Free Solemn by Kalisha Buckhanon

Singer’s grounds and she was not barefoot with heels hanging from her hands. She was near home. She knew her place.
    There car trouble? Pearletta wondered. She slowed down with the sweaty plastic bag of beer pinching into her wrist. She sped up, wished to offer her help if there was any to offer. To be useful, preoccupied and snatched into sorts.
    But as she got closer to the one opening of Singer’s, the husband’s and wife’s smiles caricatured against leafy shadows upon their windshield. Pearletta stood still. Then, the wife nodded at Pearletta. To pass. The back of the teenage boy’s head beed and bopped to the side. Rap music in the waxed Malibu. The little girl gripped the half-down window on her side, without moving her head, watching Pearletta walk through the gate. The husband and wife waved. The girl stayed propped, unmoving when the sedan’s front wheel sank into a pothole they all usually remembered to drive around. Since the family hadn’t asked her for a ride, Pearletta didn’t know what to do with their courtesy. She was a grown woman. She knew there were questions in the air and connections she had made, which she accepted. He didn’t look like a man who beat his wife or kids. They always looked up to him when they talked. The family drove away. She could have run into the pond and whisped down under the connection of lily pads, without them even swimming after her, like nobody swam after her baby. Then, for the first time but not the last, Pearletta splashed warm beer on an empty stomach before she got home.
    She rejected the sisters from church who claimed they were praying for her but wound up speaking in tongues about hobbled parents finally succumbed. The social worker misplaced her with women whose teenage babies were gunned down in spaces between the tin-roofed houses. It wasn’t that her relatives did not know or care. They just hadn’t known the child. They barely knew her. Her name once switched from Pearletta to “On that stuff.” She and her child were as good as apparitions to her sparse schoolgirl friends she neglected to invite to the civil ceremony, her parents who stopped mentioning her, her nephew who forgot her voice, her sister who couldn’t stand the man. She had been on her own with her household and was on her own, now, without it.
    Proximity to the only phone cable line within miles had been one reason Gilroy sold her on her life savings required to pay off his trailer and rent the plot. Had it not been for Gilroy and his popularity, which initially intrigued her but soon subordinated her, the clunky beige phone at the head of their bed would have remained dormant. Now that all the calls of concern and necessities ceased, it barely rang. Pearletta found a purpose for it, however. She would coordinate her new life. After a while, cops were the only folks she talked to. No one else was obligated to hear.
    â€œWell, I could use some help packing up and moving out the trailer,” she told Bolden. He took the call for her latest “emergency.” It was her fourth in a week. The first two times, she thought a masked man was in her trailer past the panel over the bedroom. The third time she wanted to get information about her “case”: the State Attorney’s name, the judge’s visiting hours, whereabouts of a death certificate.
    â€œMrs. Hassle—”
    â€œPearletta. I’ll be soon divorced.”
    â€œYes, um, Pearletta.” Pearletta heard papers shuffle back and forth. “Have you talked to any of your friends and family about helping you relocate?”
    â€œI can’t find too many numbers. I used to know them by heart, but … well, lot on my mind these days. My address book is gone … think somewhere in a cabinet. There’s the guest registry … I don’t think the funeral home ever gave it to me tell you the truth.”
    â€œStart with getting the