The Other Shoe by Matt Pavelich

to the dinner gathering, a fat man infatuated with his own name who talked rapidly and exclusively of Ned and Ned’s doings. Ned wore a yellow mesh cap streaked with some of the same greases it advertised. His hair and beard were cinder black and had been cropped to various lengths with clumsy shearing. In a half hour among them he had claimed to be the very best at some worthy thing which, unfortunately, he was not at liberty to describe or even name, and he claimed descent from Algonquins and presented the tips of his fingers as proof of it, and he told them he knew, more or less, what most of them were thinking. He said he didn’t mind. Mad in some barely governable way, Ned, it seemed, had known Mr. Brusett in years past, and he asked him about a woman named Juanita. Mr. Brusett said that Juanita was probably in Alberton with her new husband. What about Dave, then? Mr. Brusett, his voice an eggshell cracking, said that Dave was in jail, he thought. In the joint, actually. Deer Lodge. And Denny? Mr. Brusett shrugged with such finality that even the blithering Ned knew to let him alone. But Mr. Brusett was to spend no more Sundays at the Dents’. After that, Sundays were Ned’s, Ned who was not long in becoming, for Jean’s purposes, “Uncle Ned,” and the man, fascinated not only by his name, but by any name anyone might care to give him, would sometimes huff it like a toy train, “Uncle Ned. Uncle Ned. Uncle Ned. Uncle Ned.”
    A summer passed. Karen entered high school without a friend in the world.
    With just these few years ahead of her in which to become some kind of woman, she knew she could probably use a pal, and Karen thought that it was immature of her to not have one yet, but pep band and the like filled her with revulsion, and she knew that she must be revolting in her own turn, and the very situations in which friends were typically made were the times and places she could not abide, not when given any choice. There was always sufficient reason to not belong. Volleyball was out of the question because of the yelling involved, the yipping the girls did in that echo vault of a gym, and Karen wouldn’t think of basketball, knowing she was too clumsy for it, and her folks said their long Lent prohibited her running track. Karen did not join the glee club. She didn’t raise a sow to show in the 4-H barn at the fair. She was reliable in her studies, responsible about her homework, and invariably graded “Not Disruptive” in classroom deportment, but teachers did not call on her to answer. Karen knew she somehow willed this result. As a freshman she adopted the dress and swagger of the lumberjacks she’d found a generation back in family photo albums: Grandpa and Great-Grandpa on Jean’s side, standing rakish always on some freshly butchered sidehill. They held tools capable of such work, peaveys and pikes and two-man chain saws, big machines with malice for all and built to give no quarter, and these men seemed in every shot to be entirely satisfied. In their honor, or in honor of their contentment, she wore her denim pants spiked or cuffed, and she wore suspenders, and long underwear, and wool flannel, and the heaviest boots a girl could buy in her size, and it all proved itself again and again to be imprudent wear for the well-heated classroom, but she wore it anyway.
    â€œAll that girl wants,” Jean said of her, “is to be left alone. And I’ve got no kick with that. I’d rather have that than have one of these boy-crazy little brats on my hands—now that’d be a rodeo. One of these ones that’s always got their belly buttons hanging out? You just know that can’t be chaste—not in thought and deed.”
    In her high school’s bleak hierarchy, Karen, when she was thought of at all, was thought to be a lesbian and coveted by no one, no one willing to announce themselves. Of too little consequence even to be