Joyland

‘If I don’t take him to Joyland, he won’t die. If I don’t make it up with my father so Dad can come and see him, he won’t die. If we just stay here, he won’t die.’ A couple of weeks ago, the first time I had to make him put on his coat to go down to the beach, I cried. He asked me what was wrong, and I told him it was my time of the month. He knows what that is.”
    I remembered something Mike had said to her in the hospital parking lot: It doesn’t have to be the last good time. But sooner or later the last good time would come around. It does for all of us.
    She sat up, wrapping the sheet around her. “Remember me saying that Mike turned out to be my future? My brilliant career?”
    “Yes.”
    “I can’t think of another one. Anything beyond Michael is just . . . blank. Who said that in America there are no second acts?”
    I took her hand. “Don’t worry about act two until act one is over.”
    She slipped her hand free and caressed my face with it. “You’re young, but not entirely stupid.”
    It was nice of her to say, but I certainly felt stupid. About Wendy, for one thing, but that wasn’t the only thing. I found my mind drifting to those damn pictures in Erin’s folder. Something about them . . .
    She lay back down. The sheet slipped away from her nipples, and I felt myself begin to stir again. Some things about being twenty-one were pretty great. “The shooting gallery was fun. I forgot how good it is, sometimes, just to have that eye-and-hand thing going on. My father put a rifle in my hands for the first time when I was six. Just a little single-shot .22. I loved it.”
    “Yeah?”
    She was smiling. “Yeah. It was our thing, the thing that worked. The only thing, as it turned out.” She propped herself up on an elbow. “He’s been selling that hellfire and brimstone shit since he was a teenager, and it’s not just about the money—he got a triple helping of backroads gospel from his own parents, and I have no doubt he believes every word of it. You know what, though? He’s still a southern man first and a preacher second. He’s got a custom pickup truck that cost fifty thousand dollars, but a pickup truck is still a pickup truck. He still eats biscuits and gravy at Shoney’s. His idea of sophisticated humor is Minnie Pearl and Junior Samples. He loves songs about cheatin and honky-tonkin. And he loves his guns. I don’t care for his brand of Jesus and I have no interest in owning a pickup truck, but the guns . . . that he passed on to his only daughter. I go bang-bang and feel better. Shitty legacy, huh?”
    I said nothing, only got out of bed and opened the Cokes. I gave one to her.
    “He’s probably got fifty guns at his full-time place in Savannah, most of them valuable antiques, and there’s another half a dozen in the safe here. I’ve got two rifles of my own at my place in Chicago, although I hadn’t shot at a target for two years before today. If Mike dies . . .” She held the Coke bottle to the middle of her forehead, as if trying to soothe a headache. “When Mike dies, the first thing I’m going to do is get rid of them all. They’d be too much temptation.”
    “Mike wouldn’t want—”
    “No, of course not, I know that, but it’s not all about him. If I could believe—like my holy-hat father—that I was going to find Mike waiting outside the golden gates to show me in after I die, that would be one thing. But I don’t. I tried my ass off to believe that when I was a little girl, and I couldn’t. God and heaven lasted about four years longer than the Tooth Fairy, but in the end, I couldn’t. I think there’s just darkness. No thought, no memory, no love. Just darkness. Oblivion. That’s why I find what’s happening to him so hard to accept.”
    “Mike knows it’s more than oblivion,” I said.
    “What? Why? Why do you think that?”
    Because she was there. He saw her, and he saw her go. Because she said thank you. And I know because I saw the Alice band, and Tom saw her.
    “Ask him,” I said. “But not today.”
    She put her Coke aside and studied me. She was wearing the little smile that put dimples at the corners of her mouth. “You’ve had seconds. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in thirds?”
    I put my own Coke down beside the bed. “As a matter of fact . . .”
    She held out her arms.

    The first time was embarrassing. The second time was good. The third . . . man, the third time was the charm.

    I waited in the