Okanogan, Washington is a city full of one dollar Jello shooters and yellow plots of grass. The local ranger is a celebrity after contributing a sound bite for a Seattle news station. The town harlot’s name is Cindy, and her mother just had a new baby who everyone says they hope turns out more like her mother, but wishes would wind up like her sister. There is an ice scream parlor on the corner of Main Street, and the strip extends seven flat blocks to Hideaway creek, where the tire swing is rarely up for grabs. There are three restaurants: a hamburger joint, a Mexican taqueria, and Mr. Bolan’s one room dive at the back of the Cloudy Inn.

Kerry Ann moved here when she was almost seventeen in 1987. Home had never felt like the wealthy Mercer Island, Washington, so running away didn’t feel like running away from home. She had dreams of reaching New York that year, but hitchhiking proved less palatable and romantic than she’d imagined, and she’d found herself cornered in a rest stop at 2am, her pounding ribcage unwillingly trapped between a beer gut and the aluminum siding of an outhouse. It was entirely thanks to the beams of an oncoming truck that she’d escaped unharmed, and caught up to herself running down the empty highway. Her walk into the town was the first night she’d ever spent alone.

While she hunkered her skinny seventeen-year-old body down in the narrow ditch along the freeway, she didn’t think about her mother, an affluent divorce lawyer, a blond who played the piano and was hoping to teach her Italian; her step father, a real estate developer with a clean-shaven face and several charcoal suits; her father, whose life she was mostly unfamiliar with. She didn’t know that she would eventually send them postcards every month with little more than her signature and a parable written across them. She didn’t know they would never come to visit, and she didn’t know how little this would bother her. While she flung each step in front of the last, she didn’t consider her closet full of white blouses and flared jeans; her “best friend” Amanda’s long red hair; her new boyfriend Chris, a senior at a public school across Lake Washington. She didn’t think about her aunts and uncles spilling out across the map into Chicago and Eugene, or her torrid history of eager glances and trivial kisses with various family friends. While she walked, her head ducked under her black hood, she thought only about the cold, about her sneakers getting damp, about how hard she could have socked that driver if he hadn’t pinned her down. She thought about how hungry she was, and how she’d give anything just then for a donut or a scrambled egg on toast.

She arrived in Okanogan at 5am. Her first sight of it was a church, steeple-less, inside a one story house with a plaque on the door that read “God Does Not Need America America Needs God.” Stuck to the door with masking tape was a handwritten sign which read “come on in Free Cofee!” The door was open.

~

“I’ll tell you a secret,” Kerry Ann’s mother says to the bartender at the Driftwood on Mercer Island. He looks at her while wiping away a ring of liquor. It is the winter of 2005, and she, wrapped in a heavy green cashmere shawl, is well into her 60s, her graying hair and the beginning of two uneven jowls belying the youthful gaiety of her voice. Her northwest accent still holds a trace of her Midwest upbringing. Earlier, she contemplated a whiskey sour, but ordered a Shirley Temple, as it had certainly been years since her days of ‘sorry to you too!’ and throwing the champagne glass over her shoulder on the patio after a toast.

“I actually enjoy clearing the cups after company,” she tells him with a smile. “See, I’m often mistaken for the house-keeper of the family. It’s a tacit understanding that stems from the amount of time I spend at home now that I’m largely retired, and for the most part I accept it.”

She takes another sip of her soda. The bartender wanders further down the bar.

“It was different of course, with Kerry Ann around,” she continues, and the bartender nods in her direction with familiarity. “Kerry cleared the cups, I made the conversation. But these days, at the end of a dinner party, when those engines are rattling around the corner, the cups in the living room are little porcelain ghosts scattered around the coffee table, and I am their undertaker.”

The bartender turns around to wash a dish, but keeps his eyes on Kerry Ann’s mother in the mirror.

