Part 2

By: Ted Wallenius

While she gathered her things together at the Broken Pony, packing the things she wanted to keep, making a pile of the things she would throw out, another pile of the shoes, clothes, and costume jewelry she knew the other girls would want, Janey Jones thought about her Dad and his friends.

She remembered them, all of them, sitting in the shop around the corner from the house, Mom in the kitchen making fried chicken and biscuits and Janey, already impatient with the trappings of domestic life, not wanting to see how to make gravy, not wanting to wash dishes ever, not wanting to smell cooking grease or have flour on her hands, waiting for her mother to give her permission to run down to the shop and let her Dad know that dinner would be ready in half an hour.

Janey, pelting down the alley, white Keds tipped with dirt, the dress her mother had made her slashing at her knees and the white paint chipping off the sides of the houses and falling in the heat of the summer evening, running down to the shop where her Dad sat relaxing, waiting for his friends. They would all be there for poker after dinner and she wanted to see them, they always smiled at her and gave her soda pop and sometimes they asked her to run an errand for them: go to the liquor store and talk to Bobby there and bring back the pint he owes me, or get us some club crackers and a salami. Things like that.

Sighing and unbuttoning their vests so she could see the jewelry, the gold chains hanging on their necks and smell their aftershave mixing with the scent of their leather shoes, sometimes they even lifted their hands and asked Janey for advice on their cards, not because they thought she knew the answer but because for that sort of man asking a pretty girl was the same as making your own luck.

Before dinner nobody was there yet at the shop and it was just her Dad sitting with the ledger in front of him. When Janey came in he closed the book and shook his head like he was tired of all those numbers. Then he picked up his guitar and strummed the steel strings. It was a Lowden F- size acoustic with a cedar top and a mahogany and rosewood neck, a beautiful instrument, he’d won the money to buy it playing poker and from bets on football. In her memory he could play it just like Richard Thompson, making the strings go so fast that the air in the shop seemed to vibrate and the sound that came out of it was like twenty guitars, not just one.

Janey’s father was a bookmaker, that’s what he did, until one day when she was twelve years old with her red hair still in pigtails Mom cried in the kitchen and he didn’t come for dinner. Janey ran to the shop but he wasn’t there; there was no one there.

Janey tried to forget the way he’d been short-tempered with them all that week because he didn’t come home ever again, and that wasn’t the way she wanted to remember her father.

She wanted to remember him smiling at her and taking her chin in his hand and saying, “Hey, squirt, how about you run over to the store and get us a couple packs of cigarettes.” His friendswent somewhere else to play poker. The shop with its sashed windows and the paint peeling up from the glazing went too, because there was no reason to pay rent on it, and the guitar also passed into other hands and was gone forever, because then they needed money so they could live.

When she was finished packing, Janey Jones picked up the Hermés bag made of shiny white crocodile leather and took a look around the room that had been her life for ten years. Without her paintings on the wall and the clothes in the closet there wasn’t much to it. Her stuff was stacked on the bed. Janey humphed, knowing she might miss the girls sometimes, the late-night camaraderie, the horror stories, shrieking in laughter about some guy’s twisted dick, commiserating about the crushes the girls were always falling into and, immediately, out of.

Janey knew she was ready to move on.

Janey Jones walked into Tai Botman’s office and set the Birkin bag on Tai’s desk. The bag was stuffed with cash. Some of it fell out the top onto the desk. Tai, who was busy doing the month’s numbers, frowned at the interruption. Then he realized it was Janey, saw the cash, and changed his frown to a smile. Janey Jones was his best girl. None of the others could touch her. They came and went. Some of them started out like gangbusters, on hot streaks that would make Tai think he was maybe on to something, but they always fizzled out, got grumpy, started pleading sickness, found boyfriends to take care of them and lost interest in the business, or just went home to Kansas.

