PS_Winter_2012_PS Summer 11/25/12 6:55 PM Page 3
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TWO TRAILERS wo weekends after Myra’s old neighbors vacated the trailer next to hers, this man and his bony brown Lab pulled in with all his furniture tied down in the bed of his pickup. His and Myra’s two trailers sat on either side of a broad driveway, fronting a small thicket of trees nested deep by hills of rolling corn. Myra introduced herself, and he shook her hand with a big grin and eyeballed her breasts. “Very pleased to meet you,” he said. His name was Booker. A day after moving in, he tacked a confederate flag beside his front door, and after a week of waking early to his truck revving and revving, Myra gave up on sleeping as late as she used to. She slid from under her covers. When her feet touched the cold bathroom floor, she tucked her hands under her arms, sat on the tub’s rim, and squeaked the hot water faucet. She was accustomed to men looking at her the way Booker had; she was twenty-five and waitressed at Hildebrand’s, where Nancy, another server, had once told her, “Myra, you could land any man you wanted.” But Myra had never wanted men, and since last year, when Tracy left, she hadn’t wanted many women either. After breakfast the air hung blue and misty when she locked the trailer behind her. In Booker’s back yard, his Lab pined at her over its shoulder. In the past week she’d once seen Booker out there threatening his dog with a stick, charging, then hiding the stick behind his back and calling sweetly again. She smiled at the pooch and ducked into her Chevette. She followed the line of telephone poles that ran with the road into town. As a kid she had often seen her father working the tops of poles like these. Standing way up there in the unfolded arm of his cherry picker, he’d salute her
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Winter Sun by Janice Hayes-Cha © 2012 in his hard hat as she walked to school. Now she drove this route five days a week, past barns and silos and the treecovered mountains she never tired of looking at. She pictured herself as an old woman, still living in this valley in the middle of Pennsylvania. She climbed the mountains often, whether alone or with
a girlfriend, and had found the hidden cliffs, ridges, and pockets, secrets between her and the landscape. The view of it had been what sold her on the trailer, besides her limited means. When she moved in four years ago, the Levis, a retired couple, invited her to dinner in the other trailer. During the
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