A Change in Gravity

Of course, it was not level. God forbid. At least he now had credible evidence that Grampy Pete could not have believed the Earth was flat. This accretion of random building debris passing as steps had a clear curvature to it.

Mitch said a prayer to YouTube and This Old House as he speared his digging bar into the rubble like Ahab smiting the whale.

He had destroyed the form of the porch/stoop/steps by noon, filling his new wheelbarrow and dumping it in the back lot four times. He laid his shovel aside and wiped his head with a bandanna. Bandannas are cool, he had decided, impulsively picking one up at the hardware store checkout counter. He was on a mission to make them fashion again.

He was standing on the street by the wooden curb when he sensed her behind him. It was the sound of her feet, her cane, her breathing. It was the slight change in albedo on the asphalt from her shadow, even though he could not see the shadow itself.

He spoke without turning around.

"Hello, Mrs. Clarke. How are you?"

"How old are you?"

Mitch turned, frowning, until he saw the smile she could not suppress. She knew how old he was. He and Piper had always been in the same class.

"Thirty-three going on four, I'm told," he said as seriously as he could manage.

"Well then, it is time for you to call me Virginia. Or I will start addressing you as Mr. Farias."

"Okay, Ginny."

She pretended to glare. "Don't push your luck, son."

He grinned. She had always been the irreverent parent, the one who allowed the kids to test boundaries. The house he had grown up in was on the other end of town, but in Pogonip that only meant four blocks. He knew the inside of the Clarke home as well as he had known his own, he spent so much time there. He and Piper and an assortment of neighborhood kids were always busy with one project or another - building a fort, playing some sport they made up on the fly, biking out to the nearby hills, climbing the trees, running up and down the quiet streets looking for diversions.

Then his smile faded. This was not the woman he remembered, the tall, fit mother brimming with energy. The woman in front of him leaned heavily on her cane, her back bent. She was gaunt. Her face was lined, her thin hair grey, her skin translucent pale.

"Out for a walk?"

She shrugged. "Not much of a walker these days, but the doctor tells me to keep moving."

As long as I can, Mitch heard in her tone.

Another goddamn strike against my ragged soul, he thought. A profound sadness and sense of loss was his constant baseline these days. Here was another pin into the earth, firmly seating that tape. More lost time, more moments never to be gotten back.

**********

Virginia walked every day at 4 pm, and every day about that time Mitch just so happened to be working on rebuilding the steps. He would take a break and invite her to the back yard to sit on one of the old dining room chairs he had found in the garage and repainted in forest green enamel. She drank chardonnay, just as he had remembered from the days when she poured 7 Up into plastic cups for them so they could all toast whatever needed to be toasted.

"He was sorry - I could tell that he was sincere." Virginia sipped her wine. "But he just didn't have the energy to stay. I don't know if it was physical energy, or spiritual, or emotional.... What does it matter? It's all turned out the same."

Mitch nodded sympathetically. He had heard from Rose about Piper's father leaving. He hadn't been able to keep that news from slipping under his bubble.

Don't make promises you can't keep. Don't say anything you won't back up.

Virginia had something degenerative. It was almost like MS, but it wasn't MS. It was a single defect in the immense uncharted ocean of her DNA. One base missing, one invisible to the naked eye typo. And you are doomed. You lose control. Slowly, inevitably.

You can't walk, then you can't shit, then you can't eat, then you can't breathe.

It was so rare there would never be a cure for her. Nobody was even motivated to look. Not for one doomed woman in a small obscure town.

She picked up her napkin, wadded it into a ball, and tossed it across the table. It bounced off his chin.

"What?" Mitch protested.

"Don't ever make that face again. We're all dying, Mitch. Some of us faster than others. Some of us tomorrow with no warning. I'm lucky. I get to make my peace with...." She rotated her head, marking the whole valley, the world, the universe.

Mitch refilled her glass as agreement.

She never mentioned her daughter.

Mitch never asked.

**********

Piper walked in on a Monday, late afternoon, and dropped her suitcase on the front room carpet. Her mother was in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, cutting up carrots. Piper embraced her from behind.

"I missed you," Piper said into her mother's neck.

