“So, yeah. I couldn’t deal. My family kicked me out. I came back to the fire station to volunteer because I could help people—I could do that. I could be needed again. I thought if I could fix other people, I could fix myself.”
Dolores pictures the woman in the photo—the mother— taking her hand and squeezing it.
“I’m being melodramatic, I know. Well, I’m going to keep going. You’re just going to have to listen because you’re all trapped inside that photograph.”
She imagines the mother pursing her lips and narrowing her eyes knowingly.
“One day I arrived at a really bad accident, and—I don’t know—it was like pulling blocks out of the Jenga tower when I had been playing the game backwards, trying to get the blocks back in.”
She finishes her glass and pours another. Somehow the whole bottle is now empty.
“I don’t know if this makes sense. Probably not. I’m not very good with words. But still, have you ever played Jenga? Of course you have. Everybody has. I used to play with Tommy and Jay, that’s his dad. We’re not married, though. We’re off and on. Right now we’re off.”
This glass goes down like acid. She drains it all at once, and then realizes she hasn’t eaten. The clock has jumped forward. In the course of this night the earth travelled hundreds of thousands of miles through space and somehow she didn’t register the passage of one inch. She looks at the family in the photo. Their faces are losing definition, smearing at the edges, doubling, tripling.
“Death is all around me, all the time. It’s all around you, too, you just don’t know it. People have no idea what’s coming for them. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. It’s better you don’t know, trust me.”
She turns the photo over and pushes it to the back of the table, toward stacks of unopened mail. The remote control sits too far away for her to watch television. She tips herself off the chair and falls asleep on the floor, her stomach feeling like a lit match landed there and burned out.
*
Dolores feels like shit the next day at her paying job. She works four days a week at the consignment store next door to the Moose Lodge. No customers enter all morning, so she listens to classical music on the radio while tagging garbage bags stuffed with new acquisitions, ugly polyester shirts from some dead woman’s closet. The store sources much of its merchandise from the deceased. The families arrive at the curb with a truck full of furniture and knick-knacks and unfashionable clothing, all smelling like mothballs and Lysol. As they unload the junk, Dolores detects the guilty joy in their faces. The relief. They feel the happiest they’ve felt in weeks, and she’s glad she can do that for them.
Around noon, Tommy calls. It’s a school day. Something must be wrong. Her pulse spikes, sweat surges from her armpits. “Tommy?” she says, stifling the panic in her voice.
From Tommy’s end: muffled, muddled, incoherent sounds. Voices. A cacophony of rustling as objects knock against a microphone. An accidental dial. Tommy didn’t really call her. He did not want to talk to her—that was not the purpose of the call. There was no purpose. It was accidental.
But he is okay. Nothing is wrong, a small consolation which feels as triumphant as restarting a slack heart with her own two hands.