American Galaxy

Moussaka

​

Ben’s head was tilted back, his eyes aimed through the partially opened window at the moon. Anyone catching the slightest glimpse of him would assume he had life in the palm of his hand.

 

Finally someone in the car behind Ben’s honked their horn and, guided by a mixture of muscle memory and foolishness, he darted across four lanes of Route 60 onto Centerville Road never having looked to see it the light was green.

 

All that hassle for an energy drink from a convenience store, a vice he allowed himself since he was on his way to the gym to work out for at least a few hours. Colonial Fitness was three miles down Centerville, and Ben chuckled to himself over what a guy using dumbbells next to him had said while making mostly pointless conversation.

 

“The Colony…,” he’d managed between reps, “didn’t have gymnasiums … or much use for’em.”

 

Ben looked at the guy as if to recognize that he’d said something, but not in a way

that might encourage any more of it. At the time it seemed to him that the fellow weightlifter was weird, but since then Ben had begun to notice the seemingly endless number of concerns that used “Colonial” in their name.

 

So maybe the dumbbell guy made a point after all.

 

Ben let out a hearty chuckle as he passed the set of business signs that included “Colonial Lasik.” Sure, he thought: make that trip by horseback from Jamestown into Williamsburg for a routine eye procedure involving non-invasive surgery.

An ambulance was emerging from Musket Trailer Park, obviously in no rush since the

shooting on Rifle Road was previously reported to be a certain DOA.

 

This one claimed the life of only one person, while last week’s qualifier for a mass shooting on Trigger Trace in the same park had taken two lives and injured three.

 

Ben was content for the time being to reside in Galaxy Estates, also a mobile home

park, in an older single wide on Milky Way. There hadn’t been a shooting in Galaxy Estates since it had opened in the 1970’s. Musket Mobile Home Park, directly across the street and railroad tracks from Galaxy Estates, also opened in the 1970’s, had enough fatal shootings to nearly double the current population of the park.

 

The general consensus in Williamsburg, Virginia, was that kids in the one park played dodgeball, while in the other they dodged bullets.

 

Ben was looking towards Musket when one of the colored light bulbs on the ancient strand bordering the park’s sign went out, followed in the blink of an eye by every one of them. No more blue or yellow or green or purple now that just one bulb had been extinguished.

 

Only darkness.

 

Then Ben glanced over at the unilluminated restaurant, American Take-out. He noted

how peaceful the place looked before sunrise, and then how the resplendent white LED lights that illuminated the Galaxy Estates sign seemed a cruel contrast to the red, hyper-blinking lights of the ambulance hauling away another statistic.

 

The lights in this part of the city made him wonder who was up to what, so much so that he decided he’d turn around and quickly pull into Galaxy Estates to drive by Thedalia’s trailer.

 

It was long shot, but Ben fantasized about the young woman being in terrible

destress as he shows up just in the nick of time to save her from her constantly darkened world.

 

A week earlier, Thedalia had ordered Friday Fries from American Take-Out, and Ben nearly dropped her order on the front porch when she opened the door. At that moment Ben went from being obsessed with his Body Mass Index of 18.3 and being known by customers as “Five Star Ben,” his perfect review rating on the job, to someone often lost in thought about how a to woo the beautiful blind girl living on Lunar Lane.

 

And that’s just what Ben was wondering when he turned his little Honda toward her trailer and was immediately bewildered to see the lights on.

 

“The hell?” Ben asked his car’s windshield.

 

Why indeed would a blind person need a lighted room of any kind, much less in what

Ben assumed was her bedroom? Ben looked just long enough to know that he was being creepy and would be better served to take out his rapidly increasing frustration over the matter at the gym.

 

He peered towards the irksome matter a few, perplexed seconds longer, then drove away just as he received at first one, then two text messages before he had time to even glance at his phone screen.

 

Once he was back on Centerville Road, Ben saw that the messages were from two different people. He sighed to himself that neither message would be from Thedalia, because he hadn’t had the courage to give her his number.

 

******

 

Ray didn’t like waking up to the sounds of gunshots, sirens, or this early in any event. He mostly lay in bed for hours after waking, his eyes closed as he imagined what it would be like to sleep soundly. Or maybe just to never wake up.

 

Ammo Avenue was one of the louder spots in Musket, as everyone called the mobile

home park. If you said you lived in Musket, locals knew you probably didn’t sleep because of the gunshots, fights, police, or just the regrets you had over having moved there.

 

Ray didn’t move to Musket. He was born there. When he reminded people of this, they gave him the look that this meant he was simply a local. But sometimes he’d elaborate, telling them honestly that his mother gave birth to him in that very trailer.

 

Ray seldom went on to share that his birth took place in the same bedroom he sleeps in now or the same bed, because it just became more than even he wanted to be true.

 

February of 1980 was a wild one for weather, even in Virginia. It was almost ninety degrees that Sunday, then record snowfall fell on Monday. Ray’s mother was not quite fifteen years-old when he was born, his twenty year-old father in jail for statutory rape charges. Ray’s grandfather couldn’t have cared less that his daughter was pregnant, and wouldn’t have bothered to call the cops on Ray’s father had a

rumor not been spreading around Musket that he’d knocked up his own daughter.

 

Forty-six years later Ray had no education, a dead end job as a cook, two long-dead parents and a grandfather who wouldn’t let him hear the end any of it.

The knocks on the paper-thin glass bedroom window didn’t come as any shock to

Ray, and he even reached over his head to knock back upon his side of the window in acknowledgment that he was there. He knew it had to be Glenny.

 

“Shhh,” Ray said for no reason as he opened the trailer door down the hall from his bedroom, knowing Gramps, his grandfather, wouldn’t have heard Glenny’s knock.

 

“Get’n here and make some coffee,” Ray insisted.

“Mornin’,” Glenny said to Ray’s pot belly, which she smirked at before pointing herself in the direction of the trailer’s kitchen. “Wanna cup?”

 

“Yep,” Ray said. “Can’t shit without it.”

 

“Charming,” Glenny said, pulling her hand into the sleeve of her sweater so that she could use it to wipe out the cup she planned to use.

 

Glenny was in her mid-20s, the

mother of a child she hadn’t had custody of since the day he was born, and always looked to Ray like a woman in need of one of those TV talkshow makeovers.

 

Glenny’s thinning brown hair, thickening waistline and pancake flat chest all combined to make his neighbor look homely in his eyes.

 

To Ray, Glenny was like a phone that might have been the wrong size or color. None of it mattered so long as the call got made. After all, while he viewed her in

mostly respectable terms, Glenny had grown accustomed to making the expected

and almost obligatory moves on Ray when he appeared before her to be ready for a sexual favor, almost always of the oral variety.

 

No imagination would be necessary or passion

exhibited. Simply a favor each time, and with the expectation of a favor of some other kind in return.

 

Ray looked more intently at Glenny than he’d intended, wondering to himself about the supply of beef and eggplant pasta on hand at the restaurant.

 

Glenny cought Ray’s stare and took it for meaningful just as he began to look through her as if she were the wax paper he

used to line the containers that held the daily special.

 

“Come over before work,” Glenny said, inferring precisely what Ray would take the invitation to mean. “Maybe one o’clock or so?”

 

“Sure,” Ray said without any enthusiasm to speak of. He knew it was safe to slip over

for about ten minutes at that hour of the day, since Glenny’s brother, Brad, never made an appearance until after dark, if at all.

 

Brad had been back home a few nights in a row, Ray guessed, since he’d stolen a few packets of the powder from Brad’s bedroom. Ray figured it wouldn’t take much more than that amount to set some things straight.

 

And maybe help that asshole Ben finally lose a star or two in the process.

 

***

 

Corey enjoyed the gym in the early mornings before it was opened to the public. He folded freshly dried towels and imagined Ben wearing one of them as he made his way to and from the shower following his Five Star workout.

 

“The towels are fresh and hot,” Corey texted Ben, someone he really didn’t know but tried to remind of his existence every time he had the chance.

“Cool,” Ben texted back, not even thinking about adding, “thank you.”

 

Corey wanted to risk a banter of some kind, to say, “No, not cool, but warm and ready for you, sir….” But he thought better of it and, having stacked all of the fresh towels on the table

near the entry of the locker room, went about cleaning the mirrors along the wall.

 

Just last week Ben stood in front of the long wall of mirrors confidently telling Corey the secrets of his success as a food delivery driver for American Take-Out.

 

“I take myself more seriously than I do the work,” Ben told Corey.

