“Escape” by Jean Banas, acrylic on canvas, 47″ x 54″.

Warm Up – Chest Expansion

Bridget clenches her jaw, ready to explain a thing or two if the woman goes any further with the spiritual angle. One of the things, she will explain, is going to be very blunt. She’d warned this ordained woman that if God were mentioned even once; that would be the last time she’d be here at Stretch and Relax. How like a minister to try and sneak a sermon into the yoga class!

Fine for others to hear that opening your chest would free your emotions so the Almighty could fill you with peace; Bridget only needs to hear the physical directions to breathe deeply and stretch the lungs. She closes her eyes and comes up with an image that suits her better, her ribcage opening up in the same way a hay bale swells when she chops the twine that holds it firm. That holds her thoughts for a moment but her agitation butts against her calm in the same way the cows rub and move bales. The cows had been cared for today, the balky tractor and the frozen-down feed hadn’t stopped her mission.

The mission here is to relax. If she can. But it galls her to see the bible story cartoons plastered on the walls, and it is vexing that in this room, children hear how Jesus loves them and how God knows when the sparrow falls. It’s a wonder the bible school room doesn’t smell like puke. She exhales and rolls her shoulders in a curl around her breasts, then on her inhalation spreads them wide as if they were wings. Around her the yoga classmates do the same.

She’s here with a half-dozen people; two others are seniors like her. Yoga is something she would have never expected to do but neither had she expected her anxiety attack. Definitely the anxiety attack is the big unexpected thing. Really, she thought that her decades of handling all the big and little crises of farm work had given her resistance to ‘nerves’ as they used to call it, embarrassment attached. People a decade younger than her, like her sister Lisa, had a more relaxed view, the shame factor much diminished.

Bridget’s churning thoughts have bunted her attention from exercises. Back to it, she tells herself. Curl. Spread.

Cat Pose

Nowadays people have the world’s blessing to fly apart. Therapy is touted as the answer; didn’t her own doctor suggest exactly that? He could set up an appointment for her with a psychologist. Didn’t take him long to add when she is ready, because he could see his notion didn’t fly. But then, in the gentlest way, he told her to learn to relax, maybe meditate or start a journal. Stupid idea from a wet-behind-the-ears, never-had-to-physically-work-a- day-in-his-life, stupid doctor.

Jesus Christ and bloody hell, but just when she starts with her usual head down and to hell with it all, her chest tightens and her breathing gives a hitch as a reminder. Even thinking about that trip to the doctor upset her. Shoulder pain brings her smarting to the present. Had she been thinking out loud? No one seems to be paying her any attention, but still this is not good. Her neck joins the shoulder in a big ball of hurt. The pain could lock her away from relaxing as efficiently as a closed gate prevented her cow herd from getting into grain bins. Big trouble. Trouble is she has to handle the stress in her life differently or have a nervous breakdown.

Chair Pose

Lisa is the one who suggests the yoga sessions, offering that she and Tom could handle Vince one night a week. Her sister’s offer is a surprise, for years she has avoided being alone with Vince and while she never explains, Bridget has a pretty good idea of what Vince might have done and even why some women would be flattered. Not Lisa. She is a loyal sister and a faithful wife. Like their grandmother, who seems to peer out from Lisa’s face, her sister is a true soul, armed with regular church attendance, practiced charity and goodness. Maybe all that works if there is no one like Vince in the picture. Bridget stops. Somehow remembering her grandmother softens her tenseness. The hardships endured in the past were huge. Women didn’t even have the right to vote.

Someone should tell Vince about women’s rights. Like a husband of that past era, Vince tried to dish up disapproval over her attending yoga class. He’d have her think it is disobedience on her part that she be here. She watches the woman leading the class noting her mustached upper lip. Bridget decided long ago that the homely get called to God’s service, perhaps because the mirror is so cruel. What she had done to deserve Vince, beyond promising to love, honor, and obey could only be called the devil’s plot, if the devil were more than a convenient fiction. Funny to remember that her grandmother spoke of the devil as well as God. Bridget didn’t really believe in deities but she could conceive a devil like Vince. She shifts uneasily, her thighs tense to the point of quivering. Not knowing how much longer this position is to be held, Bridget takes a rest. Her body sinks to the floor where she slouches and rubs her thighs. The instructor brings everyone to a new position.

Plank Pose

Thinking of her grandmother has made her feel perversely bad. She loved the woman but would like to ask a few questions of anyone with enduring faith. Was she supposed to pray the cattle would wait for her to open the ice hole? No! She had to get out there first thing, before they crowded onto the ice and fell through. Then she had to follow that up with starting the tractor, rolling out the hay and then after the animals were tended, returning to whatever Vince was dishing up.

