Bone Dust and Cinnamon

Sid missed his wife.

He missed her hoarse voice and the way she communicated with sideways glances, her sighs that fell halfway between a smile and a yawn. He missed her toes that were too long for her feet, her flowing hair that looked the way it smelled, like cinnamon, and her name that launched so many conversations--Harper Lee—not as an homage to the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, she’d insisted, but in honor of a hotel concierge in Kansas City, a story that improved every time she told it. Harper had brimmed with practicality, but she never let that undercut her sense of adventure.

Without her, Sid had no rudder.

She would never have allowed him to sink his life’s savings into a deep-sea fishing charter and waterfront trinket shop--not with three daughters in college, exchanging a house in the suburbs and a decent job for this—bait, beer, a fishing boat, and what the owner had thrown in when Sid bought the place: an antique outboard motor mounted on the wall, a soda machine that dispensed glass bottles, a jukebox full of forty-fives, and an African gray parrot named Mango, pre-loaded with phrases guaranteed to chip away self-esteem.

“You’re-n-asshole,” Mango squawked. “Fuckin’-b’rd.”

“Shut up. I can’t think with all that yapping.” Sid hurled a crumpled credit card statement at Mango whose wings fluttered as he hopped from the counter to the beer tap.

Sid shuffled a pile of mail for his monthly game of bill poker. He dealt the letters from his lenders to their invisible proxies looming over his desk, all with their eyes on the pot--what remained in Sid’s bank account at the end of the month. They’d all urged him to adopt electronic billing, e-statements with email reminders and auto-debit to streamline the siphoning of his bank accounts, while saving the environment in the process. But Sid insisted on paper. This poker game was the only one he could play anymore.

Visa showed two pair, MasterCard three-of-a-kind. The I.R.S, full house, same hand as usual. Regional Medical Center, still hounding him for payment on Harper’s hospital stay three years after her death, they folded, after a bluff. A registered letter from Gulf Coast Bank trumped the others with a straight flush.

Sid wanted to blame a recent oil spill for the drop in business, the bad press from environmental groups showing pelicans dripping with goop and dead fish washed up on the beach, but the company responsible for the spill managed the cleanup before too much damage had occurred to the ecosystem. This meant no insurance claims or payments or funds to local businesses and no excuses for why Sid’s business continued to circle the drain. He already knew why. With his beard and long gray hair, Sid looked the part of an old salt, but that was where the resemblance ended.

His boat, the Harper Lee, named before he knew that she leaked oil and her engine clacked, made it out to sea and back on the prayers of the passengers alone, and Sid had mistaken rude drunkenness for adept seamanship when he hired his fishing charter captain.

He’d overheard passenger complaints about the pier wobbling, the smell, the noise, and the Moon House Pub, what Sid had named the bar, served imported crab and domestic beer, the opposite of what his customers expected. The bait and tackle shop sold mostly overpriced souvenirs. His aggregate online review rating on the Port Aransas TourStop website landed at one and a half stars. One customer commented: “I wish I got seasick. That way I’d have had a valid reason to throw up.”

While Sid played his bill poker game, Shellie sat at the computer, surfing websites with details about unusual deaths, accidents or murders so strange that they tested the boundaries of logic and physics. The ticks she made with her tongue and her sighs annoyed Sid as much as Mango’s squawking, while he tried to sift through ideas on how to save his business. “What? What is it this time?”

“Listen to this.” Shellie held her hand in the air, her eyes trained on the computer screen. “A man, somewhere in California, a tree trimmer. Must’ve been one of those big trees. Who knows?” Shellie tapped the desk with a pencil. “He’s pruning branches, forty feet off the ground and chainsaws through his own safety harness.” She shifted in her chair. “But that’s not the worst of it. A branch catches his fall. Lucky. Until the chainsaw clips the branch, and the dude falls forty feet. The chainsaw follows him down. An--”

“Don’t chainsaw blades stop without a finger on the throttle?”

“I don’t know. That’s what it says. Not all chainsaws work the same way.”

