. His own haircut seemed fresh and raw. “You name one, Cassie. I’m going to stand right here, the door locked, my business not open for business. You name one.”
Cassie clenched her fist under the bar, didn’t let Bud see it. “What, what do you want me to say? that I need a little voodoo? I don’t.”
“Okay.”
“Or that I’m planning to run away and not do right by Belle? I won’t.”
“I believe you.”
“I want just one thing,” Cassie said. “No, two.” Her whole body ached with the effort required not to hit Bud, she didn’t understand why he hadn’t been killed before now. “I want to see where she lived. And I want to meet Jackson LaFollette, the man she almost married.”
“Ah, Christ.” Bud shook his head, looked to the ceiling for mercy.
“What? What’s wrong with that?” Cassie appealed to him, palms up on the bar.
“You can go and do that, Cass, you can see where she lived and what she missed and wanted to go back to. But that other thing is bullshit.”
“Why, how? Tell me why?”
Bud gave her a tight smile, tilted his head, this was his look of love and contempt. “Because, dude: The Worst Thing That Can Happen To You.”
The unassailable law: Is That You Will Find What You Seek. Cassie’s hands relaxed, the muscles in her shoulders unwound, she took a bite of her sandwich, swallowed. “I know.”
Bud stared at her.
“I know,” she said.
He walked away, unlocked the front door, turned on the neon sign that said Open.
* * *
“Oh, we are going to Emmy’s house,” Puck sang, a meandering tune, “I’m usually not welcome at Emmy’s house. What will we find at Emmy’s house? God. Only. Knows.”
“Roll your window down if you want to smoke.”
“It’s cold.”
“I don’t care.” In truth, they knew exactly what they would find at Emmy’s house. Puck knew so well he’d begun a graphic novel about her life called “Saucy Little Broadcaster,” after Emmy’s old dream of reading the evening news on television. Emmy had not seen the novel, didn’t know it existed. It was quite long, and every time Puck and Cassie saw Emmy, he added another chapter. He called it his Life’s Work.
“Do you think Brian would kick me out if I kissed Emmy on the lips?”
Cassie struggled with the truc
k in the first two gears; it had hung on a long time. She was hoping to get it to two hundred thousand miles so she could present it to Emmy’s dad.
“Do you think Brian would kick me out if I kissed Bart or Dylan on the lips?”
In third gear the truck usually caught on and was fine. Not always. Patience was required.
“Do you think Brian would kick me out of the house if I kissed their furniture or, like, their spatulas and whatnot?”
Billy Poe was her mechanic; he called the acceleration problem a head scratcher. He literally scratched his head when faced with it.
“Oh, their married towels! their toothbrushes! the way their sink is always clotted with blue toothpaste! their married bed, Cassie, do you see where I’m going with this?”
“I do.”
“I DO! she said.” Puck leaned over and kissed Cassie on the cheek, he’d been drinking. “My hero.”
Emmy yelled Come in, she was standing in the kitchen holding her married spatula, she yelled at the boys to stop running, but they ignored her. She said If you’re going to run, at least take those popsicle sticks out of your mouth, if you fall they’ll go right down your throats.
Puck and Cassie took off their jackets and draped them over a chair. All of the furniture was new, from a department store in Jonah, it all matched. Dark blue with small red flowers. Dylan, who was five, ran down the hallway through the kitchen, through the dining room connected to the living room, into the living room and up onto the couch. His Popsicle stick was in his mouth. He wore no shirt or pants, just little-boy underwear patterned with trucks. Dylan was the one Cassie liked. He looked her in the eye. “Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” Cassie said.
“I wonder if you remember about the Pokémon.”
Puck covered his eyes with his hand. “Precious Savior,” he prayed, “I beg you, not this.”
“I do remember,” Cassie said.
Dylan rubbed his wet Popsicle stick against the wall like a pencil. “Who’s your favorite Pokémon?” In the spring Emmy shaved the boys’ heads, said it was easier to keep them clean. Dylan looked like a tiny prisoner.
