Afternoons Jenny twists herself through her physical therapy exercises while Jack gets drunk on homemade moonshine. He drifts through the dingy house, grabbing their tired furniture for balance, singing old Fleetwood Mac songs and telling Jenny how beautiful she is. She’s always touched, even though she knows it’s the liquor slithering through his bloodstream, turning him happy but also a little monstrous, like a two-headed beast or a catfish with arms. She opens the curtains because she loves to bask in sunlight, but Jack follows behind, closes them. He doesn’t want the neighbors in their tiny village to see him stagger and bellow. She tries to forget how she truly broke her ankle and remember the lies she tells people. Really, Jack stumbled tipsily into her on the landing and she clattered down the stairs, flailing like a broken marionette. But they tell the neighbors she stepped in a pothole while being chased by old Nell Simpson’s dog, Gracie, even though Gracie is fifteen and does nothing but sprawl in browning grass, pawing at nothing, dreaming her secret dreams. They should move somewhere else, she thinks, somewhere that doesn’t demand these bright, sanitized surfaces, maybe a city where they could drown anonymously in teeming crowds and soaring buildings. But of course the lies could be true. And didn’t she and Jack decide a long time ago that what is and what could be can bleed into each other, a boiling, effervescent concoction of wishes and need. There comes a day when they decide to go to the 7-11, the village’s only store. Jenny says it’s Tuesday because it has that unstable, jittery feel. Jack says Tuesdays don’t have a feel and it’s obviously Sunday, because there’s a church like hush in the streets and the hours are long and lazy. Jack wobbles out the front door and sways in the sunshine. Jenny maneuvers unsteadily on her crutches. Their eastern neighbor, Madeleine Sutter, watches them through a smeared window, a disembodied white face floating in shadow. Jenny waves and smiles because that’s what you do even though she’d like to spit or throw a hard, smooth stone, smashing the window and bruising Madeleine’s narrow-eyed, hungry face. Across the street is an abandoned house with ragged gray siding, a missing shutter, and a once-green yard now swallowed by dandelions, crabgrass, fluttery bunches of Queen Anne’s Lace. Sometimes at night when Jack bellows about CIA conspiracies and neoliberal stupidity, when he vomits on the sofa or carpet, Jenny dreams of sneaking into the house, where she’ll sit and stare into the dense, swarming dark until her thoughts subside into a barely-audible hum. No TV or Jack or phones. No Madeleine with a too-bright smile and a plate of oatmeal cookies they’ll throw out because they both hate raisins. She’ll be devoured by a haze of happy memories, like when she was eight and her grandmother brought her an orange kitten she named Baby. She won’t think about how Baby got gray-whiskered and fat. How tumors burgeoned in his lymph nodes and the vet slid a shiny needle into the orange fur and then Jenny had to grow up and make a life even though nobody ever taught her how. The 7-11 is freezing and the floors are greasy. The owner, Amir, is the only foreigner in the village. Of course, people say foreigner because that’s the kind of people who live here. Jenny feels sorry for him. He ought to be in New York or L.A. He shouldn’t have to feel like a fly in milk or a cockroach scuttling across a just-mopped floor. He leans on the counter, nods at them as they enter, but the corners of his mouth jerk like angry mosquitoes. Probably because the last time they came in, or was it the time before that, Jack fell backwards into a display of cough medicine. Bottles shattered and plummy amoebas of syrup spread across the tiles. Did Amir throw them out? Why can’t she remember? Lately it feels like her days are so fleeting they erase each other as quickly as they’re born. She studies the rotating rack of dried-out chicken wings and wrinkly hot dogs. They haven’t eaten in three days and they’re out of food stamps for the month because last week Jack went to the bakery and bought himself an elaborate birthday cake. A snow-white surface speckled with intricate roses and emerald leaves. Jack’s name in glittering, complicated script. They sat on the floor and ate it with their hands. The inside was as black as the outside was white and Jenny thought there’s probably a lesson in that but she couldn’t sense whatever truth hovered in the humid air. Then Jack said, Jesus, I’m forty-two years old, how did that happen, and started to cry. Jenny said, you’re okay, baby, let me just get that frosting out of your beard. Then Jack passed out and Jenny wiped up the crumbs and watched a solitary ant march stubbornly across the cracked tiles, as if this journey was the most important in its tiny, precarious life. Jenny picks up a Zero Bar, her favorite candy since childhood. She’d gobble two or three while her mother said, you know, white chocolate isn’t really chocolate, and what man would want a girl who eats sweets like that. Her mother is long dead, swallowed by the damp churchyard soil. She sleeps under an eroded stone that proclaims her a