I bought that car with Jean, Dorothy’s third daughter and my main squeeze, at a truck stop in central Tennessee, one hundred feet from Interstate 40. Two hours before that purchase, my engine rod shot across the highway on fire and settled itself into a quick flare in the brown crabgrass growing in the median. The flame made a symmetrical black ring of char and oil. A wiry young man in a padded jacket got out of his truck and pointed at the smoldering spot. Straw colored hair whipped back and forth against his face. His mouth moved but I couldn’t make out what he said. He could have been laughing or angry. We stared at each other, reflecting each other’s disbelief. His jacket was wrong for this climate. He glared into the noise, sweat crawling down his face.
Anyone who’s ever popped a hood could see that the rod had stripped out and made worthless it’s former home, the engine of my ‘89 Toyota truck. Thousands of dollars to fix, easy. Jean leaned on the back bumper and closed her eyes. She was singing. The sun punched down with a weight that turned the stranger, the bullshit cars and this grim moment into squirming liquid. We were stuck. Done. Lost.
A tow ride later, Jean and I sulked over sausage pizza at a combination Dairy Queen and Pizza Hut. A north-bound trucker had generously paid for it, but neither of us really wanted to eat. We tried to figure out our next step. After asking a few drivers for a ride without luck, we scribbled out a pathetic sign in red magic marker, planning to hold it up to the Benign Will of the Interstate: ‘Little Rock.’
Nearby, a squinting man in a three-piece suit watched. He smoked a long, thick cigarette. His hands moved involuntarily through his jacket pockets like awkward eels fishing for something to say. I couldn’t ignore his peculiarity. He sat before a backdrop of musty tile and backlit pictures of burgers. He moved over to the table beside us, then tapped his cigarette ash into a styrofoam cup. In one graceful burst, he removed his wide-brimmed hat, set it on the table and leaned over, legs stiffly crossed. “You know I come here all the time.”
I raised my eyes and took in this extra-value peacock.
“My name’s Phillip, Phil. I live near here, I’m a collector. Looks like y’all are in something of a fix. Am I right?” His voice reminded me of warm molasses.
“Hey uh, Phil. I’m Matt and this is Jean. Yeah, we’re in trouble. Our car’s broke down and we need to get on to Arkansas.” I kept scribbling.
“Hmm.” Phil filled the air with smoke. “Well, I don’t know much about things like that. I collect fine furniture. Fancy stuff, old stuff. Nineteenth century. Don’t suppose y’all have any much need for furniture.” He ashed again, but this time missed the cup. The fallen ash looked like a dried insect on the table.
“See, I collect it. Can’t say why. Sell it if I have to. I ain’t got a big place.” He gave a quick, vague gesture behind him. “Sometimes I bring friends over for parties but everyone says I’m too fancy.” He screwed his voice up into a shrill bleating, “You’re too dang fancy! Fancy! Fancy!” and then mimed exhaustion.
Jean and I glanced at each other. “Yeah. Uh, I didn’t know you could smoke at the Dairy Queen.”
“This one you can. It’s what I like to do. They got some good coffee here. 69 cent, try it.”
“Maybe in a minute.”
Acrid smoke lazily drifted from his lips. Jean gave off uncomfortable coughs. All of us held our breath under a steady minute of silence. The sun pushed through the tinted windows and muted Phil’s suit into the flatness of a washed-out family photograph. A man without shadows. The only thing left was an explosion of pressure and flaring light over his thin outline. I felt hot.
“Well, suppose I’ll be getting on.” He stabbed half his cigarette into the cup and rehatted his head with a flourish. “Been nice chatting.” Outside the building, he walked through the parking lot, dipped into a long crescent ditch that retreated into the pines, and disappeared from sight.
“Weird.” Jean furrowed at the tinted woods. “Yeah, weird.” I held up our sign at arm’s length to inspect. We still held some hope that one of these tired truckers would give us a ride for a little company along the way.
Avery was a breath of fresh air way out in gas mask country. He and his sons came there “all the time” for milkshakes. When we asked him for a ride, he sat down to listen to us with thoughtful nods, his hat pushed back on his graying head. His bulky clothes wore motor oil and dirt stains in layers. I pictured his yard full of at least ten cars, each having a specific and long unused purpose. We liked Avery.
“Done stripped out huh?”
“Yeah that’s right. They tell me it needs a new engine. A new block anyway.”
