Free A Stranger in This World by Kevin Canty

lifted the corner of her bun and looked in and then looked at her brother. “You are a disgusting human being,” she said. “I wash my hands of you.”
    “All right, enough,” Margaret said. “Sit up and eat, sit up!” And when the kids were eating their hamburgers again, she turned to me, serious again. “No more kids,” she said quietly, for adults to hear. “I’ve got two kids and my husband was a kid and it just wears me out, OK? Do you know what I mean?”
    “Yeah I do.”
    “I don’t mind a little smart-ass, not from you,” she said, blinking at me through her glasses. “I mean, you’ve got to be good for something.”
    “Well thanks, I guess.”
    “I don’t know if it was a compliment or not,” she said. “Eat your hamburger.” And she wasn’t looking at me then and I don’t know what she meant or how she meant it, but I felt this warmth all around my body, like I was inside of something, some kind of bubble or cloud with me and Margaret and the kids inside it, and I liked that feeling. Like it wasn’t me that was sitting there but some other man who was lucky about these things, lucky about love and about people.
    And then we were gone out of there and Margaret was dropping me off at my room at the Sacajawea Apartments andI saw the turquoise Thunderbird from down the block. It was Dorothy’s car, my wife. She had that car since high school, a ’66, with a white interior and a white vinyl top, a beautiful thing. I noticed that she had Arizona plates on it now, with the little cactus in the middle. I could see the back of her blond head.
    “You want to come out to the swap meet tomorrow?” Margaret asked. “I’ll pick you up if you want.”
    “I’ll call you,” I said. Suddenly I was nervous to get rid of her, not for her, just so I could think clearly. I was trying to remember how long it had been since I saw Dorothy. Over a year anyway. Two years? Suddenly I was bookkeeping again.
    Margaret said, “Well, I can’t get hold of you, so call me if you want to go.”
    She leaned across the front seat and kissed me, right in front of the kids, and we both said good-bye, good-bye, while I got out of the car. I couldn’t even think about them. I watched her little Subaru roll down the street and around the corner, but really I was waiting for the door of the Thunderbird to open. Which it did.
    One of the things about Dorothy was that whoever made up these Western girl clothes had her in mind exactly. She had on a fringe jacket and spray-on jeans tucked into her boots and she was smoking a cigarette. She was older, though, which was a surprise. There were dark circles under her eyes and wrinkles around her mouth, and you could really tell it by her hands. I saw this with a kind of panic—this was never supposed to happen—as she walked up to me slowly with a grin on her face, not too nice.
    “Who’s the squaw?” she said.
    This was her style, ice water in the face. I stood thereblinking for a minute, wondering whether to slap her, and then I remembered: if I slapped her, I lost. Life with Dorothy was one long game of cool.
    She said, “I never pictured you as a family man, exactly.”
    “I just met the woman,” I said, although I’d known Margaret for three months then.
    “That isn’t what it looked like,” Dorothy said. “It looked like Mom and Dad on the way to work. Can I come in?”
    She didn’t wait for an answer but went into the hallway and waited for me to show her which door was mine. And then it was like she never left.
    “Jesus, Parker,” she said, looking around the little room: one bed, one chair, a TV, a desk with my books from the Vo-Tech on it. “Are you sure this is depressing enough? Is that a bloodstain?”
    She pointed to a blotch on the wall that I’d wondered about myself. But I said, “No, it’s just rust or something.”
    “Well, it looks like blood to me. Have you got a beer?”
    She didn’t wait but opened up the little dormitory refrigerator