Chapter Four
Heather

Standing in the yard of her childhood home with her husband, Heather already knew her mother’s death inside and out. 

“I thought you wanted to be, um, an accountant?” her mother had asked her three years ago during Heather’s first week back in town. That morning, Heather had clawed through boxes, cursing whenever she’d accidentally rip open one with Wyland’s old business management books or his DVD collection instead of the one with her dresses. He hadn’t labeled any of the boxes, even though that was his only job besides “managing” his friends who moved his futon and ancient television set out of their tiny Chicago apartment. Heather had a suitcase packed with clothes, of course, but she had wanted to wear a dress. It had been four years since she had last seen her mother. She had wanted to seem different. Changed.

Sitting at her mother’s greasy breakfast table, she could have kicked herself. She had taken an entire hour to get ready, smearing on lipstick and straightening her already pin-straight hair as if she were going on a first date, not pretending to drink a lukewarm cup of coffee and holding her breath in her mother’s kitchen.

“No, I never said that. I’ve always wanted to be a math teacher,” Heather said, dancing her cracked cup of coffee between her hands. A lie. Heather had never planned to be anything. Thoughts would cross her mind sometimes, like in the bathroom during lunch when she’d pinch the fat of a few classmates, and she’d think to herself as she’d scribble their weights in the kitty notebook, maybe I could be a nutritionist. But that changed when she entered college and lost all sense of background and expectation. She could be anything, do anything. It was only later as she struggled through her classes that she discovered how wrong she was.

“Oh, so, will you teach around here?” her mother asked, making friendly conversation as she wiped a blood smear from her chin. A slice of what Caroline Hammel referred to as “apple pie” sat on a chipped dish in front of her, but the metallic smell the sliver emitted told Heather something different. She was almost certain her mother was slicing into the heart of an animal she at least hoped was edible. 

Heather had known she should be doubled over, dry heaving or running like a bat out of hell into the fresh air of a normal Saturday afternoon. But the truth was that her mother’s kitchen was hell, and Heather became overwhelmed with believing her skin deserved to crackle and burn. She hadn’t graduated with a math degree. She hadn’t graduated with any degree. She had spent the last year in Chicago sitting on Wyland’s dirty futon in their apartment, slicing and consuming hunks of cheese as big as baby fists. And there was no greater reward for failure than watching her mother ingest the rotting organ of a sacrificial bird.

That day, she had told her mother she wouldn’t teach—that Wyland had wanted her to stay home, relax a little after working so hard in school. There would be enough time in the world to get a job later. The lie was easy to say because the reality was crushing in comparison. Wyland wanted her home, wanted her pregnant so that she could feel “fulfilled” when she knew it was because he wanted to be the breadwinner. He wanted to be the man of the house if only to please his father. She resented him, silently refusing any potential pregnancies and keeping track of the birth control pills he asked her to throw out. He had been hounding her about having a baby for the five months since their “wedding” at the courthouse in Chicago, the ink still fresh on their marriage certificate. Their elopement was a particular point of contention with Mrs. Turnbull—another reason Wyland thought a baby would be in his favor and another reason Heather dutifully fulfilled her prescription until the one time she gave in. 

Three years and a missed pill later, nothing had changed from that moment on the courthouse steps except Heather’s growing belly and the heaviness that burdened her womb and her heart.

“Yeah, I can’t. You’ll be all right,” Wyland said, puncturing her thoughts with his shirt-sleeved arm fastened against his nostrils. He never came to her mother’s house, so she should have been grateful that he walked her to the threshold. She was not.

He waited in the front yard as Heather pushed the white, composite door with the side of her body. It creaked open against her weight, and her eyes adjusted to the dust floating in a dirty, bulbous haze. Two inches of filth crunched beneath her feet in the foyer, and she quickly stepped onto the cleared path her mother had made for her once she knew Heather was pregnant. 

“You won’t be visiting me anymore.” It was the first thing her mother had said when Heather had told her about the pregnancy. She should have been angry that Caroline had taken the moment and manipulated it into something about herself, but Heather was too exhausted, too disappointed in the nine months that lay ahead, to feel anything other than sadness. 

“No, no, I will. We’ll just have to figure something out.” So, with Heather’s help, her mother had cleared a path from the front door to the kitchen, fixed the jammed back door that Heather used when her belly had made it harder to walk from the front of the house, and kept the windows open when her daughter came over. It was a stupid thing for Heather to do, to keep visiting like their visits had ever accomplished anything. Like the air wasn’t polluting Heather’s insides. But the intensity of her mother’s hands shifting piles of brittle newspapers and dark-stained recipe books moved her more than a hug, a kiss. 

