Don’t ask why we were in Taco Bell. We never go to fast food joints, and when it comes to Mexican food, there are so many taquerias in our small California town that there’d be no reason to go to Taco Bell. But there we were at the Taco Bell on Center Street, sitting on metal chairs on the leafy patio, on a cool fall day, and this guy comes up to our table. Shifty-eyed, skinny, wearing saggy jeans, a faded Oakland A’s t-shirt, and royal blue athletic shoes, showy. Nikes I guess. They had that boomerang symbol on the sides. “Want to buy some shoes?” he asked us. I was confused. Why was he asking us? Were our shoes out of date? Mine were New Balance, comfortable, nothing fancy. I thought of them as a recent purchase, but that could mean five years old. My husband’s were whatever running shoes were on sale at Big Five.

The guy looked both ways and repeated his question.

“Hey, do you want to buy some shoes?” This time he lifted one foot and wagged it. “They’re brand new. I only put them on to walk here.”

They did look pretty new. He wasn’t carrying anything. It wasn’t clear what he was going to walk home in if we bought his shoes.

“Size 10,” he added.

“No, man. Thanks,” my husband said.

The guy nodded sadly, as if it was what he expected. He looked around for another customer, and then walked away, treading lightly, as if his feet weren’t quite touching the ground.

Jacqueline Doyle lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her flash has appeared in PANK, Monkeybicycle, Sweet, 100 Word Story, and Quarter after Eight, and is forthcoming in Post Road and The Pinch.

I don’t need to ask where we’re going. I trust this driver. I trust her sense of direction, and I don’t care about her driving abilities. I like careening around corners, springing up in the seat as the shocks bump over frost heaves. This is the north, and the roads take a beating. Logging trucks tear through woods, dripping pinesap and forest bark from row after row of harvested trees. And somewhere creeping along back roads, semi-trucks transport hidden waste from power plants. But I rest my head against the back seat window, happy to be seven years old, happy to let the music on the radio fuse in and out with the music I hum: a mix of elementary school rhyme, eighties pop, and classroom choir. I drift in and out of sleep. The repetitive thunk of small potholes wake me enough to see: yes, my sisters are still seated beside me; yes, my mother is still driving; yes, she knows the way; and yes, we’re taking that familiar road north, making the end-of-summer trip to the big lake.

 

The repetitive thunk of small potholes wake me enough to see: yes, my sisters are still seated beside me; yes, my mother is still driving; yes, she knows the way; and yes, we’re taking that familiar road north, making the end-of-summer trip to the big lake.”

I’m only seven, but already a water scientist. Part of my study, the one study where I share data with my sisters, is to test warmth in different bodies of water. At home, not far from the state border that separates Michigan’s Upper Peninsula from the Northwoods of Wisconsin, we live near a lake, small and spring-fed. There aren’t any year-round homes, but a few cottages dot the perimeter. On the bigger lake, Superior, we go to the only natural beach we know, dip into waters icy as the Atlantic, or as cold as I imagine salty ocean water to be. At seven, I haven’t been to the ocean. This doesn’t bother me. Fewer people have visited Lake Superior than the beaches on the oceans. And this makes me proud, part of a special (is it corny to say Superior?) group. And now I am a tester. It is late summer, and the warmth of lake water must be compared, tested, and logged. I jump in the waves, holding hands with my fellow lake scientists, ages 12 and 14.

My skin is the most sensitive, so they hold me, dangling between their two different bodies — one stout, more muscular, the other lithe and stretching towards puberty, and me, frog-like, with sea anemone toes and fingers, the perfect water human thermometer. The waves reach one sister’s knees, the other’s thighs, and then me, stretched in between, crucifixion-like. When the waves come, I brace myself between the two sister posts, curl up my legs to my shoulders, so my bottom gets soaked and water snakes up my shoulder blades.

I scream. We all scream. And this is okay. It is part of our duty as a lake-water-warmth-tester scientists. How loud we yell is a measure of coldness or warmth. It’s a measure of surprise, and my sibling scientist team likes surprises.