But Lisa and her husband are with Vince making sure Bridget has a home to return to after yoga. They’ll stay and visit for a while before Bridget faces the rest of the evening with her husband. Usually Vince is tired and irritable but armed with a firm voice and an established routine, Bridget can get him to bed before exhaustion hits them both.

Lately she has been dissolving a sleeping pill in Vince’s evening glass of warm milk, oh how unkind, really, this resorting to drugs. She feels forty shades of guilt over it. But tonight it is possible that Lisa will innocently warm his milk and Vince, who even now, is nobody’s fool, will refuse a doctored second glass. Which means any peace and relaxation she gains here could be wiped out when she gets home.

Nostril Breathing

That is another unexpected thing of Bridget’s life; that her husband Vince would end up with a brain injury, which sounds simple enough but is actually a bitch and a half. It is when Bridget comes up with a house remodel to include a safe room for Vince, a padded cell affair, with piped in music and a television mounted like a window, just so she can have a few minutes reprieve without calling on someone else, that she realizes she has to do something. More than just the sleeping pill in the evening.

Then Bridget who prides herself equal to a man in all things agricultural; who works the cattle in the corrals, births them in the barn and occasionally puts them down with the rifle, who drives the combine, the grain trucks, the tractor with the air seeder, who figures out their finances, and helped Vince make the right decisions for forty years finds herself unable to breathe. By the time she calls Lisa she is sure it is a heart attack.

After a number of tests, all physical reasons are ruled out for her episode. Episode. How useful the word. Bridget uses it as shorthand for Vince’s various mishaps, the occasions when he soils his clothes, the meals that he dumps on the floor or in his lap, the blank moments or bleak moments where the unfurled flag of his rage whips over her. The term episode serves to inform people that it is not all heavenly in their lives, but doesn’t seem a whine, or invite an offer of prayers. Time after time she hears how lucky she is that Vince survived. Well, yes. And no.

But it is time to put these thoughts into the corral. Fix the mental fences. She takes a moment to tighten the elastic around hair that others call a marvelous shade of silver and tuck in her favorite plaid shirt. She remembers the anxiety episode, believing it to be an attack of her heart; all she could ask is how on earth they would get by, if she were struck in this manner. It’d be the nun-operated nursing home for them both, every wall with a cross and Christ. A sorry deal, except that others would deal with her bully and bastard of a husband.

A deep sigh escapes Bridget. The episode wasn’t her heart giving out but a message for her to ease her mind; to relax. It is unlikely, though, that she can expect miracles from prayer which her sister suggested. Not bloody likely, she thinks and shakes her head vigorously. The instructor glances in her direction. Bridget frowns back, mind your own blood-of-the-lamb business.

But that frown released something. Her agitation gives way to deep breaths and her shoulders are no longer sheltering her ears as a small miracle occurs.

In and out, for every breath the world slips further and further into the background. Every breath brings inner tension to the surface where a gentle breeze blows it away. A feather floats. Every breath lifts her closer to the beauty, to the truth, to the place where she is comforted and loved.

Bridget breathes in but her exhalation is a whimper. She has to steady herself. There is nothing to cry about here. But she can’t seem to stop. Next thing she’ll be on the receiving end of sympathy and in fact, the minister is headed in her direction. She fakes a coughing spell, lifts her arms in defense and mumbles that she needs to go home.

Downward Facing Dog

She lays her head on the steering wheel as her farm truck warms up for the drive home. The evening gospel music winds around her until she hears the hymn and strikes the switch off. Partway home she has to pull off on a seldom-used intersection and let the lonesome come over her like the moon on the snow. Weakness. Her fists wipe away her tears.

This is not a nervous breakdown. There is no echo in the silence except for her mind. Oh, isn’t it? You broke down tonight at bloody stupid yoga. And the anxiety attack? You couldn’t deal with reality. No. No, this is just an episode. That’s all.

How long has she been here? It’s late.

She enters the farmhouse. The smell of gingerbread wafts out and there is laughter. Under the bright light of the dining room table, Vince jumps his marbles across the Chinese Checker board. He beams widely, having fun, getting excited. On an average night, with just Bridget as company he’d be bitching and moaning and demanding his snack.

Bridget goes to pour his bedtime glass of milk so she can add the sleeping pill. She pours the white liquid over the tiny tablet. Lisa approaches. Her hand touches Bridget’s elbow. Bridget jumps.

The full bottle of pills tipped in her hand, Lisa reads Bridget’s name on the prescription.   Bridget avoids her sister’s eyes that are searching for a denial, explanation or confession.

They will stay the night Bridget is told, as her sister pours the glass of milk down the sink and fixes another one for Vince.