Janey’d been his best earner for over ten years. She wasn’t the prettiest, the narrowest, the most talented, or the nicest sex worker he’d ever met. She just brought them back, again and again, repeat customers like the day is long. Even Tai couldn’t really figure it out.

“This is it,” Janey said.

“What?” Tai replied.

“The last payment,” Janey said. Tai Botman clicked at his keyboard. Janey shifted in her chair.

She pointed at the Birkin and said, “Here’s the last five grand. You wanna give me a hard time for paying it off early, Tai? Charge me a fee?”

Tai steepled his hands. “The last payment? Payment for what?”

“My motorcycle,” Janey said.

Tai Botman shook his head in wonder. He said, “Ten years ago, we took a trip together to Las

Vegas. While we were there, we went to an auto auction. We went out and had that big steak dinner at the MGM Grand and then I wanted to go see the cars. That was how it started. At the auction you saw it. The motorcycle you’ve longed for ever since you were a teenager. Sleek,simple, black and chrome. It was up on a podium at the back. It was just cherry. You’ve always had good taste, Janey.”

“There ain’t nothing beats a ‘52 Vincent and a red headed girl,” Janey agreed.

“They never even rolled it out onto the auction floor,” Tai said. “You begged me to buy it for you. You said you’d pay it off in installments.”

“That’s right,” Janey Jones agreed. “It cost you sixty thousand dollars. I kept my part of the agreement. $1000 dollars a month, for one hundred and twenty months. That’s fifteen percent interest, you leech. You know that? Gimme the keys.”

“What then?” Tai said. “What are you going to do once I give you that bike?”

Janey had the four packed suitcases sitting on the bed in her room, which she’d had to rent from him for ten years too. Four suitcases plus seven dress bags plus ten hatboxes. Four crates of shoes. That was just the best ones. And the jewelry and the furs.

For ten years, she’d had to have an escort when she left her Mound House neighborhood, even to go to the store for tampons. She hadn’t been able to own a car or have a bank account. She wasn’t allowed to go to school, or to have a phone that Tai or one of the bouncers wouldn’t take from her and look over every night. She wasn’t allowed to use a computer that didn’t have all the good stuff locked off.

It wasn’t Janey’s fault if she’d turned Tai Botman’s business into a lucrative gig for herself. It wasn’t her fault if he hadn’t managed to skim off all her earnings, with the rent and the licensing and food and the medical and all the rest of it. It wasn’t her fault if she knew men who had more money than a small-town pimp on the edge of America’s Great Basin, that desolate sink for all that was wretched in humankind, would ever understand.

“Once I’ve got my bike I’m outta here,” Janey said. “I made a deal with myself, a long time ago.

Once I’ve got my Vincent you’ll never see me again.” She was aware as she said it that he wouldn’t like it, but her own feelings on the subject outweighed the smarter decision, which would have been to stay silent. Tai should know. He should know her. He should know how

Janey felt, and he should respect it. It was the new millennium, after all. Well into the new millennium.

“I want you to look at something,” Tai said. He slid the Birkin bag out of the way, spilling more twenties on the desk in the process, and turned his computer monitor around so that Janey could see. On the screen was her motorcycle. It was an online auction site. She couldn’t help but look at the price. The condition said FAIR. The starting auction price said $338,000.

“Now, I hold the paper on the Vincent,” Tai said. “It’s in the safe right over there.” He pointed athis wall safe. “I bought it without your help. And I realize that we talked a bit about how you could take it from me, but I always thought we were just sort of joking around, you know, because we liked each other.”

“What about my thousand bucks every month?” Janey asked. She’d known, of course. She’d known he’d pull this shit.

