Chapter Three

I’M NOT THE TYPE of person who likes to talk about myself. I don’t even like to think about myself.

I’m sure that’s one of the reasons why I made a good cop and why I was drawn to the profession in the first place: I knew how to step outside my skin, leaving my emotions and my opinions behind, and be nothing but the job. It’s what I did throughout my childhood, then I did it for seventeen years as a police officer. Both periods of my life were basically the same: I protected and I served.

Now I’m at the beginning of a new phase of my life where I do neither, where my thoughts and actions are supposed to be motivated solely by what’s best for me.

It was my own decision. No one made me quit being a cop, despite some of the rumors.

Maybe my decision was partly due to the jolt of realizing my son was no longer dependent on me at all, not even to help him pay for college.

For the first time in my life I had no financial obligations other than funding my own existence. The major worries of motherhood were behind me. My child had survived to adulthood. He was gainfully employed, maybe too well adjusted, kept a cleaner house than me, and could cook better, too.

I taught him all those things. I was a single mom and a working mom, and he was my right-hand man. We were partners. I didn’t raise him; we raised each other, only to find out that the reward for our success was going to be that we wouldn’t need each other anymore. It doesn’t always feel like such a prize to me, but other than that things have been pretty tolerable this past year until today when a stranger mentioned my sister’s name.

Shannon might be alive. I might be able to find her. I should be happy, but I’m not. All I can think about is how sure I was of her death. I’m plagued with the same thoughts I used to have right after she disappeared, when the pain was so powerful it could double me over.

I thought I was going crazy back then. I couldn’t stop reliving her final moments, even though I didn’t know what they were and it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that I knew she would have been afraid, and I wasn’t there to save her.

Her life was over. She was gone. She would never grow up. She would never fall in love. She would never own the pair of red cowboy boots she always wanted. She would never come into my room again and touch all my stuff as she circled around my bed giving me her latest list of grievances against the world. She would never let me cheer her up by taking her to Eatn’Park for a piece of coconut cream pie. She would never bundle Clay into his snowsuit and pull him around the front yard on our old sled. She would never even learn to drive.

I wanted so desperately to believe in heaven. I wanted to picture her someplace beautiful with no cares or concerns, a place where she’d finally have Mom to take care of her, a place where that awful final fear would have been erased and replaced with bliss, but my thoughts kept returning to nothingness. An eternal black abyss.

I never talked to a shrink about any of this. A few of my buddies on the Capitol police force suggested I might want to talk to one when she first disappeared. My lieutenant came pretty close to insisting I see one, but since my job performance wasn’t suffering he didn’t have any right to push it.

I’ve always believed psychology is bullshit. I can still remember all the questions on the psych exam I had to pass in order to get my badge and gun. I couldn’t figure out what the test was supposed to prove other than how well a candidate knew how to give the answers he knew the force wanted whether they were true for him or not.

I lied on a few questions because I knew I had to.

Have you ever been brutalized by a family member or someone close to you? No.

Do you love your father? Yes.

Do you get urges to physically harm others? No.

But everybody lies on a few.

I knew the Neanderthal from Georgia sitting next to me was answering “yes” to “Do you believe in the equality of the sexes?”

And I knew J.T., the ex-Marine sitting on my other side, had to be struggling like hell with the question “Do you like flowers?”

The only one that completely stumped me was “Do you masturbate?”

This was back in the eighties when women were still fairly rare in law enforcement. Especially in the Capitol police. I was the only woman in my rookie class.

We were an elite group. Our job was to protect the nation’s government buildings and our illustrious lawmakers, which made us a federal law enforcement agency. Getting in was no easy feat. The background check alone took six months. They interviewed everyone I’d ever known, including my old elementary school principal, who was kind enough not to mention the Naughty Penis incident. There were eight weeks of intense boot camp. The classes and written exams were more difficult than anything I did in college.

I knew the question about masturbation was directed solely at men, since women weren’t an issue when the test was designed. It was a simple question to determine truthfulness. Any man who answered no was a liar.

But for women it was different. We’re not supposed to masturbate. Fortunately, this part of the exam wasn’t standardized. I had a space where I could write my answer instead of filling in a bubble.

I wrote, “Only when I have to.”

I passed, so I guess they found me sane.

And I’m still sane but my sanity is wearing a little thin today.

