Lovely Rita

THE TOWN ISNT THE SAME SINCE THE PLANT MOVED IN, BUT THESE DAYS THE LOCALS NEED CASH, NOT COMMUNITY OR EVEN FISH IN THE RIVER. THEY ALSO NEED THRILLS, AND THEY'RE WILLING TO PAY, WHATEVER THE COST

hl975, Steven Kelly was 23 and newly orphaned. His father had died of pancreatic cancer two years earlier, and Steven had quit a construc­tion job to move home and take care of his mother. She had relied on her husband so absolutely, all her adult life, that she had never filled a gas tank on her own or looked at a tax form. In her grief, after his death, she shifted her dependence to Steven. She told him it was lucky she'd had a son, as if no daughter of hers would be able to mas­ter a gas pump either. When she died of the same cancer as his father—one of the doctors described it as mercifully quick, but there was nothing merciful about it— Steven felt like a boxer losing a fight, not knocked out but dizzy from the blows.

His mother showed him pictures when she was sure she was dying, of herself as a grave little girl in a white First Communion dress, with hollow-eyed Italian relatives in suits. She told him stories: Her father had tried to start an ice cream business as a young man, but the unsold, unrefrigerated

ice cream would melt by the end of the day, and he would end up eating it him­self, dejected. Her mother had once won a beauty contest, scandalizing the family, in a bathing costume that came down to her knees. It was as if his mother was try­ing to make a safe place for her family in his brain. She died as she was becoming a real person to Steven, not just the more helpless of his ever-present parents, and so she was frozen in mid-transformation, neither one thing nor the other.

They left him the house he'd grown up in but no money, once the taxes were paid. Their small Connecticut town, where he had spent a happy, bike-riding, bait-fishing childhood, was being transformed by the building of a nuclear power plant. When finished, the plant would pull in water to cool the reactors, which would raise the temperature of the river and kill the fish he had grown up fishing. There were angry, impotent protests, and there were jobs for anyone who could swing a hammer. Steven hated the plant—every­one did—but he couldn't sell his child­hood house, so he took one of the jobs.

The plant was two miles long and a mile wide and still being laid with pipes. Ste­ven was hired to build scaffolding for the pipe fitters, then take it down and build it somewhere else. It was a union job, and they'd been told to make it last, so they worked in threes: While one worked below, the other two would climb to the top of the scaffolding and sleep. Someone usually duct-taped a transistor radio to the mouth­piece of one of the paging telephones so music blasted through the plant. When the security guards got close to finding the radio, it would be rescued, and the music would stop, until the guards left. Then the radio would move to another phone, and the music would start again: "Born to Run" blaring over the clanging and drilling and sawing and hammering.

Steven's best friend from high school, Acey Rawlings, also worked at the plant. Acey had joined the Coast Guard for a while but lost interest and was home living with his mother. Any social status Steven had in school came from Acey's reflected cool, and now Acey had mythologized their teenage years, believing them to be as perfect as high school years could be. They had missed the draft for Vietnam by the skin of their teeth, and Acey consid­ered luck to be something they had rights to and could count on.

Most nights after work, they went to the bar to drink beer until the hammering in their heads subsided enough for sleep. So in some ways nothing had changed since Steven was 16: He was still drinking beer with Acey, except now it was legal and less exciting. It was on one of those nights that a girl showed up, hanging around. She was too skinny, with small tits and narrow hips, and she leaned on the bar next to Steven in jeans and a tank top and ordered a gin

and tonic. He reflected that it was difficult not to talk to a girl standing next to you in a tank top, no matter how tired you were.

"Are you old enough to drink that?" he asked her.

She showed him her license. It said she was 23, five-foot-six, 110 pounds. He could have lifted her right into his lap. Eyes: green; hair: brown. Her eyes were oversize and ringed with green eyeliner and black mascara. He showed the license to Acey at the next bar stool, because he could already feel that Acey's interest in the girl trumped his. He was going to have to get out of the way. Then he noticed the name on the card: Rita Hillier.

"I know you," Steven said.

"You do?"

"We went to grade school together. You moved away."