And now Heather waddled down the path, her flip-flops meeting bare wooden floor. She should have gone around to the back door, but she wanted to walk the pathway one last time.  She wanted to prolong the inevitable.

“Mom? Caroline?” Heather called out. She remembered her father always urging her to call her mother “Caroline.” “She’s no real mother, bug. She’s no real mother at all,” he’d say, picking a random pet name from the stash he accumulated watching sitcoms. “Cat,” “Sweetie,” “Babycakes,” were all marbles in his mouth, but when he wanted Heather to do something, he’d use one, plucking at her heartstrings with two determined fingers. It worked, and then later, at night, she would cry because it never felt right, like wearing a shirt backward or skipping fat check during lunch. And to think that her mother chose to call him in her last moments—not her only child—made Heather wonder if dying messed harder with a person’s head than she could even imagine.

“Mom!” she shouted, walking past the staircase, past her old room that had become another bin to contain the waste. She stood at the kitchen’s door frame at the back of the house. She blurred her vision, not wanting to see what would be waiting for her. She placed her ring-less, swollen fingers on the frame and spied her mother lying on her back as if making an angel in the trash at Heather’s feet.

She stood for a moment, realizing she had left her cell in the car and knowing Wyland would pretend not to hear her even if she screamed at the top of her lungs. She took the house phone, the cord wrapped around her mother’s arms, and attempted to ignore the halo of digested food around her mother’s head. She failed and vomited on a kitchen chair.

She called 911 and maneuvered her way out the back door. The light stung her eyes, so she closed them, allowing the dizziness to wash her clean. She considered giving into it, passing out onto the grass, and forcing Wyland to take care of everything, but a memory took her, forced her upright. It was one of the first nights alone with her mother after her father had left them. The house should have felt emptier, and after a day of studying the curve of Wyland’s ears (moon snail-shaped like the shells the museum curator brought to show the class) and listening to Amber drone on about how getting glasses would ruin her second-grade existence, Heather assumed that half the mess in the house would be gone because her father had probably sent for it. But after she got off the bus, walking two blocks in the opposite direction so Amber and Rachel wouldn’t catch on, then circling back to her dismal street, she found the house to be teeming with cookbooks and canned food and an overwhelming sense of her mother’s enthusiasm.

“Heather!” Caroline had called from the kitchen. She poked her head out, her salty-caramel hair crusted white with flour. She was smiling, and the effect was maniacal, like the Cheshire cat Mrs. Donovan had read about during story hour. Heather ventured through the living room, wading through the tissue entrails of empty cookware boxes. She stumbled back, startled by a life-sized cutout of a woman in an apron, her hair curled close to her head, one high heel lifted behind her. When she finally made it to the kitchen, her mother was dressed the exact same way.

“I see you’ve met Beatrice. She was right next to the display for these aprons. Thought I’d pick her up while I was at it.” Her mother trilled like a bird with a broken wing. She was making haphazard circles, a metal bowl and whisk in her hands. The string of pearls that snaked her neck flapped heavily against her collarbone. 

“Oh, that look on your face. I know, I know I went a little overboard. But Heather, I have to tell you. I feel free. I feel, well, uncaged, you know? And when I saw Beatrice, I thought, that’s it. That’s what I need in my life. A little Gingham. Some lipstick. You never know what a person needs to become exactly who they were meant to be.” 

Heather could feel her daisy-printed backpack slipping from her shoulders, and she did nothing to stop it from plopping onto the kitchen floor. If this is what her mother was meant to be, then Heather had a new mess of worms to jam carefully back into their can.

“He’s never coming back. That man. He’s not coming back and good riddance too. We don’t need him. We’ve got our pearls and our cupcakes, right?” Caroline shoved the metal bowl at Heather’s face and blinked, once, twice, three times. “Right?” she asked again, her voice breaking into two rough-edged pieces. 

In one smooth reach, Heather ripped it from her mother’s hands, and the lip of the bowl hit hard against the wall. Globs of yellowy batter iced the anchored phone and slid downward. Caroline seemed to gasp to the beat of their steady trail. 

