When Jackie put the cigarette between her lips, a decade disappeared.

“Been a while,” Tara said.

Jackie pulled her knees to her chest and leaned into the give of her plastic chair. “Feels like we’re back in high school.”

“If we were back in high school, we’d be smoking bots behind Gabe Beresford’s garage.”

Jackie coughed out a laugh.

“But look how far we’ve come.” With a Vanna Whitish wave of her hand, Tara gestured toward the yard with its leaning chain-link fence and structurally compromised aluminum shed. A fabulous showcase of prizes.

“I still can’t believe you own your own house.”

“Well, it’s more like my parents own it. And the bank. But still.” Tara cupped the flame of her Bic and took a drag. “Not bad, right?”

“Three bedrooms. One and a half bathrooms. Fully furnished.” Jackie was quick to shore up her friend’s good fortune. “And you’ve got the old park right across the street for Elliot.”

“I love that park. Remember when Paula Corradetti broke her collarbone on the roundabout?”

“And she had to wear that sling around her neck for like, two months?”

“And it started to smell like old French fries?” Tara laughed. “Hey, did I tell you that the old guy who used to own this place died on the can?”

Jackie took another drag. “Like Elvis.”

“Yeah. His son replaced all the bathroom fixtures and everything, but sometimes you can still hear…”

“What?”

“Shh. Listen…”

Jackie listened. Tara farted.

“Oh no,” Jackie moaned. “Ghost farts.”

They cackled, and in the quiet that followed, they admired the nighttime shadows of the backyard, the patio furniture in which they sat, and the general acceptableness of Tara’s new home.

“I’m really glad you’re back.”

“Me, too.”

“Everyone else in this town sucks. I was dating this one guy for a while and — ”

“Just a sec.” Tara took a final pull and dropped the butt into an empty beer bottle. “I think I hear Elliot.”

Jackie watched her friend walk back inside the house.

After high school, Tara had found all kinds of reasons to be out of town. Bartending in Banff. Tree planting in Kapuskasing. A road trip to the east coast with some guy she just met. And that was even before she went international. Before the hostel jobs in Germany, Thailand, Ecuador. Before seasonal fruit picking in Melbourne. Before Shithead.

The screen door squawked open.

“He’s asleep,” Tara said. “But we should probably move inside just in case he wakes up again. He’s still not really used to the new digs.”

Jackie nodded. She plucked up the two bottles by their necks and followed Tara inside. She smelled the faint ammonia of old cat pee.

“Good for another?” Tara asked.

“Are you?” Above them, the little boy ticked away like a time bomb of responsibility.

Tara closed the door behind them. “It’s not even eleven o’clock. Plus, my mom’s going to babysit tomorrow afternoon, so I just have to get through the morning.”

“Your parents are so nice.”

“I guess.” Tara took the bottles out of Jackie’s hands. She disappeared, and then returned a moment later with two new ones, wet with condensation.

“They’re just so normal compared to my folks.” Jackie twisted off the cap. “So steady.”

“I think you mean ‘boring.’”

“Remember when my dad left? And your folks let me crash in your basement for two weeks? Your mom made me pancakes like, every day.”

Tara drank off a little of the beer. “You ever hear from him?”

“My dad?” Jackie shrugged. “Not really. Birthdays. Holidays. That’s about it. He’s pretty busy with his new family.”

The couch springs took Jackie’s weight, and Tara collapsed into the armchair. Between them an abused coffee table stood on four legs, shouldering a sooty incense burner and a thin stack of home decorating magazines.

“It’s not exactly my style,” Tara said. “But I guess I can’t really afford my style right now.”

“You just moved in. You’ve got plenty of time to make it your own.”

Jackie sipped her beer and gave the room a once over. Behind Tara was a framed map of the world, a stylized Mercator, blurred in muted watercolors. It reminded Jackie of the map Tara had once kept posted above her bed — a real map, the creases dividing it into a series of manageable quadrants. Tara had pushed plastic pins into the famous cities, like she was trying to fix them in place until she could get there herself.

“Got this in the mail a couple days ago,” Tara said, serving Jackie a slim envelope. There was a jagged grin where she’d torn it open. “First official correspondence I get in my new home and it’s from Shithead. He even included a photo of the three of us.”

Jackie slid the contents out of the envelope. She skimmed the letter. It was printed in a lazy, rounded hand. She found spelling mistakes. In the photo, Tara was holding Elliot and standing beside her ex in a kitchen Jackie didn’t recognize.

“Says he wants me to put the picture up in Elliot’s bedroom, so Elliot won’t miss him. Didn’t even spring for a frame.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Elliot? He doesn’t care. He’s a baby.”

“No. I mean Shithead.”

Tara took a pull from her beer. “Out of the hospital, anyway. That’s about all I know. All I want to know, really.”

“It’ll be good when everything’s finally settled.”

“Yeah.”

Jackie watched her friend’s eyes scan the room like she was searching for a different conversation. All of a sudden, her phone buzzed. Tara picked it up, looked at the display, and then let the device clatter back onto the table.

“Have you seen a lot of people since you’ve been back?” Jackie asked.

“Not really.” Tara looked over at her phone. “There’s a lot of people I could stand to avoid. At least until I get my feet under me.”

“Glad I’m not one of them.”

“Of course not,” Tara said. “I just — I don’t want to turn into the person I was.”

Tara’s phone buzzed again.

“What do you mean?” Jackie asked. “What person?”

“I don’t know.” She picked up her phone and turned it off. “The one who never makes good decisions.”

