Don't You Cry Read Free

said it was more like a stupid coincidence.
    Seeing as the tree was disassembled and stuffed in a box, it was hard to find. There were a lot of boxes in that storage facility. A lot of boxes. And I inadvertently stumbled upon the wrong one apparently, because when I lifted the lid of a box and exposed a mound of photographs of some happy little family sitting beside a squat home, lifting one up and asking of Esther, Who’s this? she snatched it quickly from my hand and said point-blank, No one .I didn’t really have a chance to see the picture, but still, it didn’t look like no one to me. But I didn’t push the issue. Esther didn’t like to talk about her family. That I knew. While I groaned and griped about mine all the time, Esther kept her feelings on the inside.
    She tossed the picture back in the box and replaced the lid.
    We found that tree and lugged it home together, but not before first stopping by our favorite diner where we sat nearly alone in the vacant place, eating pancakes and sipping coffee in the middle of the day. We watched the snow fall. We laughed at people trying to drag themselves through it, or excavate their cars from pyramids of snow. Those who were fortunate enough to dig themselves out called dibs on their parking spots. They filled them with random things—a bucket, a chair—so no one else would park there. Parking spots were like gold around here, especially in winter. That day, Esther and I sat in the window of the diner and watched this, too—we watched our neighbors lug chairs from their homes to stake a claim in the scooped-out parking spots, ones which would soon fill again with snow—feeling grateful all the time for public transportation.
    And then Esther and I carried that tree home where we spent the night prettifying it with lights and ornaments galore, and when we were done, Esther sat crisscross-applesauce on the rose-colored sofa and strummed her guitar while I hummed along: “Silent Night,” “Jingle Bells.” That was last year, the year she bought for me a pair of woolly slipper socks to keep my feet warm because in our apartment I was cold twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I could hardly ever get warm. It was a thoughtful gift, an attentive gift, the kind that proved she’d been listening to me as I complained time and again about my cold feet. I look down at my feet and there they are: the woolly slipper socks.
    But where is Esther?
    I continue my search, for what I don’t know, but I find stray pens and mechanical pencils. A stuffed animal from her childhood days, ratty and worn, hides on the shelf of a piddling closet whose doors no longer run on the track. Boxes of shoes line the closet floor. I peer inside, finding every last one of the pairs to be sensible and boring: flats, loafers, sneakers.
    Absolutely nothing with heels.
    Absolutely nothing in a color other than black or white or brown.
    And a note.
    A note tucked there on top of the IKEA desk, in the stash of paper beneath the occupational therapy textbook, among a cell phone bill and a homework assignment.
    A note, unsent and folded in thirds as if she was on the verge of sticking it in an envelope and placing it in the mail, but then got sidetracked.
    I put the cap back on the water; I pick up the pens. How was it that I never realized Esther was such a slob? I muse over the thought: What else don’t I know about my roomie?
    And then I read the note because, of course, how could I not read the note? It’s a note, which is all sorts of stalker-ish. It’s typed—which is such an anal-retentive Saint Esther thing to do—and signed All my love , with an E and a V . All my love, EV . Esther Vaughan.
    And that’s when it hits me: maybe Saint Esther isn’t such a saint, after all.

Alex
    One thing should be clear: I don’t believe in ghosts.
    There are logical explanations for everything: something as simple as a loose