“She was always such a sweet girl. I never got why she chose Brad over you.”
“Aunt Jeanne!” Cameron groans. He must’ve explained a million times; it was never like that with Elizabeth.
“Well, I’m just saying.”
Cameron, Brad, and Elizabeth were best friends growing up: the three musketeers. Now, somehow, the other two are married and having a baby. It’s not lost on Cameron that the tot’s going to take his place as Brad and Elizabeth’s third wheel.
“Speaking of which, I should bounce. Brad needs his truck back by lunchtime.”
“Oh! One thing, before you go.” With effort, Aunt Jeanne uses her cane to lever herself up from the sofa. Cameron tries to help, but she waves him away.
For what seems like a decade, she jostles around the clutter in the other room. Meanwhile, he can’t resist poking through a stack of papers on the table. Old electric bill (paid, thankfully), a page torn from TV Guide (they still publish that?), and a hunk of discharge papers from the minute clinic at the drugstore in town, a prescription form stapled to the top page. Damn, personal shit. But before he can bury the script, he sees something that makes his cheeks burn white-hot. This can’t be right.
Aunt Jeanne? Chlamydia?
Her cane thumps toward the living room. Cameron tries to shove everything back, but to his horror, the whole stack topples, leaving him holding the script. He dangles it from the tips of his fingers, as if the paper itself might be infected. A stationery transmitted disease.
“Oh, that.” She shrugs, nonchalant. “It’s going around the park.”
Cameron feels his insides lurch. He swallows and says, “Well, this shit is no joke, Aunt Jeanne. Glad you got treated.”
“Of course I did.”
“And maybe start using, uh, protection?” Is he really having this conversation?
“Well, I’m team rubber, but Wally Perkins, he won’t—”
“Stop. Sorry I asked.”
She chuckles. “Serves you right for snooping.”
“Point taken.”
“Anyway. This.” With her slipper, she nudges a box Cameron hadn’t noticed at her feet. “Some things of your mother’s. Thought you might want them.”
Cameron stands. “No thanks,” he says, without a second look at the box.
Day 1,302 of My Captivity
MY CURRENT WEIGHT IS SIXTY POUNDS. I AM A BIG BOY.
As always, my examination began with the bucket. Dr. Santiago removed the top of my tank and lifted the large yellow bucket until it was flush with the rim. It contained seven scallops. Dr. Santiago prodded my mantle over the tank’s edge with her net, but needlessly. For fresh scallops, I would have entered willingly.
The anesthesia seeped sweetly through my skin. My limbs stilled. My eyes closed.
My first encounter with the bucket was long ago. Day thirty-three of my captivity. Back then, I found the sensation alarming. But I have grown to enjoy the bucket. With the bucket comes a sensation of total nothingness, which, in most ways, is more pleasant than the everything-ness.
My arms dragged on the concrete as Dr. Santiago carried me to the table. She folded me into a pile on the plastic scale. She gasped: “Whoa, big boy!”
“How much?” Terry said, poking me with his large brown hands that always taste of mackerel.
“Up three pounds from last month,” Dr. Santiago answered. “Has his diet changed?”
“Not that I know of, but I can double-check,” Terry said.
“Please do. This sort of gain is abnormal, to say the least.”
What can I say? I am a special guy, after all.
June Gloom
There’s a new boy bagging at Shop-Way tonight.
Tova flattens her lips as he puts her strawberry and marmalade jams side by side in the grocery bag. They clink ominously as he jostles in the rest: coffee beans, green grapes, frozen peas, a bear-shaped bottle of honey, and a box of tissues. They’re the soft, lotion-y kind. The expensive kind. Tova began buying them for Will when he was in the hospital, where the tissues were sandpaper. Now she finds herself too accustomed to them to switch to the more affordable brand.
“I’ll hardly need to see that, love,” Ethan Mack says as Tova presents her loyalty card. The cashier is a chatty fellow with a heavy Scottish accent who also happens to be the store’s owner. He raps a callused knuckle against his wizened temple and grins. “Got it all up here; had your number punched in no sooner’n you came through the door.”
“Thank you, Ethan.”
“Anytime.” He hands her a receipt and flashes his slightly crooked, but kind, grin.
Tova scans it to make sure the jams rung through with the promotion properly applied. There they are: buy one, get one half price. She ought not to have doubted: Ethan runs a tight ship. The Shop-Way has improved since he moved to town and bought the place a few years back. Won’t be long before he has the new boy trained in proper bagging technique. She tucks the receipt into her pocketbook.
“Some June, innit?” Ethan leans back and crosses his arms over his belly. It’s past ten in the evening: the checkout lanes are empty, and the new boy has retreated to the bench next to the deli counter.
“It’s been drizzly,” Tova agrees.
“You know me, love. I’m like a big duck. Rolls off my back. But I’ll be damned if I haven’t forgotten what the sun looks like.”
“Yes, well.”
Ethan smooths piles of receipts into neat white bricks, his eyes lingering on the circular sucker mark on her wrist, a purplish bruise which has hardly faded in the days since the octopus grabbed her there. He clears his throat. “Tova, I’m sorry to hear about your brother’s passing.”
Tova lowers her head but says nothing.
He continues, “You need anything at all, just say the word.”
She meets his eyes. She’s known Ethan for years, and the man doesn’t go out of his way to avoid scuttlebutt. Tova has never met a sixty-something-year-old man who so enjoys gossip. So he’s surely aware of the estrangement between her and her brother. Tone measured, she says, “Lars and I weren’t close.”
Had she and Lars ever been close? Tova is certain they were, once. As children: certainly. As young adults: mostly. Lars stood alongside Will, both in gray suits, at Tova and Will’s wedding. At the reception, Lars gave a lovely speech that made everyone’s eyes mist over, even their stoic father’s. For years afterward, Tova and Will spent every New Year’s Eve at Lars’s house in Ballard, eating rice pudding and clinking flutes at midnight while little Erik slept under a crocheted blanket on the davenport.
But things started to change after Erik died. Once in a while, one of the Knit-Wits probes Tova, asking what happened between her and Lars, and Tova says nothing, really, and this is the truth. It happened gradually. No blow-out argument, no fist-shaking or hollering. One New Year’s Eve, Lars phoned Tova and informed her that he and Denise had other plans. Denise, his wife, for a time anyway. When they would come for dinner, Denise was fond of loitering around the kitchen sink while Tova was up to her elbows in suds, insisting that she was there if Tova ever needed to talk. Well, it’s not a crime for her to care about you, even if you don’t know her well, is what Lars said when Tova registered her annoyance.
After that fizzled New Year’s, there was a skipped Easter luncheon, a canceled birthday party, a Christmas gathering that never made it past the we should get together state of planning. The years stretched into decades, turning siblings to strangers.
Ethan fiddles with the small silver key dangling from the drawer of the cash register. His voice is soft when he says, “Still, family is family.” He grimaces, lowering his awkward frame into the swivel chair next to the register. Tova happens to know the chair helps his bad back. Not the sort of gossip she seeks out, of course, but sometimes one can’t help but overhear. The Knit-Wits like to natter on about such things.