her mother’s many gifts, it seems, is taking her own shitty feelings and passing them along to other people like the way you’d hand off a football or give someone else the flu. Arlene continues: “It’s all right. I’ve got it figured out. I’m going to start my own business, be my own boss. You’ll see. For now I need to…” It’s like she’s searching for the word. Then she finds it: “Ruminate upon it. Have a cigarette. Maybe a beer. And go sink into a nice hot bath.”
And like that Arlene is gone, walking her way up the steps.
But she calls out behind her—
“Hey! There’s something on the front porch for you. A package.”
Soon Atlanta hears the pipes complain as Mama starts filling a tub. Atlanta heads outside.
Out there, she finds a wicker basket wrapped in red cellophane like a Christmas present that time-traveled to this warm and dry June evening. Inside are meats and cheeses and crackers and cookies. Summer sausage in their tubes, a brick of sharp cheddar, butter crackers and sugar cookies and more.
A little tag dangles from the arch of the basket’s handle. Atlanta plucks it like a crabapple and flips it open:
“I’m sorry. I’ll help. –Shane.”
Atlanta smiles.
It’s a small smile, sure, but right now even the tiniest curl to her lips is a bright light in a very dark space.
* * *
Next day at the little grungy café in the middle of town Atlanta sits across from Shane and tells him everything, which feels good. There’s comfort in purging all this horrible stuff she’s been keeping stored up inside her.
Waitress brings her an iced tea and as she talks, Atlanta upends a small dumptruck’s worth of white sugar into it. Shane watches her over a coffee so black it might as well have been ink poured out of a squid’s behind. At the end of it, after he noisily sips the too-hot coffee, he blinks and says, “That sucks.”
Two words, so simple, and so true. It does suck. All of it sucks.
She pops the straw in her mouth, sucks up some tea. Still not sweet enough. They do not know how to make iced tea up here, she thinks. Glass of cold tea down South is like liquid crack. A glass of iced diabetes, and oh-so-tasty.
More sugar, then. It whispers as it hits the tea and sinks past the ice.
“So what do we do?”
“Well,” she says, “that’s why I need you. You’re smarter than me, plain and simple. If I figure anything out it’s because I’m lucky. If you figure it out it’s because you’re smart.”
“That’s not true. You’re plenty smart.”
“I’m not saying I’m a dipshit or anything. But you might be shorter than me physically, but you’re taller than me if you figure your brain into the equation. Let’s just leave it at that.” She sips at the tea. Feels the sugar eating into her teeth—kind of a tingly sensation. Perfect. “That’s why I need you. I’ll pay you for your brain.”
“You don’t have to pay.”
“No, I want to. Oh. Thanks for the basket of meat.”
“It had cheese and other stuff in it, too.”
“Yeah, but really, it’s the meat. Meat is so good. I do not understand how someone can be a vegetarian.” She blinks and when she does behind her eyes she sees images from yesterday’s Google search—dogs with abraded faces and rope burns like the ones on Sailor the terrier and open infected wounds. The thought of meat suddenly flips her stomach. She knows they’re not the same thing in her head but her heart and gut don’t care right now. She blanches and in a moment of clarity understands vegetarianism like a meat-eating Saul on the road fo Damascus. “Anyway uh, I’m sure the cookies and crackers are good too. So where do we start?”
“We gotta figure out where Bodie and Bird are at. They’ll show us who needs to pay, right? I mean, unless it’s them.”
“Sounds right.”
“How will you make them pay?”
“Jenny didn’t say what to do.”
“So it’s up to you.”
Atlanta shrugs.
“Whaddya gonna do to them?”
She clears her throat. “I don’t really know yet. Right now I just want to find ‘em. I didn’t see them in the phonebook at home. The Cooch said they were home-schooled so it’s not like they’re in school records or anything. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen ‘em.”
“So we’re up the creek.”
“Well, hold on, now, because here’s our resident expert—“ Coming in through the front door is Chomp-Chomp, messy hair in his