We scramble in and out of the water. Reheat ourselves on the sun-toasted sand. Scrambling is a sibling scientific technique. When we test our own lake-water back home, there will be no sand, but there will be the dock: its wood planks warmed by the same sun.  We’ll scramble in and out of our small lake, too.

Our mother/driver says it’s time we travel down, time to return home (and I think time to finish water testing and jump immediately into your own small lake). We leave our suits on to save memory. We’ve all done this before, the summer before last and the summer before that.  We know (and relish) the feel of our own lake’s water after spending hours in Superior’s cold wet. Our lake will feel like bathwater, and we will love it even more.

*

 

We travel down, about one hour south from one lake country to the next. Our lake is named “Finger,” and this always makes me smile. It’s not so much like a finger as an entire fist in hang-loose formation. One of my older sisters showed this to me, molded my hand by pushing my three middle fingers down, my thumb and pinky out, said, Heeeeey, Coooool, in one cooing breath by my ear. My thumb is the small bay, and my pinky is where the lake curls around a marsh island. My sister tells me my hand makes the best lake model: my pinky is slim enough and has just the right amount of curve.

My sibling scientist team, in the second half of the study, runs into Finger Lake. Our swimsuits are still damp from Lake Superior. The water is so warm. We agree to pretend that the lake is our private heated swimming pool, because this is what wealthy must feel like. We’ve just returned from the cold ocean and are now enjoying laps in our own pool. No tourist has it so good. Our mother leaves us celebrating our scientific studies. She walks back up to the house.

 

*

 

We travel up to Lake Superior year after year, August after August. And each trip, we test water warmth. The years pass, I don’t record how many and I don’t remember the last exact year I traveled with my scientist team in full: sister, sister, mother/driver, and me, thermometer. Why is it my year of seven is the strongest of all the other memories? Was the day that perfect? Was one body of water perfectly chilly and the other perfectly warm? Maybe I don’t remember one specific day, but a mating of days. And maybe the waters are mixed as well: small, freshwater lake body mingles with the largest freshwater body of them all. And the wet of our swimsuits can only hold memories for just a few hours but long enough to cover traveling up or down.

 

*

 

A decade later, on the early spring morning my mother dies, I can’t find my older sister — the middle water scientist, the one with strong shoulders and tree-trunk legs. She is the closest to me in age and comfort. And she has left me and my other siblings. She climbed into her car and drove up. When she calls from the road, she says she’s ten minutes from Lake Superior. She gives a weather report: the air is unusually warm for so early in the morning, for so far in the north, for so early in the season. I tell her the air is the same where I am: warm, almost unbearably so. But no doubt the water is different. No doubt all waters are different.

 

*

 

A year after my mother’s death, I get ready to drive up to Lake Superior with my sisters. Before gathering our things for the day-trip north, we walk down to our own small lake. We carry our mother’s ashes in a modest urn, one not meant for show but for temporary travel. In an informal ceremony near the shore, we scatter ashes from the urn onto the leaves and bark beneath a pine tree. There is no breeze. The air isn’t stifling but is comfortably still.  When we tip the urn back upright, the remaining ash settles, makes a soft swishhhhhh within the half-full container.

On the drive north, the urn is held between my sisters and me, three of us sitting in the backseat. The car is full of siblings. We discuss the climate.

At the big lake, we release the rest of the ashes, not on the sandy shore, but directly into the curls of waves. The lake temperature is now, and will forever remain, so very different.

Michelle Menting’s poetry and prose can be found in many journals and magazines, as well as in the chapbooks Myth of Solitude and Residence Time.

 

It was 1973, and there were long lines at the gas station. The Yom Kippur war was the cause, although all I knew about that was the wait to fill my gas tank, which I needed to do frequently for my daily trips to the psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts to visit my husband.

I thought that through sheer force of will and the power of good intention, I could save my husband from his personal demons.”

