Free Someone Else's Love Story by Joshilyn Jackson Page B

vowels and clipped her blurry consonants, but her voice retained a mountain flavor, a muddling in her a e i o u ’s.
    “Atlanta straight up, with a twist of hick,” Bridget called her accent.
    Now this girl has said, “The thang with feathers,” just as Bridget would: flat, very Atlanta, but i gets away from her.
    Stevie is asking about the origami bird, but William can’t look away from the girl, trembling in her poppy dress. Her dark eyes are nothing like Bridget’s wide-set, celery green gaze, but he looks anyway.
    As Stevie speaks, Shandi says more words. “Gun,” she says. “File cabinet.”
    William’s head dips in an involuntary nod at the way the i becomes an ah in her mouth. Fahle cabinet . Perfect.
    “I can make a jumping frog. I can make a top,” William says, to pacify the cranky infant with the pistol. So he will shut up and let this girl talk more. If the bullet is his destiny, what can it hurt him to think of his wife’s voice, a little, now?
    The girl doesn’t speak, though. She only leans in a little closer, as if she might stretch her neck over the head of the frightened child sheltered between them and kiss him. Her breath is warm. She smells clean, like Ivory soap and mint. He stills. He leans in, too, readying to put his lips on the mouth that makes sounds like Bridget’s mouth. But that isn’t what he wants.
    He wants something else. Fiercely, a pulse so centered in his body it could be his own heart beating. It is the first time he has wanted anything in months, and it is ridiculous.
    He wants to hear Bridget talking.
    Not this girl. And not the Bridget he is angry with. He doesn’t want to hear the wife who could slough off her own body, the body he loved, and fly unthinking into a white light that her oxygen-deprived brain cells told her she was seeing. She went fast, joyfully soaring with their daughter toward her God, handing Twyla, safe and giggling, into the arms of the nicest possible Jesus. A PBS Jesus, unwounded and clean. That Bridget nodded and smiled, accepted it, saying, “Yes. Let the little children go to Him.” Even William’s little child, who might well have grown up to be a rationalist.
    He doesn’t even want to hear his barely remembered wife, the one that Angel Bridget, hauling their baby cheerfully up to heaven, has superseded in his fury. His wife drinks small-batch bourbon straight up, has a flash-fire Irish temper, swarms under and around and over him in bed. Loves poetry and Stephen King novels equally. Plants a patchwork garden every spring, pansies in the carrots, crazy oregano trying to twine with shepherd’s needles. He knows these things, but they are like facts he read in a National Geographic in a waiting room one day, explicating the genus Bridget . She’s so distant she might as well be theoretical.
    The Bridget he wants is an earlier version. Ponytail Bridget in pink Converse high-tops. Before there was a marriage or a Twyla or a Saturn wagon with no backseat.
    He closes his eyes, simply to not be looking at this girl who isn’t Bridget, wanting to hear Bridget’s young voice in a singleminded, desperate, impossible way. An echo of his old obsession, from when he was seventeen, and she was the new girl at school. When he followed her from class to lunch to class to bus.
    She read books—novels, nothing interesting—as she walked the halls, oblivious to him. She found a place at the brainiac girls’ lunch table; these were not the kinds of girls that football players noticed, so his stalking went uncharted. He was so invisible to Bridget that twice she passed by close enough for him to smell her lemony shampoo, and yet she never returned his gaze.
    No one had yet proved the existence of human pheromones, but William became certain of them. There was no other explanation for his reaction to her solitary joy as she destroyed the park to raise it, to the way the basic shape and smell and sound of her undid him; she was indefinably correct for