Shellie pushed the death stories to their limits, soaking in every detail, never doubting even the most incredulous tale. She consumed them as though she were popping chocolate candies into her mouth, nonchalant until the taste hit her tongue with warm familiarity. When Sid and Shellie first met, she’d quizzed him regarding Harper’s death, about aspects not covered in official reports, graphic details, things he’d withheld from his daughters, from police, and from Harper’s family. He fed Shellie tidbits when she craved them, but never the ones that still pinched him in the middle of the night.

“So, we have that senior group this morning, right?” Shellie pulled her hair back and sat on the edge of Sid’s desk.

“Canceled. Weather coming.”

“Any ideas?” Shellie slapped her hand on the pile of mail. “For income.”

“Might be too late. One thing you could do is teach that fuckin’ bird a phrase or two that won’t insult the customers.”

“Or—slow down with the poker games.”

“Poker’s not the problem.”

“Well then, what are we going to do?”

Harper used to tell Sid that he employed the rodeo clown method of crisis management—distract and run around until the problem got tired. That method didn’t work with Shellie. Her questions never ended, hounding him about the bills, about his gambling, about the business. Shellie had filled the void in his life with Harper gone and all his daughters off at college, but that was as far as we went. There was no we. Never again.

“Harper probably would’ve wanted me to move on. But she sure wouldn’t approve of this arrangement. Just so you know.” Sid pointed at himself and back to Shellie.

“What?”

“You’re a year older than Sarah. That’s what.”

“Sarah’s a senior in college. She’s an adult, and so am I.”

“I just can’t figure why a pretty young girl would have any interest in a tired old goat like me.”

Shellie sipped her coffee. “I ask myself that every day.” She cranked the lever on the ocean side of the shop. A window that spanned half the wall inched open, leaving Sid’s mail poker game at the whims of the breeze. Seagulls cawed through the open window followed by the odor of the seaweed buildup in the inlet channel.

“Well, at least you get to live on the beach,” Sid said.

“Is that what you think? I’m some sort of slut screwing a middle-aged drop out, so I can live next to the beach?” Shellie gazed at Sid.

“I didn’t mean that.”

“You never mean anything by the things you say.”

Sid had no clue what to call his arrangement with Shellie. Girlfriend made him sound like a twenty-two-year-old. Partner? They sure as hell weren’t that. Friends with benefits? No, no, no. They weren’t starring in some romantic comedy, or worse, a reality show. He buried the idea that he just missed his daughters. That creeped him out to think about. Maybe it went no further than having a thing for redheads, but it didn’t matter what he called their relationship as he teetered on the verge of losing everything he’d banked on for retirement and prolonging his estrangement from his daughters.

Mango hopped to the edge of Sid’s desk and squawked.

“That’s it, bird.” Sid shooed Mango toward the open window. “Get out of here. Window’s open. You’re free. Fly away. Free bird.”

Mango’s wings fluttered as he hit the open air, cutting an arc in the sky before swooping back into the shop, perching on Shellie’s shoulder where she offered him a treat. She extended her arm, and Mango hopped from her shoulder down to her hand.

With the muffled voices telling fish stories in the Moon House Pub below him, Sid watched the sun drop behind the sails in the marina, listening to the water lap at the Harper Lee moored to the pier. He sat on the balcony in his house over the shop every day, thinking, when the weight of his finances didn’t manage to ruin the peace, about Harper and how the whole experience of living near the ocean would have invigorated her.

Shellie startled him when she placed her hands on his shoulders. “We may be broke, but we have a great view. At least your daughters have college funds. I would’ve killed for a college fund.”

Sid rubbed his face with a grunt. “Well, yeah, luckily Sarah’s almost through, but--”

“What do you mean—but?”

“I really thought I could make this place work. The more I sunk into it, the more I had to sink into it. Besides, a lot of people put themselves through school--” Sid couldn’t look at Shellie, afraid to see the disappointment in her eyes. “Before you say it--don’t. Not one dime of their college money ever made it to a poker pot. It was invested.”

“You don’t call this place a gamble?”

“That’s why I have to figure this out. I’ve decided to take mom’s ring to that guy and get what he offered for it. That’ll buy some time.”

“That’s crazy, Sid. Did you not listen? You never listen.” Shellie squatted in front of him, holding both of his hands. “We have to find your dad’s ring.”

Sid sat up straight, withdrawing his hands. “I wasn’t exactly honest about that. I know where my dad’s ring is.”

