Black Rabbit and Other Stories by Salvatore Difalco Page A

passed and he didn’t call. He didn’t even send a postcard like that time he split to Vancouver for a month. Wendy still remembered that card, a shot of mountains, oceans, and whales. Was it really like that there? She doubted Ronnie was checking out whales this time.
    Ronnie was hard to love, maybe harder to like. When he first presented Kim to her, Wendy almost shit herself. Kim was a looker,Ronnie no Romeo. It all made more sense when she learned of Kim’s love of cocaine.
    Connor called one afternoon.
    â€œAuntie Wen,” he said. “Is my old man around?”
    â€œNah. This guy came here looking for you. This Felix dude. Says you have to call him right away. He left a card. Sounded like he meant business.”
    â€œWhatever. Tell him to smoke my bone next time you talk to him. Fucking fag.”
    â€œHe’s just doing his job, Connor.” Wendy wanted to hang up. “Your old man stopped by a few days ago and I haven’t seen or heard from him since.”
    â€œHe was supposed to leave some money.”
    â€œHe left nothing.”
    â€œThat motherfucker.” Connor hung up.
    That just about summed up everything. Late for her methadone fix, Wendy had a hint of the bugs. The bugs used to plague her when she was using hard. Got so bad she started carving up her arms. She butchered her left arm, cutting right into the bone. The doctors warned they’d have to amputate it from the shoulder if she continued cutting. But the arm healed on its own. Wendy considered it divine intervention. She went to rehab after that, cleaned herself up as much as she could.
    When the girls first saw the scars they cried and cried and hugged her. Wendy told them they were old wounds, healed over now. They didn’t need to worry. Took some convincing, but they came around. After that, whenever she exposed the arms, they’d gently mock her. Look at Miss Alligator! Doris would cry and the other two would join in a taunt.
    Miss Alligator! Miss Alligator! Mom-my is Miss Alligator!
    The plastic alligator in the bathroom entered the scene only after Doris first made the comparison. It didn’t bother Wendy, though sometimes it did. As for Connor—fuck him if he was jammed up. She had her own problems. In the bathroom she popped four Percodans. Fuck everyone, she thought.
    She promised to take the girls shopping for new school clothes. Cash-strapped and maxed out on her only credit card, she worried about keeping that promise; if she bought the girls nothing, they’d be bummed out. She dressed them up in matching white outfits with pink lace trim, white socks, and white shoes. She tied pink bows in their hair—Doris complained that it hurt—and looked at them. Pretty as dolls. Sometimes after a fix she had trouble keeping up. But they knew the routine, and behaved on Wendy’s “medicine” appointments.
    Not far from her flat, near Silver City, the clinic skirted a cluster of squalid tenements and skeletal factories. The overcast sky pressed on Wendy’s temples. Then the Percodans came on and she flowed across an intersection with the girls trailing her like cotton candy faeries. A man in a silver Buick with a grey beard and bullet-grey eyes rolled down his window and yelled an obscenity. Happened all the time. Maybe the way she dressed or looked provoked it, or maybe something deeper tagged her. They never ever let her forget who she was. Never.
    â€œMommy, what did that man say?” Donna asked.
    Wendy said nothing and led the girls to the clinic. Junkies crowded the entrance. Many knew the girls by name and traded greetings perfunctorily. The nurse in the bulletproof dispensing booth, a pleasant, ruddy lady called Cheryl, always shot out of her seat when she saw the girls, and handed them granola bars. The girls despised granola bars but took them graciously, and saved them in a shoe box for—as they put it—another rainy day.
    That they had lived