Madonna on Her Back by Alyson Hagy

Author:Alyson Hagy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

Stadia

Laura did what he would have done if he had been in control of himself. She bought five, or was it six, pairs of tickets to Tiger ballgames, she filled her gas tank, and she waited. She knew he was too stubborn to break on the actual anniversary; Dan would never admit to that kind of memory. But he would weaken. Light rain, the rattle of a passing dump truck, LIVE BAIT signs would bring him down. She had only to watch his face instead of the numbers. May 3rd, May 4th, the double-header on the 9th: she had tickets for them all.

Dan’s father had died a year earlier, before Laura met Dan at the MacNeil’s dinner party. The illness, she understood, had been long, lingering—a thing with no boundaries. The last few weeks had dwindled on in the hospital. For Laura, the very thought of a fading death, a death without cutting shock, was numbing. Because there was no way to mark the thing then, to feel the edges and have done with it. And, for her, the power of love and grief was precise and exacting. She remembered exactly how and why she had fallen in love with Dan. His confusion with the formal silverware. His nervous finger tracing the pattern on the handle of the salad fork. That picture was frozen. So was her knowledge of Dan’s father. Liver and kidney failure. Cirrhosis. A funeral in the rain and the small photo on the shelf at Dan’s old house. She had put together a thin collage of what she thought and what she’d heard, and it held. But for Dan she supposed it wasn’t so easy. He didn’t build his scenes, so the stray pieces, floating loose around him, got to him all the time. Laura knew that. Because when he saw a State Road crew on the highway or heard his father’s old fly rods fall off their rack in the garage, his hands shivered over whatever they were trying to grasp.

Laura also knew she couldn’t quite fix it for him. They had lived together for six months, but his father was his past. She could only buy the tickets, get him into Detroit, mix him with a crowd. And she was sure she would have to play it gracefully, like every move was pure instinct, as if they always lived like that—on tour, driving for pleasure. She couldn’t let him know what she was up to, how she was moving them both forward, or he would balk. “This kind of thing has got no anniversary, no God damn memory,” he’d say. “It just happens.”

So she kept the tickets in her jewelry box, a place he never looked, and they were the first thing she touched, really touched, when she finished her shift at the bookstore. They lay on top of her passport in a paper clip, looking like bookmarks that needed to be handed out and given their place in the world. The enameled bracelets

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