Free All the Good Parts by Loretta Nyhan Page B

stalker, or maybe he was sitting in jail, taking online classes to pass the time on a life sentence for triple homicide? He hadn’t revealed much of himself, and though we were constantly told to respect other students’ privacy online, most people couldn’t wait to discuss every dirty detail of their personal lives. Was there something really wrong with him?
    You fear too much, Leona.
    Wasn’t fear supposed to be a gift?
    I walked into the Goodwill store, and the musty-smelling chaos of other people’s discarded stuff put a temporary halt to my internal rumblings. I could never resist the anarchy of a good thrift shop—the clothes had lived harder lives than I ever did, and the stories they told fed something deep and needy in the heart of my oft-neglected imagination. I quickly found a teal silk sweater (with the tags cut out, the fashion version of an untraceable handgun), a lined corduroy miniskirt (lined = old—er—vintage), and a tasseled purple scarf I thought Maura would like. Tucking my treasures under one arm, I wove through the jungle of used furniture in the back of the store, searching for a decent full-length mirror. I found one propped against a dilapidated sofa, but its wood frame was amateurishly stenciled with Disney princesses—Belle, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty winked saucily while I stared at my reflection. Imperfect, but I figured Jerry might get a kick out of it, and at five bucks it was a great fit for my meager budget. I made my purchases and slid the mirror into the backseat of my Honda, threading a quarter of it through the open window.
    “Someone’s going to steal that,” warned Suspicious Estelle when she opened her door.
    “Maybe I’m a risk taker,” I said, smiling at her, and she shook her tiny silver-tipped head, mumbling about my lack of common sense.
    I followed Estelle inside her cramped English Tudor. The house always smelled a little moldy, but today another more pungent scent overpowered the mustiness. I dropped my bag in the foyer, wallpapered claustrophobically in swirling green and brown patterns, and waited. Estelle only let me into the house incrementally.
    “Why don’t you come into the kitchen?” she said. “You can make me some coffee.”
    My smile hardened. “Perfect.”
    Usually, we avoided her kitchen. It was a small, dark cave, last decorated sometime during the Nixon administration, when the middle class finally rejected the dreamy pastels of the Eisenhower era in favor of the earthier, more somber avocado green and mustard yellow. I searched her overstuffed pantry, but the only coffee she had was instant. I filled a kettle and placed it on the burner, and then searched through Estelle’s collection of mugs until I found two without chips. Sitting quietly at her small drop-leaf table, she watched my every movement, blue-veined hands turning on her lap.
    “Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” I asked, stirring the coffees with a teaspoon. “Or are you going to make me figure it out myself?”
    “You shouldn’t use a silver spoon to do that. The acid will ruin it. That teaspoon was my paternal grandmother’s. A family heirloom.”
    I washed the spoon and dried it carefully with a dish towel. “All better?”
    “No,” she said, dropping her chin. “It’s not.”
    “ Estelle. What’s the matter?”
    She took her coffee and made a face after tasting it. “Go look in the bathroom,” she said with a sigh of resignation. “The downstairs one.”
    In the few moments it took to reach the bathroom, my imagination zipped between a thousand different scenarios, all of them involving blood and gore and quick, frantic calls to 911. The reality wasn’t that far off, though apparently I needed a priest instead of an EMT, as an exorcism was in order. Pea-green dried vomit covered every surface of the closet-sized room, including artful Rorschach splatters on the mirrored wallpaper. Fighting a dry heave of my own, I returned to where Estelle sat