“Mom?” Heather asked. She came to, her anger dulled but her senses still lightning-struck.  A fine splatter coated her favorite shirt—white with a yellow lab puppy, his tongue lapping out of its mouth as if trying to clean up the stain. 

“No.” Caroline curled her legs under her and sat on the floor. She moved the whisk, swiping tick-tock motions in front of her face. “No, no,” she whispered. Heather watched two black rivers snake down her mother’s cheeks. This was the sort of delicious thing that made sense when it was someone else’s mother—Vienna Sausage’s or some other loser who picked their nose or ate clumps of dirt during recess. But not Heather, who knew the beats of the usual orchestrated chaos in her home but was frantically thumbing the sheet music to find her place. 

A thought buried in her brain germinated and vined its way down her spine and around her limbs. She did the only thing that came to her: she hugged her mother, cradled Caroline’s warm and heavy head in her lap. She took her mother’s love forcefully, the only way she knew how.

And now, standing at the threshold of her mother’s death, Heather dared herself to relearn Caroline’s face and inwardly wheezed through the overwhelming need to hug her.

The sirens worked hard, frantic in their blaring, so Heather wiped beneath her eyes and walked around to the front of the house. The next couple of hours were technical and unfeeling, reminding her of the trigonometry classes she would sit through, looping her fingers inside the biting, metal spiral of her notebook. The police determined there was no foul play (“Surprising,” Heather had heard her husband mutter beneath his breath), and her mother’s body was sent to the county morgue. Heather waited for the news that her mother’s home would be condemned, that she would be fined for the filth and junk crammed tight in the corners. But everyone pretended not to notice the mess and stench, possibly believing they were paying a kindness to a grieving daughter. All Heather wanted, though, was for someone else to watch how easily the decay in a wall could spider, snake its way into an uncovered pore, and poison the host.

The sky had turned to dust by the time everything was said and done. It was a little past four when she and Wyland returned back home.

“You don’t have to go back, do you?” Heather figured Wyland’s father, Owen, as work driven as he was, would make an exception this one time.

“It’s just, I have a lot of work to catch up on and then with this open house thing...”

“Okay,” Heather said, standing in their driveway.

“You’ll get through this.” He pressed his wet lips against her forehead, and she watched him head back to work in his maimed BMW. 

As she jammed the key into the lock and went inside the house, Heather’s body told her to sleep. The cookies had grown stale on the plate next to the recliner. The fans still buzzed, and Heather could feel them whirring inside her. There was no way she’d be able to nap. Instead, she warmed up the computer and searched for a place to send her mother.

Heather squeezed into the small nook off their living room that now housed Wyland’s old desk from the apartment. Their second bedroom—the old home office—was now the nursery, and when she thought about that room, the way it was with its unfinished crib and bags of pink clothing Wyland’s mother delivered on a weekly basis, she shuddered and felt guilty for shuddering. She had taken to cleaning the rest of the house, even awkwardly scrubbing the grout in the guest bathroom with a toothbrush, but the nursery was a different animal. It was a definite sign of change. It was full force motherhood without the benefit of braking. 

She gasped and shifted her weight in the chair. She typed “funeral home Folkson County” into the search engine and found there were three funeral homes in the area. Bauer and Sons in Blythesville, Allman Funeral Services in Summit, The Oaks Family Funeral Home in Burling Gates. Heather remembered calling it The Addams Family Funeral Home in the third grade, alluding to a show she’d only known existed when her mother’s headache would strike her paralyzed on the couch and the TV would run unguided. She looked up Oaks—fully aware she was inching into forbidden territory—and found their web page in the search engine. A few headlines that popped up below it caught her eye.

“Funeral Homeowner Charged with Illegally Selling Chemicals to Drug Dealers”

“Funeral Homeowner, Deluca Oaks, Behind Bars”

“Deluca Oaks’s Son to Purchase and Run Oaks Family Funeral Home”

She scanned through the articles, found one from the Burling Gates Gazette that began, “Deluca Oaks, 59, owner and facilitator of Oaks Family Funeral home was arrested late last night at his place of business. He is charged with supplying chemicals to a local meth den...”

She found other articles, blog posts about how Deluca couldn’t pay the bills. How he had to fire the drivers, the grounds keeper, the local churchwomen who, alongside his wife, helped keep the home clean. How Vienna’s father, Elbert, bought and took over the business. Heather even stumbled across a picture of an older, heavy-set woman spitting at Elbert on the home’s front porch, officers pinning her thick, naked arms behind her back. Frances Oaks, the caption read. Elbert’s mother. 

