Love Letters to the Dead

At Fallfest, there is a band that plays your songs. Everyone crowds into a park near the foot of the mountains the weekend right after Thanksgiving. When May and I were kids, we would get excited for it every year. There are tents with crafts, and booths with Indian fry bread and roasted chiles, and booths with ladies selling dried red corn for decoration and pies. But once it gets dark and colder, all anyone wants is the music. Moms and dads and kids and teenagers, too, all head for the stage. Everyone puts on their jackets and dances.

Mom and Dad used to swing dance on the dirt dance floor. They were the best. Everyone would watch them, spinning and lifting. May and I would be on the side, with the Thanksgiving wreaths we made at the craft booth, licking the powdered sugar from the fry bread off our fingers. Mom laughed like a little girl as Dad threw her in the air. It was almost time for the winter to come, but we forgot about our cold toes and our frozen fingers, because we could see what it looked like when they looked like love. We could imagine the story of them, how it was when they met, how it had happened that they made our family. We were proud that they were our parents.

Last year May really wanted to go to Fallfest again, so just the two of us went together. It was the second fall after Mom and Dad had split up. We walked around and ate fry bread, and when the dancing time of night came, we went over to the stage. I stood on the side and watched as May danced with everything in her body, twirling alone in the middle of the floor. It reminded me of when we were kids and how if there was a fight, she’d dance around the living room, using all of the power she had in her to make things better.

But after the first song was over, she said, “Let’s get out of here.”

We were about to leave, and that’s when he walked up. He was wearing a heavy flannel shirt, and he had a cigarette in his mouth and dark hair that hung over his forehead. He looked old to me. May told me later that he was twenty-four.

“I’m Paul,” he said. “You looked amazing out there.” He held out his hand to May, and I saw the dirt under his nails.

May’s cheeks flushed, and the sadness that had been coming off of her was replaced by a smolder. “Thanks,” she said with a slow smile.

Paul flicked his cigarette out and asked her for the next dance. May let him take her hand, and I stood there, watching the two of them together. As he spun her across the dirt stage, May giggled.

When it was over, he asked for her number. She said, “You’ll have to give me yours. I don’t have a cell yet, and you can’t call me at either of my parents’.” So he gave it to her, and he kissed her hand and made her promise not to lose it.

After that night, May started coming into my room when she got home from sneaking out and telling me things about Paul, who she had started seeing in secret. I remember once she lay down on my bed and whispered excitedly, “You wouldn’t believe the stuff he says to me, Laurel.”

“What does he say?”

She grinned and said, “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

“Do you kiss him?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“What’s it like?”

“Like being above the earth.” She smiled like the secrets she had were enough to live off of. “He got me this.” She pulled a thin gold chain out from underneath her shirt. It had a charm that said May in cursive writing. A heart dangled beneath the Y. I thought that it was funny that Paul with his rugged boots and his calloused hands had picked out a necklace like that.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about her kissing Paul. I always imagined that May would have a boyfriend who looked like River Phoenix, but Paul didn’t look anything like that. It scared me a little bit to think of them together, but I’d been there when they met, and the secret of him tied May and me together. She was opening the door to her new world, just a crack, and I wanted to be in it with her. So when she started to take me with her soon after that, to the movie nights where she’d meet him, it didn’t matter if deep down there was something wrong. I would have followed her anywhere.