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One day at a time.
The guiding tenet of this new life of hers. In the past five years, she’d turned her life around, pared down and stripped away until only what mattered remained. She left almost no carbon imprint on the planet. She composted everything. She grew and tended and sold her organically grown produce, and she ate only organic food. Fruits, nuts, vegetables, and grains. She was not pretty anymore, and she was as thin and stringy as her beans, but none of that bothered her. In fact, it pleased her. The life she’d led showed on her face.
She was alone now. It was how it always should have been. How many times had her father told her that? You’re cold as ice, Dotty. You’ll end up alone if you can’t thaw. It was criminal that his voice was still in her head after all these years.
She put a rubber band around her pant leg and climbed onto the bike. With a flourish, she was off, pedaling through town with her cash box banging around in the basket between her handlebars. Cars honked at her and came too close, but she barely noticed. She’d learned that people were uncomfortable with old hippies in general, but especially those on bicycles.
At the corner, she held her arm out to indicate her intention and turned onto Main Street. It gave her a small bit of pleasure, just following the rules, indicating her turn. She knew it sounded odd and most people wouldn’t understand, but her whole life had been spent in the wildlands of anarchy, and the peace that came with rules and fences and society had proven to be unexpectedly comforting. She parked her bike in one of the stands outside the pharmacy. The newer residents of town, the hipper suburbanites who’d chosen this once-sleepy town as their home because it was thirty-some miles from downtown Seattle, would lock their bikes up in bright red tubing and protect their investment.
It always made Dorothy smile, seeing that sort of care being taken for things. Someday, if they were lucky, they’d learn what needed to be held close in life, and what wasn’t worth worrying over. Retying her bandanna as she walked down the cracked, uneven sidewalk, she was surprised by the number of people in town today. Tourists moved in flocks in and out of the antique stores that had become Snohomish’s raison d’être. On this street, once the only one in town, banked on one side by the wide, flat ribbon of the Snohomish River and on the other by the start of the new part of town, the storefronts retained the frontier look of the old days.
She went into a brightly lit pharmacy and strode directly to the prescription counter. Along the way there were plenty of pretty things that caught her eye—brightly colored barrettes, coffee mugs with inspirational sayings, greeting cards—but she knew that less was more. Besides, she had no money left and her check from Tully hadn’t come in yet this month.
“Hey, Dorothy,” the pharmacist said.
“Hey, Scott. ”
“How was the farmers’ market today?”
“Great. I have some honey for you and Lori. I’ll bring it by. ”
He handed her the medication that had made such a difference in her life. “Thanks. ”
She paid for her pills, pocketed the small orange bottle, and headed out. She went back out to the busy street, climbed onto her bicycle, and pedaled the three miles home.
As always, going up Summer Hill kicked her ass, and by the time she reached the top and turned onto Firefly Lane, she was sweating hard and breathing heavily. At her driveway, she wheeled left and hung on tightly as the old bike rattled down toward the house.
There was a note pinned to her front door. Frowning, she got off her bike, let it clatter to the ground. When was the last time someone had left her a note?
D—
Tully is in Sacred Heart Hospital. Johnny says to hurry. Cab fare under mat. 426 E.
M
Dorothy bent down and lifted up the black rubber doormat. A dirty white envelope lay on the damp potato-bug-dotted cement beneath. Inside the envelope was a one-hundred-dollar bill.
Dorothy hurried through the rambler that had once belonged to her parents and now was owned by her daughter—the same house a much younger Dorothy had once lived in with a fourteen-year-old Tully. The only place they’d ever lived together.
In the last few years, Dorothy had done a little work on the place, but not much. The exterior was still beige and in need of paint; the roof still grew a green moss in places. Inside, she’d ripped up the avocado shag carpeting and found hardwood floors beneath, which someday she intended to refinish. The kitchen was still the Pepto-Bismol-colored apocalypse some renter had chosen in the early seventies, but the hideous gingham curtains were gone. The only room Dorothy had really gutted was the master bedroom. She’d ripped down the cheap blinds, pulled up the gold sculpted carpeting, and painted the walls a pretty cream color.
Dorothy opened her prescription bottle and took her pill, washing it down with a handful of warm tap water. Picking up the old-fashioned corded phone in the kitchen—an antique in this cell phone era—she opened the phone book, looked up the number, and called a cab. There was no time to take a shower, so she just brushed her hair and teeth. Braiding her stringy gray hair as she walked into the bedroom, she caught sight of herself in the oval mirror above her dresser.
She looked like Gandalf after a bender.
A cab horn honked out front. She grabbed her purse and ran out. It wasn’t until she was in the smelly brown velour seat, staring through a dirty window, that she realized one pant leg was still rubber-banded to her ankle.
She stared at her farm as the cab pulled out of the driveway. More than four years ago—when she’d finally accepted the idea of true change—this place had saved her. She often thought that her tears had been the moisture that made her vegetables grow.
She was grateful for the prescription drugs in her system. The veil they provided was chiffonlike, a softening of the world around her. Just a little. Enough so that her emotions—her unreliable and dangerous moods—were calmed. Without them, she knew she could spiral downward now, into the darkness that had been home for most of her life.
Memories clamored at her, pushing, demanding until she couldn’t hear the cabdriver breathing or the engine purring or the traffic zipping past them.
Time unspooled and wrapped around her and she had no will to resist. She gave up, gave in, and for a split second the world went utterly, completely still.
Then she heard a dog barking, a chain snapping taut, and she knew where she was, when she was: 2005. November. She was sixty-four years old, a woman who called herself Cloud, and her daughter was one of the most famous people on TV. Cloud lived in a broken-down trailer on a muddy lot off a logging road near Eatonville. The sweet, cloying smell of …
marijuana engulfed her. She was high, but not high enough. Lately, there wasn’t enough weed in the world to protect her.
