Loretta Long is a massage therapist working on her MA in fiction
writing at Portland State University in Oregon.Her fiction and poetry have been published in
The Salal Review and The Daily News. She will finish her novel about four wounded
healers living in a blue collar logging town this summer. She was raised on Guam, the Navajo/Hopi
Indian reservation in Tuba City Arizona, and a small logging town in Northern Oregon. She has worked in a variety of
occupations ranging from plant potter in a greenhouse to journalist,
waitress, and yoga teacher.
|
“Son,” Ellen said. “I want you to take my
spending money, go to the pawn shop and buy me a hand gun.” She sat on the ledge of the cactus garden they let
her plant at the rest home she moved into after arthritis forced her to use a walker. Above her, shivering oak
leaves melted into a sky of field burning haze. She leaned closer to Michael and whispered, “I’m tired. I’m
ready to go.”
For an instant Michael imagined himself the helpful son, running another
errand for his mother. He’d bought fishing gear, a television, a few hunting rifles, and black powder
cases over the years at the pawn shop on Miner Street. He imagined Bob Peterson standing on the other
side of a glass display case offering his good customer a deal on a handgun.
Should he tell Ellen’s doctor what she had said, or would that get her kicked
out of the best home they could find for her?
Michael visited his mother each evening after he finished delivering window
panes for Windham’s Glass Inc. If she brought guns up again, he could describe the violent scenes he’d seen:
ten years ago, he had to help clean up a house after his wife’s brother-in-law shot himself when he was found
cheating; one of the town’s postmen shot himself at a truck stop while waiting for cops to arrest him on a
third DUI.
Michael hoped he could get Ellen talking about her garden, get her to tell
a story about a patient from the hospital where she had worked as a CNA for thirty-five years. Plenty of
people at Heaven’s Gate were watching her around the clock, except when she went out on morning walks, so
how was she ever going to get a gun?
“I’m not buying you a gun,” Michael said quickly. “A gun makes too big
of a mess.” He stopped before he told her what kind of a mess it could make.
Ellen’s strong gloved hands dug into dry soil beneath the red-tinged leaves
of an American Agave, one of her favourite succulents. At seventy-eight, her fine, curly hair was still
only 1/2 grey. She wore a straw hat, with a sweat band around her forehead. She stood up so she could face
the soil, her walker near her right hand, hips pressed against the cement ledge to keep her steady. Michael
offered her a hand but she pushed it away. A stubborn hollow in her cheeks formed as she pressed her lips
together and silently pulled the cactus from the soil.
* * *
Ellen had been threatening to kill herself since Michael was ten-years-old,
the year his father moved to Happy Valley, Idaho, married a beautician, and became a fishing guide. His
father never wrote or sent money. He acted as if his family were a rock he could push off a cliff-- pretend
never existed in the scenery of his life. Ellen told her children it was a clean break with a good-for-nothing man.
Full moon nights often brought on her worst suicidal moods so Michael and his
sister Annie would play a make-believe game. “Michael, if you were going to kill yourself, how would you do
it?” Annie would say.
“I’d eat a bush full of azalea blossoms; I’d drive out the logging roads during
a blizzard. Keep going till I ran out of gas; I’d fill a garbage can full of rocks, tie it to my ankles with
a chain, and push it off the Bullcreek Bridge.”
Annie said she would eat herself to death by consuming five chocolate cakes.
| "Ellen had been threatening to kill herself since Michael was ten-years-old,
the year his father moved to Happy Valley, Idaho, married a beautician, and became a fishing guide. His father never
wrote or sent money. He acted as if his family were a rock he could push off a cliff." |
Ellen started laughing, a signal she was safe, her children set free to return to
their midnight baseball games.
On those full moon nights, Ellen sat on the porch while she watched the neighbourhood
kids run bases. She built bird houses from driftwood and small animal bones, or she made rag dolls from knee high
socks to give out at Christmas.
By the next morning she'd be irritating the neighbours by criticizing their
landscaping--"the cat-piss smell of juniper hedges up and down the street."
* * *
Michael pulled a few chickweed clumps from the cactus garden soil. “You should
have seen the City Council squirm last night, mom,” Michael said, hoping to cheer her from her sad mood.
“Standing room only at City Hall--arguing about putting in that race car facility down by the lake. They
flew in Jack Krueger, the good-looking Nascar driver from here. You should have seen all the gals cheer.