“Dang,” she whispered. Heather found a few pathetic grains of pleasure in knowing that there was at least one family in Burling Gates more messed up than her own. It made it sweeter knowing it belonged to Vienna Sausage. 

She clicked on the funeral home’s link. She was met with the image of the two-story stone house she knew from when she was younger when she, Rachel, and Amber would run past it during Halloween screaming, “That’s where the wicked witch lives!” Heather remembered Vienna eyeballing them from her grandparents’ front yard, dressed as a toilet papered Mummy or something even more pathetic, her brother Troy throwing them the finger. 

Heather’s insides began to slightly cramp, and she clutched her globed stomach pressing against her thighs.

She winced through the contraction then clicked on the “Staff” link and scrolled through the pictures. She saw Elbert, a man she had seen in passing when she was younger and who had always looked as nondescript as all the other adults who lumbered over her as a grade-schooler.  But in his picture, he was heartily three-dimensional. A hooked eagle’s nose, thin-rimmed rectangular glasses anchored against his pale skin. Graying hair that was packed tight against his head except for a loose strand that seemed to bulge near the side of his crown. 

She was surprised to see Vienna’s picture listed among the others. She hadn’t thought Vienna would end up working at Oaks, but that was as good a place as any. She does have a life-sucking quality about her, Heather thought. 

Heather had only spotted Vienna in town one time since moving back to Burling Gates, an incident she didn’t savor recalling. Once, during a party at Amber’s mini-mansion, she had learned Vienna had turned into an oddball hermit. But Heather had changed the topic when she couldn’t stop picturing Vienna in pearls, fluttering whisk in hand.

A purple dress and the same damp blue eyes, Vienna didn’t look like she belonged at a funeral home in her picture. “A runway, maybe,” Heather mumbled, hunger twisting its claws and making her ache. She finished her quick scroll, skimming a list of drivers and a woman named “Loretta,” a part-time administrator, who looked as if she’d rolled around in a hooker’s closet before coming to work that day. 

Heather clicked “Contact” and typed in her email address. She looked at the blank subject line. “Dead mother,” she typed. She looked at the large, empty square beneath it. “What do I do now?” she wrote in the blinding white box. Heather quickly deleted both boxes, abruptly aware of how tight and restrained she felt in the office nook. She wished to all things holy she didn’t have to wear a pair of suffocating black yoga pants, the maternity bra that wrapped like an angry bow around her chest. She was alone. Wyland wouldn’t be back for a few hours. So, she slipped her swollen feet out of her flip-flops, danced the slow awkward waltz of undressing, and unfolded into their secondhand computer chair with a hopeless offering of breath. She traced the spidery light limbs that patterned her stomach and could feel her pulse pumping everywhere. 

An ache erupted out of her mouth—the visceral, verbal moan of everything she felt curled up in her cells. Her mother was gone, had left her lonely. She had no one now but a man who no longer loved her and had been seeing someone else behind her back. She banged her fist hard on the desk, and when she looked up, she saw a message on the screen. “Thank you for contacting us. We will respond as soon as possible.”

“No,” Heather said. “No, no, no,” she repeated, swiping hard at the sides of her face. There it was—proof of her stupidity. She couldn’t even work the computer correctly, let alone stand up for herself. 

For the past twelve weeks, she’d known about Vienna and Wyland. She knew about their tryst a few months back that had ended on the carpet of a house Wyland was showing, this information extracted after cracking her husband’s password to his email account. Her hate, anger was something she couldn’t even define because it stood in the face of a relationship that definitively excluded her. It wasn’t the betrayal so much as it was the act of feeling alone that had hardened the world for Heather. 

In the beginning, it was this feeling that plagued her whenever Wyland would show houses on his lunch break instead of coming home to her. “I just want to prove I can do better than Hollywood,” he’d say, and Heather made herself believe him. She also believed the little boy who often showed in his eyes and smile, the one who wanted to please his father the way most people wanted to win the lottery. 

“Okay,” was always her reply, and she’d try not to think about it. “Pregnancy hormones,” she’d say aloud, walking the cool wooden floors in their home, barefoot. She ate a lot, gained weight, grew questionable hairs, and sweated in the wrong sorts of places. “Why not go crazy while I’m at it?” she’d ask their cat, Frankenstein, who’d curl up like a black tumor in her lap. 

