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Yours,
Laurel
Dear Allan Lane,
I am at my aunt Amy’s. It’s her week. I like the weeks with my dad better, because Dad is my dad and he’s part of my used-to-be-normal family. But I still love Aunt Amy, which is why I am writing to you. Since you are Mister Ed the talking horse’s voice, I figured you’d be the closest thing to Mister Ed himself. My aunt Amy loves Mister Ed. Really loves him. She also really loves Jesus.
When we were little, Dad didn’t used to like us to spend time with her, because he thought that she was unstable. But Mom would cry and say, “Jim, they’re all she has.” Since Aunt Amy never had kids of her own, she’s always thought of May and me as her daughters, too, I guess.
Even though she’s only forty now, Aunt Amy’s hair is silver already and long, and she wears flower-print dresses. You can tell that she was pretty when she was young. But she’s not like Mom, who seems just as pretty now. Mom looks soft, like an out-of-focus picture that blurs her hair and her face a little bit into the landscape. Or maybe that’s just how I see her now that she’s gone. Aunt Amy is ski
Aunt Amy had a few boyfriends a long time ago, but they were all bad ones. I probably shouldn’t know about that, except I heard Mom talking about it once when she and Dad were fighting. Aunt Amy hadn’t dated anyone since I’ve known her until last year, when she fell for this guy who was walking across the country for Jesus. She found out about him on the news, and she decided she really admired this man. She sent him letters and care packages to pit stops along his route. And then she decided to fly out to Florida so she could join the end of his pilgrimage. She walked the last one hundred miles with him, and they struck up a romance on the road. I think Aunt Amy imagined she’d finally found her mate. Afterward, she called him a lot and left him messages, where she did impressions of Mister Ed or of the Jamaican bobsledders from the movie Cool Ru
At the begi
Dad didn’t look so sure, but I knew that if I said no to Aunt Amy, she would start talking about how they let May go too far down a path of sin and how I needed God or something.
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Then Aunt Amy pointed out that if I stayed with her, I could go to the high school in her district. I had barely considered the fact that I’d have to go to high school at the end of the summer, but if I did have to go, it seemed like a good idea to go somewhere else. So I agreed.
Now Aunt Amy hardly wants me to do anything. Go out, or see anyone, or talk to boys, or anything. The only thing she really lets me do is go on “study dates,” which is how I get to hang out with Natalie and Ha
Afterward, Aunt Amy asks if I have been saved or not and if I’ve accepted Jesus into my heart. And I always say yes, because I want to get it over with. And I don’t want her to worry. May used to say no. Then she would ask, “What about a baby? What if a baby was just born, and didn’t have time yet to accept Jesus, and the baby died? Would they still go to hell? Or what about a grown-up person, who wasn’t a bad person, but just didn’t know about Jesus because he never learned? Would they go to hell?” Aunt Amy never really answered. She’d just get sad and say that she wanted us to know Jesus’ love. She’d say see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. She’d try to make it like a game, with us covering our eyes and ears and mouths. May hated that. Now Aunt Amy is scared, I guess, that May never got saved. She wants to make sure that doesn’t happen to me. But she doesn’t know how guilty I am. I can’t ever tell.
We were sitting in the Furr’s dining room in the dark red vinyl booth under the ceiling that is too high even for a high ceiling, and I was on to the red Jell-O, cutting every cube into a quarter. Aunt Amy was asking for more ice for her iced tea. And then she started doing her Mister Ed impression and asking me, “How does Mister Ed go? Show me.” She wanted me to make my hands like horse hoofs on the table and a horse noise with my lips. Like we did when I was a kid. I’ve seen how her face falls when I say no, or how she keeps on insisting. So I swallowed and did the horse lips. Just then I looked across the room and I saw this guy Teddy from my history class with his parents, I guess. He’s one of the popular soccer boys. My face turned hot, and I prayed he hadn’t seen me pretending to clip-clop on the table.
I’m nervous, because I am going to sneak out for the first time tonight. Tristan and Kristen are coming to pick me up at midnight. Tristan nicknamed me Buttercup. They adopted me and Natalie and Ha
I explained living with Aunt Amy part-time by saying that my mom is on some sort of big retreat-type thing. I know that it’s strange that I haven’t talked to any of them about May, but it’s like I have a chance now to forget the bad stuff. To be someone else, someone like her. If I’d gone to Sandia, everyone would be watching me, wanting an answer. But at West Mesa, her identity is my secret. Besides Mrs. Buster, if anyone happened to read the story in the paper all those months ago, or heard of it, they don’t say anything about it. More likely, they didn’t pay attention, or forgot.
Yours,
Laurel
Dear Janis Joplin,
I just got home from my first night sneaking out. The window was stuck, but I got it open. Luckily for me, it’s the old push-up kind that’s easy to get in and out of. I can hear Aunt Amy snoring a little, so I’m safe. There were no parties tonight, so we went to Garcia’s Drive-In, which is open all night, and I ordered cherry limeade, and Tristan ordered ten taquitos, and they smoked pot in the car, and Kristen put you on the stereo.