Self-Portrait at Twenty-Eight Years Old Wearing a Coat with Fur Collar by Albrecht Durer circa 1500

I bought my brother Davey a winter coat when he was sober, finishing his long interrupted college degree, and staying on his anti-psychotic medications.  David, I mean. He’s forty-five, not a kid any longer.  He stayed sober and sane for the past six years.  Something changed. A hormone shifted. One of his pills worked too little. Or it worked too much. Some hand of fate loosened its grip, or, grabbed tight, and he was drinking again, calling at 3 a.m., telling me what the feral cats were telling him, fighting with his psychiatrist, fighting with our mother, filling his credit cards with purchases and returns and re-purchases and re-returns of iPads, laptops, and the Oxford English Dictionary, twenty volumes, delivered who knows where. He gave away or threw away or somehow lost his winter coat.

After a stay at detox and then a psychiatric hospital, Davey is living with our mother and reading the copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations that he asked me to get him for Christmas. Written nearly two thousand years ago, Meditations is the thoughts of a Roman Emperor on accepting duty, service and other things, like fate, that I don’t worry about given that I’m busy in the world of law, intellectual property, and money.  Davey’s resigned to circumstances; I make my own life.

“Bad job on the translation,” he says over cheese omelets our mother cooked. He wears a white wool sweater and jeans that are Christmas presents from our mother—from me, since I gave mom the money. Davey’s voice sounds as if he borrowed it from a stranger. He looks unfamiliar; but it’s been three years since I’ve seen him, and I’m tired from the cross-country flight. Davey and I still have the red hair and freckles of my mother’s side of the family. We’re both thin, but at 5’7” I’m taller. He still has that scar from when he was beaten up and too drunk to fight back, but his meds are user-friendly these days, no dead-eyed staring and jerky motions as from the Stelazine and Thorazine. We have my father’s blue eyes, but David’s are sad, as if he’d fallen down a rabbit hole and emerged when he was thirty-nine, not knowing what his life was or where it had been. We had such hopes during these past six years when he finished his B. A. in classical literature and applied for graduate school in education. Hope rose like ghosts from our childhood’s grave.

Optimism comes from my father’s side of the family. So does schizophrenia. Although mom thinks Davey’s bipolar, too.

“All right, I appreciate the gift, it’s just very modern…” Davey says, tapping his index finger on the table.

“That’s bad?” I ask. “Making an obscure book accessible? Maybe you would have preferred it in Latin?”

“Can you go shopping with David for a coat?” Mom intervenes, frowning. Her once crimson hair has faded to cinnamon and grey. Her brown eyes are tired. She butters the orange-currant scones she baked for breakfast. Some patent work on a web-based media, and I had the cash to buy her this two-bedroom condo with its kitchen overlooking the marina. My money can’t resurrect her dream of starting her own restaurant; that died with decades of Davey’s arrests, hospitalizations, medication changes, disappearances, and returns to her doorstep.

Now it’s the morning after Christmas. January promises snow. Davey needs a winter coat to replace the one he lost.

“Sure, I can drive him to the Mall.”

“Can you go shopping with him?” Mom taps her finger on the table as if she and Davey are sharing a bongo drum.

I know what she won’t say while he’s here: you’re his sister; sooner or later, he’ll be your responsibility.

~

Davey holds the North Valley Mall doors open for a white-haired grandmother hauled by yowling kids.

“After you,” he says and heads for the Mountain Sports’ Menswear section.

He scans the racks of North Face parkas, Columbia rain gear, Coleman all-weather coats, assorted down jackets. He rubs hood ruffs. He tugs at zippers. His hands drop. His nose wrinkles. Wrong color. Seams aren’t tight. Down isn’t waterproof. Too short. Too long.  A raincoat, not a winter coat. A parka, not a snorkel coat.

“Just what kind of coat are we looking for?”

“I’ll know it when I see it.”

We cross the mall to Burton’s Fine Clothes.

“Not here,” he says after a jet-fast scan of the coat racks.

We walk past screaming children and arguing spouses to reach Macy’s.

“No,” says Davey. Half-off signs hang over Women, Petites, Children, and Shoes. Menswear is a full-price wasteland.

“Trust me. Cost is not a worry. Get a coat and if you don’t like it, we can get you another coat.”

I don’t tell Davey of the client who called me at 9:30 a.m. on December 23^rd desperate for a three-hour job for some minor software package that couldn’t wait until the 27^th. It was four hours before my flight. “That will be $5,000,“ I had said, folding silk shirts and black jeans into my suitcase. He screamed; he cursed; he paid. I went online in the departure terminal, finished the job as the plane cruised over the Rockies, and emailed it to my client during the layover.

