38

 

 

 

 

38

 

 

None of this happened in any way I really know. I see it anyway. I don’t know how much of it is crazy kid-nonsense, tossed together like a junk pile of barbed wire and blunt razor blades. I feel it anyway. The rust, the scratch. The facts.

Uncle Steve waited down at the gate in his car. The drive was long, and mostly through darkness. Backstreet twists and dirt-track roads. I rode up front in my mother’s lap, her arms wrapped so tight around me I didn’t need my winter jacket, not with her and the heater, and the glowing buzz of Uncle Steve’s voice.

“You’ll be all right,” I heard him say. Over and over again. Talking to my mother, and not to me. “You’ll be fine. You’ll do great.”

The cellphone he gave her was a Nokia, small and black. They don’t make those anymore.

“There are people in this world who dream every damn minute of meeting a girl like you. Girls like the two of you.”

“I don’t know if we can make it alone.”

“You’d rat