devoted mother and a loving wife. You can’t escape the lies even in death, Jenny thinks. And why does that self-satisfied, hissing voice still thread itself through her thoughts, and of course she should have loved her mother more but it was so hard. She peels a corner of the candy’s silvery wrapping. Waves it under her nose to catch a whiff of sweetness. A fat man enters, buys a Red Bull and a pack of Marlboro Reds. Jack extracts two frosty bottles from a humming cooler. He cracks open his Fanta Orange and hands her a Dr. Pepper. She hates Dr. Pepper, which reminds her of a thick, herby medicine she had to take as a child. Isn’t that Jack all over. Never more than half-right. Always almost, never complete. She twists off the cap and drinks, because after all she’s thirsty and if you don’t love what’s in front of you what else is there. The fat man packs the cigarettes and lights one. Smoke dances over his head. Hey, says Amir. You can’t smoke that in here. Take it outside. Let me explain something to you, says the man. I’ll be calling the shots here. His pudgy arm bends. Amir jumps, his eyes wide and terrified in his olive-skinned face. Wait now, says Amir, don’t hurt me, I don’t— I don’t want to hurt you, friend, believe me. Just give me three money orders for four grand apiece. Hurry it up now. Jenny sidles a few steps and now she can see the gun. It’s not large or menacing. It’s flat, blurred at the edges. As if it’s a picture of itself, or seen through the wrong end of a telescope. But the man’s puffy finger is on the trigger. Shit, oh shit, Jack whispers. Just be quiet, Jenny tells him. The fat man turns, noticing them for the first time. Oh, he says, casually, didn’t see you two there. What a shame. A shame, Jenny repeats. What— A drunk and a cripple. It will give me no pleasure, I assure you. Wait, says Jenny, you don’t have to— Oh, but I think differently, sweetheart. His bald head shines in the late-afternoon sunlight. His eyes are navy-blue, reminding Jenny of the time she saw the Pacific Ocean on a school trip. Heaving, ceaseless, infinite. But seeing it never changed anything. She came home and graduated and got married and now she’s in a cage she constructed but somehow lost the key to. Maybe it’s okay, she thinks, maybe this kind of ending transforms the pointless waste of months and years into a story. A tragedy. Shot through with meaning. I don’t see why, Jack says, querulously. We’re nobody. We’re not gonna tell anybody. We’ve got nobody to tell. The fat man grins. His teeth are gray but still shine in the light. Tell you what, he says, I’ll give it some thought. Meantime let’s you and me have a few beers. Get to know each other. Fucking Christ, says Jenny, furious. If you think— Sure, says Jack. I can live with that. He lurches back towards the coolers. What’s your pleasure, he says, over his shoulder. Rolling Rock, says the man. Never drink anything else. I’m a Pennsylvania boy, see. That makes two of us, says Jack. Incredibly, he’s smiling. He clutches a slim green bottle and a Sam Adams. Then things seem to speed up and fragment and resist the reaching fingers of logic. They’re clinking bottles and laughing. Jack’s explaining how birthdays shatter him. The fat man nods and pats him on the shoulder and says there’s always God’s plan, friend, even if you can’t see it. Jack belches and the fat man giggles. It occurs to Jenny that certain things that should be happening aren’t. For instance, when is her life going to flash before her eyes? And wouldn’t a normal person say a prayer? But even if she believed in God, she’s certain He’s not interested in a predicament so stupidly inevitable. The fat man is in front of her, studying her with those ocean eyes. Honey, he says. What can I get you? Mama always taught me to be polite. Jenny’s arms turn into wriggling, impotent worms. Then her crutches slide out and she’s on the floor. She swallows. Hate and fear scorch her throat. But she can’t help seeing that for once, she’s been asked a question she knows the answer to. I want a Diet Coke and a Zero Bar, she says. He smiles again, kneels down, pats her wrist. His breath smells of spit and tuna. Then he’s back with the soda and the candy and she’s using her sharpest teeth to crush the white coating into the almond nougat. She’s crunching the nuts. She’s feeling a slimy patina of sugar coat her throat. It’s a chaos of satisfaction and terror and defeat. Things clash and don’t resolve themselves but she finishes the soda and the candy anyway, as though she’s a little girl again. Just wondering, says the fat man. Why him? You must’ve had options. Oh, says Jenny, he was there. Isn’t that always the way. He keeps smiling as he brings the gun up to her eye level. Hurry up and finish, now, honey. I got places to be. Jenny eats the candy in three huge, ragged bites. The man raises the gun. When it goes off Jenny’s outside her broken body. She’s not herself but a great wave, cresting, foaming, hurling itself against a cold, empty beach. She laughs in what might be delight as her mind slips aside, her body goes still, and all the years of nothingness suddenly really are nothing, so she remembers then forgets, then simply waits for whatever will happen next.