Davey scans the racks but stops to pull out a neon orange coat.

“Wrong color,” he mutters. He shoves his hand into the pockets. He checks the lining. He rolls his eyes at the price tag.

A sales clerk rushes over and says, “Happy holidays, how can I be of service?”

“Hello. How are you?” asks David. His words are a second late as if he’s translating from a private language; he waits for a reply. The clerk blinks and looks to me.

“I need this in a different color…” I start to say.

“Alright Joan, thank you, but…” Davey cuts in.

“Our post-holiday stock is on display,” the clerk explains, “We could order it for you.”

Davey puts the coat on the rack. I pull it off.

“Joan, alright, wait a minute!” My brother protests.

“I’m handling this Davey…”

“Call me David…”

The clerk blinks. Out of the corner of my eye I see Davey tapping his finger on the coat rack.

“Can you do a rush order? And do you have tailoring?” I continue.

Davey grabs the coat, shoves it onto the rack, pushes other coats around it, and turns to the clerk, saying,  “Thank you for your help, have a nice day.”

The clerk blinks and walks off.

“Davey, we could have finished this…”

“It’s David…”

“Whatever…”

“No, it’s David.  That’s my name… not that kid’s name, like I wasn’t…just say David, all right?”

“The coat is what’s important! What were you thinking?”

“C’mon, that guy would’ve wanted shipping, tailoring fees, extra charges for special orders…”

I almost say: that’s how normal people buy coats. Instead, I count to ten. I never believed Mom’s stories of giving Davey $10 for yard sales and having him come home with a Bill Blass robe and The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. Mom said he once found a leather-bound edition of all of Shakespeare’s plays and talked the owner down to $4.50 and The Hunt for Red October thrown in for good measure. (“He knows I love the thrillers,” Mom said.) Mom said that after Davey’s last binge —after he had been missing from the halfway house; after his photograph had been sent to emergency rooms, morgues and police stations; after he was found by the river — he was vomiting blood and booze onto an Armani jacket, a Goodwill tag stapled to the sleeve, a copy of Gilgamesh in his pocket.

“I’ll cover that.”

“But where’s the deal?”

“David, how many stores do we have to go to? There are other things I could be doing. There are even other things you could be doing. And there’s no better deal than a free coat. So let’s just get a coat, okay?”

Davey stares, as if he’s going to say something, but walks off. Maybe he counts to ten, too. We return to our car. We drive to the Woodland Mall. We are silent. We park, pass a labyrinth of cars to reach the elevator, and go to Mervyn’s on the 4^th floor, Target on the 3^rd floor, T.J. Maxx on the main floor, and the Men’s Warehouse in the annex. We find trench coats, Jefferson coats, snorkel coats, and leather coats. We find parkas and intricate poly-pro layering systems that fit under all-weather shells. We find coats that are tan or black, not navy blue, or that have fake fur ruffs not real rabbit fur, or that don’t reach past the hips, or that reach the knees, or that have no drawstring to cinch the waist.

We drive to the Central Valley Mall, Davey staring out the window, his nicotine-stained fingers on Meditations. We have a fight at REI.

“Did you take your meds this morning?”

“All right, what are you, my caseworker?”

“It’s been eight stores, Davey, maybe that’s who you should have gone shopping with…”

“All right, I appreciate the help, your driving and all, but call me David!”

“Well, thank God for my help,” I yell. Shoppers stare. I lower my voice. “We’ve only been driving all day…”

“All right, we need boundaries, this is my coat not yours, ” my brother declares.

“Do you always sound like you’re in therapy?”

He winces. I wince. Of course he always sounds like he’s in therapy. That’s where he is when he’s sober. Therapy. AA. College classes. That’s his life.

~

“Do you need me at Bargain Coats & More?”

“No. Why don’t you get some coffee?”

When all is lost, you can always find a Starbucks, and we do.

“It’s on me,” he says.

“I can get it.”

“Yeah, you told me, but I have money too. Cuppa joe,” he calls to the barrista.

He rummages through his jeans, pulls out a wad of dollars in a money clip, closes his eyes and says: “He does only what is his to do, and considers constantly what the world has in store for him—doing his best, and trusting that all is for the best. For we carry our fate with us—and it carries us.”

“Davey —David,” I say, holding up my hand. “Your meds, you did take them, right?“

“Relax, it’s from the Meditations. Duty and opportunity. Marcus Aurelius is famous for that.”

“Sounds like a fun guy.”

