Bonnie & Frances

I drive past the library, currently closed, black trash cans outside awaiting drop-offs without contact. Someone on the radio says he’s the right candidate for the moment because he knows how to deliver a eulogy. I think about stopping for soft serve. When I asked my son if one of his birds wanted a slice of cheese, he said, She’s not lactose, just tolerant. I said I’d pay him fifty cents to clean his room, and he negotiated me up to a dollar. Traffic’s heavier than usual, as people return to their lives, despite. Heading home, I pass an abandoned warehouse, cloaked in ivy, aside from its sign: Bonnie-Frances Lingerie Company, in vintage script. A remnant of our industrial past, perhaps, or a forgotten prop from a movie set, some scene cut from Benjamin Button. I imagine a real company, named for blonde daughters of a flannel-suited owner, white girls with ringlet curls and Gleem toothpaste smiles not featured in the modest grayscale catalog stacked with garter belts and bullet bras. The family lived nearby, some optimistic brick ranch with a slab foundation, much later surrounded by homes on stilts that scream, I’ll be fine even if my neighbors are drowning. The twins studied shorthand, married young, divorced before thirty. Bonnie used her trust fund to open a pet store, while Franny splurged on home exercise equipment, video poker, and cocaine. Eventually, the company sought a more sensible place for a factory, ending up in Metairie, like my grandparents, still tethered to the city but not enough to pay taxes. If they could have flown further, like Bonnie to Plano and Franny to Boca, I wonder where they’d have chosen. I might be there now. The news reports an accident with injury, somewhere not around here; a sinkhole on the shoulder of the interstate; a public comment period, ending soon, on future funding for the library. I doubt I’ll make it home in time.