She narrowed her made-up eyes at him. "Did you have a lot of cavities?" she asked.

"No. I mean, not more than normal."

"Did I ever kiss you?"

"No."

She shook her head. "Then I don't remember."

He could have told her that her father was the first person he had ever seen falling-down drunk, but that seemed unfriendly. "You sat in front of me in Mrs. Wilson's class," he said. "You showed me how to cheat on spelling tests by keep­ing the practice list inside your desk and pretending to look for an eraser."

"I did not."

"You think I don't know who cor­rupted me?"

"I remember cheating on math, later," she said. "Not spelling."

"Your dad used to walk you home from school."

Her eyes lost their gleam, and she looked at her drink. "That was me," she said. "They took his driver's license away."

"Is he all right?"

"I think so."

"Do you see him much?"

She frowned sideways at Steven. "You ask a lot of questions."

Acey kicked him under the bar.

"This is my friend, Acey," Steven said. "We went to high school together but not grade school. He doesn't ask so many questions."

Acey smiled his handsome smile at her, leaning forward over his beer.

Steven withdrew to the men's room to let Acey move in. Behind the closed door, he stood looking at the filthy urinal, feel­ing disoriented by his brief return to third grade. Mrs. Wilson had caught him cheat­ing on the spelling test, but he hadn't turned Rita in. It was his first and maybe only major act of chivalry. He got a zero on the test and a C in spelling, but his parents had never asked about the sudden drop in his grade. He guessed that Mrs. Wilson had told them about the cheating, and they were too embarrassed to mention

it. Rita's dad wouldn't have cared if she cheated—the old drunk might even have applauded it as wily—but it had seemed important to protect her from disgrace.

When he went back out to the bar, Rita had her head bent close to Acey's, the deal sealed, and Steven put his arms around their shoulders.

"Let's go out for a midnight nuclear protest," Steven said, and Acey whooped with eagerness.

They drove down to the marina, stole a Sunfish from a slip and sailed it across the river. Acey manned the tiller, singing "Tea fortheTillerman." Rita kneeled precariously in the bow and swayed and waved her arms in the wind, singing along on "Wine for the woman who made the rain come." When they got to the new plant, they yelled until the lights came on and the security guards came running down to the water to see what was going on. It was a pointless thing, has­sling the security guards, who were just local guys like them, getting a paycheck. But it felt good to yell on a warm night. Rita was surprisingly loud. When the guards shouted threats, fat and breathless in their tight uni­forms, there wasn't any wind left to sail the Sunfish, so they laughed and paddled back to the marina with their hands. They could see a few stars through the haze. When they got back to the slip, Steven was starting to sober up. Acey left them to go pee off the end of the dock, and Rita said, "I'm sorry I got mad when you asked if I see my dad."

"That's okay," Steven said.

"I don't see him at all," she said. "I don't know where he is."

"I'm sorry."

"Do you remember him?"

"A little."

"What do you remember?"

"Not that much, really," he said. "I just remember him picking you up at school. He seemed like a nice man."

She looked at him skeptically, and he pretended he was telling the truth. Then Acey came back, buttoning his jeans. He bear-hugged Rita, kissed her hair and took her home.

After that, Acey was in love, and he couldn't shut up about it. He talked about

Rita all the time, how amazing she was. how unlike other girls. He did it at the plant, where people weren't used to such happi­ness, and he made himself unwelcome. The married men only smiled and made jaded little jokes—Wait until the blow jobs run out— but the lonely ones found it intol­erable. A raffle was held for a car someone needed to unload, with two packs of play­ing cards cut in half on the band saw, and Acey made a big show of buying a lot of tickets and asking specifically for the heart face cards so he could give the car and the winning card to Rita. There was open glee in the plant when he didn't win.

He told Rita about it, at the bar, how he had planned to give her the car. Peo­ple raffled off all kinds of things: a gas barbecue, a load of firewood. Once a guy raffled off his wife. It was before Steven's time, and he had never met anyone who actually knew the guy, but people said it happened and the wife was in on it. The winner borrowed her for a night. Rita's eyes widened in surprise when she heard that. Acey sang "Oh, baby, baby, it's a wild world" to her, and she laughed.

