What I Did on My Summer Vacation, by Mary (1)

Chapter 3

That night the neighbor's music kept Mary awake. The repeating report of cannon shot from some historically distant war. Mary left bed and sat at her desk. She had placed the notebook paper there earlier. A pencil sharpened nearly to the eraser. She drew a line down the center of the page. She wrote Pro above the left column and Con above the right column. The best always comes first. And the worst, that which we don't choose for ourselves or want to think about, comes last. Dessert before dinner. You versus them. An enjoyable ride on a horse instead of reading Descartes. Mary looked at her bookshelf. Meditations on First Philosophy was somewhere in there alongside Ethics and Heraclitus' On Nature. She wondered if Descartes, Spinoza, or Heraclitus ever witnessed a murder.

Mary took her capris from the floor and fumbled around in their pocket and removed the hundred. She flattened it and placed it on the pro-con page. She stared at it for a while.

After checking on her mother, Mary dressed in a bigger shirt and took her housekeys and left. She took the hundred with her. She walked around the neighborhood, not aiming anywhere in particular. Shapes formed themselves from the 3 A.M. night. The dead man's silhouette at the moment of ballistic impact. The floodlights laying bare the crime for all present to see and evaluate. A spillage of blood on the ground.

Mary leaned on a privacy fence and tried to breathe. A sock or something was stuffed all the way down into her chest. Sweat flowed down her forehead. Pain rocked her chest. She could feel her lungs expanding and collapsing. A grotesque feeling arose in her stomach and welled through her throat. She bent forward and vomited into the grass.

She opened her eyes. Her dinner was there ringed in jaundiced liquid. She turned from the scene and slowly walked back home. She wiped tears on her sleeve. She climbed the stairs to their apartment landing and turned left and unlocked the door and went inside.

-

Mary watched the sunrise pearl into being. Hers was the northwest-facing window so the dark remained longer for her. She dressed in fresh clothes and left her bedroom and whipped up some batter and conjured a host of flapjacks and stacked these on a plate in the kitchen for her mother.

Through the kitchen wall she heard quiet jazz playing in Marianne's apartment. Probably Coltrane – it sounded saxophonic. Mary drank some water and went back to her room. She replaced the hundred in her sock drawer and left the apartment.

Her foot landed on something. The pink slice of a headband was sitting on their welcome mat. Mary stared at it. The flowers and paint were speckled with dirt. She snatched it and flung it over the balustrade. It flew through the air and landed in a bush.

Mary stared out at the morning world. A car drove past. She ran her eyes over the horsefield, overgrown with honey locust, traced the trees guarding its far border, the church across the field, the apartments beside the church. She breathed deeply and closed her door and crossed the landing and knocked on Miss Jones's door.

Marianne answered wearing only a towel.

'Oh! Mary. Good morning.'

'Morning. Can I come in?'

Marianne made a why-not face and nodded her head towards the inside. 'You look like you need some coffee.'

Mary stepped inside and sank into the pleather couch that faced a 40inch TV showing the news. Marianne made a small mug of hazelnut coffee in her Keurig. She stood in the kitchen and glanced at Mary every so often until the machine beeped. She handed the mug to Mary. She didn't refuse the coffee, which she usually eschewed. Mary sat drinking and watching the anchors talk about a new planned extension to Crossover Road into Rogers.