The council men didn’t have a chance.”
Ellen kept pushing the small shovel into the soil around the cactus.
“Son I’ve had it. My hips hurt, my back hurts-- I can’t even go to the bathroom right. The old people
here--all they talk about are their poodles and their grandchildren’s ballet recitals and their haemorrhoids.
It would be easy. I’d walk out into the woods over there. One minute, and you’d be a free man and I’d be
in paradise--permanent silence.”
Michael forced himself to take a slow, deep, breath, waiting until she turned
to face him. “It’s not the bullet that causes the explosion, mom,” he said narrowing his eyes so she would
listen carefully. “It’s the pressure it takes to get the bullet out of the gun. When you close your lips
to make a seal about the only thing left is your lower jaw bone.”
She looked away and sifted some rocks into the bottom of a green plastic pot.
“I understand. On a police reality show a few days ago, a detective said going in afterwards is
dangerous. . .blood molecules vaporize; they can inhale aids or hepatitis right into their lungs.
Cops have to wear gas masks.”
Michael cringed.
“I know it’s about the worst thing you can do to your family. . .but that’s
if you’re inside.” She smiled at Michael, and shook her head. “That’s why I was thinking about the woods.”
Michael was glad no one could hear them laugh all of a sudden, because
they wouldn’t have gotten the joke.
They talked about Ellen’s new antidepressant medicine; the doctor had said
it would take another week to start working. They talked about the Indian summer and all of the exercise
she’d been getting from rising at six am to go walking every morning with her walker. She was losing a
little weight and getting stronger.
Michael reached over and squeezed her bicep. “Look at this muscle you’re
getting from digging in your garden.”
She bent her elbow and made it bigger. “Not so bad for an old lady, heh.”
“You’re right.” Ellen finally said. “I do enjoy walking everyday...waking
up before the cooks get here. . .walking downtown and back again while the sun is rising. It’s not a
bad time of day.” Ellen filled the pot 1/2 way with soil, put the agave in it, and covered the plant
roots. She took off her straw hat, forked fingers through sweaty bangs, put her hat back on, and pushed
the mess of her hair up underneath the brim. She stood up as she thrust her walker towards the home
entrance. Her skirt hem needing mending hung over calf muscles strong as a young woman’s but wide as
a man’s. “Bring my agave to my room,” she said.
* * *
Michael always told people his mother was stubborn. After two marriages
she wound up hating men. Her first husband, Annie’s dad, wasn't even divorced when he married Ellen.
"You're just like your father," she would tell Michael when she got angry,
and it wasn’t a compliment.
When Ellen lived with Michael's father she weighed nearly 250 pounds, too
much for her small frame to carry, but after they divorced, she lost weight, but she still carried bags
of flesh hanging under her arms. Little pretty wings with shiny stretch marks that would flap around
when she lifted her arms to point out flowers and their names or quirky animal stunts, when we'd go
on walks together after dinner.
As a child Michael would tease her about her wings. He’d play with them,
bat them around, when she was trying to talk on the telephone or do the dishes.
It was part of who Ellen was.
She had wings.
* * *
The August Michael was starting seventh grade, he rode his bicycle home
after fishing for spotted-skin trout from a slough near the pear orchards; he rode past the junk yard
where the school janitor lived in his Dodge van with the junkyard dog. He rode past the Indian graveyard,
past the gas station, and the rose gardens. Two blocks away from home, Michael saw his mother standing
in their next-door neighbour’s lawn, yelling at a painter working from scaffolding 15 feet above.
"You better come down," her voice rang from three houses away. "Tell
the owners you're not going to paint a house purple. Who the hell would paint their house purple? What
kind of royalty do they think they are anyway?"
Later that evening, while she was cutting up an old plaid dress and
turning it into a blouse, Michael said. "When neighbours come over, invite them inside for a cup of
coffee. Or ask them how their week's been going--don't bring up every criticism you've stored up for
the last year. It's not neighbourly."
On the TV, a news anchorman described a bank robber -- 5'10 inches tall,
clean-shaven, reddish hair and blue eyes, with a chipped front tooth and a tattoo of a whale across his
muscular right bicep. They interviewed his angry girlfriend who described a tattoo of a ladybug on his
chest, inside of a heart that said "Melinda forever" across a red arrow.
