Dark Places

into thinking the farm was OK, that this year would pick up, and then felt all the sicker when she woke up to the alarm a few hours later, guilty and duped. It was surprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn’t so.
    “So you came over here with groceries and a sticker book and all along you had this
story
about Ben you were going to tell me.”
    “Like I said …” Diane shrugged sympathetically, splayed her fingers except for the ones holding the cigarette.
    “Well, what happens now? Do you know the girls’ names? Is someone going to phone me or talk to me, or talk to Ben? I need to find Ben.”
    “Where is he?”
    “I don’t know. We had a fight. About his hair. He took off on his bike.”
    “So what was the story with his hair?”
    “I don’t know, Diane! What in God’s name does it matter now?”
    But of course Patty knew it did matter. Everything now would be filtered and sifted for meaning.
    “Well, I don’t think this is an emergency,” Diane said quietly. “I don’t think we need to get him home right now unless you want him home right now.”
    “I want him home right now.”
    “OK, well let’s start calling people then. You can give me a list of his friends and I’ll start phoning.”
    “I don’t even know his friends anymore,” Patty said. “He was talking to someone this morning, but he wouldn’t say who.”
    “Let’s hit redial.”
    Her sister grunted, stamped out her cigarette with a boot, pulled Patty out of her chair, led her inside. Diane snapped at the girls to stay in their room when the bedroom door cracked, and made her way to the phone, purposefully hit the redial button with one braut-sized finger. Sing-song numeric tones blared out of the receiver— beepBeepBEEPbeepbeepbupBEEP—and before it even rang, Diane hung up.
    “My number.”
    “Oh, yeah. I called after breakfast to see when you’d be over.”
    The two sisters sat at the table, and Diane poured more mugs of coffee. The snow glared into the kitchen like a strobelight.
    “We need to get Ben home,” Patty said.

Libby Day
NOW
    M oony as a grade-school girl, I drove home thinking about Ben. Since I was seven, I pictured him in the same haunted-house flashes: Ben, black-haired, smooth-faced, with his hands clasped around an axe, charging down the hall at Debby, a humming noise coming from his tight lips. Ben’s face speckled in blood, howling, the shotgun going up to his shoulder.
    Id forgotten there was once just Ben, shy and serious, those weird unsettling blasts of humor. Just Ben my brother, who couldn’t have done what they said. What I said.
    At a stoplight, my blood sizzling, I reached behind my seat and grabbed the envelope from an old bill. Above the plastic window, I wrote:
Suspects
. Then I wrote:
Runner
. Then I stopped.
Someone with a grudge against Runner?
I wrote.
Someone Runner owed money to?
Runnerrunnerrunner. It came back to Runner. That male voice, bellowing in our house that night, that could have been Runner or an enemy of Runner’s as easily as it was Ben. I needed this to be true, and provable. I had a gust of panic: I can’t live with this, Ben in jail, this open-ended guilt. I needed it finished. I needed to know. Me, me. I was still predictably selfish.
    As I passed the turnoff for our farm, I refused to look.
    I stopped in a 7-Eleven on the outskirts of Kansas City, filled up with gas, bought a log of Velveeta, some Coke, white bread, and kibble for my old, starving cat. Then I drove home to Over There That Way, pulled up my slope of a hill, got out, and stared at the two old ladies across the street who’d never look at me. They sat on the porch swing as always, despite the chill, their heads rigidly straight, lest I muddy their view. I stood with my hands on my hips, on top of my hill, and waited until one finally caved. Then I waved rather grandly, an Old West corral sort of wave. The wrinkled biddy nodded at me, and I went inside and fed poor Buck, feeling a bubble of triumph.
    While I still had the energy, I knifed bright yellow mustard onto my white bread, stacked thick smushy chunks of Velveeta on top, and swallowed the sandwich while negotiating with three different but equally bored phone operators to reach the Bert Nolan Group Home for Men. That’s another thing to add to my list of potential occupations for ole Jim Jeffreys: operator. As a kid, that was