Free I Like You Just Fine When You're Not Around by Ann Garvin

attached to the refrigerator. Her mother’s unlined, smiling face.
    “You girls will thank me when you’re eating with the president of the United States of America and he talks about the
proliferation
of wealth or some such thing. You will be one of the few at the table who will know what he is talking about. You’ll not only know what he is talking about, but you’ll also know which fork to use. He will comment on what remarkable young people you are. I hope I’m alive to receive your thank-you letters.”
    Tig turned her head. A note in Pete’s handwriting still hung on the back of the door:
    Hallie. You live here. Do not go outside. The address is 612 Buena Vista Way.
    Tig buried her face in Thatcher’s hair. The dog’s soft ham-slice of a tongue brushed Tig’s chin.
    “I hope you know that you must live and proliferate good health way beyond your doggie years. You know, if I ever am crazy enough to get married, you have to be my maid of honor. Wendy will just have to deal with it.” Tig sighed. “Speaking of Wendy, did my negligent sister call yet?”
    Thatcher yawned her huge, exhausted, you’re-keeping-me-awake-with-this-silly-talk yawn.
    Tig looked at her phone and considered whom to call about the radio offer, then went to sleep.
    She woke in the night, turned to spoon Thatcher, and tried to recapture a dream, the tail of which sifted through her mind and sailed out of her grasp. Instead, Tig thought of her mother. Her memory played back, always clearer just on the edges of sleep. She recalled herself as a little girl in her mother’s wedding gown. She biked everywhere, her lean tanned legs pumping the pedals of her blue Schwinn two-speed, a long chestnut braid sailing like the tail of a kite straight out behind her, the knot of a shimmery yellow ribbon hanging on for dear life. She could almost feel the ivory satin of the dress flap like the incredible wings of an albino bat, just shy of the spokes and gears of the bicycle. Her bottom narrowly missed the boy-bar on every quick down stroke and jerky upswing.
    She would push forward over the handlebars, reaching out to meet the wind, racing the boxelder bugs, dandelion wisps, and voices from last night. She hated when her mother and sister fought; hated the clenched teeth, scrambled faces, hissing snake-like sentences, and slamming doors.
    Tig would hitch up the shoulder of the buttery gown of her mother’s wedding dress and grab the greasy hem, tattered by rough patches in the road. She shoved it into the waistband of her red gym shorts. She had been a prototypical eight-year-old girl, dress-up gowns mixed with skinned knees and scabs still healing on the palms of her hands. She loved how nimble she felt when she jumped off and grabbed the dress without tripping and landing in the hedges. She skidded into Mrs. Shaft’s driveway, shaving down the toe of her tennis shoe and slicing a marigold to the quick as she made the turnaround. She was a genius at dodging obstacles and keeping track of her extremities without insult; something her sister, even at her advanced age of thirteen, couldn’t quite master.
    She’d walk her bike around to the side of her next-door neighbor’s yard, and pull herself into the tire swing. If Tig swung up just right she could fold herself into the center, unobserved, sway and think. She remembered to pull up the dress and tuck the train and tulle into the tire. She thought she looked like the chrysalis in her second-grade science room, a caterpillar wrapped in silk, deaf and protected.
    “Tig!” she’d heard her mother’s voice calling once. Shoving herself further down into the tire, she smelled rubber, musty leaves, and the mothballs that had previously kept her mother’s dress pristine.
    “Tiger Lily, where are you?” her mother had called impatiently, on her way to annoyed. Tig had about three minutes before her mother added her last name to the call. She wasn’t really in trouble until then; three strikes