Rest – Deep Breathing

In the middle of the night, Vince goes to the basement and silently makes his way to the storage room and begins to rip into boxes and throw things around. He spends extra, destructive time with a certain corner, a certain trunk. The cattle-show banners are torn in half, a fate shared by brown paper envelopes that contain the deeds to their land, birth certificates and their marriage license. He is set on disemboweling Bridget’s hope chest. Linens embroidered with sparrows and daisies, hand stitched pillowcases are ground under his heels; the framed photos of ancestors are smashed. The sound of breaking glass wakes the sleepers. Jesus Christ and bloody hell, the three of them rush down the stairs.

Vince looks up as if confused by their presence. He holds a sampler that is Bridget’s oldest possession—The Lord’s Prayer in cross-stitch that her grandmother coached her to complete.

Vince who a moment ago was in a frenzy is now compliant and docile and allows his brother-in-law to guide him out of the room. He passes the sampler to Bridget. She cannot look at him but she has not the same choice with the sampler.

How innocent she had been when she stitched it. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Forgive us our trespasses. She stops reading. Forgive me. From one pill a night to the whole bottle. It is the trespass that she’s been skirting around, pretending the temptation isn’t waiting. She knew the route. She’s put down animals. Gathering her reasons, marshalling her strengths. Her legs fail her as she drops to her knees.

Lisa is there and her arms wrap around Bridget. Her comfort Bridget has heard before: Jesus loves you. He can give you strength, if you just let him.

“Jesus Christ,” Bridget calls out.

She means it as a curse, but it doesn’t turn out that way. For a moment Bridget considers Christ but the very idea curdles in her throat. It is such a weakness—meekness and lamb to the slaughter. All that goodness of gospel is religion’s nasty trick. Bloody hell, it means surrender. The sparrow fell. God saw. Bridget folds herself over her thighs and rests, a position of supplication if not prayer. The Pose of the Child

Liz Betz is enjoying her retirement pastime of writing short fiction which has been published in a variety of markets. She writes from rural Alberta, Canada. Follow her writing blog lizbetz.blogspot.ca for news of her publications. The Sparrow is her 40th short story published.

“The Aftermath” by Jean Banas, acrylic on canvas, 52″ x 48″.

I was already running late. Carmine wanted to meet near Pape and Danforth at noon. Ten minutes to go as I sped down Coxwell Avenue from O’Connor to Danforth. I’d just scored two plates of primo hashish for Carmine from Robbie in East York. Robbie dispensed for some Montreal bikers. I stood to make a couple hundred for a simple handoff. But Carmine hated waiting for anyone. You didn’t want to keep the big man waiting.

The light turned green at Danforth and I signaled a right turn. Pape was a few blocks west. At the same time, a half-ton truck on my left started through the intersection. Just as I go to make my turn, a late-breaking black BMW comes racing westbound along Danforth through the red. Slams the truck’s rear end with a sound like an airplane falling from the sky, front end crumpled, red-faced, bug-eyed driver still belted into his seat, and the BMW now set into a violent spin directly toward my car.

For a second or two I found myself watching the whole thing unfold like a slomo YouTube clip—but I snapped out of it with an adrenal surge, squeezed the steering wheel, footed the gas, and lurched forward enough for the BMW to just miss my car. But it continued on a crazy spin, somehow circling back toward the intersection, where it hit a woman running across the street with her child. The child escaped injury, but the woman went down, black hair flying as the car took her out.

I sat there, knuckles whitened on the steering wheel, trying to process what had happened. My body shook; my hands started cramping. I let go of the steering wheel. A wave of vertigo overcame me. I bent to the dash and took a few deep breaths, hoping not to pass out.

Pandemonium ensued at the intersection. Sirens wailed. People cried out. I rolled down my window for air. Debris littered the street; people scrambled to and fro. I shut my eyes, clapped my hands over my ears.

Maybe I should have stayed and reported what I’d seen to a police officer. But with abundant witnesses around, I felt my testimony would have been at best superfluous. And I had all that hashish in the car, surly Carmine waiting. So I drove off.

I parked on the Danforth not far from Pape and took a minute to gather myself before I texted Carmine. Little snapshots of the accident kept flashing in my head. Carmine was parked in a lot on Pape and wanted me to go to him. Barely able to stand, I staggered down the leaf-strewn street. The cool autumn air tingled in my nostrils and pricked my ears, but everything was bathed in a weird yellow light that made me feel like I was dreaming.

Carmine bitched about being ten minutes late. He backed off when I told him about the accident.

“Think she’s dead?” he asked.

I shrugged. Didn’t want to think about it.

“Still,” Carmine said, unable to not play the heavy, “be early next time. Time is money.”

