Harmon VI - What to Do?

Harmon had to wait at the end of his potholed driveway. Right on top of the hill like it was, he couldn't see very well, either direction. Although, usually the traffic was mostly ever day people. The slew of police, fire and paramedics was surprising to him. But only on the surface, most of the galaxy of thought between Harmon's ears was a chaotic mess. What happened her? Where did she go? He knew Darrel was involved, but should he look for Amy? She wasn't at the house, he checked, nothing there but a bunch of broken things. So many questions, perhaps Harmon would have sat in his idling truck for a few minutes anyway.

He put the shifter in park and shut the engine off. Amy was messed up pretty bad. She was blind too, he tried not to think about that. He got out of the truck and scanned the front yard. The grove of pine trees, the overgrown fence row, the power-line pole with the ugly arc light on it - he remembered going to the store with Amy to pick out curtains, heavy ones, to shut out that ugly 'booger light', she called it.

Harmon had never been a Boy Scout and he wasn't a hunter. He'd read a few books and seen a few movies so he set out scanning the ground around the front door. Maybe a drop of blood or a footprint would be hidden there like the worst Where's Waldo picture. He looked, perhaps a little longer than his abilities warranted, he didn't see anything. No clue stuck out at him.

Harmon, terrified and guilty and grieving Harmon did give up him futile search of the front yard. The sick looking sun sat right in his eyes when he checked the road to the left. The nasty clouds moving in at the edges didn't help anything, he couldn't see shit. The motor gunned and rear wheels threw up some gravel.  As hard as it was for him to admit to himself, he had a better chance finding things out if he put his sights on Darrel. He never called Darrel anymore, no matter how mad Amy got. Darrel was bad news, Darrel was a parasite. Harmon never called him, but still had his number. Unless there's a big raid, the hangouts don't change much.

The old truck with the beat up shocks made its way west, towards town - the strip man, the main drag dude, where it's at - towards the sick setting sun. Harmon fished his cell phone out of his pocket and flipped it open. He'd have to open his 'Contacts' and scroll down to 'Darrel' - damnit - Harmon hated using his phone when he was driving, he'd always swerve and he just didn't like it. But after  a couple tries and curses the phone was ringing.

'remember, when you are suffering, I have betrayed you'

Great, Marilyn Manson, Darrel never did get out of high school. He dropped out in his senior - or was it Junior year? - Harmon couldn't remember. Judging by his choice in a 'ring back', or whatever it was called, and the life style he was living, Harmon guessed he held onto the dark stuff with a tight fist. Harmon didn't know Darrel as well as those other guys, Scotty - he was alright for a pot head, lazy as hell, but a cool dude - and Jack and Tony. Harmon knew the last two even less. He guessed they didn't get stuck in this little town. He had heard Jack went off to some big deal college or something.

He didn't think Darrel was going to answer, the song went on forever, it seemed. "Hello. Hello!"

"Hey, buddy. Hey, it's Harmon." Some things never change, Harmon thought.

"Oh, god. Thank god, man, I thought... I don't know, man, weird shit's been happening." Darrel paused for a few deep breaths, "What's up, dude?"

Okay, now we're on the cool wave. Now's my chance. "Nothing, man. Hey listen, you still staying at the same place?"

"Yeah, man. We're hanging in there. Hard times and all, you know."

"You mind if I come by? Kick it for a little while? You still got that racing game?"

"Uh... the umm... yeah, I still got that racing game. Unlocked everything, had to play for fifteen hours straight. But wait, shh, you wanted to come by. That's what it is isn't it." Oh no, I'm losing him, Harmon thought. Then Darrel went on, "Yeah, sure sure sure, come on by, wait. NO! I know. There's this party this weekend at the Old Jensen's Place. You remember where that's at right?"

Harmon remembered that place alright. Abandoned forever, over grown and rotted to the point no one really knew what the place used to be. That was place you went when you went looking for things. Things you couldn't buy in the stores. Things were a little further outside the law then a bag of grass. At one point, Harmon knew everyone that hung out there regularly. That was before the meeting and the chips and calling Abe everyday just to say he was still hanging in there.

With the phone pressed up to his ear going back toward those places, that place, Harmon felt fear rise in him.

"Yeah, I remember the place. But, uh -"

"I'm kind of busy until then," Darrel cut in. "Lindsey and me, I, shit it's 'I' not 'me'. I gotta go man."