Mrs. Clarke turned to hug her. "Do I get you for more than a week this time?"

"Afraid not. Sorry."

"Oh, well. I'm making a chicken pot pie."

Piper clapped her hands like a child.

She went to unpack her bag. The house was quiet for a long spell, and when the carrots were truly chopped, Mrs. Clarke picked up her cane and made her way to the front room. She found her daughter at the picture window.

"Is somebody driving Grampy Pete's car?"

Mrs. Clarke took a deep breath. "Mitch is back."

Piper did not reply. She kept looking out at the old house.

"Oh," she said at last and went to her room.

**********

He saw the increased activity at the Clarke's house, even spotted a figure not Virginia in the windows a couple of times. The new steps were finished, so he moved to rehabbing the bathroom at the back of the house. While his ancient CD player blasted the B-52s, he smashed and cut and pretended that he was all alone in the world. It was, he knew, not much of a pretense.

But it had to happen. Inevitable in such a small pool that two fish would at last swim close.

The county fair and rodeo. He and Piper used to go together every year. They would make snarky comments about the knitting and vegetable exhibits. They would lick cherry snow cones in the shaded stands while watching the bull riding and the calf roping as arena dust drifted over them. They would ride on the cheesy carnival rides, whooping with mock excitement. They would cheer for their favorite cars in the demolition derby.

And they ate Indian tacos until they were stuffed.

He wouldn't have paused the bathroom project for any of these. It was hot and mostly unshaded out at the fairgrounds. He didn't have any desire to run into old friends, and he had long since had his fill of horses and bulls and the tinny music that played in the background all day.

He could not get those Indian tacos out of his mind.

Thirty minutes later, he was seated at a picnic table in the cool shadow of a cottonwood tree with a paper plate and an ice-cold can of Pepsi. On the plate was three-quarters of the Indian taco he was busily deconstructing with plastic knife and fork. Thick foundation of fried dough, chewy and tangy sweet on the inside and crisp on the outside. Layered with ground beef, refried beans, lettuce, tomato, cheese, sour cream.

The sun beat down relentlessly on the sagebrush and the white alkali crust on the surrounding fields. Crappy pop music rang out of tiny metal speakers like he was on the elevator to Hell.

He did not care, because Indian taco.

Chewing happily, he looked out at the stockyard fencing where the broncos were being ordered and staged for the next event. The cotton from the tree drifted down, summer snowflakes making magic, making the day and his taco just fucking perfect.

And there she was. Walking toward his table. She had no wiggle room. Her path would lead her within touching distance here in this pedestrian bottleneck formed from the three Indian taco stands and a snow cone vendor.

She did not see him. She was busy glancing back at the two children following her like ducklings.

He was filled with a surge of emotion he could not categorize.

**********

Piper loved horses. She had always been envious of her many friends who lived on actual ranches and owned horses as casually as she owned a bicycle. Her besties had invited her many times to ride one of the seemingly uncountable horses available to ranch kids. They would ride down to the river and splash in the shallows. They would walk their mounts in the moonlight across mown alfalfa fields, slowly, watching for gopher holes. They did not invite her to actual work, to cut out steers or ride side watch on round ups and drives to pastures out of the small valley in which Pogonip sat.

She would gladly have gone.

She wanted to be a cowgirl with all of her heart and soul. She was imagining it now as she looked through the enclosure boards at the stallions tap dancing with anticipation.

Three months more, she had calculated. Three months of two-week shifts at the Ranch and she would have set aside enough to buy her very own horse. It would have to be housed and fed, but she had already had a conversation with a friend who still lived outside Pogonip about stabling her new horse with their ranch string. It was totally affordable. She could have figured just how many more men she would have to... meet to get her dream, but it felt right to leave that number a mystery.

Kimberly and Kory trailed behind her. She was leading them to the snow cone vendor. She looked forward to seeing their faces when they realized where they were. Six and four. Ages when a surprise snow cone was a miracle.

Then she saw him. Mitch was staring right at her.

She actually gasped.

He was leaner and more muscled than she remembered. His hair was short, his sunburned face starting to develop lines. His eyes - they were the same. Kind and intelligent. Today they were full of something she could not remember ever having seen in them.