“So I guess I enjoy standing in the middle of the empty room and listening to the comments that are still hanging in the air, lifted up like dust when the front door closed: ‘Such a pleasure!’ someone might have said, or ‘You’re sure I can’t help with those dishes?’ or ‘Gotta pick the kids up. Oh, you know me.’ I listen to those comments while I scan the room for coffee cups in the afternoon, tea cups in the evening, wine glasses after ten.”

The bartender finishes his dish and turns to face her, leaning against the bar, his head between two bottles of high-priced whiskey.

“When I’m clearing them, I brush my fingertips over the lips of the cups, where they’re still damp or tinged with makeup, or otherwise holding onto something unfamiliar and soiled. Sometimes,” Kerry Ann’s mother lowers her voice and looks up at the bartender from her high stool, her blue eyes glistening, “I dip my fingers into the lukewarm coffee, or I run my fingers around the inside of a glass, erasing the red rim of wine, swirling it around until it drips down the sides.” She lets out a little laugh. “Oh come on - don’t be scared! It’s just a thing – I’m sure you have your things.” The bartender smiles and agrees, walking down the bar to settle a customer’s tab.

During this time alone in the living room with the ghosts of dishes and her fingertips in wine, her husband is often on the front porch making a few more points with his business partner, or around the corner with his cousin having that evening cigarette he doesn't think she knows about. After she clears the dishes, she usually goes to the kitchen drawer where she stores Kerry Ann’s letters. There is something about a dinner party, and everyone regaling everyone else with family anecdotes; it all, she feels, is some charade of how they’d achieved a perfect work and family balance, the semblance of the idyllic American dream. There is something about those encounters that leaves Kerry Ann’s mother feeling both heavy and empty at the same time, and craving something tangible to hold on to from Kerry Ann.

~

That evening he asked her, “Have you always done that?” Kerry Ann was looking up through the neck of her beer bottle, squinting one eye to see everything in green. She raised her eyebrows and smiled at John out of the corner of her mouth. It was 7pm on a warm July evening in 1990 on her front porch in Okanogan.

“When I was a child, I didn’t drink so much beer,” she replied, finishing the contents of the bottle, and throwing it at the sidewalk. She missed the concrete, and it rolled in the grass, stopping before it hit the curb. To him, she still looked like a child. Her arms were mostly elbows and wrists, her knobby knees pressed against her jeans. She was twenty years old. Her fingernails were painted like blue jellybeans. John was thirty-two, and an old family friend.

“Kerry. When you were in Seattle – before you took off. I always thought –” he began.

“I don’t remember Seattle,” she said, and she hopped off the porch and onto the sidewalk to pick up the beer bottle from the grass. The puddles in the concrete reflected the beginning of an orange sunset onto her face. Down the street, John could hear children screaming as they played on a jungle gym. Kerry gave the bottle another probing stare, holding it high above her head against the sky, and then slammed it down into the sidewalk. This time it broke.

John came to her home after a short trip to visit his mother in Seattle. He’d left his mother’s house feeling dejected and confused. He wasn’t sure that he’d decided to drive east toward Kerry Ann. Their parents were old friends, but the friendship between the two of them had ranged only from playful flirtation to general apathy. Kerry Ann was cool: blond, lithe, always in her car pulling out of the driveway. In his day, John had played the saxophone in the high school marching band, and slept through the school bus. But these days he was figuring things out, going to med school, and about to begin an internship at a Seattle hospital. It was a slow transformation to adulthood, but he had arrived, and there he was: busy, heartbroken, reflective.

That afternoon on the freeway, he felt as though he’d woken up on I-90 at the Okanogan exit. There was only one exit. It fact, it was unclear if he’d woken up at the exit, or taken that moment to fall asleep. Either way, each step he took through the stagnant town felt spongy and vital and real.

There wasn’t much more conversation between John and Kerry Ann beyond the idle hour they spent shooting the breeze on her front porch. As soon as he’d shown up at her door that evening, she’d raised her eyebrows and puckered her lips to show that she understood why he was there. It had been three years with no personal contact, just occasional updates from mutual friends or family. But really, John thought, why else would he have wound up in eastern Washington on a warm Sunday evening?

