“This is none of your business. Troy is someone from my past, and I’m trying to talk to him so that things will be right with my son. My son, who is the only child I am interested in raising right now. You’ll have to find someone else to do that for you.”

She slammed herself into her car. Jackie made a gesture through the window that succinctly responded to many of the points made. Diane shrugged and reversed the car out of the spot.

“I’m finding out who that guy is and what you have to do with him,” Jackie shouted after her. “I’m getting to the goddamn bottom of this. You just stay out of my way while I do.”

Diane responded with acceleration. Jackie threw the paper after her.

“Screw you,” Jackie said.

“KING CITY,” the paper said, back in her hand.

“She has no idea what she’s talking about,” Diane and Jackie said simultaneously and separately, but about this they both had their doubts.

23

Sitting in her car, which sat in front of her house, which was not thinking anything at the time, Diane took out her phone and the paper that Evan had written on.

Diane did not remember much from her meeting with Evan at the diner. But she did remember he had texted her. She had also taken photos of him. She had also asked him to write down his name.

She remembered Jackie chasing after Troy. Diane, thinking of this moment, rubbed the burn marks on her left forearm. Why was Jackie looking for Troy? There was a great pit of the unknown under the rickety bridge of her and Josh’s relationship, and every time she looked down the pit was deeper than before. She felt annoyed with Jackie but furious with Troy. Another young person caught in the wake he was creating as he moved lightly through his careless, carefree life.

She looked at the piece of paper. It said “KING CITY,” and on the back it had Evan’s name. His name was not Evan. She looked at the name on the page and said it aloud. She said it again, and then put the paper down.

“Evan McIntyre,” she said aloud, and shrugged. “That’s just what it’s going to be then.”

Diane opened her photos and looked at one of the pictures she’d taken of Evan at the diner. He was wearing a tan jacket. She stared at the picture, then closed her eyes, hoping to burn the image into her mind, or onto the backs of her retinas, or into the mystic cloud of the collective unconscious, whatever it is that makes us remember images. She was no scientist.