Free The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters by Timothy Schaffert Page B

breath on her neck. “I went to the river,” Mabel said. “I heard Dad whistling. I really did.”
    “I’m too tired to play,” Lily said. “Go to sleep.” Though it was much too hot to be lying so close, Mabel drifted off at Lily’s command, the newspaper clipping still crumpled in her fist.

6.
    AT CARUSO’S STEAK-AND-SPAGHETTI house on the square in Bonnevilla, Jordan strummed a guitar as part of a guitar trio that trolled about the tables for tips and song requests. Lily waitressed and ran the cigar counter, selling the Palmas and the Pencils and the Churchill Sweets.
    A long bench sat along one wall of the lobby of the steak-house, and the same handful of men gathered there nightly. They spent hours tossing cards into an overturned hat in some lazy game. As they talked, smoke lifted from their lips with every word or laugh or wheeze, and the minutes they burned from the ends of their lives clouded the lobby.
    Lily closed up the cigar counter and slapped her hands toward the old men on the bench, like shooing pigeons. When she turned her back on them, she felt somebody’s bony fingers brush across her ass, and a shudder of death workedthrough her. It outraged her that even one of them thought they could touch her with their rotten-corpse hands, and “Which one of you ratty fucking dogs . . .” was what she wanted to say, but her boss still sat at his corner desk counting his day’s dollars, smoking a long, fat Excalibur.
    Lily locked up the glass humidors on the counter and heard the clink and churn of the toy vending machine by the front door. “Anything good?” Lily asked Jordan. He examined the small plastic globe that fell from the chute and took from it a sheet of lick-on tattoos. He placed a picture of a hula girl on his tongue then lifted the sleeve of Lily’s dress and pressed the wet paper against the skin of her upper arm.
    Lily held her sleeve up and blew on the tattoo to dry it; she winked at Jordan, charmed by his gift of the hula girl. She gave Jordan a lot of grief a lot of the time, but he was irresistible, mostly, like his attraction to old comics bought from used bookstores. Though he read the Daredevil, and Ghost Rider, and Silver Surfer, it was his taste for Hot Stuff, and Baby Huey, and Little Lotta that attracted Lily. She had thought it adorable one day when she’d gone in for a pedicure and found Jordan sitting at his manicurist’s table sipping from a cup of Thera-Flu tea and reading Spooky, the Tuff Little Ghost.
    “A guy who was just in here said there’s an abandoned house burning to the ground in the country,” Jordan said. “Everybody’s driving out to watch it.”
    Lily followed Jordan out the alley door. Jordan looked handsome and reckless to Lily, his guitar strapped to his back,a few crazy notes plinking from the strings with his walking. The double breast of Jordan’s blue uniform was unbuttoned, and he held a bottle of something to his thin, naked chest. The uniform was from an old high school band, complete with braided epaulets; the restaurant owner had bought it at the hospital thrift.
    When they got in the Packard, Jordan held out the bottle, a raspberry-flavored schnapps. “Want a sip?”
    “Ick,” Lily said. “You’re a mess with all your sweet stuff. Rot your teeth and your gut.” When Lily first met Jordan, she thought him a cute ruin.
    “You’ve got some wrong ideas about me,” Jordan said.
    A portable tape deck sat on the floor of the Packard, and Lily turned it on. When she heard Chrissie Hynde singing, she took the tape from the deck and saw her father’s handwriting across the white label of the cassette. The tape was one of many Lily’s father had left behind. Lily thought it was sweet that Jordan would have this with him, would play something like “Brass in Pocket” even when alone.
    Lily’s father had some musical talent, she remembered; he could play a song on the piano, just having heard it once. Often, when Lily heard a new song,