Fear.

He quickly reined it in and smothered it polite sauce, but it was and had been fear.

Piper could not run from this.

She walked to the picnic table and sat down opposite him.

"Hi, Mitch."

"Hello, Piper."

He searched inside, but the tank of words was dry. He tapped it with a frantic brain and it rang hollow. He reached for his manners.

"How are you?" He noticed in his peripheral vision he was still holding his fork. He laid it down.

How am I? Piper made her face into cement. Those word made her want to burst into tears, and she did not know why.

"I'm good, Mitch."

They sat in silence. Mitch's eyes took in all, traced the details as familiar to him as language, but changed now. He searched the marks of time on her. They were evident, and they made her even more beautiful. The innocent child had become a woman.

Piper flashed back to the nights in the treehouse her father had built them. She and Mitch would gaze out the windows at the constellations, majestic and bright up here in the high desert night. And they would talk. About school, about their friends, about the future, about travelling to the stars together and living among them forever. Hours and hours and hours.

Mitch glanced down at his plate. He had a myriad of questions. He had several novels of things to tell his oldest friend.

Nothing would come out.

I lost the right to assume that she wants to hear anything I have to say.

The two children bellied up to the picnic table, red cones in hand. Kimberly laid the change down in front of Piper.

"Will you take a picture of us by the snow cone machine?" the child asked.

Piper took her phone out and handed it over. "You can do it."

Kimberly gleefully snatched the phone and ran off to pose her brother. Piper followed Mitch's look at them and then back at her.

It would be so easy to tell him that these two were not her children. Something she would later think perverse restrained her.

An older man Mitch recognized paused beside them. "Hello, Piper," he said. "How's your mother?"

"She's doing well, thank you. I will tell her you asked after her."

The man hesitated as though wanting to speak to Mitch, but then he smiled, nodded, and moved on. Piper rose and went to round up her charges.

She turned back as she was herding them toward the parking field.

"Good to see you, Mitch."

Mitch waved feebly, feeling like a complete dork.

He had never ever not finished an Indian taco. He tossed the remains of his uneaten meal into the nearest trash drum.

**********

Double D Ranch

Visitors to the Ranch were often surprised to find that the place had a world-class kitchen. The owners were determined to operate their establishment with all the conveniences of a top resort. Admittedly, a resort where cash would get you any kind of sexual thrill you could convince one of the ladies in residence to indulge you in, but a resort nonetheless. And a resort had to have great food.

They opened a plush 50-room hotel which connected to the brothel via an air-conditioned tunnel. Guests at the hotel could walk two climate-controlled minutes from the lobby and pass through a door on the right to fine dining... or pass through a similar door on the left to fine whatever you desired.

There was a gaming area off of the restaurant where patrons ran the risk of getting nothing but the thrill of gambling for their dollar. If they instead visited the brothel, there was no risk. Everyone was a winner. It would be more than a dollar, sure, but the odds were overwhelmingly in the customer's favor.

The chef and his staff fed the Ranch's working girls as well. Any item on the menu, any time of day or night. No charge. Happy workers made happy customers.

This early morning Lulu was seated at a long table tucking into a bowl of fresh fruit from which a wonderful smell of melon emanated. Piper sat down next to her holding a cup of tea, and in a few minutes a waitress delivered a plate of bacon and eggs and a tumbler of orange juice.

"Busy day ahead?" Lulu said, nodding at the hearty meal. She suddenly wished she had not said it.

Piper picked up a slice of bacon and bit off a third of it at one go. "I hope so. I need to burn off these calories. Six hours or so of aerobic exercise ought to do the trick."

Lulu watched Piper attack the scrambled eggs. She had never been the kind of Ranch employee Piper was. She often imagined what it would be like to have multiple penises inside you every day, but she had never directly asked any of her girls. She did not want them to have even the hint of a suspicion that she was judging them. So Lulu listened to their gossip, and drank in their shop talk. Most often it was clinical, and so dispassionate that it became disconnected from emotion. Still, there were times when she was in a mood and a naughty comment or explicit conversation or just watching an excited customer walking hand-in-hand with a girl to her room gave her an erotic tingle between her legs.

