She saw every day what an active mother Diane was in Josh’s life, talking regularly to and about him, helping him with school and society, allowing him to be a child and to become an adult, and this reminded Jackie to visit her own mother. Diane also often literally reminded her.
“We should stop by and visit Lucinda,” Diane would say after work.
Today all of them were at Lucinda’s house for a barbecue. There was everything you needed for a barbecue: a small plastic bucket full of mud. Everything.
“Happy birthday,” Diane said to Jackie. “Sounds like someone has decided to finally grow older. How old are you now?”
“Twenty-one. I skipped twenty. Not everyone has to turn twenty. Don’t know when I’ll turn twenty-two. Maybe in a few years, when I’m ready. Is Troy coming?”
The Troys had settled in the barista district. It turned out that he was an excellent barista, just as he had been excellent at everything else he had done. Carlos had taken to issuing each Troy a pink flamingo, which had the double effect of removing the flamingos from Night Vale for good and taking each Troy out of his current reality and into a reality of his own, where he could be a helpful and competent individual, rather than a helpful and competent horde. It was a highly scientific solution, and Cecil would not stop talking on the radio about how brilliant it was that Carlos had thought of it. “Nothing is more attractive that someone who is good at their job,” Cecil often said.
“Josh invited him, but honestly I think even he doesn’t really want his father to come. Speaking of which, how about you and Troy?”
“There is no me and Troy,” said Jackie. “It’s too late for that. Besides. I already have a family.”
She took her mother’s arm. Lucinda laughed and patted her hand.
“That’s nice of you, dear, but I don’t mind if you want to spend a little time with Troy. Not for him—I could care less about him—but you might get something out of it.”
“Have you remembered any of your childhood?” asked Diane.
Lucinda let go of her daughter’s hand.
“No,” said Jackie. “We’re working on it, but might be it’s gone for good.”
“Even if we don’t have the then, dear, we have the now,” her mother said, biting into one of the wax avocados, as she always did when trying to process her feelings.
“You really should stop eating those, Mom,” Jackie said. “They’re not real.”
“‘Should’ and ‘will’ are different words,” said Lucinda, taking a second big bite.
Jackie shook her head and went out the sliding glass door into the backyard. Josh came barreling into her.
“Jackie!”
He was small, and round, with broad, feathered wings and wide green eyes.
“Looking good,” said Jackie. “Have you ever tried flying with those?”
“No,” he said, flapping self-consciously. “I wouldn’t know how.”
“You’ve flown as a housefly before.”
“That’s different. I don’t go high or far at all. I wouldn’t know how to fly with wings this big.”
“You won’t know until you try, man.”
“Can I help you at the pawnshop sometime? I’ve never had a job. It sounds kind of awful and kind of fun.”
“It’s exactly both,” she said. “Tell you what. If you can fly higher than the roof, I’ll let you do a shift with me tomorrow.”
Josh grinned nervously, but first he turned to Diane, who was watching the conversation unfold with something less than enthusiasm.
“Is it okay, Mom?”
“It’s okay, Josh,” she said, not sure if it was okay. She hid her anxiety behind smiling eyes.
I’ll always be a mother, she thought, but I’ll always be a lot of things. I wonder what the next of those things will be?
Josh looked back at Jackie, who nodded and gave him a thumbs-up with her empty left hand, and then he looked up at the sky. His wings worked and his body slowly lifted off the grass.
“Please try not to hit any windows, dear,” said Lucinda from her lawn chair.
“Just be careful please,” said Diane.
Josh banked around experimentally. He was a little lower than the rooftop. Diane watched him, one hand over her eyes, one over her heart.
“Watch your head,” she said, but to remind him of something he already knew, not to tell him something he didn’t.
Jackie gave him another thumbs-up, and he returned it to her. He tried a loop, and managed a wavering somersault instead.
Troy watched all this, sitting in his car just outside the house. He had both hands on the wheel and he was smiling. It was definitely a smile. He had been sitting there for a couple minutes trying to make a decision. As he watched Josh, he thought about what Jackie had said about helpfulness, and what Diane had said about his role in their lives, and he made a decision.