Sid took a deep breath. He hadn’t thought of his dad’s ring in years, not until last week at the appraiser who had identified his mom’s wedding ring as one half of a priceless set belonging to some seventeenth-century Romanian royals. Sid’s grandmother purchased the rings for one hundred and fifty dollars at an estate sale in 1960 as a wedding gift for Sid’s mom, not because she’d thought they were valuable. She adored the way they looked, the message they conveyed. The two rings, snakes wrapped around branches, became a single snake with bejeweled eyes when the rings came together, partial inscriptions together depicted the complete lovelorn tale. No one in the family thought the rings had anything other sentimental value. According to the appraiser “collectors would pay big bucks for the two rings together,” enough money to pay off the notes on the shop and boat with some left over. Sold by itself, the appraiser offered little more than the market value of the metal and jewels for his mom’s ring.

“Oh my God. Well?” Shellie held out both hands. “Where is it?”

“It’s in a skull,” Sid said.

“A skull?” Shellie kept her gaze on Sid as she pulled up the other chair, her eyes telegraphing her thoughts, her imagination salivating over skulls, death, and decay, hungry for every detail.

“Just forget it. There’s no getting it back.”

“Why not? Is it in a grave?”

“No—not really.”

“What the hell, Sid?”

He rubbed his face, avoiding Shellie’s eyes. “It’s gone.”

“Sid, look at me.” Shellie leaned over and placed her hands on Sid’s cheek, forcing him to make eye contact. “Where is the ring?”

August of 1977, a month after his dad disappeared, Sid and his mom were in Paris visiting his aunt who worked as an au pair. She took them to the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, Sacre Coer, and the Louvre, so on the last day, when Sid had tired of museums to the point of being unmanageable, she suggested the Catacombs. The dark labyrinth of skulls, femurs and ribs, stacked like ossuary Legos housed the remains of eighteenth-century paupers evicted from overcrowded cemeteries in Paris with no valuable possessions, no bracelets or gold teeth, no scepters, no canopic jars, only the indignity of naked bone with millions of silent voices who’d already said goodbye. Plus, one wedding ring belonging to Sid’s dad, dropped into the eye socket of a poor soul the nine-year-old Sid had dubbed Jean Paul Deadguy.

“Somewhere in the Catacombs. In Paris.”

Shellie hopped out of her chair and headed to the patio door.

“Where are you going?”

She turned back. “I always told myself that if I ever went to Paris, I’d bypass the Louvre and all that clichéd crap and head straight for Jim Morrison’s grave and then to the Catacombs.”

“Oh, and that’s not clichéd?”

“Not the tourist part that’s open to the public. I’m talking the miles of passageways people get lost in. Dark tunnels where the dead commune and secret societies meet. Urban explorers.” When she spoke of the Catacombs, when speaking of the dead, Shellie came to life, throwing out facts and legends about graffiti dating back to the French revolution, caverns filled with bones, large unmapped areas, hideaways used by the French resistance in WWII as well as the Nazis, an illegal cinema, the risk of getting so lost in the dark that one could die unfound and fit right in after decomposing. “So, I’m going to pack.”

“Oh, hell no. There are millions of skulls in that place. I was nine. And messed up in the head. And we can’t just rummage through the remains. They don’t allow that.”

“For that kind of money, I’m willing to try it.”

“If we can’t pay the bills, how can we go to Paris?”

How much did his dad owe him for all the Little League games he never coached, the math homework he never helped with, the advice on dating he never gave, the times he hadn’t taught Sid to drive, the grades he never praised Sid for, the graduations he never attended, the kites he never flew, the pet he never got him, the wedding he hadn’t attended, and the grandchildren he never met. That ring wouldn’t have covered a down payment on what his dad owed him.

Sounds of packing emanated from the bedroom. Suitcases rattled. Hangers slid down the clothes rod with a muffled screech. Shoes pounded on the floor. While Shellie packed, Sid rustled through a box of mementos from his childhood, wondering if he’d accumulated enough air miles to book a trip to Paris, adding in the estimated cost of the cheapest hostel in Montparnasse.

“What are you doing now?” Shellie pushed open the bathroom door.

