Our Town by Kevin Jack McEnroe Read Free Book Online Page A

Bruce,” while he was still in her presence, but then she went back to pirouetting. She put her hands up and her hands down and spun, more and more. Quicker each rotation. She grabbed her skirt and pulled on it. “Dance with me, baby,” she yelled at Dale with her eyes closed as she bounced her head from shoulder to shoulder. “Come on, baby. Please?” She kept her eyes closed. “I love you more than the earth, the moon, the sun, and the stars,” she opened them now, but not to look out, just to flutter her lashes.
    “No. I can’t,” Dale answered. He’d followed her out and sat on a lawn chair. “You look too happy. I’ll just screw it up.”
    She kept spinning. A top. “Suit yourself,” she whispered with her eyes closed, and she kept on dancing more. She danced like it was just her instincts. Like she was happy—actually happy—and she didn’t care that people saw. Even if it was just Dale. Even with him she usually seemed self-conscious. But not now. I guess that’s what mushrooms are, Dale thought. It just makes you who you wanna be. Not like pot butter. That just made me feel fat. And then hungry. So then I ate more. So then more fat.
    “ I CAN’T FIND my necklace,” Dorothy said as she shook Dale awake. He usually woke before her. But not today. He was up late forcing himself to throw up.
    “What do you mean? It fell off?” he answered, pulling sleep from the corner of his eye.
    “I guess.” She grabbed at her neck, but nothing. “I don’t know.”
    “All right, well.” Dale strained forward then pulled the covers off and got up. He pulled jeans on without underwear. But it was hot so no shirt. “Let’s look in the bed. Start there.”
    It wasn’t in the bed.
    “Do you think it fell off last night?” Dale asked from his knees, checking under the frame.
    “Maybe,” she sniffled. “Yeah, maybe.” She tapped at her neck as though she still might find it dangling against her rib cage. She pulled at her blouse between her breasts. It was a long chain, the kind you could take off without unclasping. It must have just fallen off.
    Dale walked to the glass deck door and unlocked it and pulled it open. A car drove through the canyon down the street.
    “How you feeling today?” Dale smiled a smug smile.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I don’t know,” he slid open the screen. “Aren’t mushrooms supposed to give you a bad hangover?”
    “Oh, please. I hardly took any.”
    “Really?” Surprised. “It didn’t seem that way. The way you were acting, I mean.”
    Dale looked under the folding deck table—a turned-up ashtray. A flip-flop. A deck of cards—then under the hammock.
    “What is that supposed to mean?”
    “I don’t know,” he said and stepped onto the grass, cool on his feet, not from the air but from the sprinklers. He didn’t answer awhile. And then, “You just seemed, like, really happy. Really happy to just be you.”
    She was on her knees, crawling, searching in the grass for where it could’ve bounced off. She got up fast when she saw a snake hole. She breathed.
    “I think I was just really happy. Actually, you know?” And she thought about what she’d just said. “Yeah. I loved my necklace. And dinner. I was just having fun,” she looked at him in a way she hadn’t in a while. Concerned. “Weren’t you?”
    “Yeah. I was,” Dale replied, then looked back to the ground. “I just liked your dancing. I just really liked your dancing.”
    DALE DIDN’T REALIZE he’d never be able to forgive her. At the time, he pinned his anger on her losing the necklace, and it was this lack of care—this callous disregard for his feelings—that allowed his rageto be justified. From this point forth, he looked back at this as the beginning of the end. How could she care about him—how could she care about anything—if she could lose something so important? What kind of priorities does she have? What in the world is wrong with her? How could she? Just how could she?