Tai said, “The value of that motorcycle can’t even be calculated. It’s in mint condition. It’s got 476 miles on the odometer. I change the fluids every sixth months. The brakes, the engine, they’re all pristine. The gas in the tank’s been taken care of, the carb, everything. The battery gets a trickle charge. It’s sitting on new rubber but I even have the original tires in storage. It’s hot, baby, a thousand cc’s of two-stroke, V-Twin glory. Rollie Free used the ‘48 prototype to set a land speed record on the Bonneville Salt Flats just 400 miles in that direction,” Tai Botman gestured east. “They maybe made thirty of the ‘52’s, and there’s only 19 left that anyone knows about. This is one of ‘em. Maybe the prettiest one. There’s no way I’m giving you that bike for $120,000. That’s ludicrous. I don’t care if your Dad loved the song. I don’t care if he sang it to you when you were a girl. The bike is priceless, Janey.”

Tai stood up. He went to his safe, spun the dial, and opened the door. He took out bundles of hundreds. One hundred bills to the bundle, ten thousand dollars in each one of them, held with its fat strip of glue paper. One, two, he set them in front of Janey, three four. Until there were twelve of them. Then he set down two more. “Interest,” Tai said. “For holding your money. Like a bank. I can even continue to keep it for you, if you want. It’s probably safer than putting it under your mattress, but you do what you want.”

“On that note, Janey,” Tai said, “how are you ever going to get all that stuff you’ve got stacked on your bed out of the Broken Pony?”

“I need to go out,” Janey said. “Will you please call me an escort?”

“Sure thing,” Tai said with a smile.

• • •

“There’s a guy over there wants everyone to smell him,” the bartender hissed at Two-Cents. It was Friday night, and Two-Cents and Stacy had invited their next-door neighbor to go for a beer at the Corner Bar. Now he, Stacy, and Tim Whiting sat huddled in a threesome on stools, alternatively watching the rare bubble rise to the surface of their beers and the bottles in the back bar mirror. “Says a girl peed on him over at the Broken Pony.

“What’s the Broken Pony?” Two-Cents asked.

Stacy kicked him in the ankle from her stool, making him wince his pimple covered cheeks. Shemused how most of the time she couldn’t get Two-Cents to say a word, and when he did talk it was to say something stupid. “What’d you do that for?” Two-Cents demanded.

“You know why,” Stacy said, taking a demure sip from her beer, examining her strappy red platforms for any scuff marks, then returning them to the railing beneath the bar. The shoes were new and she loved them. She had glitter nail polish on her toes.

“You think that really happened?” Two-Cents asked.

“He sure smells like something happened.” The bartender made a face, nodding in the direction

of the customer in question, who was nursing a bourbon at the far end of the bar. “It is not pleasant.”

The door to the Corner Bar blew open and Janey Jones came flying through it. As the door slammed shut behind her, Two-Cents’ pock-marked face turned bright red and he buried his nose in his beer, refusing to look up from the bar-top. Stacy eyed the newcomer with interest. The Corner Bar, which rarely had two females in it at the same time, seemed to grow warmer.

Janey wore acid-washed blue jeans with holes in them and a black shirt covered with rhinestone sparkles.

“I like your blouse,” Stacy told the stranger. Janey’s long red hair shone in the light.

Two-Cents pondered the luck that would have his wife and his moll sitting next to one another at the bar and wondered if he should feign illness, or at least run to the bathroom and do a quick bump.

A troll-faced man lumbered in behind Janey. He sat down beside her and somehow disappeared.

He didn’t actually disappear, it was just that with the sparks flying off Janey they all forgot about him.

Stacy watched, fascinated. Two-Cents, overcome with shame and the need for something to lift his spirits, nudged Tim’s shoulder. The two of them crept off to the bathroom like girls.

“Give me a shot of Patron,” Janey ordered the bartender.

Without taking his eyes off her, the bartender reached for the back bar and brought the bottle forward. He reached below the bar and set a shot glass in front of Janey. He could tell without looking that there wasn’t enough tequila in the bottle.

“You want me to chill it for you?” the bartender asked.

“I don’t care,” Janey snapped. “Do whatever it is you do.”The bartender shrugged, squeezed the last drops of tequila into a tin, added some ice, and started stirring. Frost crept up the metal sides of the tin. He covered it, strained the clear liquid into the glass, hoped against hope it would be enough, saw that it wasn’t.