“What does it look like?” Locks of silver and brown surrounded Sid’s feet. Wisps of hair floated to the ground.

“But I love your long hair.” Shellie rubbed her hand up the back of Sid’s bare neck. “Oh my God.” She leaned in for a closer look. “You shaved your beard. Why?”

“I’m jogging my memory.” Sid had cultivated facial hair in some form since his senior year in high school. Harper had loved his beard. Shaving it left him as exposed and pink as a crab molting its shell.

Shellie picked up the yellowing photograph of a nine-year-old Sid that rested on the edge of the sink. “You were so cute.”

A week before Sid’s ninth birthday, his family had piled into their conversion van and headed for the beach. Sid’s dad walked out on his family on the last day of their vacation, after Sid, his mom, and sister returned to the motel room from souvenir shopping. On the dresser next to the television his dad had left a note next to his wedding ring. Sid never got to read the note, though he’d assumed, like everything else, that Jimmy Carter had been to blame. His mom never noticed the ring, so Sid shoved it in his pocket with the sand dollars, broken kite string, and the two quarters and three dimes it would cost for a banana split at Lulu’s.

Sid shooed Mango and plopped down at the kitchen table with a handful of cookies, freeing his memory to jog off the trail and onto the beach when he poured a glass of milk, a ritual his nine-year-old self performed every day that summer. Shellie joined him at the table.

At nine, the obvious had escaped Sid, but his father had dropped a breadcrumb trail for anyone to follow with hints about his feelings for his family, starting with the silent treatment. After his mom pushed in an ABBA eight–track for the ten-hour road trip to Port Aransas, his parents never said one word to each another. Sid’s mom spent her time that week collecting shells, distant in thought, and his sister, after having sunbathed with baby oil on the first day, holed up in the motel nursing blisters from her sunburn. His dad, an avid fisherman, spent the week deep-sea fishing. Sid wasn’t man enough yet, his dad had said, and he didn’t want to ruin his one vacation by attending a seasick baby when there were swordfish waiting to be hauled in.

Sid downed his milk before he twisted the cap off a discount bottle of spiced rum. He dropped two cubes of ice into a glass and filled it to the rim with rum, blocking Shellie from taking the bottle before he finished his pour.

Sid’s phone vibrated, lying face-down, cutting an arc across the table. He finished his drink with a gulp. Within seconds, the phone rumbled again. As he poured another glass, the voicemail jingle sounded. Of the fifteen collectors with his number on speed dial, his stomach turned when he saw on the screen the one number that could send his retirement straight to the monetary morgue, Gulf Coast bank, the lienholder on the shop and the fishing charter boat.

Sid bounced the phone in his hand and hurled it against the wall, almost hitting Mango. Mango hopped onto the counter, squawking “fuckin’-b’rd.”

Shellie slid into the chair opposite Sid. “Don’t worry. Let’s go to Paris. We’ll find your dad’s ring.”

Sid rubbed his face, his hands searching for a beard that wasn’t there. “Why not? Broke either way.”

“Is your passport up to date?”

Sid nodded. “Yours?”

“Yeah. Remember, I was going to Italy last year.” She slapped him on the back. “Before we—I moved in with you.”

“Yeah, and now my daughters won’t visit anymore.” They exchanged swigs of rum.

“Tell yourself that if you want to, but I am not the reason your daughters don’t visit you.”

It didn’t help matters that he was dating someone their age, but his daughters blamed him for their mother’s death. No one knew what really happened that night on the ice but Sid. The official account alienated him from his daughters, the truth might have sullied the final memories they had of their mother. Either way, the story had come to rest with Maggie, and he couldn’t bring himself to think about it.

Sid eyed his phone teetering on the edge of the sink, tempted to help it the rest of the way into the dishwater as he and Shellie continued to exchange swigs as though they were high school kids under the bridge at 2:00 am.

“So, you hate to fish,” Shellie proclaimed. “You don’t like being on the water.”

“I get seasick,” Sid said.

“You sunburn. And you hate the smell of bait.”

“Don’t you?”

“That’s not the point.” Shellie smacked her forehead.

“What is the point?”

“Why did you buy this place to begin with?”

“No good reason.”

