Make Believe by Tom Epperson

Author:Tom Epperson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alaya Press
Published: 2021-10-31T16:33:47+00:00

26

“Like, wow!” said Penny as we walked along the boardwalk, and I laughed.

“Sorry. I had no idea it was gonna be like that.”

“Oh no, it was great. Not every girl can say she had her foot stepped on by Dennis Rodman!”

“Listen, about my friend, Larry. He’s not usually like that. He’s really a pretty good guy. But his wife left him and now he seems to be having some kind of nervous breakdown or midlife crisis.”

“Poor guy.”

We strolled past closed-down businesses on one side and a straight line of palm trees and light poles on the other. We could hear the ocean’s faint, sad swish and swash. We couldn’t see any stars but we could see a big bright moon. Just a scattering of people were left. A cadaverous man sucking on an oxygen tank as he walked his plodding, aged beagle, who looked as though he could use an oxygen tank too. A pair of down-and-outers sitting on steps and sharing a bottle in a brown paper bag. A very fit-looking girl zooming by on roller blades, perhaps dreaming of being the next Suzy Hotrod. Two fat teenage girls, wearing ridiculously tight and revealing clothing, marching along on quivering thighs, one talking on her phone and the other texting on hers, oblivious to each other and the palm trees and the ocean and the moon.

“You’ve got an advantage over me,” I said.

“What?”

“Well, you’ve googled me, so presumably you know all about me. But I don’t know anything about you. Except you work on Montana and you’re from Illinois and you’ve got a nosy old neighbor named Mrs. Stallings.”

“I don’t think I mentioned her being nosy.”

“Is she?”

She giggled. “Yep. Nobody can sneeze on our street without Mrs. Stallings saying gesundheit.”

“What part of Illinois are you from?”

“Anna. It’s just this little dink-water town. Very Republican. Very white. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. When I got out of high school, I moved to Chicago. I was there till I was thirty. And then I decided it wasn’t happening for me in Chicago and I came out here. And that’s the thrilling story of Penny Ruemmler!”

“You still got family back in Anna?”

“Last time I checked, my mother was still alive.”

“I take it you’re not close to her.”

“She’s only close to people she thinks will buy her a drink or loan her the rent money.”

“Brothers? Sisters?”

“I had one sister.”

I noted the past tense.

“What was her name?”

“Jacqueline. Jackie. She was four years older than me. She’d take care of me when Mom was off on one of her benders. When she was fourteen, she was playing softball at the park. She put her hand on a metal fence, and then she just dropped dead. A power line had come down and was touching the fence about a hundred feet away, and she got electrocuted.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. Jackie deserved better. She was the best person I ever knew. Really brave. Always determined to never let life get her down. Oh, look! What is that?”

Penny was pointing into the sky.

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