Men sitting quietly at other tables looked over at Acey cavorting for Rita and shook their heads. When Acey sang "Just remem­ber there's a lot of bad and beware," he had to pull his chin into his chest to get close to the low notes at the end.

Even though Steven knew Acey was driv­ing everyone nuts at the plant and guessed there would be some attempt to take the Romeo down a notch, it still took him a minute to realize what was happening when a high, spooky voice came over the PA system one afternoon, filling the whole plant, calling, "Riii-ta, lovely Riii-ta!" Then it made a kissing noise and hung up.

The guys around them were already laughing, and Steven saw knowledge dawning on Acey's face. He thought he should have taken Acey aside long before and told him to keep his mouth shut.

The high voice came again, asking, "Rita, where are you?" Then the kissing noise.

Acey stalked to the closest paging phone, holding a wrench like a weapon, the guys still laughing behind him. No one was at the phone, of course. When Acey turned back with the wrench, he nearly bumped into a white hat, a liaison who came to check on the site for the cli­ent. Normally someone saw the white hats coming soon enough for all the sleepers to get down off the scaffolding, but this one had appeared out of nowhere.

"Who's doing that voice?" the inspec­tor asked Acey.

"I don't know," he said.

"Who's Rita?" the white hat asked.

Acey didn't say anything. The guys didn't either.

"Tell me," the white hat said.

"It'll stop," Acey said.

"It better," the man said.

It did stop, until the next inspection. As

soon as the white hat got there, the voice came over the loudspeaker again. "Riii-ta, darling ff///-ta!" And then the kissing noise. But by then it wasn't really about Acey or Rita. It had turned into a way of baiting the inspector, who went to their foreman, Frank Mantini, to complain. Someone who was standing outside the office heard Mantini tell the inspector it was a harmless prank, the guys letting off steam.

The white hat put a 100-dollar bill on the foreman's desk, according to the eavesdropper, and said, "It's yours if you find out who's doing this."

"I don't want the money," Frank said.

"Find out anyway," the white hat said.

Frank Mantini had a family at home, three daughters, and must have felt his job was at stake. But he couldn't stop the prank. If he caught one guy—which he couldn't—there would always be another to carry on. Then they switched tactics and started to torment him specifically. The high, spooky voice would say, "Frank-ie, you can't catch me!" and then make the kissing noise and hang up.

It went on for days, third-grade stuff: the occasional "Lovely Rita," sometimes a line of the Beatles song, badly sung, but mostly taunts for Frank. The white hat came in every day. Frank Mantini started to look ill, and people were saying that whoever was doing the phone stuff should lay off.

At the end of the week, Frank took Acey to the bar for lunch to pump him for infor­mation. Some of the guys at the plant went to the bar at noon every day, and the bar­tender had their drinks lined up. They were career drinkers, old hands, and they drove back to the plant unimpaired. But Frank Mantini and Acey weren't those guys. Acey came back drunk and decided to take a nap, not up on the scaffolding but in a quiet corner on the floor. Frank had already gone into his office and shut the door.

Acey's quiet corner, where he had put his jacket under his head, was behind a parked front loader, and someone went to use it. The poor guy climbed in, started the engine and backed up, feeling a bump. He stopped and climbed down again to check what it was, and saw that he'd backed over Acey with one of the front loader's heavy back tires, crushing his skull.

Someone tripped the alarm, and the ambulance came, pointlessly, and the white hat showed up. Frank Mantini got dragged out of his office, smelling of whiskey, and fell to his knees at the sight of Acey dead on the floor.

The death—the real weight of it—didn't hit Steven for a long time. He felt as if he was watching everything from behind glass. He got his old rod out and went fishing, and wondered why he and Acey had stopped going, why they stole boats to protest the plant but didn't take advan­tage of the last years of cold water and healthy fish. He didn't catch anything and

thought maybe the fish knew what was coming and had already cleared out.

