Gone Girl

week or two.’
    She blinked at me, and blinked back toward the TV set, a game show where people screamed and cried a lot. She took a grandmotherly interest in me, she’d certainly let me stay on, indefinitely: The cabins were half empty, no harm.
    ‘You better get a job, then,’ Dorothy said, not turning away from the TV. A contestant made a bad choice, the prize was lost, a wuhwaaahhh sound effect voiced her pain.
    ‘A job like what? What kind of job can I get around here?’
    ‘Cleaning, babysitting.’
    Basically, I was supposed to be a housewife for pay. Irony enough for a million Hang in There posters.
    It’s true that even in our lowly Missouri state, I didn’t ever have to actually budget. I couldn’t go out and buy a new car just because I wanted to, but I never had to think about the day-to-day stuff, coupon clipping and buying generic and knowing how much milk costs off the top of my head. My parents never bothered teaching me this, and so they left me unprepared for the real world. For instance, when Greta complained that the convenience store at the marina charged five dollars for a gallon of milk, I winced because the kid there always charged me ten dollars. I’d thought that seemed like a lot, but it hadn’t occurred to me that the little pimply teenager just threw out a number to see if I’d pay.
    So I’d budgeted, but my budget – guaranteed, according to the Internet, to last me six to nine months – is clearly off. And so I am off.
    When we’re done with golf – I win, of course I do, I know because I’m keeping score in my head – we go to the hot-dog stand next door for lunch, and I slip around the corner to dig into my zippered money belt under my shirt, and when I glance back, Greta has followed me, she catches me right before I can stuff the thing away.
    ‘Ever heard of a purse, Moneybags?’ she cracks. This will be an ongoing problem – a person on the run needs lots of cash, but a person on the run by definition has nowhere to keep the cash. Thankfully, Greta doesn’t press the issue – she knows we are both victims here. We sit in the sun on a metal picnic bench and eat hot dogs, white buns wrapped around cylinders of phosphate with relish so green it looks toxic, and it may be the greatest thing I’ve ever eaten because I am Dead Amy and I don’t care.
    ‘Guess what Jeff found in his cabin for me?’ Greta says. ‘Another book by the Martian Chronicle guy.’
    ‘Ray Bradburrow,’ Jeff says. Bradbury , I think.
    ‘Yeah, right. Something Wicked This Way Comes ,’ Greta says. ‘It’s good.’ She chirps the last bit as if that were all to say about a book: It’s good or it’s bad. I liked it or I didn’t. No discussions of the writing, the themes, the nuances, the structure. Just good or bad. Like a hot dog.
    ‘I read it when I first moved in there,’ Jeff says. ‘It is good. Creepy.’ He catches me watching him and makes a goblin face, all crazy eyes and leering tongue. He isn’t my type – the fur on the face is too bristly, he does suspicious things with fish – but he is nice-looking. Attractive. His eyes are very warm, not like Nick’s frozen blues. I wonder if ‘I’ might like sleeping with him – a nice slow screw with his body pressed against mine and his breath in my ear, the bristles on my cheeks, not the lonely way Nick fucks, where our bodies barely connect: right angle from behind, L-shape from the front, and then he’s out of bed almost immediately, hitting the shower, leaving me pulsing in his wet spot.
    ‘Cat got your tongue?’ Jeff says. He never calls me by name, as if to acknowledge that we both know I’ve lied. He says this lady or pretty woman or you . I wonder what he would call me in bed. Baby , maybe.
    ‘Just thinking.’
    ‘Uh-oh,’ he says, and smiles again.
    ‘You were thinking about a boy, I can tell,’ Greta says.
    ‘Maybe.’
    ‘I thought we were steering clear of the assholes for a while,’ she says. ‘Tend to our chickens.’ Last night after Ellen Abbott , I was too excited to go home, so we shared a six-pack and imagined our recluse life as the token straight girls on Greta’s mother’s lesbian compound, raising chickens and hanging laundry to dry in the sun. The objects of gentle, platonic courtship from older women with gnarled knuckles and indulgent laughs. Denim and corduroy and clogs and never worrying about makeup or hair or nails, breast size or hip size, or having to pretend to be the