How to Be a Bar Stool

3.

Mark wakes up with his head resting on a brown stain on the carpet and the rest of his body hanging sideways against his leather couch. His temples are throbbing and his vision is blurry. He blinks hard three times and notices a little girl, maybe 10 years old, standing up on her knees, a controller in her hands. She's playing Super Nintendo on his old box television set.

"Norma Jean, is that you?" Mark asks groggily, wiping crust from his eyes.

"Shhh, I almost beat it," the little girl says.

He recognizes the voice. It belongs to Brandi, the little girl who lives across the street. He also recognizes the girl's stained tank-top, her ripped shorts and the rubber bands that hold up two short ponytails jutting out from the top of her head. He's never seen her wearing anything else.

"What are you doing here, kiddo?" Mark asks, pushing himself up off his head and fully onto the leather couch.

"I wanted to play Mario."

"How'd you get in?" Mark's vision is made up of pictures and pictures spliced together, running past him in a slow slideshow. His head is a chorus of bass drums and crash cymbals.

He rests his elbow on his knee and puts his fist to his mouth, holding his nose on his top knuckle and biting the bottom one, giving his best impression of a thinking man. This keeps him from hurling.

"Through the front door, like always," the little girl says to the television screen. "I was gonna come through the window like everyone else, but Momma says broken glass is dangerous."

Mark looks over at his living room window. It's shattered. He can see a large glass bottle laying on the hot pavement outside. He turns back to the little girl. "You winnin'?" he asks her.

"Yeah."

"Me, neither."

"Shhh."

There's a knock on the door – two quiet taps. The little girl turns to Mark and puts her index finger perpendicular to her lips, then uses the same finger to draw an imaginary line across her throat. She hops up off her knees and runs out of the living room, through the kitchen and out the open back door.

Mark stands up and takes a deep breath, running his hand through his long blond hair. He opens the front door to find Mrs. Wendmyer standing on the other side. She's hugging herself, pale as a ghost.

***

Here's something most folks don't know about Miss Wendy (that's what she tells her friends to call her): she's the last living Wendmyer in the great state of West Virginia.

She grew up in a time and place where families were more like small communities. They looked out for each back then, each generation providin' for the next one and lookin' out for the one that come before it. Her family – her Momma, her Daddy, her sisters and brothers, her aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews, her grandparents and cousins twice-removed (there were forty-three of them altogether) – lived on a compound together about twenty miles south of town.

There was always this rule among families like that back then: each child had the responsibility of lookin' out for the one that come after it. That's the only way these large families could get along so well, and people these days can't figure out how to do it. Everyone's gotta have a responsibility takin' care of others, even kids.

Miss Wendy never did have that responsibility, though. She was the baby of that family for nine long years, and ended up bein' the baby of that family all the way to the end of the line. It was like the whole damn compound dried up after she was born – the women just stopped spittin' out babies. But not for lack of tryin', I'll say that much.