Free All Saints by K.D. Miller

furiously at the wet on your cheeks, the slick on your lip. Then flush the pieces. Press the lever with ceremony. Snap to swaying, drunken attention. Salute. Goodbye. Goodbye who?
    â€œI was never going to see Liz again. I swear, Babe. And I thought she understood that. I thought she knew it was a one-shot deal. Just for old time’s sake. But she must have got Rick to tell her where we were living. Wouldn’t surprise me if Rick engineered this whole thing.”
    Barney. Yes. That’s the name. That’s who. Goodbye, Barney. See you soon.
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    The smallest place they ever had was the bedroom they occupied for two days and three nights on the train going east. It had a bathroom the size of a phone booth with a sink no bigger than a soup bowl. When Emily filled the sink to wash her hair, the water sloshed back and forth with the rocking of the train, slapping her face and invading her nose.
    There was a table the size of a chessboard that folded down under the window. While Dave passed the time traveling through the cars talking to people, Emily sat at the table looking out the window and writing in a lurching scrawl in her journal. Every time the train pulled into a station, she rushed out and bought postcards to send to her parents from Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg.
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    She had insisted they visit Dave’s parents once before they left. “You can’t just disappear. You have to let them know that you’re going.” And that I exist.
    His parents lived in a robin’s-egg-blue bungalow in Burnaby. They were little and English and old. Dave’s mother began to cry as soon as she saw him, her eyes big and frightened, as if her son was back from the dead. His father, bent and balding above a curiously mask-like face, looked at him and growled, “Been a while.”
    The living room, which Dave’s mother called the sitting room, was flocked with doilies and peopled with knick-knacks. “It keeps me busy, the dusting,” she whispered from behind a Kleenex when Emily looked around and said something polite.
    Emily could see that Dave’s father was one of those men who is never at home in his own house, who is forever being reminded to wipe his feet and knock his ash and use his handkerchief and not leave fingermarks. She wondered if he had a shed or something out back where he could go to fart and swear and spit. While Dave’s mother sniffled and Emily chattered absurdly about the upcoming trip and their plans, he sat silent, sliding hooded eyes now and then toward his son, then quickly sliding them back. Emily had the sudden strange notion that she was seeing Garth Marples. She knew that whenever she worked on her story after that, she would imagine the Garth Marples character looking exactly like Dave’s father.
    Dave said almost nothing during the two-hour visit he had agreed to. He sat hunched, in unconscious imitation of his father, checking his watch and sliding his eyes now and then toward Emily, his expression unreadable. (“I don’t want to talk about it,” was all he would say on the way home. And so they never did. It was a trade-off. Emily had gotten her introduction. In return, she never asked him to go back there again.)
    â€œI could show you his room,” Dave’s mother whispered, tapping Emily’s forearm with a damp hand. “Where he used to sleep.” They went and stood together in the doorway of the most feminine room Emily had ever seen—flowered chintz wallpaper, billowing ruffled curtains, a rose-patterned sofa bed choked with those little shaped cushions that men pull out from behind themselves and throw on the floor.
    â€œI did it over. It’s the guest room now. I tried to keep it—you know—just the way. For the longest time. In case. But then—”
    A bark sounded from the living room, followed by a growl. Then another bark. “Oh no,” Dave’s mother whimpered. “Oh no no