Sid remembered a bronze man in his sixties on the beach that week in 1977. The man wore a Speedo swimsuit and gold chains around his neck. His skin looked like leather, and he’d told Sid something.

“The ocean’s a glorious companion or a scornful lover,” Sid said. “It all depends on how you approach her. Always treat her with respect.”

“What the hell?”

“That’s what a man told me on the beach when I was a kid.”

“That’s why you bought this place?”

“No. Just sounds right, I guess.”

Shellie threw up her arms and grabbed the remote control.

Planning their wedding twenty-three years ago, Harper had wanted, insisted, begged for them to spend their honeymoon in Paris, but the thought of being in the same city as his dad’s ring tugged on Sid, made him revisit the Lord of the Rings, and he imagined himself as Golem sniveling around for his precious in the Catacombs while his new bride looked on in horror, so they’d gone to Montreal instead. Marrying Harper, buying their first house together, the births of his daughters, each milestone reached buried Paris under a mound of life’s details, but the pull of the precious had returned. Saving the store and the fishing charter wouldn’t redeem him in the eyes of his daughters, but it would keep them in college with their rightful funds Harper had insisted they have.

Shellie dropped her bag and studied the Paris Metro map at Charles de Gaulle Airport. “So, you hate boats. You’re afraid to fly. Let me guess, you’ve got a problem with trains, too?”

“I don’t hate boats. I get seasick.” Sid hadn’t spoken of his fear of flying, but he’d spent eight of the ten hours in the air clutching the arm rests with white knuckles. “I prefer solid ground. Nothing wrong with that.” Sid joined her at the map. “Actually, I like trains,” he said with a nod. The last time he’d ridden a train, during a trip to Manhattan, a drunk college kid had thrown up on his shoes.

“We find that ring, and we’ll have enough money to get you the therapy you so obviously need.”

On the trip from the airport to the city, while Shellie slept, Sid concentrated on the movement of the train, the clicking, the passing city scenes, other passengers lost in their own worlds. He wanted to like trains, as he’d claimed he did. As they pulled into Gare du Nord, he elbowed Shellie to wake her up.

Coming to Paris to try to save his business, his house, and salvage some pride in the process gave Sid a bump of energy, but actually finding Jean Paul Deadguy would involve delving into a cavern of his memory long blocked by caution tape. Down the stairs, more stairs, and into a low ceiling, a tunnel of concrete that led to a subterranean gathering of ghosts, millions of them with voices of bone, he remembered the musty smell as he’d strolled with his mother soaking in his surroundings. He’d taken his father’s ring everywhere that summer, rubbing on it in his pocket, wondering if he’d turn invisible like Bilbo Baggins if he slipped it on. That day, he had it out as he walked, trying it on, wearing it on his thumb, wondering how many mighty swordfish his dad had hauled in on their vacation.

“I wonder how Mango’s doing. You sure your friend is--”

“I thought you hated that bird, Sid.” Shellie tugged at Sid’s arm trying to get him to look at her.

“That doesn’t mean I want him to starve.”

“Mango’s fine.” Shellie rolled her eyes.

As they made their way through the Catacombs, peeking into empty eyes, Sid found Shellie distracting in the place she’d dreamed of visiting her entire life.

He watched as her fingers greeted the bone, encircling the eye socket of a skull, her eyes closed, her fingers penetrating the void. “What are you doing?”

“I-I’m looking for the ring.”

“Looks like you’re getting off on that poor French peasant to me.”

“Fuck you, Sid.” She smacked his shoulder and continued down the corridor of bones, searching for glints of metal with her smart phone flashlight. “Remember the other day when you asked me why I was with you? Well, this is why.”

“What?”

“This. You’re not like everyone else.”

The bones told a different story. He was the same as everyone else. No matter how different someone was, how dissimilar their lives were, everyone ended up the same way, with the same layer of bone dust, with the same distinct smell bones have when stripped bare of all flesh and left to breathe subterranean air, a scent not unlike damp cinnamon, the way Harper’s hair smelled. “Harper had cancer.”

Shellie’s eyes narrowed. “You told me she died in a car accident.”

“She did. But she had cancer. Pancreatic. Late stage. We didn’t tell anyone. Not even the girls.”