“He’s expressing the Stoic philosophy. Life is rational, nature acts for the best, and the worst can be endured for the better. You should read it,” my brother says, handing over my coffee. “Just my way of saying, all right, I’m not teaching like I wanted, but I get man-around-the-house, fix-it jobs from mom’s friends.”

After David leaves, I get a double tall Americano. There was no need to embarrass him by correcting his order. Sitting at a tiny table, scanning my Kindle, I can’t remember many times when I was nice to David. It’s hard to think of that now when I remember his courtesy to store clerks and grandmothers. I don’t like remembering how we had read the Wrinkle In Time series together, and the Lord of the Rings, and how David had written to J.R.R. Tolkien for a dictionary to learn the Elf language. I don’t like remembering the summer Saturday nights we’d haul our beaten up kid’s telescope onto the back porch, David telling me the myths of Lyra and Orion and Cassiopeia, me searching for new meteors, new comets, new stars, mom chasing us back indoors right at midnight. I don’t like remembering just before I was sixteen, and David was seventeen.  The year it began.  When David would laugh and shriek through the night. When, for him, a chair became an oracle, and a can of beef barley soup became filled with worms.

I found my calico cat with her blood soaking into the back yard’s dirt, her skull smashed in, bits of her brain stuck to a red brick. I screamed for my mother.

“An accident,” she said. She was crying. “What else could it be?”

I knew then how it was going to be. I gave away my gerbils. I didn’t ask for permission before finding a new home for Mr. Charles Ames, our schnauzer. Meanwhile, Mom kept a steady stream of psychiatrists, therapists, faith healers, naturopaths, and acupuncturists flowing through our home.

I remember when I first saw David in the hospital.

“He didn’t mean it,” my mother kept saying.

David was sweat-soaked and turned away from the other patients: those without belts in their pants or laces in their shoes. My parents accompanied me, but I was alone—alone with the memories of the police arriving, of the ball-peen hammer David had used to pound demons out of my sleeping mother—didn’t that prove David loved us, and we loved him, he was trying to save my mother from demons—of my father throwing David to the ground, of my mother shaking and crying, of bruises on her arms and blood on her face, of screams. The neighbors said the screams were mine.

At the hospital, I remember David sat staring at a wall.

“Speak, friend, and enter,” I had said saying the words used to open the dwarves’ lair in The Fellowship of the Ring.

“Go away,” David told the wall.

I did. I asked David’s psychiatrists if I’d become like him. Back then, the psychiatrists were Freudians , so they blamed the mother, or Laingians, so they blamed the mother, the father, the sisters, and brothers. Then they said it was genetic, so they blamed the parents’ families.  Now they say it’s genetic with an environmental trigger, like drug use or trauma, nothing I could do anything about. So I did what I could. I worked as a library aide after school and a babysitter on weekends. I had dinner at friends’ houses where no one screamed, no one talked about medications, and it was safe to have knives at the table. I studied, earned scholarships, went across the country to college, found summer jobs away from home, and only came back at Christmas. I accompanied my mother as she brought coffee, sandwiches, and books to David when he lived at the halfway house, the treatment center, the hospital. I went to law school and became rich. David came of age and lived on the street.

Now our father is dead. Our mother is old. What will happen when I’m the only one to look after David?

~

David taps me on the shoulder. “No luck at the so-called bargain store.”

I tap my watch. Time’s gone; all I’ve done is remember things I can’t change.

We walk to the car. David hunches in the back seat sending plumes of smoke into the twilight air. David loved holding my gerbils in his now gnarled hands. He loved petting Mr. Charles Ames until the dog licked his nose in a frenzy of gratitude. He loved being my big brother, the one who kept my secrets, the one I trusted.

“Still reading Aurelius?”

“Yeah,” he is quick to respond, “listen to this: Does what’s happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity…”

“That’s quite a list,” I laugh.

“… prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness, and all the other qualities that allow a person’s nature to fulfill itself?”

“You believe that?”

“On my better days, yeah,” he replies. “At least, I hope so.”

I cannot love David. Perhaps something else is possible. I don’t know what.

“That’s not the way to Mom’s,” David calls out.

“I’m taking an alternate route,” I say. “Humor me.”

~

We see a strip mall where we stop, walk into Martin’s Menswear, and David sees his coat.

“All right. There it is. And in my size.”

I grab the coat off the hanger.

David grabs it back. He stuffs it between two other coats, saying  “I saw a 20% off coupon in the Bay Guardian.”

I count to twenty. I imagine ripping the coat to threads. I count to ten. This is all David has. The delusions, the hallucinations, maybe even the drinking are held in a delicate biochemical balance he can’t control. Finding the deal is still his.