Went on with my day, feeling spooked and fucked up. Drank a few scotches to settle my nerves. I’d been off the opioids for six months. Yeah. I’d gotten in deep. Started with sciatica issues. Oxycontin blissed me out so much I could walk without gimping around. Grew to love the high. Long after the sciatica healed, I kept popping the pills. Felt sick as a dog when I wasn’t high. Don’t know how I crawled out of that hole. Guess I wanted to live. The new shit was killing folks. But the temptation never went away. It hung around you like a vulture circling a dying animal. When you’re jonesing hard, you don’t care. You almost welcome death. Go on, get it over with. And stress made you jones like nothing else. Would have been easy to relapse that night. But I didn’t. I just got good and drunk.

Then, watching the late night news, I saw a report about the accident. Drunk driver arrested at scene. Mother of three pronounced dead on arrival. Recent immigrant from Guatemala.

Man. One minute you’re walking along minding your own business, maybe laughing about something, feeling good, alive, looking forward to the rest of your day, the rest of your life, and the next minute you’re gone. Poof. Just like that. It was incredible how fragile we were, how nothing. I didn’t sleep that night. Kept replaying the scene in my head: driver’s red face, mother pulling child, hair flying as the car struck.

Next day I drove by the intersection. They still hadn’t cleaned up the debris and some police-tape surrounded the bus shelter on the southwest corner. Thought I detected a stain on the road, roughly where the woman had fallen. Could have been motor oil, transmission fluid, or God knows what. But something told me it was blood. Forensics weren’t needed at this point. No mysteries here. And no one was going to clean it up. In time the traffic would smooth it all out, smear it down into the asphalt.

A few uneasy days passed. Your problems really begin only when you start thinking about them. So you do things to distract yourself. Drive around town. Maybe watch a flick or two on TV. Smoke dope or drink until you can’t think. Try to forget what you are, forget those events that trouble you, forget yourself. Tell yourself that under no fucking circumstances will you relapse. But nothing helps.

Found myself cruising along O’Connor a few mornings later. Yeah, cruising. Had the tunes turned up. Still like my metal when I’m in cruise mode.

It was a crisp, sunny day. Rusty leaves blowing around. Full autumn. I won’t say I had resisted my demons. I won’t say that. I’m not here to lie about myself and paint a picture that would somehow, unfaithfully, ennoble or validate me and my existence. I know I’m fucked. I know I’m lost. I fell in a long time ago. I passed the event horizon a long time ago. Once that happens—as we all know—there is no escape.

Robbie had another delivery for me, and Carmine would be waiting, but I couldn’t bring myself to go up to Robbie’s shitty apartment and swap nothings with him while he scaled the hashish. I sat in front of his building for almost an hour. I couldn’t do it. It was comical. I sat there laughing to myself like a cretin. I wouldn’t have thought it funny if I wasn’t high as a kite.

To be honest, Robbie and Carmine bored me to death. I didn’t fear them anymore. I didn’t like them. They had nothing to offer me. I don’t know why I was mixed up with them. Easy money? But it was nothing. It was a nothing gig and only sanctioned my status as a nothing. Maybe that was the answer, after all: that they confirmed what I believed about myself.

I turned down Coxwell and headed toward the Danforth. Almost noon. I drove slowly.

When I got to the intersection, I felt dizzy. I turned right on Danforth and parked near a Greek pastry shop. Don’t know what I was doing. Trying to regain my bearings? Reliving the horror? Going for another adrenaline rush? Except for a dented signpost, chaotic tire marks, and flowers lain by the southwest bus shelter, no sign of the accident—but I thought I could still see a bloodstain on the road. I was sure of it. I wanted to get a closer look. The noon traffic was intense. I was too high. I stumbled around the intersection. People gaped at me. It was too much. I returned to my car. Took me a few minutes to get it together. Eventually I drove away.

Later, Carmine called me.

“You junkie piece of shit!”

Man, he was mad. I would have shit my pants if I cared.

“I want out,” I told him.

“Out, you cockroach! You’re on the hook for five large. How do you expect to pay that back? Out? You’re lucky I don’t come there and break your legs right now.”

“Carmine—”

“Don’t Carmine me. I don’t wanna hear it. Now listen here, sonny. Tomorrow you show up to Robbie’s by ten thirty, no ifs ands or buts. Show up or you won’t be talking to nobody no more. Understand? You fucking junkie. You couldn’t stay clean even for a few months. You’re pathetic.”

He hung up. Pure buzz kill. But he was right. I was pathetic.

That night I couldn’t sleep again. The usual monsters danced through my head. Kept seeing that BMW dude’s red face, looking right at me, wasted out of his mind. Too drunk to feel anything. Too drunk to know.

Unable to empty my head, I dressed and went out. Got in my car and drove to the intersection. The streets were all but deserted.

I parked near the bus shelter, exited my car and walked to the middle of the road, looking for the exact spot where the woman had fallen, perhaps a bloodstain, likely dried by now. A cab appeared, so I jumped back to the sidewalk. The cabbie slowed and looked to see if I wanted a ride. I waved him off and returned to the middle of the intersection.

