Mimi joined them, wrapped in a blanket. Alan dug and Brent held the sock
and Mimi watched solemnly.
A trapezoid of light knifed across the back garden. They looked up and
saw Krishna staring down at them from a third-floor window. He was
smiling very slightly. A moment later, Link appeared in the window,
reeling like he was drunk, giggling.
They all looked at one another for a frozen moment, then Alan turned
back to his shoveling. He dug down three feet, and Brent laid the little
Allen down in the earth gently as putting it to bed, and Alan filled the
hole back up. Mimi looked back up at the window, eyes locked on
Krishna's.
"I'm going inside," Adam announced. "Are you coming?"
"Yeah," Mimi said, but she didn't. She stayed out there for ten minutes,
then twenty, and when Alan looked out his window at her, he saw she was
still staring up at Krishna, mesmerized.
He loudly opened his window and leaned out. Mimi's eyes flicked to him,
and then she slowly made her way back into the house.
She took his pants and his shoes and left him in the park,
crying and drunk. All things considered, it had gone well. When
Trey told her that he had no idea where her brother was, she
believed him. It was okay, she'd find her brother. He had lots
of friends.
Alan thought that that was the end of the story, maybe. Short and
sweet. A kind of lady or the tiger thing. Let the reader's imagination
do the rest.
There on the screen, it seemed awfully thin. Here in the house he'd
built for it, it seemed awfully unimportant. Such a big and elaborate
envelope for such a small thing. He saved the file and went back up to
bed. Mimi was asleep, which was good, because he didn't think he'd be
able to fall asleep with her twice that night.
He curled up on his side of the bed and closed his eyes and tried to
forget the sound the Allen had made.
#
"What is wrong with you?"
"Not a thing," she said. Her brother's phone-call hadn't been
unexpected.
"You're fucking insane."
"Maybe," she said.
"What do you *want from me*?"
"I want you to behave yourself."
"You're completely fucking insane."
He woke to find Billy gone, and had a momentary panic, a flashback to
the day that Fred had gone missing in the night. But then he found a
note on the kitchen table, terse: "Gone out. B." The handwriting sent
him back through the years to the days before Davey came home, the days
when they'd been a family, when he'd signed Brad's report cards and
hugged him when he came home with a high-scoring paper.
Mimi came down while he was holding the note, staring at the few spare
words there. She was draped in her wings.
"Where did he go?"
"I don't know," Alan said. "Out."
"Is this what your family is like?"
"Yeah," Alan said. "This is what they're like."
"Are you going to go out, too?"
"Yeah."
"Fine," she said. She was angry. She stomped out of the kitchen, and
stepped on her own wing, tripping, going over on her face. "Tomorrow,
you cut these tomorrow!" she said, and her wings flared open, knocking
the light fixtures a-swing and tumbling piles of books. "Tomorrow!" she
said.
#
"Good morning, Natalie," he said. She was red-eyed and her face was
puffy, and her hand shook so that the smoke from her cigarette rose in a
nervous spiral.
"Andy," she said, nodding.
He looked at her across the railing that divided their porches. "Would
you like to join me for a coffee?"
"I'm hardly dressed for it," she said. She was wearing a pair of cutoffs
and house slippers and a shapeless green T-shirt that hung down past her
butt.
"The Greek doesn't stand on ceremony," he said. He was hardly dressed
better. He hadn't wanted to go up to the master bedroom and face Mimi,
so he'd dressed himself out of the laundry hamper in the basement.
"I don't have *shoes*, Alan."
"You could go in and get some," he said.
She shook her head.
Her shoulders were tensed, her whole skinny body a cringe.
"We'll go barefoot and sit on the patio," he said after a moment,
kicking his shoes off.