Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,40

aboveboard. Let’s not hurt anyone we don’t have to.”

Georgie hung up. He went downstairs and watched television with his mother, until she turned it off and looked at him.

“You know I watch the news during my break at the hospital,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” said Georgie. “They’re not still shortchanging you on your break time, are they?”

“Don’t change the subject. Other day I coulda swore I saw Esther on TV. Channel 9. All dressed up like some hoochie princess, and talking about her daddy, who was in the army.”

“Small world,” said Georgie. “A lot of coincidences.”

But it was a lie, about the world being small. It was big enough. By the time he drove to Lanae’s house the next morning, there was a small crowd of reporters outside. They didn’t even notice him pull up. Kenny kept opening the door, telling them they had the wrong house. Finally, he had to go to work, walked out in his uniform. Flashbulbs snapped.

“Are you the one who encouraged the child to lie, or does the mother have another boyfriend?” yelled one reporter.

Georgie couldn’t hear what Kenny said back, but for the first time in his life, Georgie thought Kenny looked brave.

“Did you do this for the money?” yelled another. “Was this the child’s idea?”

All day, it was like that. Long after Kenny had left, the reporters hung out on the front steps, broadcasting to each other. Lanae had already given back the tickets; beyond that, she had given no comment. He could imagine the face she made when she refused to comment, the steely eyes, the way everything about her could freeze.

“How,” the reporters wanted to know, “did this happen?”

Their smugness made him angry. There were so many things they could never understand about how, so many explanations they’ve never bothered to demand. How could it not have happened?

At night, when no one had opened the door for hours, the reporters trickled off one by one, their questions still unanswered. Lanae must have taken the day off from work: her car was still in its parking space, the lights in the house still on. Finally, he made his way to the house and rang the doorbell. She was at the peephole in an instant. She left the chain on and opened the door as wide as it could go without releasing it.

“Georgie,” she said. She shook her head, then leaned her forehead against the edge of the door so that just her eyeball was looking at his. “Georgie, go away.”

“Lanae,” he said. “You know I didn’t mean it to go like this.”

“Georgie, my five-year-old’s been crying all day. My phone number, here and at my job, is on the Internet. People from Iowa to goddamn Denmark have been calling my house all day, calling my baby a liar and a little bitch. She’s confused. You’re confused. I think you need to go for a while.”

“Where?” he asked.

He waited there on the front step until she’d turned her head from his, stepped back into the house, and squeezed the door shut. He kept standing there, long after the porch light went off, not so much making an argument as waiting for an answer.

The King of a Vast Empire

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, my sister called to tell me she’d decided to be an elephant trainer. At first, the only thing I could think of elephants being trained for was the circus, which we had never been to as kids, so I pictured cartoon elephants balancing on giant plastic beach balls, like in Dumbo. I thought for a second that Liddie was dropping out of school altogether to wear sparkly spandex and chase them around with a baton, which seemed unlikely on any number of counts. My sister liked college, had once been banned from the local Fluff N Stuff pet boutique for trying to liberate a show poodle, and hadn’t been near a stage since she quit dance school, in the sixth grade, after calling its photo display of smiling ballerinas the hall of kiddie porn for voyeurs without the balls to be real pedophiles, in front of the academy’s male director. Liddie was not running off to join the circus. What she actually had in mind was working at some kind of conservatory for elephants with post-traumatic stress syndrome.

“Elephants experience trauma the way humans do,” she informed me. “They’re fascinating animals.”

“Humans aren’t that fascinating,” I said.

What was happening with me right then was, the first woman I’d been with for longer than a year had