Thin Love(3)

“Want some popcorn?” She doesn’t wait for her son to respond before she moves into the kitchen. Keira takes a moment to herself, to push away the most relentless, insistent ghost.

On the counter she sees her mother’s cookbook. It is red and white, Betty Crocker and opened on the stand to a recipe for Chicken and Dumplings. It was rarely used and never by her mother, but the sight of it has Keira looking around the room. The counters still shined, even though they were unused by her mother who never learned more about cooking than picking up the phone to have someone else prepare it. And still, those shadows of her mother’s ghost could not block other things she remembers about this room.

Keira attempting French toast and Kona’s successful efforts at distraction. Kona leaning her against the counter, shirtless, his jeans lowered; her legs around that thin, tight waist, her open to him, giving, taking; her fingers hanging onto the edge as he worked inside her. Keira can still hear her own moans bounce into her ears across the wood floors. He fills this place and sometimes, Keira thinks, he still fills too much of her head, too much of her heart.

She had pushed back those memories, those sensations that Kona always worked in her, but being home has allowed her to remember how much he had consumed her. To her, then, he was life. He was breath. He was the searing part of her soul that burned her from the inside. With him, she couldn’t think, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t move past the way his mouth felt on her skin. He had been that all—life, death, breath—all those impossible things you aren’t supposed to feel at eighteen. A first love so real, so tempting that sometimes she was sure he was a figment of her imagination.

She blinks away that memory and pulls out an empty bowl when the volume on the television increases. Kona’s voice is louder now, clearer, and Keira moves to the pantry, fetches a small bag of popcorn and slams it into the microwave. The cadence of his voice has grown deeper, heavier with a rasp and there are no vestiges of his Uptown roots in the inflection. He belongs to the world now, not the city, not their university, certainly not to her. Keira’s heart skips double time, throbbing with each word she manages to hear from Kona’s interview.

Sixteen years and she still can’t manage to forget him.

Sixteen years and the heavy weight of his words to her still render her dumb.

“Walk away, Keira. Walk away from me and don’t look back.”

She did. He could hardly blame her for listening.

“Mom, it’s starting,” Ransom calls into the kitchen.

She takes a breath, then another and opens the microwave when it sounds. “Just a second, son. I’ll be just a second.”





The woman had looked older than her sixty-one years when she died. The picture accompanying the obituary tells him that much.

Kona pulls the newspaper closer to his face examining the hollow cheeks, the thin nose. He hadn’t thought of her in years. Not the dead woman. She’d always been an uptight, cruel bitch and he felt nothing save surprise at her passing. He had been convinced she was simply too mean to die.

Cora Michaels (nee Marquette) died peacefully in her home April 19th after a lengthy illness.

Peaceful was something Kona believed she didn’t deserve. Painful, kicking and screaming, he thought, befit her better. He skimmed the obituary until he found the name he was looking for.

She is survived by her daughter Keira Riley, and her niece Leann Marquette-Bankston.

Keira Riley.

Not Keira Riley hyphenated with another name. No husband? He knew not to get his hopes up. Keira is a bridge he burned long ago. His indifference had been the kindling, his words the bright spark that set flame to them both.

But he couldn’t stop himself from lingering on the memory of her smile. Absently, Kona rubs his thumb along the smooth scar on his cheek. A beer bottle in the alleyway of a bar they were too young to frequent had left its mark and still reminds him of her every day.

Of them.

Keira’s temper had been quick and sharp. His face was marked because he fell in love with a girl who didn’t like him touching a flirty waitress. God, how she’d raged that night. He’d loved every second of it.

“Wildcat,” he says to himself, a small chuckle moves out of his mouth at the memory. She swore she hated the nickname, but he caught her blush each time he said it.

Kona leaves the newspaper behind on the table, takes in the bustle below him in the city. Street cars gliding by, packed with tourists. Horns blaring, fingers lifted in the city’s greatest tribute to assholes, cops parked in the medians, itching to pull anyone over and in the distance, the river—the great old girl that breathed the pulse of half the country’s struggle right into the Gulf. This city, his hometown, reminded him of years past, of her. His eyes glance back down at the paper and Kona retrieves Keira’s face, that smile again, the memory of her skin.