Jim had two breakdowns within a couple of months. The second one landed him in the hospital, which looked a bit like nearby Harvard, all brick Georgian buildings in a green and gold autumn landscape. I thought that through sheer force of will and the power of good intention, I could save my husband from his personal demons. The wait for gas became part of the struggle. I had to visit Jim every day and return him to who he had been, a Fulbright scholar and the Phi Beta Kappa who loved football and Friedrich Schiller, not the trembling man who had recently looked at a copy of Manet’s painting of a boy soldier playing the fife and read sinister meaning into it. “He’s going to die in battle and no one in his family will even know what’s happened to him.”

Those were the days when a psychiatric hospitalization was covered by insurance for 30 inpatient days. In one month, after the benefits were up, the patient would cue up magically to wellness and be released. I wanted to believe that. I did everything I could. I visited Jim faithfully, participated in family group, and saw the social worker who was assigned to me for the duration of Jim’s stay. Doris was a kind, older lady who’d been around the block many times with relatives of the mentally ill. I hated her. She tried to undo my conviction that I could cure Jim. “If you don’t take care of yourself,” she said, “you can’t care for anyone else.” I had to admit I felt like I was in combat. The hospital was my Golan Heights. The enemy was psychotic depression and I was a battle-fatigued wife who was just beginning to understand mental illness. When the nurse who was leading family group spoke to me with soft sympathy, I was undone. Armor penetrated, I sobbed in her arms.

Our marriage ended in divorce three years later, after a lot of therapy for us both, and a lot of wading hip-deep in guilt for me. No one thought to try to treat us as a couple, although that was the other broken part. The mental health system just looked at us like distinct atoms to be handled separately.

It took me several weeks to screw up the courage to tell Jim I was leaving. During those weeks I had an excruciating crick in my right shoulder muscle. I had told no one in our families what I was going to do, fearing their shocked disapproval. I could hear them saying, “You just don’t run out on your sick husband, or “ for better or worse, in sickness and in health.” I really wanted to have children and Jim had said he’d “cooperate” but couldn’t promise to actually raise kids with me. My shrink said, “You didn’t sign up for this.” Plus, Jim was back working but threatening to quit with the expectation I’d take care of him forever. It was time.

I sat Jim down in our kitchen and blurted it out. “I’m leaving.” The muscle spasm in my right shoulder disappeared instantly. I moved into a friend’s apartment in Cambridge while I looked for a permanent place of my own. I left behind almost everything I owned except my clothes. The pain of loss and guilt turned me into a fugitive. Later I would regret not taking photographs, family mementoes, and cherished books.

The aftermath of my leave-taking was complicated, and my social network divided into two camps. I was either the selfish spouse who couldn’t take the heat. Jim’s hard-boiled aunt said, “She thought it would all be beer and skittles.” She also commented on Jim’s depression. “He’ll just have to snap out of it.” Or I was the gutsy young woman who made a difficult decision and chose independence. My brother said, “You got the monkey off your back.” Although he’s the one who has stuck it out for 40 years with a mentally ill wife.

After a year of too much casual sex, too much alcohol, and leaving therapy too soon (all related, I’d say), I lost my job to Harvard’s system of treating librarians like faculty. You were promoted up or you were out and I was out. My experience with a husband who had a serious mental illness had led me to the next gate in my life. I wanted to understand this life-altering illness called depression and I wanted to capitalize on my talent for giving people advice, which had emerged in my work as a reference librarian. Stung by being fired, I also wanted to get myself a big fat credential. I took classes in psychology so I would have more to offer a graduate program and I sent applications to schools in the Midwest.

I became a psychologist. And I have made progress. I still have an attraction to the unhappy and anxious, but I don’t beat myself up for this. Even more important, I no longer believe I can cure anyone, including myself.

Jim? He went on to a life of under-employment, which in the United States, until Obamacare, was always accompanied by no or lousy medical insurance. His health deteriorated, his weight climbed up, and he smoked heavily. He was a writer and eked out a very modest living. He had at least one long-term relationship with a woman. He had several brief hospitalizations for his depression.

Jim died in 2001 of a heart attack while at work. He was 55 years old. A friend called to tell me and also told me that Jim had just started a new job and had a new girlfriend.

