The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters Read Free

the daytime, Mabel didn’t mind the search for help. She’d jump a fence and cross a feedlot to drink from the pipe of a windmill. She’d watch the hawks circle then land in the trees planted for windbreaks at the edges of the fields. She’d eventually scare up a farmer who’d probably make fun of her lack of mechanical know-how, but the mocking was usually playful and flirty and Mabel enjoyed it. The fact was, Mabel had taken a few courses in mechanics from a community college, but she liked getting lost and needing help. She liked kicking up new people from a landscape so forsaken.
    With Lily in her bedroom, Mabel returned to the fainting sofa. “Eat me,” Mabel mumbled, to Lily maybe or to no one in particular. “Bite me.”
You’re much too easygoing
, Mabel remembered her mother telling her, back when Mabel’s father was still alive.
People will stomp all over you, if you’re not careful
. What kind of a thing was that to tell an eight-year-old girl, Mabel now wondered. “Kiss my rosy red,” she said. She picked up a fedora from a hat stand, spanked off its dust,and put it on. Size 7. She felt a static electricity working out from the brim of the hat, lifting strands of hair from her skin. She used to think that snap of shock was her father having become some short-wired ghost, giving her a little smooch. Sometimes Mabel saw her father’s reflection in the corners of glass or caught scent of the clove gum he constantly chewed, and she knew he remained watchful and curious about the ways of her life. Mabel wasn’t at all religious, but it only made sense that her father kept near. His blood was still inside of her, after all.
    Jordan drove up just as all the old clocks for sale on the wall began their fractured chiming. “Anybody got the time?” Jordan said, smirking and stepping in. The shop’s light glinted on the key he wore on a shoestring around his neck. Mabel and Lily first met Jordan a year or so before when he’d come out to sell some torn-up Louis L’Amours. Mabel bought everything he brought out over the months. She paid much too much for the metal ribs of an old barrel and the red tailfin of a wrecked ’57 Chevy. Jordan’s teeth were already yellow and broken from too much nicotine and sugar, so he had a shy, tight-lipped smile Mabel and Lily both fell for.
    He leaned over the back of the sofa and Mabel touched at the key swinging from the end of its string. “What’s that key to, anyway?” Mabel said.
    “Some lock somewhere,” Jordan said, shrugging. “But I got this deal I’ve got to strike up with you. Think you’ll buy this?” He held out a silver egg-shaped container, and hetwisted off its top to show her the green stains inside. He said, “In this, you’d cure your betel nuts in lime.”
    “I don’t know,” Mabel said, suddenly tired of contemplating the price of junk.
    Jordan set the betel-nut thing next to Mabel on the sofa, and he shouted out for Lily. He took a swig from a little bottle of Vicks Formula 44 he carried in his pants pocket. “Oh, Lily,” he sung out.
    He loved Lily very much, Mabel knew, but Lily was devoted to no one in her life. She was only moved by the attention of strangers, particularly strange men in their late twenties, men who maybe had a divorce already, or at least some well-earned disillusion. Lily worked nights at the steak-house and days at the counter of a bakery in Bonnevilla. The bakery was across the street from a Texaco station and down the street from the police station and the library. Mechanics and cops and mustached librarians in tweed would come in to buy stale pastries at half price and to tease her about the coffee as black and nasty as bilgewater.
    It did seem to Mabel, as she watched Lily come down the stairs, that Lily wore their father’s suicide almost seductively. Maybe the men sitting alone in the bakery, leaning in toward her as she poured her awful coffee, would smell her perfume, a perfume as uncomplicated, as