Renewal (cont'd)

We buried her in the cemetery where her husband was, out by the A train in Far Rockaway. One of the largest cemeteries on the Eastern Seaboard. I don't think Tawnya could really reconcile that her mother had died that way. It preyed on her. She would wake up in the night sometimes, screaming like she did that day. It was hard.

I had gotten to know Tawnya two summers before, out on Coney. I was doing some manual labor down there and she was just waiting for her mom one day.

"Are you doing alright?"

I was lifting a three hundred pound steel railing for the husk of a storefront I was working on.

"Yeah, I'm alright."

We talked the rest of that afternoon, then she came out and had a beer with me. Things moved fast.

"You think you can handle it?"

"Well, we'll see."

Three months later, I moved in with her. I'd lost my place, and she had one.

It was pretty good for a while. Then her mother.

•

We walked around, summer sun assaulting us, the bright aggressive sights and sounds battering us, a Latin girl of about twelve with a T shirt that said "Too Hot For You," and all the rides screaming for money, blasting hip hop and salsa.

Rick was telling us how he'd gotten to New York.

"So then it's in Jersey, an I'm sayin yo, you fuckin' gotta take whatchu fuckin' got!"

He was a welder, and he hadn't had work in several weeks. So he had to come back.

"Not for nothin, but union dues is just like payin for da right ta not woik, s'dey can fuckin' fuck demselves."

I sometimes agreed with him. But in the South, where there are no unions and they call it Right to Work, the wages are so low that German companies are moving down there like it's a goddamn Third World country.

We walked past the freakshow, and they added a new act this year. The Illustrated Man, a guy tattooed from head to toe, had died a few weeks back, so they added Koko the Killer Clown. Some guy who shot his girlfriend and did some time.

Anyway, so we walked out on the boards, the creaking reminding us of December. They were white with the brutal sun as we avoided sweaty excons in tank tops.

At one point we stopped and looked out into the ocean, through a sea of families, most with boomboxes blaring their favorite flavor of Top 40.

"I can't believe it's still here," Katie said. "Somehow I just thought it would be gone." She blinked at the sea as a few gulls floated past in a slow moving dream.

Tawnya walked up next to her and looked out too. Katie said something to her I didn't hear. Tawnya hadn't been talking all day.

I stood back by Rick and listened to him tell me how his landlord fucked him over. Seagulls bobbed around us in the air like marionettes, mocking us on the ground.

The sky was blue, high, the reverse of the grey slate that it was last winter. The only thing that remained of that day was something in Tawnya's chest, something which I also felt to the bone. The birds floated on past.

--Philip Hopkins
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