Guess it was this weekend at that place. Harmon took a deep breath.

"HEY! HARMON! HEY!"

He brought the phone back up to his ear. "What, man, what's up?"

"Amy said something about going. Maybe you guys could come together. Later." Click

Harmon looked around at the odd landscape. He'd seen it a hundred times, but this light. This sunset sucked. So did a party at the Old Jensen Place.

And, no, Darrel, Amy would not be coming.

Harmon V - While You Were Sleeping

Dirty feet padded softly across the bedroom floor. The sick light coming in through the window gave the nightmare bedroom a dressed look - or maybe the way a nightmare would look if the lights were turned suddenly on, with eyes open. Amy quietly made her way through the bedroom with purpose, certainly without a destination in sight. Amy's eyes were closed, and where the stitches had pulled, making the crude workmanship even cruder, the blood had dried. All of it, the scrapes and pieces of broken porcelain and glass she picked up when they didn't just slide through and let her pass, even where the truly stubborn pieces grabbed on and dug deeper into her foot with every step, none of these things caused a drop of blood. The broken scabs didn't glisten with the wet look of repair work in progress.

Harmon missed out, he really did. Amy was active while he slept, while the ugly clouds slinked into the sky. Just a little rest, that's all, just a little rest for Amy. But Amy wasn't Amy anymore. Amy was the name given what was now nothing but a mannequin. A shell, a body without a mind - there were things going on in there, no doubt, but they weren't Amy - rose from the bed as Harmon slept. The jerky movements of the new Amy bumped and crashed into what there was left to crash into. She made her way to the master bathroom, booting up perhaps, she spent a few minutes banging the forehead of her ruined face into the tile below the shower head. The puppeteer had gotten better by the time she got out of the shower stall and walked on legs that appeared severely asleep. There, she grabbed a brush after much fumbling around blindly. Her fingers gripped the handle of the brush until they popped and the skin around the bigger knuckles ripped open. The brush came down on the counter suddenly and Amy's teeth came together with her lips peeled back in a skull like grin. Pieces of tooth pinged off the mirror.

Now, she strode by Harmon with ease - maybe she didn't want to wake him - and without pause at the hurts the body sustained. Just past where Harmon's feet stuck out from between the end of the  bed and dresser she stopped. Pivoting on her right heel - twisting those stubborn hitch hikers even deeper - Amy reached out to the small TV on the dresser. She, or whatever controlled the things going on behind those stitches, found the power button with no fumbling. Amy was working better and better.

The same thing couldn't be said for the TV she left on as she went out the front door Harmon never got around to closing and went on her way into the pine grove ("Money in the bank son, money in the bank"). The news was on. The news was always on now. Every channel was cashing in on the bizarre spectacle of the ever increasing crime rates. Things were going pretty bad out there, not here in Collin's County - "Even more reason not to drink," Abe Kastel would say over coffee after a meeting. But the news caster spoke to deaf ears in this bedroom, Amy was gone and Harmon slept the sleep of the dead. She yammered on anyway, even though the little TV on the end of the dresser only allowed her to report as if she were speaking on a cell phone with bad service.

"This is June Amarta with...         World leaders convened today with the U.N....  President Ger... an unknown number, somewhere in the hundred-thousand range...                   U.S. troops to...                                If the required number of volunteers isn't reached... talk of a draft... Expected to start deployments in the next few months...              

And onto other news, in China..."

And on and on she went. June would be relieved by the next reporter in line and so on. But Harmon slept, rebooting perhaps.

Abe closed his phone and sighed after he read the text from his friend and pupil of sorts in the art of sober living. He sighed and leaned his head back and adjusted himself in the uncomfortable doctors office waiting room chair. Most things weren't okay, he hoped Harmon and Amy were. He hoped his Ruthie was okay, too.

Eve Artwork

"No Turning Back"

18x24 rough newsprint

graphite pencils, compressed charcoal, black ink, pastels

Artwork by: Paul Cowdrey

Adam Artwork

"Adam (about 4 years old"

14x17 heavy weight vellum

graphite pencils

Artwork by: Paul Cowdrey

Amy Artwork

"Amy"

18x24 rough news print

graphite, marker, pastels

Artwork by: Paul Cowdrey

Harmon IV - "You're late for work, baby"

Staring into the deep shadows and sunlight dancing on the shot glass and the bottle of whisky Harmon fell into a semiconscious - not quite dreaming - state of thought. The ruin of the house still lay before him and the sun would be in his eyes still. Those things were real, those things were true. But the part of him that fell into the shadows and colors of the self destruction button didn't see those things.

