Our second cousin Leslie arrives five minutes late, parks her twenty-year-old bastard Toyota, and then opens her door to a sheet of rain. She has no umbrella, only a clear plastic raincoat of some ancient provenance. This is Central California, and the last umbrella she owned, she lost years ago, during the last season of any appreciable rainfall; the drought being what it is and has been, she’s never bothered to replace it. Who thought she’d ever need it again? But now there are sheets of rain. An atmospheric river of rain. A firehose of rain, bouncing off windshield and pavement with something like vengeance or the Biblical judgment we all expect and earnestly pray for. With something like the emotions that have brought her here to this parking lot and this church and the memorial service that, even now, is underway.

She splashes through the parking lot, and we watch her, the lot of us—ancient aunties as well as we, the distant cousins, and the swarm of young adults and their ankle biters we call our progeny, those lousy tumors who grew up to borrow money, take our car keys, and threaten to put us in homes whenever we forget a grandchild’s birthday—all of us watch her through the plate glass windows on the north side of the sanctuary, those windows that allow for a more diffuse, less direct light, so important here in the summers that seem like an affliction rather than a season.

It’s a kinder light.

Kindness being what we all require even if it’s not deserved. For we are all sinners, all of us, and all of us are guilty of crimes against humanity as well as the good Lord Himself, large as well as small. For example, offenses against fashion, such as Leslie, who is wearing ridiculous shoes, completely unsuitable for the occasion as well as the weather. Sandals with calf-length straps, Aphrodite-wear from some hippie-dippy former time that she is twenty years too old to wear. Not to mention the sunflower print dress that is too bright and out of touch for the occasion and too tight for the bulging figure therein. Too short to hide the mandala on her thigh. Then again, who are we to judge? We’re all just doing the best that we can, aren’t we? Even if we’re not doing well at all. For her part, Leslie looks lost. Intimidated by her ten minutes of tardiness and the prospect of entering the sanctuary after the service has begun. Not to mention the shoes. And the dress. Those sunflowers! Good Lord in heaven above… Does she still have no sense?

After nearly fifty years, who would be here that she recognizes? Us, of course. But after so much time and with so little direct contact, she will not know who is who among this sea of gray hair and grave faces, and no one goes to a memorial service expecting name tags or a scorecard and index. The only one she knows intimately and recently is the departed, and he won’t be greeting her or speaking in her defense, now, will he? Hardly.

As Pastor Hartley finishes his welcome remarks and the choir shifts into an up-tempo version of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” featuring our youth band with its four electric guitars, a drum kit, tambourine, and maracas, Leslie makes her belated entrance: bad shoes, wet plastic, and all. Fifteen minutes late for a funeral, can you believe it? Of course, the hinges need to be oiled, and the doors have swelled with the rain, and they stick noisily together, and all heads turn reflexively as she pushes her way inside before we return our attentions to Pastor Hartley, the choir, and the front of the sanctuary once again.

But then, isn’t that the way we’ve always treated her? One quick glance being enough? Enough to know that enough is never the end of the story.

 

SHE HAS BEEN so far from our consciousness for so long, our Leslie, that her appearance now—while not entirely unexpected—has been something of a shock. Years have gone by, and she is as old as the rest of us, not frozen in time—she is no teenager in amber, after all—from the date of her departure to this day, the day of her inevitable return. Because it was inevitable. We always assumed she would come back, even if we had assumed she would return as the same person who left, but she has come home in the way that this valley draws all of its natives back. Ten years, twenty, sometimes decades more. It doesn’t matter that our air is an oven of foul vapors in summer, a slurry of exhaust and dust, better living through chemistry and the inevitable cancer clusters; our babies always come back, no matter their age or condition. The draw of family in the center of the center of our state. The lure of a life more honest and dangerous than what is lived in those beach enclaves of the privileged and unaware.