I decide to go talk to E.J. He’s much better than any shrink. He doesn’t cost anything, he always provides me with beer, he doesn’t ask any questions, and he doesn’t offer unrealistic advice. His commentary at the end usually consists of “That sucks” and is always dispensed with more beer.

I brush myself off after my tussle with Choker and check my face in the rearview mirror. There’s no damage but I’m going to have a honey of a bruise on my thigh. Probably one on my butt too, which is what I sit on all day to do my job.

I’m a couple miles from E.J.’s house when I come around a bend and find him walking down the side of the road.

I pull up behind him and slow down. He looks over his shoulder, startled at first, then cautious, his look no different than the one my dog gives me from underneath the kitchen table each time I return to the room. There’s no suspicion in it, just an animal wariness based on the primal knowledge that everyone who is not you could be a potential problem.

His eyes are very blue in his pale face. Once summer arrives, he’ll get to see a couple hours of light at the end of each day, but that amount of sun isn’t enough to erase the effects of his subterranean existence. In winter, he doesn’t see any daylight at all during the workweek.

Right now the sky is shouting summer; it’s a flat, bright blue dotted with white clouds whipped into a motionless lather while the land seems to be barely awake.

“Hey,” I greet him.

“Hey,” he says back.

“What are you doing?”

“Walking.”

“I can see that. You walking anyplace in particular?”

I can’t help noticing that I found him at the site of his rescue.

“Back home.”

“Where are you walking from?”

He stops. I stop my car.

“Home,” he says.

“In other words you’re out for a walk.”

“That’s what I said. Where are you going?”

“To see you.”

“I’m not home.”

“Get in the car,” I tell him.

He starts to walk around to the passenger side then stops and watches an SUV coming from the opposite direction. It slows to a stop and parks on the other side of the road about a hundred feet from us.

A woman gets out and closes the door behind her. She smooths out the front of her pleated tan shorts over her pot belly, puts a flattened hand to her eyebrows like a visor, and scans the empty field stretching toward a horizon of low green and gray mountains.

Two children climb slowly out of the backseat and a man gets out from behind the steering wheel, all three of them blinking suspiciously at the sky.

The woman turns and says something to them. The children respond with groans. Their heads loll back on their necks and their arms flop at their sides like they’ve been simultaneously struck dead. The man responds by spreading out a map on the hood of his car.

They’re tourists.

“Shit,” I hear E.J. say.

He’s been spotted by the woman, and she’s identified him as a local. She starts heading toward him, smiling and waving wildly. I know his gut reaction is to run in the opposite direction, but he knows she knows he’s seen her and he’s not a rude man.

He stands his ground and lifts a hand in greeting but doesn’t smile.

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen any strangers out here. The initial swarms of visitors that jammed the road and snapped pictures of each other posing with backhoes and cranes tapered off fairly quickly into a small but steady stream that lasted for a couple months until it became a trickle then dried up to nothing. People no longer come here for the sole purpose of seeing where the rescue took place, but if they’re in the area for some other reason, they sometimes stop by.

“Hello,” she calls out to him.

Her smile broadens as she gets close enough to read the J&P Coal Company logo stitched on his ball cap. She’s definitely a tourist. He watches her approach in amazement. No matter how many he’s dealt with, he still has a hard time believing in their existence. Up until a couple years ago, running into a talking dog out here would have been less surprising than running into someone like this woman.

“I was wondering if you could help me?” she asks him.

He sticks his hands into his jeans pockets and shifts his weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

“I can try,” he replies.

“Are you from around here?” she asks.

“Born and raised.”

She looks at his cap again.

Her facial expression changes from being pleased in general to being pleased with him. He has become more than a potential tour guide; he could turn out to be the tour.

“That’s great,” she gushes.

I look over at her car and notice her family isn’t in any hurry to join her.

“Then I’m sure you can help me. I’m looking for the place where the miners were rescued.”

“You found it,” he says and motions toward the field with a jerk of his head.

She turns her head expectantly, still smiling, and stares out at the field. Two years ago it was turned into a mud pit by tons of earthmoving equipment, drills, and cranes, all of it illuminated twenty-four hours a day by giant spotlights and flash photography, but now there’s nothing exciting or frightening or even slightly unusual about it.

The flat, grassy land is bordered on the south by the road, the north by the hills, and the west by forest. To the east it slopes off into acres of gully. It’s one of the best places to come at night to spot deer.