 

The statement seemed ridiculous but so did being known as Five Star Ben, Corey knew, and he was just happy to stand there watching Ben in his towel, glistening as he said

self-aggrandizing things that had no basis in reality.

 

“That makes sense,” Corey lied as he peered at the front of Ben’s towel for what had proven to be the allowable time.

 

“Sure it does,” Ben said. “I make sure I’m put together in ways that make a customer want me back at their front door.”

 

Ben noticed he had Corey’s rapt attention and felt deserving of it.

 

“Because what they see has gotta be as good as what

they get,” he continued, slipping a pair of underwear on without first removing the towel.

 

Been flung the towel off of his midsection in the direction of Corey, who made a point to

drape it around his neck instead of dropping it into the basket he was hauling around for just that purpose.

 

“I’m sure they love what they see,” Corey said as he watched Ben arrange himself inside of the underwear and then strut over to his locker to put a shirt on.

 

“Everyone sells what they’ve got,” Ben continued.

 

“Yep,” Corey agreed devotedly.

 

“And anyone can deliver a pizza!” Ben declared. “But not everyone can deliver THIS,”

Ben said, pivoting his six-foot, two-inch, 190 pound-frame to face Corey one last time.

 

The brown eyes and wavy, dirty blonde hair only added to what needed no more, Cory thought to himself.

 

****

 

“I know, I know,” Ben texted Ray. “I’ll be there to load up and roll out on time.”

Ray seemed to want to reinforce some notion he had that Ben worked under him, no matter how many customer-awarded stars Ben had next to his name.

 

“Just making sure,” Ray emphasized annoyingly. “Since your work reflects on my work.”

 

“Whatever,” Ben texted, then stuffed his phone into his hoodie pocket and got out of the car for the short walk to the gym door.

 

He noticed Corey watching him from the other side of the windows, then looked away for

a second as he stuck his hands down the front his gym shorts to keep them warm.

 

*****

 

“Just lean back and get comfortable,” he said. “I’ll watch over you as you enjoy yourself for me.”

 

Dolly had rehearsed all of her positions and knew where her legs would need to be for this request. Just as she found her positions in the darkness that had been her world for the last few years, he lost sight of her completely.

 

“Umm,” he said patiently to a darkened screen. “Lights out…”

 

“I’m sorry,” Dolly said, then used her foot to again press the button she’d accidentally

hit to bring light back to the setting. It was on an extension cord leading to a floor lamp in her bedroom, and had previously been used to light a Christmas tree in her apparent in Norfolk, the last residence she ever saw.

 

Dolly had an audience of one - DonOne, that is, whose profile said he was a white male from the United States Midwest region, between 28 and 46 years-of-age, a site member for two years.

 

“Oh there you are again,” DonOne appreciatively cooed. “I didn’t know if for a moment you

were having me identify with your world….”

 

“No,” Dolly whispered, overlooking the insensitivity of the remark since it went with

the territory. “Just a little technical difficulty…”

 

“That’s okay,” DonOne said in a businesslike tone. “But the show must go on.”

 

Dolly nodded in agreement and got back to it.

 

 

TOM YUM

 

At the ripe old age of nineteen, Ben had more daydreams in his eyes than experience under his belt. Until only a year earlier, he’d lived in Surry, a town of less than 300 people occupying under one square mile of land.

 

“In no hurry?” The man may as well have said to no one as Ben sat in a parking space outside Colonial Fitness, having had his daily workout.

 

“Hurry for what?” Ben asked the man in return.

 

“To let someone have that parking space!” The man said from his luxury SUV’s opened window to Ben.

 

“Plenty more space right over there,” Ben pointed out with an air of indifference.

 

“But you’re not using the space you’re in for anything except sitting there on your phone,” the man began arguing.

 

“And so someone has to walk an extra fifty feet to get to the GYM!,” Ben said.

 

The man looked at Ben but said nothing.

 

“So be it, then,” Ben said, in no mood for a challenge but not leaving until he felt like it.

 

The man stared blankly at Ben until the futility of it all prompted him to move along.

 

“So be it,” Ben repeated as a way of making his lack of concern for the man’s invented plight perfectly clear.

 

Ben could remember having something to complain about, though he seldom did. His mother developed aggressive, recurring breast cancer before he was out of diapers. He never knew a time when she was safely out of the woods, or when visiting the city with her so she could be treated wasn’t a sign of bad news.

 

That was Williamsburg for an even younger Ben. Another diagnosis. Radiation.

Chemotherapy. When his mother died the year before, Ben emphatically told his father that he had no intention of following in his footsteps as a groundskeeper for the nuclear power plant.

 

In Ben’s mind the plant had killed his mother, though he had no proof or arguments that went beyond the hushed cries into his pillow at night. And Ben’s father, not to be outdone in blame gamming, associated his son’s birth with his wife’s cancer. Since he was unwilling to disassociate Ben’s life and her cancer while she was still alive, by the time she died he seemed to want

to bury Ben with her.

 

It hurt Ben that his father couldn’t view his own son’s childhood has anything more than a metastasizing. Less than a month after his mother died, he was unceremoniously invited to leave the only home he’d ever known.

 

Ben would rapidly pick up on a world of work and hustling that completely lacked any intimacy capable of throwing him off of his game.

 

From the looks and even stares he received from women and men, Ben felt like a kind of traveling exhibition who might encourage enough tips to someday get him away from the city of Colonial Doctors and Dying.

 

****

 

Thedalia had been blinded by trauma, she was told, so since the event she would ask the universe if some equally momentous but altogether less tragic occurrence could return her sight. She had nothing to bargain with or promise in

return for such a beneficial twist of fate. She just wondered if it was possible, such a miraculous thing.

 

An especially sweet nurse had once suggested as much.

 

“Bad took it,” the nurse said. “Good could bring it back.”

 

Thedalia clung to that possibility, however remote, as she navigated her tiny trailer.

 

Her kitchen was so small and that was perfect, which was true of everything about the trailer. Only one bedroom, bathroom and even a single closet, which held what she had and wore with room to spare.

 

Thedalia also wondered about the possibility that the loss of her sight was to save her from seeing too much too soon afterwards. She knew if she’d seen the faces of the reporting officer, investigator, or even the look on the faces of the hospital

personnel swabbing away at her, that it might have been even worse.

 

THEY saw. SHE couldn’t. And it’s as if by the time she’d reached that point, it seemed to her that the medical personnel assumed she’d always been blind.

 

For Thedalia, it was as if they were sad for her that someone did it against an especially

defenseless person.

 

“Her hair is brown,” Thedalia heard one say to another. “So if the perp’s wasn’t then we know we’re looking for -“

 

“- BLACK!” Thedalia said. “His hair was black.”

 

“Umm,” one of the nurses said. “How can you be so sure?”

 

“I saw it!” Thedalia roared back.

 

“Oh,” the nurse said and then told another nurse she’d be back in ten minutes.

 

But what Thedalia heard in her mind was, “You mean to tell me you could see the guy and managed to still let him get at you and do this thing to you?”

 

Thedalia could see what was happening to her in real time, but not through her eyesight, she later tried to explain to the investigator.

 

“Can you tell me exactly when during the attack,” the investigator ventured. “How far

in did you black out?”

 

“I went blind,” she cried. “I didn’t black out. Besides, how far in does someone need to be before it’s okay for their eyes to not want to see any more?”

 

****

 

Corey hadn’t felt as much personal pride since an encounter in Richmond’s

Carytown a few months before. A city kid by nature, he felt at ease standing outside his apartment building at two o’clock in the morning, smoking a cigarette and observing the goings-on.

 

Smiling back is all he was guilty of. Two guys walk past him, one of them winks provocatively, Corey giggles and smiles at both men.

 

“I’ll kill your bitch ass out here tonight,” the guy who winked said to him as both guys

pressed Corey’s face into the ancient cobblestone street.

 

While they didn’t kill Corey that night, they soundly separated him from his dignities, then trotted away with howls of self-satisfaction before he felt secure enough to stand up. It was as if the weight of the two men were still upon him so that he couldn’t get up. When he finally did, he reasoned that he’d remain outside long enough to smoke and hopefully the indentations from the cobblestones in his face would go away.

 

Corey didn’t cry that night and had really stopped wondering if the two guys were straight, gay, or if they’d been spooked by something that kept them from killing him. He contemplated what he could assume from memory might have been their more specific demographics.

 

Haunted by recollections of the punishing assault, Corey soon moved to his aunt’s place at Galaxy Estates in Williamsburg.