He had stolen a boat, raced across Klamath River and taken off into
the woods with 5,000 dollars.
"Nobody cares about anyone else," Ellen said. "What the hell am I here
for--spending every minute making sure you don't grow up acting like your damn father."
She turned off the TV, walked out to the woodpile, and carried an arm
load of firewood into the house. Then she pulled out a bucket of gardening tools and went back outside.
From the kitchen window Michael watched her kneel in front of tomato plants. Michael felt his front
yard looked like a junkyard, plants potted in hubcaps, car parts sitting on patio furniture, a lawn
full of weeds mixed into crooked rows of vegetables.
But the next day, the purple paint on the neighbour’s house was
covered over in a subdued shade of khaki green.
* * *
On Ellen’s 39th birthday, Michael was the only one still left at home.
Ellen’s pant legs were covered in newly mowed grass; her bobbed black hair fell across her face, as she
leaned over the kitchen counter to blow out the candles. But she stood up instead, as if she needed
to speak her wish out loud.
"I'm giving up men for good." she said. "I'm going back to school to
become a nurse’s aide. I got a job at a residential care centre." She opened her handmade canvas purse
to pull out an envelope. "My first check--- $500. You're going to have to do more housework." Then she
leaned down to blow out the few candles still left flickering.
After getting certified, Ellen worked two days on the maternity floor
of the hospital. To work a full week, she picked up twenty-four hour shifts in a 8-bed residence on Peal
street, two miles from the main highway. Previously a home for unwed mothers it now housed mentally
retarded men.
Michael went with her during the twenty-four hour shifts to do odd jobs
around the home for extra spending money.
While fiddling with a loose hinge on a door frame or trying to fix the
motor on a lawn mower he would watch his mother curiously, feeling he'd never met this woman before.
Ellen often cared for Stevie, a man with an IQ of 64, who had lived
in the state hospital from the time he was 10, placed there after setting fire to a pile of old tires
outside his family garage.
Every weekend Michael helped Ellen hang blankets to freshen in the
sun on long lines reaching from the apple tree to the house. "A creepy, mean psychiatrist finally
let him out when he was thirty-five years old," she said.
While she clicked clothespins to the line, she told him Stevie’s heart
had been so malformed at birth that doctors from San Francisco visited every year to listen to the
sounds his heart made. “He has the most unusual heartbeat anyone in the country has ever heard.
It’s a miracle he lived past 5-years-old.”
Ellen said Michael must avoid using the word “blue” in front of Stevie.
School children had teased Stevie when his fingers and lips turned blue from poor circulation and
the word triggered bad memories.
“It sounds like a washing machine.” Michael heard Dr. Winter say,
standing in the kitchen on one of his home visits, a stethoscope in the centre of Steves chest.
“The atrio-ventricular- nodular sound. Instead of the lub-dub it’s more of a whooshing sound,
wouldn’t you say?”
| "Camped out in the hospital waiting room, Michael read The Myth of Suicide;
Why People Want to Die; Women and Depression. Scientific studies revealed that the longer a person
imagined their own suicide, the more likely it was that they would be brave enough to carry it through." |
An intern standing beside Dr. Winter pushed his large hand through his
straight black hair and nodded after he had listened too. “Washing machine. ... pretty good description.”
The intern settled his earpiece into Stevie’s ears so he could listen to
his own heart. Then he slipped the shiny metal circle under Michael’s shirt so their patient could
compare his heart notes with Michael’s. “Hear the difference?”
Stevie lived with one lung and one kidney; ribs deformed from scoliosis
wrapped tightly around a heart with only one thin pulmonary artery and three chambers instead of four.
“Do you want to hear Stevie’s heart, Michael?” Dr. Winter asked.
After he listened, Michael pulled Stevie’s shirt back down. “It sounds
like a waterfall to me.”
While Michael rebuilt his Fiat in the vacant lot next door, he let
Stevie turn wrenches on his old parts. Then he drove him to Goodwill each afternoon, to put sales
stickers on metal hangers for the donated clothes sold in the stores.
The day after New Years Stevie rolled down his window, stood up,
and leaned his entire body into the freeway breeze, flying his arms out like wings. “I have the
fourth of July off,” he screamed in the wind. "I don’t have to work on the Fourth of July. That’s
a holiday for me.”
