Free Miss Me When I'm Gone by Emily Arsenault Page A

sank. Frank, I thought. He’d been completely absent this visit, allowing Shelly to focus all of her attention on me.
    When Shelly opened the door, I heard her say, “My kid’s here. She’s asleep.”
    She let the person in anyway, and as they started to talk, I was relieved to hear it was a woman. This wasn’t unusual. Shelly’s friends seemed to know my bedtime—occasionally they’d come and visit with her after I was in bed. And I continued to busy myself fashioning my stuffed monkey into funny contortions, as I sometimes did when I couldn’t sleep.
    Then Shelly said something that made me sit up straight in my bed. She said, “It’s more complicated than money. I don’t really want money. And all the money in the world wouldn’t even get me Gretchen back, anyway.”
    Get Gretchen back?! So it was true. Someday Shelly might bring me back here and be my mother. I couldn’t imagine it. Would she start pretending to care about my dittos, my 100s? Would she let me take ballet? Did the Emerson school cafeteria have chicken nuggets?
    The TV was burbling loudly, so I couldn’t hear everything. Eventually, though, I heard the other lady say something loud enough for me to hear. Something like: “If you think you would hold up in a fight against him, you’re wrong, Shelly.”
    This scared me. She was probably talking about Frank now. I could figure out that much, because I knew how much Shelly and Frank fought. She was warning Shelly about Frank. It seemed to me a lot of people didn’t really like Frank: me, Nantie Linda, Aunt Dorothy, Grandma, the neighbors.
    And yes, it was a relief to know that others knew what I knew. That Shelly and Frank fought. It was not a relief to hear someone else sound like they were worried Shelly should be afraid of him—like I was.
    It seemed to me, after a few minutes, that Shelly and her guest were getting angry at each other.
    Shelly said, “If he doesn’t stop, I’ll go to the police.”
    “You think the police will believe you?” her friend asked. And she told Shelly she should be careful.
    A little while later, Shelly’s friend left, and the TV droned on into the night.
    A few weeks after Shelly died, the framed picture showed up at my mom’s house in a box of things her mother sent her, for her and me to remember Shelly by.
    I had seen that bird drawing. In college. I thought about it on my way up to see Gregor.
    I didn’t remember what year it was now, but I came into her room one day after a holiday break and saw it sitting on her bookshelf. I asked who’d drawn it, thinking maybe a young cousin or babysitting charge. And she told me she had drawn it when she was a kid. I probably gave her a funny look. Displaying one’s own framed childhood drawing was, fittingly, a decidedly quirky thing to do—but a bit on the egotistical side for Gretchen. I believe the drawing disappeared within a week.

Chapter 12
    I have to admit, Gregor annoyed me before I’d even met him.
    “Gregor? Like the bug in the Kafka story?” I’d asked Gretchen when she first told me about him.
    “Yeah,” she’d said. “But he’s nothing like that guy, really.”
    That was true, I’d soon learn when I met him. I had to admit he was very attractive, but for his creative facial hair. He almost always wore a scarf with his dark, pec-hugging T-shirts—more often than not, a cowboy kerchief, which seemed to me pretty contrived, but with her later-in-life attraction to things country . . . who knows? Maybe Gretchen found it charming.
    And I didn’t care for his light red goatee. He looked like a leprechaun—a young, narrow-faced, hipster leprechaun.
    Now, as he led me into his and Gretchen’s chilly, high-ceilinged apartment, he seemed just a sad leprechaun. He wasn’t wearing a scarf of any kind—only jeans and a loose green T-shirt that said THE JESUS LIZARD on it. His feet were bare, and he kept placing one foot over the other and curling his toes, as if he were self-conscious