The funeral was at St. Mary's, where his parents' funerals had been, and Steven sat in a pew like someone's accountant, think­ing about what the flowers cost, and the casket. Frank Mantini, who had lost his job, was there without his family. Acey's little brother, the snotty kid they used to put in a headlock, now a stocky 19-year-old with a crew cut, read from notes, his voice shak­ing, about how he would never have a big brother again. Acey's mother, who used to cook Steven eggs and muss his hair, tried to speak but couldn't. Then a big motherly girl with caramel-colored skin, Acey's first cousin, got up and helped everyone out by saying nice things without breaking down.

Rita sat next to Steven, not crying. She had sobbed and screamed when he first told her. After the funeral, Steven drove her home and they sat in his truck, talking about nothing, until finally she got out and went inside. He went back to his parents' house feeling like death was on him, a film on his face and grit in his teeth. He took a shower in his old bathroom, wish­ing he had a warmhearted girl like Acey's cousin to hold on to, and cried under the stream of water. In the morning, he got up to go back to the clanging plant.

Rita called him three days later and said, "I want you to help me hold a raffle."

"A raffle for what?"

"For me," she said. "I want to charge five dollars a ticket."

"What's the prize?" he asked.

"Me," she said. "I said that. For a night."

Her voice, disembodied on the phone, sounded very young. He thought about her skinny body, the odd waifishness. "No one's ever charged five bucks a ticket," he said.

"No one's ever got a five-dollar hooker either," she said.

He wondered how much the guy had charged in the mythical wife raffle. "Some of them might have," he said. "Some of them get it for free."

"I've seen the way they look at me," she said. "I think I can get five a ticket. That's 540 bucks, with two decks. If I

could get 10, it would be over a thousand and I could get out of here. But I don't know if I could get 10."

"It's illegal."

"So is every fucking thing that goes on at that plant," she said. "Jesus. Will you help me or not?"

He sat with the phone to his ear on his mother's couch and imagined himself pushing raffle tickets for Acey's girlfriend's pussy, for the girl who'd shown him how to cheat at spelling in third grade. "No."

"You have to."

"I don't have to do anything. No one's going to buy a ticket."

"They will too. Just get me the cards, and I'll sell them myself."

"Get your own damn cards. You can cut them with scissors."

"It's not the same," she said. "It has to look like what they're used to. I need you to help me."

Steven hung up and sat looking around his mother's living room, at the curtains she had sewn, now long faded, and the flowered couch where she had sat, miss­ing his father and dying. It seemed strange now, their long marriage, their total depen­dence on each other. His father couldn't cook a meal or shop for groceries any more than his mother could gas up a car.

In the morning on his way to work, Ste­ven bought two decks of cards, one blue and one red. All he was going to do was give Rita the cut cards and let her do what she wanted, but Kyle Jaker, a kid on Steven's crew, saw him at the band saw and asked what the raffle was for.

"Nothing."

"Come on," Jaker said.

"Acey's girlfriend wants them."

"For what?"

Steven paused too long before saying, "I don't know."

"Oh, man, is it for her?"

Steven wondered how Jaker had guessed that, and moved away. "I said I'd get her the cards, that's all."

Jaker was scrappy and vain and pale skinned, with a wild cowlick in the back of his carefully combed hair. It gave him a roosterish look. He skipped along beside. "How much?" he asked.

"She wants 10." Steven thought Jaker would balk at the price and they'd be done.

Jaker pulled a 20-dollar bill out of his wallet. "I'll take two," he said.

Steven had never seen a 20 come out so easily at the plant or in the bar. Maybe not in his life, ever. "I'm not selling them."

"You just sold two. Come on."

He held the bill out, and Steven finally took it and dealt him two halves from the blue deck.

"The jokers!" Jaker said, grinning. "Jaker's jokers. That's good luck."

Word couldn't have spread faster if Steven had announced the raffle on the paging phones, which had gone eerily silent since Acey's death. By lunchtime he had sold (continued on page 96)

Lovely Rita

(continued from pag 85) all of the blue deck and started on the red. He had agreed to meet Rita at the bar, and she climbed into his truck. He put the wad of bills and die blue stubs on the seat between them, and she grabbed the cash.

"I knew it!" she said.

