Free Going Away Shoes by Jill McCorkle Page A

the sewer system. “You need to get that checked,” he whispers, while Nanci goes to the bathroom.
    I smile and say thank you without moving my lips. Now Charles has his brother dousing plagues as well, even though their grandmother keeps pointing out that they are in the wrong holiday. I can tell she wants me to make them stop. “Blood. Guts. Puke.” They fall out laughing and I ignore all the looks. I call out cheerful good-byes and happy holidays. Then I focus on the nativity scene, where Mary pulls her coat close around her and stares up into the dark night sky. Joseph has driven away in his little green car, and now it is once again just the three of them. She breathes deeply. Behind her, within the warmth of the manger, Jesus and Spiderman are happily talking and laughing. They are swaddled in worn soft quilts while they drink eggnog and rid the world of plagues and pestilence. She ponders this in her heart and it is good. There is no place on earth she would rather be. And that is what makes this night different from all the rest.

ANOTHER DIMENSION
    Ann has not been back to her childhood home in over two years, not since the death of her father, but her brother, Jimmy, has updated her on all the changes he and his new wife have made. Ann has not met the new wife but could tell from the pictures Jimmy sent at Christmas that she looks a lot like the ones before her: short, blond, young, some pedigree or another Jimmy will find worth telling. Ann’s luck with lasting relationships has been just as bad as his, the difference being she hasn’t married all of hers. “That’s because I’m honorable,” he said during his last divorce when she pointed this out. “Or stupid,” she responded, falling into the sarcastic sparring that had long ago become their way of communicating. Her first and only weddingring was then in place on a finger she hoped might some day plump around it, claiming permanence, as she’d once admired on an older neighbor who, after forty years, couldn’t get hers over her knuckle. The trapped ring reminded Ann of a photograph she once saw, a tree grown around and embracing a tombstone, both recognizable for what they were and yet now joined and inseparable in the most natural way. But now she is returning, post-divorce, to collect Jimmy’s I told you so in person or maybe to see if she can return. Call it tired of running. Call it an exorcism.
    Right after their mother’s death, when Ann and Jimmy were kids, their dad had dated somewhat indiscriminately. Therapists might have suggested he do things differently but he was a therapist and assumed he knew best. “Besides,” he said at the end of his life, hospice care and their stoic stepmother and her polished professional children in the kitchen planning the details of his funeral as well as her move to a condo in Atlanta, “your mother was dying for so long. Did anyone ever look at it from my point of view?” He was a frail abbreviated version of himself by then and yet he talked more in those last days than he had ever talked. Still, there was much left unsaid.
    Their dad was a reasonably nice-looking man, and when their mother died, he was only forty-three, five years younger than Ann is now. Jimmy had manifested his looks, the long lean legsand nonexistent ass, which looked fine on a young guy in Levi’s but kind of pitiful on a grown man. Still, their father had a head full of thick gray hair he kept cut close and he kept himself fit by nightly sit-ups and walking the golf course from sunup to sundown every Saturday and Sunday that he could. If there was anything that appeared unattractive about him, it certainly didn’t stop the calls and indications of interest —things he said began happening the year before their mother died, when Jimmy was in fourth grade and Ann was in first. He never revealed their names but it left Ann with a sense of distrust for many of those who arrived with arms full of food and sympathy and, later in