And She Was by Cindy Dyson

that.”
    “The kids are his. They have no right…”
    Mary’s words stopped. The oldest woman I have ever seen moved from the darkened back hall. She wore a flannel housecoat and beaded leather slippers. She walked with the gait of a tired bull rider. Her face was a puzzle of folded skin, too deep to be called wrinkles. She sat in a chair next to Mary and lifted the great burden of her lids to meet Mary’s eyes.
    Mary crumpled. She fell onto her knees, her head finding the old woman’s lap. “I’m sorry,” she moaned between sobs. Hands, as gnarled and dry as driftwood, moved across Mary’s tangled hair, sweeping again and again. And then the old woman began to moan. A low, quiet moan I’d never heard before. It filled the small house with an ageless sadness, burdened the air with mourning.
    I moved backward to the door, leaving them there. I could feel the rhythmic moan as I started my bike. The engine seemed to pulse with it, the air seemed to hold it. The sun was creeping up below the horizon, and I had no place to go where I wouldn’t be alone.
    Except Bellie’s. Even the thought of sleeping on her couch with that horrid cage of flowers dangling over me was better than being alone tonight. Sure, I was a little worried about Nicholas, but he’d be more angry with Mary than with me, once he sobered up. I was more afraid of myself, of this sudden blunder of a rescue I’d actually accomplished. I needed someone who was chatty and had coke.

APRIL 1986
take a minute
    I stayed with Bellie a couple days, until Marge told me Nicholas was back out fishing. After Bellie’s riot of a house, my little gray home on a hill felt more lonely than ever. Thad wouldn’t be back for a couple more weeks at least, and I had no one to ease myself around, no one to gauge myself by, no one to be anything for. My defenses were down, and I got reflective. Not just about the past, but the kind of reflection that flings the past forward to clash with the present. And battle for a future.
    I would think a lot about the last time I’d seen my dad.
    I had been cocktail waitressing in Redwood City. The man I’d been shacked up with had just decided to go back to his wife and kids. He left me with an apartment I couldn’t afford and a red Fiat with low-profile tires. I packed up everything I wanted to keep, which barely filled the backseat, and left. I can’t say why I wanted to see Dad one more time. I did not love my father. I had no hope that we’d ever be close again. It may have been a need to know that at least I’d seen him once near the end.
    Grandma Jane had given me the address of Yolanda and Phil Caracus at Ever-New Wrecking and Salvage just south of Bakersfield, outside a town aptly called Weed Patch. She also said he was sick. “Oh, honey,” her voice crackling with age, “he’d just love to see you again.” Iknew she sent money now and then. That she’d given up visiting. That he had become one of the invisible: ties dissolving, eyes averted, and waiting to die.
    The temperature had climbed into the nineties, even though it was mid-April. And no, I didn’t have air-conditioning in the Fiat. I kept the windows down and a towel between my legs to keep them from sticking together. I found Ever-New right on Highway 56, a two-lane several miles from Weed Patch. The dust made a ball of haze around the car when I stopped. It was close to what I expected—a low-slung, half-metal, half-wood building, the front obscured by crap—an old lawn mower, dissolving cardboard boxes overflowing with small engine parts. A collection of wind chimes and twirlers buried the front door. Nothing moved.
    A dangle of humongous bells banged against the glass as I pushed the door open. Inside more junk, once loosely organized, now given way to entropy. To the left a long, fleshy-colored Formica counter stretched under a burden of boxes, grime, and four ashtrays. A man’s head rose from below the counter. His hand felt toward a cigarette