Free Summer of the Dead by Julia Keller

right? ’Cause that’s about all you expect from me. That’s, like, the upper limit of my abilities, right?”
    â€œI’m happy for you, Shirley. I just want to—”
    â€œIt’s not a regular kind of job. It’s special.” Shirley scratched at the faded denim fabric that covered her right knee, picking at it, the way you’d bother a scab. She didn’t look at Bell when she spoke. “I’m managing a band, okay? Getting some gigs lined up. Putting together a YouTube video. You heard ’em the other night. Bobo Bolland. Been around awhile, but this is a fresh start. He writes these great songs. The kind you remember. The kind that get under your skin, you know? I think he’s got a shot. This could be big. Really, really big.”
    Bell struggled to keep the disappointment out of her voice. “You don’t know anything about managing a band,” she said quietly. “Do you?”
    Shirley abruptly bolted forward in her seat, as if a few thousand volts had just been delivered to her extremities. Her head bobbed up and down. “See? You see? I knew it,” she said, looking around the room, mumbling her umbrage to invisible witnesses. “I knew you’d try to piss all over it. That’s why I didn’t tell you.”
    â€œI’m just asking—”
    â€œYou’re trying to take care of me. Like I’m a baby or something. And you know what, Belfa? I don’t want your fucking help anymore. Okay? Got it? Got that straight? I have to be in this house right now—my PO says so—but the second I don’t, the second I’m back on my feet, I’m outa here. Got it?”
    Shirley lit another cigarette and flopped back against the couch cushion. She’d had a hard time holding the lighter still enough for it to meet up with the end of the cigarette.
    Bell waited. Whatever she said right now would be misconstrued. Whatever she did would be wrong.
    It was her sister who broke the raggedy-edged silence.
    â€œYou know what?” Shirley said.
    â€œWhat?” Bell replied. She said it cautiously, warily, expecting another jab.
    But Shirley was smiling now. A real smile, not a bitter, ironic one. Her mood suddenly shifted; her voice was back to normal. It was as if the last few minutes hadn’t happened. Just that fast, Shirley was a different person. Ever since she’d come back into Bell’s life, she had exhibited these out-of-the-blue turnarounds. Bell found them a little unnerving—they were too much like her own quicksilver switches from rage to sympathy—but she’d learned not to look surprised. Hell. Maybe it was genetic.
    â€œWhen you were a little kid,” Shirley said, voice warming, “you’d cry up a storm sometimes. Not for any reason. You’d just cry to be crying, I guess. Daddy’d go crazy. Tell me to shut you up or else. So I’d take you outside, night or day, and try to distract you. Daytime, it worked okay—you’d see a bird or a flower, some shit like that, and you’d start pointing and get all excited and stop the blubbering. But nighttime, it was harder. Nothing to see. And you’d just be screaming and throwing yourself around. Daddy said that if you didn’t shut your mouth pretty damn quick, he was going to shut it for you.” Shirley winced “And he’d do it, too. You bet your ass he would.”
    â€œI don’t remember.”
    â€œCourse you don’t. You were two, three years old. Just a baby.”
    â€œSo what did you do?”
    Shirley took a minute to lift the cigarette off her lip. Her hand trembled. She aimed a jet of exhaled smoke at the ceiling. Even after the smoke had dissipated, she kept her chin tilted up; her eyes stayed on the ceiling, as if crucial parts of her story had fled there a long time ago for safekeeping, and she was reading sentences—crafted in a private language knowable only by