[Fiction | Issue 10]

L Mari Harris

Front Street cats

He tells New Chris it’s only temporary as he nails sheetrock up in the garage, lays carpet over the cement floor, and springs for a new window A/C.

It’s just until Old Chris gets back on her feet.

He feels responsible, sixteen months up in Chillicothe because of him, Old Chris running deliveries out of M.J.’s Tavern, never once caving when the detectives hammered on her—Just say it. We know who you run with. Make it easy on yourself.

New Chris isn’t happy she’s been pushed out of the house and into the garage, temporary or not.

But where’s she going to go? They both know she’s stuck. Her family’s back in Arkansas, and he has to drive her to the Country Mart three days a week, where she dons a hair net and slices big slabs of honey ham and peppered turkey until she can’t feel her hands anymore and her shoulders pinch up to her ears.

And Old Chris is now a little intimidating looking, even to him. She gained weight in prison. All that starchy food and sitting around, sallow skin, and grey streaks running through her dull brown hair.

Old Chris cranks the television volume as loud as it will go from the moment she wakes up. When he complains, she says she got so used to all the yelling and metal doors clanging open and shut that silence now makes her a nervous wreck.

He tells New Chris she can sneak through the back door and tiptoe downstairs, to the half-finished bathroom tucked into the far corner of the house next to the furnace and water heater any old time she wishes.

It’s working out, until Old Chris and New Chris find themselves standing face to face, as he’s sitting at the kitchen table reading through the police blotter.

They scream. Bring each other’s mothers into it. He should know better by now, but he tells them to calm the fuck down, which sets off another round of screaming, until they’re both hoarse and gasping and clutching their knees.

He has a certain way of lowering his voice, of making people lean in closer and go quiet. It’s not so bad now, is it? Trust me, he croons to them, stroking their heads like little pets.

After New Chris finally goes back to the garage, Old Chris asks if he’s in love with the girl. He says over and over I couldn’t leave her on the streets until Old Chris wipes her tears and says she believes him.

He admires the walkway laid of bricks stolen from behind a contractor's building one night as he walks to New Chris's door.

She asks if he’s still in love with the woman in the house she used to call hers. She never gave me up. I owe her, he says over and over, until New Chris buries her face in his shirt and says she believes him.

But New Chris grows tired of sleeping alone in the garage every night. She complains she never sees him anymore. She’s tired of using the half-finished bathroom in the basement. Tired of not being able to cook real meals because Old Chris is always in the kitchen, drinking stale coffee and playing Solitaire on her phone, television blaring HSN.

Old Chris and New Chris want each other out.

They stand in their doorways, shouting across the walkway.

He orders them to stop, to show some God damn gratitude for putting a roof over their heads.

A heatwave hits and refuses to lift, the air what his mother calls soupy. She lives in a retirement home down by the harbor, and he begins sleeping on her couch to get away from the screaming television and the two Chrises.

When Old Chris and New Chris are at their jobs, he installs cameras facing each door and downloads an app to his phone.

He begins sitting on his mother’s little balcony every night, nursing a six-pack. Livestreams the patch of yard between his house and the garage.

One night, Old Chris stomps down the walkway, but New Chris doesn’t budge from her doorway. He watches Old Chris charge and retreat, like a bluffing bear. He shakes his head, laughing, finishes off his beer. Decides New Chris has more moxie than he’s been giving her credit for, decides she may come in handy for one of those jobs that need a little more bravado, a little more finesse, to pull off.

But what he decides he loves most is the silence.

Watching as they bare their teeth, tongues protruding, fingers clawing, their hands clenching into fists.

Furious over what they think is theirs to capture and hold.

__________

About the author

L Mari Harris’s stories have been chosen for the Wigleaf Top 50 and Best Microfiction. She lives in the Ozarks. Follow her @LMariHarris and read more of her work at lmariharris.wordpress.com.