"You're late for work, baby,"

Harmon shook his head from side to side, his chin resting on his chest. That wasn't real, Amy was gone, she didn't think about things like work schedules and laundry. Amy didn't think about anything anymore, oddly, she was the only thing Harmon could think about. The early morning minutes stretched, oh yes, they stretched and stretched, and Harmon's heart follow suit. Stretched and stretched, from the worst anger he'd ever felt to the best memories of Amy. The memories hurt... bad, so bad a part of Harmon felt selfish and guilty for wanting them to stop. And they would, the memories would be replaced by the anger. The anger was soothing, he had a focal point, an enemy. A goal.

Just before the sun peaked its piercing rays above the tree line outside the screen door (he still hadn't shut that damn door) two things happened.

Harmon's rage consumed him and he stood with such force the chair not only fell over but slid on the linoleum  to crash into the cheap paneling. As his legs straitened his hands gripped the bottle and shot glass and added them to the mess around him. He added these things to the mess inside himself, as well.

"Pick up. Someone loves you. Pick up. Someone loves you" Amy's voice filled the air around him.

IT'S HER, IT'S REALLY HER! SHE JUST NEEDED SOME SLEEP. IT'S HER!

But Harmon was heartbreakingly mistaken. He knew it in an instant. He never hated a cell phone more than in that moment. A silly ringtone Amy put on the gadget. What was he thinking, he loved that ringtone. He'd never changed it. He put that on ever new phone he'd gotten in the last five years.

He looked down at cell phone on the table. The sun faded the screen slightly but he could see who it was. Pick up. Someone loves you, continued on and a part of Harmon soaked it up, every tone and pause. He never ignored his sponsor's calls. Never. But he let the phone sit. He let Amy go and tell him someone loved him. He let her live for a brief moment and he could hear her in the kitchen next to him, putting dishes away and telling him to get the phone. The life they would have, could've had.

When the phone quit and directed Nick's call to voicemail - where ever that was - Harmon picked the chair up and put it back in its place. With a heavy sigh he seated himself back in his place by the table. Reluctantly, he picked up his phone and opened his text messaging option. Through sobs and more tears darkening his shirt and places on his Dickie's work pants he fumbled through a text message to his contact Nick Sponsor.

'nick, i'm sober. i have to do something for a little while. i'll call you when i'm back in town. the coffee cups half full, always :)'

The cell phone chimed its message that the message had been sent. As if on cue Harmon got up from the table and made a left to the bathroom. He hadn't showered in what felt like weeks. The grease under his fingernails bothered him, it just never seemed to come out. Plus, he had the dried sweat to get rid of. He was okay, he talked to his sponsor - sort of - and smashed the bottle of liquor he fully intended to drown in. Time for a shower.

He always listened to the radio when he did his hygiene thing. Wearing a towel, Harmon came bopping out of the steamy bathroom. He had a big smile on his face. He wasn't going to work, he wasn't drunk and today, yes today, Amy would go to rehab. Then he opened the bedroom door.

Then he remembered Darrel. He remembered the voice that gave that name away. He remembered the rise in her still chest. Yes, yes today, right now, this very moment, Harmon remembered everything, but he saw nothing. Their bed was a mess, sheets everywhere. Their bed was empty.

First the towel fell from around him, then the floor and the debris fell up all around him. Harmon lay there in the floor. This time no dreams haunted him, just blackness. Nothing.

Harmon III - The Next Morning

Amy's chest rose and fell. Harmon stayed there in bed with her in the gray predawn, he cradled her with the care a lover shows their other. They were lovers of that sort. Fast and alive at first and totally 'in love' they began the seven year journey. Now slow and steady, like Amy's breathing, like Amy's heart beating, their journey still held together with the glue only that only those fabled 'soul mates' can get their hands on.

After Amy uttered those broken syllables, "Da... rrel", Harmon's body jolted into warp speed. His exhausted mind from the extra hours at work and the meetings whenever he could get to them, and of course the patience it took to watch and wait and hope for a sick person - no, not just a person, a best friend, a soul mate - to get the help, to find the happiness existing in a sober day, in relatively healthy body. The few moments of wide awake adrenaline fueled rage for Darrel were just that, a few moments. The constant slow rhythm of Amy's breathing and heart beating lulled him to sleep as surely as a mother's lullaby for a baby. But his sleep wasn't restorative, he found no peace there.