“Hm, and you said it was your momma. Going to get your momma?”
Jean leaned forward. “Yes sir, trying to take her up to live with me.”
“Well...” He took his hat off. “Maybe I got something there. A Chevy. Brakes good. Starts good. It’s a good car. The trunk don’t really work right. Bit old. Not much to look at, but sound like it’ll get you wherever you’re headed.”
“Wow...” We looked at each other in wonder and switched to confused poker faces. “I mean, we don’t really have much money. That’s the problem.”
Avery’s chuckle receded from a sharp cough of laughter. He slurped sugar and cream, grinning. “With that sign and all, I figured y’all was millionaires.”
He and one of his sons drove off to bring back the car in question. The remaining kid gave us a mumble and wandered off to the arcade to perform some kind of angry dance in front of the Tekken machine. In our booth, Jean and I whispered excitedly about this fantastic turn.
“But what if it blows up?”
“Matt, now why would it blow up? What are you so worried about? This guy seems cool.”
When they got back, Avery was all business:
“Six hundred and she’s yours. Now, I know y’all is in a hurry. Why don’t you just take your old license plate and put her on the car here? Sticker, too.”
Pause. “Can you do that?”
“Can? Hell, course you can. Nothing stopping you, is it? Get pulled over though, show’s over. Drive it easy, it don’t go fast for nothing anyway, and handle all that DMV garbage when you get on. C’mon, use my screwdriver. Leonard, get my screwdriver.”
Why not? Hell of an idea, Tennessee to Arkadelphia, Arkansas - smooth and easy. That puddle of pizza was starting to look half-way decent. After a pleasant test drive, we admitted that we didn’t have much of a choice. The seats were comfortable, too. Jean and I split the cost of the car. I remember watching fifteen twenty dollar bills come out of the ATM in one automatic belch. Avery wished us luck, thanked us and left, saying “Give your momma my best” as he stood to go.
It took a few phone calls, but I found a shipping service in the Yellow Pages that would take the Toyota back north in a couple days. The light outside began to ease its hold. My first polaroid was taken at this moment: our “new” Celebrity sitting in front of glowing gas pumps with the first slouch of charcoal evening granulating the picture behind a flat pink sheet.
*
After a night of driving and playing with the radio, we woke up in an empty church parking lot on the Arkansas side of Memphis. Morning slid down the untended brick walls. Before this trip, our friend Nina packed us a paper bag of chocolate and peanut butter sandwiches that tasted like fried candy bars. We winced through this breakfast and watched a pair of crows hop around the church’s dumpster, making precise, intelligent punctures in the swollen plastic stomachs that held their long-suffering rewards. Old bread and iceberg lettuce, mainly.
“You think Dorothy’ll be glad to see us?” I asked, hoping to get Jean talking. Her relationship with Dorothy had thinned into an almost comfortable distance piled on distance, with neither of them really knowing each other’s lives beyond the most concrete outlines. Jean spent her first fourteen years living with Dorothy in housing projects around the Little Rock area. This was followed by a period of living with foster guardians and a lot of moving. She ended up staying with her sister Cherie and finishing high school in Los Angeles.
“Jean?” I tugged at her shirt. No response. She kept watching the crows and chewing.
Dorothy’s other two, much older daughters, Camille and Cherie, had intensively supported their mother for periods of several years. They got burned out on keeping her above water, and put her in a mental health home out of exhaustion. They did this without Jean’s knowledge. For nearly a year before we made the trip, letters had been coming in the mail for Jean postmarked from Arkadelphia, AR. Dorothy’s handwriting lets you know that she’d been a secretary and a stenographer for a good piece of her life. Her words are clipped and clear. They are angular and confident marks in straight lines across the page. The letters Jean had been getting, that pulled us to Arkansas in February, were of despair, confusion and suicide. An orderly and neat arrangement of unrelated puzzle pieces. A general inability to care anymore.
Being poor, mentally unstable and hurt brought Dorothy to the point of taking regular doses of methadone. This was her doctor’s idea. The drug, according to its taker, “dudn’t do a damn thing, not one.” Her first suicide attempt, shortly after she was put into Courtyard Gardens, was an overdose of methadone. Rather than rethink the medication route, her doctors had then decided to switch tactics and prescribe Dorothy three other strong painkillers simultaneously. Jean saw clearly that the technology of strangers, dope and cleanliness would never help Dorothy. Courtyard Gardens was a waiting room, not a cure.