That night, they lay naked on her iron-framed bed. She looked even less substantial without her clothes on – a single slender bone balancing above the sheets. Next to her on those white white leaves of cotton, he looked flabby and hirsute, like a longhaired cat stretched out across the floor in a slice of light. He confessed that he’d often thought about doing it before. Even when she was young – fourteen, he said, shaking his head.

“Huh,” she replied, and pulled out a cigarette from her bedside table. When her arm reached for the drawer, her elbow seemed to bend backwards. “I never knew. But now that I think about it.” She lit a cigarette, handed it to him, and lit another for herself. She took a long drag, and blew the smoke up to the low stucco where it circled them, spun around by the unevenly rotating ceiling fan. “And I hear you’re married,” she added, as though it needed to be said.

“Are you kidding me?” John laughed, turning to her. “You think I would be here if I was married? Whoa there Kerry Ann. I’m divorced.”

Kerry let out a small click in the back of her throat. She slowly tilted her head toward her chest, and closed her eyes. It was almost as if a slight smile appeared on her face. Smile or not, whatever powerful authority she’d thought she had was lost, and at last John saw the Kerry Ann he knew: real and embarrassed and no more aloof than a glorious, arrogant child.

“Oh my God…” she began, continuing to stare down at herself. The ash on her cigarette grew long and precarious, dangling from her hand off the side of the bed. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I had no idea!” She pulled the sheet above her breasts, then let it fall again to her waist. She turned to John.

“I thought this was some… thing. You know? But that’s really not what it meant to me – or, what I mean to say is…” and she raised her eyebrows apologetically, then burst into laughter.

~

The first letter Kerry Ann’s mother received was a month and a half after Kerry had disappeared. “Disappeared” was Kerry Ann’s mother’s preferred terminology for the incident. It made it seem as though the mattress might have swallowed up her sixteen-year-old, or some act of God had pulled her out the door, down the carpeted steps and into that sickly sweet and uninviting night. Jasmine flowers had surrounded the walkway up to the house, but after the disappearance she tore the flowers up. A year later, a new gardener planted pansies, and she didn’t protest.

Naturally, that “first” letter doesn’t count the truly first letter, which arrived immediately following Kerry Ann’s disappearance, and explained succinctly that she was staying in Okanogan, had found an apartment that she could afford, was picking up shifts at an ice cream parlor, and that she preferred they didn’t visit. That letter came on the heels of the phone call, during which time Kerry Ann calmly insisted that she was content, and would they please not call the police, because it would only make the family look bad, and if they made her come home, she’d only return at the first available opportunity.

Kerry Ann’s mother was furious – she had given her daughter everything! She threatened to visit, but Kerry Ann refused to see her, and truthfully, the voice coming through the phone didn’t sound a thing like the Kerry Ann she thought she knew; the daughter she wanted to have, but had somehow lost. Her husband insisted that it was, indeed, a lost cause, and would Kerry Ann ever be ashamed when she returned home with the painful realization that “the world isn’t going to just take in some skinny young girl with a GED and offer her a pension plan.” So Kerry Ann’s mother took to sad moments alone in strange corners of the house: behind the chute in the laundry room; in the small space between the piano and the living room wall; in the walk-in closet of the guest bedroom, which was filled with boxes of Kerry Ann’s childhood art projects.

No, the first real letter was sent in a yellow envelope, and the card it contained depicted a small life raft in a vast, still ocean. On the inside was printed the phrase,

Rats desert a sinking ship.

under which her daughter had signed her name, Kerry Ann, with the tail of the “y” ending in a heart. It was easy for Kerry Ann’s mother to disregard the card as the shallow attempt of a bitter teenager to pour salt in the wound. She had no idea what she had ever done to deserve a child disappeared, but nonetheless she kept the card, smelled it even (though its scent was only of paper and chemical dye), and slid it into a kitchen drawer where her husband was unlikely to find it.