Michael pulled over fast, made him buckle his seat belt so he wouldn't
fall into the traffic. Stevie told everyone about his holiday ten more times that day as if reminding
other people would help him not forget.
Everyone knew they had to knock loudly before they entered Stevie’s room.
He kept magazines full of naked girls beneath his bed and whenever he felt angry or lonely he went to
his room to jack off, several times a day. Before anyone told him, Michael walked in on Stevie lying
on his side, curled around himself like a shell, his large, crooked penis as swollen as a sweet potato.
“Wash your hands,” the care givers screamed whenever Stevie came out of his room.
Michael’s mother was the only caregiver who would let Stevie hug her.
While she stood beside the sink, she helped him break open eggs, stir pancakes, and cook his own breakfast.
When she was there, he folded his laundry and sat in the kitchen while she got medications ready or
prepared meals for the other residents and five staff members. Turning up the rock music on his portable
cassette player, he danced on the kitchen’s chequered vinyl. She went to a Valentine’s Day dance with
him one year and kept a picture of them on her refrigerator, dancing to Janis Joplin’s Bobbie McGee.
In a tuxedo, his crooked hips swayed, shoulders shimmied like a long, narrow flag in the wind.
“I have the Fourth of July off.” Stevie said the next day. “That’s my holiday.
I don’t have to think about hangers on the Fourth of July.”
“Do you even know when the Fourth of July is?” Michael heard Ellen ask.
Stevie thought for a long moment before he said, “August?”
The night Stevie chocked on popcorn he wasn’t supposed to be eating
because he had trouble swallowing, he was found dead in his room. Ellen blamed herself. She’d taken
the night off to go to a musical at the Performing Arts Centre downtown. A week later, they found Ellen
locked in the medication closet, slumped on the floor over a methadone pump, barely breathing.
Camped out in the hospital waiting room, Michael read The Myth of Suicide;
Why People Want to Die; Women and Depression. Scientific studies revealed that the longer a person
imagined their own suicide, the more likely it was that they would be brave enough to carry it through.
At times Michael wasn’t sure if he had started imagining his own suicide too, or if he was only making
scenes up to help his mother. He studied his own thoughts carefully while he tried to read his mother’s
mind. Afternoons, he walked downtown streets dreaming up funny stories to tell her.
After a month-long stay in the hospital and a doctor’s release, they let her
come back to work, but transferred her to a residential home on the other side of town.
* * *
A few years later Michael drove his white Ford Fiat back to Klamath Falls
from Southern California where he had been accepted into college. He had started smoking menthol cigarettes
by then, trying to fit in with the other students, even though he was on the football team, and Ellen had
warned him about the negative effects of smoking since he was a kid. She was worried about it a long time
before everyone else was.
Above the visor, Michael had stashed his smokes along with a photo of
his new girlfriend in her bikini. When Ellen walked over to greet him, before he even got out of the car,
he got a little nervous and was fiddling with things and the smokes slipped out of the visor and lay spread
out over the picture and the empty passenger’s seat. Ellen glanced at the cigarettes in Michael's lap and
on the floor and between the gearshift and the seat and picked up the photograph.
She looked Michael directly in the eyes and said, "Oh, so now you've
started smoking." And then she shook her head and walked back in the house carrying the image of his
girlfriend in her hand.
Michael told his friends later, “Once something like that happens, and
she doesn't think she can change anything, she never brings it up again.”
* * *
His sister's daughter, Sasha, inherited Ellen’s negative thinking. Michael
had read it could run in their family so he decided not to have any children.
Michael's niece spent her 16th birthday on the psyche ward of St. Anthony’s
Medical Centre. Michael remembered visiting his sister two days after Sasha had eaten the sleeping pills
and lain down on the railroad tracks.
He found his sister in her living room. Her long, grey hair spread out
across her strong shoulder muscles, the smell of sour onions surrounding her, from spending nights
with her daughter and forgetting to bathe. In a soup pot, she'd stashed all the jigsaw pieces, to
make room for a box of family photographs, spilling onto a table and the floor.
She and their mother had worked on a photo album all morning, filling it
with family pictures for Sasha.
Michael studied the album carefully.
Single portraits of a dozen or so of his aunts, uncles, and cousins.
The photographs of Sasha looked just like Michael's mother: dark curly
hair and deep blue eyes, serious as hell, smiled maybe once a week. “Without inner peace there can be
no world peace," Annie had drawn on the front in blue calligraphy.