She left in her late teens, during that time when she only half-knew the effect that she had on boys her own age not to mention those older men, especially the sadder ones, the ones who labored under their own delusions and rescue fantasies. Poor Leslie, we heard them say. Poor Leslie. As though these pathetic little men had some sort of magical power to mend the broken. Fat John Randall, for one, who managed his wife’s family’s lumberyard and hardware. Poor Leslie, he said, she doesn’t deserve… And it was true, we thought, that, as an only child, she didn’t deserve her parents’ grubby fecklessness, the violence of their words to each other, their alcoholism, or—at their worst—their fists. The general poverty of their lives and the bitter confrontations that only ended when the police were called after midnight, the red and blue lights revolving and ricocheting off the walls and windows of our darkened houses, the squawk of their radios intruding into our nominally quiet streets, the specter of disorder and chaos threatening our modest and decent lives.

How many times did Pastor Ellingson (our pastor, two pastors before Pastor Hartley) go to their door, hoping to intervene, hoping to spread grace over their chronic angers? Leslie’s father once broke her mother’s jaw with a single slap while for her part, her mother once stuck a kitchen knife into the back of her father’s hand. None of these moments surprised any of us, nor was Pastor Ellingson surprised when one of his interventions resulted in his own black eye, the result of stepping between the two combatants in the name of our Lord and Savior.

In the midst of all that anger, Leslie somehow grew up kind and sweet, somehow innocent, a dumb little angel, possibly, one of those miracles that defy explanation. That she didn’t fully understand how to carry herself amid the bloom of her adolescent body was heartbreaking. We heard story after story: such as her high school classmate Jason Mitchell, who, before he asked her to be his girlfriend, stole a necklace from the jewelry store in the mall and was arrested before she could try it on, much less give him her answer. Or Walker Metcalf, her junior-year civics teacher, who nearly threw away his career (not to mention his marriage) during the semester that she sat in his class. Each morning, she crossed her legs in front of him, her thrift store dress just this side of indecent, one foot bouncing, her shoe dangling from her toes, and he couldn’t keep his eyes from the dime store chain that encircled her ankle or that hollow just below her desk. He developed a nervous swallow and a stutter. Toward the end of the semester, he got into the habit of picking her up as she was walking the half-mile to school, and while he told himself that he was merely being considerate to someone less fortunate, he also had to admit to himself that he was beginning to lose himself to an obsession. Of turning left rather than right, of driving with her to the coast and some sand-filled motel room, where the two of them could… Did she know that Walker’s interest in her was more than that of a concerned teacher? How could she? Then again, how could she not? She didn’t invite others’ interest, but she would have had to be blind to all of the social cues and clues, wouldn’t she? Still, we thought that she didn’t deserve the reputation that clung to her like a shroud: homewrecker, slut, whore.

Nor did we feel that she entirely deserved the rumors that lingered after her departure, the summer after her high school graduation. During that summer she worked at the Randall lumberyard, and the rumors were rife: about her and Fat John Randall and John Randall’s bitter, pinched, and flat-chested wife. All of which took place so many years ago, and even though neither John Randall’s wife nor John Randall is among us any longer, the stories still float through our conversations as though those stories were true, no matter whether we believed them or not, then or now. For belief is not necessary for a good story, any more than factual accuracy, is it?

 

THAT WAS THEN, and this is now, and now that we see her for what she is so many years later, did we really have anything credible in which to believe or fear? Did we really have any reason to worry? We see her in those gaudy flowers, her hair wet from the torrential rain, hair that at some time prior was chopped matronly short and as unbecoming as only a bad haircut can be. We stare as unobtrusively as possible before our attentions are drawn away as Pastor Hartley intones, “Let us pray,” and now Leslie sits in one of our pews for the born-again, staring at the hands folded in her lap as though they belong to someone else. When she came in, we expected what—a scarlet A to appear in flames on her breast? An act of public weeping and confession? Of course not. What an outrageous cliché either of those would be. Over the top. Excessive. But we expected something more than the most mundane of gestures: a hint of a whisper and Velma Claremont sliding over from her sweet spot on the aisle, so that Leslie might have a place to sit. At weddings, Velma always takes pictures of the procession, recession, and the service with her iPhone and then posts all results to her Facebook group, Christians Who Really Love Jesus, but this is clearly no wedding and her phone stays hidden in the depths of her purse, and while she moves over, she does so in a way that makes her reluctance clear.

