Gone my lover’s dream. Lovely summer dream. Gone and left me here to weep my tears into the stream, sad as I can be. Hear me willow and weep for me. Whisper to the wind and say that love has sinned. Left my heart a-breaking and making a moan. Murmur to the night to hide its starry light. So none will see me sighing and crying all alone

Rosie sang as Cal swayed, and I gulped my booze, convinced there would never be a scene more melancholy.

Cal sidled up beside me after the song was over, standing between my stool and the auntie to my right. “He didn’t want to go with something more upbeat for the occasion?” I asked, drawing a laugh from my companion.

“Would you have preferred ‘Happy Days Are Here Again?’” he teased, knowing from my countless rants, I would not.

“You have a smart mouth, you know that?” I grinned. “I should do something about it.”

And an hour later, in the warmth of Cal’s bedroom, we rang in 1933 doing just that.

13

April 1933

Though Maksim took any opportunity he could to tell me I was a pessimist, I didn’t agree. At best I was a realist who saw the flaws in a country and its people that others were driven to ignore, and at worst I was too numb to think much of anything. Being the way I was insulated me from the disappointments so many had to cope with when inevitably the things they’d hoped for unraveled before them, sashes slipping off the shoulder of a statue who promised them liberty she could not afford. I never trusted her to follow through, I never trusted any of them, so I hadn’t been jarred when the government let the country down. The masses, on the other hand, had ingested empty promises as though they were sustenance and the growling of their stomachs nearly drowned out the sounds of their screams. And still they hoped, proving optimism was the most dangerous disease, one that would never be cured by reason or doubt. There was no logic in the minds of the buoyant, no way to anchor them with rationale. Instead, they floated toward the clouds, heads full of air, arms wide open, waiting to be lifted even higher, to be saved. One prick of a pin and they toppled to the Earth, a pile of limbs, waiting for words that always came, the vacant vows that had them ready to rise again. The cycle of hope.