"I hate this."

"I knew they'd buy them."

"You could get hurt."

"I can take care of myself," she said. She lifted her hips to tuck die cash away in her tight jeans. The wad of bills bulged out the denim. Then she put the blue stubs in her jacket and zipped up the pocket, like a kid putting away her milk ticket.

"There are other ways to get money," he said.

"I've tried them."

"Have you seen those guys?"

"You know I have."

"Why not just turn normal tricks?"

She gave him a level stare. "Do you know how many blow jobs it would take to make this much money?" She held out her hand for the other tickets.

"I'll sell them," he said. "You shouldn't have to do it."

Half the remaining tickets sold to the lunch crowd in the bar. The other half sold by the end of his shift. Some guys pretended to be helping out Acey's girlfriend, but most of them had a hungry glint in their eyes. She was a celebrity—Lovely Rita, muse of the pager phone, die dead guy's girl. Ste­ven diought he was getting an ulcer.

She was waiting outside die plant when he finished his shift. He walked toward his truck and she followed. Inside the truck, he gave her the money.

"What do we do now?" she asked.

"There's no we here."

"What do I do? To run the raffle."

"You put the cards in a hard hat and draw one out, and the holder of the other half wins."

"Where does it happen?"

"In the plant."

"Can we do it at die bar?"

"What die fuck is diis we?"

"Can I do it at the bar?"

"You can't do it alone."

She blew her bangs off her forehead, exas­perated. "Make up your mind," she said.

"I'll do it at work tomorrow," he said. He pictured himself standing in front of the hungry crowd, and he was glad he hadn't bought any tickets. If he won, having set up the raffle, they'd tear him apart.

"Thank you," she said, and she gave him back all the stubs, checking her pocket for ones that she'd missed.

He drove her home in silence, and she kissed him on die cheek—an odd, dry, sisterly kiss. Then she clambered down out of the truck and ran dirough the dark to her apart­ment. He drove home to bed and lay wide awake, until he rolled on his back and imag­ined himself the raffle winner. He whacked off like a teenager to put himself to sleep.

When he got to work die next day, early

for his shift, the place was crawling with white hats. They were everywhere: talking to the crews, poking around. He assumed it was because of the accident, and Acey, but Kyle Jaker told him that one of the foremen had been caught diverting stain­less steel to replace the pipes in his house.

"That's all?" Steven asked. The place looked like a kicked-over anthill.

"When's the raffle?" Jaker asked.

"I can't do it with all these hats here."

Jaker scanned the busy plant. "I should've bought more tickets," he finally said. "You got any left?"

"No."

"You got your own?"

"I didn't buy any."

Jaker raised his eyebrows.

"I forgot to," Steven said.

"So when's the raffle?"

"I don't know," he said. "After the white hats clear out."

"Hey," Jaker said. "I was just asking."

The white hats didn't clear out, and everyone was jittery. With no one sleeping on the scaffolding, there were too many men on the floor, and they got in each odier's way. Steven kept waiting for some­one to clap him on the shoulder, charge him with pandering and throw him in jail.

Word started going around that the drawing would be at the bar, and the rumor became a kind of groundswell, it had its own momentum. The guys had given him their money, and they wanted a raffle. By the end of his shift, he had sweated through his shirt, and he changed into a new one.

He'd never seen the bar so packed. Kyle Jaker produced a hard hat and offered to do the drawing, so Steven gave him the cards. Jaker stood on a bar stool and grinned down at the men standing shoulder to shoulder in the bar, staring up at him. He held the hat over his head, as if performing a blood ritual.

"Wait," Steven heard himself say. He was on his feet, when a moment before he'd been sitting at the bar. He hadn't meant to say any­thing, and his heart was pounding in his chest It didn't seem to have its right rhydim.

Men turned to look at him, ready to hear him out.

"I know I started this," he said. "But I don't—but we shouldn't do it. Let's just give her the money."

There was a long silence while the men looked at him. No one came after him, and no one laughed. They just turned to look at Jaker again, showing Steven the backs of their heads. They didn't say anything because they didn't need to. The desire in the room was palpable, and the thing was under way.