 

He was still looking back, but trying to look up and be bold in his own way.

 

****

 

“Son…” Ray heard his grandfather say as he considered the soup of the day. It was nippy out, even damp, so he stood inside the restaurant’s doorway wishing his grandfather hadn’t joined him.

 

Through the front window Ray saw a coroner’s van pulling out of Musket onto Centerville Road, obviously headed for the medical examiner. He’d heard several rounds of gunfire earlier in the day, but Glenny had also come over and mentioned

that someone may have overdosed.

 

Ray could hear his grandfather clearing his throat of nothing at all, then glanced that way just in time to see the old man shake his head, discouraged.

 

Taking this personally, Ray mumbled to himself but audibly enough, “Not much longer for you, old man. This’ll do it.”

 

Then Ray pulled an old, metal salt shaker with a large handle from the back of a cupboard, unscrewed the top and poured in the contents of the little bags of power he’d stolen from Glenny’s trailer.

 

Most days Ray was the only one at the restaurant, since it was a smaller affair. Ben was the most frequent person coming and going, picking up meals for delivery.

 

People often ordered and paid for the daily specials online, which kept Ray from having to deal with the public any more than necessary.

 

When Corey walked in, Ray knew it was his usual since he had the day off and liked to pay with cash. Corey wanted to make sure that Ben delivered it to him in Galaxy, even if it would be an easy enough walk to get it himself.

 

“Delivery, please,” Cory said.

 

“I know, I know,” Ray said. “Your buddy Five Star’ll be by there for you to see later on, then.”

 

Corey didn’t enjoy Ray’s tone, and sensed he was capable of worse things than a poor attitude. If it weren’t for wanting so desperately to see Ben on his day off from the gym, Corey would have chosen another dinner option.

 

“I guess all’s quiet over there in Galaxy,” Ray said kind of bitterly. “As usual.”

 

“It’s cool,” Corey said. “I guess.”

 

“Must be,” Ray agreed with some sarcasm. “Cool not having gunfire and junkies and dealers and cops and ambulances to deal with.”

 

“I suppose,” Corey said, then added honestly, “I’m glad I don’t live in Musket.”

 

“Yeah,” Ray said. “I’m glad you don’t, either. We got enough weird shit going on over there without you.”

 

“Guess so,” Corry said, resigned to the fact that he didn’t care enough about Ray to argue with him.

 

“Keep the change and I’ll see Five-Star when he gets there.”

 

“You’ll enjoy that,” Roy said mockingly. “I bet.”

 

“Then you win,” Corey said, then added. “For once.”

 

Corey was out the door before Ray stopped speaking to him.

 

“You gotta go, old man,” Ray mumbled, then began to think too much to himself about the abuse.

 

Ray didn’t finish school because Gramps told him he was too stupid to keep going. He’d lost one job after another through his twenties because he’d been told he wasn’t being paid enough, was a sucker and didn’t have the skills to be a real man with a real job.

 

“That’s why I whipped your ass when you were a boy,” Gramps often said. “Because I knew you’d grow up to be too much of a shit for me to wanna hit! So I had to do it while I could.”

 

And he had. Ray was snatched from his bed in the morning for a wake-up beatdown so many times that he knew the taste of blood in his cereal.

 

Often the old man would go to work, guiding cars on and off of the ferry to and from Surry, then come back home looking at Ray like he better be friendly, or else. And Ray did what he was supposed to, even if it never really paid off.

 

Because, or else.

 

*****

 

Ben turned slowly onto Stardust Street, feeling good that his day was approaching an end. As it tended to be lately, Corey would be his last delivery of the night and home was only a couple of blocks away.

 

Milky Way, where Ben was renting a trailer, was also lined with crape myrtle trees and rhododendrons. Children rode their bikes, played and used colored chalk to draw rainbows, the sun and moon onto the

road.

 

Residents drove their cars slowly over the temporary works of original art, waved approvingly at the children and sometimes stopped to offer encouragement.

 

No one in Galaxy ever really spoke about the constant string of tragedies taking place an easy walk away in Musket. They simply resided beneath the same sun, moon and stars as the less fortunate and noticed nothing proximate to them so long as they persisted in looking up, up and away.

 

Corey would as usual be the last delivery made, since Ben would almost be home. As he got out of the car with the delivery in hand, been looked up the hill toward

Centerville Road. At that particular angle, the backs of the lighted sign for American

Take-Out seemed to almost levitate just above the backside of the Galaxy Estate sign. No

one would have been able to make out the words Take-Out or Estates, but the rest was readable in reverse and punched holes in the nighttime sky.

 

Ben could also see Thedalia’s trailer from the sidewalk leading to Corey’s front door, then noticed a light as it was being turned off inside. For just a second he had to stop when it looked to him like the moonlight was pouring beams through the lettering of the signs that cast a soft glow onto her trailer.

 

As Corey opened the door, Ben had to stop himself from attributing the visual to his mother. He was working and crying wasn’t an option.

 

****

Corey ordered the same special each of his nights off since he’d worked at Colonial Fitness. And Five Star Ben had delivered it each time.

 

“Come on in,” Corey insisted.

 

Ben did as he was asked, making his way smoothly

enough to fill the doorway of the kitchen as if it were a frame to showcase his amazing physique.

 

He was wearing jeans and a navy hoodie that were as generic as clothing gets, but for Corey it was a moment of perfect design all around.

 

“Enjoy your day off?” Ben asked, having learned that to be polite was to be tipped.

 

“Not bad,” Corey said. “Just ran some errands and got back in time to have the place to myself since my aunt’ll be at work until late.”

 

“Cool,” Ben said, fine with holding up the door frame as long as needed since he had

nowhere to hurry off to and wanted to hit $100 on tips if at all possible.

 

“How many stops this evening?” Cory asked.

 

“Including you,” Ben said. “Eighteen.”

 

“Wow,” Cory said somewhat playfully. “That’s a lot of getting gawked at for tips…”

 

“Haha,” Ben said. “If being gawked at pays the bills, I’m here for that.”

 

“You certainly don’t show it all at the gym,” Corey said in a mocking lament.

 

“‘cause nobody’s tipping me there,” Ben said, almost playfully.

 

“Speaking of which,” Corey said. “Let me walk to the bedroom to get some cash from my wallet.”

 

“Cool,” Ben said. “Mind if I take a leak?”

 

Ben had asked this before when he was there, but this time he wanted to express some appreciation for Corey’s generous tips and online ratings.

 

It was time, he felt.

 

“There you go,” Corey said, pushing the hall bathroom door open for Ben as he walked by it on the way to his bedroom.

 

Ben didn’t shut the door and proceeded to completely unbuckle and unzip his jeans,

opening up a view that he felt assured Corey would take in within seconds on his return from the bedroom.

 

Ben knew that Corey would have been mesmerized if he’d bothered to elaborate on

some of the delivery experiences. If he just told him about the wealthy couple who

ordered delivery late every week just so that they’d be Ben’s last drop. And how he would take long, relaxing showers in their master bathroom while the couple made love, watching him from their bed.

 

And tipped $200 each time.

 

If Corey knew about that, or how a man tipped even more than that for Ben to enter through his garage, take off all of his clothes and walk into his kitchen naked. And this man told Ben that he suffered from allergies to all kinds of clothing and things picked up by fabrics. So Ben, being a Five-Star delivery man, played dumb and did as he was asked, nothing more, nothing less.

 

But as Ben caught Corey’s silhouette in the darkened hallway, the whites of his eyes

pointing towards the part of the bathroom mirror that provided the view he had to offer, he knew the last thing that Corey would suspect was that Ben was a Five-Star virgin.

 

Ben took a bit longer still to let Corey enjoy it, but did smile to himself about the possibility that he might have finally met the woman he trusted to see none of what everyone else wanted to and what he really was.

 

Ben’s healthy stream had ended as he grew lost in thought over Thedalia.

 

“Ah,” Corey said from the bathroom doorway. “All better?”

 

“Yup,” Ben said, buckling up, then got his tip from Corey as if neither the voyeurism or

exhibitionism hadn’t occurred.

 

Once outside, Ben noticed the beams of moonlight trained on Thedalia’s trailer had intensified. It was as if the universe were telling him to focus on her, most of all.

 

 

Wurst

 

 

Ray tried to look through Gramps to see any cars that might be coming from the

right, but it was easier to simply lean forward. This had been his lifelong practice and struggle, to work around Gramps in whatever way possible.

