Free She Got Up Off the Couch by Haven Kimmel

write on the street outside her house, in soap,
Ede! Will You Marry Me??
And then we got to sit on the front porch and watch her pour boiling water on his proposal and scrub at it with the broom she had probably just climbed off of after a trip to the bank.
    Like my father, he was a natural driver of anything, any vehicle, and like Dad he was not averse to driving angry. He flexed his jaw muscles almost all the time and could not be made to converse if he chose not to, but with his friends he loved to tell a story and he laughed and laughed. There was never a time he didn’t love Jesus; there was never a period in his life when he was faithless, and as he grew up he became more and more devout, and more hurried in his desire to leave home, which he did.
    He joined the National Guard and there was boot camp at Fort Polk, Louisiana. He wrote letters home and included a picture of himself on his bunk in a white T-shirt, a sweet smile on his face we rarely saw, and then he came home. He had become a man meant to wear a uniform. Uniforms were only concepts until the first time Dan Jarvis wore one and then the universe stepped back and said
Ah, so that’s who they were for.
    He found a girl so pure she could have been made from Ivory Soap. When I first met her she seemed only barely older than I, she was so petite and shy, and she had the delicate facial features of a cat: blue, almond-slanted eyes, high cheekbones, a small nose, long black hair. My sister said she was a size “aught,” and maybe her dresses were even in the negatives. Elaine. I met her and thought she must have been floating around in a purity bubble all seventeen of her years, nothing mean or crude touching her, but it turned out she was stubborn in her goodness and that’s how she had kept it. She was so tender to me and her hands were so small; when Dan gave her his letter jacket she looked like a child adrift in giant’s clothes. Where Elaine was concerned, quiet as she was amid our family of scalawags and jesters, there was nothing not to love, and Dan married her as fast as he could. The high school girls, the lovely blondes with money and lake houses, disappeared like dandelion fluff.
    He and Elaine gave us our first new baby, Jenny, and she too was breathtaking, and all of us had to acknowledge that there had been a certain amount of beauty, a pool available to our family, and Danny got nearly all of it, then gave it to his daughters, including Jessica, who came two years later. And none of us resented it, because you can’t resent the sublime when you are lucky enough to see it, and it’s pointless to resent a man you cannot reach or touch. He took his wife and little girls and moved away.
    Here are memories I stole. He had a terrible temper and Mom asked Dr. Heilman the best way to deal with it. Dr. Heilman said, “If he throws a tantrum tell him you’re going to take away his favorite thing until he calms down. Then give it back to him.” Dan’s favorite thing was his Davy Crockett coonskin cap, and one afternoon when he lost his temper Mom said, “Danny, I’m taking your cap away until you can behave yourself. When you’re done acting this way, you can have it back.” He looked her dead in the eye. He was three years old. He said, “I don’t
ever
want it back.” And she knew right then that she had snapped a little something in him entirely by accident, a part of him that must have been born fearing the way love unzips us and leaves us vulnerable to assault. He zipped that part up. Mom never took anything away from him again, but it wouldn’t have mattered if she did.
    She could not prevent him from sneaking outside and peeing on the street. When she asked him why he insisted on doing so, he said he didn’t want to miss anything; he wanted to watch the cars go by.
    He had a little red wagon in which he pulled around a tombstone. The tombstone remains a mystery, but he loved it. Then in winter he would silently leave the house in the