Two weeks later, the second letter arrived. This one depicted two prisoners shackled together by an iron ankle chain. They were looking at each other, one bemused, the other angry. The interior of the card read:

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link.

Again, Kerry signed her name below the message.

And what was her mother to think of that? Was she calling her weak, or expressing that, as a child, she felt she’d been imprisoned in this house of such great abundance? Kerry Ann’s mother was successful, a strong woman, the only girl in a household of four brothers growing up, none of whom had managed to hold a steady job much less become partner in a well-established law firm in a major metropolitan city. The next card, three weeks later, depicted a luscious mountain-side, and read:

A rolling stone gathers no moss.

“Indeed,” Kerry Ann’s mother thought to herself. This card, just like the others, she hid from her husband in the kitchen drawer.

And so it was that, over the next two years, she assembled a collection of proverbs: Nothing ventured, nothing gained in September of the following year. The somewhat insulting Better to be alone than in bad company, which was followed quickly by Birds of a feather flock together. Over time, Discretion is the better part of valor was followed by Faith will move mountains (igniting a searing fear that her daughter had perhaps entered some religious cult), and even the rural Make hay while the sun shines.

She did, of course, telephone Kerry Ann every so often, and usually after allowing herself a depressing moment alone wasn't sufficient to erase that empty feeling. The conversations between the two of them usually related to the weather or local Seattle politics, and they established several unspoken but stringent rules: that Kerry Ann’s disappearance was never to be directly referred to (or else the conversation would result in short and angry diatribes); that, although Kerry Ann called her mother ‘mom,’ there would be no further expectation of fulfilling any familial obligations; and strangely, that they never mention the letters, nor address the enormous elephants in the room: their broken relationship, and Kerry Ann’s young and gradually accepted independence. Kerry Ann’s mother found, over time, that they had little in common, and over the following years, their sporadic correspondence eventually dwindled to nothing at all. Then, on Kerry Ann’s birthday four years after she had disappeared, her mother received Necessity is the mother of invention, and this, for the first time, contained a hand-written message:

Happy Birthday. Things are well, and I’m returning to Seattle. - Kerry Ann.

~

When John confessed to Kerry Ann for the fourteenth time that he loved her, it was 1995, and she was engaged to be engaged to another man: Rodney. A college basketball player. John’s misconstrued tryst with Kerry Ann in Okanogan had occurred five years earlier, and from it developed a strict but intimate friendship that only matured when Kerry Ann returned to Seattle to open an ice cream shop. John and Kerry Ann sat in a glen outside Woodland Park Zoo. There was very little grass due to the rabbits that lived in the rocks at the base of the hill. There were estimated to be more than two thousand of them. John didn’t know much about rabbits, but he played a lot of guitar, and his mother was recovering from a brain tumor, and two of his friends’ marriages had failed, and his father was long since dead, and Kerry Ann was his best friend for three long years of scattered visits from eastern Washington and late nights in front of the TV with her head against his shoulder against an armrest.

He told her he loved her the first time in his tiny basement apartment while sitting on his single bed underneath a map of New Mexico. Then again in the front seat of his Chevy on the way back to her place. Twice he mentioned it while driving north to Everett for a hike, or a concert, or a beer. Each time, she smiled. She explained again that she was in love with someone else, as though he was unaware. That she loved him, she really did, and that he was only saying this because he was afraid that she would leave him, which she would never do. But John didn’t let up. He took her to the park each week, and spoke to her of his love for her. He bought her a series of segmented exotic fruits: a pineapple; a soncoya; a mountain soursop. He explained in every way he knew that when he woke up, she was the first thing he thought of, and when he fell asleep, she was the last thing that entered his mind. That he loved her arrogance, respected her estrangement from her family, admired her startlingly successful business strategies. That he stood in awe of her distinctive life, and the entropy that brought them together that one exceptional evening in Okanogan. Over time, however, he grew to expect Kerry Ann’s close hug, her pithy words about loving him but being in love, still in love, and why couldn’t he just be her friend? He found a certain foundation in those words, and felt himself start to slip deep into them.