“All right,” I sigh. “We’ll do it your way.”

We traverse the mall in search of a Starbucks with a Bay Guardian. We drive to the next strip mall, find a shoppers’ kiosk with a Bay Guardian, drive back to Martins Menswear, get our feet in the door and the coat off the rack and past the cashier with ten minutes to closing. David wears the coat as we walk out of the store.

Stars beam in the blue-purple night. I’ve seen that color in crocus bursting above ground in an offbeat blast of January sunlight. They can’t last. But there they are. Like the hope I had during the past six years of David’s sane, sober life. I want the hope. I want the hope because I want my brother back.

David beams. He stretches his arms. The navy blue coat seems to merge with the darkness. Cuffed sleeves notch over his wrists. A fur hood surrounds his face. The pockets are deep enough for books, a sandwich, a thermos of coffee, a bottle of rum. The coat is a den of warmth for a college student waiting for buses. The coat is a home a homeless man could carry on his back should David return to the streets. Perhaps not for months. Or years. Perhaps never. Perhaps tomorrow.

Apollo and Daphne by John William Waterhouse, circa 1908

Junie the Tree started the game because the rest of us are cowards. That’s what she said, anyway, and no one was going to fight with her about it.

If Junie says you’re a chickenshit, all you can do is accept it. Then change it.

I stick my hand into the can and swirl the little scraps of paper around. This is one of those big novelty cans you find at the grocery store, filled with three different kinds of popcorn, the outsides decorated with holiday themes or whatever cartoon characters are popular right now.

Tiny echoes of rustling paper bits bounce off the sides of the can. Ghost scents of chemical caramel and cheddar powder drift up to my face.

“Just pick one, Ellie,” says Amelia. She’s got a cigarette in one hand. She nibbles on the thumbnail of the other.

“No shit,” says Brady. “You’re taking for fucking ever.”

All five of us are getting antsy. The anticipation, the nerves, this happens every time.

“Okay,” I say, “Get up off me, already.” I extract a folded piece of paper. I open it and read it to everyone. “Sucked off a stranger in the men’s room at Hardee’s.”

We all look at each other and shrug. “Not bad.”

“Well, it’s sorta gross.”

“Meh. Not super gross. There’s grosser.”

Codie takes her turn, pulls out a scrap of cheesy-smelling paper. “Ate two dozen tacos. Stuck my finger down my throat.”

Junie the Tree rolls her eyes, but we only see the normal eye. The lazy eye is concealed beneath her eye patch. “Is this amateur hour? Try harder.”

Frizzy blond hair sticks out in all directions on her head. Hair so blond it’s almost white; so fine you can see Junie’s angry pink scalp. Her shoes look like they belong to two different people. On her left, a blue, adult-sized knock-off of a Converse All-Star. On the right, a small, child’s size in the same style. Junie never had toes on her right foot. Instead of toes, it’s smooth, thick flesh.

She reaches into the can and pulls out an anonymous confession. She unfolds the paper, then starts laughing. After a moment of giggling, she reads it to the group.

“Shit myself at a party. Took off my crappy pants and hid them in my ex-girlfriend’s purse.” Junie folds the paper, still laughing and says, “Hilarious, but not enough.”

Brady reaches in, he eyes each one of us as he takes his time, feeling the bits of paper, looking serious and concentrated, as though reading them with his fingertips. He clears his throat, like he’s about to make a grand speech to a room full of people wearing suits and ties. “Fucked my brother.”

Junie the Tree leans forward on the couch. The way she smiles, it’s the same smile you see on the faces of mothers looking down on their ailing child. Soothing. Empathetic. A healing smile that says how much she wants to take the pain from you; that makes you feel like everything is going to be okay. “That’s better,” she says.

~

The last time I saw Junie cry was the same day she decided to be a tree.

Every morning, when I went across the street to Junie’s house to walk to school, there was an event. Screaming. Hurled objects. Rage-red, tear-streaked cheeks. I’d enter the house, following the sounds of her mother’s shrieks, yelling at Junie to eat her goddamn oatmeal, to comb that awful hair, to stop wearing that stupid eye patch to school.

“That thing is for your eye exercises. It’s not a fashion accessory. You’re in the sixth grade, not a fucking pirate ship.” She grabbed the eye patch and snapped it. Junie screamed and knocked her bowl of goddamn oatmeal on to the floor.

Me, I’d just stand there like an idiot with my hands in my coat pockets, wishing I wasn’t a dumb kid. Wishing I was someone brave, or at least a little older and taller.

