I spent more time with you than my own mother. You gave me my first lesson in pastry making.

It was a lot of work to prepare for a Trece party, thought Marci as she and her mother waited for the makeup lady. I can’t imagine a wedding, she thought. For over the past few months she’d had dress fitting, food and cake tastings. There had been decorations and flowers to decide on. When you thought about it, Trece was as important, if not more so, than a marriage. There was generally no surgery required for a wedding. 

The gap between us was growing, though nothing, ostensibly, had changed. While no one made mention of what had happened, the unreciprocated feelings were becoming a burden on the group. Nothing was said, but Bianca was deferential, and she liked to be around Earl less and less.

Then Earl disappeared. 

After my senior year, my parents died in a summer car accident, and the funeral was hot. At eighteen, I was the youngest of my brothers. David was twenty-eight and lived in L.A. with his wife and kids. He was a tax attorney and the executor of the estate. Michael was twenty-five and living in Ann Arbor, finishing his M.S. in Biochemistry. He was getting ready to apply for med school. They knew I had no plans and made no effort to make any for me. The service was short, and my parents were buried side by side, thirty feet from a pine at the north end of Sojourn Memorial Cemetery.

Last night in bed she touched me and I shuddered. My body did this of its own accord. She must have thought the reaction was a sign of my desire. We made love and all the way through I had to muster all my self-control. Still, I could not help thinking about the other woman, wishing it was her my body was connected to.

It was a rainy Tuesday morning just after opening and I was in the lobby of the First National Bank shooting the breeze with Bill, the bank security guard. Bill’s a retired mail carrier doing the rent-a-cop shtick to keep busy and to supplement his retirement income. A rather scruffy looking character came in and took a quick panoramic look-see of the bank’s lobby. Spotting the two of us, he walked over and just like that, handed me a small pistol.

“You don’t really have a choice,” the nurse explained.

The timbre of her tapping foot echoed within the confined walls of the hospital’s modest room. I noticed a very large scar stretching across her left knuckles.

“You mean I have to sign it?”

He found the North Star. At least he thought it was the North Star, since it seemed to be the brightest, but when he turned the N on the compass in that direction to test himself, the arrow pointed the other way. Moving the compass around, he found that the lit up area must be West Philly, he thought, proud of himself for figuring it out. He tried to find their house. His dad had turned the living room light on before they left, so he figured one of the dots was theirs.

Halloween with the class from hell. My very first year of third grade, and I had four students show up wearing questionable costumes.

First, and least, was Jacob. He had a black suit (presumably from a recent wedding or funeral), a pair of sunglasses, and disturbingly realistic plastic handgun. He was an assassin. I made him keep the gun in his backpack, which he claimed ruined his costume.

I tapped the GPS incessantly but no map came up on the screen. Ray had warned me to get it fixed. “Hell, just buy a new one down at Costco,” he’d said. But somehow the task was always tumbling out of my priorities. My fuel gauge arrow was hovering just above empty, and I knew there’d be nothing but a two-lane country road for the next twenty miles. I pulled my cell out of my purse and turned it on. No service.