At the airport, Cate changes for dollars the pesos her father stuffed into her backpack when she wasn’t looking. She minds this less than the money her mother gives her. She thinks of her father’s donations as minor installments of penance, for his carelessness at the tool bench.

Waiting at the gate, she watches elephant videos on her cell. She has to be careful. Eventually the uplifting stories, like that of the friendship between Tara the elephant and her best friend, Bella, the small white dog, lead to those which involve happy reunions like Shirley and Jenny, but with backstories of why they needed to be reunited, some tragic twenty-year separation as they were shuffled from circus to zoo and back again. Or Raju, the elephant who is so amazingly happy he’s weeping because he has finally been released from fifty years of misery and beatings in a cage. How will anyone be able to make that up to him?

visitors

Cate has finished her articulated drawings and sent off the files to Lauren and Molly. Now she waits. After a crush of too much to do, she suddenly has nothing pressing. She calls Neale and asks if she can tag along to yoga.

“I can even pick you up. I travel with four-wheel drive.”

“Oh, that’s great. I don’t and I was fishtailing all the way to the Jewel and back. I thought about canceling on account of the snow, but I got calls from people in the hood, women with cabin fever. So I’m going to run a limited schedule. Come soon. I just have to put away my groceries. You can get me there for Level One.”

Now, after her big offer, Cate is running late, which is bad, but when she pulls up in front of Neale’s house, Neale is not waiting outside. Cate calls her cell, but gets sent straight to voice mail. The front door has been unopenable for the past couple of weeks since Joe played a trick on Neale with crazy glue. He was thinking about the crazy part, not enough about the glue part. Although at twelve he usually seems twenty-five years old, every once in a while he seems eight.

She drives around into the alley and puts on her flashers. As she gets out of the car, the DJ is saying, “New song by Neko Case, right after the weather—” Turning off the ignition annihilates the rest of the sentence. Cate loves Neko Case, and if she’s quick, she thinks—in a very small thought—she can get back in time to hear the song.