 

When he got to the supply store, he’d get all of the boxes filled with styrofoam delivery trays, cups, straws, napkins and bags into the back of his little truck easily enough. It would be a load for sure but he’d get Ben to swing by to help him unload

and unpack it as usual, once he was back at the restaurant.

 

“Wait,” he heard Gramps mumble. “Hold on.”

 

Ray ignored him, backed up to the loading dock and got out of the truck. Ray knew that Gramps’ communicative repertoire consisted of nothing but attempts to get him to either stop what he was doing or do something he wasn’t, especially since physical abuse was no longer among the capabilities.

 

Dean’s name was seldom said without it being noted he was black. Gramps had of course never appeared to Dean during any of the visits Ray made to the warehouse.

 

Like any fit guy who hadn’t been abuses by his grandfather and had a generally positive attitude about life, Dean was resented by Ray.

“Can you load it up for me while I hit the head?” Ray asked Dean, who smiled with amusement since that’s what Ray always asked.

 

Dean, barely thirty years old, looked like he spent his days working out and his nights getting plenty of rest. Ray once

angrily complained to someone there that Dean looked like he was strutting standing still, and the person laughed so hard at Ray that he didn’t speak to them for weeks.

 

After having loaded up the bed of the truck, Dean felt like it was okay to put a couple of the smaller boxes filled with plastic straws on the passenger seat.

 

Once Ray returned, he noticed this and grumpily stuffed the boxes behind the seats. He knew

he’d see Gramps returning from wherever he’d been.

 

Ray stood on the loading dock looking at Dean as if he had nothing much to say.

 

“Okay,” Dean finally said, walking away pleasantly enough to irritate the daylights out of Ray.

 

“It’s Wednesday so I have the truck loaded and I’ll be back to restaurant after a while,” Ray texted Ben.

 

Dean glanced only briefly at Ray from the other end of the warehouse, noting that the poor guy was looking more and more like his miserable grandfather.

 

“Is it really Wednesday?” Ben texted back. “I had no idea. Thanks.”

 

“You’re welcome,” Ray wrote back, certain enough Ben was being sarcastic.

 

“I’ll be by when I can,” Ben continued. “To help you get those very few, featherweight

boxes all the way from your truck, ten feet inside. Don’t worry.”

 

“And unpack it all,” Ray texted, just as he turned around and saw Gramps back in the truck. “Don’t forget.”

 

“Sure,” Ben wrote back. “Because you have a busy day grappling with all that sausage and whatnot. Later man.”

 

Ben had previously described Wednesday’s special as Worst Wurst, and that easy dig stuck with Ray.

 

Since there would be no point in texting Ben back, as that sounded like the last word on

the matter, Ray got back to his own reality.

 

He saw Gramps shaking his head in a clearly judgmental way, not even bothering to look at Ray through in rearview mirror, as usual. The old man had communicated a great many things by shaking his head in a negative way.

 

But Ray knew time was running out for Gramps. Only a couple more days and he’d disappear for good this time.

 

****

 

It was pure happenstance that Ben and Thedalia would be at Colonial Supermarket at the same time, but Ben wasn’t about to let opportunity go to waste.

 

“Hi,” he said, having walked within about ten feet of her in the deli where she waited in a casual line to place an order.

 

“Hello,” Thedalia said hesitantly.

 

“It’s me,” Ben said and immediately regretted it when he saw the natural unfamiliarity of

his voice expressed on her face.

 

“I’m sorry?” She asked, prompting more from Ben.

 

“Ben,” he spat out. “I’ve delivered to you before.”

 

“Umm,” Thefalia said. “American…Take-Out? I mean, most of what I get is delivered, as you can guess.”

 

“Oh sure,” Ben said. “Of course. I hope to see you again Friday evening for your fries!”

 

“Oh,” she said with a smile. “Guilty. My weekly indulgence.”

 

“Mine too,” Ben admitted, wishing she could see him and maybe he’d be wrestling less with the art of verbal communication.

 

“Well,” Thedalia said consolingly. “The porch only creeks under a lot of weight, and it doesn’t make a sound when you’re there.”

 

“I’m light on my feet,” Ben said, wanting so much to describe himself from his toes to his dark brown hair, just to make his case.

 

“I hear you,” she said. “Sounds like you’re in good shape.”

 

“I AM!,” Ben said too quickly and cockily, then mitigated, “I mean, I’d like to be, or hope to be maybe. You know, I try.”

 

Thedalia laughed out loud and could almost hear Ben’s ego recalibrating.

 

“Okay,” she said.

 

“You’re really pretty,” Ben said, and once it was out there was no regretting it.

 

“Thank you,” Thedalia said, feeling herself blush.

 

“I wanna be your delivery man,” Ben said before he could edit it in his head.

“Oh?” Thedalia said.

 

“I mean, Friday night,” Ben clarified. “Or any night. Whenever. Just saying, like,

whenever you have something coming I wanna be the man to bring it.”

 

“You do?” Thesalia said, laughing through a smile.

 

“Yep,” Ben said, noticing how beautiful her teeth were when she smiled. Or when she didn’t. Nothing made sense. It was all insane and he didn’t know what to do next.

 

“I guess I’ll see you Friday evening, then,” Thedalia said.

 

“I wish,” Ben said, then realized he may have been perceived of wrongly. “I mean, I hope so. Because you’re perfect, just like you are, and yep, sure, you’ll see me then, unless I see you first!”

 

“Oh gosh,” Thedalia said, shaking her head and sincerely amused by Ben’s awkwardness.

 

“I mean,” Ben said. “Of course I’ll see you first, just saying I’ll be really glad to see you. Very. Can I give you my number?”

 

“Um…sure!” Thedalia said, having fun now. “Hold on a sec.” She pulled out her phone and readied a screen for the input. “Here,” she said, handing him the phone.

 

“I’m Ben,” he said, pressing his digits.

 

“I know,” she said. “Bringing It Ben.”

 

“No no,” Ben said. “It’s Five Star Ben.”

 

Thedalia burst out laughing and this time Ben did too.

 

“Well, make me your last stop Friday,” She instructed. “And maybe we can share the fries and hang out some.”

 

“Sure sure sure,” Ben said, sounding like he’d just been stuffed into a cannon at a circus and couldn’t wait to be sent flying.

 

“Okay then,” Thedalia said.

 

“Please text me,” Ben said honestly. “And I’ll text you back.”

 

“I got ya,” Thedalia said.

 

“Next!,” the man working the deli counter said. “Ma’am?”

“That’s you,” Ben said.

 

“Thank you,” Thedalia said.

 

“Don’t mention it,” Ben said, never wanting to walk away but backing up just the same.

 

For the first time ever, he felt like there might be a way forward in the city.

 

******

 

Dean usually only went to the gym on weekends, but he’d gotten off of work earlier than usual and decided he’d have a midweek workout to let some steam off.

 

He was sort of frustrated, between having to deal with idiots like Ray and then

noticing the fuel gage and that someone may have siphoned gas from his car the previous night. He turned off of Bullet Boulevard onto Trigger Trace prepared to run inside for his gym bag, then keep moving.

 

He nearly made it. But by the time he’d grabbed his bag and downed a glass of water, an ambulance was blocking the road on Barrel Way, and three cop cars were preventing passage on Holster Street. Dean knew better than to back out too quickly, since that had once lead to his being chased down as if he had robbed a liquor store instead of just trying to make it someplace on time.

 

So he waited before backing up, watching as the police in front of him hauled off a brother in cuffs, and in his rearview saw the paramedics pushing a stretcher with a body covered by a stained white sheet to the ambulance.

 

Business as usual, which only made Dean want to get to the gym more. Too much stress could kill a man, so he just made a point of decompressing his days away until this wasn’t the way.

 

As he finally made his way out of Musket, Dean dodged another ambulance as it was turning in.

 

“Jesus,” Dean said sincerely. “I gotta get the fuck outta here.”

 

******

 

Corey folded towels and as usual paid no more mind to what he was doing than he had to. Ben had come and gone, so it was all boring from here on out until the weekend, when the guy named Dean came for a workout.

 

Dean and Corey had exchanged plenty of looks but never spoken more than a couple of times. And Dean never showered at the gym, just left when his session was finished.

 

It shocked Corey this time to see Dean at all, much less in only a towel, all of which he found mesmerizing.

 

“What’s up?” Dean asked.

 

“Nothin’,” Corey said, giving away his appreciation inside of a fraction of a second.

 

“You?” Corey decided to reciprocate. “How’re you feeling’?”