“I’ll have to go back to get another bottle,” he said.

“Just give it to me,” Janey said.

“It’s not enough,” the bartender protested.

Janey stared daggers at him. “Just give it to me like that, you putz. I’m not paying for it, he is. And don’t you ever argue with me again.”

She drained the tequila without changing her expression and turned to her escort. “Pay the man,” she said, which he did before fading into the background again, like lumpy elevator music.

Stacy couldn’t take her eyes off Janey. “Are you a—” she began. “I used to work at the Broken Pony,” Janey said. She turned on her escort. “Go wait in the car,” she ordered. He didn’t move, just shimmered back into substance on his stool.

“What, you think I’m going to split out the back door? Go wait in the car.”

Driving wind blew into the Corner Bar as Janey’s escort opened the door and made himself scarce.

“That’s a bitter, bitter woman,” the bartender said to no one in particular.

Two-Cents and Tim Whiting came back from the bathroom, sniffling like they’d had a good cry together. They turned up their noses when they passed the lonely peed-on man at the other end of the bar and hurried back over to where Stacy and Janey sat.

“Hi, Two-Cents,” Janey said.

“You two know one another?” Stacy queried. Two-Cents turned red again.

Tim Whiting thought of an incident he’d seen with Stacy and her husband Two-Cents. He’d been in his living room, slouched on the couch, a can of beer in one hand and the remote in the other, nothing important on the television set. There’d probably been drool hanging from his lip or pillow lines on his cheek. It was around five o’clock, summertime, quitting time for people who still had to go to work.Two-Cents pulled into the driveway and sat like he usually did, a shadow behind the tinted windows, working on some business deal or other, checking over his accounts, or contacting his dealer, or whatever it was he did in there. For some reason, Tim stood up and went over to stand behind the curtains and look over at his neighbors’ drive across the street.

Unbeknownst to Two-Cents, bent over his phone in the driver’s seat, Stacy came out the front door into the driveway and crept like a ninja along the side of the truck. As Tim watched, she ducked down to pass the driver’s side window and crept towards the back corner of the truck, where she paused, lying in wait like a mongoose.

When Two-Cents opened the door and stepped out, distracted, she bunny-hopped towards him from behind and reached up to put both her hands over his eyes. At first Two-Cents straightened in surprise, perhaps even anger or fear that he was about to be robbed, but then he realized it was his wife. He turned and wrapped his arms around her, and then the two of them went into the house together, smiling.

Now Stacy turned on Two-Cents. She had rage in her eyes. “Is this the girl you’ve been stepping out to see?” she demanded. “Don’t bother lying to me, Two-Cents. I know it is.”

Two-Cents set his head on his hands on the bar. He glanced at his beer.

“You know, you’re really a piece of work,” Stacy said. “Does the word ‘husband’ mean anything to you?”

Two-Cents didn’t say anything. What was he going to say?

“Do you remember when we took our vows? In the church? In the church, Two-Cents. Your mother was there. You know, it’s not just me you’ve got to please, it’s the man upstairs. He’s judging you too, since it doesn’t seem like you have any ability to judge yourself. Or restrain yourself. How much of our money have you given this woman?”

Embarrassed, Tim Whiting turned to his other side, where Janey Jones sat on her stool, out of arm’s reach of the jilted woman. No one had better say Janey didn’t earn her money. And no one had better say if you took better care of him at home. If anyone on either side of Tim said either one of those two things he knew it would start the whole bar on fire, with him sitting right there in the middle.

Stacy’s anger was reserved for her husband. “You know, it’s bad enough that you’re nothing but a low-life drug dealer, but on top of that you’re not even a faithful low-life drug dealer.” She pulled Two-Cents away, over to the dark end of the Corner Bar, leaving Janey and Tim alone on their stools.