On the way back from the hospital, Annie called Michael from a pay phone.
“Mom and I told her about Uncle Chuck," she said. "We told her all about Bob and all of the aunts, and
Grandma Louise. Mom described her own illness of-course, and the way it was for her relatives: people
tied to beds and stuck in straight jackets, electric shock-- getting closed up in rooms with people
who were drooling and talking to themselves. How much better the treatment was these days.”
Michael realized then what all of the pictures in the album had in common.
“You brought your own daughter an album people normally use for baby pictures,
filled with every relative you'd ever heard about with a serious mental illness?”
Michael could hear Annie turn a country western station down. "We didn't want
her to think it was her fault," Annie said, her voice too high in the silence.
* * *
After Ellen retired, she sold her house and moved into the nursing home,
even though she was still perfectly healthy, other than using a walker because of the arthritis in her back.
Ellen moved across the well-tended lawn to greet her son in a stubborn, fast
way. Mr. Andrews, another rest home patient, studied Ellen closely from the front porch. She shuffle-walked
efficient as an athlete, hips wiggling from side to side in her walker like a hula dancer. As Ellen passed,
Mr. Andrews waved, shaking his head, because he knew she wasn't ever going to wave back.
Michael waved instead.
A flyer sent out in the mail to family members said. "When men and women live
in nursing homes together, there are times when romantic relationships develop, and studies have shown these
friendships to be beneficial to patient health when the feelings are mutual. Our staff is trained not to
panic if they walk into an amorous event."
Mr. Andrews had been a computer software engineer for Boeing in Seattle,
and he told stories about flying cars, dancing girls boarding ships docked at the Port of Seattle during
WWII, and inventing the steering-wheel column turn-signal for automobiles-before he started working on
airplane computers, the size of large rooms.
Michael's mother was someone who could spend all day out in the garden
replanting cacti, but when other residents wanted to tell her a story about their grandchild, or a pet
they'd had for 15 years, she'd bark out an insult to stop their talking. But when Mr. Andrews told
stories, she listened, and Michael often heard her laughing, if she wasn't sitting too close to him.
After reading the newsletter, he hoped they might hit it off.
On Sundays, families were invited to stay for the after-dinner lecture.
They ate pork chops and mashed potatoes sprinkled with parsley and paprika, steamed mustard greens
with vinegar and butter.
"Your mother is setting such a good example for some of the other. . .more
sedentary residents, " the activity director said, looking towards the empty living room area, strands
of grey hair were caught in the little gold hoops decorating his ears. "Some of our patients would camp
in the chairs from morning to evening if we'd let them, spending all day looking out the window or
watching talk shows on the television."
At the blackboard, he finished writing out healthy blood pressure measurements,
and said, "It doesn't matter how old you are. You can still stay fit as a fiddle. See how Ellen gets up at
sunrise every day no matter what the weather is like, pushing her walker as fast as she can down the street."
Ellen smiled wryly afterwards. Michael studied her closely. Was she opening
taverns on part of her morning walk? He wanted to tell her to invite Mr. Andrews along.
Later that month, Ellen started meeting Mr. Andrews in the living room
every evening for checkers and a movie. Some nights they spent in his room together. One weekend, without
warning anyone, his family came and got him. They were moving to Montana and they bought a house big enough
for him to live there too. He was going to take care of the great grand-children after school and do the
books for the family’s on-line antique business. Ellen gave him the Agave she’d replanted as a souvenir
from Heaven’s Gate, then stood outside her garden and waved as they drove away.
* * *
For Christmas that year, Ellen wanted only a new pair of tennis
shoes--her old shoes were looking shabby.
The shoe sales lady could tell she had bunions. She took Ellen's old shoes
from her hands, turned them upside down, and pointed to the inside edges, so raggedy that one side had
a small hole worn all the way through.
"She walks on the inside of her feet," the sales lady said. "See the ridge
here? Higher on the outside and worn down on the inside. She's got used to walking this way because of
the bunions." When the saleslady bent over to pick up a pair of shoes she kept her knees close together.
| "Sometimes Michael tells people about his mother's death. Now
and then he'll mention it to a friend he hasn’t seen in a long time, or when he’s gotten too drunk at a
tavern. But whenever Michael brings it up, he always makes sure he tells them he’s proud of her courage." |
After Ellen had tried on nearly 10 pairs of sneakers, the shoe clerk said,
"I tell people what I think about their shoes. I don't just give them a line to make a sale-I'm honest with
customers. It was just yesterday a lady asked me, 'Do you like these shoes?'" The sales clerk shook her
blond bangs. “‘No,' I told her.’No, I don't. They make your feet look fat.'"