But one day she decided to answer the question with a strong declarative sentence. She got into her car and drove around with a printed-off listing of houses for sale in the area. Wyland would never say where the houses were located, just that they existed, so Heather and her belly took to the streets, navigating with one hand while the other was highlighting, circling the next find. 

The day she came to it, the sky was too clear. She stopped several houses down and decided to pretend she was merely out for a walk, exercise good for the baby and all that nonsense as loneliness fed on her fingers and toes. 

Heather walked slow, spotting her husband’s car in the driveway. It stood empty and alone, and for a second she was relieved, but she forced herself to venture further. She walked down the side of the front yard and worked her way to the back. She didn’t have to go far. She looked through the kitchen window and then stepped back, the house’s vinyl siding cutting into her buttocks. She didn’t have to look again. She knew it was Vienna, sitting at the kitchen table, Wyland at the other side. They were both smiling. 

Heather reasoned it would have been easier if she had seen them blatantly embracing on the black and white tiled floor. She loved that floor, the quick view of crown molding, the marble countertops. That’s the reason she began to cry. Because she loved a house she did not live in. 

Because this time, Wyland’s indiscretion was with Vienna Oaks. 

Instead of saying a word to either of them, packing up and leaving town, Heather had sat daily for the past three months in the ugliest piece of furniture known to man, recovering her history to find the very instant her life went wrong.

But this time she was tired of sitting, so Heather set to the arduous task of redressing. She could feel Frankenstein eying her as one foot found her flip-flop and the other tried to maintain her balance.

“Entertained?” she snapped, and the full-bellied cat lifted his rear at her and hissed. She grabbed her burlap bag off the floor and waited until she was shut tight inside her Corolla.

“This is stupid, so stupid.” Her voice was the only thing louder than the pulse ripping against her skin. She drove without feeling. She edited her yelling down to just the one word, “stupid,” until it was written everywhere she looked.

Navigating the streets she had walked as a kid for Halloween, she arrived at Oaks, and it was like she had always remembered it, except shabbier, worn down. Looks like we have something in common, she thought.

She pulled up alongside the curb and struggled out of the car. She almost forgot her bag, and when she bent back down to grab it, fear pounded between the vertebrae in her spine. 

“I can’t do this,” she said to the newly shampooed interior. It was a stupid task she had found on some baby site, some woman bragging how her husband had shampooed the insides of her car. Heather had asked Wyland if he could do the same thing for the Corolla, and he had rolled his eyes and told her the baby wouldn’t care if it was driven home in the Weiner mobile. So, it was Heather who had vacuumed it out and worked the seats into a lather. It was Heather who started crying because she had used too much soap, and now the seats were hard and suffocating with their sickly-sweet stench. She had ruined her car. She would ruin a baby.

“Hey, there. Come on in, we still have twenty minutes till closing.” Heather took one last intake of vulgar breath and looked up. It was the hooker.

“I’m sorry,” Heather swallowed. “I think I’m lost.”

“In our driveway?” the hooker asked. She was wearing a black sequined dress and what looked like doorknockers at her ears. The woman was on the home’s front porch, the door held open by her lifted heel. Heather could hear a man complaining that she was letting the air out.

“Seriously, come in.” Heather did what the woman asked because she did feel lost, and something in the man’s tone convinced her it was shameful to keep a door open for too long.

Inside the lights were dim. The shades were open in the room to the left and some light had eked its way through. There was an empty space near a podium surrounded by ferns in pots. It was the place a casket should be, Heather realized, and everything that had been crashing her heart minutes, hours, and months before came to a halt staring at that dead space.

“Let’s sit in the break room. Elbert’s working a few kinks out for our open house in the office,” the woman said, and Heather counted her teeth with her tongue, trying to remember what Wyland had said about an open house. She wondered just how hard he’d break out into a sweat if he knew he’d be running a booth with Mark in his ex-mistress’s front lawn. Maybe he already knew.

The light in the break room shifted violently off the canary yellow walls and into Heather’s eyes. The room contained a small kitchen, and she could smell something cooking in the oven.

“Pasta bake. Ziti. Elbie’s favorite,” the woman said, blushing like a teenager. Heather kept taking inventory on the inside of her mouth. She remembered blushing like that in high school. How the sting would take her cheeks at night, in bed, dreaming of Wyland. 

“I’m Loretta, by the way,” the woman said, extending a set of red-flamed nails. Heather took it and allowed her arm to be bounced up and down. She told Loretta her name.