When Tim said, “Love is so complicated” to himself, Janey overheard him.“Love?” she demanded from her stool. “What’s that? I just need someone to help me get back my motorcycle.”

Tim perked up. The cocaine buzzed around in his brain. Tim liked motorcycles. “What kind of bike?” he said. “Where is it? I’ll get it for you.”

Janey appraised him with slitted eyes. “You ever been to the Broken Pony?”

“Nope,” Tim said, not sure if he should be embarrassed about the admission. It was one thing to talk about the whorehouses with guys like Two-Cents. It was another to talk about them with someone who worked there.

“Hmm,” Janey mused. “That’s good. Tai knows everyone who’s ever been to the Broken Pony, and he’s got cameras everywhere. If he recognized you there’d be no way. But if you’ve never been there . . .” she trailed off, thinking.

“I’ve never been there,” Tim repeated. “And who’s Tai?”

“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Janey said, and explained it to him.

“Are you sure he’ll come back out?” Tim Whiting asked.

They both looked to the dark end of the bar, where Stacy continued to berate her husband.

“Oh, he’ll come back out,” Janey said. “He always comes when I call. They all come when I call.”

By: Ted Wallenius

Part 1

“I feel free,” Two-Cents thought.

A moment later he remembered the double white lines of delicious Bolivian marching powder he and Janey Jones had just hoovered up in the bathroom. The bathroom was neither men’s nor women’s; it was just a bathroom, with clean towels, artwork including a small statue of a wild horse, and matching color potpourri.

Two-Cents thought, “That’s usually when they shoot you.”

He took a look around the front room. There wasn’t a gun or a uniform in sight. Just the girls and the bartender, a big kid with a crew cut and a barrel chest who probably hadn’t poured a drink all night. People didn’t go to the Broken Pony to drink, and if they were there under false pretenses they were quickly made to feel they needed to go somewhere else, across Highway 50 to the Corner Bar, for instance. The bartender at the Broken Pony was an expert at making people feel they needed to move on. It was a business, after all; there was competition right across the street, in those pink cottages with their lace curtains and silk sheets on the beds that was on Home Box Office back around the turn of the millennium.

Nevada was the only state in the Union that admitted the world’s oldest profession existed, making it legal in any county with less than 700,000 residents and no contradicting ordinance.

Brothels paid an estimated half a million tax dollars per year in Lyon County, where the Broken Pony was located, and where girls as young as eighteen could do it legally. The Covid-19 epidemic and resulting regulations were devastating to the business, but now Lyon County was growing. Elon Musk had come, searching for a new mineral fortune in the form of lithium for his batteries, and bringing with him thousands of workers, many of whom were away from their families and church groups and lonely for the sorts of company the brothels could provide.

There were many requirements for the operation of a brothel. All workers had to be licensed, documented, and were required to pay taxes on their proceeds. The sex workers underwent required weekly checks for gonorrhea and chlamydia with a licensed physician, and once a month for HIV and syphilis. In 2009, Heidi Fleiss applied to start a male brothel, and urethral inspections were added to the list so boys could participate as well. Before any act with a customer began, a physical inspection of the client’s genitalia was conducted. Condoms were required for oral, vaginal, and anal intercourse.

As a result of all the rules there were only nineteen licensed brothels in Nevada. They were regulated and safe. In partnership with state and federal authorities, they defended against human trafficking and child pornography. There were rumors of girls who retired young and lived comfortable second lives on the proceeds of their labors. The nineteen licensed brothels accounted for less than one percent of the prostitution which occurred in Nevada. The rest happened on Las Vegas street corners, in motel rooms in Reno, and everywhere else in between, from Elko to Ely, from Tehachapi to Tonopah.Tai Botman, the owner of the Broken Pony, tried to keep all this in mind at the holidays, when he dressed his girls up and drove them fifty miles over Spooner Summit to Lake Tahoe, where they enjoyed appetizers at Wolf by Vanderpump, Beef Wellington at Gordon Ramsey’s Hell’s Kitchen, and finally a bottle table at PEEK Nightclub in Harrah’s, dancing and swilling Cristal until the wee hours of the morning.

