For the First Time She Noticed What it Felt Like - Carol Arnold

So this guy who looks like a pear, he says to me, “Where’s your aunt live?”

I say, “She lives out there.” I wave my arm like I’m pointing at something but there’s nothing to point at, just miles of flat dirt. It’s hot, the sun like some little kid’s yellow balloon getting ready to burst, and the sky turning the same color as the sheets before you throw the bleach in. I think about home, that hot night with Horace, us floating naked down Goat Creek, the owls hooting and the town lights twinkling in the distance. I think about Kiki. I think about losing her Cracker Jack ring, finding it again in my pocket like it’d been there all along. I think about Delores and her brandy sniffers, all lined up in a row on the coffee table, the TV blaring. I look out at that flat brown dirt and my stomach turns upside down, like I’m noticing for the first time what loneliness feels like. A tear comes to my eye and rolls down my cheek. I wipe it off real fast.

Horace says to the pear man, “She and I go way back. I’m her uncle.” He fiddles with the jack, making the car go up even more. I try to sit without leaning over too far, but it doesn’t work so I get out. We’re all standing there on the side of the road. Pear man scratches his chin and looks up at the sky. I see a long jagged scar running down his neck. It looks like a bolt of lightening in a comic book.

“You two want some work?” he says.

“What kind of work,” Horace says.

“Farm work, grapes, cattle. Could use a hand around the place. My wife needs help around the house. Thought the girl here could do that.”

“I’m a singer,” I say. I don’t know why I said that, but it just came out. It wasn’t a big whopping lie like some I tell. After all, the old men at the mission tell me I got a voice like an angel. But I never called myself a singer before. It doesn’t feel so bad.

“A singer?” Pear man looks me up and down, squinting up his eyes even more. His mouth goes from upside down U to right side up, but crooked in the corner, where the scar is. He starts to laugh, the crooked part just hanging there like it can’t move with the rest of him.

“Yeah, I sing at the church in town, the mission. Every Sunday. People say I’m pretty good.”

Horace pulls the tire off with one big jerk. “Don’t believe much of what she says. She got a truth problem.”