Marianne
Kevin Joseph Ryan
Sun plashes through whiteout and hail—peeking at the ice-rankled farmhouse—as Dolt Cameron
stamps his boots on yellow garage floor, eyes toward the attic. In sunshine, enough to make him
squint, Dolt teeths off cap and mittens, heaves jacket with a grunt from cold lungs, then strips
down to the pale, checkered integument of long johns. Tilting, Dolt falls. From inside, his cousin
Agriss yells, “Who’s there?” The heavy door opens outward in warmth. Noises scurry from
behind the tinted screen door window. Dolt can’t see, so he listens, listens to the kids playing
hopscotch on kitchen tile.
Agriss grins into the window, spreading the fog of his breath, “That you, Dolt?” Thunder
grumbles into hail, and sunlight is gone. Agriss grins, grins hearing the freezer growl clinks of
ice into a highball, then another, then enough for the three men.
“Sure is,” says Dolt from the garage. The two older kids run out from the kitchen,
grabbing, and drag him inside. Dolt nearly spills a drink onto an up-turned face, whose
excitement reveals a few lost teeth, but he sets the glass on a table, lifts Ramona by her armpits,
places her on the counter.
She plays with a collar button, “Where are my surprises, Uncle Dole?”
“Hmm, well, where . . . wait a minute! They must’ve gotten snatched by that bear I had to
wrestle on the way over here.” Giggles from one child; horror, the other.
In a whir, Marianne paces through the kitchen. Dolt barely sidesteps her, her head downand-bobbled, with little Celeste at her neck. Her face is slack and patched with frown. The dog,
shaken from sleep beneath the table, perks her ears, groans, then tail-between-legs it into the
front room until she spots Agriss, darts his way, then settles her head onto the man’s work
boot.“Marianne,” hums Dolt in chatter, “Why ruin our fun?”
“Yes. Hello Dolt. It’s always nice when you drop in unexpectedly like this,” registering
what he said, “Oh . . . well,” in need of a nap, “I’m off.”
Genuine, Dolt: “Sorry, Marianne.”
“It just started snowing again,” says Agriss, “Heavy snow, and if it don’t stop, the
power’ll go out.”
*
When Agriss journeys out with a cart of gas cans—enough to light the generator (“How
do I know we’ll need it? I just do”)—Dolt and Forner get so sloppy that one of them trips over a
pair of slippers and busts his lip and glasses, laughing through teeth as he sweeps jagged ringlets.
The men pause and lean, paused and lean, pausing and leaning to eavesdrop as Marianne argues
in the master bedroom. After a shrug, Dolt and Forner dance with the kids to “Just a Gigalo” by
Luis Prima. The record player is so loud that they can hear when fuzz treads under the needle as
it shakes a hurdle of dust. The men make promises with the kids, who are too young and naive to
realize that the grown-ups will forget it all by morning—and even if they happen to remember,
they’ll be so sick with hangover that a small betrayal will seem, right then, hardly worth
lamenting.
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