“All this death, really makes you think, huh?”

Sid stared into the vacuous gaze of one skull after another, and as the tour guide urged the group forward, Sid heard his mother doing the same. Sid. Come on. The cleft above the right eyebrow, the enlarged nasal cavity and discoloration, a muted violet stain on the right cranial lobe. As his mother called again, Sid deposited the ring, as though he’d inserted a coin into a Galaga arcade game, into the eye socket of Jean Paul Deadguy where it fell with a clunk.

“That’s him.” Sid gave Shellie a nudge. “That is Jean Paul Deadguy.” Sid pointed to the unmistakable violet stain.

“No way. Really?”

Sid aimed his smartphone flashlight into the sockets, looming at an awkward angle for a peek inside, catching the glint of metal. “It’s in there, Shell. I don’t believe it.” He stuck his finger in to locate the ring with no luck. “Your hands are smaller.” He blocked Shellie from the view of a German couple behind them.

“Skulls don’t have a bottom, Sid. We just have to pull it out and voilà,” she said in a French accent with pouty lips.

The skull of Jean Paul Deadguy, eye-level to a nine-year-old, sat in the middle of a perfectly formed wall of bones, a cornerstone on a femur stack for the scores of skulls above him. “It looks wedged in there.”

“Don’t worry, these bones are stacked really well.”

Sid shook his head. “I wonder if a magnet would work.”

“Wow. Where did you go to school? Only if it’s some cheap gold-plated metal. Which it isn’t.”

“What about chewing gum on the end of a stick?”

Shellie eased her hands around the skull. “Get ready.”

Sid couldn’t find a good place to situate his hand, but when Shellie worked the skull from its perch, he spotted only the rusted flint wheel of a cigarette lighter. “Damn.”

When Shellie attempted to resituate the skull, several bones, femurs, slid from the stack, bouncing onto the path. The German couple walked away. An American couple laughed, snapping photos with their phones. Shellie stacked the bones, and another fell. When she finished reseating them, the stack looked disheveled, making it stand out in the corridor.

“It doesn’t look right. We’ve disturbed the Catacomb Feng Shui.” Shellie shielded her face from those who’d witness her inept attempt to stack the bones.

Sid began searching on the other side of the corridor, and suddenly all the skulls bore the same violet stain as Jean Paul Deadguy. Their blank eyes stared him down. Their jawless grins mocked him as though they all concealed a fragment of worthless metal, he could mistake for gold in a shell game with craniums. He lifted a skull from the top of the stack and peered under it. Nothing. He did the same with the next one. Nothing.

“What are you doing, Sid? You were nine. You couldn’t have reached the top of the stack. Down here.” She held her hand at waist level.”

Sid rubbed his face. The skulls in the stack grew flesh around crooked teeth, paupers’ complexions, all shouting choose me. “This is it.” Sid motioned to Shellie. “I’m sure of it this time.” Locked in thoughts of his failed retirement venture and his daughters’ scorn, he saw the empty eyes line up as though he’d won a jackpot on a macabre slot machine and pulled the skull out. No metal. He pulled out another. No ring. And the one beside it, nothing, as he dropped the skulls to yank out another down the line.

“Sid. Stop.” Shellie grabbed his hands, catching the skull he held before it hit the ground. Shellie’s face twisted. Her nose scrunched, and Sid realized what he’d done before the cascade of bones filled the passageway. Shellie dropped the skull and closed her eyes.

The police did not believe Sid’s story about the ring, not that it would have mattered. They charged him with desecration of the dead and disruption of a national monument, which, in lieu of paying the fine, demanded a three-month stint in the Paris taule, an offense he bargained down to disturbing the dead, but he still had no way to pay the fine. Shellie received what amounted to a scolding. They told her that her vacation was over and escorted her to the airport.

Within the cold walls of his cell, a cube he shared with a West African vagrant and a drunk Parisian, Sid charted a plan to win back his daughters. Again, beneath the body odor and concrete, he smelled cinnamon. Three years after her death, he had a difficult time conjuring Harper’s face or the sound of her voice. Now, he wondered if her hair ever really smelled like cinnamon, or whether his mind had fabricated that detail, hair that looked that much like cinnamon must also smell like it. Knowing Harper, she’d used a high-priced salon shampoo filled with unpronounceable though enviro-friendly-not-tested-on-animals ingredients, a list that could have included cinnamon.

