I took a blue tarp from the back of the shop and we laid it over the boar, pinning it down with bungees in all four corners. The animal’s tusks and back poked up, propping up the middle of the tarp in a bright bulge that made me feel nervous for its safety. We climbed into the truck and Milo pulled down the alley and into the street.
“Let’s get something to eat. You can’t live off beer.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Our father would never have left a taxidermied animal in the back of a truck, but he also never would have delivered one to anybody. “The boar might get fucked up.”
“It’s already fucked up, and we need breakfast.” Milo rubbed a hand against his concave stomach. He was wearing an old T-shirt from high school, a rose-colored one with a front pocket stretched out from storing chewing tobacco. His coloring was more sallow than usual, a sickly unnatural hue. I hadn’t been spending much time with him lately—too busy with work and avoiding the spillover of his feelings—and realized he looked worse than I did. How is he taking care of his daughter if he looks like this? I wondered. How is Brynn’s kid getting fed?
Even thinking Brynn’s name made my brain swim with images of her: crooked teeth and wide red mouth, a girl with so much light in her it almost hurt to look at her face. The one who’d taken up my thoughts since childhood. Memories of Brynn put razor blades in my stomach, never butterflies.
But I forced those images down and focused on food. I could do food. I nodded at Milo and he smiled, turning left, down the street to the diner.
“Maybe it’s time to talk about selling the business.” Milo steered with his left hand, elbow jutting out the window while he punched gears with his right. “The economy’s not great, and there’s no money from life insurance, since . . . you know.”
My brother had never saved a dollar in his life. He looked so smug, talking about something he’d never had to care about. The closest thing he had to a savings account was his daughter’s orange-and-blue UF piggy bank. I wanted to smack him. “What do you know about running a business?”
“You’ll end up losing everything you’ve saved. You need to be realistic.”
I’d already put most of my savings into financing the shop, but I wasn’t about to tell Milo that. Being realistic meant facing our situation head on, and the fact of the matter was that I was the only one taking care of things. There was no one for me to turn to for help. It made me angry, that my brother could drive me to breakfast and tell me what to do when he never had to deal with any of the shit that came with it. He hadn’t found our father, head leaking brain matter onto the metal table where we’d cured our first hide.
“Maybe you could chip in a few bucks,” I said, peeling at the paneling that was beginning to separate from the dash. “It’s your family too.”
Milo’s grip tightened on the steering wheel, and I stared out the window. I knew it wasn’t fair to say something like that. It wasn’t his responsibility to help pay for a shop that our father had never wanted him to help with. I might not have understood our mother, but at least she always showed she cared. My father treated Milo like an inconvenience, an acquaintance he didn’t like all that much, someone taking up space in the house.
“I’m trying to help,” Milo said, tentatively putting his hand on my knee. That kind of touching felt forced, not like anything we’d ever done with each other. He and I were handshake buddies. We slapped each other on the back when we hugged.
“Let’s just drop it,” I said. “I’m too fucking tired.”
The parking lot of Winnie’s was already half-full. I scrubbed at my gluey eyes and blinked to free an eyelash that had lodged itself beneath a lid. The sun beat down on me as I climbed out of the truck, and I spared a glance at the boar, nestled beneath a sea of blue plastic sheeting.
“You good?” Milo scratched at his bedhead and squinted at me.
“He’ll be fine. In and out, right?”
The diner smelled like burnt toast and bacon grease. Milo led us to the very back, next to the kitchen. Brynn and I had come to Winnie’s for years, just the two of us, and then we’d brought Milo. Then two again: the two of them without me. Waitresses flew through the swinging doors, indistinguishable from each other aside from their brassy hair colors: coppery penny, corn-silk yellow, the magenta of an especially fiery sunset. One bright head stopped at our table with her notepad already jammed down into her apron. Her hands were birds; one fluttered up into her neckline to fiddle with a button, while the other tugged at an earring.
“You guys want the usual?” she asked, mouth slick and red. Her voice was low and scratchy, like she needed to clear her throat. “Regular? Some coffee?”
“Maybe double that, Molly. Jessa had a late night.”
Unlike Lucinda with her cool prettiness, these women were aggressively sexual. Milo and I both had a type and Marsha looked a lot like it: predatory, confident, voluptuous. Brynn was long gone, but stuck between us like a divider we couldn’t quite pull down. My best friend and Milo’s wife, a woman we’d both known our whole lives. She still dictated how we saw each other. How we saw other women.
He worked his wedding ring around his finger in slow, methodical pulls. She’d been gone for years and he still wouldn’t take it off. He’d already gotten the best girl; he’d married Brynn, who was curvier and funnier and meaner than anyone. Marsha slid a hand along his neck and Milo laughed that weird, high-pitched giggle he got whenever anyone paid him too much attention.
I stared out the window and kept my eyes on the boar.
SUS SCROFA—FERAL PIG
There wasn’t room on the bed for another body, but that didn’t stop Brynn Wiley from climbing in behind me. She curled up next to the wall, legs still striped with cocoa butter that hadn’t yet sunk into her skin. One socked foot insinuated itself between my calves as I lay perfectly still and tried to pretend my heart wasn’t preparing for flight beneath my rib cage.
Two of our friends were propped in front of us on the floor while we watched a movie in my bedroom. It was my sixteenth birthday and I hadn’t even asked for a car; I’d wanted fleshing kits and a chance to work a little on the boar we’d gotten into the shop.
Why are you always so warm?
Lips sticky with gloss stuck to my ear. I’d find a red stain there later and wish it were permanent; that it would smear there forever.
You need to shave. Fingertips tapped my knee, dry and scabbed. You’re disgusting, you know that?
It was hard to know what was happening in the movie when someone touched me in a way that made my skin feel peeled. Every nerve ending was exposed and frayed. Suzanne and Lizbeth laughed, and then one of them passed the popcorn bowl up onto the mattress beside my head. A hand slid beneath my T-shirt. The cold from Brynn’s skin radiated all the way to the bottom of my pelvis.
Her hands ghosted, plucking indiscriminately at my flesh. She found the knobs of my vertebrae, pressed her fingers between the slats of my ribs, cupped her palm around the bulge of my hip. The music from the movie wasn’t loud enough to cover the sounds my mouth wanted to make: wounded animal noises, whimpers pulled from deep in my chest. I sat up and folded my knees under me, putting the popcorn bowl between us. Brynn smiled, crooked left canine glowing radioactive blue in the light from the television set. She opened her mouth and I practiced tossing popcorn kernels inside, one by one.