I tried again, quieter. “You think Dorothy’ll be glad to see us?” Jean glanced from the crows to me, then back to the crows. Her voice rolled out carefully.
“Well, yeah. I mean, she never met you before. Probably won’t know what to think. You never know how she is, sometimes she can have a whole room cracking up and sometimes she’s like a little jellyfish you don’t even know is there.” She turned her eyes towards me.
“My mom is a trip. I have a little notebook somewhere full of quotes from her. That damn place has probably got her all screwed up, though. I went there a little after they stuck her in. It’s hell.” She got quiet, making it clear that there wasn’t much more to say. We stood up stiffly.
“We should go. Who knows how many miles are left in this heap.”
“I bet like 5 or 6, maybe 10.”
“Shut up.”
Onward. My mouth felt horsey and thick. I squinted in the sun and drove like a smuggler. Outside of Little Rock, we pulled up next to a sparkling green Impala with spinning rims. Jean and the driver beamed glory bound smiles at each other. He had bright gold teeth.
“Ha! Ha! I’m home! I’m home!”
We made a stop in Little Rock to wait on a $200 money order from our friend Quinn at a grocery store Western Union. Every twenty minutes, a pudgy pink woman in a yellow and black polo stuck her head out and said, “It’s coming through now. Be a minute.” I began to think that everyone must set their clocks by her, calling the store every two weeks to make sure they have it right. It felt like hours were passing. Time congealed into a globular paste you had to wipe off your eyes in order to stay awake. I was now neck deep in Pudgy Pink Standard Time. We dozed.
*
We got there late, around 10. When we walked through the lobby, a piano, shining clean tile, a loud television, and glassed eyes turned towards us like slow, soft crabs. I remember the crusty smell that only nursing homes have and how the white tube lights made everything look thirty years older. This was a neglected public mental health home a few miles outside of Arkadelphia. The woman at reception raised her eyebrows but kept her face pointed at the computer in front of her.
Jean laid an elbow on the desk. “Pockrus...um, Dorothy?”
The eyebrows spoke. “And you are?”
“Her daughter, I’m her daughter.”
The eyebrows blinked and looked up. “Y’all have the same nose.”
Dorothy was in Room 115. When I walked in Jean was standing with Dorothy in front of her, hands on her shoulders. There was a curtain between the roommate and us. She would moan slightly whenever we spoke. “A real bee-aye-tee-see-aych,” we found out later.
“Look Mom, I’m here. We came to take you with us. You can live with me in Connecticut. We’ll take all your stuff. You don’t have to stay here. Don’t worry, ok.”
The first thing I ever heard Dorothy say was, a little giddy, “I’ll put my teeth in for that.”
In a climate of despair, the brightest and most bewildering moment is when someone gets to leave. A young guy named Ray, who actually seemed a little younger than me at the time, seemed joyful while helping us load Dorothy’s stuff, a humble set of plastic shelves and suitcase full of clothes, into the trunk of the Celebrity.
“I had a feeling tonight, didn’t know what it was. Man, that’s a feeling to listen to. Something is going to happen. Right? Right! Ha! How you feeling Dorothy? Going out, right?”
“Oh, fair to middling.” She was pushing down the hall in pigeon steps with her purse and her white acrylic sweater snug under her left shoulder. Nurses crossed their arms and watched us for clues of misdeeds they were already sure of.
“Believe that!” Ray made more jokes and grabbed things out of our hands to take them. He talked about playing the saxophone and traveling with his father. His cheeks shined around a krazy glue smile. Mobile was his town, he said, but he’d been everywhere. I had thought that he worked there until he mentioned, sounding kind of distant and slow:
“You know, but sometimes, things happen an you end up in a place like this, you know. Not a lot gone on here. Don’t play much either, now.”
The rest of the people in there, sitting around their TVs or pushing walkers, were mostly older and unresponsive to our fast moves. They regarded the parade of Dorothy packing and leaving with tranquilized indifference, if at all. One of the nurses handed Jean a stack of pill sheets about a foot tall meant for Dorothy. Apparently, a diagnosis of ‘schizophrenic’ meant that you needed to eat your weight in pills every week.