I’d been there when Junie’s parents forced her to endure her eye exercises. They’d cover her good eye with the eye patch, then empty a pill bottle of tiny plastic beads out on to the coffee table.

Scattered all over the table, hundreds of colored specks. Those same plastic beads that some girls put on safety pins. Friendship pins. Those little girls, they loved those beads. For Junie, they were symbols of aggravation and forced normalcy.

Junie’s father would hand her a pair of tweezers and sit her down on the floor. One by one, Junie tried to pinch one of those tiny symbol specks to put them back in the bottle. Her lazy eye off in another direction, unable to focus. Her head tilted at an odd angle, trying to point her eye toward those tiny dots of color. Her lip started quivering, fighting to keep all the angry tears trapped in her head.

The tears and screaming came long before the bottle was halfway full.

The day Junie decided to be a tree, I opened the front door of her house and found her sitting on the brown shag carpet of their tiny living room. She had one foot in the air, trying to duct tape a sandal to her toeless baby foot.

“Help me with this,” she said. “Quick. Before my mom gets out of the shower.”

I squatted down and held the sandal to her foot while she wrapped tape around it.

“How come you don’t just wear your tennies?”

“I’m sick of tennies. I want to wear sandals.” She cut the tape and stood up. “How’s it look?”

I took a step back. Her right foot was mostly duct tape. All around the back of her heel and over the arch was silvery gray. Only the toe of the sandal was visible, looking like an empty shoe. “It looks good. Where’d you get sandals, anyway?”

She had her hands on her hips, holding her two feet together, admiring her handiwork. “Got ’em at a garage sale for a quarter.”

That’s how Junie’s mom found us when she came out of the bathroom.

“What the hell are you two doing? Why aren’t you on your way to school yet?”

“I had to finish getting ready.”

“Well, you can’t wear that. And what is that shit on your foot?”

“Sandal.”

Me. Idiot. Hands in my pockets. Silent and wishing. A useless coward.

Junie’s mom shook her head. “Go change. You can’t go to school in a green t-shirt and ratty brown corduroys.”

“I’m a tree.” Junie dropped her arms down at her sides and stood up straight. “See? Tree.”

“Stop being ridiculous.” Her mom’s hair was still wrapped up in her post-shower turban. “Get changed and get to school. You’re making Ellie late by pulling this shit.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t care if I’m late.”

Junie’s mom rolled her eyes and shook her head. “You’re just as bad as she is.”

That’s when Junie made a break for it and dashed out the front door. I ran out after her, finding her already in tears.

“She’s so stupid,” she said, in between little sobs. “I don’t get why she wants me to wear a bunch of stupid outfits that don’t look like anything. At least now I look like something. I look like a tree instead of a boring person in a boring outfit.”

“I like it,” I said. Junie didn’t seem to hear me.

“And she always wants me hide my foot. I don’t care about my foot. If someone else feels weird because of my stump, it’s their problem.”

“Yeah it is.”

“She’s ashamed of me, but she should be ashamed of herself. She’s the reason I’m not like everyone else.”

Before I could respond to her, Harlan Strunk caught up to us, riding his skateboard.

“What’s up, Goony Junie?”

“Shut up, Harlan,” I said.

He ignored me. “What’s wrong with little Goony Junie? Why you bein’ a crybaby, Goony?”

“I’m not a crybaby. I’m a tree,” she said.

“What? You’re a freak is what you are, Goony.”

“I’m… a… TREE!” Junie lunged at Harlan, throwing her whole body at him, knocking him off his skateboard. He landed hard and Junie landed on top of him. He cried out and the skateboard rolled underneath an ugly brown station wagon that was parked in the street. I heard the grinding stone scrape of Harlan’s body against the gravel on the road.

Junie jumped up off of him, unhurt. “I am a fucking tree.”

Harlan sat up, the right side of his face scraped up, with a few tiny bits of gravel stuck to his cheek. He cradled his right elbow, rubbed his face and narrowed his eyes at us, but remained silent.

Junie straightened her eye patch. Brushed off her brown corduroy pants. By the end of the school day, everyone at Daleview Middle School knew that Junie was whatever she wanted to be. And no one was going to fight with her about it.

~

Junie says that the worst thing about shame is the way it chains you down. The way it holds your mind hostage and won’t let you go, gnawing from the inside out, feeding on you like a parasite.

Getting rid of it, she says, is really just a matter of purging. Puking out the parasite.

After she got kicked out of college, Junie abandoned her plans to be a psychiatrist.

“I can help just as many people without that bullshit psych degree,” she’d said. “And now I can start earlier.”

A few weeks later, Junie told me about the game.

