A Parallel Life

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Authors: Robin Beeman
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could take classes in the afternoon. I would lunch from noon to one and be home when Bill returned. Then I went to Section 635—Gardening—and gathered a stack of books for my book sack.
    On my lunch break I took a walk along the creek in a nearby park. It was one of those sun-choked late-May days, somnolent with a sense of spring fulfilled, that grants its own form of grace. I am sure that it had never occurred to Bill that I might have another life, and I have decided that he must not find out. I hope for the best. We don’t need to know everything.

Solstice
    I T WAS THE DAY the Murphy’s Shetland pony Fiesta broke down Tilly Worth’s garden fence and ate all the Kentucky Wonders as well as the marijuana plants Tilly grew to supplement her Social Security, the day Walt Tarver found two women making love in his barn, and the day the Polonius brothers’ compost pile caught fire and the fire truck broke an axle on the road up to put it out. It was the loveliest day of the year, the longest sweetest day, the day when summer is still a new idea, and it was the day Rita Tooley wound up with two lovers and couldn’t make up her mind.
    Neither of the men was perfect. But Rita wasn’t the sort to mind. She bought her clothes in the flea market, and she fastened her ideas together with the happy glue of coincidence. She liked cups with chips, and men with flaws. Rita was beautiful but no beauty. She was small and a bit heavy. Her hair was abundant but wild, and her smile wide but off center. Her eyes were innocent of meaness and she cooked like an angel.
    On solstice morning Rita woke in her bed with Joe beside her. She always woke with the first light and often envied Joe’s ability to sleep until roused. But this morning she envied no one. A mockingbird had been rehearsing its arias for hours, and beside her Joe snored gently, breaking his own rhythms with little grunts and murmurs. She moved closer to him and put her face barely an inch from his and let his breath flow onto it. Joe was the only manshe had ever slept with whose breath was sweet in the morning.
    It would be a perfect day. She would serve breakfast in her little cafe downstairs to the tourists who came through town on their way to the ocean and then she would serve lunch to others who were late going or early returning and then she would close and let those who wanted dinner go to one of the big places farther along. Then she would pack a basket and she and Joe would drive to a ridge and drink wine and eat cold chicken and salmon and fresh bread and summer tomatoes and watch the last light dissolve into the ocean.
    This, however, was not to be.
    For Beck was on his way, even at that moment, in the old silver Mercedes he’d won in a card game the day before in Reno. Beck had been away at a place with the resortlike name of Deer Lodge. It had been a mix-up, he’d said all along, a mix-up having something to do with a transportation problem and with finding that the truck he was driving had been filled with freezers and televisions acquired in irregular ways. And because he was Beck, he believed his own story and was on his way back to Rita, who he knew would believe it, too. He hadn’t called her or written her in the last year because Rita wasn’t the sort of person you called or wrote if things weren’t perfectly fine. With Rita you needed a face-to-face. After this face-to-face he was sure things would be right once more.
    â€œWould you like bacon or sausage with your eggs?” Rita asked Walt Tarver, though she knew that he alwaystook sausage. She also knew that he always wanted to order and never tolerated assumptions being made on his behalf. He owned almost everything in the area and he wasn’t one of those to whom Rita could ask, “The regular this morning?” As she wrote down Walt’s order, she looked up and smiled good-bye to Joe, who was leaving the kitchen with his lunch bag and

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