 

“Stressed,” Dean answered honestly. “Just decided to get a good shower before a workout so I’d have a clean sweat, maybe get my body right for rest of the week.”

 

Dean’s disclosure and body language were both so sincere that Corey instinctively

told him to sit on the bench near the lockers, which Dean did without any protest.

 

Walking behind him, Corey placed one hand on each of Dean’s shoulders and began

massaging so intensely that tears welled up in his eyes. The care and human warmth

going from another body to his was more than he was prepared for after the day he’d had.

 

Dean stood up and turned around too quickly for Corey to finish apologizing for

anything he may have done wrong. He reached out and gently touched the side of Corey’s face with such tenderness that he felt he might collapse.

 

Each of them tried to speak at once, paused to let the other speak first, then did the same thing again before bursting into laughter.

 

“Really,” Corey finally said. “You okay?”

 

“I will be.” Dean said. “Sorry.”

 

“For wh-?” Corey attempted.

 

“- come to my place Friday night after work,” Dean said. “Get my number and I’ll text you the address.”

 

“Okay,” Corey said. “I’ll be there.”

 

They both felt a meaningful connection had been made. It was more like shooting stars than fireworks, and Friday night would be a date.

 

*****

 

Big Dipper Boulevard lead into Galaxy Estates. Ben turned onto Constellation Court to make

his last delivery of the evening, passing kids who laughed and waved as they enjoyed lighting up their part of the evening with sparklers. A nice couple waved at Ben as they walked their dog.

 

After Ben made his delivery, he headed toward Moonlight Lane to look at Thedalia’s trailer once more before calling it a night.

 

“Glad to have your number,” Ben texted her, noticing again that the light was mysteriously on in the bedroom end of the trailer.

With no response, Ben drove off.

 

*****

 

“That’s a good girl,” FatherTyme insisted. “Just lay back and ignore any text messages you get from your boyfriend. Pay attention to me, Dolly.”

 

“Yes, sir,” she said, having listened to the client’s bio information prior to accepting

his exclusive reservation for the time slot.

 

Her phone now silenced, she went about the task of making a clear living in a world of financial clouds. These transactions, commerce between individuals where she was compensated and still safe, helped to pay her bills and wait out relief from a system that had so far told her she was a fraud.

 

“Oh that’s a VERY good girl,” FatherTyme said, making it clear from the start that his session would be predictable.

 

She’d been called hysterical, or at the very least her body’s response to being violated had been termed a form of “hysteria.”

 

Her blindness went under an investigation equal to or greater than what had caused it.

 

“Hysteria blindness,” the doctor dismissively said. The investigator didn’t hear “injury” or “harm,” and only assumed “self-inflicted.”

 

His questioning of Thedalia had been further injurious, and she felt she had to fight his approach with as much anger and defense as she’d tried to fight off her assailant.

 

“It’s weird to go blind that suddenly,” the investigator said, searching for a response

that would help him close a case he had hostility towards.

 

“Have you ever been raped before?” Thedalia asked him, crying now.

 

“Have YOU?” He asked, then feeling like he should amend his retort. “I mean, is this your first claim of rape?”

 

“Claim?” Thedalia cried.“Claim?!”

 

“Well, accusation?” He lamely clarified.

“Are you even going to look for him?” She asked.

 

“Look for who?” The investigator shot back, argumentatively. “You blacked out.”

 

“I didn’t black out!” She cried. “I lost my sight.”

 

“Which is highly unusual,” he insisted.

 

“A lot more unusual than rape,” she said.

 

“But what’s the difference?” The investigator had lamented.

 

“Push your hips out some,” FatherTyme instructed. “Or UP. Yes, up some. So long as

you can stay in the frame, oh yes, there you go, sweetie.”

 

“Why can’t you just help me?” Thedalia remembered crying to the investigator.

 

“Why can’t you help yourself?” The investigator asked cruelly.

 

“I can’t, not yet,” she admitted through her sobbing. “I don’t know what I’m supposed

to do.”

 

It was at that moment that Thedalia fell through the cracks and found herself wedged

between the truth and a system’s willful neglect of its intended purpose.

 

“Has anyone told you how beautiful you are?” FatherTyme moaned.

 

Yes, Thedalia wanted to answer. A sweet, silly delivery boy with a warm and caring voice said so. And he made her feel like it was so.

 

But she was still alone and in the dark, working, for now. And while she wasn’t exactly able to trust anyone just yet, she’d try to find the light, some good to break through all the bad.

 

Or maybe it had found her.

 

 

Tostada

 

Ray knew Thursdays were almost as easy as Fridays, preparation-wise. For

Thursdays, most of the ingredients were in extra large cans or otherwise ready-to-serve, like the bread itself.

 

Lettuce and other ingredients that needed to be diced

were a task but nothing to lose his mind over.

 

He had Gramps for that. The old man disappeared in the grocery store, but Ray saw him in the truck with that look like he’d been waiting for hours. Colonial Supermarket was nearest Musket, and he’d gone there to shop his entire life.

 

Ray’s mother had a job as a cashier there when he was a little boy, and he’d beg

to go see her every day. Finally, Gramps took the toddler by the arm, threw him into the car, dragging him into the grocery store as Ray wailed and cried.

 

“He wants his ‘mommy’ so much,” Gramps hollered. “So there it is. He’s got hismommy, the little pussy.”

 

Ray’s mom lost her job that day and wasn’t able to get another until there was an opening at a daycare nearby. Part of the deal was she got paid slightly less if her Ray was able to come to work with her, and that suited everyone, especially Ray, just fine.

 

That had been the best year of Ray’s life. He was only four years-old, but he could remember playing with the other children and feeling, of all things, like a little boy.

 

Happiness doesn’t last in Musket, though, and Ray instinctively knew his mother wasn’t sleeping late one morning. Of all the ways to die in Musket, from gunshot to overdoses or domestic violence, she’d had simply and

inexplicable expired. Barely twenty years-old, she went to bed one night and never

woke up.

 

“Having you did her in,” Gramps reminded Ray plenty. “You were too much for a girl her age!”

 

The declaration weighed on Ray, but so did the idea of the only other thing she could have possibly died of. Beauty. Maybe, Ray wondered, his mother was just too beautiful to survive in Musket. And so one morning she went where beauty goes.

 

Away.

 

*****

 

“Hey beautiful,” Ben texted without any hesitation in response to a “Good morning”

text from Thedalia.

 

“You’re something else,” Thedalia recorded, then sent. Ben loved her voice and how it reached his ears in perfect pitch with the way he felt about her.

 

“No,” Ben spoke into his recording option. “But you are.”

 

“Do you have a lot of deliveries lined up for you?” Thedalia asked Ben.

 

“I guess so,” Ben said, enjoying the ease with which she shifted into another topic. “I haven’t heard from Ray, the angry dude I work with, yet, but it’s only eleven-thirty.”

 

“When do you have to start working?” Thedalia asked.

 

“Around three-thirty or so,” he said. “since I help out some at the register and the kitchen a little even sometimes before I start heading out with deliveries.”

 

“The thought of you sort of calms me down,” Corey texted Dean.

“Sorry I didn’t respond to your text last night,” Thedalia voice-texted Ben. “I was busy

working.”

 

“You seem to know how to calm a brother down, yourself,” Dean admitted to Corey.

 

“I guess you work from home,” Ben said to Thedalia. “That’s makes sense.”

 

“I really want to see you somewhere other than the gym?” Corey texted Dean.

 

“I just refer to whatever has to get done as work,” Thedalia said, saving herself from

further explanation.

 

“That’s cool with me,” Dean texted Corey back quickly. “Musket. Trigger Trace. 23. I’ll

be home by 6 or so so anytime after that is good.”

 

“It doesn’t seem like your days would be empty,” Ben texted Thedalia, trying not to

second-guess every word he said.

 

“Want me to bring anything?” Corey texted Dean.

 

“Not empty at all,” Thedalia texted Ben. “But there’s room for more.”

 

“Just you,” Dean texted Corey.

“I’ll pick up something to eat. Just bring you.”

 

“I don’t take up much space,” Ben texted Thedalia. “Just need a chair in the corner, maybe by a window.”

 

“I’ll be there,” Corey texted Dean. “Tomorrow night is perfect.”

 

“Your chair will be reserved, then,” Thedalia voice-texted Ben.

 

“Can’t wait,” Dean texted Corey.

 

“Counting on it,” Ben texted Thedalia.