“The thing about shame,” she said, “is that it’s easier if someone else pulls it out of you. You write it down, no one knows who writes what. When someone else reads it, when you hear your shame talking back to you, it’s out there. It’s in front of you.”

People are too afraid to speak their own shame, she says, so they need to hear it spoken from someone else. They need someone there when they hear it. The more, the better.

We started out small. First, with tiny, petty shame. Then, we worked our way up. The more people who came to play, the deeper the confessions became. Some people only came once. Others, like me and Codie, we came almost every night.

After the game caught on, my boyfriend Derek, he started freaking out. The first time I brought him to a game was the last time. He ran out of there before we’d even finished drawing confessions.

“Everyone in there needs help, Ellie,” he said. “Especially your friend Junie. This kind of shit is how cults get started.”

Derek, he was just one of those people who feel better when shame isn’t spoken out loud.

Junie says that boyfriends and shame bind with the same chains.

~

Junie slides off the couch and joins the rest of us on the floor. She puts her arms around Amelia, who starts sobbing. Not gentle tears; the anguished, hyperventilating flow of tears that come from suffering.

I look at Brady, his eyes wide and befuddled. Codie is all slack-jawed surprise. I can’t see my face, but I know the expression is the same. We’re all mirrors of one another.

Somehow, Junie is reading all of us.

“I didn’t want to,” Amelia says through her sniffs and choking sobs. “I didn’t want to, but he… he… he was hurting me, and… I DIDN’T WANT TO!”

“I know, I know.” Junie the Tree, she smoothes Amelia’s hair. Her good eye and bad eye both rimmed with tears. “Now we can start making it better,” she says.

The rest of us, we help Junie. We sit there on the floor of Junie’s little trailer, holding one another in a big knot of arms and tears. Junie the Tree in our center, holding us up.

Rasmenia Massoud is from Colorado, but after several weird turns, she ended up somewhere in France. She is the author of the short story collections HUMAN DETRITUS and BROKEN ABROAD. Some of her other work has appeared in various anthologies and online at places like The Foundling Review, The Lowestoft Chronicle, Literary Orphans, Metazen, Full of Crow, Flash Fiction Offensive and Underground Voices. You can visit her at: http://www.rasmenia.com/

“Cats” by Franz Marc, circa 1909

After her third dog passed, Lorelei adopted an overweight calico. The couple that had brought him in wrote on the form 12 yrs old, heart problems. The cat dealt with enough heft to make it impossible for him to clean his own back, so had dreadlocks down the spine and dandruff, too.

“Are you sure you want grumpy old Murray?” asked the boy at the desk.

“I want to help,” she said. “I can’t get attached to a cat.”

~

The cat was renown for hissing at the volunteers in the shelter, but when Lorelei let him out of the carrier in her living room, he sidled up against her legs and rubbed, weaving around her calves in fat figure eights as if he missed her. When he rolled on his back on the carpet, he looked like a seal. He slept on the end of her bed. Trapped her feet under the covers. Wheezed. Strangely, the sound helped her fall asleep.

After a few nights, she loved the cat as if he were a dog. She told him, “You’re going on a diet.” She put Special Recipe for indoor adult cats into his dish by the refrigerator. “Let’s slim you down. You’ll live longer.”

She cut out his dreads. She brushed him until his fur shined. He purred.

Lorelei’s next-door neighbor, Joe, came to eat dinner and watch East Enders on the BBC every Tuesday night. They had gone to school together as kids. In high school, Joe tried to date her, but she preferred the closeness they shared as friends. Both inherited their parents’ houses. Both moved home after their busted marriages. Neither had kids.

With Joe there, Murray hissed and hid beneath the couch, but he couldn’t fit all the way, so they laughed to see the cat’s doughy haunches and his thick tail whipping and slapping the rug.

“How do you like the new old cat?” Joe asked as he ate beef stew at her kitchen table.

“It’s working out pretty well,” she said. “Better than I thought.”

Joe nodded and chewed.

“He’s good company. He sleeps on the bed.”

“Really.” Joe wiped his mouth. He leaned back in his chair and called out in the direction of the living room, “Hey, Murray, what’s your secret, buddy?”

Lorelei laughed, covering her mouth with her fingers.

“Lori, you know I’d be happy to join you in bed anytime you’d let me.”

“I’m happy as we are.” She looked down at her stew. “You know that.” She looked up.

“I’m going to keep reminding you that we could be happier,” he said and winked.

“Let’s not mess with it.”

But she liked that he had called her by her childhood name.

