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By Root 955 0

have two unspoken, fundamental wants that occur as soon as they open their eyes. They want to be pursued and they want to know that they are beautiful. Abbie had always been pursued by most men and everyone had always told her she was beautiful. She’d never been anything but. Then cancer. Surgery, radiation, chemotherapy. Slash, burn and poison. In her mind’s eye, sitting on that bathroom floor, she saw a remnant of her former self. I did not see that. But how do you convince her of that? How do you tell her that she is not the sum of what she sees in the mirror? Starting with Rosalia, Abbie had taught me to see past the surface. I spent the next few days pilfering her scrapbooks. Abbie had never been one to keep every picture she had taken, but there were enough to get the job done. I found eighteen of my favorite pictures. I had some blown into life-sized posters, the rest I turned into eight-by-tens. I taped the eight-by-tens to every mirror in the house. Abbie couldn’t look in the mirror without seeing what she once looked like. I hung the posters at the end of every hall, so every time she turned a corner, she was reminded of what her whole body once looked like. Then I walked her around the house. Abbie hated it. She hated seeing pictures of herself. She’d never been one to look at them before, and she waved her hand across the house. “Take them all down. I don’t want them.”

“Abbie, I don’t care if you want them or not. They’re staying.”

“But…why?”

“The mirror lies.”

32

JUNE 7, MORNING

I could smell eggs cooking and hear bacon sizzling but that’s not what woke me. It was the laughter. Abbie’s laughter. I blinked and the warm furball next to me crawled out from under the blanket, hopped up on my chest and started licking my face. About the size of a loaf of bread, its nose was cold, whiskers long and the pads on its feet were digging into my ribs. I sat up, put both feet on the floor and waited while the spin of the earth slowed.

The room was screened in, maybe twelve by twelve feet, metal roof, ceiling fan, fishing rods leaning in the corner. Cobwebs hung between the trusses along with two propane lanterns that rocked in the breeze. Spindly live oak limbs wrapped around both sides, giving shade and protection. A summer porch of sorts. Through the cracks between the boards I could see the ground, some thirty feet below. Stairs wound down to the river beneath me, while a walkway led toward the main house, the smell and the laughter. I fingered my left eye. Puffy and tender, I forced it open. My vision was fuzzy but I could see out of it. The Pelican case rested on the end of my cot. The revolver was there, too. I set the dog on the bed, flipped open the cylinder and found it loaded. I tucked it in the small of my back, heard Abbie laugh again and set the revolver back on the bed.

The dog jumped down, ran three circles around its stub of a tail, then pranced halfway down the walkway that led into the main house. Two more clockwise circles, followed by one counterclockwise and then it disappeared into the main house. I’m not too versed on dog-speak but I had a feeling that meant “Hey, food’s this way. Follow me.”

Abbie sat at a small table sipping something hot. A blue bandana covered her head, but not her ears, and she was wrapped in a terry-cloth robe that looked like it fit Mr. Hawaii. He stood over the stove talking both to a skillet full of eggs and what looked like a parrot perched on his shoulder. I walked into the room and all three looked at me. The bird—a brilliant red and blue—dropped off the man’s shoulder, landed on the table, then climbed onto Abbie’s arm, using its beak to pull itself up to her shoulder.

A small, muted television sat on the table next to Abbie. A talking head from one of the networks seemed to be rifling through the news of the day. The man turned to me, hung a towel over a shoulder and extended his hand. “Bob Porter.” He pointed at the parrot. “That’s Petey.” Then he pointed to the dog. “That’s Rocket.”

“I owe you a lot.”

He split the eggs between two plates and motioned