She turns back to him, obviously disappointed.

What do these people expect to see? I always wonder. What they want is a re-creation, like the rooms in wax museums that show different forms of medieval torture. They want to see the five miners, starving, wet, and shivering with cold, huddled together in a chamber no bigger than a bathroom and half its height, staring blindly and crazily into the impenetrable darkness.

They think they want to experience what those men experienced, even if only for a few moments, but they’re wrong.

“Are you a miner?” she asks him.

“No, ma’am. I just like the cap.”

“Were you around when it happened?”

“No, I wasn’t anywhere around. I don’t know anything more about it than what you saw on TV and read in the newspapers.”

“Oh, I followed every minute of it. I still remember everything about them.”

She begins ticking off their vital statistics like someone reading from a baseball card. The only things missing are their heights and weights.

“There was Lib, 56, the boss of the crew. Married with two grown sons and four grandchildren. He was a Vietnam veteran and you could tell how much all the others respected him. Then there was Jimmy, 58, the oldest one on the crew. His wife was a lovely lady, a schoolteacher. He had that adorable accent and used all those quaint sayings. I’ll always remember him saying to one of the reporters at their first press conference…”

Here she breaks into an attempt at an Irish brogue that sounds like a cross between the Lucky Charms leprechaun and Desi Arnaz.

“…You wouldn’t be trying to soft-soap me, now?” She giggles. “Who uses words like that?”

E.J. glances over his shoulder at me through the windshield and we smile at each other, thinking of some of the other words that only Jimmy uses that wouldn’t have made it past the network censors.

“Then there was Dusty, the youngest one, early twenties, with the skinny wife with the big doe eyes and the newborn baby and those sweet little twin girls. He’d only been working in the mines for two years.

“And Ray. The talkative, friendly one. Late thirties. Married with two teenaged daughters.”

She lowers her voice confidentially.

“His wife was a piece of work. She managed to get herself into every interview. A big lady and always dressed to the nines. My husband said she looked like a drag queen going to a hoedown.”

She laughs.

“And last but not least Jimmy’s son, E.J. Good-looking. Never been married. Strong, silent type. Hardly said a word.”

“Sounds like you collected the entire set of Trapped Miner Trading Cards,” E.J. comments.

“I never saw those,” she says seriously, then after a moment smiles knowingly at him. “You’re joking with me, aren’t you?”

He admits that he is with a nod of his head.

She puts her hand back up to her forehead like she did earlier and peers out at the field again.

“Is there a statue near the hole?”

“No.”

“A plaque?”

He shakes his head.

“Well, there should be,” she says indignantly.

He doesn’t bother telling her that everyone around here agrees that there should be something to mark the spot but no one can agree on what it should be or who should pay for it; while everyone else argued, Nature immediately reclaimed it with grass and weeds.

“Can we walk out there?” she asks.

“Sure.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Only during hunting season.”

She gives him a questioning tilt of her head.

“You might get shot,” he explains.

“Oh,” she says.

Before she can ask him anything else, he mutters something about being expected somewhere and jumps into my car.

We leave her in our dust.

         

E.J. LIVES IN A SMALL white ranch house set back from the road at the top of a steep gravel driveway. Structurally the house is well cared for but the premises lack any decorative touches. No landscaping to speak of. No flowers. No lawn ornaments. No curtains on the windows.

A detached garage invisible from the road sits behind the house. His old brown Dodge Ram pickup is parked in front of it with the hood open. A few tools are scattered about. He must have been working on it again before he went on his walk.

I park behind the truck.

He gets out and heads straight to the garage.

Before I follow him, I open my glove compartment and take out a bottle of Advil and dry-swallow a couple capsules. I’m starting to hurt after my fight with Choker.

I find him bent over with his head and torso hidden behind an open refrigerator door and one dirty hand clutching the door handle. The mother in me wants to scold him for wasting electricity and letting all the cold air out. I also want to tell him he needs to do a better job of washing his hands, but I don’t say anything.

His decision made—the choices are beer, beer, and beer—he steps back, holding a beer in one hand, and closes the door with a slam, leaving a set of motor oil fingerprints behind to mark his territory.

When he remembers me, he reaches back into the fridge and tosses me a can, too.

I snap it open and beer gushes all over my hand. I look around for a roll of paper towels or something to wipe it off with. I don’t see anything.