There, I thought. Found it.

A circular or perhaps somewhat oblong stain, roughly two or three feet in diameter, darkened the asphalt almost to black. I was certain it was blood. I checked if any cars were coming. When I saw the coast was clear I kneeled down, lowered my face to the stain and sniffed it. I shut my eyes and sniffed it, hoping to discern or dispel I don’t know what.

Salvatore Difalco is the author of 4 books. He splits his time between Toronto and Sicily.

“Lost Dreams” by Jean Banas, acrylic on canvas, 47″ x 55″.

The neighbor to the south was a single woman in her forties, Annie, who heard the sirens at close to midnight. Grateful for the cool air breathing through the front door screen, untroubled by the insomnia, which had become her bed partner since her divorce (and would be, she predicted, for the rest of her life), she was lying fully awake on the living room couch, listening. She’d heard the electrician from across the street slam his Ford Explorer’s door at ten; she’d seen the tip of his cigarette pulsing and imagined it into a firefly. She’d heard Happy’s dog tags clinking as the ancient shepherd nuzzled his way down the block, across her lawn into the carport, and back again to his home four houses up. Happy is tomcatting, she’d thought to herself, crossing her open palms across her breasts, pleased by the slight gift of sleeplessness: Happy’s nocturnal ritual defying her town’s leash laws.

She’d heard the first siren call from blocks and blocks away. Too raucous, she felt at first, to be the harbinger of death. Eddie, her neighbor to the north, was coping with stomach cancer, had been for two years. But still he pulled her garbage cans in every Thursday after pick-up as he’d done for over a decade. Just three days ago, she’d seen him pulling wisps of Bermuda grass from beneath his geraniums. He was thinned down, but his spirits seemed good. His voice was hearty and stern when he directed his grandson in mowing the lawn, in blowing the cement walkways clean of grass clippings. He was coping well enough that Virginia, his wife, sometimes escaped to Annie’s kitchen table for a cup of coffee and ten minutes of complaint. He’s so cranky, Virginia would say, nervously centering her coffee cup on one of Annie’s woven placemats. The chemo makes him dizzy. He doesn’t eat. Annie thought Virginia brave and loyal; she envied the smell of carrots and potatoes, steak and onions wafting across the backyard fence exactly at five o-clock. Annie couldn’t imagine not eating a meal which smelled so basic, so much more homey than the scrambled eggs or bowl of granola which had become her own thoughtless last-minute dinners. Virginia’s kitchen stood as Annie’s emblem of the enduring marriage. Cause or effect, Annie wasn’t sure, but she was vaguely aware that had only her oven, or her and Alan’s oven, produced the meaty perfumes of Virginia’s, they would never have been divorced.

She didn’t think about the yelling.

A neighborly sort, she’d thought when she arrived in the neighborhood years ago and came home from work after dark to find her garbage cans pulled off the street, illuminated neatly in the carport by her headlight beams. Perhaps it was neighborliness; perhaps it was Eddie’s insistence on order. His own front yard was all hard lines in concrete except for the square of lawn buffering his porch against the sidewalk. Cement curbing enforced Eddie’s red roses, which grew in deadpan earth as flat and clean as new asphalt. Annie, not much of a gardener herself, had thought one turned the earth beneath shrubs and flowers to make the broken surface welcoming to water. Eddie’s roses, though, were thriving in their hardscrabble floors. If a spent bloom managed to escape Eddie’s deadheading to drop its petals, he had them swept clean within a day’s time. A man so intent on tidiness as Eddie could not be nearing death, which would surely render dropped petals trivial.

As the sirens sounded and neared, Annie sat up from the couch and moved to the screen door, where she stood and watched. Two cars were parked in front of Virginia and Eddie’s: the older son’s white Lexus, the younger son’s dark blue Taurus. Annie was not a car person. She recognized these two makes only because Eddie had been quick to point their merits out to her. When the older son, Eddie Jr., had moved up from Camry to Lexus, Eddie schooled her in engine size, mpg, and luxury options like heated leather seats and defrosting rearview mirrors. Eddie had waved her over to the curb while she was mowing her lawn not so long ago. She’d let the mower engine die to hear about Eddie Jr.’s success at his chiropractic clinic, success that made the Lexus possible. These conversations—it was almost as if Eddie were a salesman trying to sell her a car—seemed misplaced in some psychic geography with which she was unfamiliar, what with Eddie Jr. inside the house visiting with Virginia, Eddie Sr. outside outlining the virtues of the Lexus to Annie. What was most impressive was cost, though, Annie had learned from Eddie, and that it was possible to pay forty thousand dollars for a car remarkably like nearly every other model on the freeway. She’d sensed early in her residence in their neighborhood—Eddie’s unembarrassed question about what she’d paid for her house–that money, having it and spending it, was important to Eddie, to his sense of himself in relation to others. Annie was neither a buyer nor a getter; Eddie became her weathervane of consumerism. His sons’ cars, the woven redwood fence newly erected across his back lot line, airplane tickets to the Dakotas, each was introduced and outlined to Annie in fine accounting including even the relative cost of cars not bought, fence bids not accepted, addendums necessary to certify the financial acumen of the buyer.