Her sighs accompany the sound her haunches make moving over on the upholstered bench of the pew. But Velma also knows how to recover beautifully, especially when the visitor is such a surprise. Such a juicy bit of news with whom she is now hip to hip. “So nice to see you, sweetheart,” she whispers, patting Leslie’s closest thigh. Velma can be a little patronizing; after all, she was three years ahead of Leslie in school, and she’s never not been older and more mature. Not to mention of better stock. “So good of you to come.”

“Yes,” Leslie says, the object of her response as yet unclear. “I mean, I had to come back for this. I just had to. No matter what.”

The plastic raincoat crinkles and crunches and squeaks in tune with their whispers.

Leslie tries to brush some of the water from her petrified raincoat but that only gets her sunflowers wet.

The years have not been that kind, Velma decides with one side-eye glance. Bulges and a bra of the wrong size to go with that bad haircut. Not kind at all.

Velma pats Leslie’s thigh once again. The late middle-aged version of Leslie’s tattooed thigh, a reminder that even sirens must face the ravages of time.

Velma sniffs.

Not a trace of those teenage pheromones in evidence.

We were happy when she left because—if we were to be honest—she made all of us uneasy. We were her peers, but who knew what would happen next? What other hapless father, brother, husband, or son might be swayed? Men are not to be trusted, after all, for they are creatures of their appetites. On the other hand, what if Leslie developed same-sex tendencies? After all, there were those among us who grew nervous in the girls’ locker room when she was nearby. A shortness of breath, a tightness in the chest that might as well have been a cardiac event. But while no one would admit otherwise, none of us were proud of our reactions, dependent as they were on our parents and their friends, who made their opinions of Leslie all too-well known. Not to mention our own fears. We were friends as well as family, after all, no matter how distant, and while many of us thought she was being viewed in ways that were fifty years or more out of date, none of us thought to defend her.

When she left for Los Angeles and then John Randall followed, we said that the only proof necessary of her power over men was John Randall’s F-150 and the key he turned in the ignition. If anyone failed to understand the significance of his absence, then the presence of four suitcases on John Randall’s lawn the following day was the only other necessary clue. Because Fat John Randall had begun to lose weight, he was taking an interest in his appearance, and we couldn’t call him fat anymore.

The only thing that John Randall’s wife could tell Suzanne Lengel, her best friend and confidante at the pet store—where she worked for “the fun of it” and not because she had to—was that he had had the flu. Maybe an ulcer. Something serious but not terminal. He had to buy new clothes, his weight loss was so evident. Whatever. John Randall’s wife was nervous, Suzanne said. Nervous about her husband and her husband’s new interests, it seemed, more so than any illness.

During the day, we heard that John Randall often found reasons to visit with Leslie at her position at the lumberyard cash register, even though he shared an office on the second floor with his father-in-law. The office had a window overlooking the racks of two-by-fours and four-by-fours and the four-by-eight sheets of plywood, but it also had a view of the register, and when he wasn’t downstairs kidding with Leslie, he was upstairs staring mournfully down upon her, while his father-in-law watched him and harbored his suspicions, all of which he passed along to his daughter.

The arguments erupted at night then between John Randall and his wife, arguments repeated back verbatim to Suzanne Lengel.

“This is what I told him,” John Randall’s wife said to Suzanne. “I said, ‘Either you fire that girl, or I will fire you. What do you think about that?’ And he said, ‘Fine. Fire me. Like I want to work for your father and your family forever.’ I said, ‘Be that way. Cut your own throat.’ And he said, ‘I will, and I’ll drink the blood with a cheese sandwich.’

“What kind of idiotic thing was that to say? So I said, ‘You’ll see.’ And he said, ‘Fine, I guess I’ll see,’ and I said, ‘Fine.’ Fine. God in heaven, what he thinks he’ll do on his own is beyond me.”

