Ghosting. Kirby Gann

quiet, masking indifference, what brings her to Lake Holloway early on a Saturday night. Shady ignores his conspiratorial air, and answers in a voice that hails Lyda already in the house: “Dad says I can’t sit around the house just ’cause I’m between schools, I got to find a job. So I’m out looking for one, far as he knows.”

      “You told me that already,” Lyda calls from behind the open door. “Now what you going to do with that fancy degree, Miss Prettier-Than-I-Am?”

      His mother has always liked Shady. She had held hopes the girl might turn Fleece around, making her son into the man he was not. Mothers live on wishes and hope, she would say.

      “Your momma’s in a new dress,” Shady whispers on their way up the yard. “She said you wouldn’t notice but you might surprise her if you did.” She answers Lyda once they are in the kitchen. “I don’t know. Sit around and deal some solitaire? Stare out the window? Whatever a girl in crisis is supposed to do. Go to church?”

      Lyda snorts derision. And then quickly apologizes, as though her mockery had burst out as unexpectedly as a belch. “Never had much use for church myself. All they wanted was me to sing His praises and keep these knees squeezed tight. You can see how that worked out.”

      They laugh, but the entire scene feels false to Cole, a performance he is expected to play along with without question.

      “It’s not like that where I go,” Shady says. “Brother Ponder at CWE, he’s about the positives God wants us to nourish in ourselves. God didn’t put us here to fail. It’s a good message, good to be reminded of sometimes.”

      “If you say so, hon.”

      Lyda sets a pot of water on the stove and the topic dies. The three awaiting the burner to light is like the commencement of some other deep ritual, each silent and respectful of the abeyant silence. It’s Lyda who breaks it, telling Shady she should check the rehab clinic if she’s serious about picking up a job. “I still have friends there”—now it’s Cole’s turn to snort, but she ignores him—“they’re always hiring clerks and orderlies. Turnover’s high, you can imagine.”

      Cole does imagine, or more precisely, remembers. He had visited the clinic many times as a kid. He remembers blood on tile floors, trembling hands and grinding jaws, zombie-shuffles down antiseptic hallways. A population of strange adults somehow absent from themselves, their feet wrapped in paper. Slow-healing, self-inflicted wounds on skin the color of lime pulp.

      “Didn’t you say you were studying pre-med, anyway?”

      “Biology. But yeah, med school’s in the Beck family plan. More and more school as far as a girl can see.”

      “Better than being out there on minimum wage far as you can see. You’re too young to understand how important opportunities are. How rare they are.”

      “Cole seems fine without it, without school I mean,” Shady answers in a way that betrays the effort to keep her voice playful.

      “Oh honey we don’t want to go there, do we, Cole?”

      “What?” Cole says. He hadn’t been paying attention, lost on the shivers of blue flame trembling from the stove jets.

      Lyda sighs. “I wish you boys would’ve took a chance at college. Your daddy’s brother could’ve helped there. Not that either of you was any good at school. All I could do to get them to even go.”

      The thought amuses her and her smile predicts a laugh that does not quite arrive while she dumps out spoonfuls of coffee into the filter taken from the broken percolator. She sets it above the mouth of a teapot made of the same speckled tin as the cups. It’s not a memory Cole can find, Lyda hurrying the boys off to any school bus.

      “That a new dress, Momma?”

      The laugh breaks forth, then. She dismisses him with a wave. “This little thing? A gift from my new suitor! The girls look pretty good in this, don’t they?”

      She sways her hips back and forth, a move she calls ‘ringing the bell.’ “Ding, ding. Ring a ding ding.” She laughs again and Shady joins her. “I’m not so far gone I don’t know my son, you two. She already telling you what to say, sugar?”

      Shady denies advising anything even as Cole insists it’s still a nice dress. Lyda flicks at the hem above her knee, slumps one hip against the stove.

      “Oh, he’ll do for now. They always mean well at first.” She pours the rest of the boiled water into the filter and sets down the pot. “Honestly I’d rather hear me a story. What’s this adventure you all got into the other night? Shady was telling me.”

      His mouth falls open; blood heats his neck. He turns at Shady in dismay, smacking into what rushes off her tongue before he can find words of his own: The transformer, she says.

      “Oh. Yeah,” Cole says. He slumps into the table and sets a foot on a chair. He presses hand to forehead, gathers warm sweat in his palm. “Yeah, that was something to see.”

      “What is it with you two?” Lyda asks, squinting at both.

      “What?” Cole asks.

      “Nothing,” Shady says at the same time.

      His mother studies their faces with sporting suspicion, a rusty streak of hair falling from its nest and framing the curve of her jaw. She tucks the lock behind her ear. “Don’t either of you think I don’t know when something’s up. You two are acting tighter than a cat in a bread basket. You’re up to something.”

      “What are we up to?”

      “Running around like vandals tearing up statues, from what I hear. Lawrence Greuel, that man must be near sixty and you’d think he’d have bigger things to do than make delinquents out of good kids.”

      “That was Spunk. You know Spunk. Mister Greuel wanted us to scare up Fleece.”

      “I could’ve saved you both the trouble and told you you wouldn’t have found him. Lawrence Greuel could’ve told you the same.”

      She gets a new cigarette going and makes a show of looking for an ashtray. Not finding one, she ashes into her hand, and then her tin cup, as her eyes sweep her son’s.

      “His dogs are running the place now,” Cole speaks wearily into his hands. “Fleece was out.”

      “Out.”