Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

I just want you to know I’m on your side,
Nick. I’m here for you
. Probably baked him cookies.
T h e 
Ellen Abbott
cameras are now panning the
Volunteer Center, which looks a little shabby. A
correspondent is talking about how my disappearance has
‘rocked this tiny town,’ and behind her, I can see a table
lined with homemade casseroles and cakes for poor Nicky.
Even now the asshole has women taking care of him.
Desperate women spotting an opening. A good-looking,
vulnerable man – and fine, he may have killed his wife, but
we don’t 
know
that. Not for sure. For now it’s a relief just to
have a man to cook for, the fortysomething equivalent of
driving your bike past the cute boy’s house.
They are showing Nick’s grinning cell-phone photo
again. I can picture the townie slut in her lonely, glistening
kitchen – a trophy kitchen bought with alimony money –

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mixing and baking while having an imaginary conversation
with Nick: 
No, I’m forty-three, actually. No, really, I am! No,
I don’t have men swarming all over me, I really don’t, the
men in town aren’t that interesting, most of them …
I get a burst of jealousy toward that woman with her
cheek against my husband’s. She is prettier than me as I
am now. I eat Hershey bars and float in the pool for hours
under a hot sun, the chlorine turning my flesh rubbery as a
seal’s. I’m tan, which I’ve never been before – at least not a
dark, proud, deep tan. A tanned skin is a damaged skin,
and no one likes a wrinkled girl; I spent my life slick with
SPF. But I let myself darken a bit before I disappeared, and
now, five days in, I’m on my way to brown. ‘Brown as a
berry!’ old Dorothy, the manager says. ‘You are brown as a
berry, girl!’ she says with delight when I come in to pay next
week’s rent in cash.
I have dark skin, my mouse-colored helmet cut, the
smart-girl glasses. I gained twelve pounds in the months
before my disappearance – carefully hidden in roomy
sundresses, not that my inattentive husband would notice –
and already another two pounds since. I was careful to have
no photos taken of me in the months before I disappeared,
so the public will know only pale, thin Amy. I am definitely
not that anymore. I can feel my bottom move sometimes, on
its own, when I walk. A wiggle and a jiggle, wasn’t that
some old saying? I never had either before. My body was a
beautiful, perfect economy, every feature calibrated,
everything in balance. I don’t miss it. I don’t miss men
looking at me. It’s a relief to walk into a convenience store
and walk right back out without some hangabout in
sleeveless flannel leering as I leave, some muttered bit of

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misogyny slipping from him like a nacho-cheese burp. Now
no one is rude to me, but no one is nice to me either. No
one goes out of their way, not overly, not really, not the way
they used to.
I am the opposite of Amy.

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