She thought she had the upper hand and that hand had his short hairs in a nasty twist, but it wasn’t long after that conversation that John Randall threw a duffel bag into the back of his truck and pulled away from the house as well as the lumberyard that, in his mind, had always belonged to his wife and their two unpleasant children.

We said that Leslie’s parents—no matter how shiftless and hostile toward each other—would have to intervene. For the good of their daughter, the health of our church, and for the sake of the Randalls’ marriage and our family of faith, if not for their reputation. But Pastor Ellingson wasn’t willing to risk another black eye or broken nose in yet another fruitless confrontation with those two stiff-necked and angry people, and the pastoral care committee hemmed and hawed for so long that their delay became its own decision. Suzanne Lengel sent a fruit basket to the Randalls’ house and signed the card from the church as a whole. John Randall’s wife gave the peaches to their children, who threw them against the cedar fence in the back yard, and the beef stick to the dog, who threw up, and Leslie’s parents were none the wiser and no more involved than they had been for the previous eighteen years. Blame us, if you will. Blame us, her extended family. For failing to give her the care and the caution she needed.

When Leslie boarded the bus in downtown Fresno, she did so with the aid of John Randall who drove her to the station and purchased her ticket. And when John Randall left his wife’s house, after thinking and thinking and measuring his options, none of which were good, he did so without the weight of his wedding ring, which he left in a dish in the master bathroom. His wife couldn’t fail to see it, he thought, and she did not. Jammed upright in the bar of Ivory, it looked like a tiny gateway to an alien world. She saw the gold wedding band with its inscription from the Song of Songs—because once upon a time there had been passion of a sort, passion that could only be announced by Scripture—and she screamed through the phone to Suzanne about the perfidy of men. Their unfaithfulness. One man in particular. One stupid, weak, and stupid man. Hence the fruit basket and a card that read:

“Blessed are those whose faith abides, even in the darkest hours.”

It was not a direct quotation, but it was Biblical enough to satisfy John Randall’s wife. She felt sufficiently vindicated to attend services that next Sunday without any embarrassment, and although there were still more than a few whispers in the two back rows of pews, she kept her eyes forward and pretended not to hear.

John Randall beat the bus to the station in San Fernando by half an hour. And when the doors opened and passengers began to disembark, he began pounding his hands against the windows and yelling for her attention. This was entirely unlike John Randall, for of all the men of our fellowship—brothers and elders amongst us—he was considered among the meekest of the meek and certain to inherit the earth. Instead, he had traded that inheritance for a bottle of Four Roses and an eighty-miles-per-hour race down Highway 99.

“Leslie,” he bellowed. “Les. I’m here. Oh, dear God, I’m here. Ready to change my life. And yours.”

We heard that she refused to leave her seat and that she had covered her head with a jacket and pretended to sleep until the bus left the station. Her ticket was for Glendale, so she had no obligation to leave, and John Randall had become an embarrassment, even to (or maybe especially to) an eighteen-year-old girl of little to no social awareness, no matter how empathetic she might have been to another person’s pain. The bus driver radioed for police assistance, and before he had a chance to close the doors, two members of the California Highway Patrol pulled up with lights and sirens, and John Randall was given an invitation to spend twenty-four hours in state-sponsored accommodations for his own health and safety, a five-hundred-dollar bill for the officers’ inconvenience, and an invitation to return at a later date for a court hearing.

We heard that John Randall howled for the first two hours of his confinement, and after that he alternately whimpered, pulled his hair, and ran his forehead into the bars of his cell until the skin above his eyes split and a guard was summoned for a towel and a series of butterfly bandages.

All this while Leslie stayed with an older cousin in Van Nuys, who put her in a spare bedroom that was crowded to the doors with broken and damaged furniture and boxes of unsold eight-track tapes: Spirit in the Sky, Bridge over Troubled Waters, and After the Gold Rush, among others. Leslie’s cousin, fifty-six and a widow from a marriage that had taken her from the bosom of our church family, told her in no uncertain terms that while living in her two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow that Leslie would not be allowed to drink or smoke, curse or have gentlemen callers. If she wanted to make a phone call, she could go down the street to the phone booth in front of the drugstore. Furthermore, she told us—that is, Leslie’s cousin did—that she didn’t know how long she’d be able to support such a project in this most wicked of wicked times and wicked towns. If Jesus came back, well, that would be all right by her because she hadn’t signed up to take care of a teenage girl and certainly not one with the reputation that Leslie carried with her, even two hundred miles south. The little slut.

