Free If a Stranger Approaches You: Stories by Laura Kasischke Page B

dustbin and in the ashes and beneath the piles of gray rags that had been left to rot in the kitchen cupboards since our mother had started her new job and we ate nothing but bread and peanut butter.
    We couldn’t find it.
    “Dad, God, where did you have it last?”
    He shrugged. He wiped his eyes. He said, “I’m so sorry, girls. That’s just how I am. You know your old dad. His keys. His glasses.”
    “But this isn’t keys, Dad. This isn’t glasses. This is the only proof of your existence we have .”
    And then they sent our mother to the War, where she was killed in an ambush within a few hours of stepping onto foreign soil. Agroup of terrorist-mothers had laid in wait at a train station. We were heartbroken, but at least we knew we weren’t alone. We saw the other children’s mothers also lain out in a row on what looked like a filthy floor, dirty sheets over their faces, their shoes looking as new as our mother’s had the day before she left for the War.
    Since we had no proof of a father, we received our Orphan Benefit packages every third Saturday in a box. Tissues. Rice. Bottled water.
    Our father lost his sense of humor about his situation soon after that. The rags spilled out of the cupboards, onto the floor. We didn’t even know where they were coming from, the rags. They looked like used bandages—not bloody, just sooty. They were dingy and good for nothing except covering up our father, who was completely camouflaged there on the gray couch under the gray rags.
    Soon, we received our notices to report to the Division in which our mother had worked before she was drafted. In a way, it was a relief, getting out of there during the day. Even when the boss was in a bad mood she’d let us joke around with each other. And there were a lot of jokes. So many women standing around a conveyor belt all day—you can imagine.
    Then, after a few years, they declared amnesty for all the fathers who’d lost their passports. The President said she couldn’t think of any reason to go on punishing such long-forgotten mishaps. Fathers were absentminded. It was time we just admitted it, got on with our lives.
    But we didn’t tell our father about the amnesty. What difference would it have made? It might have made him actually feel worse. So we let him go on thinking he was in danger. Sometimes one of us would pretend to knock officially on the door so the other could pretend to hurry him into hiding. It got harder and harder to get him off the couch and then back out from under the bed, so we didn’t do it very often. Just often enough. Things went on quite well like this for quite a long time.
    Surely, we thought, they wouldn’t send us both to the War, being that we were orphans, as far as they knew—but, why wouldn’t they, of course?

Somebody’s Mistress, Somebody’s Wife
     
    O ften she unplugged the answering machine and let the phone ring sixteen, seventeen, times before she answered it. It was always him. He was the only one who would let the phone ring that long. He was the only one who called her in the morning while she was getting ready for work.
    “ Babe, ” he’d say, as if he were out of breath, but not as if she’d surprised him by answering.
    “What do you want?” she’d ask.
    To this, he’d say nothing. She pictured him in his little white sports car with the roof down, his silver hair gleaming in the sunlight, his red tie lapping the wind over his shoulder, his cell phone held to an ear, maybe one elbow resting on the car door, arm extended, driving with his knee as he sometimes liked to do.
    Even in the winter she pictured this, although he lived even farther north than she did, and the winter was a bad one.
    “Don’t call me again, Conrad,” she’d say. But then she’d hold the phone to her ear a long time, listening to him breathe, waiting for him to say something he never got around to saying.
    When Karen was a child she’d been told a cautionary urban legend by her