There had been no service. Jake had asked his mother about any plans, and knew she wouldn’t lie to him. Frank had been buried with no fanfare, his plot paid for by the Forest Service.
The snowbanks were still deeply furrowed from the excavators. The headstone was simple, just like the man beneath it. It was becoming dusk, and the temperature was dropping.
Jake stood there, his breath visible in the rapidly cooling air. He wanted to talk out loud, tell Frank about his daughter, about Bert converting, about the sewing machine.
Instead, he reached out and patted the headstone, and made his way back home before it grew too cold. Frank would want him to take care of Rachel, he knew that much. Just like the feral cats, Frank’s daughter was a desperate creature.
Jake had heard the stories, and he hoped that some truth had been left out, over the nine years of retelling. She had once been an outcast, and Jake decided to take it upon himself to show her that she was not alone, that she was not the only one.
The Regulars
Rachel grew accustomed to her new morning routine. Every weekday began with a washcloth bath, followed by coffee and chain-smoking, and then rote praying she hoped would take root one day. She trudged out to her truck, and left it to warm, drank another cup of coffee, smoked another cigarette. By then, the windshield had defrosted, and she could see well enough to drive to work.
At the bar, she started every shift by pulling the chain on the neon signs. The Dirty Shame was open every day, at precisely 8:00 a.m. The men from her meeting appeared shortly after, drank coffee, smoked, and kept a close watch on their new recruit. She had fallen in with a gang of taciturn men older than her father, and after one meeting, they knew more about her than her father ever had.
Rachel assumed that the patrons of the bar would remember her past, would treat her with disdain. But drunks knew better than that. She had control over the thing they wanted most.
Gene Runkle showed up at eight thirty every morning. He was the dogcatcher in Quinn but was terrible at it, probably because he spent every single day drinking. The only thing he ever caught was gossip. He looked the same as he did when Rachel was a child. Rachel stopped by in the mornings to badger her mother for lunch money, and Gene Runkle was always drinking his first or second beer. Fifteen years later, he did not have the red nose and cheeks of an alcoholic. Gene Runkle was a gray man. His face and limbs were the color of shirts and sheets laundered for years, in a barely functional washing machine. His hair wasn’t silver. He had a full head of it, and it was the kind of blond that had given up and faded, leached of color, yellow in some lights, the hue of old wood.
At nine o’clock in walked Mrs. Matthis, who had once been the judge’s wife. Her first name was Erlene, but Rachel addressed her formally, as did everyone else in town. The judge died ten years prior, pneumonia that he just couldn’t shake, a bad rasp that turned into a death rattle. After he died, Mrs. Matthis immediately took to drinking, as if she had always been waiting for the opportunity, determinedly, a little desperate, vodka and tomato juice every half an hour. She always kept her composure, and left before the lunch crowd. Mrs. Matthis sat far away from Gene Runkle—she did not engage in his rumormongering. Every day, Mrs. Matthis worked a book of crossword puzzles, sold at the Sinclair, new at the end of every month. She never asked for help with answers but was obviously not certain, for she used a pencil and brought her own pink eraser and pencil sharpener. She left the curls of shavings in neat piles around her purse. When Mrs. Matthis sharpened her pencils, it sounded like the scratchy chirp of crickets. Mrs. Matthis was the puffy kind of drunk, swollen hands and face, cheeks chapped red, pink hands clutching at the pencil so hard her joints turned white. Despite this, she erased carefully, almost daintily. The crossword puzzle books were cheap and the paper tore easily. She erased often, and Rachel suspected the boxes were filled with gibberish. Mrs. Matthis’s mind was obviously pickled, and there was no way she could recall the largest of the great lakes, or the famous college football coach from Alabama.