“Use the finger,” he says, gesturing toward a giant yellow foam WE ARE NUMBER ONE finger from a Steelers game.

It’s covered in fingerprints, too, and dotted with hardened stains and flecks of dried foodstuffs. A few chunks of foam are missing, like someone has taken a couple bites out of it.

“I’ll pass,” I tell him.

I pull up a lawn chair and take a seat. The garage is his pride and joy and much homier than the house. He built it himself and has pictures of it in various stages of construction tacked to the back of his workbench the same way my dad used to display baby pictures of me and Shannon.

He has an old couch out here and a small TV. His J&P baseball team cap and jersey hang on a nail and a deodorant stick sits on a shelf between a pair of jumper cables and a flashlight. In amongst a couple Ball jars of random nails and screws is a pair of photos in attached frames that close like a book. His mom just gave them to him: one is his parents’ original wedding photo and the other was taken at their fortieth anniversary celebration last month.

Reading material consists of copies of Field & Stream, a few Victoria’s Secret catalogs he’s snagged from a girlfriend’s place, and a few hardcover novels in cracked, discolored, plastic library dust jackets, which I’m willing to bet are several years overdue.

He has a makeshift kitchen set up on a card table next to the fridge that consists of a few mismatched plates and bowls, a battered coffee maker, and a George Foreman grill I got him for Christmas. He loves the grill so much he named it. He calls it George.

He keeps his dinner bucket and thermos on the table, too, and I can’t stop looking at them.

I have no idea how he’s been able to go back into the mines after what happened to him, but I guess car crash survivors get back into cars, and injured soldiers go back into battle, and abused women sleep with their abusers.

I know how hard it would be for him to quit. I know how much he loves running the continuous miner, the sixty-ton cutting machine that’s replaced the manual jobs of undercutting and blasting that the miners of the past used to do. The machine is a wonder, according to E.J., but like most miners who have been around for awhile, he had mixed feelings about it when the company first started using it because it did the work of at least fifty men, which meant those fifty men lost their jobs.

He’s told me there’s nothing in life that thrills him as much as the sight and feel of the miner’s gigantic steel cutter head ripping into the coal face, its dozens of carbide teeth chewing up the wall of rock with the same ease as an electric knife carving through a rump roast.

Part of the rush comes purely from the power he feels while guiding it, but I’m sure another part comes from pride. He’s one of the best operators in the business. With him at the controls, the massive machine moves cleanly and efficiently. No one—including Lib—can match his speed or get as much coal out of a cut with as little movement.

But even knowing how much he loves it, I still don’t understand how he went back.

I still have the occasional nightmare where I wake up clammy and cotton-mouthed thinking I’m still standing numbly and helplessly on the hillside overlooking the rescue site wondering if I should be praying that he’s still alive or that he died instantly.

I can’t imagine what kind of nightmares he has.

I take a gulp of my beer.

“You want George to make you a burger?” he asks as he pulls up his own lawn chair.

“Not right now. Maybe later.”

I look around for a diversion. I want to talk to him. I need to talk. But I’m not anxious to begin.

I spot yesterday’s newspaper sitting on top of a stack of papers in his bright orange recycle bin.

“So you guys actually went through with it,” I comment, referring to the front-page story about the Jolly Mount Five suing J&P Coal. “It’s all anybody’s talking about.”

He glances over at the paper too, and his face puckers like he’s just heard a bad joke.

“We filed the papers. Whatever the hell that means. Now we’re waiting to see what he does next.”

The way he says “he” I know he can only be referring to God or Cam Jack.

My mind flashes to the visit he paid the miners in the hospital the day after their rescue. It was unannounced and a complete surprise since he had never bothered to show up while they were trapped.

He went to their rooms one after the other. Suddenly there he’d be standing in a hospital room doorway: Cam Jack himself in a fine dark suit with a pristine white shirt, a steel-gray tie the same color as his slicked-back hair, and an American flag tie clip, looking hale and hearty despite his own recent hospitalizations and the rumors flying around about his failing health.

He proclaimed that he didn’t give a good goddamn about hospital policy and being politically correct and gave them all boxes of cigars and bottles of whiskey.

He called them “my boys” and even though that term would have caused all of them to bristle if he had used it a week earlier or a month later, at the time they didn’t seem to mind. There was nothing like a successful rescue mission to soothe the tensions between the foot soldiers and the top brass, especially when the big man himself showed up brimming with praise and bearing gifts.