But one day at the rabbit park with a bag full of celery, she let down her guard in a way John hadn’t witnessed in years. She sobbed into the dry earth, letting snot drip down her face all the way to her neck. She exploded into emotions John didn’t know her capable of: she was furious; she was devastated; she was in love with him. John leaned back on his elbows and laughed the heartiest laugh he had ever experienced. He felt it spin around in his stomach, and detonate in every pore.

“What kind of a man who claims to love you loves to see you cry?” Kerry Ann screamed at him. She looked like a newborn: a sticky wriggling mess of snot and tears and fresh pink lips. “What kind of man laughs out of pure joy when you cave in to him? When you buckle to him? Listen to yourself! That happy laugh of yours!”

John smiled at her wet cheeks, her blotchy eyes. He realized that he loved her even more when she was screaming at him.

“You and me,” he said, grinning at her as she wiped her nose on her sleeve. A brown bunny nearby watched them and twitched its face before lifting one oversized foot to balance on the other. “We do. We laugh at each other. We love to see each other cry because it means we care! I was so scared that you just didn’t care!” The rabbit flopped back to both feet, and scampered into a small cave between two gray rocks.

Kerry Ann sobbed into his shoulder, occasionally hitting him hard in the back with her fists, furious at her own emotions. She had spent her time in Seattle focusing on her life: she didn’t need a family, she didn’t need children, she only needed something simple: companionship, friendship, and steady employment. Her relationships had been logical, sound, even methodical. She was happy alone, and content in sensible company. But here was John without reason or sense, and he wanted her forever. It was the timelessness of his desire that terrified her.

John spread his palms across Kerry Ann’s round cheeks, smearing her mascara into war paint across her cheeks. He wrapped his arms around her and tucked his chin behind her neck, locking the two of them into place. It is so amazing the way two people can fit together so perfectly, he thought while she sobbed beneath him. Later that year when there was an earthquake and the ground jostled out beneath them like the beginning of a fun house ride, he thought the same thing while they held each other underneath the kitchen table. Wasn’t it so perfect the way the curve of her shoulder and the bend in her neck fit so neatly into his own? He felt that they could package themselves into an open barrel and pull the lid on tightly before throwing themselves off the top of a waterfall. That they would cascade easily down.

~

“Those shoes were so slick I felt about five years old,” says Kerry Ann’s mother to the bartender, finishing her soda. “But then I was never much of a bowler to begin with.

“In high school, you know, in the ‘60s, we had weekly gym class. My sophomore year, I managed the basketball team. Did you know you can get a letter for that? Do they say that anymore? Get a letter? Well, my mother never thought it prudent to spend the money on the jacket, or the extra $10 for the felt letter itself, but I earned it. Junior year I took bowling. I suppose it was partly to upset her – she certainly never came to a match. And it’s too bad, because I shined.

“We did the drill first, at Leilani Lanes. Mr. Cartez would say, ‘your objective, ladies, is the heel-toe flow.’ The heel-toe flow. Every Tuesday afternoon, we’d practice the flow: start slow, and end with perfect posture.”

She takes a sip of her soda. The bartender goes down the bar to attend to an elderly man.

First, Kerry Ann’s mother remembers, they would line up ahead of the yellow lane. As she approached the front, she would hold her red ball firmly at her midline and begin counting in cadence: ‘one and two and three and four and.’ It was a four step course. After step four, she would do as each girl ahead of her had done, and step out with her swing-side foot so that it made heel contact on the count of one. Sometimes, when the alley was particularly empty, the girls would line up side by side, each to her own lane, and bowl ‘like synchronized swimmers’ as Mr. Cartez was fond of saying. Kerry Ann’s mother imagined that from the rafters they must have appeared more like geese against a yellow sky, rolling in perfect formation. They all wore gray knee-length skirts and black sweaters.