Jaker smirked at Steven, then waggled his fingers over the hard hat like a magician and drew out half a card slowly, with great ceremony. He held the card so everyone could see it. "Red-backed three of clubs," he announced. "Fuck, that's not me."

Everyone in die room dug in his pocket or looked at the stub in his hand. Finally Frank Mantini came forward. He'd left the plant, and Steven hadn't sold him any tickets. He handed Jaker a stub, and Jaker

held it up to match the card he'd drawn. A sigh of disappointment rose up from the crowd, and there was a round of applause for Frank. Acey's ruined foreman seemed to have some kind of right to the girl. Then the men poured out the door to go home to their families, or to bed. The built-up ten­sion in the room was gone.

"Congrats, Frankie," Kyle Jaker said. He clapped him on the shoulder and moved off.

Frank Mantini turned to Steven, still holding the cut card.

"Where'd you get that?" Steven asked him.

"I had 12 of them," Frank said. "Some­one called me. I came down and bought what I could off the guys. I've got daugh­ters her age."

"Don't start," Steven said. "I didn't want to get involved."

"Bullshit," Frank said. He handed over the halved three of clubs. A vein stuck out of his temple. He seemed to have more white in his hair than he had two weeks ago, but Steven could have imagined that. "You were Acey's friend, right?" Frank asked.

Steven said nothing.

Frank looked hollow-eyed. "When you see her," he said, "would you tell her to knock this shit off?"

Steven said he would.

"And you knock it off too," Frank said.

Steven drove by Rita's apartment after leaving the bar. Frank was right: He hadn't tried hard to stop it, and he hadn't tried to make it right, like Frank had. If he had bought a ticket and won, he would have wanted his prize. He'd been thinking of her the way everyone else had, of her small hands and her wide mouth, of her strad­dling him with her skinny legs. She was the girl in the Springsteen song, if anyone was. "Wrap your legs round these velvet rims and strap your hands across my engines." Now he could wake her up and tell her she was free—he could be the hero. Or, he realized as he sat in the dark in his truck, he could pass off Frank's three of clubs as his own. She wouldn't know until it was too late. Frank Mantini would shit bricks, but Frank had already made his noble gesture and gotten his satisfaction from that.

Steven was about to drive away, unde­cided, when Rita came outside. She was wearing a white nightgown with a pink rib­bon woven through the neck, left untied in the front. She was barefoot and she had been crying, and she got in the truck. He could see the outline of her small breasts inside the white cotton, and her face looked naked with no makeup.

"He's gone," she said. "He's gone."

"Acey?" he asked.

"No, this guy," she said. "My father—I wanted to find my father, so I got this missing-persons guy, you know, who finds people. He said he could find my dad, for sure. So I paid him, I gave him the cash, and he was supposed to look for my dad. and then he just, I don't know, left. And took the money. I'm so fucking stupid."

"I'm sorry," Steven said.

"But you know what?" she said. "I'm

almost glad. I think he would've found out my father's dead."

"Why do you think that?"

"Because he never looked for me," she said wildly, gesturing to the world outside. "He never found me!" Then she seemed to real­ize that he had never looked for her when he was definitely alive, and she deflated, shrinking into herself. "I don't know," she said. "No one can drink like that forever."

"Maybe he could," he said. "He was a tough guy."

She wiped her nose. "Yeah," she said. "So who won the raffle?"

"Frank Manrini," he said. "Our foreman, the one who was fired." He fished the card out of his pocket and gave it to her. "He bought a bunch of tickets. He doesn't want anything. He said he has daughters your age, and he wanted me to tell you to knock this shit off."

She looked at him, wide-eyed and for­lorn, then made a small, anguished noise and covered her face with her hands. Her shoulders in the white nightgown shook. She crawled across the seat into his lap, fitting herself sideways between his chest and the steering wheel. Then she tucked up her legs and buried her wet face in his shoulder. He put his arms around her too-thin shoulders, carefully. Her hair smelled unwashed but not in the way of adults: She smelled like an unshowered child, like sum­mers at the public pool when he was 10.