“So, Heather, how can I help you?” Loretta asked. Heather had to pause and roll the question around. She studied its angles. She wanted to talk to Vienna. She wanted to tell her she was a real nightmare for sleeping with her husband. She wanted to scratch the other side of Wyland’s car and bust out his windshield. She wanted to paint over the break room and get rid of the fluorescent lighting. But she couldn’t stick with one train of thought because Loretta’s plastic earrings were having a seizure at the sides of her head, and she could hear “Elbie” steadily humming into the phone in his office.

“My mother’s dead.”

“Oh, dear, I’m so sorry. Okay, well, one sec,” Loretta said, patting for the pockets that were noticeably missing from her dress. She stood up from the rod iron table to retrieve a pad of post-it notes and a pen from a drawer near the fridge. She wrote down Heather’s name. Purple lines looped and scrawled into letters.

“Okay,” Loretta said, looking back up at Heather. She seemed to be waiting for something.

“Is that it?” Heather asked. Loretta’s mouth twisted into an “o” and then she wrote down “dead mother” underneath Heather’s name.

“I’m sorry. I’m not very good at this. Vienna will be back later so if you could come in tomorrow to give her the details...”

“She’s not here?”

“Vienna? You know her? No, Elbert gave her the day off. She needs it if you ask my opinion. The poor thing looks wretched. For the past three months at least, she’s been the same shade of gray, and if you know Vienna, she’s never gray. Colorful I’d say, always wearing one of those pretty summer dresses. But lately, she’s been...off,” Loretta said, moving the purple pen through her fingers like a baton. “I’m worried about her,” she quietly added. 

Heather watched one of the fluorescent lights buzz above her head and hoped it would blind her. Her grip was loosening. She could feel the fight leaving her.

“Is she going to be okay?”

“Should be. It’s the anniversary of her mother’s death, so I know it’s rough, but this time it’s different.” Loretta got up to check on the ziti. “Maybe she went to the movies or something,” she sang from the oven. Heather’s thoughts quickly turned to Wyland’s scratched up car door. Well, at least Vienna wasn’t reconciling with her husband.

“That’s good. Don’t tell her I came in. I want to surprise her tomorrow,” Heather said. Her fingers searched for Dolores in her swollen abdomen to keep her in the moment. She felt light-headed. Her adrenaline was wearing off, and in its place came that often underused drizzle of empathy.

“How far along are you?” Loretta asked, returning to the table and nodding at Heather’s belly.

“Seven months. Seven months today.”

“Wish we had a little one running around here. Hey, if you know anyone we could set Vienna up with, let me know. Maybe that would bring her out of her funk,” Loretta said. Heather said she’d do her best then followed Loretta’s sequined dress out of the room.

“So yeah, come by tomorrow morning. Vienna will be back, and she’ll get everything taken care of. I assume your mother’s being held somewhere manageable?” Loretta asked in the entryway, and Heather could feel her empathy dividing and extending to the lady with plastic earrings who didn’t look quite right in a funeral home.

“Yeah. The police told me she’d be held at the morgue tonight and to contact a funeral home to make arrangements.”

“Perfect,” Loretta said, then cleared her throat through her enthusiasm. “I’m sorry.  I don’t mean to be rude. I really feel terrible about your mother, it’s just Elbie’s on the phone with that floozy from the storage place, and she wants to set up a booth here for the open house. I mean, how would you react if some harpie was after your man?” Loretta asked, fidgeting with the front door.

“Not very well, I’m sure,” Heather murmured. She began to walk out when she mentioned accidentally sending the contact form to the home’s email address.

“No worries. Vienna will delete it. Can’t figure out that computer mumbo jumbo for the life of me,” Loretta said from the porch, and Heather nodded at her red nails dancing across an imaginary keyboard.

In the car, the soap in the upholstery burned Heather’s lungs. It flirted with the air, her senses, the agonizing lump of shame between her eyes. Vienna was the wrongdoer, the reason for the mess that sat in Heather’s lap as solid as Dolores did in her stomach. But Vienna had lost her mother, had lost her best friend when Wyland moved to Chicago, and maybe Heather didn’t have to sit through it all, but she didn’t have to make things worse either.

She wanted to find that part of herself again, the part she had spotted in her husband all those years ago when they were kids in a lunchroom, defenseless to the world and the hurt that clawed through them. 

Heather just wanted to make everything better.