Free Love Saves the Day by Gwen Cooper Page A

ago now—five weeks. When I think about that, it doesn’t make me miss being touched by a human. It just makes me miss Sarah all the more.
    Even though, with all the snow, it doesn’t feel like springtime, Josh and Laura are having his family over to the apartment tonight for a springtime holiday called Pass Over. Sarah and Anise used totalk sometimes about the casual “potluck” holidays Sarah would have in her Lower East Side apartment when Laura was young. Neighbors and friends and people who worked in Sarah’s store would come in and out all day whenever they felt like it, bringing food with them and eating foods the other humans had brought while Sarah played music on her DJ table. Christmas was one of only two days in the whole year when her store was closed. The other was Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving wasn’t so bad, Sarah said, but there would always be at least one person who would call her at home on Christmas Day, begging her to open the store just long enough to sell him one last black disk he needed to give some other human as a gift. When you’re raising a daughter alone, according to Sarah, you have to get your money when you can. So she would run over to her store long enough to sell that one black disk to that one human, and then it was good there were so many people in her apartment to keep an eye on Laura while Sarah was gone.
    I don’t know how Upper West Side humans celebrate holidays, but it doesn’t seem like there’s anything “casual” about Josh’s family coming over. It’s Monday morning now, and Laura spent all Sunday attacking our apartment like she was mad at it. She’s always cleaning things whenever she has a few extra minutes, but yesterday she
cleaned
everything from the floors to the ceiling until every speck of dirt was gone and the apartment smelled unbearable from cleansers. She even cleaned under the bed in her and Josh’s room. Josh laughed when he saw her doing this and told her that his mother wasn’t going to inspect under their bed. But Laura said it was the first time his parents were coming over for dinner since they’d gotten married, and she wanted everything to be “immaculate.”
    While Laura was busy cleaning, Josh went out to buy special foods to serve to his family. Everything went into the refrigerator when he got home, and now whenever Laura or Josh opens it, the smell of wonderful meats and other things I’ve never tasted before drifts all the way upstairs. I hope Laura remembers to be generous when she arranges my special Prudence-plate of food at dinnertime tonight.
    I don’t know who exactly in Josh’s family is coming over, but the one person I know
won’t
be coming is the man who used to be married to Josh’s sister. That’s because yesterday I heard Josh say, “At least I don’t have to look at that Dead Beat at holiday dinners anymore.”
    I’m not sure what a “Dead Beat” is. Anise used to say that Laura’s father was also a Dead Beat. But Sarah always used the word
beat
in a positive way when she was describing the music she loved. Anise also said that Laura’s father was a talentless good-for-nothing. He tried being in a band, and then he tried being an actor, and he was even a photographer for a little while, but he never stuck with anything long enough to become good at it, although he took that picture of Sarah that Josh brought to live with us here, and I see Laura looking at it sometimes when Josh isn’t in the room with her.
    I know what
dead
means (it’s what happens to mice, for example, when cats catch them), but I also know how unusual it is for humans to say anything bad about dead people, because they can’t help being dead. So maybe being a Dead Beat means a human who makes really awful music and then forces everybody to listen to it until they
wish
they were dead. That doesn’t seem exactly right, though. I almost wish the Dead Beat
was
coming over tonight, so I could see what one looks like.
    The thump of