So Annie recognized easily the clean shapes of the sons’ cars as she stood at her screen. Their presence assured her that the sirens, winding themselves to hysteria as they drew closer and closer, were not coming to Eddie’s house. The sons—tall, portly take-charge types, gray-haired like their father—would not allow public disorder to overcome Eddie’s household any more than Eddie would. They were only visiting, Annie was sure, staying through the Late Show as they’d frequently done since Eddie’s diagnosis. When a midnight walk held more appeal than the prone, passive acceptance of her insistent insomnia, often Annie would pass Eddie’s house and the moonlit gleam of the sons’ parked cars to the studio applause following Letterman’s dialogue and the delayed roars of Eddie and his offspring. Where was Virginia, she’d often wonder, and then satisfy herself with the image of Virginia (a tiny beehived blonde waif amidst her big men) baking a lemon chiffon pie or a double chocolate layer cake for the midnight pleasure of her family. Annie herself had become the recipient of such riches on the morning after. Virginia would appear skittishly at the front door and offer her a quarter of a pie or an outsized slab of cake: Eddie can’t take the cream anymore. Or the frosting doesn’t sit well with Eddie these days. As soon as Virginia returned to her kitchen to design some other dessert, Annie would stop whatever she was doing, pour herself a glass of milk, and eat the pie or the cake. She was diligent about reporting to Virginia her enjoyment of the treats. She told herself Virginia needed her guiltless, unrestrained absorption of calories to make up for Eddie’s failure.

The fire engine, then ambulance, came from down the long south end of their street. The engine lurched to a stop in front of Annie’s house, two yellow-hatted firemen hitting the sidewalk at a run. The paramedics were a heartbeat behind, exiting the ambulance which had pulled onto Eddie’s lawn. (Tire tracks! Annie thought. Eddie won’t be happy.) Up and down the block, front doors widened and neighbors stepped out, the whiteness of pajamas and robes fluttering mothlike in and out of doors, back and forth from porch to porch, lawn to lawn. Nobody turned on a light. The paramedics unrolled a stretcher from the ambulance. When it sprang tall, its wheel-tipped legs scissoring open like an ironing board’s, Annie startled and stepped back. It was Eddie.

She shut the front door; the murmurs and footsteps, the throaty rumble of the fire engine softened. She turned off the kitchen light and, her hand sliding gently against the walls for guidance, she made her way to the bedroom, to the rumpled bed she had left hours before. Tomorrow she would speak to Virginia. She would try to find some small way she was needed, some small service she could offer that wouldn’t get in the way of the big sons and their wives whose voices ebbed and flowed as, her watching completed, she fell into sleep.

Annie’s house had been a wreck when she’d bought it. An affordable wreck, though, whose methodical clean-up and repair had so exhausted her that she had found it possible to sleep heavily for two and three hours at a stretch after a day of hauling garbage and hacking shrubs, scrubbing sinks and painting ceilings. What others had seen as an eyesore Annie had seized as a welcome alternative to Valium and Diphenhydramine, the refillable prescriptions to which her distracted gynecologist had prescribed when she’d murmured something about sleeplessness in response to the obligatory doctor’s summation following her check-up: Any questions? What she’d wanted, really, was guided instruction as to how one resumes single life after twenty years of muted, soft-cornered marriage. What exactly does one do with dinner, the one meal of the day which she and Alan had shared? How does one set a pretty place and face the four food groups alone? With a candle or without? When the fickle Honda’s clutch gives up the ghost during rush hour on a Thursday evening, whom does one call now that Alan, her best friend since high school, her officially documented ex-husband, was living on the outskirts with a golden retriever and his pregnant girlfriend (younger, although Alan had explained courteously it was her relative vivacity, not her youth, that had seduced him out of their marriage).

Annie had been a good patient and swallowed the Valium, but it enabled inaction, which opened the door to reflection, which led to the road down self-recrimination. The Diphenhydramine left her headachy and slothful for hours after waking. When Alan had asked, graciously enough, if she’d consider selling their pretty bungalow so he could extract his half of community property in cash, she hadn’t the wits to refuse. Homeless, she’d followed the directions of realtors the way she’d followed those of her distant doctor. The first refusal she’d offered to anyone (could it be decades since she’d said no, I won’t?) concerned the house.

