When Cate is leaving, Ricky says, “I’m not going to have a day off between now and Boxing Day.” She almost forgets the money, the thin, folded pad of fifties she presses into Cate’s hand at the end of visits. Cate hates that she takes these, especially hates dawdling around, as she is doing now, until her mother remembers and goes to find her purse.

The heat in her car has rejuvenated a residual shrimpy aroma. She sees a couple of texts from Maureen, who actually did want to come along today.

on my way

Cate texts back, tosses her phone onto the passenger seat. She takes Ricky’s cash, hikes herself up in her seat to slide it into her back pocket, then starts the engine.

On the drive back into the city, she thinks about the pointlessness of her relationship with her mother. They’re like two people who years ago had rooms in the same boardinghouse, a time neither looks back on fondly. Visits like today’s always shoot Cate into a black hole. What lies down there emits no light. What always follows is a slide of predictable brooding on assorted failures. Eventually leading to sorrow for elephants. Specifically, the third elephant.

To start with, there were three elephants at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Older females, friends from the circus/zoo circuit, a little past their prime, settled for their retirement decades in a small space in a cold climate.

Then Tatima died. Respiratory infection. Then Peaches died of what the zoo claimed was old age, although she would have likely had another twenty years left had she remained in the wild.

Which left Wankie. For the rest of the winter she was consigned to an indoor space with a concrete floor. To keep her from being lonely, zookeepers put an old television into the room. When the city understood what was going on at the zoo, a town hall was held, and the zoo was urged to repatriate Wankie to the nearest bit of wild, the elephant sanctuary in Tennessee. Instead, she was pushed into a truck bound for a zoo in Salt Lake City. She freaked and lay down inside the truck. Elephants can only lie down for a couple of hours before their weight crushes their organs. Somewhere outside Omaha, they tried and failed to unload her, and so the driver just kept going. When they arrived in Salt Lake, they took her out of the truck and euthanized her.

Whenever she is at her lowest ebb, Cate thinks about Wankie. Who is always available for imagining, not dead in the truck, but rather standing inside on a concrete floor, through a long winter, watching TV.