I happened to be visiting New England a few days after the call. It was a trip I had planned months earlier to attend May Arts Weekend at my son’s school. My flight arrived in Albany, New York, too early to go to the school, and I drove to the site of the Battle of Bennington, where in 1777 Americans prevailed over the British forces in the early days of our country’s war of independence.

It was the day of Jim’s funeral in Boston. I was completely alone in the state park that commemorated the battle site, in a green and gold New England spring morning, with a promise of the lushness summer would soon bring. Looking out over the mountains of southern New York into Vermont and Massachusetts, I said a prayer for Jim, who had lost his battle with the demons he carried within him. I said a prayer for me too, another casualty of the war.

Marie Davidson is a psychologist and writer in Glenview, Illinois.  She has had essays published by the JRC Press in From Oy to Joy  and From There to Here.

 

The summer my wife, Carrie, and I went on a road trip out west to Yellowstone Park, it was the first time we’d ever traveled so far in a car for a vacation. We drove over four thousand miles, round trip, from Maine by way of a Triple A Trip Ticket that had our route highlighted so we wouldn’t get off track.

Carrie’s sister, Millie, was going to feed the cat and collect the papers and mail, so there wasn’t anything to fret about when we were away. She’d water the couple of plants we had, too.

It was so brown, flat and empty that we hadn’t imagined such a place ever existed, except maybe on the moon.”

We were into our third day on the road, somewhere in western Nebraska. It was so brown, flat, and empty that we hadn’t imagined such a place ever existed, except maybe on the moon. Carrie kept asking where the trees were and saying the only time she ever saw so far was when she was looking straight up to the heavens. She was right about that. You could actually see the curve of the earth, because there wasn’t anything to block the horizon no matter which way you looked.

The wide-open spaces kind of appealed to me though. Filled me with some kind of awe, you could say. But Carrie wasn’t of a like mind on that score. She thought it was way too desolate and it put her off some.

“Where would your friends or family be out here? People can’t live in such a place,” she said, but then I pointed out a house sitting way off from the highway.

“Somebody does,” I remarked, and Carrie just shrugged her shoulders, saying, “Not me . . . never.”

We pulled into to a rest area to stretch our legs and relieve ourselves, and we saw this old car off to the side with its doors wide open. Three kids were running around like they were playing tag and a man and a woman we figured to be their parents were standing there just looking kind of lost. We parked across from them, and the woman gave us a friendly wave.

We were about to head into the facility when the man asked if he could have a word with us. We turned and walked over to where they were parked. The kids stopped their chasing about and stared at us as if we’d just magically appeared out of thin air.

“Thank you, sir,” said the man, extending his hand to shake.

He couldn’t have been more than 25, and the woman with him looked even younger. Both had this haggard and wary expression on their faces that gave me the impression that life had not been too easy for them.

“My name’s Josh and this is my wife, Carmen. We’re in kind of a bind. We ran out of cash on our way home to Laramie and only have enough gas for a few more miles. We thought we were fine, but underestimated what we’d need to get back home. Kids haven’t eaten since yesterday, too.”

Here the young man took a deep breath that looked to pain him and slowly continued.

“Would it be possible to get a small loan from you? Enough to get us on our way and get the kids a little something to munch on? We’ll pay you back as soon as we get home. Just give us your address. You can trust us. This has never happened to us before. Had to get to Kansas City for my mom’s funeral, so we took off from Laramie half prepared.”

My wife gave me a quizzical look, but I could tell that she was feeling sorry for the couple and their brood. They looked like decent enough people to me, so I asked how much they needed. When I looked around, I saw that their kids had resumed their playing near our car.

“Thank you, sir. I figure $20 for gas will get us home. If you have another $10 for the kids to get something to put in their bellies, that would be great.”

I gave my wife a glance and could tell she was okay with giving them the money. As soon as I reached for my wallet, the woman grabbed my wife’s hand and thanked her profusely.

“Please give us your address, so we can mail it right back to you, ma’am,” she said.