Ellen chose a pair of Nikes, white with pink trim, soles that let her walk on air.
It turned out the shoe sales lady had been one of Ellen's labour and
delivery patients. "I really liked your Mom," she said, as Michael handed her money. "I always asked
if your mom was working when I was ready to have my kids. Your mom was the only nurse there who would
let us scream as loud as we wanted to--said it was good for us--it helped the baby come faster. Everyone
else tried to get you to be quiet." She twisted her necklace pendant: three gold hearts with little
flakes of diamonds around the edges.
* * *
When Michael got the call from Ellen's doctor, he was staying at Jubitz truck
stop in Canada in the stowaway in his rig where he kept a microwave, little stove, a TV.
When Dr. Green said Ellen had killed herself, Michael picked up an axle-wrench
lying by the microwave and threw it out the side door. It hit another semi headed for Colorado, broke a window,
and caused problems he didn't need right then.
He asked the doctor who the hell had gone and given her a goddamn gun.
“She didn't use a gun. She jumped,” he said. “Climbed over a railing and flew off
the roof of the Performing Arts Centre on Valentine’s Day morning.”
* * *
Annie and Michael went to the restaurant across the street from where she jumped,
to talk to the staff.
They told the staff there how depressed she'd been.
Ellen walked up five flights of stairs on the fire escape outside the building,
dragging her folded up walker behind her, one of the cooks told them.
At the top of the staircase she unfolded her walker, pushed it to the edge,
and left it there, one of the waiters said. It took her a little while to manoeuvre herself over the cement ledge.
By that time one of the bus boys was getting really worried. He'd yelled for
the manager to see if they shouldn't call security or the police, but it was in that instant that she jumped.
As soon as she'd crawled over, she flew off.
For a moment Michael imagined he could see her, fleshy wings open in the sun,
gliding to the ground in her pink tennis shoes--until he remembered.
This time it was not a dream.
He kept worrying about a waitress from Montana, raised on a dairy farm in a
Catholic family, and the only dying she'd seen was animals.
She'd been the first one to cross the street to see if she could help Michael's
mom, found her with her leg twisted under her body as if her knee stuck out of her hip joint, found her with
her foot twisted around the wrong way. The waitress was shaking and crying while she talked to them, trying
to get the story out.
Michael felt he should have told someone at the home about her asking for a
gun. He knew that if he told anyone now, he'd be blamed for what had happened, blamed for not speaking up.
He had been used to keeping her secret dreams silent and after all these years, even after what he’d read,
he didn’t think she’d ever really go and do it.
"Mom wasn't ashamed to talk about it with me." Michael wiped at his eyes
with his sleeves and put his arm around her shoulder. Her snotty nose and face makeup left orange marks
on his blue denim shirt. "She lived a good long life. She was tired of things is all." He could tell that
the waitress partly felt angry with him for being related to the person who made her have to grow up
suddenly, her first year away from home.
What was the last thing she thought about before she jumped, Michael
wondered. Did she think about her grandchildren? Did she think about what she had for dinner and wished
she could have another meal? Did she suddenly remember a lot of good things that had happened to her,
finally, and have a last regret? Why did she wait so long to go through with it to it? She waited until
she was 79-years-old.
* * *
When he got her pink and white shoes back he hung onto them. He keeps her
Nikes in a plastic Ziplock bag in his shop where he works on his delivery truck and builds shelves out
of the old windows he replaces with energy efficient panels.
Ellen didn't even like riding in Michael's sports car with the roof down,
at the end. She said she didn't like the feel of the wind any longer. "The wind hurts," she said.
Sometimes Michael tells people about his mother's death. Now and then
he'll mention it to a friend he hasn’t seen in a long time, or when he’s gotten too drunk at a tavern.
But whenever Michael brings it up, he always makes sure he tells them he’s proud of her courage. She
had the balls to carry it all the way through. She didn't mess it up or do it half-assed. “It’s a damn
shame,” he says. “All of it.”
* * *
|
|