We got our last look of the place out in the parking lot. After knotting the trunk shut with nylon twine twice, good and tight, I considered asking Ray if he wanted to come. A great tiredness had settled into me by that point, two trying days and nights so far, and I swallowed this unpredictable idea with thank you’s and goodbyes as Jean settled Dorothy into the back-right seat. Ray wished us luck. He backed away while facing our car with his arm proudly in the air. He darkened to a silhouette as he neared the fluorescent rectangle of the building’s automatic sliding door. Zip.
Where do you go after springing an old lady from her nursing home against the will of her family and caregivers in an illegal car? Cracker Barrel. We sat around a bowl of corn muffins, our buttery fire, and didn’t talk much. I don’t think that any of us knew what would happen next, so there wasn’t much to say. This was the beginning of something that could go either way, and definitely didn’t have a name yet. Dorothy drank Diet Dr. Pepper and complained about her roommate like she was the weather.
*
We stayed in a Motel 6 that night, dyeing Dorothy’s hair “Light Ash Blonde” with Clairol color. When we had searched a drug store for the shade, Dorothy kept repeating the phrase “Light Ash Blonde,” emphasizing each word with critical importance, like you would explain why drinking bleach was a bad idea to a child. Her patience with the night staff quickly fell apart.
“It’s all that will do. Anything else turns my hair red, bright red. I don’t look good as a red head, look like a clown. No, don’t show me ‘Light Blonde,’ light ash blonde!”
“Ma’am, please...I’m looking, ok? Look, here.”
After we found the color and found a cheap motel, I slid a clear plastic shelf out of her single piece of furniture and put it under the room’s only chair to keep the carpet from staining. Dorothy spent twenty minutes taking her dentures out. Pink Fixodent stuck to her fingers and she brushed them on a fist-sized wad of dry toilet paper, which did nothing. Wrapped up in a green towel with her hair wet and combed against her head, this woman was the spitting image of a pissed off turtle.
“Dorothy, I noticed you don’t have any eyebrows.”
“Sure don’t. It was all the rage when I was younger to pluck them out. Yeah, like a chicken, sure. Never did grow back. Been drawing them in since, see?” She pointed and made a surprised face.
“There’s nothing there. Why did you do that?”
“Well, usually is. Sometimes I wish I’d kept them. This damn hair and damn eyebrows. I’m keeping the damn people in business, yeah!”
I put on a pair of latex gloves that came with the hair dye and started rubbing a white substance that looked like hand lotion and smelled like ammonia into Dorothy’s scalp.
“I plucked them...the Veteran’s Association, when I was working for the Veteran’s Association. Before I got married. Easiest job I ever had. You see though, unfortunately, Clara Bishop had a re-lay-shin-ship going with Bob Fredrickson, who was my boss, and decided it was my fault, him not divorcing his wife.” Dorothy rolled her eyes and threw up her hands.
“I was minding my own business. People crazy, just are. Had to quit eventually. You should know I’m psychic, I see the things that most people don’t see. Like what’s going to happen before it happens. I knew that she was out for me and wouldn’t let her tell no lies.” Her words ballooned with satisfaction.
Jean, where she lay on the neatly folded bed, offered to the ceiling: “My mom thinks she’s psychic. This isn’t new.” Dorothy gave a start of shock, glaring over at Jean. She should know better.
“I am psychic. More than you know. I had a talisman necklace that a gypsy lady gave me and when I put it around my neck, when it hit my chest, I saw the devil. Bright red with flames all around him. Remember Carl? When I saw that devil I knew Carl was doomed to die.” It was starting to get loud in there. The wallpaper held its ears.
“Jesus Dorothy. Did you say this kinda shit to the doctors?” Jean was saying what I was thinking.
“Nooo! No I did not! Got enough sense for that. Keep quiet and don’t get bothered. Ten years ago they tried to give me Soma on top of my Ambien to shut me up! Saw through that too, yeah. Neither one does a thing though. I sleep the same with it as without: none. Ooh, this pain.” Her face stretched to unimaginable proportions while her mouth became a nickel-sized black dot. The yawn was punctuated by a tiny squeak.
Her refrain during the first six months of our acquaintance was “I am in excruciating pain at all times.” This was brought on by a shoulder injury from sloppy physical therapy after an earlier surgery. Her right shoulder blade is about an inch and a half above where it should be, and moves slowly up and down. The bone under her skin looks like a bald, tired wing seeking air. She could hardly sleep.
