Onward Toward What We're Going Toward by Ryan Bartelmay

afternoon. The bar I told you about.”
    â€œYou know I don’t want to hustle pool. That life is behind me.”
    â€œIt’s gotta be better than waitressing. All you do is complain about that.”
    â€œYeah, well, the only thing bad about waitressing—other than waitressing—is that I gotta wear that horrible uniform. I feel like . . . like a . . . I don’t even know if there’s a word to describe it.”
    â€œCheap slut.”
    â€œThat’s two words. And aren’t you supposed to tell me I look good?”
    â€œI like cheap sluts.”
    â€œWell, I don’t like looking like one.”
    Green smacked Mary’s ass, and she playfully slapped at his hand and gave him a don’t-be-making-no-sexual-advances-this-morning look. “Take the garbage out, will ya,” she said. “And get yourself established already. So far, this ain’t playing in Peoria.”
    After taking a shower, Mary went to the kitchen looking for Green, but he wasn’t there. She glanced out the window. Green was sprawled facedown in the driveway, not moving. A young girl was kneeling beside him, checking for a pulse on his neck. Across the street, Bradley students who had been on their way to class were forming a crowd. One girl had a hand up to her mouth, while her companion, a boy wearing a backward baseball cap, sipped from a to-go cup of coffee.
    Mary thought about Green saying he smelled oranges. Wasn’t smelling citrus a sign of something? She’d heard that, but couldn’t remember what it was a sign of. The girl kneeling next to Green rolled him onto his back. He looked dead. Oh my God.
Don’t be dead. Jesus. Please don’t be dead. Mary heard herself whimper: Green . She reached out and touched the window. She took a deep breath. Green . His head rolled to look at the girl who was kneeling over him. He’s not dead. He’s alive. He’s alive! But he was so pale, and his lips were almost blue. The girl shouted across the street for someone to get help, and the boy with the backward baseball cap handed his to-go coffee to the girl with her hand to her mouth and tore off down the sidewalk.
    In the ambulance, the paramedic leaned over. “Can you hear me, sir?”
    Green didn’t move. He was looking at a cabinet in the front corner of the ambulance; there was a sticker on the door that said, DANGER, in red lettering.
    â€œSir?”
    Green blinked.
    â€œCan you talk, sir?”
    Green grunted.
    Mary had a wadded-up Kleenex in her hand. She dabbed at her eyes.
    â€œMa’am. Is he normally responsive?”
    She nodded and sniffed. “Green, honey, it’s going to be okay. Answer the man’s questions.”
    Green turned his head to look at her—the fear in her eyes nearly broke his heart. He hadn’t told Mary about Jane—or Sue or Leigh Ann, for that matter. The thing about Green was that when he fell for a woman, he fell hard. He fell hard for everything, and anything. Case in point: a move to Peoria at the age of sixty-four. Green didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve; he pinned it to his forehead. He’d been married three times before he met Mary. The first one had been Sue Morris, a girl in his high school class, Lakeville High School, Lakeville, Montana. Three days after graduation in 1953, they were married by the justice of the peace in Bozeman and didn’t tell a soul, not even Mort Morris, Sue’s father, or Green’s parents, church do-gooders Betty and
Bob Geneseo. Actually, Sue was supposed to tell her father, the young couple’s hope being that Mort would reach out a hand and get Green a job in the silver mines outside of Lakeville, maybe help set them up in a little one-bedroom house by the railroad tracks. But each time Green asked Sue if she’d told her father, she hemmed, stuttered, tried to change the subject, and touched her nose a lot. Green knew why she was stalling. He