Now it was the end of August, the dog days, heat, dust and ennui, and one of the girls in the Broken Pony’s parlor began tinkering on the piano. It was the sort of piano that has a folding lid over old ivory keys. The girl began by lifting the lid. She had dark hair that went all the way down to her waist and she wore rose-colored underwear. The girl wasn’t playing any sort of melody but she tinkled the piano keys with two fingers while she stared at Two-Cents. She was so skinny that her teddy sagged on her chest.

Two-Cents dropped his gaze first and turned back to the bar. When he did, the girl in the teddy slammed the lid back down over the keys on the piano with a loud bang, snorted like a truck driver, and walked dismissively over to the other side of the room, where she stood under a large smoky, sepia tinted portrait of William Bonney, adopting the outlaw’s exact same posture except that she didn’t have a rifle under her arm to use as a crutch.

Another of the girls, this one with purple hair, sat on the red velvet barstool next to Two-Cents, showing the bartender professional photos she’d had done. By looking over her shoulder Two-Cents could see that she had 1) no hangups about her body, 2) fascinating skills as a contortionist, and 3) the ability to blow fire. This second girl looked slyly back at Two-Cents, making Two-Cents drop his gaze again, pretending he hadn’t been sneaking a look at her photos on the bar top. At that point the purple-haired girl also huffed, dismounted from her stool, and went to stand beside the skinny girl in the rose-colored underwear, both of them imitating the blank stare on Billy the Kid’s face. Two-Cents tried not to take it personally. He wondered how much longer it was going to be before Janey returned from the back of the house to save him.

He was almost ready to wander back there to look for her. That would get the house muscle involved, and not in a good way. The house muscle was the same fellow Two-Cents didn’t want to know about the four 8-balls of cocaine he had in vials in the pockets of his jeans. Drugs were strictly off limits inside the Broken Pony. The discovery of illicit substances in the Broken Pony would cause Tai Botman, the brothel owner, to lose his brothel owners’ license. Brothel owners’ licenses were very expensive, argued over, bribed over, graves dug over, and Tai Botman had absolutely no interest in that sort of trouble.

Two-Cents was a cocaine dealer. Elon Musk’s operation went on twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and when his workers were off shift they wanted to party. In Lyon County, non-violent crime was up thirty percent. The police department and the clerk of courts were both hiring. Two-Cents had a good reputation and good suppliers, and because of the fentanyl danger and the proliferation of meth in northern Nevada those two things were important. Two-Cents did a profitable business that kept him up and away from home at allhours, day and night.

At last Janey came hustling back into the front room of the Broken Pony, heading straight for Two-Cents, her filmy black nightgown billowing businesslike behind her. Breathless, she thanked him for waiting. “Sorry,” she said, “housekeeping’s behind today.” The black nightgown accented her red hair. Two–Cents breathed a sigh of relief and mentally checked the state of his package.

Janey was still thinking how the last guy had insisted she squat overtop his chest and pee on him.

He was a good customer and she couldn’t afford to disappoint him. For the housekeeper Rosa, who had to strip the sheets and muttered to herself while she was doing so, louder when Janey was in earshot, he was a catastrophe. If this kept up Rosa was considering purchasing some rubber sheets, although on the face of it she knew lack of absorbency was not going to improve the situation.

• • •

Stacy Worth loved her husband. Or at least she thought she did. She didn’t feel very loving when she caught him going to the Broken Pony. She caught him because of his phone.

“Who’s this message from?” she demanded, showing him the text: Meet up? Half an hour?

Two-Cents shrugged. He wasn’t a man of many words. He held out his hand for the phone but she refused to return it.