Is it any wonder that two months later, after Leslie’s widowed cousin could take it no longer and ordered her to leave, that we lost track of where she had gone, what she had done, and who she had done it with? Is it any wonder that her return, some forty years later, seems a miracle? A foretaste of salvation?

Pastor Hartley has wandered off script as he is wont to do, and we wait for Aaron Neville, the choir director, to prod him back to the task at hand. Aaron coughs. Once. Twice. Points to the Order of Service that is projected onto the scrim above the choir stall. “Yes,” Pastor Hartley says. “Yes.” He shakes his head, as though to clear his mind of a persistent daydream. “Brother John will now share a word from the last hours of his life.”

It’s true.

We will get a voice from beyond the grave.

Fat John Randall has come to speak with us via a last video message, he who was no longer fat and, then forty years later, was wasted by the cancer eating away his lungs although he never smoked, such are the ironies of this life we live, even under the watchful eyes of Heaven:

Listen [he said, a slight hiss from his oxygen tank attending his every word]. Listen. I have lived my entire life in a war with time. Not a war against aging, because that’s happening regardless, and the war is lost the moment it begins, but the illusory promise of some moment of freedom after a particular obligation as opposed to the life in the present. Taxes to be paid, children to be raised, work obligations to fulfill, a wife to be mollified no matter how estranged—all of these invite neglect of the present moment in favor of anxiety about some phantom of the future. I’ll be happier once that’s over, I think. But then another obligation comes along, another obstacle to hurdle, and I am once again unable to live the now for the sake of what’s to come.

John Randall’s children, those brats of some forty years ago and now middle-aged—yet, somehow, even less appealing than they were as children—sit impassively in their pew and watch their father’s face along with their own families who are more of the same. Brats, we call them, even now to their faces, as though we traffic in irony. Irony, however, means nothing to us. Only innuendo. They are members of our larger family, and we love them—yes, yes, we do, please do not think otherwise—but that doesn’t mean we have to like them or desire to spend time in their company. That they each moved an hour away and in opposite directions was not disappointing to anyone other than their mother, who died a week before the first grandchild was born.

The oxygen cannula bobs from John Randall’s nose as his recorded self speaks to the camera; a hospice nurse hovers just outside the frame, only one sleeve of her cartoon smock visible. Lucy yanking the football away from Charlie Brown.

“You can do it,” her disembodied voice says in moments of dead air, “yes, you can. You can finish this. Confession. It’s good for the soul. Think how much better you’ll feel.”

John Randall speaks, stopping occasionally to collect his thoughts if not his breath.

I tried [he said]. I tried. I tried and failed [and even from a distance, we can see his eyes begin to water]. Until now. Now there is nothing but the present, and there is precious little of that. I might be tempted to look past my present, but I already know the future, and that is altogether certain and utterly mysterious at the same time [at which point, he paused, his chest expanding and contracting]. Most of you know, don’t you, most of you know my past. You’ve tsked and you’ve tutted, you’ve gossiped and you’ve judged. Don’t say you haven’t. I don’t blame you, for I would have done the same. I know you because I am you. I once tried to live fully in the present. Remember? I thought I could trade my obligations away for a moment of fulfillment and peace. But then I came back to reality, which is only the ominous truth of our lives. I tried and failed, but in failing, I came back to you because, from you, there is no escape.

Of course, there is a not-so subtle turning, a shifting of backsides in the pews, our eyes turning toward Leslie while John Randall’s voice stumbles from word to word. A hiss, a catch, a pause. Leslie sits forward in the pew, chin on her knuckles, her elbows on her knees. The sunflowers. The tattoo. We cannot avert our eyes. As she cannot avert her eyes from the screen and John Randall’s last image. If she were suddenly to burst into flames, we would not be surprised.

