“Do you even like bluegrass music?” Emily asked.
Martha blew her nose in the center of the pillow. “I’ll wash it,” she said. “There’s just that feeling, you know? When something happens, and you have to let it happen and you get that feeling, like your heart is breaking? That’s how I feel about joining a bluegrass band.”
“I didn’t know you liked bluegrass music.”
Martha rolled onto her back. Her mascara had smeared into two dark smudges on her eyelids. It made her look like an animal with its fur or feather patterned like false eyes. “That’s just it,” Martha said, closing her real eyes and inadvertently widening the false ones. Emily could barely watch.
86:PM
Olivia’s whole body shook, not like a leaf but like the tree itself, a deep kind of shudder that only happened at the hands of loggers. A tree feels its deepest movement in those final seconds. She once watched a program on television where a falling tree snapped at the trunk, creating a ten-foot-long catapult that tossed a logger fifty feet into the air. They called it kickback.
AM:87
Betty and Simon drove down the dirt road playing Amish or Vietnamish.
“A Bible in every compartment,” he said.
“A compartment in every Bible,” she said. “Tet Offensive.”
“Non-offensive. What’s mine is yours.”
“What mines? Agent Orange.”
“Orange preserves.” He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “I Am Become Jebediah, Raiser of Barns.”
Betty leaned back and closed her eyes. “Good one.”
88:PM
Goosebumps came more easily, though it was the middle of the summer. Tess sat in front of the fan and alternated between jerking sobs and laughter at the sound she made. That hiccup of breath was a terrible sound to hear in the dark, and she would laugh, rub her goosebumps down, and sob. She needed to make the decision to cut, because making the decision would bring instant pain and healing simultaneously. She was the kind of girl who climbed the tallest tree and cried to be let down, but she was also the kind of girl who would scramble and jump down on her own as soon as someone went in for the ladder. Here in the dark, she needed to decide.
AM:89
Missy looked at her watch, and back at Chet. “Half an hour,” she said. She was sitting cross-legged on his chair, naked, watching him on his bed.
Chet yawned. “Until when?”
“It’s been half an hour since I felt good about this situation.”
“The sex?” He wondered when she might finally leave.
“This whole situation. It’s been about thirty-two minutes.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about it,” he said, pressing his palms to his eyes for a second before removing them and blinking in the light. He was tired, he wanted sleep. “It was your idea, as I recall.”
“Don’t give me that. It was our idea, together.”
“You essentially teased me until I gave in.”
“You gave in. Fantastic.” She rolled onto the floor and covered her breasts with a phone book. “Now I’m a rapist, and a bad lay.”
“Jesus, Missy, you’re not a rapist.”
“I teased you, you gave in. You gave in like it was prom night.” She moved the phone book over her face. Chet reached to the side table for his glasses, which he polished carefully before placing them on his face. He looked at her breasts. Behind the phone book, she was crying.
“Don’t be dramatic,” he said.
“Time keeps going,” she said. “I thought it might not, but it did.”
Missy was making some kind of extended moan from behind the phone book. Chet watched her chest heave. The phone book bobbed up and down with her breath.
“We didn’t go to prom together,” he said.
90:PM
Frances’s pale skin felt stretched so thin that if she scratched her face or arms, she would mangle herself. She imagined the skin would peel up underneath her fingernails like lacquer from a table. Perhaps she wasn’t drinking enough water, she thought, perhaps she was sleeping too much again. When she slept, she had wonderful dreams.
AM:91
And the angels looked upon the land, and they said, LORD, look upon this woman who waxes her stairs at seven in the morning. And the LORD looked upon the earth with grave mercy and spoke, saying: That woman must perish, for she is well and truly mad. And the woman upon the earth slipped on her waxen stair and cracked two ribs and suffered a skull fracture on the way down and she looked to the heavens and with her dying breath said, Why, LORD? And the angels did open beers and laugh, and the LORD did take pleasure in the morning.
92:PM
Terrence realized his eyes were closed. He wasn’t sure how long they had been closed or if he had been sleeping during that time. Perhaps five feet away, he heard Charles moving across the floor of the box. Terrence coughed and Charles stopped moving.
“Terrence?” Charles asked. “Are you awake, old friend?”
“I think so.”
“You may have been meditating. I wouldn’t want to disturb you.”
“What are you doing over there?”
The noise and movement began again. “I’m tamping down this velvet material,” Charles said. “I was feeling a little buoyed.”
“That was your imagination.”
“It was an uncomfortable feeling. There wasn’t much better to do, while you were meditating.”
Terrence felt the kernel of an argument in Charles’s tone and it immediately made him nervous, though they were friends. Perhaps it was the confined space, Terrence decided. He closed his eyes and tried not to stir again, or to be bothered by the velvet noise.
AM:93
There’s no rule saying you have to be a child to compete in the Westbrook Elementary School Science Fair! I read the Rules and Regulations very closely! I spent approximately twenty-two hours on my volcano, which I have named Carla! I put her chemicals in bottles I labeled with my calligraphy pen! When I arrived, holding Carla aloft, the women at the check-in desk admired my work aloud and asked me who I was bringing this project in for and I said I am entering this category for myself, please! My name is Leonard and this is Carla! And they did laugh and one of the women made a clicking noise with her fingernails on the table because she wouldn’t recognize ambition if it slapped her in the face!
94:PM
Reginald fought the impulse to help Betty sign the loan. She had the paper wedged awkwardly under her left arm, still holding a wine glass as she attempted with her other hand to manipulate the pen into action. There’s no reason to rush, he said to himself, she’ll get it on her own. It was essential, as a salesman, to not be too pushy.
She wasn’t putting enough pressure on the pen to start the ink flowing. She shook the pen gently and looked at her husband. Reginald thought about the importance of the ink that was at that moment trapped in the reservoir of Betty’s pen, a very nice Cross fountain, now that he looked at it, with some kind of filigree along the side, possibly an inscription. Perhaps it once belonged to her father, a man who in his day would run circles around Reginald’s rinkydink furniture store. Quite possibly, the pen was the only item of his she carried around, though it seemed equally likely that her purse was full of tie clips and cufflinks and miniature portraits of the man. Just one stone from one cufflink could get Reginald out of the mess he had gotten himself into. He prayed for a few inches of ink.