 

*****

 

“Gotcha,” Ray read from his phone screen. He’d irritated Ben just enough to begin getting short responses and soon knew he’d get none. And he’d be gravitating toward that next stage soon enough, since Ray couldn’t help but to poke at Five -Star Ben, everyone’s favorite delivery man.

 

“Sure,” Ray texted back unnecessarily.

 

Glenny was finished with her business now, anyway, and had stood up somewhat creakily, he noticed, as she headed to the bathroom. Ray was on the old sofa, zipping his jeans up as he saw his Gramps walk into the kitchen, staring out of the the window over the sink.

 

“Tomorrow, old man,” Ray mumbled miserably, not wanting Glenny to hear him as she

made her way back to the sofa to sit and smoke a cigarette.

 

*****

 

“It was good talking to you the other night,” Corey said to Ben as he finished getting

dressed.

 

“Cool,” Ben said sincerely. “Anytime, man.”

 

“I think it kinda helped me settle some things,” Corey shared as he sat in the bench facing away from Ben and looking down the length of the locker room.

 

“Like your curiosity?” Ben asked.

 

“Haha,” Corey said. “That, for one. But also how you got your stars, so to speak.”

 

“Yep,” Ben said. “Just trying to please folks in the best way I can and still leave in one piece.”

 

“I’ve been falling apart lately,” Corey said without meaning to.

 

“Man,” Ben said, applying deodorant. “Wouldn’t know it to look at you!”

 

“Just seems like it can all go away so quickly,” Corey said sadly.

 

“I guess so,” Ben agreed, taking what Corey said in his own way. “I sometimes feel like I don’t even know what day of the week it is -“

 

“- it’s Thursday,” Corey confirmed. “And I only know that because tomorrow is Friday Fries, plus something else.”

 

“Yep,” Ben said. “Gotta sweet girl I’m meeting up with on my last stop tomorrow…”

 

“That’s great!” Corey said sincerely. “Me too!”

 

“Okay, great!” Ben said, trying not to seem surprised.

 

“I mean, a guy,” Corey said. “Of course. But I can’t wait.”

 

“Me either,” Ben shared. “Same here.”

 

Ben inhaled and seemed satisfied that his shower had left him free of any scent of sweat, then craned his head to prompt Corey to do likewise.

 

“I’m gonna hang in there and see what’s good,” Ben said to Corey. “And one day I’ll wake up knowing what’s special, not just what the special is.”

 

“That’s it right there,” Corey said. “I think I want more, you know? And it just makes me sad to know how I figured it out.”

 

“I’ve been thinking about more lately, too,” Ben said. “And maybe more’s been thinking about me, if that makes any sense.”

“Hmmm,” Corey said. “Damn right. Makes perfect sense.”

 

“No different than you,” Ben said emphatically. “I see a ‘more’ or two checking you out here, maybe wanting to make it good with you.”

 

“Yep,” Corey smiled.

 

“See,” Ben said, patting Corey on the back. “There’s hope for us yet.”

 

“Maybe,” Corey said dreamily. “Maybe.”

 

*****

 

“Are you into it?” AshesAway asked Dolly.

 

“Of course,” Dolly lied, having taken an unusual chunk of

time to feel ‘into it,’ and now realizing she had to regroup without the client catching

on too much.

 

“I’ve got to get outta here after a few minutes,” AshesAway said firmly. “The wife, and plus I gotta big deal event to get to in a while.”

 

“I’m sorry,” Dolly said softly.

 

“We’ve done this before,” the big city suit continued. “You know all the routines that get me where I need to be, so let’s just do what we did last time, the time before and so on. Got it?”

 

“Of course,” Dolly said even more softly, and put on a repeat performance for the return customer to the backdrop sounds of his moaning, grunting and finally needing her approval.

 

“Very good boy,” Dolly said, though unable to see the product of all his hard work.

“Very good.”

 

“I want to do good,” AshesAway admitted breathlessly. “For you.”

 

“And you did,” Dolly reinforced. “You always do so good.”

 

“Holy shit,” he said anxiously. “That’s her. Gotta go. You’re getting THE biggest tip

today. Bye.”

 

“- uh,” Dolly managed, having heard the connection go dead just as she’d taken in enough air

in to speak.

 

Thedalia lay there thinking, naked and awkward, but in a way that appealed to her. It wasas if she’d found some gateway in the deepest dark, having walked as far as she needed to instead of crumbling.

 

Maybe she’d see again, maybe not. And she’d keep doing whatever she had to in order to

survive and make her way. But she wasn’t about to be held down by herself, most of all, as punishment for what someone else did to her.

 

Though she couldn’t see her own hand in front of her face, she remembered what it

looked like. She decided she’d just try to connect what she’d seen to what she’d now only sensed and picture a way forward.

 

The show would go on, she said to herself with the sort of blind optimism other people only say they have.

 

Thedalia closed her eyes and imagined seeing Ben someday.

 

*****

 

Dean had worked since he was about fifteen years-old, taking single days off to graduate high school, contest a speeding ticket and bury his brother when he died of Covid.

 

He was pretty young to be such a well-oiled machine. He drove a car with bullet holes in it, lived in a trailer with bars on the windows, and he was thinking to himself it had been enough.

 

What kind of luck was in store for a black man who’d never had any? He wanted to know this and had no one or nothing but a cracked windshield to ask.

 

Serotonin, he thought. Dean remembered that potatoes had it and he’d have some

just in time to feel lifted and not pull the cute white boy down any.

 

“Pride,” Dean said to

himself. “Pride.”

 

Just dress the part, walk the walk, talk the talk, all that, and it’ll feel as right as it looks one day.

 

Nothing to lose on a Friday night, and it was only a day away.

 

****

 

It was a typical Thursday of late for Ben. His last delivery was the same woman who lived in a gated community and insisted on being last the first time she saw Ben.

 

So Ben understood that he would be asked inside to do a small favor, which was usually take the trash out. Then the woman would insist he come back inside to wash his hands. After that she’d insist he got grease or some filth on his pants and demand he take them off so that she could clean them off with an old toothbrush in her laundry room sink.

 

Ben would stand nearby with no underwear on, behaving as if it were all normal.

 

After the woman cleaned his pants, Ben would put them back on and away he’d go with a generous tip.

 

What it took to make other humans happy confounded Ben, but the transactional simplicity and yield, especially, appealed to him. He had recently suffered a terrible loss, and so he felt like he had plenty of time to pursue a more substantive life after surviving any way he could.

 

Ben was what his mother’s obituary called him. A survivor.

He took a deep breath as he got into his car, his pants still damp, and dared for just a moment to believe there was something more to life than surviving.

 

Fries

 

Dean’s eyes involuntarily bulged as his head tilted from curiosity. Then, after the initial shock wore off, he waved back at Ray.

 

Dean had lived in Musket for more than a decade, worked at the warehouse for even longer, and gotten take-out from American since he was a kid.

And never in all those years had Ray waved to him when passing him in the park or anywhere.

 

Until now.

 

“I see good things coming our way,” Corey had texted Dean the night before.

 

Dean suspected his new friend might be clairvoyant. Add to the wave from Ray an ominous hush that seemed to have fallen over Musket Trailer Park, no talk of ambulance sightings or police visits overnight, and there was certainly cause to be hopeful.

 

But what in the hell is hope, Dean had to contemplate. The concept lingered on his mind

so heavily that he had to stop the car in a kind of panic, a need to have the ability to think and not be distracted.

 

Parked now in the lot of a shuttered gas station, he stared at the “CLOSED FOR BUSINESS” sign.

 

The word “hope” had been thrown around so much but he never really applied it to his life

and times any more than he would the word “rich,” “secure” or even “happy.”

 

The words on the sign jumbled like an eye chart as Dean leaned forward to put his chin on the steering wheel. He wondered why he’d never claimed his own share of this magical ingredient of life. Was it because someone else thought he didn’t deserve any, or because he agreed with them.

 

Dean was proud. He’d worked his entire life and never complained to anyone that it was hard or unfair. He paid his bills and played by the rules. He hadn’t had a vacation, he worked when others wouldn’t or couldn’t, showed up on time

and left late.

 

He remembered Corey had cried when he touched his face. But also that he had cried, too.

 

It was sinking in with Dean that hope, whatever the hell it was, might be a good thing. He put the car back on the road and decided he could afford to have a little of it.

 

*****

 

The original intent had been to smile at Dean, but Ray wasn’t very practiced at smiling. Then he figured Ray would see him laughing and find that ominous enough, so he was set to do that and remembered he’s not really the laughing type. So at the

last second Ray decided to just wave at Dean.

