The locals she knew meandered in and out of relationships with each other and there was a general vibe that sooner or later everyone would settle down with someone by their mid-twenties. If you didn’t get married the first time around, the high school sweethearts that married after high school would divorce and you could catch one on the second go-around.

She felt like a spinster at twenty-five and laughed about it. In her future husband daydreams, he started looking more and more like a lump.

She was married in a year. And she left the town and immediately felt superior to it. It definitely hurt when she swallowed her pride to return south years later, after everything had gone so terribly wrong. She let Barrett keep the furniture because he wouldn’t have got any if she didn’t.

Because of her mindset prior to marriage, and because of how it burned down and withered gray so steadily and predictably, Amelia didn’t feel like a fully realized individual until her divorce. That, despite her being close to fifty at this point in her life, she was destined to have that failed marriage, and that because of who she was and the type of man she had sought out, the marriage was bound to last a long period of time, and that it all had to have happened how it happened because that was her worldview at the time, and now that it is over, she didn’t have to have any hang-ups about it.

She felt no hostility toward Barrett, but almost something worse. No malice, but her emotions all reflected the crystallizing thought she held about him, that you had me then. You had to have had me then because you were what I wanted but I am not that anymore and you cannot have me and I know this better than I know anything else in the world.

Now, ironing out white linen in an abandoned storefront, the adolescent daydreams returned. Barrett, tall, face casting some kind of whiny brooding, stood over her. They began having sex, and he came inside of her. And time passed, but it didn’t, and she had her daughter.

And their daughter grew up and it was not exactly memory, but definitely memory’s kin, because everything happened as it did in reality except their daughter had not died at twenty-three and in this fantasy she did not imagine them hugging, crying, talking about anything, nothing was addressed or swallowed or dealt with, she fantasized about her and her daughter shopping for clothes at that nice mall in Chesterfield, and when one credit card was rejected, they laughed and used another.

And she was not crying or smiling but ironing out the white sheet to wrap around the composite board display, which she would line with small pictures, advertisements, and a rocking chair.