He pulled up a chair, settled his bulk into it, and talked to them about their grandfathers and their dads and their uncles. How his own dad always said those boys up in Jolly Mount were the toughest, most dependable miners on God’s green earth. He used to say he’d give four of his Marvella miners for just one working Josephine.

He knew the old man watched the whole rescue from his seat up there in heaven. He may have even had something to do with them getting out alive. And you can be sure he was damn proud of them. Lesser men would have given up. Lesser men would have gone nuts.

Personally, he never doubted that they were going to come out of it alive, either. He understood them. They were cut from the same cloth. They were from the same place. They were in the same business, and they were proud of what they did. Outsiders didn’t always understand. Hell, he couldn’t tell them how many times he had to defend himself and his family to other rich people because the Jacks made their first fortune in coal. Like that made him dirty or something. Like money made from owning hotels or selling wrinkle cream was somehow superior. Money was money and he had enough to live anywhere he wanted to but he lived in Centresburg, PA, goddammit. This was his home, too.

I was visiting E.J. when I heard him coming down the hall to his room. I ran and hid in the john. I hadn’t seen Cam Jack in the flesh for over twenty years.

“You don’t sound too excited about it,” I tell E.J.

“Dusty and Lib and Ray all want to do it,” he answers, hoping I won’t notice that he’s avoiding telling me what he thinks about it. “Dusty’s desperate for the money since his restaurant went belly-up. He doesn’t care where the hell it comes from or why he’s getting it. Ray’s got a family. He needs the money too, plus he’ll go along with anything Lib says, and Lib says if a jury of our peers thinks we should have some of Cam Jack’s billions then why shouldn’t we?”

“He’s got a point,” I reply. “But I don’t get how this works. The investigation’s been over for almost a year now and J&P’s in the clear.”

E.J.’s pucker becomes more pucked.

“According to our lawyer,” he begins to explain, “the results of the investigation don’t matter in civil court. We don’t have to prove anything. All that matters is everybody knows what an asshole Cam Jack is. How bad his mines are. How many safety violations have been cited against him. How everybody knows the explosion in Beverly was his fault too, even though nobody could hang it on him. He says we don’t need any proof at all. All we need to do is get up on the stand and tell what it was like to be buried alive for four days. All we need is a sympathetic jury.”

I nod my understanding.

“I know your dad’s against it,” I add.

He smiles.

“He really got into it the other night with Lib. My dad said”—here he breaks into a perfect impression of Jimmy’s brogue—“‘You’re a grown man, Lib. No one put a gun to your head and chose your job for you. It was your choice, and every day you went to work you knew there was a chance you’d die. So I say it’s your fault. Sue your bloody self.’”

“And you agree with him?”

“All I know is miners don’t sue coal companies.”

“Why not? Everybody sues everybody nowadays. Why shouldn’t you?”

“Everybody’s looking to get something for nothing.”

“This wouldn’t be for nothing. The money would be for—”

“For what?” he interrupts me. “Waiting to die? How much is that worth in dollars?”

He gets up from his seat and heads to the fridge for another beer.

“I don’t want his money,” he says. “I work for my money. Plus I got enough money from the book deal and that idiotic TV movie.”

I know he’s sincere. I also know he wouldn’t get any personal satisfaction from beating Cam Jack in a courtroom. To a guy like E.J., there’s something innately cowardly about hiding behind checkbooks and lawyers and legalese. Beating Cam Jack on the ball field or in a game of pool would be appealing, but court means nothing to him.

He realizes a judge and jury can’t fix what he considers to be wrong with the man. His stinginess, his carelessness, his lack of appreciation for the company his dad gave him almost led to the destruction of the mine where E.J. worked. I think this bothers E.J. even more than the fact that he almost died. The threats to his physical well-being are a hazard of the profession that he accepted when he took the job, but the treatment of the mine and the equipment he can’t forgive. What kind of man doesn’t take care of his own stuff?

“What do you want?” I ask him.

I hear the refrigerator door slam behind me and the snap of a beer can being opened.

“I want my old life back.”

I glance around his garage. Anyone who didn’t know him the way I do would find his comment funny. The surface of his life now compared to his life before the accident is exactly the same. He has the same job. Lives in the same house. Goes to the same bar. He didn’t buy a new truck or a bigger TV or a better mower. He didn’t get a new wardrobe or a new philosophy on life or start eating new foods and drinking new beer.

