Free Losing Graceland by Micah Nathan Page B

same, no change Jehovah knows
.
    “How old was she?” the old man asked, and he went back to singing. “
I’ll never forget the night you told me—
”
    “Seventeen.”
    The old man whistled. “Man, those young ones are like kittens. Always looking for something new to play with. Trick is you have to be the one to walk away first. Kittens don’t chase string that lies on the floor. They chase the string that pulls away.”
    “So I shouldn’t call her anymore?”
    “Hell, no. Sobbing won’t make a seventeen-year-old girl take you back.”
    “Well, I wasn’t going to
sob—
”
    “Young girls live in mythology.” The old man brushed crumbs off his shirt. “Their music, their movies, their relationships. Heartbreak makes them feel grown-up. Nothing a young girl wants more than to feel grown-up, and she’ll lay waste to anyone for the taste of a broken heart.”

7.
    hree women sat in a corner booth in the Coyote Café roadside bar with a sign above the kitchen door that read
If You Send Anything Back We’ll Spit in It Again
. The room was small and noisy, rough pine walls covered in custom license plates with various rock star names (Hendrix, Jagger, Lennon), and framed photos of Marilyn Monroe, Babe Ruth, and Joe Namath. Beer posters showed busty cartoon beer maids dripping froth from giant mugs. A chandelier hung in the middle of the dance floor, a ten-armed gold ball with colored bulbs at the end of each arm. The jukebox was lit with strobing LED.
    The three women wore khaki shorts and pastel tanks, tanned legs shiny with lotion. They were all barefoot, toenails painted in shades of pink, sandals in a pile under the table. Fiona—freckles, long black hair, and a toothy grin—stared at her friend.
    “So what would you do if a cute guy walked into this restaurant,” Fiona said, “and gave you that look?”
    Alex pushed her blond hair behind her ears. A thin scar ran across her upper lip. “What look?”
    “
That
look,” Fiona said. “You know the look I’m talking about.”
    “I wouldn’t do anything.”
    “You wouldn’t give him a look back.”
    “Absolutely not.”
    Fiona slid her feet off Alex’s booth cushion and let them slap onto the plank floor.
    “Oh, that’s such bullshit.” Fiona frowned at Heather sitting next to her. “Alex used to be an honest girl. I don’t know what happened.”
    Heather sipped her Coke. Fiona put her feet back up.
    “Would you call Derek if he called you?” Fiona asked.
    Alex paused. “Yes.”
    “And what would you say to him.”
    “Depends on what he’d say to me.”
    “What if he apologized?”
    “Then I’d take him back.”
    “She’s still in love,” Heather said, and she wrinkled her nose at the Coke fizz. “Leave her alone.”
    “I say she’s not in love,” Fiona said. “I say she doesn’t know what love is.”
    Alex raised an eyebrow. “And you do?”
    “I never said that. But I know what love isn’t. Love isn’t a boyfriend who fucks someone else while his girlfriend is at the hospital taking care of her mother.”
    “
Ouch,
” Heather said.
    Alex looked away. “It was a difficult time for everyone.”
    “Nuh-uh.” Fiona waved her index finger. “Derek doesn’t get that free pass. You have to earn that free pass, and Derek didn’t.”
    “He came by, every day.”
    “Until he met
her
. And then he gave you excuses.”
    Alex set her drink down and stared hard at Fiona. “It was a difficult time for everyone.”
    Fiona leaned back, arm draped over the back of their booth. “Not for Derek it wasn’t, and that’s all I’m going to say.”
    They walked in, the old man in front and Ben behind. Ben immediately saw the girls laughing in their booth and wondered if he’d ever become the kind of man who approaches three laughing women. They took a table by the dessert cooler. Ben pushed the menu away because he was sick of eating. Every few hours they’d stopped somewhere for food. The old man always left hundred-dollar