He dreamed of the first time he told Amy he loved her. Out on the State land where the caves sat just off the hiking trail. They would go there on Fridays in the summer time and watch rented canoes float down the river he and Amy would swim in sometimes. They'd sit up high on the cliff face behind some brush and make up lives for the people down in the canoes and smoke pot and laugh and kiss - and everyone knows what that leads teenagers to do next. Happy times on the hiking trail. One day in mid August, when the temperatures seldom dropped below 90, they sat up on their perch behind the brush and discussed what a bummer it was to not have any weed. Harmon spread his arms wide, "Hey, babe, there's weed everywhere!" And she laughed - without the aid of grass. When their eyes met again Harmon slipped those three little words into Amy's ears. Those words that are so dear when they're meant went straight to Amy's veins and into her heart forever.

"I love you, too," she said and wiped a small tear from the corner of her eye.

Suddenly, Harmon felt older.  His back hurt as he climbed out his old truck. When he pushed the latch on the screen door his thumb throbbed from a missed strike with a hammer earlier that day at work. His mind throbbed with excitement and worry. He knew there what was in the fridge, several cool delicious cans of self destruction.  He had it all planned out though, despite the tugging in his gut to go get a beer before he did anything else. First he'd enter like Ricky Ricardo, "Amy, I'm home!" only he'd go on, "Honey, today I'm a camel." Then she'd laugh and he'd explain what his buddy at work told him about camels going twenty-four hours without a drink. And she'd get it, she'd totally get it. The bells that chimed in his head, would chime in hers. They'd hold hands by the sink and pour it all out. Life would be great, maybe they'd talk about kids. Maybe, but Harmon was nervous it wouldn't go like that.

As he stepped across the front door threshold all the picture glass cracked in its frame. The juice glasses on the coffee table beside the ash tray fell into pieces with loud cracks of thunder. He could hear cabinet doors slamming open and closed, open, closed. An endless stream of dishes flew out of the broken cabinet doors and smashed over and over again against the far wall of the kitchen. And all at once the bedroom door came off its hinges and there was Amy. Only Amy's hair was a mesh of bloody, ratted dread locks hanging askew, pointing this way and that.

She slid across the carpet to where Harmon stood. The ends of big toes the only part of her that touched the ground, the chaos of breaking things and ear shattering noise had no effect on her. She just slid closer and closer to him and now she was nose to nose with him. He could see the sunken cheeks, the corpse like bluing of her face, the empty places behind her stitched closed eyelids. Harmon could see the tiny places where the stitches had pulled through from over stressing the stitches when they were fresh.

Her mouth came open and her lips cracked. Suddenly, the sound of the wreckage of the house was muted as if cotton balls were stuffed in Harmon's ears and then sound came from her mouth. From between Amy's cracked lips. At first Harmon only heard the constant deep boom of a bass drum. The sound changed and with each change he saw the stitches in her eyes ripping a little further.

Harmon sat straight up in bed, it was dark outside and his clothes clung to him from his sweat. His ears rang with the last of what nightmare Amy said - DARREL.

The horror of the dream faded the way dreams do, only to be replaced with a new one. Amy's chest didn't rise anymore, really it looked as if she were holding her breath, her chest and breasts pushed up and her mouth hung open in a silent scream. He saw with perfect clarity the cracked lips forming this eternal final terror.

Tears fell from his eyes making dark spots on the pillow they had shared while he dreamed and her mind burned bright like the sun before going dark like a snuffed out candle. Then he got up out of bed and went to the kitchen, cheeks wet and getting wetter by the moment. By the time he was seated at the kitchen table the sun was just peeking above the trees he could see through the screen door - he never did get around to closing the front door properly. And the sun made shadows on the blond scarred wooden table top. A short shadow trailed behind the short glass sitting in front of Harmon, a longer shadow stretched out to the left of the short one. The light coming through distorted into a darker, almost coffee color before it reached the table top next to its cleaner shorter companion.

Idly, Harmon wondered why the alarm clock wasn't going off. If the sun was coming up he must be running late for work. Then his absent wondering eyes found the ends of the shadows on the table in front of him. Through his sorrow, his pain, his rage, Harmon eye balled the glass - made to hold just an ounce and a half - and the bottle of Kessler's whisky.

