You want to be with her right now. Janie. But you can’t because Charlene is here.

Fucking Charlene. Fuck me. Shit. Stop it.

Jack should sleep tonight. Fuck, I hope he sleeps through the night. Bad night. Has to be the left leg. Favoring that one again. God forgive me for the extra dose, but he took it so late because you’re here. He wanted to be awake. Company. When do we ever have company since we’ve been here? When does he ever look at anyone besides us? But the leg. Favoring the leg. Maybe he didn’t see that I could tell. Hope he’s sleeping.

Shit. Fucking stop it.

If I could just smell her. If I went to bed now it might wake him. Hell, it would probably wake him. God the look on his face when I fell asleep on the couch. But I didn’t see it. I didn’t see it, Jack. Come on, let’s see what we have for breakfast.

Please.

The skin between her breasts. The little line there, just a fine crease. How long has that been there? Beautiful. She laughs low in her chest and it rumbles through her ribs. Too many cigarettes.

I’m going to jump. From the bar top. She’s laughing in the background, which is so good, so enough. Catch me, Jack. Carry me up the stairs. Fucking laughing. She knew how much I wanted you.

Stop.

Did I really let myself get this drunk? Am I even drunk anymore?

Remember that little while when everything just kept lining up? Planets, chakras. Remember when the pain was just background noise, and it was only sometimes that you had to smile though it? Remember when pain pills were for fun?

Fuck I would love a pill.

Can not take Jack’s pills. Where the fuck do you get a pill around here? Might help to make an acquaintance or two. Time. In time.

I miss home. That fucking huge bathtub. Did we really install that shit? Did we really make a haven in that monstrosity? All that beer we drank. Everything was so funny, just leaning back against the wall and watching you try to read how to do it from a library book. A library book. We fucking did that. I remember because I grilled you a steak for that shit.

Sleep through the night and it’s steak and eggs for breakfast, Jack. The girls will bitch to high heaven, but yes.

If I could just smell her. If she was just here, sitting at the table with me, I think my hands would stop shaking.

Quit it, Mona.

The renovating of downtown Dogwood has always happened in irregular spurts. Office buildings got coughed up first, when some genius decided to wrap a couple of old store structures in new windows and some sort of bland gritty substance. There are still a couple of those left, but the folks like my brother are edging them out slowly but surely. Creatures tend to prefer that the history not be rubbed off of their locations.

We have a blues bar, a couple of restaurants, a coffee shop in the reopened Galaxy Theater, and a bar that’s just a bar, but which is really adjacent to the blues bar. By we, I’m not really referring to my immediate family; I’m talking about, you know, those of us who are not them. There’s a used book store. We’re friends with the owners there, even though the Merc has a blue million used books as well.

Don’t squint or you might catch one of us. We’ll be arranging bluegrass at the gazebo or Shakespeare on the library lawn. Gutting an old ice cream truck for a mobile soup kitchen. Teaching a class at the Craft Shed. Comping a drink for one of the willing.

Maybe you saw me earlier today, walking back from the Galaxy with a recycled cardboard carrier full of frozen lattes I’d picked up as an apology for being such a sulky bitch last night when Ben told me that Stephen wants me to start drinking my supplement twice a day. Yes, I pouted, and I imagined that it bothered him that I was bothered even as he dolled himself up and then left to hook up with his latest mystery.

And yes, I did drink a second last night, but not before I crept into his room and sneezed into his closet. So today it was lattes on my tab.

You’d be amazed and appalled at what I have to do to make myself sneeze.