They stayed there so long, Rita alternately sobbing and sleeping, that his arms grew stiff and the sky started to lighten. Rita finally woke, cried out and extracted herself. At no point had she tried to kiss him, and he didn't try to kiss her, either. It wasn't because she was Acey's girl. It was because she seemed to be drowning and might drag him under.

She wiped her nose with her hand. "What do you remember about my dad, really?" she asked.

He didn't say anything.

"You can tell me," she said.

"I remember he came to school one time to get you, in the middle of the day. He just showed up in the classroom, and he was drunk, I guess. I didn't really know that then. He knocked over a kind of easel thing. He called Mrs. Wilson by her first name and said he was taking you out of school. She said he couldn't."

Rita stared at him. "God, I don't remem­ber anything," she said. "It's like a big eraser came through that part of my brain. Did I go with him?"

"I don't think so."

"Why didn't you tell me when I met you at the bar?"

"Why on earth would I tell you that?"

"Is that why you didn't want me? Why you handed me off to Acey?"

"I didn't hand you off," he said. "Acey grabbed you and didn't let go. He was crazy about you. He talked about you all the rime."

"Really?" Her face crumpled.

He didn't want her to start crying again. He had to get out of the truck and stretch his legs. "Are you hungry?" he asked. He started the engine. "Let's get somediing to eat."

Still in her nightgown, at a glossy diner table, she sat eating eggs and pancakes as if she'd never seen food before.

"Slow down," he said. "You're going to hurt yourself."

She licked maple syrup off her thumb. "I think I'm going to go away," she said. "Maybe find my brother. Do you remember him?"

"No."

"He was older. When we were kids we used to take care of each other. I wanted to be a ballet dancer, and he used to tell me I could, and he would draw pictures of the costumes I would wear. I remember that."

"Did you take dance lessons?"

"No." She laughed. "That didn't seem to matter. Hey, can I maybe borrow some money?" she asked. 'Just a litde bit. I gave so much to die guy, die detective. I guess he probably wasn't a real detective, was he?"

"Do you mean borrow, or keep?"

She made a pained face. "I don't know," she said. "I want to get on my feet. I'd want to pay you back."

After breakfast, he drove widi her to the bank and gave her $400 he had earned building scaffolding with Acey. And then Rita vanished. It was a family talent. Steven drove by her apartment, and there was a sign saying it was for rent.

He went out fishing a lot after that. Some­times he would go at night and borrow a Sun-fish like diey used to, because it was so easy. Other times he would sit on a dock before

sunset with a line in the cool water, watching the light play on the surface. He caught fish, not as many as he remembered catching as a kid, but enough to prove they were still there, waiting for food to come by, unaware that the river was only theirs until the plant started up, and then their time was over.

He finally left the plant, months before it was ready to open, not long before his job would have run out anyway. He sold his parents' house and moved to Florida, because there were plenty of jobs building houses there and because it felt like a place everyone had moved to. It didn't seem like a place anyone was from. There were girls in the bars there, too, and sometimes he talked to them. If they didn't seem too crazy, he sometimes took them home.

There was one who moved in with him, who was a few years older than he was. She had been a mermaid at a water park, and she looked like a mermaid, with wavy blonde hair. She showed him some of her act once, in the pool at his apartment build­ing, with the kids coming out on the balco­nies to watch her do backward somersaults. It was convincing even without her green tail, and in that moment he thought he might love her. But he kept comparing the way he felt about her to the way Acey had seemed to feel about Rita, and it was a hard standard. After a few months he broke it off and felt better. He didn't want anything that felt like it had a history to it.

When they started to drain a nearby swamp where birds and fish had lived, for a new housing development, Steven watched the protests and the prepara­tions with interest. The bird people were furious, the developers unmovable, and Steven was filled with relief that the fight wasn't his. Nothing here was his: The streets weren't full of things he'd done with Acey, or places he'd ridden his bike in grade school, and nothing reminded him of his dead parents. Even the old people were older than his parents had been. He thought there should have been something sad about how little he was tied up with the place, but instead it felt like freedom. He was free because it wasn't his water here, and they weren't his fish.