Fun Take Out No Parking

Early in the morning, on the first day in May in which the weatherman finally noticed it was spring, Dreela Moran drove south hoping to leave the wintry scowl of 'Neath Lake, New York far behind.

She turned onto Maindaring Road, past the deflated angles of the nearly one-hundred year old, clapboard sided buildings that led out of of town, past the Bingo Diner, where she worked waiting tables and past Decanter's Pub where Ace, her husband drank relentlessly in order to, as he said it, "make her widow status official."

Dreela, knew the drive itself would provide no distraction but she had become avidly dissatisfied with life and believed that a few day's visit with her older sister would improve her frame of mind. Her car was a new and murderously financed, cobalt blue Monte Carlo - an extravagance she was able to take due to working full time at the Bingo Diner since the previous summer.

The job had given her the drab thrill of a little extra cash--her first steady employment.

The car, inside and out, was a mess. A chevron of bird droppings adorned the hood from having been parked under a large sugar maple tree next to her cabin and a half-dozen paper coffee cups rolled on the floor at her feet.

The radio was anchored on an AM station from downstate. She was not sure how to change it or how turn it off. She was not sure she wanted to as all of the station's high-occupancy personalities and voices were so full of gravity they curved space and time as they spoke. She would be forty-nine years old in a week, a member of the backward masing generation.

She heard the psalm simple peal of the eight o'clock church bells as she drove past St. Kitts church and saw Father Adeste Garoux, hunched and rotund with his italic gait and feeble posture, like holy-water taffy, heading off to a free breakfast at the diner. He carried a few creased pages in his hand that were being pressed into a crumpled knot by the wind.

She passed one of 'Neath Lake's two officers, Bosporo Miels, seemingly a cop for eighty of his forty-saw years and saw as he, backlit by the rising sun, sneezed a small meteor shower of phlegm into the atmosphere. He ducked into the police cruiser that was parked in front of town hall and was so thin they said he was just badge and bones.

She had the sense that, without even without leaving 'Neath Lake, there was no going back.

In fact, the drive, everything, was a blur until she reached her sister's home, a red cape-cod house surrounded by a picket fence on a small hill near Philadelpia. It had warmed up quite a bit and she was overdressed. She was tired and hungry and her sister was not in the mood to cook so before they reached their first meager impasse they went out for Chinese food. But they could not find a place to park. They drove back home, called in an order and waited an hour for it to deliver. The guarded and arbitrary small talk they made throughout dinner was not much more than an affirmation of just how lonely Dreela felt.

After dinner, she wandered into the living room.

Her sister called to her from the kitchen, "Are you up for a game of cards?" she asked.

"Unfortunately, I guess, no,"

Dreela pulled her legs underneath herself, turned out the only light in the room and settled into an oversized armchair like a famine settles into a rural village during a drought.

It was going to be a moonless night and Dreela waited patiently for the blessed pragmatism of the deep darkness.