He told me it would have been an affront to the life he had prayed so hard to keep if he changed anything about it after he was allowed to keep it. But something did change that was beyond his control. Something inside himself. I know the feeling. Survival is a great thing, but the knowledge of what you survived never goes away; you can’t escape from yourself.

“I think Shannon’s alive,” I blurt out.

“What?” he says and comes walking back to his lawn chair. “Are you serious?”

I nod. I can’t say anything more at first and E.J. doesn’t pry.

When I feel properly composed, I tell him all about Gerald Kozlowski.

He doesn’t say anything at first. He just stares at a grease stain on the cement floor.

“Have you told my mom?” is the first thing he asks.

“No. You’re the first one I’ve told.”

“You’ve got to tell her. Shannon was like her own kid. So were you.”

I know he’s right. Isabel took care of Shannon during the years before she was old enough for a full day of school. She quit her job teaching and sacrificed a second income that her own family could have used in order to babysit for the child of a man who never showed any gratitude. When I was a child myself, I simply regarded all of this as some more nice stuff these nice people felt compelled to do for us because of a combination of their niceness and our desperate situation.

It wasn’t until I became an adult and raised a child of my own that I understood the rareness and the enormity of their generosity, and how niceness had little to do with it. Isabel and Jimmy had been motivated by anger and outrage; they had been on a mission to save us.

But all of this aside, I don’t like E.J.’s tone. He’s lecturing me.

“What was I supposed to do? Quit school when I was six years old to stay home with my motherless baby sister? I didn’t have a choice. I watched her as soon as I got home. I took care of her at night and on weekends.”

“Stop it, Shae-Lynn,” he says roughly. “Everything in life isn’t a competition. I’m not saying you didn’t take care of your sister, and I’m not saying my mom took better care of her. I’m just saying my mom and dad should know about this.”

“I was planning on telling them when I know more. Nothing’s for sure yet.”

“What do you mean, nothing’s for sure? This lawyer from New York is looking for her in her hometown. He said he knows this is her hometown. That means he knows her. She’s alive.”

We both fall silent as we let this fact sink in.

“So what are you going to do?” he asks me.

“I don’t know. Maybe I should help him find her.”

“You sure you want to find her?”

“What kind of question is that?”

He gets up from his chair and starts pacing.

“Personally, I’m pissed as hell at her. My mom almost died from grief when she disappeared. So did you. Have you forgotten all that? What she put you through? What she put us all through? Here all along she’s been fine and she never tried to contact any of us. You’re gonna forgive all that?”

“We don’t know she’s been fine,” I tell him. “We don’t even know she left on her own. Maybe she was abducted.”

“Abducted? In Jolly Mount? And then I suppose she was taken away and tortured and brainwashed?”

“It happens.”

“It’s been eighteen years. She never tried to contact you once. You’re telling me she was tortured and brainwashed for eighteen years?”

He stops in front of me.

“How does this guy know her?”

“I didn’t ask him. I was too shocked. I couldn’t think straight.”

“And you didn’t tell him you’re her sister and she’s been gone all these years?”

“No. I didn’t want him to know I knew her. I don’t know why. It was a feeling I had. I don’t trust him. I’m not sure I want him to find her. I’m not sure it would be good for her if he did.”

I stand up, too. Talking is not helping. It’s making me feel worse. He’s bringing up too many things I don’t want to think about.

“I’ll get more information out of him later when I see him again tonight,” I tell E.J.

“You’re seeing him tonight? You planning to screw it out of him?”

I take a step closer until the tips of my breasts are almost brushing against his chest.

“Don’t start on me. You’re one to talk. You’re the biggest slut I know.”

“Men can’t be sluts.”

“Then you’re a pig.”

“I’m a stud.”

“You’re an ass.

“It’s a disgusting double standard,” I think to add.

He smiles and takes a swallow of beer.

“It’s a great double standard.”

We’re almost touching. A few inches more and I’d be able to feel the hard denim of his fly push against my belly. The thought makes me think back to when I was first starting to want him. We were still kids and the sight of the newly developing muscles in his arms and back when he’d go shirtless became so magnetic to me that I found myself looking for any opportunity to brush up against him without knowing exactly why, only that any physical contact with him sent a thrill through my body that would lodge between my legs and make me want to get back on my bike, clamp the banana seat tightly between my thighs, and ride down a particularly bumpy hill.

