KAREN
Josie is talking me into getting more medical tests run.
I’m too old to be probed, picked apart, and sedated for hours.
But I agreed. Sort of. To please her. Obeying the young ones seems to be the only way to shut them up these days.
I did barter, though. Josie agreed to sit down with me properly and go through my and her mother’s pictures and important belongings.
They have stories. Young ones don’t value those much.
What are they going to show their grandchildren one day?
A hundred pictures of the food they ate on a regular basis?
Thousands of selfies they took? We have a boring generation of old people coming soon.
While I was in the hospital, the doctors did additional tests. Said, with the current prognosis, I might have two years or so. That’s nonsense. The last time they gave me a year. I confronted them. They said I am an anomaly. They are more optimistic now.
I’m too old for people’s nonsense of calling the things they don’t know how to solve anomalies.
The anomaly was the guy who continuously ruined my life for years, now dead. He and his nutjob. Birdie seemed decent enough when she worked for me. Turned out you had to dig deeper to find the rot. Those two are not an anomaly anymore. They are dust.
“You’re one foot in the grave,” Donna jokes.
That might be true, but I have two feet, two arms, and if everything fails, I still have teeth to bite my way out.
Now that this ordeal is over, I’m not ready to go yet.
They say I’m stubborn. Maybe that’s what they say about all old folks.
We have a low tolerance for nonsense. And the world today?
Well, they must be handing out some type of bulk discount for nonsense.
I hear Josie’s car drive off—she’s gone to hang out with Rika. Those two, they’ll stick together. When it’s my time to go, Donna will keep an eye on them. They are tough young women. Those who never went through rough patches will never appreciate a smooth road.
The flames in the fire pit grow higher. I look at Donna and meet her smile. As if she knows what I’m thinking. The woman who barely smiles is smiling. How about it?
Donna takes a sip from her tumbler and a tasteful drag of her Winston, her usual combo. These days, she starts drinking early in the day.
“I need a couple of those just to get my compass straight,” she explained, which translates into, “I’m getting old and don’t give a damn.” I missed this woman.
She hums a little, staring at the fire. Donna is the one who once taught me about Sacred Burns. We’ve done a number in our lifetime. But this one is the most important yet.
Twenty-five years. Four bodies. A lost daughter. The secrets we’ll take to our graves. A despicable man I wished I’d never met. But then, we wouldn’t have had two smart brave women for granddaughters. Sometimes, beautiful things are born out of terrible secrets. Go figure.
Finally, we are leaving the past in the past.
Centuries ago, they started a rule of burying bodies six feet underground. For disease-control. To deter robbers. To prevent farmers from plowing into the bodies as well as animals digging for them.
The secrets like ours? Well, those have sharp edges, like broken glass, and sharp teeth that bite. Those sorts of secrets have to be buried seven feet deep. And all that goes with them has to burn. The fire is cleansing but also annihilating. Some things can’t leave a trace.
I nod toward Donna’s cardigan. “Go on now,” I encourage her.
She digs in her pocket, holds its contents in her hand for a moment, nodding to herself, and throws it into the fire.
It’s a letter. The letter I got from him weeks ago.
The letter I forwarded to Donna before I called her for the first time in decades, to remind her that what evil isn’t killed, comes back twofold.
I watch the paper catch on fire, the lines still visible but burning quickly.
Missed me?
I came back for what’s mine.
She’s a pretty girl, just like her dad she’s about to meet.
Derek.
The letter sparked Donna’s outrageous act of vengeance when, one rainy night, two weeks ago, she started her car and tracked Derek to Fair Road.
“When we get old, they tell us to slow down,” she said later, when she told me what she’d done that night. “What they don’t understand is that in order to get things sorted, sometimes you have to gun the engine.”