Left for Garbage

before he left for work, and carrying Deeley, left the room.
    Oddly, her father’s refusal to penetrate her unhappiness made Denise feel easier about everything. There was no other choice then and now, all there was left to do was find the best way. An hour later she was up and acted less distressed to her father as he prepared to leave the house. She was even swinging Deeley’s hand back and forth in hers as her father walked out the door.
    “Tell Ko Ko to have a good night at work, Dee.”
    But only she knew that she had dropped Deeley’s hand as soon as her father pulled away and walked her briskly into the living room, slapping in Deeley’s ‘Dora the Explorer’ DVD, telling her daughter to stay where she was and out of trouble because Mommy had some work to do. No sooner had Denise managed to sit down in front of the computer and open her browser, there was Deeley, her face squeezed up in distress.
    “I want Mommy to watch with me,” Deeley insisted.
    B ut Denise shuddered and spoke between her teeth when she answered her baby, “I am busy … Mommy is very, very busy, and if you don’t want to watch your goddamned tape, you can go to bed.”
    Deeley had studied her mom with enormous confused eyes and then her small shoulders hunched in distress as she turned and reluctantly returned to her movie.
    Denise ignored the sound of her sniffles and her small voice speaking comfortingly to that ugly doll of hers - Mama, she called it.
    That day was really , to all intents and purposes, the day Deeley died in Denise’s mind - Saint Patrick’s Day, the day she shopped death on the Worldwide Internet, moving rapidly from neck breaking to internal injuries before finally settling on chloroform. After all, Denise wanted to cause no suffering. She would practice using the chloroform on Deeley to put her to sleep, see where it would lead, and in the end Deeley had not suffered, except for that one bad moment in the trunk.
    Eight days ago Deeley had died and Denise had begun to live. She was out of that fucking house for good and with Aaron now, her new man. It was pretty magic what she and Aaron were to each other. Her life was even better than any fantasy she could have made up. It was beautiful, in fact, so beautiful she had just gotten a tattoo saying exactly that: Beautiful Life . Aaron was raging and she was out every night as his woman, and in his arms all day long, and she figured he felt the same way, and that when it was time for him to go back to New York, they’d be going together.
    But like a bad blast from the past, her car stunk. No, that wasn’t the right word, her car reeked. She had never thought about this part of it: How the hell was she supposed to know a dead body is the worst possible smell on earth, that it smells a thousand times worse than throw-up? And she’d driven the porcelain bus on gag reflex enough to make the comparison.
    The plan already had a few things going wrong, and these unacceptable flaws could be the ruin of Denise. She had taken a few new trash bags from her parent’s house, with all intentions to bag Deeley before disposing of her the day she died, but that hadn’t worked out. Those trash bags remained in the trunk. Denise had needed only a minute away from Aaron to use them, but the night of Deeley’s death, Denise and Aaron had gone together to rent a movie. Ironically, he’d picked one about a mother who abandons her baby. How weird was that? Then they had stayed in his bedroom all night, up until four, and wouldn’t you know, Aaron had skipped classes to spend the next day with her, but she had escaped on a ‘work call’ to at least get over to her parent’s house for an hour to try to think of some way to dispose of the stink.
    She had thought about their own backyard for a burial site. Deeley deserved to be close to home. Probably stupid, but options were scarce. So, she had gone to their neighbor’s house and borrowed a shovel on the premise of transplanting a bush with hindering roots. She had gotten so far as to dig about a twelve inch hole behind the pool. That was not going to work because the ground was too hard to move. It would take forever and instantly be recognized as a grave should it come to that - the police possibly looking for Deeley in the near future. So, she had returned the shovel quickly, and then drove down by the airport, looking for a possible burial site. But nothing appeared private enough, so she had ended up back at