You know what I mean, don’t you, when you get up in the morning and walk through to the kitchen, tousle-haired, yawning and scratching your bum, and in the kitchen the man drinking coffee and eating toast isn’t your husband, and the children playing with their Coco Pops aren’t your children, and the man who isn’t your husband says, “Morning darling, sleep well?”
He hadn’t counted on Rachel’s lasting presence in his life when he first approached the small, peculiarly dressed, redheaded girl standing with her face only inches from his favorite student’s lithograph.
Melvin taught me his layering technique which maximized on the taste of all the ingredients. Instead of lumping the lettuce on one side and cramming the meat into the other, they were layered into the sandwich. A layer of veggies, then a layer of cheese, then a layer of meat. This pattern continued so that all the main ingredients were evenly distributed. When you bit into the sandwich, you experienced the whole taste in your mouth. It was in the layers. It was how the sandwich was meant to be eaten.
All the street kids were angry but the hustler boys were the angriest of all, especially the straight ones who had no desire to have sex with men but did it just to survive.
Talk turned one night to the subject of heroism in the modern age. At one point in the conversation, somebody (Ivy probably) claimed that a world that allowed for Toddlers & Tiaras on prime time television categorically could not allow for ‘heroism’ on the scale of the ancients.
Tomorrow he would drive to Belfast, or maybe Bucksport, to look for a job. Pearl Staples would be hanging around Perry’s during her sister Evie’s shift when he went to get a crabmeat sandwich and Orangina in a glass bottle. Tomorrow, he would sit next to the bell at the lighthouse and breathe in salt air and seaweed, near a beach whose sand was made of stones and broken mussel shells, nothing you’d want to walk on barefoot.
The Chicken Ranch is the most prestigious brothel, famed for housing the prettiest, cleanest girls. My father told me that a real estate agent had taken him to that part of town years ago when he was in the market—for real estate.
Malory is shambling down the aisle toward me. Again. We’re at our wedding – the same one we’ve been repeating every day since our actual wedding ceremony two months ago. But, there’s only so many times a guy can dance to “When a Man Loves a Woman” before he wants to brain himself with the punch bowl ladle. Only so many times he can act surprised to find the garter under the wedding dress. Only so many genuine smiles he can give the photographer. Oh yes, the photographer is her – I guess our – hostage, too. And the priest. I’m paying them to keep them here.
The lights were dim and the room smelled like sweat and sweet perfume. The aromas twisted and blended under the heavy tracks of disco funk. Drag queens stomped from one end of the floor to the other, their massive wigs and elongated lashes shaking to the undulating beat