Mercury

by Amy Jo Burns

In the last eight years, so much of their marriage had become about power—who had it, who gave it away. A slippery, constant leveling of the scales.

But his father had built so many things in his life that he never bothered to take care of. Houses, marriages, sons. He made people laugh. He also took whatever he wanted. Mick was dapper, and devil-stained, and draining as hell.

This church had preachers come and go, but it survived because it had the people of Mercury’s guts in it. Folks in town scrubbed it, decorated it, patched it, married their sweethearts in it, baptized their children in it. The building stood for a spark of the eternal in an ending world, though Waylon never felt his own mortality more than he did when he sat in these pews.

Way believed in haunted places, not because he was a Christian, but because he was a roofer. His whole business was revealing stories untold, ones that hid until they began to leak.

Shay loved best when he said, Show me your worst thing. I promise I won’t look away.

What did it mean, Marley wondered, to be married to one Joseph, but wife or mother to them all? The only thing she’d never been in the Joseph house was a daughter.

Marley’s mother had taught her that what people say is often not what they mean. Are you alone, Elise had asked her. Are you a Presbyterian, Ann wanted to know. Who is your father, Mick had demanded.

Marley had been holding out hope that on one of those nights after dinner, Elise would sit beside her on the sofa and ask about how she was faring as the new girl at school, or what she missed from her old town. Elise never did. She was forever consumed by the needs of her four men—feeding them, cleaning up after them, correcting them. Compensating for them.

want to love someone,” Marley said. “I know it’s not enough—but that’s what I see. Maybe it’s a man, maybe it’s a child. I don’t know.” “Maybe,” Ruth spoke softly, “it’s you.”

“He can’t know,” she said. “None of them can. They’re fragile, our men. Surely you can see that. No telling what they’ll do if they discover I’m not the saint who feeds them supper.”

“But that’s what loving someone is, isn’t it? Knowing you’re going to let them down. Having to live with it.”

It struck her then, how adept he was at apologizing, how earnest, as the son of two people who didn’t know how to do it at all. He’d learned from the absence of it, how to fill that empty space with what he’d needed but never received.

It was everything Marley expected would happen, and she found no satisfaction in it.

“Sins are like butterflies.” Shay kept his cool. “They all began as something else.”

Marley stood in front of him and pointed to his chest. “Decay is all you can see because that’s what’s in here. Every time you defend your father, it grows.”

“I think it’s more likely that we love the right people in the wrong way.”

Shay had been taught that God was too pure to look upon sin. And Shay wondered, then, what on earth there was left to look at—if not people hurting each other, misunderstanding each other, missing each other.

All the people Shay loved had fought over ephemeral objects at one time or another—wedding rings, maroon heels, grand pianos, drumsticks. They were so easy to take hold of, to restore to their rightful homes.