Marvel and a Wonder by Joe Meno Page A

another balled-up tissue.
    “The funny part is he’s the only person I’d like to get advice from on all this. I keep thinking if I could only get him to look at these papers for me . . .”
    “I’d be more than happy, if you wanted a second pair of eyes on anything.”
    “I wouldn’t dare bother you, Jim. You been too nice already.”
    “Just being neighborly. Burt woulda done the same in my place.”
    “Well, what’s done is done, isn’t that right?”
    “I guess it is.”
    Jim saw that she was smiling again, her pearly teeth tucked behind a pair of lips that looked softer than anything ought to be.
    “Who knows? Maybe no one will buy it,” she said, her voice brightening.
    “Who knows?”
    “I guess I oughta be celebrating. Though I don’t feel much like it.”
    “You should.”
    “Hey, I just got an idea,” she said, her eyes meeting his. “How do you feel about having a drink with me?”
    * * *
    Outside the sunshine was being uncooperative. Everywhere Gilby turned, he had to squint, his eyes sore from it, his neck beading over with sweat. The reflection of himself in the glass windows gave him a definite guilty feeling. He looked like a crook, his longish hair scraggly in the back, his chin unshaven, a hood, a lawbreaker exactly like his older brother. Who knows? Maybe Mr. Peel with his Sunday school bifocals was right. Pulling the brim of his baseball hat down over his eyes, Gilby decided the only thing left to do now was to head over to the Bide-A-While and see if he couldn’t use the money he had borrowed today to win big off the video poker machine. He turned the corner, finding Main Street deserted, with the saloon in sight at the end of the block.

_________________
    At first they tried parking behind the Baptist church, but a cleaning lady gave them the evil eye. Lucy Hale blushed a little, pulling the station wagon out of the parking lot and turning down another alley. “I got a half-pint of blackberry schnapps in the glove compartment,” she said. “Unless that’s too low-class for you.”
    “Not at all,” Jim stammered.
    The station wagon pulled down a narrow side street off Main, flying over the brick-paved road, then they idled before what remained of the CutCorp Knife Corporation, a tan-colored manufacturing plant that seemed to blot out all the angles of the sun with its rectangular shape. Lucy put the car in park, switched off the engine, and unlatched the glove compartment, retrieving the stout-looking bottle of schnapps. She offered him the first sip, which he refused on principle. “Ladies first,” he smiled.
    She unscrewed the plastic cap, pressed the glass against her soft lips, drinking deeply, a single thread of purple liquid looking glossy on her chin. She grinned when she was done and handed the bottle over to Jim who, overcome by the sweetness of it, only took a small sip. He could feel the waxy traces of her lipstick against the bottle’s ridge, the glass still warm from her mouth, and a pang of nervous disappointment at immediately knowing what would—in a million years—never happen. He coughed a little as the sweetness bit against his tongue, his eyes tearing up, him smiling as he passed the bottle back.
    “Too sweet for you?” she asked, and he nodded, wiping the corner of his eyes. They both turned and looked at the boarded-up plant hulking before them, the many broken and missing windows gaping there like the missing teeth of a corpse.
    “We had money in this place,” Lucy whispered. “Not a lot. But some. They’re over in India now. We sold everything we had in it before they went over. We could have pulled in a fortune but Burt had made his mind up.”
    “My Deirdre worked a summer there. When she was done with high school. I used to drive her here, every day, six in the morning. She was a different girl then.”
    “It was all different.”
    “It was.”
    “When I was little, there was a pond out here we used to swim in. Now there’s just this.