Sissy Spacek Chemo Patient (pt 2).

Faye offers her M&Ms from an open bag but Jackie says no thank you. You look good, her aunt tells her. You look like you’re getting the hang of it, being a girl, I mean.

Yeah, I’m a whiz with the sewing machine, Jackie says. All the girls in home ec are so jealous they could just die.
Her aunt’s teeth are black at the roots and her breath smells. I’m just trying to say the right thing here, she says. That you look good.

And you look like cancer, Jackie says, and I hope to god that’s what it is.

I’m fit as a fiddle, Faye says. But check back next year, you never know. Leaves blow down the road and across the sidewalk in waves. Jackie wishes she had sunglasses, or hair with bangs, because it is far too bright out.

She’s got a guy, Faye says. He’s in the Army, a sergeant or something. He would have married her already if she didn’t clean out his bank with all that drug horseshit.

People can be awful, it’s a tragedy, Jackie says, every world an icicle. Can you please tell me what this favor is because I am a very long way from home.

You can stay the night with us, Faye says and Jackie slaps her across the face, rocking her aunt’s head to the side; Jackie did not know she was going to do this, but once done she is filled with the greatest satisfaction she will ever know.

Faye cups her cheek. Nobody touched you kids and nobody made you do nothing to each other, it was just you playing in the tub and shit, people make movies like that all the time and nobody runs around calling them perverts.

They don’t sell them, Jackie says. They don’t pass them around town.

They stare one another down like old dogs. This sergeant, Jackie says, Money figured out a way to keep him, I guess.

Faye pushes up her sleeves; her arms are boiled from a lifetime working in diners. I told him she was pregnant, she says, and he better do the right thing if he knew what was good for him, and got my friend at the neonatal to make me some pictures to show. They made up before he went back to the war, and he’s been writing her every day.

Then mission accomplished, Jackie says, but some day you’re going to need a baby.

She stops, realizing; she cocks her head, looking at her aunt with her mouth open wide.

He’s a nigger, Faye says. Maybe as dark as your daddy. He’s back in seven months if he don’t get killed, not that Jesus is that kind.

She leans back inside of the El Camino, coming back up with a dull grey cylinder like a thermos, handing it over. There he is, she says. I got more of his stuff, a lot more, and you’re going to want it.

Jackie holds the cylinder; Faye is saying more but she isn’t listening. They didn’t find him until two weeks after Jackie came back to Rain City, dumped in a ditch with his pants off, and it was all over town that they didn’t have a funeral because he was all ate up, and that Jackie had gone to the house to get him but they called the police on her.

On Sundays she gets to go outside, Faye says, getting into her car. Come back at breakfast if you’re still around. You can talk to her about it.

Why me, Jackie says. The thermos is tucked under her chin, cold and comforting.

Ask her, Faye says. It means a big deal to her for some reason. She pulls away from the curb, and then Jackie is chased onto the sidewalk by another car waiting to take the open space. She starts walking, surprised at how heavy the ashes are, and how they shift and how the solid pieces ting against the metal. She spins it in her hands, listening to the music of her brother’s bones, considering where she’s going to spend the night.