Grime (6 page)

"Anything good?” Val asks.

“You didn’t look?”

“Doesn’t have my name on it.”

I put the letters back in their envelopes,
then the bundle back in the manila pouch, then the whole thing back
in the box. "Nothing that changes anything."

She doesn’t say anything, just shoos me off
the bed. "Come on. Help me get the mattress out."

It takes us about two hours to finish. We
don't talk, really, except the occasional "hand me that, will you?"
But then the last room is empty, and we’re standing in the yard in
the middle of the night, looking at the mound of trash in the
trailer. With Jamie’s truck gone it just sits there, immobile,
unable to go anywhere. Stuck.

I don’t see the cat anywhere.

I turn and look at Val, really look at her.
"How did you do it?"

"Do what?"

"How did you turn out so normal?"

She smiles and pulls her Newports from her
pocket. Taking one for herself, she offers me the last in the pack.
I take it, and accept the light she holds out. "What the fuck is
normal?" she asks after a long drag.

God I've missed this. I suck the smoke into
my mouth and hold it there for a while, tonguing it. Val looks
appraisingly at the overflowing trailer. "Dump will be open in a
few hours," I say when I finally exhale.

"I don't really feel like waiting. Do
you?"

We only have to drive half an hour to find a
suitable place. The field is empty, the sign advertising it as for
sale and ideal for retail or residential development is faded and
torn. God bless Middle America.

I've always found the smell of gasoline
enticing. I wait until Val has unhitched her little dented Hyundai
and moved it out of the way before I start pouring it over the junk
in the trailer. We didn't bother to unload.

She'd picked up another pack when we stopped
for the gas, and as Val walks back toward me she's lighting two in
her mouth at the same time.

One she hands to me. The other she flicks on
the pile.

It doesn't catch right away. As I inhale I
watch a blue curl of flame follow a steak of gasoline, ripping one
of the plastic trash bags apart like a zipper, until it finds a
stack of old newspapers.

Then whoosh.

I hand the cigarette back to Val and she
sucks it in deeply. Neither of us speak for a while. We just stand
side by side in the dark and watch the flames crawl around all the
shit that should have stayed buried and forgotten.

I don't know how long it's been.

I've gotten lost in my own head.

“Twice a year,” Val says out of nowhere. “I
send you an email twice a year. And a card every Christmas. I’ve
been doing this for thirteen years. That’s twenty-six emails,
thirteen cards. Do you know how many responses you sent?”

I have no idea. “No.”

“Four.”

“No, it’s got to be more than four.”

She shakes her head. “No. It isn’t.”

The flames crackle.

I reach over and grab Val, put my arms around
her shoulders, tuck her in close. She leans her cheek against my
chest and circles her arms around my waist. We watch as the fire
grows.

"There goes Jamie's deposit," Val says.

“I’ll pay her back.” I owe her that much.

"Ethan really is a good guy, by the way," she
says. "Rough around the edges, but a good guy. Not like the others.
My kids absolutely loved him when they came down for Christmas last
year, and they don’t warm up to new people easily.”

"Gwen spent Christmas with you?"

"Usually does. Jamie, too, when she can." Her
shoulders rise and fall as she takes a deep breath. “You know, you
have an open invitation. Not just Christmas, but whenever. Just
call first, because only dicks drop in unannounced.”

“Trust me, you’ll have advanced warning.
Nobody goes to fucking Oklahoma on a whim.” She laughs, this great
throaty contagious laugh I had no idea she possessed. The trailer
keeps burning. “Are you sad that Dad’s gone?” I ask.

“Not really, no.”

“Does that make us bad people?”

“Probably. Yes. We’re terrible people.” She
leans back and looks up at me. “But you know what they say about
apples falling from trees, right?”

I laugh. Hard. Great gasping laughter that
suddenly isn’t laughter anymore, and I’m sitting on the ground, in
the dirt, and I’m not quite sure when it turned into crying but it
has, and Val is cradling my head and whispering “it’s okay, it’s
okay” over and over.

I don’t see the others before I leave. I
insist on buying Val breakfast, five a.m. waffles at a greasy
24-hour chain joint, and then we go our separate ways. At the hotel
I take another shower, even longer than the last, and by the time I
get out the sun is coming up. I lie down on the bed to try and
catch a couple of hours of sleep, but my mind won’t shut off.

Eventually I give up and call the airline to
see if I can change to an earlier flight. I haven't slept at all,
but I'm at that level of exhaustion where it doesn't matter.

After I drop off the rental and make it
through security, I still have a couple of hours to kill before my
flight leaves. I have a book in my bag, but I don’t feel like
reading. Instead I just sit at the gate and look at my phone. It
still works, even with the crack in the glass.

He sent me a few more messages since last
night. I delete the thread without reading them. Then I go to my
contacts and I find his name, and delete that, too.

I don’t realize how long I’ve been sitting
there until the gate agent announces my flight on the loudspeaker.
Everyone around me gets up to stand in line, but I don't. I just
sit in that godawful plastic chair and turn on my phone again,
stare at my contacts list, while they call my boarding group. Under
the tab of my recent contacts are each of my sisters' names, all
those texts and emails and phone calls and group messages working
out the logistics of this trip. The gate agent calls for final
boarding. I just stare at my phone.

Beside each of their names waits an empty
star.

K.H. Leigh is an independent fiction,
science-fiction and fantasy author, as well as a collector of
antique 8mm movie cameras, and a travel enthusiast. She lives in
Los Angeles, California.

For more visit
khleigh.com