“No . . . that’s okay. Don’t worry about it. Glad to help,” I said.

“Oh, please let us pay you back,” insisted the woman.

“We’ll get paid back some other way, dear. A good deed always has its rewards,” said Carrie.

“That is tremendously Christian of you,” said the man, tucking the bills into his pocket.

“Well, good luck to you and your family,” I said, taking Carrie by the hand and moving us in the direction of the restroom.

When we returned to our car, there was no sight of the family we’d run into in the parking area. My wife and I sat for a while thinking about the poor folks we’d helped and feeling pretty good about our act of charity.

“It was the right thing to do, honey,” said Carrie, squeezing my arm affectionately.

“Yes,” I said. “It was the only decent thing to do.”

That night we reached Guernsey, Wyoming, where we planned to stay on the last major leg of our west-bound road trip. When we gathered our things to take into the motel room, we discovered that Carrie’s camera was missing.

“Did we leave it back where we stayed in Lincoln?” asked my wife.

“No. I think we contributed more than $30 to those folks back at the rest stop,” I answered, thinking of the kids playing around our car while we talked with their parents.

“No . . . really? You think those kids stole it. Well, I can’t . . .”

“Hate to think that . . . but, yes, I’m convinced they did. I know your camera was in the back seat.”

“Oh, that’s just so awful! Can’t imagine anyone putting their children up to stealing from people. What’ll we do?”

“Nothing we can do. We don’t have their address. All we know is that they were going to Laramie . . . if, in fact, they were.”

“We should call the police.”

“And what would we tell them? We don’t even know their names.”

On our return home, we stopped at the same roadside rest area where we’d had our bad experience. Just for the heck of it I asked the attendant if she remembered seeing the couple we’d run into. She gave us a surprised expression and then lifted a bag from behind the counter.

“You the people who left this behind?” asked the woman, removing Carrie’s camera from a sack.

We were more than a little stunned, to say the least. “Yes, it’s ours. But how . . .?”

“A young couple said they found it in the parking lot and hoped you might come back and get it. And, Lord almighty, here you are. Isn’t that just the darnedest thing?”

“Did they say anything else?”

“Not at that time, but they came back a few days later and told me to put this envelope in the bag with the camera.”

We thanked the attendant and returned to our car. But we were in shock. There I opened the envelope and found a piece of paper with handwriting on it and three 10 dollar bills.

The note read as follows:

Our oldest child has a problem with taking things that don’t belong to him.

When we got back home, we found your camera, and he confessed to stealing

it from your car. We feel so bad and hope you come back to that rest stop so

you can get your valuable. We’re still not sure what to do with our child’s problem,

but we hope returning your camera shows him how to right a very

bad wrong. We may have to tie him up in the basement until the devil is out

of him. Bless you and thank you for your kindness. God be with you always.

 

“Oh Lord, they wouldn’t do that to their child, would they? That would be so cruel.”

“No . . . I doubt it. They’re probably just joking about tying him up.”

“Well, they didn’t strike me as the joking type. We have to try to get in touch with them.”

“There’s no way we can find them, honey. There’s no address on this envelope.”

“Maybe they left it with the attendant. Let’s go ask.”

We checked back with the lady in the rest stop, but she said the young couple hardly spoke a word when they dropped off the camera and, later, the envelope.

Carrie was so upset at the possibility that a child might be abused on her account that she even suggested we go toward Laramie and try to track down the family.But I convinced her that it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack without having their names, and we continued on home to Maine.

Since that trip a few years ago, we’ve pretty much put the whole thing out of our minds. But every so often it comes up in conversation – and we start worrying about that kid all over again.

Michael C. Keith is the author of eleven story collections, a critically praised memoir, and two-dozen non-fiction books. Find out more at www.michaelckeith.com.