She worked on the phone, wanting to throw it at him. A few keystrokes and she pinned the message on Google Maps. “This is from Mound House,” she said. “What were you doing in

Mound House?”

“Work friend,” Two-Cents mumbled, wondering how he could’ve forgotten to turn off location services again. He’d needed directions for a delivery was how.

“You don’t know anyone in Mound House,” Stacy chided him. “This is from the Broken Pony.”

“He’s doing some electrical work there,” Two–Cents lied.

Then Stacy did throw the phone at him. She started to cry. “Now I have to get tested for VD.

And now she knew what all those charges were on the credit card.

It wasn’t entirely Two-Cents’ fault. Stacy wasn’t interested in sex. When she was nineteen years old, she went into labor at thirty weeks. Before the doctors could perform a C-section the dead thing inside her came out, sideways, ripping her open from the top of her vagina all the way backto her anus. Stacy needed four blood transfusions and almost died. When it was all over her body had changed. The nerves were all torn up. Stacy was left with no baby, no man, and bladder incontinence.

For a long time Stacy wallowed in self-pity. Then she met Two-Cents, who was the most passive, least judgmental man she’d ever encountered. He accepted her as she was. When he asked her to she married him. And she loved her husband. She loved it when he held her, with his arms around her and her cheek pressed against his chest. Still, she didn’t want him to put that thing inside her. It didn’t feel good, and she couldn’t understand her friends when they said they liked it.

“You need to see some girl’s hatchet wound that bad?” she sobbed to Two-Cents.

Stacy had image problems. She was a bigger girl, shaped more like a weeble-wobble than an hour glass. She had curly blond hair that she hated even though the shining tresses inspired jealousy in all her friends. Because she thought she had to overdo it to make herself attractive she used a color of lipstick that was too pink for her complexion. Somehow it ended up going real well with her hair and the green eyeshadow she used on her eyes.

When Stacy looked at herself in the mirror she often thought of Bette Midler, Barbara Streisand, or, on bad days, Dee Snider.

It didn’t help that she was now forty-two and childless.

It didn’t help that she still worked the check out line at the local grocery store, that she saw the same people over and over again, day after day, and that she made the same small talk. There was Mrs. Merkle on Tuesdays, collecting her butter, milk, and eggs. There was Mr. Dinetta on

Fridays, in line with his slipper moccasins, his driving cap, his Burberry scarf, and his frozen lasagna. Stacy wanted to tell Mr. Dinetta to take a cooking class; the lasagna would be better and he might meet someone.

It didn’t help that her husband’s name was Two-Cents, or that he was a good for nothing small-time cocaine dealer who liked seeing prostitutes more than he liked her.

• • •

Tim Whiting crouched amongst the dead sunflowers at the edge of his property. He’d been meaning to take them out for at least a week. On Oprah’s twenty-year-old advice Tim was reading The Corrections. In summertime the heads were just like Jonathan Franzen described them, “meaty and splendid, heavy as brownies . . . Nature could hardly have devised a more inviting bed”, but now there weren’t any more bright yellow flowers, there weren’t any more goldfinches bouncing the stalks up and down as they pulled out the seeds, making the patch of sunflowers look like it was infested with a convention of partying garden gnomes. It was justgrayish-brown sticks and spiky deadheads, sharp enough to draw blood. Not that those deadheads didn’t still conceal life. Tim would find them there in spring, the green shoots coming up one, two, and then in swaths. He didn’t mind. He admired anything that could thrive in that clay, in the heat, wind, and drought of Great Basin summers.

Tim had been a motocross racer. The day it all ended he wore the red and black livery of Ameropump Racing Injectors. He’d taken the hole shot with ease, kneed his nearest competitor off his line and out of balance as he passed, then roared around the track once, gaining the whole way, until he was four lengths out in front. At the end of the second lap, on the second to last jump, the big one, the one they called the Wu-Tang, he decided to really let it loose. He hit the lip hard, flying higher than he ever had, riding the wind, skying so high, engine purring. A photographer at the bottom of the Wu-Tang took a photo at the pinnacle of Tim’s flight, capturing the slogan on his jersey. It read “Big Air by A.R.I.” Tim still had the photo hanging over his bed.