 

“There,” Ray thought to himself, certain he’d sent a message.

 

*****

 

Thedalia had to be Dolly for two clients booked a half-hour apart, so she knew she’d have to be performance-minded and not thinking about anything shaping up to resemble “date night.”

 

“Fries are healthy,” Ben had texted her. “Actually good for you, like Friday night itself.”

 

“You spend hours on end at the gym,” Thedalia reminded him in response.

 

Any affirmation Thedalia received about her appearance as Dolly was mitigated by

the existence of reality. And she knew this in both a pragmatic and profound way. Having been raised to believe she amounted to less potential than her male siblings, she’d learned to combine the acquiescence and awareness needed to both jump through the hoops demanded without falling into the nets set up on the other side.

 

It was never going to be fair and that was that. Now that she couldn’t even jump through any hoops, much less see the net awaiting her fall, she was left with the measures of the blind.

 

Feel, assess, listen, decide.

Thedalia felt Ben more than a girl who could touch him. She’d heard him and accessed his build. She liked what she was hearing, she decided, and deserved a moment or two trusting the process, the universe and someone good.

 

She still saw nothing, sadly, but because of a kaleidoscope of butterflies suddenly inhabiting her stomach, Thedalia felt wonderfully mixed up.

 

*****

 

Corey’s eyes wanted to see his phone screen all day, but he was working and so was Dean. Maybe some clarification over food, who was getting it and perhaps from where, would justify a text or two for planning purposes. Just confirming.

There was something about Dean that went beyond the circumstances and timing. Corey had devoted most every waking hour since their brief but bonding encounter to the existence of the man.

 

What did Dean like to watch on television, was he a huge sports fan and did he like a lot

of different kinds of music? Did he come from a big family or was he an only child? What kinds of things did he dream about and had he ever shared the same dreams with anyone special?

 

Corey swore he’d show no indication of being in high gear when he was with him and

just let him take things where he was comfortable. Then he wondered if letting Dean

have control right away would make him want to plow Corey like like ten acres of farmland, only to leave him unsown, blowing in the wind.

 

The dramatic analogy made Corey return to folding towels and focusing on the tasks at hand. That, he knew, was his best bet for making it through the day.

 

Being calm. Meditating, maybe. Or should he even try to chant? Something, anything, to keep his mind off of Dean. Deep breaths. There, he thought to himself. Only a few hours to go.

 

“You got this,” he said aloud to himself.

 

Then a text came in.

 

“How’s your day going?” Dean asked.

 

Corey screamed so loud that it was heard at the front desk.

 

*****

 

Ray had never met anyone who didn’t like fries. And he didn’t know anyone who’d ever said they knew anyone who didn’t. But then Ray figured he didn’t really know that many people so maybe there were plenty of them and some of them even hated

fries, kind of like he hated anchovies.

 

“Five-Star,” Ray exclaimed as Ben walked through the back door of the restaurant.

 

“Okay,” Ben said. “The line-up is pretty much up and down Centerville this evening and ending in Musket tonight.”

 

“Yup,” Ray said.

 

“Add one for me to take with me,” Ben said. “I’ll pay for it online in a sec.”

 

“No problem,” Ray said. “On the house.”

“What?” Ben said, mystified. “I mean, thanks.”

 

“Don’t mention it,” Ray said, seeming to be in the first good mood Ben had ever witnessed.

 

“Thanks again,” Ben said.

 

“No! Just wait! Go away!” Ray blurted out after having turned around.

 

“Huh?” Ben said, confused now. “I said I can pay for it and it’s nothing. No biggie.”

 

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Ray said.

 

“…I’m the only one here,” Ben said.

 

Ray looked out front and could see Gramps in the front of the truck. Ben looked at Ray and shook his head. It was quiet except for the sound of styrofoam until Ray smiled and looked in Ben’s direction.

 

“I got it,” Ray said. “It’s all good.”

 

Ben already had enough on his mind, so he got his first route loaded up and took off.

 

*****

 

Glenny never wanted much more than what people gave her, but lately she’d been thinking it was time to try something new.

 

She’d seen something on a talk

show about people who “nested.” This just meant they shared some of what they had

and their time with another person, maybe making life somehow easier on the

both of them in the process.

 

Glenny wanted to bring it up to Ray, and make sure he knew she didn’t want to move in or get married, nothing that drastic. But maybe she could come over while he was at work and clean up some, do laundry and look at TV some. Then if he brought back some dinner they could shoot the breeze for a while before she headed back to her

trailer.

 

Not every night, she’d point out. Just most nights. And since she had a little money coming in from the state, maybe go someplace now and then, just up the road or whatever.

 

Glenny looked around her and imagined that maybe it was worth a try. Ray was a tough sell but she was too, she figured, and life was passing by more each day.

 

She’d already lost a kid to mistakes she’d made. And every time she saw her brother, Brad, she wondered if it might be the last. Glenny assumed he was dealing drugs because he always paid his share of the rent with cash.

 

She paused her own thoughts for a moment to make room for a new thought.

 

Hanging on, she said to herself, was a good thing. Because, she reasoned, things always change.

 

Hope, she guessed, had to be better than nothing. Glenny would be willing if Ray was.

*****

 

Ben hadn’t anticipated greatness. His life had been more the hope that something

would be bearable. But it had been a season of change, of looking inward, upward and onward, so maybe, just maybe, greatness was actually possible.

 

He had a lot of people appreciating him, but it was all based on the visual, he assumed. And he couldn’t have

said that he’d been saving himself for someone special, because he hadn’t. After all,

he knew very well if someone had offered him a ticket out of the city and longer term

peace of mind, he would have jumped at the chance by jumping right into their bed.

 

He’d been prepared for it and could tell it was a possibility.

 

That is, until Thedalia. Since her appearance, he knew he could hustle some and take care of the bottom line, sure. But maybe there was a bottom line beneath the bottom line he hadn’t known of, and it paid in ways he hadn’t contemplated.

 

He didn’t want to be afraid of what he had to lose now that he finally figured out he had something to gain. To really gain. And he didn’t want to scare her off, either, with any premature dreams of grandeur.

 

Ben wanted to step carefully into her world, to make where he was standing clear. He didn’t want to impose, cross a line that only she could see. He just wanted to be respectful and genuine.

 

And, he knew, he also wanted to scoop Thedalia up in his arms and never let her go.

 

*****

 

Potatoes were of the people, by the people and for the people, Ray once said to Glenny, prompting her to laugh until she nearly choked. Glenny thought about it later and concluded that the statement wasn’t so funny as unexpected, coming from Ray.

 

When you take a food that is a drug to begin with and load it up with other addictive garnishments, you’ve got buyers.

 

Friday Fries were a hit before any of the other daily specials were conceived of. They were easy, plentiful and made people feel good on a night of the week that had a head start on good.

 

Ray had taken the old metal salt shaker from the cupboard beneath the counter and set it among the usual containers of toppings like bacon bits, cheese, onions and salsa.

 

This is really it, he thought to himself. No turning back now.

 

*****

Ben’s mother had tried to make it less personal for him, her death. She explained to her only child that life is like a story and so often the beginning is no different than the ending.

 

“What little baby inside of his momma’s womb really wants to be born?” She asked

him. “No one’s bothering him, he’s happy, comfortable and well fed.”

 

“I’m glad I was born,” Ben said, thinking it was what he was supposed to say.

 

“Of course,” his mother said. “But I fought and clawed to be born. It’s almost like I remember it sometimes!”

 

Ben looked at her with belief, no matter the impossibility of such a thing.

 

“Yep,” his mother continued. “And then I went to war with life just to get what I needed, only to turn around and fight and claw to keep it all and even survive.”

 

“Are you done fighting and clawing?” Ben tearfully asked his mother.

 

“I’m afraid so, honey,” she said.

 

“Then let me fight and claw for you,” Ben begged her. “I’ll do whatever I gotta do, just

tell me, Momma, please just tell me what to do!”

 

“Fighting,” she said to him. “It was never your way.”

 

“That’s okay,” Ben said. “I’ll learn.”

 

“No,” his mother cried softly. “You came into the world so calmly and quietly I was half wondering if you weren’t a stillborn.”

 

“Really?” Ben asked.

 

“Yessiree,” she said. “You looked up more than at anything or anyone. Like you had somewhere you needed to be and it wasn’t ’round here.”

 

“I don’t know what to do,” Ben cried.

