Depositing Garrison's money felt like collecting hush-hush fees, a quiet, under-the-table tap tap tap, as if she were born into the mafia and wasn't to tell. Her mother scoffed at this. Money didn't care where it came from. Life cost just the same. Dina deposited the checks into a savings account; it added up. After her mother's death, the checks arrived in Dolores's name. She considered burning them but didn't. Don't be foolish. The right amount of money gives you freedom. You can do what you want when the bills are paid and your refrigerator is stocked.
She traveled. She went north because most young midwesterners went south. She reached Minot, North Dakota as residents pulled block heaters out of their garages. There was nothing of interest in Minot, but she was tired. She spent two weeks at the Traveler's Lodge where she met a man named Willie at the continental breakfast. He asked to take her to dinner, and she decided it was time to leave.
Dolores checked out and turned her car south and west, meandering along narrow roads that scissored through the Black Hills and then Wyoming. Snow began to fall, and the landscape looked alien. She dreamt of Mars while sleeping in her car at rest stops.
While eating pancakes at a diner in Casper, her Aunt Regina called to say she was entering the hospital and expected to die soon. Two days later and thirty minutes outside of Denver a nurse named Diane called to say that she had. Because there was no one else to tend to her aunt's affairs, Dolores set her course back east toward home.
Truth be told, Dolores did not like to travel, so when she learned she had inherited the house, she pulled up the peach-colored Berber that stretched across every room in the house, including the bathroom, painted the walls white, and moved in.
It was a small house, but it was nice. The back sliding door off the kitchen opened into a fenced-in, oversized back yard with three trees, a shed, and a row of lilacs her aunt had kept pruned into fat eggs. A gate in the back fence opened to a walking trail; and across the walking trail, a carpet of green yawned across two acres. A setup like this needed a dog, and so she brought one home from the shelter. Because most of the dogs she knew were named Buddy and Bailey and Murphy and Lou, she named hers Todd. His breed was anyone's guess; when she was asked, she said "Bastard" and left it at that.
She noticed the boy first, holding the hand of the odd man with the untucked shirt. They stood motionless where the sidewalk met the grass, the sun behind making them featureless like paper dolls. Dolores threw Todd's tennis ball. The boy broke away from his father and ran swinging his plastic library goodie bag beside him.
It always alarmed her to see the same random stranger more than once in a day, made her feel as if God were shuffling chess pieces and she was missing the play. In this case, it alarmed her more in that they seemed to be watching her. (GJE-3: Reappearance of ego. Start again.) And then the boy there, Army crawling under the shrubbery for Todd's tennis ball, her head started to buzz. He reappeared, ball in hand, and threw it back toward the picnic table where his father appeared to be stranded.
"Wonderful! Thank you!" she told him. They both followed Todd.
The boy's father seemed trap, caught, stuck. The buzz grew--vibrations, up threw the heels of her feet. Mountain pose, mountain pose, mountain pose, she told herself. Center of Earth, where are you? The man stammered something in response to something she had said. What had she said? Was this what it felt like to lose ego, finally? That in fact, the moment ego left, one drifted into the ether, finally consumed entirely by energy? If GJE-3 is a success, how will I note it? She noted the irony of wanting to celebrate the accomplishment of a project that would eradicate the compulsion to celebrate accomplishment. And then she began to panic, feeling herself tangling. Overgrown vines in chain link. The buzz grew to a pounding. Unbearable.
And then it stopped. The boy's hand slipped into hers. It was weightless. "Oh," she said. Green fringe from the shrubs stuck in his hair. He had a cowlick at the crown of his head, just as she did, and she resisted the urge to smooth it down.
The boy's father exhaled audibly and unballed his fists. Todd yawned, stretched onto his belly, and sighed with his snout on his front paws, the tennis ball in between.
"This is Phillip. Do you babysit?" the man asked, stiffly.
Phillip. "Sure," said Dolores.
Phillip squeezed her hand, and somewhere in between, she felt her mother say Yes.