We know the long end to John Randall’s story: how he was released from jail in southern California and came back to Fresno, chastened if not entirely repentant. How he attempted—half-heartedly, it must be assumed—to make amends with his wife. We said she would never take him back, they would never be together again, and we weren’t disappointed. However, we were surprised to discover that John Randall, rather than his wife, declined the opportunity to resume the marriage. Instead, upon his return, he informed his wife that he had no intention of moving back into the family home, nor did he expect ever to work for her father again. He was there solely for the sake of their children. No matter how ill-mannered they might be or how unlikeable they might become. He and his wife would remain married or not, as she wished, if only for the sake of her place within the community and family of our church—a legal fiction as well as a social one—but he would no longer accept his mail at the family address nor sleep in the marital bed. He went to work for a cotton broker and learned the business, and made twice as much money as he would have had he stayed in his wife’s family’s lumberyard. Which caused us, at least for a moment, to question what we know of judgment. But, at that point, we were no longer terribly interested. We saw him at church at regular intervals, sometimes with his family and sometimes apart. He lived, he worked; he smiled, he blessed us on a Sunday morning or a Wednesday evening, and he shook the hand of whoever happened to be the current pastor—Pastor Ellingson, Pastor Singer, Pastor Bartlett, Pastor Hartley—on his way out the door. His wife died, and while he attended her funeral, he refused to speak or take part in her remembrances, beyond his presence in the second row of pews. And there, after one last bout of tittering, our focus upon him finally turned away. Until today. Amen.

“Amaizing grace” is John Randall’s last hurrah; the sound may be sweet, but we are distracted, unable to inhabit the sentiment in the manner to which we are accustomed. Pastor Hartley has barely uttered the last phrase of his benediction before we are turning toward the side doors and the wet concrete of the patio. Four members of the women’s worship committee have set up, in the shelter of the eaves, the coffee urn and the desserts, the Styrofoam cups and paper plates and napkins and the ecological nightmare of the plastic utensils. Wouldn’t you know that the clouds have parted, the skies have cleared, and the rain, so Biblical an hour ago, has vanished. Steam rises from the pavers. As though prearranged, Velma Claremont ushers Leslie to a spot in front of the squares of sweating chocolate cake, which is where we surround her.

We give Suzanne Lengel, John Randall’s wife’s best friend of the past, the opportunity to begin. After ten years of steadily encroaching osteoporosis and her own sedentary tendencies, she is bent over, and although she stands at something like a right angle and her hair is gray straw, she begins her interrogation not so differently from what it would have been in junior high: “Look at you,” she says. “Look at you.” Which might be funny since she can barely raise her eyes above Leslie’s prominent bosom.

“I’m not sure,” Leslie says, “that— Well, you know.”

“Know what?” Velma says.

I don’t know,” Suzanne says, her eyes twisting upward in something like a leer. “None of us know, do we? That’s the point. None of us know. Not any longer. We’re too old.”

“No?” Leslie says. She looks puzzled but more than willing to be amiable. “Maybe. I don’t suppose we do.”

“Why are you here?” Velma asks. Only she, amongst us, is willing to voice our naked curiosity. “Why are you here after so long?”

“Oh,” Leslie says. She removes her plastic raincoat as though shedding a second skin. It crinkles and creaks as she folds it. “I wanted to pay my respects. Mr. Randall was very kind to me. Even at the very end. Which was just a misunderstanding.”

“That’s it,” Suzanne says, signaling for a chair so as to relieve her neck and back and breath. “We need the whole story. All of it.”

It comes out in a flood, a torrent of words, which none of us expect. How badly she felt moments after the Highway Patrol officers had taken John Randall away. How conflicted. How embarrassed. She was a teenager, for god’s sake, two hundred miles from everything she’d ever known, there had been a forty-year-old married man pounding on the Greyhound’s windows and doors, and the rest of the passengers were staring at her as though they were sharing space with a circus freak.