“Getting on late. What time is it?” A tremor from another yawn crossed Dorothy’s face, but stopped before reaching full flower.
“Near midnight. Doing this was your idea.” I had worked the lather in for about ten minutes, creating a pasty lump of yarn where her hair used to be.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t let her tell no lies. Clara Bishop had it out for me. I saw it! Psychic.”
“I don’t know who that is, Dorothy. You’re gonna have to wash this stuff out of your hair before it starts burning.”
“I’ll get to it. Say, play that Freddie Fender tape. Brought it in, didn’t you?”
Jean rewound and played the tape on our red plastic Fisher Price boombox, a greatest hits collection led off by Dorothy’s favorite, ‘I’ll Be There Before the Next Teardrop Falls.” She remained sprawled flat on the bed, performing this task with only one active arm. Slide guitars and crooning filled the drowsy little room. It resonated well with the cigarette smell, chugging along with a Pudgy Pink shuffle.
“I don’t particularly care for the rest of the songs, but yeah that’s a good one there, play that one again. He was a Mexican, you know. Freddy Fender? Mexican man. I’ve always liked Mexican men, I’m part Mexican and so’s my daughter Camille.”
Jean sat up on the bed and looked Dorothy directly in her face. “Mom, you’re not part Mexican, not even a little. Neither is Camille.”
“You ever look at Camille? Everyone ever saw that child say hands down she is Mexican!”
“A thousand times! And that doesn’t make any fucking sense!”
Dorothy rinsed out her tingling hair and lay down into her nightly Lunesta stupor with an open romance novel resting over her face. Jean and I fell on some blankets for the night. I suppose we should have been nervous or reflective or something, but we just slept. The motel room became dull blue with only the parking lot lamps glowing through the blinds.
*
Money was becoming a very real problem. Gas, food, our $600 hoopdie and getting the old truck shipped north had about cleaned us out. Jean had no money left, I was leaning hard against broke, and Dorothy had nine dollars in food stamps to her name. The only option left was to drive straight through to Connecticut on fried candy bar sandwiches and no sleep. What remained of Quinn’s kind loan all went into the gas tank.
Jean had also, when we woke up the next morning, discovered an angry message from her sister Camille saying that she called the police and gave them our description. The Courtyard Gardens people called her. Looking back, this was a pretty tepid threat. She didn’t know where we were or what we were driving. At the time, though, it made everything feel rushed.
It was definitely time to go, but we had one more stop to make. We headed toward Gene Hatfield’s house in Conway, about an hour and a half northeast of Arkadelphia. "This man’s lawn is an underground landmark in Arkansas. Wild stuff. You have to see it," according to Jean. My curiosity got the better of me and I drove the extra distance despite our gas woes. All of us needed some brightness and affirmation to get through the coming drive.
Jean seemed to have an intuition, windows from long neglected space in her memory, which she used to feel where Gene Hatfield’s house was once we’d pulled off the highway into Conway. She became more and more excited. “Left! Left! No, there!”
We met his yard before we met Gene. The polaroid I have of Dorothy, the shortleafs and the Celebrity was taken in the driveway leading up to his house as she first glimpsed his creations. Spidery pine arms above the roof clutched striped bowling balls, bicycles, a city of broken statues, clustered tires carved into an alligator, and dead branches painted gold. The lawn itself, perfectly flat and surrounded by low bushes, held the weight of imploded tractors reconfigured, crunched, stretched, and blistered with mirror shards and mannequin heads. Trash waved and warped in frozen explosions and soggy lions. Two bikes faced opposite directions, welded together about 4 inches apart. You and yours could ride in circles forever, I suppose.
We took this chance to play, using mirror pieces to make a kind of peek-a-boo line of sight tag around the piles. Jean and I popped around like feverish bunnies. We took pictures of everything we could find and soaked up this alien landscape with a hunger born of the first good night’s sleep in several days.
“Here! Here! Get this one! Look at the eyes!”
“Oh my damn!”
The best of the pictures has Jean meticulously picking through a pile of gold bottles as an old beech towers over her, balancing inflated purple balls and dead papery brown leaves. Dorothy regarded such wonders with raised forehead stencils and slow drags on her wild cherry cigarillos.
“The hell kind of people y’all got me visitin?”
