Book of Extraordinary Tragedies by Joe Meno

Author:Joe Meno
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akashic Books

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I ignore all the ghosts hovering along the street as I get Jazzy from school in October. I find my niece waiting with a group of other kindergarten students by the east door. Immediately, from the color of her face, I can tell she has been crying. I ask, “What’s wrong?” and when I go to take her hand, she turns and runs away. The backpack trips her up at first and so she drops it and cuts across someone’s front lawn. I have to stop and put the bicycle down and grab her bag and by the time I try to follow her, she’s gone.

I call out her name again and again but there is no reply. I rush back to the bike, put her tiny backpack over my shoulders, and pedal past all the Halloween decorations in windows and placed on lawn after lawn. She is four and I have no idea where she is. Finally, just as the sun is beginning to set, I see her sitting on someone’s front porch, holding the hand of a grinning plastic skeleton. I don’t even bother to ask her what happened. After we get home, I open her backpack and find all her school papers have been balled up or torn apart.

* * *

Alex asks if I want to do our laundry together. I don’t know why, to be honest. It’s her idea so I go with it. She comes by in a beautiful 1980s cream-colored Mercedes, which has a good deal of rust creeping along the rear bumper, but is still a marvelous-looking vehicle. She says it’s her father’s but he lends it to her whenever she wants, which sounds like it’s actually hers but she has a hard time admitting it.

We go to a laundry place on Rockwell. Both of us fold our clothes at the exact same time. A long stretch of time goes by without us talking, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. I like how quiet, how thoughtful she is.

On the television at the laundromat, someone is explaining how the banks no longer have any money. Good, I think. Let them know what it’s like to try to survive. Let them eat cereal without milk for a couple of weeks.

I look over at Alex and she smiles, demurely folding a sweater. I realize how you almost never meet someone like her on the southside. She seems like she has herself together. She wants to know more about me, my neighborhood, is not afraid of going to fast food joints or just hanging out at Circle Park. So we meet out a few times during the week, go get some fries at Pop’s, then on a Friday night she invites me to her dorm room and I fall asleep there and after that things begin to get much more serious.

* * *

Alex makes out like she means it. The sex is something, and that’s all I will say. We sit in her dorm room where she is an RA, in our underwear, and listen to records.

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