Free Farewell Navigator by Leni Zumas Page A

overlooking an alley above the adult video store where you work. Totally temporary.
    Temporary, I echoed, armed with bleach and paper towels. I had offered to deal with the bathtub, which was encrusted with unidentified brown-red matter. While I scrubbed she sat on the toilet, smoking, and lectured me about my stupidity. You’re a nice person, she said, and thus you assume other people are nice too. They are not. Most people are not nice at all. You have to act accordingly.
    Isn’t that kind of depressing?
    Not as depressing as being robbed blind by a trifling poseur.
    God bless him, I said feebly.
    Moving along. New subject. Let’s think of where to have dinner tonight. To celebrate. Toast our new freedom. Free of the house, free of trifling poseurs. . . .
    Free of car, I added.
    After the sun went down, we woke up hungry from our naps on a sleeping bag and a folded blanket. The Copper DomeRestaurant was two blocks away, an acceptable walking distance for Ginna, and specialized in thirteen varieties of pancake. I had original buckwheat, she had banana chocolate chunk. We did not talk about the future. Did not discuss my staying or going. My father was not mentioned, nor Ginna’s mother, who often asked Ginna wasn’t it enough to have been plunged into these reduced circumstances—did she have to be getting fat in the bargain?
    On the walk back, flakes caught on our lashes. The floor of the city sparkled quietly. The snow would stop, and morning would come. Ginna would go downstairs to stand behind the smut counter while I drank the coffee she had cooked on the two-ringed stove. The air would be cold against the blurry panes. And I would make the call to my father, who sat worrying in Wisconsin, and give him more reasons to be disappointed.
    But the sacrificed car and my hasty departure were better things to tell him than nothing at all, than a frightening silence, than long days of wondering where I slept at night. I have a roof , I planned to say, for now. I have a friend. For now it’s all right. I will let you know what happens.

THIEVES AND MAPMAKERS
    On the last day I saw my mother, we ate dinner on the back porch. Veal chops and butter beans and apricots in syrup. Flies swarmed around the fruit but my mother said to ignore them, so we chewed and chewed and she asked about work. My job was at the fairgrounds, running the Demon Cups. I would listen to the kids scream for three minutes then pull the lever back. I watched for accidents.
    I don’t like it, I told her.
    Oh, well, you do! she said, popping a fly-pocked apricot into her mouth.
    I don’t like the job.
    But you do like the job.
    The calm in her voice made me tired. That summer I was tired all the time. My spine had twisted into knots from the tedium of running up my body. My eyes ached from looking at things I had already seen. I had an unnamed sickness that scaled my skin and brittled my eyeballs, but being sick was more pleasurable than being bored and I felt more interesting, in my affliction, than my mother and the neighbors content with their strong lungs and straight spines and useless health.
    I believed the Town itself had infected me. Although it looked clean on the surface, it was like a river that’s quit running,whose water languishes on the rocks, collecting germs. Because nothing in the Town ever changed shape, hidden viruses were allowed to grow. The rooms of my house stank of sameness; the familiar pall of the slipcovers had become a daily torment. It wasn’t city, it wasn’t country, it was a way station of gray streets and brown storefronts and paralyzed faces.
    In those hot guts of August I would wake up drenched with fears of waking in the Town until I died. My sweat smelled like rust.
    On the day I turned eleven, I had asked why my father was missing from yet another of my birthday parties. My mother explained that when he left, four winters before, he never did find his way back to us . I imagined my father coughing up knobs of