Free Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing by Lydia Peelle

me,” she says and winks, then swipes at the counter with a rag and turns to the crackling fryer. “Bob takes over at four.”
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    When I get down to my table, Dub’s already in his tent across the way, refolding and restacking T-shirts. The tent is packed with them, most XL or larger, stiff with silk-screened designs: women in Confederate flag thongs leaning across the hoodsof Ford and Chevy trucks, bloody-fanged pit bulls in studded collars, Uncle Sam with his middle finger extended above an American flag and the message THESE COLORS DON’T RUN . A ’Nam buddy left him a warehouse full in his will. Dub’s been on the road two years now, says he’ll quit when he sells them all. But I don’t know. There’s a point of no return, I’m beginning to think, and Dub may have passed it several thousand miles back.
    I’ve been traveling since spring. Already the highway has become the one true thing, towns only stopovers, names on signs. Certain smells, clouds, movements of trees will once in a while feel exactly like home. Shadows will fall on the road in such a familiar way that I get disoriented and think I’m back in Virginia, headed down to the farm, where everything is still as it once was, and a certain sort of peace will come over me. Then the light shifts and it all shatters.
    I pull out my boxes, roll up my tarp, and set up my table: blue glass medicine jars, tin toys, old coins, moldy magazines and tools. Wherever I go, I’m always knocking on farmhouse doors, offering to clean out old couples’ sheds and barns. All I need is some bleach and a wire brush, and people will pay fifty bucks for an old milk pail, a Red Flyer with a broken axle. ANTIQUES , my sign says. Dub is always pointing it out to people, laughing. “Antiques? He sells junk. I sell trash.” Business is generally slow. I’m lucky enough to get Dub’s runoff, wives who wander over while their husbands are clawing through piles of T-shirts, debating if the woman astride the John Deere tractor is better in blonde or brunette.
    I hear Dub shout my name and look up, annoyed. What now? “Looky here!” he’s saying. He’s standing in the door of his tent, waving me over. In his hand I see something hanging from a chain, glinting. When I get over there he holds it out against his palm for me to see: a girl’s necklace, a tiny gold heart, nearly swallowed up in his beefy hand.
    â€œWhere’d you get it?” I say, suspicious.
    He taps the side of his nose. “Found it on my way over here. Sniffed it out.” His eyes are glassy from the heat, his forehead glistening. He’s got half a pound of shrapnel in his left calf and thigh. Walking, standing, everything takes its toll. He pulls out a folding chair and sits down heavily, grunting. “Hell,” he says, grinning like a dog. “I think it’s worth something, too.” He grabs my hand and pours the chain into it. “Go on, man. Take it. Sell it.”
    I look down at the little heart. Why not? Everything else on my table is borrowed, begged, stolen from the dead. When I go back and lay it down among the old campaign buttons and souvenir pen knives, it might as well be a relic of someone long gone from this world.
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    Six months ago, my twin brother Clay’s comic books were the first things I sold. Our house and pastures went to a development company after two days on the market, every penny paying for my mother’s new apartment in the center with round-the-clock care. Her mind, by then, was as twisted and looped as a tattered curtain in a dark window. It was up tome to clear out the house. Clay’s room, fifteen years after his death, was exactly as he’d left it, untouched for nearly as many years as he’d been alive. Opening his door stirred up the dust that had settled in his absence, made it gleaming, glaring, new again. It was another day before I could bring