Wide Blue Yonder by Jean Thompson

perfect. It doesn’t mean we don’t have to do our part. But we are your—what? What is that face supposed to mean?”
    “Why do you always talk like that? Why do you always think you know everything? God. You don’t know fucking anything.”
    “That’s enough of that kind of talk.”
    “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.” But the splendid anger that had propelled her was already trailing off, and her mother was giving her a saddened, superior look.
    “All right,” she said. “Thank you for your elevated and mature contribution to the discussion. I think I’ll let you talk to your fatheryourself about Aspen. I can’t imagine he’ll really want to take you anywhere.”
    The caftan billowed and frumped its way out of the room. Stupid stupid stupid stupid.
    Abe was a great father. Even when he was president he’d make time to kiss the boys good night. Mary said he spoiled them. Two of them died. Little Eddie and Willie. They died of things like scarlet fever and typhus or something else that nobody died of anymore. It was terribly sad. She sent her sadness across the years. She always felt it reached him somehow, just as his wisdom and suffering reached her.
    Maybe she should go ahead and die. Or almost die, so they’d feel sorry for her. She knew it was a childish way of thinking, but her whole idiot self was turning into a mess of impulses and shrieking nerves, and if someone had proved to her that in her next life she would come back as Mitchell Crook’s dog or Mitchell Crook’s parakeet, anything that was allowed to look on him awake and asleep and remember, dimly, that she had always loved him, she would have said yes, gladly, let me die.
    Since she was not dead she did things like call his apartment on nights she was certain he was at work. So she was a stalker. It wasn’t anything she couldn’t deal with, now that she had absolutely no pride. It was a sickness, the following and the calling. A secret sickness that she only pretended to want to cure. How weak, degrading, shameful it all was. Once she had said these things to herself she was free to go ahead and do what she wanted. She always blocked her phone number in case he had Caller ID or some other kind of police superscanner. The phone rang four times before his machine picked up. “Hi, Mitch here, I’ll get back to you.” Plain and simple. Eight syllables. You could have set them to music. The sound of his voice was a drug that she only allowed herself every so often. And once when she’dmiscalculated and he answered with a breezy hello, she dropped the phone as if it burned her. The actual fact of him was just too overwhelming.
    Some nights she drove out to Lake Springfield, just to depress herself further. It was a tame sort of a lake, with a soft mud bottom and water the color of tea. There were fish in it, sure, people caught them and ate them, even though there was supposed to be some disease you could catch from swimming in it. There were places kids went to drink beer and mess around. She and Jeff had done that, plenty of times. She heard he had a new girlfriend. She guessed she was glad he wouldn’t be hanging around pestering her, but there was something irritating about it also.
    She drove through all the places she imagined police might patrol. The public housing complexes, the crumbling, deserted edge of downtown with its welding shops and gaping warehouses. The mall where scuzzy kids her age hung out in packs, and the truly awful liquor store that looked like it got robbed about once a week. From time to time it occurred to her that it was genuinely dangerous to be in such places. She took pride in this. It made her feel she was finally accomplishing something. And when a black guy in an old rattletrap car pulled up next to her at a stoplight and said, in a bored voice, “Hey, you want your pussy licked?” Josie only said, “No thank you,” and drove on.
    She almost never saw a cop car. You’d think there was no crime