Bone Valley by Claire Matturro

he’d paid cash. He had also bought something called potassium sulfate, and, for a man who lived yardless on a sailboat, he had purchased an awful lot of fertilizer from a home-and-garden supply.
    The fertilizer receipt definitely caught my eye.
    Fertilizer, as Timothy McVeigh had taught us all, made bombs.
    If you knew what you were doing.
    I looked at the rest of the receipts, not much liking what was beginning to twirl around in my gray matter. Diesel fuel and fertilizer. Okay, okay, maybe he needed some diesel fuel for the auxiliary motor in his sailboat. Maybe he had a large number of houseplants on board.
    But he wouldn’t need that much fertilizer.
    No, this was fertilizer in amounts for small forests, or at least very large yards.
    A nice spike in my anxiety level hit both my head and gut, and, no closer to understanding anything, I smoothed out the receipts and slipped them into my desk drawer to be organized, memorized, copied, and filed later. Then I eased back to my kitchen.
    Just as I scooped out my shade-grown, fair-trade, ten-dollars-a-pound coffee into the French press, Jimmie came tiptoeing into the kitchen and gave me a big bear hug. I felt tears start up until I noticed he had helped himself to a pair of Philip’s pajamas, which were about twice too big on him. He looked like a goofy old clown, and I ended up smiling. I hugged him back.
    A toilet flushed, I heard the sound of running water, and sighed. Philip was awake. By the time I poured the hot water over the ground coffee in the French press, Philip was in the kitchen, eyeing me, I thought, just a bit tentatively.
    “Thought we’d be quiet, let you sleep in,” I said.
    He nodded, quietly and possibly guardedly.
    The doorbell rang. A bit early for company, I thought. Jimmie and I were still in pajamas. Philip, of course, was dressed, and nattily at that for a Sunday morning after an explosion. “Would you please get that for me?” I asked, keeping my voice carefully neutral.
    While he went to the door, I went to get dressed, leaving Jimmie with cursory instructions on the French press. “Push that plunger thing down in another minute.”
    By the time I got back to the kitchen, Dolly and Bearess were milling around, with Dolly making herself right at home, and rather pointedly ignoring Jimmie, who was drinking coffee, still wearing too-big pajamas.
    “This isn’t a good morning for company,” I said, looking at Dolly. “We had an…an…accident last night.”
    “Are you all right, dearie?” Dolly asked as she opened my cabinet, fetched out a china bowl, and poured a smidge of coffee in it, ladled milk into it, and put it on the floor for Bearess, who slurped it up in one bold tongue stroke and wagged for more.
    I started to point out that that was my grandmother’s china bowl, but Jimmie was faster on the draw than I was.
    “She near got blowed up,” Jimmie said, and poured his second cup of coffee.
    “I don’t think we should be discussing this,” Philip said, and poured a cup of coffee.
    “The correct statement would be, she was nearly blown up,” Dolly said, and poured herself a cup of coffee and topped off Bearess’s china bowl.
    By the time I got to the French press, there was no coffee left and my dull Xanax-and-wine hangover had swelled with the crowd in my kitchen.
    “You know, I could pressure-clean that house of yours for you,” Jimmie said to Dolly. “That is, if you was to cook me a homemade meal sometime. Chicken is what I likes the best. Lilly don’t fry chicken.”
    Dolly was studying on Jimmie, while I heated water for a second pot of coffee, and then the phone rang. I ducked out of the kitchen to the bedroom, Philip close behind me, and I answered it and somebody I didn’t know asked for Philip. I shoved the phone at him and went back to the kitchen. Right then my primary goal was to consume a large cup of coffee and as soon as possible.
    A few minutes later, as finally the caffeine began to seep into my