Mercury

by Amy Jo Burns

At some point, a marriage must become a junkyard of things, unfinished sentences and earring backs scattered across the floor.

“You’re free to do what you want,” she said. “As am I.” Thing was, though, she wasn’t. Her father still held that soft spot for a fellow soldier and understood things Elise could not. “You’ll go with him,” her father said, plain as that. “He’s earned your loyalty.” And maybe that was true, though Elise so desperately wanted her own loyalty to earn. Her father had taken away her chance to make her own choice. To remain with her sisters, who, in time, would find husbands of their own. What else could she do?

She leaned over him, ran her fingers through his hair, and touched him with a tenderness she didn’t feel. They hadn’t spoken much since he came back—or much at all—but his body began to say what his mouth couldn’t.

I have never seen anything or anyone as beautiful as you were in that dress.” He ran a thumb against her lip. “I thought of it every night.” Elise leaned in to kiss him, and Mick began to tremble. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. You already have, she thought. “You won’t,” she said. He took her to bed, and they found a kind of happiness together. It was all they had in those days, and it was real.

“There’s more to this life than just trying to survive it,” Marley told Evangeline. “Maybe your grandmother never had the chance, but you and I do.”

Evie stood on the ledge of the bell tower and reached both hands out into the sky. A breeze curled through her fingers, and Evangeline Joseph let herself lean toward it. That soft wind took flight and called her higher, like the opiate of a piano’s prelude, the hush of rainfall on a midnight roof, the way a heartbeat flutters like a wing.

Even though the characters and events in this novel came mostly from my imagination, I’m the daughter, granddaughter, niece, and sister of some phenomenal roofers.