Harmon II - Behind the Door

With his hand pressed against the rough plywood door - the kind a five year old can put his foot through, hollow - Harmon felt the words coming to his lips. His internal voice had turned into a mantra and now it made it's way out, softly, almost a whisper:

god,

Grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.

Just for today,

Just for this minute,

Just for now,

Right now.

Amen.

And again and again the words came out, almost inaudible, until the prayer became a run of 'god, god, god, god, god'. He didn't know how long he leaned there against the bedroom door. His mind raced, now that the prayer had made its way out there was room for his imagination to go to work. And it did.

Memories flew through him. The time Amy stumbled in just before dawn, just before Harmon had to leave for work. That was a bad one, he actually had to open the door himself and let her slump into his arms. A bad one, sure, but not the worst - oh, no. One night, asleep on the couch he awakened to high beams streaming through the living room windows. He waited and rubbed the sleep from his eyes, waited for Amy to stumble up the four steps to the front door, but there was nothing. He didn't hear the heavy footfalls on the creaky stairs, no wrenching over the side of the railing. Opening the front door, Harmon instinctively prepared to catch weight (about 98 pounds) and was surprised to find her, not propped against the porch or the door but laying in the yard just past the line of the gravel driveway. Fear fought its way through the fog of sleep that hadn't completely departed and he rushed to her. She lay there in an unnatural way, one arm bent around behind her back her left leg positioned as if she were jointed like a bird. He got her to the hospital that night and she dried out for about a month - if you don't count the pain meds, which she was very fond of.

These memories and a myriad of others skittered across his conscience. He was sure it had only been a few seconds but in that time his left hand had curled itself into a fist and now nestled itself between his upper and lower teeth, effectively gagging the nonsense his beloved serenity prayer had turned into. Perhaps that night in the yard where he found Amy with a broken arm, leg, nose, and a few teeth (and about as close to an overdose as any person weighing 98 pounds could get) was the worst, but it was far from 'out of the ordinary'. And now Harmon leaned against the cheap hollow door to their bedroom with wicked thoughts about what lay behind it. The imagination can be a harsh mistress at times and Harmon's fit the part in these awful seconds, twisting the horrible scene in the yard into something much much worse. The fight or flight started creeping through his muscles and they twitched, but undecidedely. Stay or go, help or leave her to her fate. But he knew he couldn't leave her, he loved her - more than loved her. They had made a life together, such as it was and he couldn't be so cold as to run away. After all, she was sick. Whatever waited behind the bedroom door, Amy was sick.

Harmon tried, delicately, to get Amy to come to a meeting with him or read some of the literature he brought home from the meetings he went to at the old church in down town Sowell Pike. Basements full of coffee, cigarettes and the sick trying to get well. Usually, he'd suggest this after a worried, sleepless night waiting for her to come slumping against the front door and then into his arms. The days after she spent dry - sometimes one or two days, sometimes a week - were glimmers of hope for Harmon. Maybe this time she'll crack open the old 'Big Book' his father had given him, maybe this time she'd spend a week dry and then maybe a week sober. But not yet, and he didn't press the issue. She'd come around when she was ready, it did no good to drag a reluctant horse to water only to find out that all your efforts were in vain because you could get the horse there, but you could never make him drink. Harmon knew that and he waited in his love for her. A love that started back when they were in sixth grade at Sowell Elementary.

Their love grew like a garden of roses, but as they say, "Every rose has it's thorn." Harmon was terrified of what thorns grew on the other side of that door. He lowered his left fist from his mouth - he could see a clear indention where his teeth had clamped down on his knuckles - and eased the knob and then the door open.

The bedroom was dark, full of shadows, his eyes couldn't see anything at first but soon they adjusted to the gloom and he saw her. His beloved Amy made a lump on the floor at the end of the bed. She wasn't moving. Harmon stood there, paralyzed, waiting to see the rise and fall that meant breath from the lump on the floor. Oddly enough, he was holding his breath. The way time stretched while his mind raced when he was leaning against the door, stretched even further. Every second felt like an eternity. She wasn't moving, she wasn't breathing. Now, thoughts of what the hospital staff would ask and how bad things were and the possibility that the sheet on the stretcher might just cover her entire danced a jig on his exhausted mind. And then, a slight rise from the lump, from Amy. She was breathing, barely, but she did take a breath, she did. Harmon blocked the possibility that his imagination - wicked, wicked thing - was playing tricks on him.