“I didn’t know what to do,” she says. “I still don’t know what I should have done.”

“Here,” Velma says, handing her a paper plate with one of those aforementioned brown squares, along with a cinnamon knot and a cup of the weak, lukewarm coffee we know so well. “Your blood sugar must be low.”

Leslie tells us the rest while she chews without tasting. How she left that dark bungalow in Van Nuys without knowing where her next steps might lead. How she went from church to church, from the Baptists to the Methodists to the Lutherans and Presbyterians and Catholics, one Jewish synagogue, and even the tiny Bible church in one of the poorer neighborhoods so far off the beaten track, she only found it because she heard them singing. She told them she had been stranded, and they all provided something for her aid. They all provided phone numbers and resources and maps where shelters were located and kitchens could be found. She couch-surfed choir rooms when it was allowed, and she worked for meals and housing when it was offered. No one turned her away. Then again, certain boundaries were observed. There was that one Baptist minister, who seemed a little more friendly than necessary, but then his wife was the church secretary, and she was just outside the door.

Finally, she found a job working for an insurance agent, who stared at her during her interview without listening to a thing she said. Once he saw her, he realized that the position he was offering required no experience; he could teach her everything she needed to know. It would be his honor to teach her everything she needed to know. He wrote whole life and term policies, homeowner’s and auto; he dabbled in real estate and mutual funds and sold used cars on the side. He could do just about anything except keep his shirts clean during meal times. They went to a Unity Center maybe five or six times a year, and if they faced any serious problems, they knew the number for the Prayer Line by heart. But they really didn’t have any problems at all. Nothing important, nothing to speak of. Maybe they didn’t have as much money as they’d like and a new car might not be remiss, but problems? No, not really. They now had five children from ages fourteen to thirty-two, and she couldn’t be happier.

“They’re the light of my life,” Leslie says. “My darlings.”

Three or four of us begin to leave when the subject turns to families, since we all have them, and we’re in agreement on this: no one has been left unscathed. By the older or younger generation, it doesn’t matter. We have all been subject to the anger and grief and the lunacy that blood brings.

“I’ve been so lucky,” she breathes, and a few more of us drift away when she reaches for her bag and the accordion sleeve of pictures that are sure to follow. “See what I mean?” she says, pointing to a blurry mass of bodies in shorts and tee shirts on green grass. An enormous dog lying at their feet.

“That’s fine, dear.” Velma pats her arm to stop her from removing the photos from their plastic pockets; Leslie wants us to have a clearer look. She wants us to have a clearer look at the family that is her source of so much pride, and now we know. We know what she is, this cousin of ours, the source of so much of our adolescent consternation. She’s boring. Boring. And just as old and encumbered as we are. She fled to Los Angeles, but she became neither movie star nor hooker. She might as well have stayed among us for all the difference she’s found in this life.

And now she’s weeping a little, dabbing at the corners of her eyes, but no one tells her that she’s left chocolate frosting in place of the bleeding mascara she intended to remove.

“Without Mr. Randall, I might have stayed here,” she says, looking from Velma to Suzanne to the last few of us who are left, none of us gratified. “Not that it would have been a bad thing, not exactly.”

“But,” Suzanne says, “but it might not have been a good thing either.”

“Oh,” Leslie cries. “You do understand. You understand. I had to leave in order to return. You have no idea how good it is to come home.”

And that is when we know what we have known all along, what has been lurking on the outside edges of the frame.

We hate her, as much as we hate ourselves.

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  • David Borofka is the author of ‘Hints of His Mortality’ (winner of the 1996 Iowa Short Fiction Award) and the novel ‘The Island’ (MacMurray & Beck). His latest collection of stories, ‘A Longing for Impossible Things’, was recently released as part of the Johns Hopkins Poetry and Fiction Series and won an American Fiction Award for short stories from American Book Fest. His novel ‘The End of Good Intentions’ was published in September 2023, and a new collection of stories, ‘The Bliss of Your Attention’, will be published on January 21, 2025, also by JHUP.

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