UNTITLED

PAINTING BY CHARLIE KEEFE

And she does.

In the rush of it, she didn’t think to change. She will soon have the time and money to buy fresh clothes, like Fran Fine’s matching sets. Before walking into the gas station, she tears the apron off her uniform so it’s passable as a collared blue dress.

Her perked heels clack up the parking lot, all the way to the young and scruffy gas station attendant.

Slipping the ticket over the counter, she clears her throat: “I’d like to cash this in, please, if you could call up whoever dishes it out. I don’t really know how it works. I’ve never done this before.”

“Let me see.” He looks at the ticket on the counter, flaccid-faced. “This is a gag gift.”

“A what?”

“You know, a gag. A joke. A put-on. Surely whoever handed it to you told you that after they saw your face.” He pushes it back her way and taps the fine print on the back.

She clutches at Gina’s arm: “Come on. Let’s Thelma and Louise out of here. They’ll eat our dust. Randy’s going to choke on it. With both of us gone, he’ll have to do the work himself.” A laugh scratches her throat.

“You know I can’t,” Gina responds. “I’ve got to get Joe through school.”

Joe, Gina’s son. The heat of the moment made Anita forget. Remembering it makes her alone again. She supposes it should

“You mean these five cherries aren’t worth a damn thing?”

Five pitless cherries, somewhere out there a leopard with pitless eyes, herself with pitless pockets. A streak of five losing days, again and again.

“A laugh, that’s all.”

“A laugh,” Anita repeats hard enough to shed a grating silence. She brings a hand to her temple, heat in her face and spreading down the rest of her body.

The attendant rifles through the register. “Look, I’ll give you five dollars for it, just ‘cause I hate to make a girl cry. It’s not funny if they don’t tell you. I’m sorry for the trouble.”

Anita shakes her head. She starts for her car, then turns on her heels. They scuff from the blunt force of it. She comes back for a singular item.

Ringing her up, the attendant asks, “You gonna be okay?”

“Soon.” She digs into her purse.

He shakes his head. “On the house.”

Tires burn rubber, turning into the parking lot she swore to never return to. She dumps everything out of the laundry bag and onto the floorboard. With the bag emptied, she puts her gas station purchase inside.

Anita takes the back way in. Slipping in Randy’s door, the room is dead. None of the other women and no Randy. He’s out for lunch with one of his sponsoring lady friends, the leopard skin thrown against the back of his chair.

Tough luck. He might not have given her the pitless cherries, but he has given her too little, too much.

Her red-nailed hands rummage through the desk for his American Spirit cigarettes and lighter. She lights up, puts the cigarette in her mouth, then heaves the laundry bag onto the desk. After taking the purchase out of the bag, she dumps it over the leopard skin like toilet detergent. It’s that same blue color, but not that same clean scent. A clean scent like that could get nauseating when it singed your nasal passages from years of scrubbing on your knees.

But this, it reeks of oil, heat, and anger. Seven unburnt years.

Anita puts the cigarette out on the kerosene.

BY SEGAN BETTENHAUSEN