His paralysis broke and he rushed over to her. Going down on his knees and trying to get the blanket unravelled from her slight frame so he could see her face, he was a terrified wreck. She was making a soft mulling sound deep in her throat and that was all, no movement. She was dead weight in his frantic hands. He got her face out of the blanket - cocoon - and smoothed her hair back off her forehead.

"Amy, my god, what happened?" She gave nothing back, almost like she didn't hear him. "Amy!" he hollered and felt immediately bad, but she wasn't responding. He lifted her, blanket and all, onto the bed and still she just made those awful sounds in her throat. He went over to the closet and turned the light on there, leaving the door just cracked. Maybe he didn't want to shock her with the bright overhead light, maybe he was afraid of what that stark bright light would reveal. But the thin, soft light from the closet revealed enough.

Harmon felt his gorge rise and made his best effort to swallow back. He turned his head and a stream of bile and coffee splashed on the carpet at the end of the bed where Amy had cocooned herself sometime before he got home. Wiping his mouth he turned back to look at her and despite is revolting stomach he curled up next to her in bed and cradled her as best he could. Her chest still rose and fell slightly and Harmon held onto that. Tried to use each breath she took as a shield against the nightmare that was her face.

Where round orbs should be, below the eyebrow and above the cheek bones, the skin lay concave; dipping in instead of protruding out. Just before Amy would make one of her low throaty sounds, Harmon could see the muscles there around her temples trying in vain to blink, to see. What hurt Harmon the most was the way the skin - so thin and pale - pulled against the stitches crudely laced through her eyelashes. And then that anguished sound, a scream perhaps had she more strength.

The tears that had been welling in his eyes spilled over the rim of his lower lid and he laid his head down on her chest. He couldn't look at her like this anymore but with his ear on her chest he could know she was still breathing, that her heart was still beating. And he cried, and Amy cried with him, only, where his tears made clean tracts through the grease and dirt on his face, hers were red runnels of fluid leaking from her empty eye sockets. They laid there like the lovers they were, amidst the ruin and tragedy and hurt. He cradled her with his arms, with his love, with his soul.

At some point, fatigue took over and Harmon's body shut down. He slept there through the night with her (he would clean her up and call for an ambulance in the morning) until he heard a strained gurgling coming from her chest.

He was wide awake in the predawn gray the moment she made a sound - the way a parent can hear their baby in distress from across the house. "What? What, baby, what'd you say?" Harmon was frantic. She was making sounds like she wanted to tell him something. He needed that, he needed to know what happened, what he should do. "Who did this, baby? I'm right here, you can tell me." He wiped the tears and the film of snot off his face and she gurgled out another stressed syllable:

"Da..." she managed. "Da..." The muscles around her eyes twitched again, letting loose another small stream of tears that weren't really tears at all. And then another syllable to join the first, "Da... Da... rrel."

DARREL!!!! Harmon's mind reeled. The good old Serenity prayer forgotten now, Harmon couldn't accept any of this. None of it, no way, Darrel would pay for this. That scum, drug peddling (and now) sadistic waste. Harmon would find him.

Harmon I - Before the Burning

Harmon edged his old truck off the road and onto his gravel driveway. He pulled past the copse of pine trees - "Money in the bank son, money in the bank," his father liked to say - and cursed the worn out shocks on his truck when he hit the deep parts of the rutted driveway. He cursed again when the coffee sloshed over the side of the paper cup in his hand. Damnit, his internal voice hollered.

God, grant me the Serenity... the other internal voice spoke up. Yes, yes, accept the things I cannot change. That included his aching groin and the potholes in his driveway. He'd tried every summer for five years now to fill in the divots, but when the November rain came all his efforts washed away. The only solution left was to pave the driveway and Harmon didn't have the money for that. He could accept 'not having the money' and he could accept a set of shocks a year on his truck. But when he walked in the front door of his double-wide trailer that good old Serenity prayer started cycling again.

The house was in shambles. Broken glass crunched under his feet as he slowly made his way through the living room and into the kitchen. Cupboard doors stood open or hung askew from a twisted hinge, at first glance it seemed every single dish in the place was smashed, not just broken, smashed. Then Harmon saw the two coffee cups hanging from hooks he'd screwed in under the cabinets over the counter right after he and Amy moved in. All at once his senses were assaulted by the wreckage around him. As if everything his brain had recorded from the moment he stepped into his home was put on hold until he saw those coffee cups. His ears were blasted with the sound of the crunching glass underfoot and his eyes watered as the images his eyes had stored came at him like a Polaroid flip book.