~

Joe sat next to Lorelei on the couch to watch TV. She felt Murray’s tail thwack against her foot. She worried about Joe’s weight on the cat. Joe wasn’t fat, but he was a large man. In that way, he took after his father, but only in size. Joe could handle his alcohol. As long as she could feel the switch of Murray’s tail, she felt the cat was probably fine.

When the show ended, he helped her with the dishes. She walked him outside to the path through the hedge between their houses.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked.

“Next time,” she answered.

It was always the same, from when they were teenagers, their little joke.

In the living room, Lorelei propped a corner of the couch up with the dictionary and spoke sweetly to Murray. She used a treat to finally get him to spin around and crawl out. At bedtime, Murray did his seal-flop in the middle of the rug. He didn’t follow her to the stairs.

“You’re punishing me cause you think I have a new boyfriend, aren’t you?”

Murray switched his tail.

“But you’re my new boyfriend, Murray. You’re the guy for me.”

~

In the bathroom, Lorelei looked out the window to Joe’s house while she brushed her teeth. His kitchen was all lit up. She slipped into the guestroom, her old childhood room, where she could spy more easily in the dark. She saw him sitting at his kitchen table, one leg crossed over the other. He wore only denim-blue boxers and white socks as he talked on the phone. It was past eleven. He laughed, looked happy.

She remembered his body differently, young, hairless, playing Marco Polo at the public pool, always jerking around. She recalled thin tight muscles bulging from his soccer uniform. Now he looked soft and comfortable. Relaxed.

Who would he be talking to at this hour? Joe had friends and maybe someone special, more than just a friend, but she didn’t know.

Murray howled from the hallway. Lorelei fixed the curtains and headed for bed.

She passed Murray in the hall. “So, big guy, I guess I’m forgiven.”

He waited for her while she brushed her teeth.

~

The following Monday, Lorelei had an e-mail from Joe telling her he couldn’t make it on Tuesday. Something had come up at his crew club. There was a special meeting for the board.

She ate leftovers and watched East Enders with Murray curled on the cushion where Joe usually sat. She felt a tightening around her heart. She realized she missed Joe. In the kitchen, she made herself a cup of lemon ginger tea and sat down at the table.

After fourteen years of marriage drama, she longed for peace, some solitude. Joe didn’t push or cloy. They shared the one night a week. She imagined that sometime in the future they’d have sex, but she didn’t want to rush.

She startled when he rapped on a glass pane of the kitchen door.

“Oh.” She pressed one hand on her chest and beckoned with the other for him to come in.

He carried a paper bag. “Am I too late for dessert? I brought ice cream.”

“Murray and I thought we weren’t going to see you tonight.” Her voice was pitched and sounded giddy.

“I saw your light.”

Murray hunkered down on the threshold in the archway between the living room and the kitchen, ears back, scowling, his tail going.

“You’re all threats, Mister.” Joe teased the cat as he scooped ice cream into coffee mugs. “I dare you to do something about it.”

“Let’s eat at the table.” Lorelei worried about Murray hiding under the couch. “At least he’s not hissing.”

Joe told her all about the crew club meeting. Someone had spray-painted the boathouse.

“Apparently it’s not graffiti. Now it’s called Street Art.” He laughed. “Some of it is quite beautiful.”

“Remember in tenth grade when we painted the Civil Rights mural on the new gym wall?”

“Remember the senior trip to Mexico?” Joe wagged his eyebrows up and down.

“Let’s not go there.” It was the one time they’d made out and groped each other a little after they played Quarters for shots of tequila. She got up to rinse their mugs. “Let’s walk. I’d like to see it.”

“See what?”

“The Street Art.”

On the riverfront, Joe shined a flashlight, illuminating a painting of three women, larger-than-life, with over-exaggerated fleshy parts squishing out of red, white, and blue vintage swimsuits. The women lounged by a pool. They held up fancy martini glasses that were as wide as their heads. Cocktail stirrers in the shape of thin pink penises protruded out of the glasses. Gold fireworks exploded on the black sky background.

“Whoa, weird.” Lorelei stepped back to try to understand it better.

“It’s wild, isn’t it? It has this three-dimensional look,” said Joe, standing up close, gesturing at the picture with the weakening beam. “Inviting. Couldn’t you could step right into the party.”

She shook her head. The light on the painting made the women look clownish. The river chilled and dampened the air. She wanted to go home.

“I’m kind of freezing all of a sudden.”

Joe turned to her and shined the flashlight on her midriff, forming a circle of dull luminescence that enveloped them both. “Lori,” he said. “Can’t I kiss you?”

“Next time,” she said playing along.

“No, now.” He stepped closer and paused.

