You Only Get Letters from Jail Read Online Free Page A

that I could. Her lips were nice, and she was comfortable and slow and when she kissed me I stopped thinking about all of the things that were cluttering my head. She ran her hands down my ribs and pulled at the bottom of my T-shirt, and for a second I thought that I would feel her hands on my skin, but then they dropped my shirt hem and moved down and she fingered the fly on my jeans and her left hand started rubbing at the crease, and then it moved to the right and started squeezing the bottle in my pocket up and down and up and down and I knew the rhythm she was trying to rub and I realized that what she had in her hand was not what she thought she was gripping.
    I pulled back from her and she tried to keep me from going but I rolled back enough to get a hand down to my jeans, and she put her hands on my shoulders and pulled me back toward her and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
    I fished the pill bottle from my pocket and held it up to her. The light from the pole beside us caught the amber and made it flash like a turn signal. She took it from me and squinted at it to read the label. “OxyContin?” she said. Candy held the bottle up to the shaft of light. “Who’s Sharon O’Donnel?”
    I leaned my head back against the seat and wished there was no top on the car and I could look up at the stars and find Orion, because he was always there when I needed him. I could always take comfort in the three stars of his belt. “Sometimes my mother,” I said.
    â€œWas she sick?”
    I remembered the nights of crying in the bedroom, the muffled sound of her pillows taking the brunt of her sobs while Christy and I sat in the living room, inches apart, the TV on in front of us, blank-screened and throwing back light, and the only thing we moved was our eyes.
    â€œYes,” I said.
    I nodded and stared out the windshield toward the tree trunks and buckthorn that I knew were somewhere in front of me.
    She handed the bottle back to me but I couldn’t make my fingers close around it, so we held it between us together. “She’s been dead for twenty-six hours,” I said.
    She was quiet for a minute and when she spoke it was barely a whisper. “Phillip told us,” she said. I felt her hand slide up to my wrist. She took the bottle and I let her. “Come here,” she said.
    She pulled me in toward her and she undressed me in layers and she was so careful and soft that I hardly felt her. I closed my eyes and let her move me, lift my arms one by one, raise the T-shirt, pull it over my head, take the jeans and the socks and the shoes. Every time she took something off me, she pulled me closer to her so that the heat from her body held me like a blanket. I tried to talk to her, tried to apologize, but every time I found my voice, she said shhhh against me and lifted a finger to my lips.
    When I was undressed, she unbuttoned her shirt and pulled me to her and wrapped the open sides of the shirt around me, and she edged down against the door so thatwe were both lying across the seat and I wasn’t so much against her as settled into her, pressed in below her surface. When I opened my eyes, she was looking up at me, and I could see the creases in her brow, the lines on her face, and I knew that the parking lot light was showing her age. She raised her head a little and kissed both of my eyes and went back to work, moving me, burying me, guiding me, drowning me, and from that height above the seat, rocking and rocking, I could see over the door panel and out onto the hillside, and smell the mountain grape and deer brush leaking in. Far away I could hear a dog barking, faint clips of sound breaking the heavy stillness of the highway and moving away from me. I knew that soon Phillip would be at the car, and he would want inside, and I would have to come to the surface again. I didn’t know for just how long I could stay.

----
CASH OR TRADE
    ----
    My dad brought