Oh no. Amy! his mind clamored. He made his way back through the kitchen and living room and went to the bedroom door. He put his right palm flat against the door. Amy (and Harmon too, if you want to get down to brass tacks, though it had been some years now) had a knack for holding onto things that didn't work: sleeping all day, drinking all night, waiting for the house to clean itself. Not least on the list, but below bad habits, was bad friends. Amy kept friendships going with some of the underbelly of the little town of Sowell Pike. Harmon knew some of them, the ones that hadn't been carted off, either in a hearse or a cop car. Knew of them, more accurately put, a few years on the calendar was a few lifetimes in circles like that. But Amy held on, to the habits and the people. And now this.

Harmon at Home (Foreward)

Harmon, we remember Harmon. The grease monkey at the warehouse. The young man with the window problem in his truck. Yes, that's him now, going into his double wide there, behind the stretch of pine trees. For one heart stopping moment he didn't know if he would make it to his driveway. Positioned just so at the top of a rise in the two lane, no shoulder, road he lives on, that it's impossible to see the oncoming traffic. Just as he started nosing his old truck left, across the double yellow stripes a big new SUV came barreling along the other direction. The 'Hidden Driveway' signs didn't seem to apply to, well, anyone. He jammed down on the brake pedal and the truck pointed towards those yellow lines for a second. He took a deep breath, held it - that's what the anger management classes had taught him - and let it out slowly. Let's try this one more time, he thought through his exhausted nerves. Two nineteen hour shifts back to back will do that to a person.

Second time's a charm, or something like that. He made it down his driveway and then into the trailer. It was uniform day, the laundering service did their drop off and pick up on Fridays, and Harmon carried his armload of uniforms to his closet and hung them up on his side, the left side, of the closet in the bedroom. Needless to say, regardless of what the radio was playing, Harmon wasn't bopping his head and mouthing the lyrics as did when it was coffee making time at the shop.

After he visited the fridge and found some Busch Light  still lurking behind the leftovers - a small smile touched his face, all the way to his eyes, when his fingers felt the cold, perspired can - he made his way to his final destination: the easy chair.

He moved his dog, Bud, out of the seat. It took him a few moments to get the big dog to move, he seemed pretty reluctant to give up the seat/bed he'd been occupying for most of the day. But the dog moved and so did Harmon. Right down in the seat and in one smooth movement, activated the recline mechanism. Now Harmon was good. Right where he wanted to be.

"Hey! Amy, where's the remote," Harmon hollered across the wall behind the entertainment center - milk crates and a couple 2x12's. On the other side of the wall, Amy stirred from the place she'd been occupying for most of the day. A muffled, indecipherable replay came back at him. "Amy!"

"What the hell do you want!" he heard that. Sometimes he could swear she was skipping like a broken record.

"The remote, what'd you do with it?"

"I don't," a pause, Harmon guessed she was scrubbing the twelve or so hours of sleep from her face, "know where that damn thing is."

She sounded mad. Great. But Harmon did another anger management breathing technique. "Don't worry about it honey. I'll find it." He took another drink of his beer and started looking through cushions and under couches. There it was, the goal. He had it made now: beer, remote, off the clock. As he plumped his slender frame down in the easy chair again he also blessed himself for not having any kids. With the hours at work and Amy's sleep schedule he just didn't see that working out so well.

The bedroom door opened and there emerged Amy. "Darrel called....mmm, sometime today," she said through the thickness of too much sleep. Harmon waited for the rest, but Amy was busy scratching at an old scar on the side of her head.

"And..." he said.

Big yawn, there you go girl, yawn it out. "Um," she blinked and looked around like it was the first time she'd been here, "he's having a get together tonight. Well, it's more Darrel and Lindsey's thing."

"Baby, I just got home from a double shift and I'm tired. I'd just as soon stay at home and veg."

"Well, I need you to talk to him for me," there they were, the eyes aware now and full of intensity.

"Come on Amy, don't you think it's time you gave that shit a rest?" those were the wrong words. The worst possible words he could have said. But his hope, in vain, was that she'd set down that hard stuff and then maybe - maybe - they could talk about having kids.