that Josie, I thought, breathing heavy into the microphone, taking a step to investigate the crime scene. Carl never took that photo off the mirror. Said it caused too many fingerprints. Didn’t want to lose it. Insisted it be in the one place he could see from every corner of the room.
On my next step forward, the phone cord ran out of length, causing me to stop hard, causing me to look down. There, I spotted something that made me stop breathing altogether.
Bates said, “Who is this? I can hear you. I swear to God if this is—”
I cupped the receiver to mute his voice and turned in a slow circle. At my feet, bits of photo paper littered the floor, scattered like bird shot. I looked to Carl, stunned, and in his loose grip was what remained: sweet Jenny, looking the same as always—wearing a shapeless two-piece suit, corsage at her breast, smile on her lips—only now she had part of her arm torn off.
I couldn’t believe it. He’d lost his damn mind. There was no other explanation. Not for this, or for wishing himself dead. None of this behavior fit him.
But then again, what did I know anymore? He’d kept so much from me. Too much. I had no way to gauge how thin his edge between self-loathing and self-harm was, and I stood there considering it until the off-the-hook howler tone beat against my palm. Then I hung up with only one good option: I had to gauge his edge by imagining it was the same as mine.
With this measuring stick, I had an amended to-do list, and no time to do it. I bent over, sucking in a shriek of pain, and collected every last piece of ripped picture off the floor. Then I walked to the dresser, hands shaking, put the little pile to the side, and set about writing Carl a note. A few scratched words on the back of the order slip: Walmart. Josie joined. Be back.
The curled tape from the photo still hung on the mirror, so I pressed my message to it. From there, I pulled my sock drawer open, swept the unmatched ones out of the way, and uncovered the tin cigar box where I kept my dog tags, my fake Rolex, and my father’s old Smith & Wesson pocket pistol—a two-inch-barrel .38 hammerless, which shot tried and true as long as the target was no farther than across a poker table.
Firearms were frowned upon here, obviously, but I’d cataloged it as an antique keepsake. People seemed to believe its age devalued its purpose. I witnessed my father shoot it only once, up in the air, when we won World War II, and I’d shot it a few times at a range. He’d called it his “lemon squeezer.” Carl called it a memento. I called it my life insurance.
Very funny, Carl had said. And it was, wasn’t it? But then again, it wasn’t, because he didn’t know how many decades I’d hung on to a single cartridge for a single selfish purpose. And he didn’t know there was a shameful number of times I really thought about using it—long before this place, before him, before I’d managed to carve out this late-in-life contentment.
Nowadays, notions like that sounded like a foreign language to me. Pure gibberish. Imagining them coming from Carl’s head was even more disorienting, like no language at all. More of a banshee scream. It was absurd to think he’d help himself to my gun while I was gone, and yet . . .
The clock above our door ticked away. The bus departed in three minutes—the time it would take me to schlep to the foyer. I peeked over my shoulder at Carl, then slid the cartridge out of the gun cylinder. The cold metal case chilled my fingertips and sent my heart rate to the sky. It was strange that such a small thing could do so much damage, that we should fear or flaunt it like we do—or that it should be such a relief to have it in my pocket. But it was, and after I slipped the revolver back in the tin, along with the bits of photo, and closed the drawer, I felt safe—which in my opinion was a hell of