There’s a block of Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village where you can get anything you want.  A city block with every cuisine imaginable: Mexican, Indian, Italian, Turkish, Vietnamese, Ethiopian.  You can get French crepes filled with Nutella and walnuts from a stand run by Moroccans or made-to-order falafel. Have steak frites, then eat freshly baked cookies.  It’s three o’clock in the morning?  That’s okay.  They’re open twenty-four hours.  A dive sells ninety-nine cent pizza and two dollar beer next to a shop dedicated to grilled cheese: try the gruyere, harvarti and goat cheese on sourdough. Next door is a restaurant with a thirty-two dollar Black Label burger. The curtains are drawn and you can never get a table, even after you wait at the bar for two hours (standing room only) because people like Nate Berkus and John Mayer have tables ahead of you.

You think how oddly similiar these two walks are. The same sort of crisp fall day, the same butterflies in your stomach.”

You can smoke hookah or get a tattoo or buy a Statue of Liberty key chain.  You can watch students perform stand-up and years down the road when they become famous you can say you saw them when. For just the purchase of one drink, you, too, can take the stage and hope to see your own name on the marquee one day.

You can buy drugs.  You can buy sex from creatures who pace the block whispering,  “Powder? Dime? Ten minutes?”  You can walk the same hallowed ground where Jimi Hendrix once played and Lenny Bruce once read. You can waste away hours of your life on a Saturday afternoon in one of several dark bars drinking cheap pitchers of beer with your friends because you couldn’t think of anything better to do. You can stand in the middle of the street looking downtown and see the new World Trade Center.  You can turn around in the exact same spot and view the Empire State Building, just beyond the treetops of Washington Square Park.

You can also get divorced in that little Italian cafe whose name you never can remember.  ‘Home of the Original Cappuccino’ they claim on an advertisement painted on the side of the building which you can read from your apartment window.  Don’t get the cappuccino, get the tea, herbal if they have it. Milk and caffeine will wreck your stomach.  You’re already nervous.

You think the last time you were this anxious on a walk was on your wedding day. You think how oddly similar these two walks are. The same sort of crisp fall day, the same butterflies in your stomach. The same man standing waiting at the end for you.

He’s waiting outside the Italian cafe when you arrive.  Together you find a seat inside at a table in the corner.  It’s an odd time of day — too late for lunch, too early for dinner — so the place is mostly empty.  Thank God, you think.  New York is always so jammed packed with people you’ve become used to strangers being a part of your conversation.  No such thing as privacy here, but who cares?  You’ll never see them again.  Today though, you don’t want anyone to hear what you have to say. You don’t want to hear yourself say it, but it’s the thing that has to be said, because it’s true: it’s over.

He removes the ring he wore as a token of his love and faithfulness and slides it across the table.  He does it awkwardly, slyly, in a way that makes you think of a drug deal.  He cups his hand over the ring, looks over his shoulder toward the window.  Once the hand-off has been made he relaxes back into his seat and attempts a smile.  You wonder if that’s what he looks like every time he buys heroin — tense, suspicious, then sweet relief.

You place the ring in your bag.  Putting it on your thumb would probably be safer but you can’t bear to wear it.  The gold band belonged to your grandfather and giving it back was the right thing to do.  But it pains you just the same.  You stopped wearing your ring months ago, but even if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have returned the gesture since you bought it with your own money.

He leaves quickly, and you stay behind to finish your peppermint tea and try to remember how to breathe, how to walk, how to live alone.

Next you can venture a few streets over, toward Bleecker, where the street takes a sharp turn north.  Have a hot chocolate on a stick, or maybe one of those famous cupcakes.  The one with the raw cake batter center.  You can sit in the park and wait for your friends to get off of work.  You can bump into your now ex while you’re waiting, and have a sort of laugh at the absurdity of bumping into one another so soon. You can cry for two hours until your friends get home from work then drown yourself in tequila while they do their part to try and make you forget this day, even for a little while.

You can return to your apartment and sit on the stool by the window in your kitchen.  You can light a cigarette and stare at the cappuccino sign painted on the wall across the street and vow never to return to the Italian cafe.  You don’t need to.  There’s another Italian cafe here, too.

Blake Brunson is writer and interior decorator living in New York City.  Her work has been published in House Beautiful.