From where he was flying, Josh could see the other red-tiled rooftops of Sand Pit, between the identical rooftops of Palm Frond Majesty and the Weeping Miner, and other housing developments with elaborate names and houses failing to live up to them, and just down the way the strip mall with Big Rico’s Pizza and Carlos’s lab, and beyond that City Hall, draped in black velvet for the night, and a young woman walking to her car, Mayor Cardinal, yes, but also Dana again for the night, going to meet her recently cured brother for a celebratory dinner at Tourniquet, and beyond that the tall black walls of the forbidden Dog Park, and, in the parking lot of the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex, Cecil from the radio station and Carlos the scientist with bowling bags in one hand and the other’s hand in the other, strolling inside for League Night, a kiss before they opened the door and then they were gone, and beyond that the Moonlite All-Nite Diner, which, true to its name, was as busy then as it was at any other hour, with Laura offering fruit from the gnarled branches of her body and Steve Carlsberg digging heartily into a slice of invisible pie, and beyond that Diane’s old office, full of computers and tables where work could be done although no one knew why they did it, where Catharine had stayed late to finish up some work at a desk which was tarantula-free, although she still flinched at imagined light touches on her hand, and beyond that the low bulk of the public library, outwardly quiet, quietly seething with librarians, and near that his own house, which was just now thinking of him, and where a faceless old woman was secretly refolding all of his clothes, and beyond that the Night Vale Daily Journal building, whose sole occupant was considering a wall of hatchets, ready to get down to the bloody business of local journalism, and beyond that the movie theater, its blinking lights showing through the sentient haze of Stacy as she prepped the box office for the midnight movie audiences, silent customers who fade into being in their seats at exactly midnight, watching movies that play on the screen even with the projector shut off, before fading back away into nothing without even waiting for the ending credits to finish, and beyond that the hole in the vacant lot out back of the Ralphs, and the Ralphs itself, offering fresh food and low, low prices, although never at the same time, and beyond that Old Woman Josie outside her house, no paper in her hand, and Erika, and Erika, and Erika as well, all outside in the garden, and the tower of Night Vale Community Radio, blinking light atop, and Jackie’s Pawn Shop, formerly Lucinda’s Pawn Shop, a place that was just then closed, that was now closed more often than it wasn’t because its owner wanted to be somewhere else sometimes, and the windows of the hospital, doctors flitting from one to the next in an unexplained instant, and the car lot where used car salesmen loped joyfully over their car-strewn territory, barking at a moon that they did not understand but then no one else did really, and the Brown Stone Spire, ancient and humming a malevolent tone, and a cordon of helpful helicopters keeping everyone free, and out past all of that the sand, a small eternity of sand, desert like there would never be anything else, and beyond that, eventually, something else, because there is always something else, and King City, no longer forgotten, an ordinary town, with an ordinary mayor, who was just then taking off his jacket, a man in a short-sleeve shirt holding a deerskin suitcase, and stepping into his house where a family greeted him with his correct name at last, and beyond it and around it all other ordinary towns, and all ordinary people, who were sleeping or not sleeping, who were metaphorically or literally alive, or metaphorically or literally not, gone but alive in our hearts, or gone and forgotten, all existing somewhere on a spectrum of loss, and beyond them and around them the oceans and forests, momentarily teeming with life before the great planetary hush, and out beyond that a sky that was coming around slowly to the idea of sunset, or was, somewhere else, just having the first thought of day, and beyond that the wavering red lights of spy satellites, watching, and the steady blue lights of unidentified spacecraft, watching, and the white light of what we mistakenly assume is the moon, watching, and beyond that void, and void after that, void on and on, with a scattered vanishing of non-void mixed in, and beyond that so many mysteries that it didn’t seem to Josh that he would be able to solve even one of them, not if he had all the time in the world, and he didn’t have all the time in the world, and he would never solve even one mystery.