The Floating Cradle

Fourteen

"She'll be mad if you take that," I said, watching Dan place Linear and Nonlinear Circuits on a stack of books raided from my and Allie's joint shelf. It was October, five months after her whirlwind departure, but I was yet to displace any of her things with my own, despite all the bickering we'd done over the cramped bedroom when she was around. Dan, grease-stained from working at the garage all day, had invited himself in one evening under the pretense of replacing the bulb in my desk lamp; twenty minutes later, he was still there.

"Ain't helpin' nobody sittin' on a shelf," he said. "I'll get more use outta it when I start my apprenticeship."

In a year's time, Linear and Nonlinear Circuits would be piled in the side paddock with the rest of Allie's books and knickknacks and whatever of her clothes I hadn't managed to hide amongst my own, doused with Jack Daniels, and torched, the cows lowing over each other as smoke permeated the barn, the pyre glinting off Dan's silver-cuffed wrists as he was led stumbling into a squad car, ash drifting down like dirty snow, Mama flaying him with the same excoriations she'd laid upon her eldest daughter when she'd turned her back on the farm: "You ungrateful good-for-nothin' low-down wicked child, you ain't settin' foot in my house again, I ain't puttin' up with your shit no more—"

(But she would take him back, contrite after his weeklong stint in jail, vowing to quit the drink, promising he'd get himself a good factory job and grow the Hell up, not that it mattered. She took him back because he came back.)

"That's mine, actually," I lied as he lifted a model rocket from the bureau. He gave me a withering look.

"No it ain't," he said. "It's mine. She and I built it together. We painted our initials under the USA right here, see?"

I sat back on my bed, sulky. I always liked that rocket, its elegant cylinder one of the first things I saw when I woke up in the morning. And I truly believed that she would be back for it. That she would miss it.

"You know how they used to make old-fashioned rockets like this? The ones they sent people to the moon in before first contact?" Dan asked me in a softer voice, turning the model over in his hands. "This big part here was called the 'launch vehicle.' Made up of a bunch of 'stages,' which're basically just engines. The stages ignited one after another, burnin' like a zillion gallons of fuel, shootin' this little piece—where the astronauts sat—into space. That's all the launch vehicle was good for: burnin' up, fallin' back to the ground, gettin' the spacecraft outta dodge."

"Sounds like a waste," I said, hugging my pillow. Something about the tenderness of his movements was disquieting.

He considered the rocket for a few more seconds, then, without warning, pitched it against the wall, shattering it in a cold, plastic explosion. I jumped, looking to him for an explanation, but his face was like an empty plain.

"It's only a waste if it don't work," he said, kicking the pieces aside and walking out my bedroom door. "Reach the moon, and you don't care what it cost."