“I’m dying, Sid. It’s bad,” Harper had told him. “I won’t put my girls through watching me waste away. No offense, but I’m the strong voice in their world, Sid. I want to go out on my own terms.”

“Strong? That means fight it, right?”

“This is aggressive and it’s going to get bad fast. I have zero chance to beat this. They need their memories of me to be what they are right now. You have to help me, Sid. I can’t do it.” A second opinion? Harper scoffed at that. She’d claimed to have had a second and a third opinion.

Staring at the drunk Parisian on the lower bunk, now three weeks sober having been locked up a day after Sid, the drunken fight he’d had with Harper over his refusal to help her kill herself hung in the air of his cell. Both he and Harper with too much to drink first fought over who should drive when neither of them should have.

“It’s not like you to just to give up.”

“I’m not giving up, Sid. I am controlling my own destiny.”

“But you seem fine to me.”

“What? Once I’m incapacitated and everyone is miserable, then you’ll do it?”

The car hit a patch of black ice and swerved. Sid regained control and pulled to the shoulder.

“I’ve stayed with you all these years, Sid. You’re half here and half in another world. You haven’t been the best dad. You know that, right?”

“Better than my dad.”

“Oh, that’s saying something.”

The rest blurred in his memory. He remembered them screaming at each other, Harper drunker than him. She’d thrown around accusations and threatening divorce and reminded Sid over and over that she had so little time left.

“I’m not going to do it. You have to fight through this. We can do it together.”

“We?”

Harper got out of the car. “Fuck you, Sid. I’m walking home.” She slipped on the ice and fell back to the car.

“Harper. Are you okay?”

She slammed the door.

Without thinking, without taking the car out of gear, Sid hopped out and ran around to check on her. The car continued forward. Sid slipped on the ice as he rounded the trunk, as he saw the car pulling Harper along beside it. She’d slammed the bulk of her curly cinnamon hair in the door. Sid scrambled to his feet, jogging by the car, pulling the door handle, cursing the auto-lock doors. Harper tugged at her hair, her eyes filled with panic and tears. “I want to fight it, Sid. I don’t want to die,” she’d screamed as the car rolled into the highway. Sid chased the driver’s side door to throw the car in gear, but a truck crested the hill. He dove for the ditch as the truck slammed the car and Maggie into the guardrail, a death that might have wound up on one of the websites Shellie loved so much.

Sid figured that a Paris jail was too good for him, that he deserved much worse, but after three and a half weeks, the magistrate released him on the condition that he return to the U.S. He hadn’t gotten the ring. His life would never be the same, but his daughters needed to know the truth. Their father was still alive. They needed him. They didn’t have to hate him.

When he returned to the shop, a yellow slip of paper from the water department taped on the window greeted Sid with notification of service disconnection. His key wouldn’t unlock the door. The Harper Lee sat in the marina, imprisoned behind a locked pier gate. A new sign hung in the front window of the shop that said no trespassing. Mail spilled from the mailbox with a hand-written note sandwiched between the bills and notices.

Hey Sid, the bank foreclosed. They took everything. Sorry, you wound up in jail.

I found a place to stay with a friend of mine. He’s in the Navy in Pensacola Beach.

If you ever make it to over to Florida, make sure to look me up. Anyway, I had fun, Sid.

Thanks. Shellie.

Sid heard a muffled squawk from inside the shop. He rubbed a circle of dust off the window and peered inside. “They took everything. Yeah, except that fuckin’bird.”

He checked the windows, all locked except the one in the back by the supply closet. Sid poked his head through the open window. “Mango. Window’s open. Fly away. You’re free.”

“You’re’nasshole,” Mango screeched. “Fuckin’bird.”

Sid held out his hand. “Oh, come on.” Mango fluttered over and landed on Sid’s forearm.

His car had gotten repossessed, so Sid walked to the bus station with what cash he had left, Mango on his shoulder. If his daughters wouldn’t see him, if they wouldn’t hear what he had to say, or if they didn’t believe him, or trust him anymore, they might at least be willing to teach Mango a few new words.