A Stranger in This World

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Authors: Kevin Canty
and took the last beer and opened it. She drank it like a drowning man, half at once. Then sat down at the table and started chopping out a line of something, crank I guessed, onto my one clean dinner plate. A little silver hunting knife with lumps of turquoise in the handle was the weapon. She chopped it fine and then took a hit in each side of her nose off the sharp point of the blade. Tears welled up in her eyes as she shook her head. “Jesus, that’s good,” she said. “A little eye-opener. Want some?”
    “No, thanks.”
    “Suit yourself,” she said, dipping the point of the blade into the crank again and lining it up her nose. I watched herlike a hungry dog watching a person eat, following the point of the knife with my eyes. I’m not that kind of person anymore, I told myself. I’m done with that.
    Eyes still shut, making a face from the pain of the hit, she said, “I need some money, Parker. I’m sort of in trouble.”
    Fuck you, I thought, and then I said it: “Fuck you.” Back in town for thirty seconds and already we were playing by her rules and my own life had shrunk to nothing. “You come around here,” I said, trying to find the words. “I haven’t even seen you for a year and a half …”
    She just looked at me calm and straight-faced until the words dried up completely. “I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t need your help,” she said. “You know that.”
    “So what?”
    “I’m just asking for mine,” she said.
    “What do you mean?” I asked her. “Are you talking about the house?” She looked up, and it was the house, and I started to laugh.
    “I’m not kidding you,” Dorothy said. “I was your wife for all the time we were making payments on that place. I’m entitled to something.”
    “You never put a nickel into that house,” I said, still laughing. “I mean, don’t bullshit me. But it don’t matter anyway.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “That money’s gone, darling. That money was gone a year ago.”
    She was all business now, a skinny mean-faced woman, just the way I always liked her. She asked me, “Where exactly did the money go?”
    “I don’t know, darling,” I said, and there was a kind ofglory in it. This was not a regular mistake but a big one, a disaster, and I felt a kind of roller-coaster excitement at the memory. Nothing that was good for you. I said, “Most of it I can’t remember.”
    “That was thirty-two thousand dollars,” Dorothy said.
    “Not after the lawyers got their cut—the lawyers, and then the neighborhood association that started the lawsuit got a percentage. And then a big chunk of the rest went into that idiot Ford pickup. You know I wrecked it.”
    She shook her head.
    “Put it around somebody’s mailbox out by Ripton. I didn’t total it but pretty close.”
    “You didn’t have insurance on it?”
    “They canceled me out a couple of days before. I guess I didn’t pay the bill. I don’t know. I never found the letter. But then when the bank took the pickup back, I had to pay the difference. That and the Visa bill we ran up, and after that I don’t know. I mean, it went somewhere, I guess. It’s gone.”
    “Thirty-two thousand dollars,” she said again, and thought about it for a minute. “Jesus, Parker, you spent that money like it was a dime.”
    I bobbed my head, like she had just paid me a compliment, and it felt like that: this was the one thing I’d done, the thing they couldn’t take away from me. This was the only time I’d ever be bigger than life.
    “That was it,” I said. “The house, the truck, I quit showing up for work over at the carbon black plant and they canned my ass over there. Did you hear about the guy who played the country record backwards?”
    Dorothy shook her head.
    “He got his job back, he got his dog back, he got his wife back …” I looked down and noticed that Dorothy’s hands were trembling. She was holding one of her hands just off the tabletop and watching it shake, like

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