Postcards from a Dead Girl Read Online Free Page A

Dad were literally sent to our house. Junk mail arrived for him daily, which was unsettling at first because he wasn’t there to tear it up and grumble about it. But we got used to it. It was weirdly comforting to know that Dad was important enough to have been solicited for cable television and lawn care and someone’s vote for office. In a strange way, the junk mail had made us feel he wasn’t far away, like there was a fleeting chance he might still be around. We actually missed it when it stopped coming.
    But telemarketers were never welcome.
    Sometimes I could tell when the phone was for Dad because Mom would mutter something into the receiver and then slam it down. “Who called?” we’d ask. “No one,” my mother would say. Then she’d look at us and repeat it with great conviction. “It was no one.” Just like in the movies, when one character asks another what they’ll do now that something terrible has happened, like a plane’s pilot dying of a heart attack mid-flight. “What do we do now?” a passenger inevitably asks. “Don’t know,” the character answers. Their gaze drifts into the distance and they repeat what they just said, as if repeating it brings a deeper, more serious meaning. “I just don’t know.”

chapter 10
    I’m doing it again, the car-wash thing. It’s raining hard outside and I’m inside my car, which is inside a small cinder-block building. I’m watching the spot-free rinse spill down my windshield, and several feet away the autumn rain is streaming down the windows of the car wash. I can’t tell if I’m outside or inside. It doesn’t matter. I bought ten car-wash codes and I’m doing laps. There’s no line because of the weather, so it’s all mine.
    A simplicity exists within the touchless system that relaxes me, the way the robot arm works its way around my car in perfect quadrants, spitting pink foam and rinsing with such precision. There is a challenge to getting my car automatically dried in less than the sixty allotted seconds of high-velocity air spewing from the three black throats of the ceiling fans—I’m sure the entire front half of my car is dry when the rainfall spots the hood and it’s time to drive back to the beginning.
    Zero comes with me sometimes. He’s so laid back about everything, but he can barely stop from wetting himself when we do the car wash. If he knew I did laps like this, he would never be able to contain himself. I left him home today.
    I like it in here because nobody can reach me on my cellphone and the four-and-a-half-minute cycle is short enough that there’s nothing else to do but sit. I like it in here because my car is clean and there are no postcards. I like it in here because I know where I am and I know where I am going.
    Outside, a clearing has cut through the clouds, and through it the sunset is visible. Two cars have already lined up at the car wash; my lone reign is officially over. Good thing the codes are good for thirty days. I finish my last drying cycle and drive down the road. I study the sunset in my peripheral vision.
    I’ve been watching sunsets lately, to see what the big deal is. As a rule, I like them. I respect their beauty and punctuality, and I’ll admit to an occasional feeling of awe when the colors are just so. What I mean about the big deal is that so much has been laid on the sunset—heavy-handed metaphors, sentimental music. Everyone’s always walking into them, and that is some very intense light. Maybe that’s where the term “love is blind” comes from, because so many people are walking into sunsets, burning out their corneas.
    Often in the movies, the sunset image is shoved in my face so I’ll be sure to know what to feel. I’ll admit to enjoying a large number of Westerns that have ended this way. Maybe I’ve even welled up a little when the