The screen door opened and a humble looking man of about 70 in a blue sweater waved us in the house. He sat Dorothy down and, after asking her preference, brought out a can of Diet Coke with a pink straw. “It ain’t Dr. Pepper but it’ll do.” She put her mini-cigar out and did her best mosquito impression. When concentrating, Dorothy squints one eye nearly closed and opens the other as wide as she can, and this soda was the first time I’d ever seen her do it. I tried not to laugh, but failed.
Hatfield liked to laugh and liked to talk to plants. He would be going over some detail of the sculptures outside and, seeming to forget an important point, might lean over to a violet or philodendron: “Wassat?” Then there was silence. We really had no idea what he was doing.
“Oh. Well see, you have to wait. They’re a little slower, the plants. And I just watered them, so they’re busy. They say that it’s true, that tractor was my grandfather’s. He got it from the owner of the Conway Feed Store. You’d be amazed what these little guys remember. I think they hear better than I do sometimes.” I looked over at his growing green shelves with new eyes and tried to concentrate for whispers.
“That’s right! That’s right.” Dorothy piped in. “Had me a petunia that knew my bank code. And I had to convince it not to tell my mooch neighbor, Teresa. Teresa Perry, ooh!”
Gene smiled an of course smile. “I guess we all think we have some spicy secrets, don’t we? These little guys probably know more about me than I do. When I go outside it gets so I can hardly think, so much chattering. Plants outside always got more to say. Always do...” He fell silent, then looked up with a sharp start and furrowed his brow. “Well, let’s see if there’s anything round here y’all folks might be interested in.”
He showed us around “my wife’s house” and let us look through his piles of paint thickened canvases, keeping one at his instruction. Hatfield’s generosity had a pervasive, calming quality to it. He reminded me of an eccentric Mr. Rogers. Once Dorothy finished her drink, I looked around for a spot or decoration that Gene could stand beside for a good last picture. The picture has him smiling into the camera and holding up a three inch Lego man with a red bowler. It is a real smile.
*
We left Arkansas that afternoon, merging onto I-40 beside the ceaseless roar of the microscopic space between semi-truck tires and asphalt. After twelve aching hours, we stopped at a Waffle House in the mountains of western Virginia. It was three in the morning. Jean and I slouched over painfully necessary cups of coffee and Dorothy sneezed incredible strings of mucus into her napkin. The smell of vegetable oil was several generations thick. I felt dessicated. While the late night staff played cards at a corner table, I pulled myself up to drop quarters into the jukebox and look for something worth dancing to.
“Play the Freddy Fender.” Dorothy’s voice had become a lean honk.
“Dorothy, there’s no Freddy Fender on here.”
An outrage. “No Freddy Fender? Well play something then.”
“Do you want to pick a song?” I said, mostly as a joke.
“Sure.”
Jean was tired and let out the best protest she could manage. “Matt, no...she’s gonna...”
But she was already up there, calculating. In less than 5 seconds, Dorothy let out an “Ahh!” and, fixing her finger into a bony resolute egret, pecked out her choice. “What’d you pi...?” The first symphonic chords surrounded us. It was “My Way” by Frank Sinatra. In spite of the general ungodliness of that song at this moment, I let out a laugh. It was an incredible laugh. A laugh for all of it, especially those dour nurses. For Ray, too.
Jean got up and we swanned into a slow-motion melodramatic ballet. Three minutes of giggles and twirls. After what seemed like a very long time, Frank faded back into nostalgic silence. Our weird shuffle helped us cross the line from dog tired back into manic, and we were ready to go again. Back in the car, Dorothy let loose a parting shot: “Y’all sure looked funny, dancing to a slow song at the Waffle House. Them people working in there said y’all were crazy. Lunatics in love, they said!” She found this hilarious.
The mountains hummed a bright iridescent blue under the snowy moon, and soon I was the only one awake. This was the first time I remember thinking, “I’d better not mess this up.” Not just thinking that, but every part of my body saying it, too. Almost like a kind of thirst. I only had to stay awake. I only had to stay awake and listen and watch. While those mountains blindly watched back and everyone slept, hopefully that would do.
*
I keep my pictures in an unceremonious ziplock bag. Some of them I’ve found in other people’s trash, some of them are faces I don’t see anymore and some of them I can’t get rid of. When I show pictures from the time we came to get her to Dorothy, she usually says something like “Gettin uglier as I go, ain’t I?” or “I didn’t know they still make polaroids.” I guess they’re mostly for me at this point, good for a laugh or just to have something to talk about.
