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  • Elizabeth Trundle (bio)

I stand at my window for long stretches and I look outside. This makes me sound lonely. At the same time, it's a window. So I saw Prentice when he pulled into the driveway with a car trailer attached to his Wagoneer. I knew he had been gone. I have his house key for emergencies.

I waited a few minutes while he grabbed bags and boxes from the back seat and took them into his house through the kitchen door. Then he went inside, and stayed inside, so I decided to go over. The garbage truck was making its way up the street and I waved to Clark, who hangs off the back and loads the cans. It was early in the morning. Prentice must have been driving all night. I wondered how many packs of cigarettes he smoked in the car, and I looked in through the open window. There was a pile of books on the front seat, one of them lying open.

"It doesn't run," he said as he came out of the house. I followed him back to take a look at the car on the trailer. It was antique, a Cadillac, bright blue with shiny chrome and a sparkly veneer that I wanted to lick. But I have no interest in cars.

"What will you do with it?" I asked. The houses around here are expensive, and the residents particular. The town has ordinances to stop a person from leaving a car up on cinderblocks and forgetting about it.

"I'll get it running."

"You can't fix cars."

"No," said Prentice. "But I can pay someone else to." He smiled at me and slapped the hood. "Sixteen thousand miles. That's all she logged in twenty-one years."

"I'm sorry for your loss," I said, sounding like every other helpless sucker in the universe. But my face had burned for days after Prentice left, because I did not say it when I first got the chance. He came over to tell me he was headed south, that his mother had died, and then he asked me to take the mail from his mailbox and [End Page 85] pile it up on his porch every few days. I did not say a word to him. I just started to cry. He finally turned around and went home. I should never have answered the door.

And so I made a second effort and expressed my sympathy in proper terms. Prentice thanked me and removed his glasses. He wiped them on his white collared shirt, which was crumpled and smudged, as if he had been wearing it for days. Prentice has these sneaky feline eyes, sort of yellow-brown, sort of topaz. He put the glasses back on and made a gesture toward the Bridges' yard, where their youngest daughter, Amelia, was riding circles in a small ring on her horse. She was posting.

"It still amazes me that people around here are allowed to keep horses," he said. I am wearied by the sight of Amelia and her sister, two large-breasted girls, and the horse they groom and feed and take to shows in a white trailer with the name "Count" painted across it in gold.

"My ex-wife, Charlotte. She still rides," Prentice said. "You know, it gets addictive. The friction. The friction gets addictive."

"While you were in Florida," I told him, "Pippa saw some kind of wild animal going in and out. From a hole. Under your porch."

"That so?" said Prentice. "What was it? Did she get a good look?"

"She thinks opossum. She saw it more than once. But it was always dark."

Prentice absorbed this information as he watched Amelia and Count come around again in the tiny paddock. I decided to write to Pippa later, and tell her that Prentice did not seem to care about the opossum under his porch. Pippa's main concern was that it might have babies down there, suckling and yelping, pink and unformed. That Prentice might come home and exterminate the whole lot.

"Opossum," said Prentice. "They've got a kind of creepy grandeur. Don...

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