Free Ice Shear by M. P. Cooley Page A

to annoy me—he did just fine by existing.
    â€œLook,” I said, “is there something you needed? I’m ready to drop.” I reached my car and yanked at the door, which was glazed over.
    â€œHere, let me,” he said. At his third tug the ice cracked, and at the fifth the door came open. Without touching him, I slid around him and turned on the ignition, jacking up the heat after the engine had run a few seconds. I reached under the seat and pulled out both my ice scrapers. “You know how to use this, southern boy?”
    â€œNever heard about my grand New Year’s of 2002 on the Great Lakes?” Hale scraped ice off my back window. “Me and Dushawne Wilkes, the two new guys, out on Lake Superior hunting terrorists who might be swimming across to bomb Detroit.”
    â€œWas that before or after you stopped talking to us?” I punctuated this with a broad sweep, and ice slithered past the elastic at my wrists.
    Hale stopped scraping. “Look now, June, I’m sorry about that. And I’m more sorry than I can say about Kevin. Him being gone, it doesn’t seem real.”
    â€œMaybe if you responded to a single one of his e-mails you would’ve known the illness, the cancer, was serious.” As I moved around the car, I banged my shin on the bumper.
    â€œShit,” I said, rubbing my leg.
    Hale walked toward me, holding his hand in a defensive position as if he thought I might launch myself at him and tear his eyes out, which was a distinct possibility. “I know,” he said, “how ugly my behavior with you, with Kevin—”
    He stopped speaking as a woman’s voice floated across the parking lot.
    Last Christmas Eve you hung mistletoe
    Right beside the door.
    You kissed me under it every night
    And said, “Please, baby, more.”
    Barbara Merry Christmas came toward us, her feet unsteady. No one had ever coaxed her last name out of her, so we all called her by the sixties girl-group Christmas carol she sang all year round. Sometimes she belted the song and sometimes barely whispered it, and I could tell how much heroin she had taken based on the strength of her voice.
    And when Christmas passed you kept it hangin’,
    Kept claiming all my kisses.
    By Valentine’s you found another girl
    And by Easter she was missus.
    Today was one of Barbara’s good days. Her voice was full, and you could make out the former fun girl underneath the wreckage. She was wearing her lamb’s wool jacket and a fox stole around her neck, more holes than fur at this point. Her eyes were lined up to her eyebrows like Cleopatra, and she’d teased the hair on her left side into a bouffant style held in place with a rhinestone barrette. Barbara lived in a basement apartment over on Congress Street, which probably cost her, at most, two hundred a month. Her landlord said she always paid her rent in full and in cash. Barbara’s name appeared on the pawnshop lists every so often, selling an engraved cigarette case or a pair of earrings. She never begged for money, but rather performed . My dad had tried to get Barbara into Mercy House several times in the seventies and eighties, and I’d enrolled her in a sober-living environment, but her addiction and the demons in her unruly brain always drove her back to the drugs.
    Hale seemed torn between helping her and keeping his distance from the obviously crazy woman. “Can we help you, ma’am?”
    Barbara didn’t respond to his question—she never did—but launched into the next stanza of her song. Her hips did a little shake that was more of a wobble than a shimmy, and she raised her arm over her head and brought it down into a snap.
    Christmas Eve’s come round again,
    The mistletoe’s up still.
    I’ve got my tree, my popcorn strings,
    But I don’t have my angel.
    Thank God for Barbara, I thought, and gave her a few dollars just for helping me escape. Barbara