Piper had her phone out sending off a text when Lulu asked if she had done anything fun on her week.

"Oh, yeah," Piper said excitedly. "I went to the rodeo. You should have seen the beautiful horses there."

She turned the screen so Lulu could see it and began to swipe through pictures.

"This one I would love to own, but he would buck me off in a second. Isn't he gorgeous? And this one... black as midnight with that little white star on his-"

"Wait. Go back."

Piper looked up, confused, then swiped back through the non-horse out-of-level snaps of the snow cone cart and machine until Lulu said "There. Stop."

Lulu reached over and zoomed the picture. "Who is that?" She asked.

Piper examined the screen. It was a shot of her sitting across from Mitch. Kimberly had caught them in an instant where they were secretly intent on each other. Piper, one hand extended to the camera as if feeling for her two charges, Mitch, his arms folded on the table, paper plate shoved to the side. It was obvious that they were each studying the other and trying to make it appear they were not.

Lulu pointed at Mitch. "You know that guy?"

"Yeah," Piper said, getting alarmed. Why was she getting alarmed? She felt little hairs stand erect on the back of her neck. "He's a friend from my hometown. Why?"

"He was here. A couple of weeks ago. You just missed him."

Piper's eyes lost focus.

**********

"Where's Piper?" Sandy whispered later that day as three young men leered at the lineup. The three were way too obviously split off from a bachelor party at one of the Strip hotel casinos. Hungover, well-dressed but disheveled, and horny, they were going to pay top dollar. They might even go in together on some lucky gal. Or want 'two chicks at once, man'. The profit was in the extras.

"Piper?" Barbie arched her back to accentuate her cleavage. "Oh... you mean River. I haven't seen her since this morning. Maybe she's sick."

**********

Pogonip

Mitch had broken. Given in to his curiosity and politeness. During an afternoon visit with Virginia a few days after the rodeo, he cautiously asked about her daughter, and the floodgates were breached. He received a summary of ten years. A childless marriage. The two kids were her sister's. Her current lucrative job as a therapist-in-residence at a renowned rehabilitation center for some condition Virginia did not seem to fully understand and which kept her away from Pogonip for two weeks at a time.

Which is why he was surprised to see Piper's Camry in the driveway across the street on a Thursday, just four days into her 'residence'.

He was leveling the cement underfloor of the main bathroom and wondering if Piper was okay. He did not have to wait long to find out.

She pounded on the front door until he rose stiffly and limped to answer as his knees warmed up.

Piper came in without invitation. He closed the door and followed her to the living room, where she spun around.

"You know." She spoke with a flat despair. Only once before had he heard such unhappiness in her voice.

He nodded. "How long do you think it will be until somebody else sees through that wig and that-" He made a circle in the air in front of his face.

She just stared at him.

"Don't worry," Mitch said. "I won't tell anyone." Then a thought. "Does your mom-?"

That melted some fuse inside her and her face distorted. Despair exploding into panic.

"Mitch, please... don't...."

"Piper! I would never do something like that to you-"

He stopped. He had started to wonder how she could possibly entertain the notion that he would hurt her. Because I already did something that hurt her even worse.

After an awkward pause, she said, "Should I get a different wig?"

He reached down to unvelcro his knee pads. "No. When you were coming down the hall...."

He stood, tossed them onto the sofa, and shrugged.

"I recognized you from the way you moved."

Those words punched Piper in the heart. She ran to the door, flung it open, and fled.

**********

"Onion?"

Rose bit her lip, considering. "Are they sweet?"

Mitch cut a piece and put it in his mouth. "Yup."

"Okay. Thin, please."

Mitch shaved several slices from the onion on the table and distributed them between the two sandwiches he was building.

Lunch at the B&C Market was easy. Rose cut some honey ham. Mitch gathered a loaf of whole wheat from the bakery aisle, mayo and relish and pickles from another, chips by the door, an onion from produce, soda from the cooler. He laid these on the small table in the back and went to work while Rose watched. She had to answer the bell out front and serve two customers before she was able to come back and sit.

"Voila!" Mitch said, sliding a sandwich on a paper towel to his cousin.

Rose took a bite, then pulled a chip out of the bag. "How's the project?"