You won’t want this one, the realtor had grumbled dismissively, kicking a broken sprinkler head from the front step. It needs so much work.

I want it, Annie had countered, thirty seconds inside the door. I’ll take it.

She’d warmed to Eddie easily in the early days in her new neighborhood. He appeared with his weedwacker after Annie blistered her thumb trimming the foot-high lawn in the back yard. He backed his tarnished silver El Camino into her carport and loaded the pyre of debris she’d dragged from the spider-webbed tool shed. Going that way anyway, he’d said, refusing her offer to pay for the dump fee. When her house and yard had been tidied and transformed from dereliction, You do good work, Annie. Meg and I were saying how nice the place is looking. Then, almost shyly as he turned away: You’re a good neighbor to have. Once during a break at work she’d mentioned to a co-worker that her neighbor was a Rush Limbaugh fan. When the woman pretended to choke on her coffee, Annie felt disloyal, as if she’d delivered a low blow to a person who’d only ever been kind to her.

Although it was Eddie’s upraised voice she overheard through the years, truly hotheaded angry if she were frank about it, and never Virginia’s, her fondness attached to Eddie rather than his wife. Virginia flitted while Eddie stood; Virginia waved while Eddie talked. It seemed to Annie that Eddie’s wife moved as if she were one step ahead of a rabid dog or a speeding car. Something about Virginia unsettled Annie, made her question uninvited all the secrets woven into a person, even a neighbor appreciated and trusted, even a woman who never let slip a complaint or discontent. A woman like Annie herself, who would never inquire about an absent husband. Or a present one.

She and Eddie and Virginia had developed a vacation system for picking up papers and mail, watering pots, pulling cans in and out on garbage day. In terse, polite notes they would inform each other of the dates of their removal from the neighborhood. When Virginia and Eddie went back to family in the Dakotas each fall, Annie stood sentry over their two houses. When Annie infrequently traveled for work, to San Francisco or Denver or Minneapolis, she left her house safe with Eddie and Virginia. Virginia collected teaspoons, Annie knew, and Annie always remembered to find her a pretty souvenir to add to her collection, an enameled tribute to the Twin Cities or the Golden Gate, over which Virginia’s exclamations of thanks would arise and subside, truncated to make way for Eddie’s questions about flight conditions and hotel locations. In season, baskets of overflow strawberries and peaches, bags of persimmons and apples, were set unannounced outside Annie’s carport door. A loaf of persimmon bread, a jar of apple butter, would be placed outside Virginia’s kitchen in the early morning. When the Honda failed, it was Eddie whom Annie had called, first for advice, then for a ride to the rental car agency. It was Eddie’s mechanic who replaced the clutch. Annie had been blessed with perfect neighbors.

~  

Annie tiptoed across her damp lawn to fetch the morning paper. Eddie and Virginia’s had, like hers, been tossed on the sidewalk, barely off the street. Eddie usually had his paper in long before Annie. Sometimes before dawn, standing at the kitchen window drinking her morning coffee after a troublesome night, Annie would see him, water hose or push broom in hand, waiting for their tardy paper boy. Virginia Annie liked to imagine sleeping, maybe rolling into the sheeted warmth left by Eddie’s body. It was always Eddie who brought in the paper, who handled the garbage cans.

The sons’ cars were gone, Eddie’s house still. The ambulance tires had marred the lawn as she’d predicted, flat indentations criss-crossing Eddie’s thick carpet like the tracks of interrupted ironing. Eddie would probably rake and then mow, as soon as he was able, to erase the imperfection. With the papers hooked under her arm, Annie knocked at the door. Through Virginia’s yellow lace curtains, she could see into the kitchen, chairs sitting cockeyed around the table, leftover coffee cups and dessert saucers awaiting rinsing and stacking.

Annie knocked again. She wanted to set the paper down and leave, but this seemed an instance where louder raps were warranted, so she knocked and waited. Hospital, she thought. The sons and Virginia are still at the hospital. It had happened before.

That evening Annie came home to find her block a congregation of cars and neighbors. The electrician from across the street, Happy’s elderly master and mistress, the pregnant accountant from the new house on the corner and her three-year-old, two middle-aged men she didn’t recognize, Eddie Jr. The old dog was asleep on the sidewalk, eyes shut, his loose leash coiled sloppily around his lowered head. The two-year-old, Annie thought his name was Morgan, was swinging a plastic baseball bat. She edged past them, pulled the Honda into the carport, set her purse and a quart of milk down on the step outside her door, and wondered what she could say, how she could phrase a question about the ambulance, the fire engine, Virginia’s absence that morning.

“Can I ask how Eddie is?” she called to Eddie Jr. as she crossed her lawn. He turned from the accountant and stared at her, red-faced, rueful. “I’m Annie. Next door?”

