The Heart Does Not Grow Back: A Novel by Fred Venturini Page B

with, here’s what I think of my hair, here’s the lotion I use to prevent chafing. Here’s the magazines I read, the subjects I like. Here’s the food that I eat. Here’s the movies I think so much of I want to buy them and watch them collect dust on top of my television for the next decade. Mine would have been, Here’s white box after white box after white box of store-brand necessities, here’s ramen noodles, so yes, I’m broke.
    Clerks are taught never to make conversation about a customer’s items. You don’t watch a guy check out with a pack of condoms, a jar of strawberry jam, and a case of Red Bull and say, “Looks like you’re in for a fun weekend.” Nope, just “How are you, bleep, bleep, bleep, here’s your total, off you go.”
    In the midst of this clerk evaluation, I saw my target, a tall, thick man who wore glasses and the kind of mustache reserved for porn stars or sexual felons. I decided to go to him, a clerk I recognized from my many Wal-Mart trips. He made eye contact with me, giving me a slight smile that was priming the pump for his official, rehearsed “How are you this morning?”
    I smiled, but to avoid eye contact, I shot a perfunctory glance into the checkout lane parallel to his, and saw brown hair, the same shade as Regina’s. The same nose. The same cheeks. I could see the unmistakable blue eyes, but before I could even let my mind say, Oh my God it’s Regina Carpenter, my mind pumped the brakes and reminded me it had to be Raeanna.
    I hadn’t seen her in almost four years, not since the day before the shooting, passing her in the hallway at school. She had clutched her books that morning, almost afraid to look at me, a girl almost as shy as I was. But those four years were such eventless, empty years for me, the shooting could have happened yesterday. I looked like a dummy, staring at checkout lanes. Finally, mercifully, she looked up and said, “Dale?” I eased up to the checkout counter, a nebula of nerves firing all at once. The name tag read RAEANNA . No miracles here, just a smiley face rolling back prices.
    “I haven’t seen you in such a long time,” I said, stacking items on her little conveyor belt. “You look amazing.”
    I was being slightly generous. She held most of her high school beauty, but her right eye was fucked up, the vessels thick with blood, the flesh surrounding it black and yellow, a kaleidoscope of bruising. That legendary blue iris lurked in the center. It made me think of Regina’s eye hanging against her cheek after her head got blown off. Here it was, alive again, these living eyes serving as a before and after picture. Rae’s skin looked tired and loose against the bones of her face.
    Her lip had a scar I didn’t remember. Her hair was messy, not intentionally, but forced by circumstances or time, a huge departure from her high school days when her hair was sculpted, shining, gorgeous like the rest of her.
    “That’s sweet of you to say,” she said, her eyes down, fixated on her scanning chores. The messy hair was made to fall into her face, and she would brush it aside, into her bad eye, a dark curtain she kept drawn over the injury.
    “So how have things been? What have you been up to?” she said. Small talk—conversation kindling never meant to ignite, rather, meant to just smolder because if we had a real conversation, it would be about the heavy ghost of Regina, and how each of us has tried and failed miserably to move on from her memory.
    “Nothing special,” I said.
    “What are you doing around here?”
    “Nothing special,” I said again, staring at her injured eye. A man was behind this. Women don’t get into bar fights. And no one falls down on their eye. The eye is in a concave area of the skull, designed by evolution for protection against accidents. If someone has a black eye, you can be pretty sure it was intentionally provided by someone else’s fist, or maybe a stray elbow in a pickup basketball game. She