Free South of Elfrida by Holley Rubinsky Page B

into their mouths, mariachi music in the background from the Mexican restaurant in another lane. The festival draws huge crowds and takes place in a village two thousand miles south of the village where Lee saved Cuthbert and where Gregory, she believes, despite what others say, killed himself.
    â€œWhat happened to Irma?” Sam wants to know. He has big brown eyes and unruly hair.
    â€œWhat are you saying?” Lee thinks about the astonishment on Gregory’s face the day that Cuthbert wobbled to his feet and stayed there. Gregory had been diligent in feeding Cuthbert mash and water with a baby spoon and eyedropper, yet repeatedly he told Lee she was wasting her time. The day Cuthbert stood up, Gregory smelled of quinine and bergamot and he’d been wearing the same shirt for three days; he hadn’t won the contract he expected, after all. And soon after that, as though (she’d thought at the time) the blow to his career was the last straw, he took a noticeable number of pills, a combination of Aspirin, Tylenol, and maybe a dozen Benadryl, the drugs that she’d assumed killed him. The autopsy uncovered the fact that he had kidney cancer, advanced and undiagnosed. His death wasn’t ruled a suicide. He would have been in great pain. Why hadn’t he told her? Why had she been so oblivious?
    The trumpet in the mariachi band blares its solo.
    â€œYou said Irma escaped.”
    â€œOh, Irma.” Gregory’s death remains sad and confusing; Lee just can’t figure why she didn’t have some wifely insight that he was so ill. “Irma escaped from that bear twice,” she says. Irma was such a survivor that when the bear came again, the chicken ran to the house and threw herself against the sliding glass door, just as the ambulance was on its way for Gregory. Lee, distracted when she spotted Irma frantic against the glass, had slid the door open to let her in and then forgot about her. Irma pooped all over the living room before hunkering down beside a basket of straw flowers. Only a serene clucking led Lee to her the next day, after Gregory was pronounced dead and the whole spinning house came to a stop.
    â€œChrist, Irma was saved. Why not Gregory?” Had she noticed anything wrong, anything that stood out? No, she had not.
    â€œWe don’t get choices,” Sam says. “What about Cuthbert?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWhat about Cuthbert when the bear came back?”
    â€œOh, he ran into the bush and came out when I called him. He knew me. He seemed so grateful to see me, it made me cry.” Cuthbert had followed Lee back to the chicken coop, repaired by a neighbour. Irma was already inside, so Cuthbert was happy. “So there they are, Cuthbert and Irma, and here I am, Lee alone.”
    Shirley steps down from the truck, mop in hand. It’s not that she likes to do everything related to sanitation and hygiene, but she does it because Sam is so bad at it. “It was fate,” she says to Lee. She takes the band out of her ponytail and shakes her hair.
    Shirley won’t use the word death or dying or dead , so Lee says, “What was fate?”
    â€œThat Gregory moved on.” She taps her toe against the front tire of Lee’s new Schwinn cruiser that leans against the trunk of a mesquite tree.
    â€œYeah, moved on,” Lee says. She likes them because they don’t mind listening to her theories about what happened to Gregory. They don’t think she should have “moved on” from her loss. She stands, stretches her back. “See you later.”
    She dingles the bell on the handlebar and rides away past the food stalls—the Indian fry bread and taco trucks, the pizza stand with red-and-white striped umbrellas out front, the corndog and cotton candy trucks—and turns onto the lane where she rents the apartment above a fine arts gallery. Her landlord, Derek, and his partner play opera in the mornings while they dust