“Oh, sure.” He put out his big hand. “Eddie Hausauer.”

Annie took his hand, found herself squeezing it too long. “How’s Eddie?”

“Dad passed last night.”

Happy stood and shook, nudged his wet nose against Annie’s knee.

“I’m so sorry.” She knelt and felt for the velvety inside of Happy’s ear. “I’m sorry.” She held the dog’s head against her neck.

“Took the ambulance and the paramedics almost fifteen minutes to get here. He was gone when they came. My brother and I, we came over when Mom called. Thought it was indigestion.”

“The cancer?”

“Massive stroke.” Eddie Jr. was massive, Annie thought. A mastiff was a dog like Happy, but bigger.

Annie stood. “What can I do? For Virginia?”

“Oh, we’re keeping her over at our house. We’ve got lots of room. Family’s flying in from the Dakota’s this afternoon.”

“A casserole?” Annie said, hopeful.

“Maybe later. We’re doing fine now.”

“He was … your father was always so good to me. He—“

“One tough German, that’s Dad.”

“And services?”

“Thursday morning. At the Methodist Church on Fairmont.”

“Yes.”

The accountant said something about being out of town. Happy’s old mistress picked up the dog’s leash and tugged. Annie understood Eddie Jr. had no more to say, neighbors having been informed, services announced. She knew that in times of loss, it was better to jump right in and do rather than ask. She thought of Eddie’s lawn, his flowers, the Bermuda grass growing beneath the geraniums like the stubborn hair on a corpse, ignoring the body’s signals of shutdown.

“Please give Virginia my love,” she said, touching Eddie’s broad shoulder.

“Will do,” he said, already turning away. Then, salving his shortness with her, he turned and grinned. “Dad was tough, but Mom’s tougher.”

Annie hadn’t thought of Virginia as tough in all the years she’d neighbored next to Eddie and his wife. It wasn’t her physical smallness in contrast to Eddie’s size, though she was the kind of tiny that suggested frailty, however untrue the stereotype might be. Maybe it was her voice, deeper than one would expect, and never raised, not even when Annie heard Eddie’s bellows for Meg, Meg, across the back fence, laced with Rush Limbaugh’s tirades. Annie would hear the back door open and Virginia answer: What is it, Eddie? It would be something misplaced, not where Eddie damn well knew he had put it, or something needing replacement, more lawn fertilizer or bird seed, which Eddie damn well knew he’d asked her to buy. Virginia would scurry and find the lost thing or head off in the car to Wal-Mart to buy whatever it was Eddie had asked her to restock, more than once if his retorts were to be trusted. Annie would put down her broom or put away her clippers and tiptoe into her own house, embarrassed, ashamed as if it had been Annie whom Eddie was castigating. Virginia tough?

But she hadn’t thought of herself as a tough woman, either, certainly not for all the years Alan had seemed to be taking care of her and their life together. Certainly not when Alan had segued into his abandonment of the marriage by explaining patiently how he’d always wanted a dog (news to Annie, who couldn’t recall such desire in her husband), how it was Patti’s golden retriever which made him see that Annie just wasn’t the person he needed to be with now. She’s playful, he’d said with an overflow of ardent admiration which made Annie nauseous; she’s outrageous. To cut him off—she heard the next line coming—Annie had said with a sarcasm so atypical Alan had not understood: She makes you feel twenty years old again, doesn’t she? Alan didn’t miss a beat. Yes, exactly! Annie became a conspirator then, Alan made her one, to all the passions and intrigues of his relationship with Patti. Once even, before he’d left their house for good, they’d made love between Alan’s drawn-out monologues on Patti’s uniqueness. It was as if for Alan, talking about his new woman became the aphrodisiac inspiring final coitus with his old one. Annie had been a strangely willing participant, the outgoing member of a ménage a trois collecting what she could before her displacement.

What had she been thinking, Annie asked herself as she put the milk into the fridge and slung her purse onto the kitchen table, her stomach clutching with the frankness of memory. What kind of person would let herself be handled so hurtfully by a man who’d promised to cherish her? A man who’d been her best friend? Could she even hold Alan to blame for what she’d allowed him to do to her? She shuddered and gripped the table edge with both hands to stop the shaking in her shoulders. These were thoughts she’d only ever before suffered at night, when the gloamy edges of insomnia welcomed nightmares. What did she and Virginia know of the toughness of men?

[Part II of “One Tough German” can be read here.]

Anna Villegas worked as a full-time college English professor in California’s Central Valley for forty-one years. Her published work includes four decades of short stories, poems, essays, newspaper columns, and three novels. Now retired, she lives in Nevada City, California, where the folk, the foothills, and the ghosts of her Gold Rush forebearers supply inspiration for her fiction.