Free The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sarah Braunstein

said, “What kind of proposition?”
    â€œIt means I’d like your help; it means I have an idea to run by you.”
    She was mildly offended. “I know what it means.”
    â€œIt won’t take long. It would—it would make a world of difference.”
    She was supposed to run and she did not. She prepared herself to run, she knew the risks, but now, face-to-face with him (a notorious Him, a textbook stranger), her instinct was merely to listen. She said, “What can I do for you?” and was surprised by the rote, disinterested way it came out, like the voice of a tired waitress.

1
    S am’s girl wasn’t pretty. You couldn’t call her that, but he didn’t mind. He liked her long neck, like a dancer’s, pale clean hair to her shoulder blades. She was gangly, wide-hipped, big feet. It didn’t matter. He liked everything: her shirts a size too big, her sagging kneesocks. She went without a bra but not in a wild way, not like Mimi McKendrick who wore beads and black nail polish and let her little breasts knock about. His girl crossed her arms over her chest, drew attention to her own embarrassment, her shock at having wound up, one day, today, for no reason except dull destiny, a woman. Her eyes were clay-colored, her fingernails bitten to the quick. He admired everything about her. In her presence he was all clenched fists and thubbing heart.
    â€œHelen.”
    It brought to mind his grandmother (who wasn’t a Helen but of the age when women were Helens) and a wooden horse and also a cat with half a tail he’d known as a small boy. The name was many things, belonged to people and animals and some cities, but it was hers first and hers foremost. It had a formality, he thought, a sanctity. It was proper. His first-grade teacher was Mrs. Helen. It could be a surname or a pet’s name or a myth, but now that it was her, this girl, that’s all it would ever be.
    â€œHelen!”
    There was nothing to do but shout it.
    â€œKeep your voice down,” she said. “Hush.”
    She said things like that— hush . She was just sixteen but spoke like a mother already, in a weary, vaguely amused voice.
    â€œHelen,” more softly.
    â€œThat’s better, yes.”
    They were sitting on her bed and kissing. It was nearly dusk on a Tuesday in early spring. Her room was a child’s room: pink walls, braided pastel rug, shelf of dolls in church dresses and straw hats, a ribbon tacked to the back of the door, which was closed. The door was closed and they were sitting on her bed and they had been kissing. It was kissing, yes, but it wasn’t what he had imagined. It was kissing in name only: lips brushing dryly, no exchange of saliva, idle tongues, hands on their own laps. Still, he would take it.
    The ribbon behind the door said Runner-Up in gold letters. A pink ribbon with gold letters, and at once he saw her as the runner-up, a too-tall girl pulling herself from the pool, out of breath, bloodshot eyes, a scrape on her knee, downy fuzz in her armpits. The sky would have been overcast, her mother frowning—“There’ll be more races”—and handing her a towel which her sister had already used.
    â€œI have a paper to write,” she was saying. “It’s due Wednesday. The War of 1812.”
    â€œI know about that war.”
    He knew nothing.
    He loved her as the Swimmer. She pretended not to mind being runner-up. She hated her mother, hated the girl who’d won the race. She loved the color of sky, like bone, and the chlorine burn in her eyes. Her face didn’t show anything. She rode home in the back of the station wagon, arms and legs goose-pimpled, lips blue. She hung that ribbon up out of defiance. I will not care. I am not this ribbon. He saw everything with precision: her blue lips, bloodshot eyes, her cold and healthy heart. He was making it all up. He didn’t know about the ribbon. He didn’t know