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

Hang in There
posters.
It’s true that even in our lowly Missouri state, I didn’t
ever have to actually budget. I couldn’t go out and buy a
new car just because I wanted to, but I never had to think
about the day-to-day stuff, coupon clipping and buying
generic and knowing how much milk costs off the top of my
head. My parents never bothered teaching me this, and so
they left me unprepared for the real world. For instance,
when Greta complained that the convenience store at the
marina charged five dollars for a gallon of milk, I winced
because the kid there always charged me ten dollars. I’d
thought that seemed like a lot, but it hadn’t occurred to me
that the little pimply teenager just threw out a number to see
if I’d pay.
So I’d budgeted, but my budget – guaranteed,
according to the Internet, to last me six to nine months – is
clearly off. And so I am off.
When we’re done with golf – I win, of course I do, I know
because I’m keeping score in my head – we go to the hot-
dog stand next door for lunch, and I slip around the corner

---

to dig into my zippered money belt under my shirt, and
when I glance back, Greta has followed me, she catches
me right before I can stuff the thing away.
‘Ever heard of a purse, Moneybags?’ she cracks. This
will be an ongoing problem – a person on the run needs
lots of cash, but a person on the run by definition has
nowhere to keep the cash. Thankfully, Greta doesn’t press
the issue – she knows we are both victims here. We sit in
the sun on a metal picnic bench and eat hot dogs, white
buns wrapped around cylinders of phosphate with relish so
green it looks toxic, and it may be the greatest thing I’ve
ever eaten because I am Dead Amy and I don’t care.
‘Guess what Jeff found in his cabin for me?’ Greta
says. ‘Another book by the 
Martian Chronicle
guy.’
‘Ray Bradburrow,’ Jeff says. 
Bradbury
, I think.
‘Yeah, right. 
Something Wicked This Way Comes
,’
Greta says. ‘It’s good.’ She chirps the last bit as if that were
all to say about a book: It’s good or it’s bad. I liked it or I
didn’t. No discussions of the writing, the themes, the
nuances, the structure. Just good or bad. Like a hot dog.
‘I read it when I first moved in there,’ Jeff says. ‘It is
good. Creepy.’ He catches me watching him and makes a
goblin face, all crazy eyes and leering tongue. He isn’t my
type – the fur on the face is too bristly, he does suspicious
things with fish – but he is nice-looking. Attractive. His eyes
are very warm, not like Nick’s frozen blues. I wonder if ‘I’
might like sleeping with him – a nice slow screw with his
body pressed against mine and his breath in my ear, the
bristles on my cheeks, not the lonely way Nick fucks, where
our bodies barely connect: right angle from behind, L-
shape from the front, and then he’s out of bed almost

---

immediately, hitting the shower, leaving me pulsing in his
wet spot.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ Jeff says. He never calls me by
name, as if to acknowledge that we both know I’ve lied. He
says 
this lady
or 
pretty woman
or 
you
. I wonder what he
would call me in bed. 
Baby
, maybe.
‘Just thinking.’
‘Uh-oh,’ he says, and smiles again.
‘You were thinking about a boy, I can tell,’ Greta says.
‘Maybe.’
‘I thought we were steering clear of the assholes for a
while,’ she says. ‘Tend to our chickens.’ Last night after
Ellen Abbott
, I was too excited to go home, so we shared a
six-pack and imagined our recluse life as the token straight
girls on Greta’s mother’s lesbian compound, raising
chickens and hanging laundry to dry in the sun. The objects
of gentle, platonic courtship from older women with gnarled
knuckles and indulgent laughs. Denim and corduroy and
clogs and never worrying about makeup or hair or nails,
breast size or hip size, or having to pretend to be the
understanding wifey, the supportive girlfriend who loves
everything her man does.
‘Not all guys are assholes,’ Jeff says. Greta makes a
noncommital noise.
We return to our cabins liquid-limbed. I feel like a water
balloon left in the sun. All I want to do is sit under my
sputtering window air conditioner and blast my skin with the
cool while watching TV. I’ve found a rerun channel that
shows nothing but old ’70s and ’80s shows,