as they hit the puddles in the muddy courtyard. As always, Chloe is wearing the wrong clothes, nothing but a jean jacket. The cardboard poster cylinder she has under her arm is getting wet, and she makes a show of pulling together the top of the food bag.
“Your dinner’s going to be soggy.” She smiles at Penny, waiting.
Then Jason appears, a head taller than Penny, and yanks the apartment door open.
“Jesus, Pen, you leave her out in the rain?” He jerks Penny out of the way so Chloe can duck inside. The apartment reeks of cigarette smoke and mold, dark spores collecting in the corner of the popcorn ceiling overhead.
A couple sits at the folding table in the kitchenette. She looks sixteen, crack-skinny, yellowish, pimpled complexion, the marks of meth around her mouth, and when she turns to Chloe her eyes don’t focus. The man—he’s older—takes the cigarette out of her hand, taps the dangling burn of ash into a Pepsi can, and takes a drag. He has dark hair pulled in a low ponytail, and he gives Chloe the long up-down, his black-hole eyes unblinking.
“That’s my brother Lisle,” Jason says smoothly. He does not introduce the girl. Jason is so tall he has to duck under the crooked brass light fixture in the entry, two bulbs burned out. “This is a friend of ours, brought us some dinner.”
“Thought Penny said she was a social worker.” Jason’s brother hasn’t broken his stare, just moved it to the bag of food in Chloe’s hands. He draws on the cigarette, blows smoke in his girl’s face. She blinks, slowly.
Jason doesn’t answer, and Chloe doesn’t either. Confidentiality, she thinks. She moves to the table, clears a space among coupon flyers, chipped saucer ashtrays, ketchup packets, and empty soda cans, and puts the Fred Meyer bag down.
“You might need to reheat the side dishes,” she says, and then notices there’s no microwave. “I sat in traffic forever. You wouldn’t think, on a holiday…”
And then Chloe sees it. It’s right there in the corner of the living room, and she feels their eyes on her as she looks at it. A bassinet; the kind that comes from Kmart, with scratchy white eyelet fabric cut cheaply and stretched awkwardly over a plastic frame. In the bassinet there’s a stuffed green bunny rabbit, its painted eyes fixed stupidly on the ceiling.
“What’s that?” Jason gestures at the cardboard tube still jammed under her arm.
“Oh, it’s nothing. I just remember the other day you guys said that this place didn’t feel like home, so I brought you some posters.”
They are old posters, ones that didn’t fit with Chloe’s scheme for her house when she decorated—she now has nothing but black-and-white photography, mostly Dan’s but some Helmut Newton, a few attempts of her own, the framed U2 Joshua Tree poster that has moved everywhere with her since high school. Chloe had decided that in Portland, she and Dan would paint the rooms bright colors but let the art mimic the weather: stark contrasts of black, white, and gray.
“I mean, you don’t have to put them up. I just thought anything is better than bare walls.”
Jason takes the tube, pops the end off. Inside there are two posters: a reprint of Goya’s Gatos Riñendo, something she bought at the Prado’s gift shop when she was in Madrid three years earlier. The other is a dizzying photograph of the Palio, the horse race around the Piazza del Campo in Siena, where the towns people line the walls of the city center with their mattresses to protect horses and riders in the brutal dash to the finish. Since they left Spain two years ago, Chloe has wanted to go back, visit their old friends in Tarifa, and travel north to Siena for the Palio, but there have been babies due, adoptions to arrange, and summer is Dan’s busy biking season anyway.
While Jason unfurls the posters on the orange shag carpet, Chloe takes a moment to inventory the apartment. Just the bassinet, and over by the edge of the sofa, next to a carton of Kools and a jumbo bag of sour cream and onion potato chips, there is a case of store-brand diapers, size N for newborn.
There is an exchange; Penny says something to Jason Chloe can’t hear.
“Let me handle it!” Jason hisses.
“Pardon?” Chloe asks; she should know now, if it’s all falling apart.
“I said, you better get on home. Roads are always dangerous on holidays.”