When You See Her by Barbara Boehm Miller

Author:Barbara Boehm Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: women's fiction, historical fiction, carnival, identity, freedom, perception
Publisher: Red Adept Publishing
Published: 2023-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

By nighttime, Gigi felt horrible, hungover and remorseful that she had caused such trouble.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll clean out the truck. I promise.” She had come over to the house to apologize and was trying to drink the cup of coffee I’d made for her, but she gagged a little bit every time she took the smallest sip.

“I hosed it out hours ago.”

“I’m sorry, Lo. Poor Lonny too. I ought to go apologize to him too. You want to come down to the Showstop with me?”

“You’re going to go like that?”

Gigi seemed to have given no thought to how horrible she looked and smelled. She unstuck her blouse from her body and tried to comb her fingers through her hair, but they got snagged on the tangles.

“Come on and take the night off. You got to ease up on the drinking anyway. Even Jim said as much.” I nodded to the empty chair where he usually sat at the kitchen table. “Jim drove out to see if he could help Scratchy and Thelma. They’ve been having more trouble with their neighbors.”

Jim’s way of helping them would no doubt involve what he sometimes referred to as “cracking skulls,” and even as I objected to that approach on some level, it was likewise impossible to imagine how deliberate conversation would be any help at all.

“I get antsy just sitting around. You know?” Gigi scanned the closed kitchen cabinet doors, wondering, I knew, what there was to drink in the house.

I pulled a deck of cards from the silverware drawer and started shuffling, liking the falling click-clack of the cards as they bridged together. I dealt out a hand. “We can play some gin rummy. I won’t even keep score.”

Gigi put her head down on the table and started to cry, big unexpected sobs that nonetheless didn’t surprise me.

I nudged her pile of cards closer to her. “It’s your turn.”

When she kept crying, I patted her shoulder and rearranged her cards into an organized fan and played her turn for her. Little by little, she began to pay attention to me, to what I was saying, answering when I asked what she wanted to discard and what she wanted to hold.

“I can’t do this no more, Lo.”

“Yes, you can.” I peeled a card from the take pile and pushed it facedown toward her.

We played for a good long while, until finally Gigi fell asleep on the couch. I sat in the recliner next to her, wending my way between dreams and wakefulness, not wanting to leave her unattended for fear she would find the Four Roses above the sink or leave and go home or, worse still, make her way to the Showstop.

My vigilance appeared to have some good effect because Gigi developed and refined an ability to go full days and nights without drinking. Something always came up, of course, to prevent her from giving it up entirely, but the truth of the matter was she wouldn’t have had much of a social life or much to do even if she had wanted to attempt such a feat.

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