Free Verse

Also by Sarah Dooley

Body of Water

Livvie Owen Lived Here

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Dooley.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

eBook ISBN 9781101657256

Bird images: EkaterinaP/Shutterstock. Paper images: Picsfive/Shutterstock.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Beth Anne
and all my library
writers

Nobody tells me this is the last time I'll see my apartment off Route 10. Nobody but Michael ever tells me anything, and Michael died. Still, I touch the grooves on the counter where he used to dice potatoes without a cutting board. I shuffle my sneakers against the scuffs in the linoleum where he used to kick off his fireman boots, trading them for his grocery store shoes.

I want to say something. Something just right. But time keeps moving and the words won't come, and my brother isn't around to hear them anyway.

Phyllis, the foster mother the state of West Virginia has picked for me, is still a stranger, despite the three days I've spent pacing her unfamiliar house. She drapes an arm across my shoulders, but it doesn't fit right, so she takes it back. Before she leads me away, she checks the windows to make sure they're locked. She mumbles something
about the thermostat but never manages to find it. She puts my jacket around my shoulders but doesn't make me use the sleeves. She leads me to the car.

“You didn't find your dress, Sasha?” she asks. Her question is pointless, since she left my key on the counter and locked the door. If I didn't find my dress abandoned in a closet or lost behind the landlord's couch, what difference does it make now? Strictly speaking, we weren't supposed to be in the apartment to begin with, but it was my only piece of clothing that looked okay for a funeral and my last excuse to be here.

I shake my head. I didn't actually look for the dress, not once I was inside. There were too many other things to look at and to think about.

Phyllis drives us back through town to her small house in one of the nicer neighborhoods in Caboose. She doesn't have a driveway, so she parks on the gravelly shoulder of Route 10. She cuts the engine and waits for me to move, then, when I don't, creaks her own door open. She loops around the front of the car and opens mine, too.

“We need to be back in the car in forty-five minutes.”

The dress she puts me in is too loose in the chest and smells like grease and Avon, like somebody sprayed Skin So Soft on a plate of fried potatoes. She stands behind me, finger-combing my hair. It hasn't been washed in days. Nobody's played with my hair since my mother left, and
it makes tears crawl up into the back of my throat. I swallow them down.

Phyllis's front door sticks, and she kicks it closed behind us with enough force to make it stick. She tugs the doorknob to be sure it locked. This is not one of those sweet small towns. People will steal your prescription medication. They will steal your copper wiring. They will steal your dog. The neighbor kids are out on the porch, bundled up against the cold. I've caught glimpses of them before, through the dead February trees that separate the two yards. The boy is digging a trench around the bottom step with a stick. The two little girls stop fighting over a toy truck long enough to stare us down with round green eyes. Phyllis ushers me into the car and closes the door. The girls go back to their truck. The older one wins and the younger one flings herself down in a tantrum. Even with the car door between us, I can hear her high wail cutting through the cold. I draw my feet up onto the seat, and when Phyllis slides behind the wheel, she reaches over and tugs my skirt down till it covers my knees.

“Hold on,” she says. I don't think she's talking about the car ride.

•   •   •

The church smells more like perfume than air. Me and Michael would have stood in a corner and made fun of people's pantsuits and glittery brooches, but this is his
funeral and all he does is lie still. I won't look at him. I stare instead at the flowers, which look as though they might be real, only I know they're not, because it's February and nothing much is blooming now. Through its burgundy carpet, the floor feels hollow, like I might fall through it if I step too hard.

The minister is only a minister on Sundays and when somebody dies or gets married. The rest of the time, he runs fire calls with Michael. He calls Michael his fallen brother, and I press fingernail prints into my palms. Michael wasn't anybody's brother except mine.

The pastor's eyes find me in the crowd, and I watch sadness deepen the lines on his face. I know all the faces and all the names of Michael's fellow firemen, but I can't always put them together. I check the program, which is printed slightly off center so that the last few lines of Psalm 23 curl around from the back.
Pastor: Allen Ramey
. Right.

Ramey talks about the man upstairs as though he's afraid to say the word
God
too loud. It's a simple service because both the man doing the talking and the man surrounded by flowers prefer things that way. Michael was never one for the dramatic, so Ramey keeps the service bare-bones short out of respect.
He was a good man. He sliced cuts of meat at the Save-Great by day and put out fires by night. He once literally saved a kitten from a tree, and got scratched so deep he had to get stitches.
A grim chuckle.
We hassled him for weeks over that one.

Everything he says is true. Michael was a good man. He did work two jobs. He was the kind of guy who would go out of his way to save a kitten, even if he cussed it while he did. None of those things are the most important part of who he was, though. He was my brother. Michael was my brother, and now I don't have a brother.

“They don't make 'em like old Harless anymore,” Ramey says. I wrap my arms around myself because there's nobody else to do it for me.

•   •   •

The cemetery is close to where Michael and I lived. Michael's firehouse only has one real fire truck, which is parked now at Michael's graveside, a flag hanging from its raised ladder. The rest of the fleet is made up of people's old Chevy S-10s, with red lights Krazy-Glued onto the dashboards. The squad is small and mostly volunteer. I only know their last names, because Michael called them by
Ramey
or
Kamm
or
Sweeney
, usually with jokes or swearing after. Most of them are young, and most hold other jobs, like Michael. I see them around town, salting fries at Burger Bargain, shelving old TVs at the pawnshop, dodging potholes with school buses.

I think maybe Ramey's going to start talking again, but he just stares at the ground and waits. A radio crackles and Michael's name is called, as if he's being asked to respond to a fire.

“Harless, this is dispatch, please respond.”

We wait for his voice to come over the air.

“Harless, this is dispatch, come back?”

Come back!
I think.

“Dispatch to Harless, please respond.”

He doesn't, and he doesn't, and he
doesn't
.

“Dispatch to Harless,” the voice on the radio says. “You are relieved of your duty. God bless you for your service.”

Somebody sobs. I think maybe it's Phyllis. She never met Michael, so she probably doesn't know he'd be embarrassed by all the fuss. He always said he wanted to be cremated and then scattered on the grounds of the fire, if that's what took him. Which is stupid, so I never told anybody.

The prayers and flags and radio static are all too much to take in. I expected the dirt and the hole in the ground, but I didn't know the hole would have neat corners and this metal structure, now lowering the box out of sight with a low hum. It reminds me of the air conditioner in our apartment, which is a silly thing to think about.

Michael's gone into the hole before I can stop him. I'm supposed to throw in a handful of earth, but instead I hold the two fistfuls of black dirt. I'm pretty sure I got half an earthworm. I smell the dirt. I taste it, and it tastes like rare meat or lost teeth. My lip and chin are smeared with grime. Polite mourners turn their faces away. Phyllis takes a wet wipe from her purse and cleans my chin as casually as she would her glasses.