Miss Peach Explains
Promiscuity to a Toddler
by Catie Rosemurgy

Long Gone Daddy
by Lee Normant

Cleaning Theory
by Janet Wondra

Long Gone Daddy
    Lee Normant

Harry Lee and Mary Ann meet me at the door.
    “We loved your daddy,” Mary Ann says. “We’ll miss him.”
    Harry Lee and my daddy grew up, played ball, hunted, scouted timber, got rich, and got drunk together until Daddy lost two decades of pine profit to the president of the Lion’s Club in a game of poker on a hand where Daddy had two jacks, and Daddy came home, took off his rings, and went on a two-week-long bender that culminated in an inglorious stunt at the Varnville country club.
    “Sure,” I say. “I loved him, too.”
    “Harry Lee just wanted you to know.”
    After Daddy’s stunt, he skipped town. Poof. I heard nothing of him until last week. A stranger called the house. He said he was a cop and that Daddy had died in a halfway house in Tennessee. Where would I like them to ship the body, he asked.
    I buried him out near Corner Lake, where he took me fishing when I was a kid.
    Mary Ann takes her husband by the arm, but he’s still not saying anything, swaying in his two hundred–dollar shoes, his bowtie undone like a cut noose.
    “I need a drink,” I say, and breeze into the wedding reception of my long-lost love.
    Up onstage, the band from Beaufort belts out a beach song, and I pick my way through the dancers and find the bar. At least three hundred townfolk plus another hundred of the groom’s family who I don’t recognize. It’s easy for a man to get lost in here, and I’m glad I’m not spending my time exchanging hollow sounds with old church members or baseball coaches. All the usual suspects fending off death with word after word after word.
    I see Mary Ann and Harry Lee again, but this time they’re out on the dance floor shagging, harmonious as their names. I’m surprised they can carry the beat, but Daddy always said they could dance.
    There’s the bride. She’s dancing with her daddy, a good man who told me once of driving across west Texas when he was twenty with a suitcase full of speed and only the road stretching out before him like a ribbon on the gift of red desert.
    She’s a classic, the bride. Like the other Peeples women, she is tall and beautiful, with an ivory neck, a perfect and soft face that looks like it was copied from Southern Living. Like the other Peeples women, she married an up-and-comer, a boy of good stock from down near Ridgeland who graduated from State with a business degree. There she is, Rebecca Peeples, the first girl I ever loved. I never stopped.

Continued in volume 41, issue 3, summer 2005