Thirty feet up in mid-air, his throttle cable snapped. Without the revolutions of the motor to stabilize it, the bike nosed over and dove straight at the ground. Tim, surprised, paralyzed, watched in disbelief as the brown dirt, chewed up by a hundred knobby wheels, came closer, closer, drifting up to meet him and the handlebars of his motorcycle. Wham. The impact broke out five of his front teeth and shattered his knuckles, all four on his right hand and three on his left, sparing both his thumbs and left pinky, but that was it. Just like that his racing career was over. ARI took their colors and their sponsorship and their Big Air elsewhere.

Rehabilitation sucked. Tim had dentures and casts on both hands. When the casts came off the physical therapy was endless, painful at first, then so boring he couldn’t stand it. When he was ready the doctor suggested he try something physical to loosen up the joints. Tim, who’d grown up in cowboy boots, settled on roping. He got a bale of hay and put it out in his front yard, in front of the bright yellow sunflowers. He tacked a set of steer horns to the hay bale, and then he sat on his front porch with a cold can of beer and spun a lasso at his makeshift bull, over and over, all day long, right hand, left hand, until he could make and release normal fists again.

Now, twenty years after Oprah and Jonathan Franzen dueled over his selection to her book club, there were crushed cans of beer scattered all around the bale of hay. There was a can of Red Bull balanced between the steer horns, and the sunflowers were all dead and scratchy.

Tim Whiting looked across the street, to the house where Stacy Worth lived. Tim liked Stacy. A lot. He knew she had a husband, but it didn’t keep him from liking her. There was just something about her. She wasn’t beautiful in a skinny flighty vapid made-up influencer super-model cartoon sort of way. She was beautiful because she was real, and because she smiled at Tim and waved at him whenever she saw him from across the street.

Crouching to snip the dead sunflowers, Tim hoped Stacy wouldn’t come outside. As men grow older their bodies change, and that change is most apparent when they’re wearing pants. Pantsthat used to stay buttoned around slim, youthful waists now insisted on pulling down, down, and down over pear-shaped, beer-reinforced middles. Tim could feel the autumn air directly on his lower back. And in the crack of his ass. If his neighbor Stacy took an innocent glance out her window right now she’d get a full look at what clothes were supposed to hide on people.

To keep his pants in place, Tim drove to Kohl’s and picked himself out a pair of suspenders.

They were red suspenders, and when he chose them he had an almost pleasant moment picturing himself chopping firewood and looking like Paul Bunyan, possibly even with his shirt unbuttoned all the way down his chest and the suspenders accentuating his bulging pectorals and six-pack abs and the sweat on his brow in a way that would make Stacy unable to resist a sideways glance.

The problem was, when the time came to raze the sunflowers, Tim didn’t put on the suspenders.

Instead he hoped against hope that those push-ups and sit-ups he did, all summer long, some days anyway, would make the jeans work the way they were supposed to, the way they used to.

Now he needed to turn in a direction that would directly expose his butt crack to Stacy, who was no doubt watching from her living room window. Sure, he could stand up and shake his knees out and walk around to the other side and maybe get the bastard from there, but that was so much more work than just turning that way and making the cut.

He turned, feeling the air caress the portion of his anatomy he’d rather not expose. With two squeezes of the lopper he almost got through the sunflower stalk. The damn thing was as big around as his wrist. Just to be sure he was alone in the neighborhood he glanced across the street to the front door of the Worths’. As he did, Stacy walked out on her porch and waved at him.

“Hi, Tim!” Stacy called.

“Good morning, Stacy!” Tim felt blood rush to his face as he straightened and yanked his pants up over his hips.

“That’s quite a view,” she laughed. “Just like when the plumber came last week.