Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,7
keeping an eye on me, and I remembered ignoring them as I tried to figure out, at five years old, my next step in emancipation. I’d done a lot of pacing on the porch until Gard came out with a bag of boiled peanuts. He didn’t say anything. He was three years older, so if he’d said anything to me, it would have been scripture. But he didn’t say anything. He just sat in one of the rocking chairs, and after a while I sat down too, and then he took some of the boiled peanuts and started working on them, and then I started working on them too, and when the peanuts were gone he said we should go inside, and we did. I don’t even remember why I’d wanted to run away.
But Gard was a black hole in my head now. And so were my parents. They weren’t triggers or anything like that—they were just gone. I could trace their absence the same way scientists studied black holes: the absences of something that should have been there, the gravitational pull of something I couldn’t see. They were dead; I guess it’s easy enough to say it that way. They were dead. Now, I ate boiled peanuts when I went to the cemetery.
My Uber finally arrived, a Ford Escape that looked brand new and was one of the nicer trims, leather, the works. My driver was Jerome, young—probably my age, but Christ, on someone else that looked really young—with a skin fade and bleached tips. He liked to talk, make jokes. He had this really deep laugh. Once or twice, I caught him looking at me in the rearview mirror, and I considered it. Richard had insisted on an open relationship, insisted being the key word. Against my objections. Against all my protesting that I didn’t care that he was older, didn’t care that he was worried I hadn’t dated enough. Richard had insisted. So I thought about letting Jerome drive me somewhere else. I thought about what it would feel like to take a drink from his hand, our fingers brushing. I thought about what it would feel like if he was standing behind me, his breath hot on my neck, a hand wandering down my chest. It was a game I played sometimes. I’d run the story all the way out, just to see. I used to be able to feel a flush in the hollow of my neck. I used to hear my heart hammering in my ears. I used to be able to throw a little wood now and then.
“Hey,” Jerome said when he pulled up in front of Ray’s building. “I don’t usually do this, but—”
I slid out of the car, shut the door, and tipped him on the app. For a moment, the Escape idled at the curb, and I thought Jerome might do something really stupid like buzz down a window. After another moment, though, the Escape pulled away. He had one of those LED Uber signs in the back window, and it clicked on as he turned at the next corner.
Ray lived in Moulinbas, which was the older and seedier side of Bragg. In many ways, it could have passed for the rougher sister of New Orleans’ French Quarter: narrow streets of Creole townhouses with painted brick, cast-iron balconies, and steeply pitched roofs. The glass was old and thick and wavy where it hadn’t been replaced; the October sun glinted off the dormers set high on the townhouses. In many ways, Moulinbas catered to the same general population as the French Quarter. Many of the townhouses had been converted into bars and restaurants; others held shops selling souvenirs, or offering day trips, or spa treatments, or manicures. There were even a few herbal supplement stores that offered a convenient place to get weed, and I thought about buying some just to see how Richard would react. In the end, I decided not to; I was afraid I would get Worried Patience when what I wanted was hissing-cat fury.
Some of the townhouses still had apartments and residences on the upper floors; Ray lived in one of the half-story apartments in the building in front of me. I had visited a few times because Ray was easy to talk to, easy to be quiet around, and an easy escape from that beautiful, bipolar house. I’d always been irritated by the low ceilings in the half-story unit, although the dormer windows offered a beautiful