VenCo(3)

“Shit. We gotta make it work, babe.” Arnya St. James was no quitter, except at last call (one of her better jokes). Breathing hard, she extracted a bent book of matches from her jean shorts pocket, lit a cigarette, and scratched her forehead with a thumbnail. “Maybe we have to balance them across the top?”

Bigger pieces secured, they’d come back to get the four columns and frame for the canopy. Arnya carried them one by one to the dumpster beside the nearby elementary school, hefting them up and dropping them in, her ropey arms flexing with lean muscle.

“Gotta hide them. We’ll come back for those fuckers on a second run. Hope the damn truck doesn’t come. Should be okay, seeing’s how school’s out for summer.” Then she broke into the Alice Cooper song of the same name and sang it with a bobbing head, with air guitar thrown in at red lights when the awkward cart was coaxed to a stop.

Lucky was mortified when they went back; garbage runs were usually in the wee hours, and it was now approaching noon. They also usually didn’t involve her drunk mother hanging ass-end out of a dumpster screaming for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and some motherfucking help, while the St. Brigid’s summer tennis league watched. But when the pieces were all home and the bed was assembled with the help of her mother’s latest man friend, Lucky forgave Arnya everything. It was indeed a bed for a couple of queens, one of whom immediately passed out facedown with her boots still on, while the other lay with her thin arms folded under her head, wondering what they would do for curtains. A week later, they arrived in typical Arnya fashion.

Lucky woke to Arnya’s blurry face in her face. Her mother gave her shoulders a shake. “C’mon, I need some help here!” She let go and disappeared.

Lucky heard uneven footsteps and something being dragged. More steps, then the sound of the front door closing. She drifted off.

“Goddamn it, girl, wake up!”

Lucky jerked so hard she rolled off her towel and onto hardwood. Must have fallen asleep on the front room floor watching TV. A little hard on the bones but better than being all alone in that big bed.

Her mother shouted from the bedroom, “In here. You’re gonna love this!”

Anxiety spiked in Lucky’s stomach. She never knew what was going to happen when Arnya got that excited.

She pulled herself up, scratching her bare bottom, exposed by the wide cut in the leg of her mother’s Budweiser one-piece bathing suit. The neckline scooped low and the crotch hung between her thighs, but it was the perfect pj’s for a sticky summer night.

She found her mother standing on top of the futon mattress they’d hauled up onto their new bed frame.

“Ma, you’re wearing your shoes!” Lucky pointed at her mother’s feet, still clad in her favourite pleather ankle boots, the uneven heels showing their plastic bones. “Those are the nice sheets! They take up a whole load at the laundromat.”

Arnya took the last drag of her cigarette, plucked it out of her mouth, and expertly flicked it out the open window behind her. “Oh Christ, Lucky, quit menopausing and give me a hand.”

Lucky finally noticed the voluminous bundle of red fabric spilling across the bed like a murder scene, its edges trimmed in every hue the rainbow could throw up. Arnya bent to lift a swath, throwing an arm out for balance, looking like a goddess statue in a fountain of cherry Kool-Aid.

“It’s a parachute,” she said. “Do you like it?” Arnya’s smile was so wide Lucky could see the silver caps on her back molars. Standing on their bed at four in the morning, with a head full of whiskey and a desperate plea in her dark eyes, Arnya was at her softest.

“Yeah, Mom, it’s great.”

“It’s the perfect canopy! Help me get it up over the bars.”

Lucky hopped up on the bed, too, and they struggled with the slippery fabric until they managed to get enough of it over the two longer bars that they could yank it into place. Then the two of them flopped down underneath it to catch their breath, hair wild over their gritty pillows.

“Now we can go anywhere we like. Anywhere in the whole shit world—and we’ll have a safe landing.” Arnya curled into her daughter like a drying flower, the whiskey congealing into sleep.

Lucky lay awake in their shelter of red parachute silk, braiding pieces of her dark hair with her mother’s rusty strands. She had no idea where Arnya had found it, and she didn’t care: she took what was offered, when it was offered.

“It’s perfect,” she whispered.

It was one of the best memories Lucky had, the one moment in childhood when it seemed the whole world was in front of her, full of all the adventure she could handle. Soon after dragging that canopy home, Arnya was gone, and for a long while, it seemed like she had taken all the adventure with her, leaving Lucky behind with nothing.



“How do I tell Stella they’re selling the building and we have to move?” Twenty years after the parachute score, Lucky sat at the bar, peeling the label off her second bottle of beer.

“Want another before I call it?” Harley was already reaching for the handle on the beer fridge behind him.

“Nah, I’ve got a job this week.”

Not a good job, just another gig the temp agency had set her up with. And tomorrow was only Thursday. That meant two more days in her shit cubicle, at her shit desk, before the weekend. And then Monday would come again, like a fresh hole in her life, one she could fall into and never get out of. Is it still anticipation if all you are anticipating is nothing? No, it isn’t, it’s—