Dark Places

light-bulb jutting out the top like a broken tooth.
    “Fuck. You.” I screamed. It was directed toward me as much as my dad. That, at this stage of my life, I was expecting Runner to act correctly was stupid to the point of outrageousness. The letter was just a big long palm stretching out over the miles, asking for a handout, working me as a mark. I’d pay that five hundred and never see Runner again, until I wanted more help or answers, and then he’d work me over another time. His daughter.
    I was going down to Oklahoma. I kicked the wall twice, rattling the windows, and was going for a good third windup when the doorbell went off downstairs. I looked outside automatically, but from the second floor saw only the top of a sycamore tree and the dusky sky. I stood frozen, waiting for the visitor to go away, but the doorbell went again, five times in a row, the person on my porch knowing I was home, thanks to my tantrum.
    I was dressed like my mom in the winter: big, formless sweatshirt, baggy cheap longjohns, thick itchy socks. I turned to the closet for a second and then decided I didn’t care as the doorbell went again.
    My door has no window in it, so I couldn’t get a glimpse of the person. I put the chain on and opened the door a crack to see the back of a head, a mat of tangled tawny hair, and then Krissi Cates turned around to face me.
    “Those old women over there are kinda rude,” she said, and then gave a showboaty wave, the kind I’d given them the week before, the broad, fuck-you wave. “I mean,
hello’?
anyone ever tell them it’s not polite to stare?”
    I kept looking at her through the chain, feeling like a little old lady myself.
    “I got your address from the—when you were at the club,” she said, bending down to reach my eye level. “I don’t actually have that money for you yet. Uh, but I was hoping to talk to you. I can’t believeI didn’t recognize you that night. I drink way, way too much.” She said it without embarrassment, the way someone would say they have a wheat allergy. “Your place is really hard to find. And I actually haven’t been drinking. But I’ve just never been good at directions. Like, if I reach a fork in the road, and I can take a right or a left, I will choose whichever is wrong. Like, I should just listen to my gut and then do the opposite. But I don’t. I don’t know why that is.”
    She kept talking like that, adding a sentence and then another, without asking to be let in, and that was probably why I decided to let her in.
    She walked in respectfully, hands clasped, the way a well-brought up girl would, trying to find something to compliment in my run-down place, her eyes finally alighting on the box of lotions by the TV set.
    “Oh, I’m a total lotion fiend too—I have a great pear-scented one I’m really into now, but have you tried udder cream? It’s what they used to put on dairy cows? Like on their udders? And it’s so smooth, you can get it at a drugstore.”
    I shook my head loosely, and offered her coffee, even though I had only a few granules of instant left.
    “Mmmmm, I hate to say it, but you have anything to drink? Long drive.”
    We both pretended it was the long drive, like two hours in a car would make anyone need some liquor. I went to the kitchen and hoped a can of Sprite would appear in the back of the fridge.
    “I have gin, but nothing to mix it with,” I called out.
    “Oh, that’s OK,” she said, “Straight is good.”
    I had no ice cubes either—I have trouble making myself fill the trays—so I poured us two glasses of room-temperature gin and returned to find her loitering near my lotion box. I bet she had a few of the mini-bottles jammed in her pockets right now. She was wearing a black pantsuit with a pale pink turtleneck underneath, a painfully aspirational look for a stripper. Let her keep the lotion.
    I handed her the glass and noticed she’d painted her nails to match her turtleneck and then noticed her noticing my missing finger.
    “Is that from … ?” she began, the first time I’d known her to trail off. I nodded.
    “So?” I said, as nicely as I could. She took a breath and then settled herself down on the sofa, her gestures tea-party delicate. I sat down next to her, twining my legs around each other and then forcing them to untwine.
    “I don’t even know how to say this,” she started, swallowing some gin.
    “Just say it.”
    “It’s just that, when I realized who you were … I mean,