“Do not place one foot in front of the other do not step from side to side do not shuffle Diane I see you shuffling do not hesitate between steps.”

At her fourth step, she would bend her swing-side knee, keeping her back upright and standing lady-tall. She would push her sliding foot forward and anchor herself to the ground with the other. She would feel the ball moisten in her palm, and focus all her attention on the feeling of that weight, the sensation of the push and its effect on her hips, her belly, her sloping shoulders. “Superior body balance,” Mr. Cartez called it. He would have them run drills: one and two and three and four and stop. Remain motionless at the end of the slide. Feel your body pull forward with the centrifugal force of the red ball. Hesitate. Sweat. Hear the crash of the pins at the far lane. Breathe. Repeat.

“It was a four step course,” Kerry Ann’s mother tells the bartender when he returns. “The bowling, I mean. And let me tell you something…”

She leans into the bar, and the bartender tilts his head humorously down to her, cocking a large bemused ear toward her head.

“I’m a three-stepper,” she whispers to him, and flashes him a girlish grin. “Gutter ball after gutter ball for me on the four-step course. And then one day, I slipped up: one and two and three and bowl! And there I was: strike. With three steps, I couldn’t help but bowl strikes at every turn. Granted Mr. Cartez was not fond of that! Me breaking the rhythm and all.” She snorts. The bartender pulls up a nozzle from behind the counter and refills her drink.

“I always thought I was a terrible bowler,” she continues, after sipping through the straw. “I certainly wasn’t much for basketball. Turns out, I just needed one less and. A three-stepper! And my mother, rest her soul, missed every second of it. Well, it has been years, but I’ll bet you right now, you take me to an alley, and I’ll bowl a perfect game.”

~

“So let’s go then,” John said to Kerry Ann. They were married now in 2001, Kerry Ann beginning her thirties. She still managed her ice cream shop, and had recently opened another shop in an up-and-coming neighborhood near Freemont. John had finished his residency and was entering into the political hierarchy of a large local hospital, sporting several gray hairs.

“I just don’t know that I can,” she responded. She hadn’t seen her mother in almost fourteen years. There were the cards, of course. Initially, she’d thought in sending them that she might teach her mother something about independence; about finding order in disorder. But quickly, the letters became for her a sort of ritual, like searching for Easter eggs as a child, or getting a familiar haircut. She was reassured by the routine. Sliding the postcard into the mailbox felt right, comfortable. Then, over time, she felt that she'd grown up; that she simply grew away from letters. So it was awkward at first, returning to Seattle. She and her mother had spoken to each other briefly on the telephone after she arrived, and only about the task at hand: to set a date, the following weekend, for tea. But her mother had cancelled on an answering machine message the next day. Something about a business trip; she had to take her husband to the airport. So they rescheduled for a week later, and that time Kerry Ann was forced to cancel: she’d agreed to do a job interview; she really couldn’t reschedule. And so it went, for several months: they planned to come together, or at least pretended to, and danced politely around the subject for each other. Things just kept coming up – travel, work, illness – and gradually, over the course of various answering machine messages and dates pushed back and still farther back, they fell out of touch again.

For a while, Kerry Ann was nervous – would she run into her mother while grocery shopping, or in some hole in the wall café? Would they embrace like old friends, spend hours over coffee recounting the lives they’d led separately? Or would they look away, continue down the aisle, out the door, into the city? But over time, Kerry Ann came to terms with the fact that she and her mother really had nothing in common – what was the point in a forced encounter? They weren’t likely to spend time in the same places – she never stepped near the suburbs, and, considering her absence, her mother appeared to avoid the city in much the same way. When Kerry Ann left home, she found something new – why not continue to move forward?