The kiss was warm, just long enough to show them both that now could be the right time.

She caught his free hand. “Come on, let’s go back.”

They’d left the lights on in the kitchen. Murray stretched horizontally on the linoleum floor just inside the door. He had not assumed his usual seal-flop position. Lorelei said his name, but his tail remained still.

“Jesus Christ, Joe, I think he’s dead.” Her fingers on one hand covered her mouth. She pressed the other to her chest.

Joe squatted and placed a flat hand on the cat’s torso. “He’s warm still. But I think you’re right. I don’t feel any up and down.”

“Okay, that’s it.” Lorelei sank into a kitchen chair. “This is my last pet.”

Joe petted the cat’s smooth back as if the cat were alive. She thought of the dandruff Murray had when she had first brought him home. The kitchen clock ticked.

The phone rang over in Joe’s house. She glanced at the clock. It was after eleven.

He stood. “I have to run over and grab that call.” He pumped his hands up and down as if to calm her, but she had not shown any agitation. She felt discouraged and cold. “But I’ll be right back,” Joe said. “Really, Lori, I wouldn’t leave you now if it wasn’t important.”

She shut the kitchen door behind him and locked it.

“Odd. Another eleven o’clock call,” she said aloud, but of course, Murray couldn’t hear; he was dead.

She grabbed a bath towel from the dryer in the laundry room, smoothed it flat on the floor, and rolled Murray onto the makeshift shroud. She swaddled him, leaving his head uncovered, and carried all twenty-three pounds of dead weight up the stairs to the guestroom. She set him in the middle of the bed and stood next to him in the dark.

Joe had surprised her, leaving when she had a dead cat on her hands. Now she couldn’t stop herself from peering at his house through the curtains. He stood in the kitchen wearing all of his clothes and seemed to be looking at her house, but he was still on the phone and he appeared to be laughing.

~

Standing there in the dark, she thought about a night when she was sixteen. First, she heard Joe’s drunken father singing outside. Then, through this same window, she watched him crash into the redwood bird feeder and fall on his back. He stayed in that position, unmoving, for what seemed like forever. Lori’s parents were out, and no one from next-door came to investigate, so she’d gone over to see if he was dead. He wasn’t. He was staring up at the moon, eyes wide, smiling. When she leaned over him, asked if he was okay, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her to the ground. He rolled on top of her. He called her baby girl. She yelled for him to stop. He shushed her. She couldn’t move. Lorelei felt knuckles press into her hipbone. When she heard the clinking sound of his buckle, fear clogged her throat. She could hardly breathe from the man’s weight.

Then Joe appeared. He kicked the side of his dad’s gut and yelled, “Get up you fucking bastard! Jesus! Lorelei!” As soon as she was free, Lorelei ran home and locked all of the doors. She showered and put on fresh pajamas. She sat on the toilet seat in the bathroom until she heard her parents’ car in the driveway then she went to bed. The next morning, when Joe came to walk her to work, he tried to smooth it over. “He doesn’t remember anything, Lori. Not a thing. I’m sure of it. He never remembers.”

She had held up her hand. “Stop! I don’t want to talk about it.”

“What were you doing out there?”

“I said stop it, Joe. You dealt with it. We’re all just fine.”

Though Lorelei did not think of that event very often, she had thought about it last spring, when Joe pulled up the parched cedar ground creeper that had pricked her through her lightweight pajamas that night. He replaced it with waxy-smooth periwinkle that bloomed a deep purple in the summer. The bird feeder out front at Joe’s was new, too.

Now she adjusted the curtain at the guestroom window. She leaned over the bed. “Our time was short and sweet, old guy.” She patted the mass of Murray’s body through the towel. “Great while it lasted.”

She shut the door behind her, closing the dead cat inside. She brushed her teeth, and went to bed. She missed Murray’s weight against her feet.

Twenty-minutes later, the telephone rang. Seven rings. She had expected as much. She turned to face the wall and drew her knees to her chest under the quilts.

Seven more rings. Then, silence. Then, seven rings. Then, silence.

Tomorrow before work, Lorelei would bury Murray next to her three shelter dogs in the back yard. She imagined Joe would see her digging a hole and come to help.

They’d start all over.

Again.

They’d start all over.

Jodi Paloni lives and writes in the foothills of southern Vermont. Her stories appear in Green Mountains Review, Carve Magazine, The Atticus Review, Whitefish Review, upstreet, Spartan, and others. She is the 2013 winner of The Short Story America Prize for Short Fiction and placed second in the 2012 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. Jodi reviews fiction for Contrary Magazine and New Pages. She has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Read an interview with Jodi here.