The feeling wasn’t mutual, though. At around the same time, he started hanging out less and less with me. He stopped talking to me at school. Eventually, he was never home when I called or stopped by his house.

I couldn’t figure out what had happened. The only explanation I could come up with was to blame my breasts. The equation appeared fairly straightforward: We were best friends, then I got breasts, then we weren’t friends anymore.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in breasts. He was definitely interested. Just not in mine.

I used to sit in the bathtub, crying, trying to scrub them off with a washcloth until my skin was almost raw.

I know it didn’t make sense. I should have been happy. I had a great figure; I was suddenly pretty, something all girls were supposed to want. But the way I saw it the only thing my new body did was attract a lot of attention from guys I didn’t like and cause me to lose the one guy I did.

My cell phone rings.

I pull it out of my pocket and walk away from him.

“Jolly Mount Cab,” I answer.

“Hi, Mom. I have a favor to ask. Actually, it’s more of a job. I think I can trust you with it.”

“Hi, honey. I’m fine. No broken bones. No missing teeth. Thanks for asking.”

“Mom,” he sighs, “I know you started it. You can’t expect sympathy.”

“What’s the job?” I ask him.

“I need you to drive out to Pine Mills and help a woman change a flat tire. I’m not going to do it. It’s beneath me.”

“And it’s not beneath me?”

“You drive a cab. I’m an officer of the law.”

I love this kid. The things that come out of his mouth. When he was six, he wouldn’t eat pie a la mode because ice cream and pie were both desserts and he insisted that eating them at the same time would be a conflict of interests.

“Well, yes, of course. No one should expect an officer of the law to change a tire,” I reply, doing my best imitation of Inspector Clouseau so “law” comes out sounding like “loo.”

“It’s not my job. If she was a different kind of person I’d do it regardless, but I think it’s important to teach her some respect for the profession. She has a bit of an attitude.”

“What kind of attitude?”

“The kind that would lead someone to think having a flat tire merits a 911 call.”

“Why didn’t the operator tell her to get bent?”

“She was hysterical during the call and said there had been a fatality.”

“She lied and said someone was dead in order to get a cop to change her tire?” I ask incredulously.

“Someone is dead. A groundhog. She hit a groundhog.”

I can’t help laughing.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No, I’m not. Fortunately, I was in the area so I got here fairly quickly and was able to radio back in time to keep the state police and the fire department from wasting their time coming out.”

“So why are you calling me? Why not Mack’s or some other garage?”

“I thought you could use the money.”

“I can charge her?”

“Charge her an arm and a leg.”

“You’re still thinking about health insurance, aren’t you?”

“Gotta go.”

I look back at E.J. He’s gazing out the open garage door.

The first time I saw him after the rescue was in the hospital corridor. He was wearing a hospital gown and slippers that looked as ridiculous on him as a circus tutu on a bear. His left arm was in a cast, and his left hand was bandaged.

He’d been bathed and shaved and given a haircut, but nothing could be done to get rid of the hollowness in his cheeks or the ghostly pale of his skin. His face was covered with dozens of tiny brown cuts and purple bruises that made him look like he had a strange rash or a bizarre batch of freckles.

He smelled of smoke and it was instantly obvious to me that he had snuck somewhere to have a cigarette and now he was heading back to his room. I couldn’t figure out how he had been able to do it with all the nurses checking on him constantly and all the reporters congregated at every exit.

He stared at me. His pupils were still dilated, and his shock and confusion over being alive were still evident in his eyes, making them appear wild and haunted one moment and as depthless and motionless as pools of night water the next.

He still gets that look sometimes. He has it right now.

He catches me watching him and picks up the first available object as a distraction, which happens to be the photos of his folks.

I always loved my own parents’ wedding photo. My mom looked ethereal in her white lace and gauze. Dad looked awkward and too big in his rented tux, but he wore the defiance of youth and the triumph of capturing a pretty girl better than anyone else I’ve ever seen.

I was around ten years old when I got up the nerve to ask him if I could have the picture when he died instead of him giving it to Shannon.

He gave me a suspicious, startled look. I knew it didn’t have anything to do with the photo. He just didn’t like me figuring out he wasn’t going to live forever.