Today, however, she felt as if stalled. The night before, they had gone to bed angry, a huge mistake according to the various marriage books she had leafed through while blushing in the corner of her local bookstore. They certainly had no serious marital problems, and as she often said, “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it,” but in fact she often feared some sudden and abominable marital discord. Because surely, things couldn’t keep going so well? She was pregnant, yes, there was that too.

But indeed they had gone to sleep angry, and when she woke up there was no fire creeping through her windows, no meteor shattering the new landscaping around their home, no zombie waiting quietly for her foot to dangle from the bed. There was just John, asleep beside her, and he looked just as he had the night before. When they’d woken up, he’d kissed her forehead, her eyelids, and up from the point where once there had been a bowl between her hips, along the strange line that had appeared on her enormous belly, tracing his lips along the map of veins and stretch marks that rippled across her skin like so many dissident arrows.

“Let’s call her,” he said. There was no apocalypse outside her window. They’d gone to sleep angry, and woken up just as they were.

“I’m not ready,” she said, crossing her arms over her swollen breasts like a sullen little girl. Here was her husband, and he still loved her, even when they fought, even when they fought to the point of exhaustion and simply didn’t have a chance to forgive each other before tumbling into a heavy, dreamless sleep together.

“Let’s visit her,” he said, and smiled at her. “You and me and baby makes three. And mom makes four.”

“Oh shut up,” she responded, smiling back at him. He nuzzled his head against her belly button.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

“I can’t,” she responded. It was morning. The night was gone, and he was still here, and she was, and she was huge and loved him, and they’d gone to sleep fighting but woken up just as they were.

“Let’s visit her,” he said again. “Everyone will win – I know this is something you want. Let me make the decision then. Or let him,” he pet her stomach.

“Okay,” she said, staring intently at him, and then past him, out the window. “Let’s visit her. Let’s.”

They’d gone to sleep angry, and woken up to sun winding its way through the curtains and into their bed. To the sound of a bicycle outside their modest pale blue 1920s two-story home. To the thump of a late newspaper delivery, and the beginning hack of their neighbor’s lawnmower. To the sweet smell of fresh grass, of overturned dirt.

“Let’s do it,” she said, and he grinned at her. He was still here, and she was, and nothing had changed, or perhaps something great. Had it really been a dreamless sleep?

“She’ll be so proud,” he said.

~

“Oh, I had big plans,” Kerry Ann’s mother explains to the bartender as he ambles slowly to the door. He flips the sign and saunters back, dabbing at various tables with his dishrag.

“I decided that I would buy my daughter a modernist dollhouse,” she continues. “I had it all planned out: it would be a single-level structure with a Zen garden in the back complete with a very small rake, and an embankment of sand grain pebbles. There would be no more than three pieces of furniture in any single room at any single time, and everything would be white and clean. There would be a very small room in the front hall for very tiny shoes, which must be shed before entering into the sitting area. No room was complete without running water, or a broad window overlooking my daughter’s room.

“My daughter would have several dolls to choose from: one would look just like me: petite, blond, aging gracefully. This was in the 70s, okay? And I was very small. Another would be tall and broad like her father. One would be little and rosy cheeked and frustrated just like her. There would be a wide variety of multi-cultural offerings: an Indian mother; a Korean son; a plethora of Mexican men and women; a Shiite; a Pomeranian dog.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” she adds. “You never can tell what’s going to happen. I thought about buying that dollhouse when my baby girl was born, and then things just kept coming up. A rolling stone gathers no moss, right?”

The bartender smiles at her and picks up her empty glass. He wipes away the ring underneath it, and throws his dishrag in the sink behind him.

“I was busy,” she concludes, pushing herself up from her chair. “But then, it wouldn’t have been appropriate anyway.” He waves to her from the counter when she reaches the door, and says goodbye.

“When I see her,” Kerry Ann’s mother responds, “I’ll tell her hello.”