 

“You carry on,” she instructed her son. “You take it as it comes your way and make what way you can from what you’ve got.”

 

“But you’re all I got,” Ben sobbed. “When you go, I’ll be alone here and there’s no changing that if you leave me.”

 

“No, honey,” she said. “I’m alone now. We’re born alone and we die alone. And it’s okay, I promise you.”

 

“I don’t want you to be alone,” Ben swore. “I’d go with you if I could.”

 

“Nope,” his mother said sternly. “That’s not your story, it’s mine. I’m through scratching and clawing and there’s no more fight left in me.”

 

“I’m so scared,” Ben said.

 

“You’ll see right away that me dying won’t kill you,” she promised him with a nod of

her head. “Like I said - this isn’t your story. Your story hasn’t finished being written

yet! You’ll go out quiet, looking at something everyone else is too busy to notice. Years and years from now. That’s my baby. That’s my boy!”

 

It had been exactly a year to the day since his mother died, and Ben felt like he could turn the page with her blessing.

 

It was his story now.

 

*****

Living in Musket was a lesson on death. And Ray had noticed that Glenny, someone who’d used drugs, didn’t touch the small box with powder he found snooping in Brad’s occasionally used bedroom.

 

Over a few months all of the powered or just some of it would disappear and then reappear in the box. If it was what he thought it was, then he’d know for sure soon enough. And if it was there in Musket, why would it be anything good, Ray asked himself.

 

All he knew was that nothing good came from being in Musket.

 

*****

 

“I’m here,” Dean texted Corey. “Got enough to share and will TRY to hold off on eating any before you get here. No promises, though. Jumping in shower now. Door’s

unlocked.”

 

Corey looked at the last message he’d received from Dean and sighed somewhat

heavily to himself.

 

Trigger Trace wasn’t as foreboding as he’d imagined. In fact, Corey found it quiet and

almost charming compared to the reputation that surrounded the park, deserved or not.

 

He self-consciously decided to call Dean in advance of walking in his front door. It wasn’t that he wasn’t up for the adventure that came with a new relationship, he was just in uncharted territory.

 

No answer.

 

Corey walked to the door, lightly knocked, then decided to simply do as he’d been asked. He’d seen Dean in only a towel before, but not with the towel unfastened.

 

So the sight of him like that sent any hesitancy back where it came from.

 

*****

 

“I’ll have your last deliveries ready in a few shakes,” Ray texted Ben.

 

“Cool,” Ben texted back, still finding Ray’s demeanor unusual, but not letting it overshadow an important night.

 

“I’ll be by with American Take-Out’s famous fries in just a little bit,” Ben said. “Hot

and made to order.”

 

“Sounds like a Five-Star delivery to me,” Thedalia texted flirtatiously. “So don’t get a

poor customer rating by sampling too many ahead of time!”

“Never can tell,” Ben playfully texted back. “What I’m up to when you can’t see me!”

 

Oh no, Ben thought. Why would he use those particular words?He put his face in his hands and shouted at himself.

 

“Well then,” Thedalia shot back. “I guess I’ll just have to count them, one by one, to see for myself.”

 

Oh God, Ben sighed to himself, exhaling dramatically enough to feel almost collapsed. Then he put his phone down and drove directly to the restaurant.

 

****

 

Glenny figured the walk would do her good. It wasn’t so much about putting Ray on the spot as being what folks call “pro-active.” She’s heard about it on a talk show.

 

Besides, Brad had just made one of his occasional appearances and griped to her that it seemed like someone had been in his room.

 

“You’ve been in your room,” Glenny told Brad. “That’s it.”

She mumbled to herself about how difficult men made the world, then kept on walking.

 

*****

 

Corey bolted from the trailer and had gotten a hundred or so yards from Dean’s door

before he realized there was no ambulance within shouting distance. Of all times, he

thought, for there not to be one in Musket Trailer Park.

 

“Help!” Corey hollered in desperation. “Somebody!”

 

Glenny heard the cry for help and decided to continue walking away from the

voice. Everyone had their mission, she thought to herself, and she was on hers.

 

****

 

Ben’s first route had been delivered about an hour earlier, so enough 911 calls had

dispatched ambulances to homes where Friday Fries had been delivered to raise

suspicions. It seemed like fentanyl, the paramedics said, possibly in delivered food.

With that, it didn’t take long for the law enforcement response to resemble what happens after a terrorist attack.

 

“Just help him,” Corey cried to the paramedics, having turned Dean’s body back over

so that he could massage the carpet indentations from the side of his new friend’slifeless face.

 

The fight to get Corey to let go of Dean was a serious one, his cries shooting through

the night air like bullets, ricocheting off of the metal trailers like the inside of a

pinball machine.

 

“Is your friend an IV drug user?” one of the paramedics asked Corey.

 

“NO!,” Corey cried. “Just look at him!”

 

He took a deep breath as he saw the container of fries on the kitchen counter. The night was supposed to be great, a beginning of something, Corey thought to himself.

 

Then he screamed at his life, his loss, everything.

 

The sound travelled quickly, alerting everyone within earshot that tragedy, this time, would not be part of a night in Musket.

 

*****

 

Glenny arrived after the half-dozen police cars had surrounded the restaurant. She

heard Ray demanding they leave so his grandfather would return and have dinner with him.

 

“Gramps!” Ray hollered, his hands cuffed behind his back. “You should have come back to eat with me, then you’d go to sleep just my mama and never wake up.”

 

“Ray,” Glenny said, but he wasn’t hearing anyone.

 

“Now everyone can go to sleep like her,” Ray said. “Everyone!”

 

“Ma’am,” a policewoman asked Glenny. “Would you have any idea where we can find

the man’s grandfather, so we can question him too?”

 

“What?” Glenny asked, dumbfounded.

 

“We think the two of them may have put something poisonous in tonight’s delivery specials,”

the policewoman explained.

 

“Why?” Glenny asked, needing more answers than questions.

 

“The man says he expected his ‘Gramps’ to have dinner with him,” a policeman walked up and said. “Any idea where that individual is?”

 

“Dead,” Glenny said. “About a year now.”

 

“And his mother,” the policewomen said. “Was she an overdose victim?”

 

“No,” Glenny said. “She just went to sleep one night and never woke up, is all I know.”

 

“We got’em cuffed,” another policeman hollered. “Hospital or the station?”

 

“Do you know the man very well?” The policewoman asked Glenny.

 

“Not really,” Glenny lied. “But the delivery guy drives a red Honda and lives right there in Galaxy. He may know something.”

 

*****

 

Ben had walked on air toward the front door of the tiny trailer on Twilight Court. His mother’s words told him that his story continues, so he had to keep living it.

 

He felt mischievous as he sampled some of the fries and then couldn’t quite close the container as it had been.

 

But his taste test was a sincere effort to make sure the night’s special was indeed special enough for her, because if not he would be tossing it in the trash and heading with her to a

nice restaurant in town.

 

He was greeted at the door before he had a chance to knock.

 

Thedalia was smiling.

“I’m smiling, too,” Ben said to her.

 

“Come inside,” she said.

 

“There’re a couple of chairs over there by the window.”

 

“Nice,” Ben said.

 

“Go have a seat,” Thedalia said. “The window is opened a little so it may seem chilly. I’ll go get us something to drink.”

 

“Sure,” Ben said, “it’s great.”

 

Thedalia listened to him make his way to the chair, suddenly feeling as if she could almost see him sitting down. This split-second experience reminded her of the nurse who said the damage done by bad could sometimes be undone by good.

 

Ben seemed so good to Thedalia.

 

She thought about it for a second and realized that she very well was seeing him. But

his outline and features, though strong and handsome, were accompanied by a sense of something possibly being wrong.

 

Ben, for his part, looked out of the window and enjoyed the view while he could.

 

Thedalia was slowly making her way back from the kitchen when the police knocked on the door. She put the drinks down on a small, wooden table next to the chair Ben was in.

 

“I’ll be right back,” she said.

“Wasn’t expecting anyone but you.”

 

Ben said nothing.

 

Thedalia opened the door and heard the police ask her if the man who drives the Honda was inside.

 

“Maybe,” Thedalia hesitantly said. “Ben…do you drive a Honda?”

 

Still no response from Ben.

 

Three police officers entered the trailer and went directly to the chair by the window to talk to Ben. They noticed the styrofoam container of French fries was opened.

 

Ben’s head was tilted back, his eyes aimed through the partially opened window at the moon. Anyone catching the slightest glimpse of him would assume he had life in the palm of his hand.