There was a knock at the door. It was the kind of knock people make when they know a baby’s sleeping.

Jackie looked at her watch. “Your folks?”

Tara shrugged. She got up and walked down the hall to the door. Out of sight, Jackie could hear Tara’s cheerful greeting, and then the muddled tenor of a man’s voice.

“Jackie’s here,” Tara said a little more loudly than necessary. “She came by to see the new place.”

More masculine murmuring.

“Of course not. Come on in.”

There was a moment when it seemed like something must be happening, but there was only the conspicuous absence of sound. Tara came back into the room, followed by the man Jackie had heard.

He was tall. The living room’s door frame didn’t so much let him enter as birth him. Streaks of grey weaved their way into his sand-colored beard. He slouched into the room, gripping the cardboard handle of a six-pack. He was familiar, like an older brother of someone Jackie used to know.

“You remember Murray, right?” Tara said.

Of course.

“Hey, Murray! How’s it going?”

The man smiled his slow grin. Night air and cigarette smoke rolled off his clothes. “Hey, Jackie.”

Murray managed a bicycle repair place downtown. In high school, Jackie and Tara had worked there on and off. He’d been this cool, older guy who paid them under the table and showed them how to use a water bong. Standing in Tara’s new living room, he just looked old.

“He saw the light on,” Tara explained to Jackie.

“Yeah,” Murray confirmed. “Thought I’d bring over a little housewarming present.” He lifted the six-pack to corroborate his story, and then made his way to the opposite end of the couch.

“It’s good to see you,” Jackie said. “It’s weird we never run into each other.”

“Well,” he said, stopping to rattle out a thoughtful cough, “I’m pretty busy with the store and the kids and stuff.”

“That’s right,” Jackie said. “I forgot you had kids.”

“Two boys.” His fingers made a peace sign. “Abe and Finnie.”

“And are you still with — ” Jackie fumbled.

“Alice,” he said. “Yeah.”

The three of them drank. Tara pulled another beer from Murray’s six-pack — some brightly colored can Jackie had never seen before. With a certain scripted formality, Tara repeated some of the things that she had already told Jackie about the house.

“I heard the old guy who lived here died taking a dump,” Murray added.

“Yeah,” Tara said. “They had to update the whole bathroom.”

“Ever hear his ghost?” Murray blew a raspberry.

They talked a little more, mostly about the town. How it changed. How it stayed the same. What happened to the people they had in common.

“Remember Anju? Used to work at the bike shop?” Murray asked.

Jackie conjured a vague impression. “Sure.”

“She got her PhD or something. She’s probably, like, a tenured professor, now.”

“Oh, cool,” Jackie said. “She seemed pretty smart.”

“Bit of a snob, though,” Murray said. “Always acted like she was better than everyone else.”

Tara shrugged. “Maybe she was.”

Murray finished his can and put it down on the coffee table with a tinny ping. He stifled a belch. “I should probably get going.”

He pushed himself up from the couch. Tara didn’t say anything.

“Working tomorrow?” Jackie asked.

He shook his head. “Taking the boys to the park across the street.”

Jackie thought about how her own father used to take her to that park. Stay right here, he’d say. I’ll be back in half an hour. For thirty minutes, Jackie would live out a wild freedom: walk across the top of the monkey bars, run the wrong way up the slide, spin the roundabout faster and faster until other the other kids squealed with white-knuckled terror. Parents would direct their children away from her, as though she was some kind of feral child, dirty-haired and sand-smudged. When her father finally returned, he’d reward her with Fruitopia. Cherry Coke. Snapple iced tea.

Tara saw Murray to the door. Jackie could hear them speaking quietly to one another. When she returned, Jackie slid another can out of the carton and waggled it at her friend. “One last beer?”

“Nah.” Tara sighed. “Think I’m okay.”

“Look at you making good decisions.”

“Look at me.”

Jackie heard a faint cry from the boy upstairs, and the two friends sat in frozen silence like they’d been caught doing something wrong. After a few seconds, the crying subsided.

“Is that the first time he’s come by?” Jackie asked.

“Murray? Kind of.”

“Remember when he got wasted at lunch and we had to cover the till while he crashed under the workbench?”

“I don’t think I was working that day.”

“Really? He kept burping in his sleep? Like, super loud. And that old woman left the store all offended?”

Tara shook her head.

“Maybe that was after you quit.” Jackie paused and tried to access the memory. “Yeah, because I had to close the shop on my own, and when I finally woke him up, he tried to kiss me. I think he was still half-asleep or something.”

“Huh.” Tara reached for the ceiling and yawned luxuriously.

“Well,” Jackie said. “Maybe I should call it a night, too.”

Tara smiled and wiped a little tear out of the corner of her eye. “Sorry. Just can’t party like I used to.”

They stood up together and made their way toward the door. Jackie leaned her hand against the wall to keep her balance as she put her shoes on. “I’m really glad you’re back.”

“Me, too,” Tara smiled. “Have a good walk home. Stay safe.”

Jackie agreed and was out the door.

Across the road, a yellow blade of streetlight cut the playground from the rest of the darkness. All the old climbing structures had been replaced by a molded plastic pirate ship and the gravel had been covered with a series of interlocking rubber panels. Jackie was surprised to see the lethal roundabout still there, turning slowly in the stillness. She sat down on the chill of its metal surface and lit a cigarette. She moved her feet and eased into a gentle spin.

All around her was the familiar horizon. The silhouette of the Unitarian Church and the water tower, the distant willows sulking by the riverbank. And in the background, the grey wash of a moonless night. As Jackie rotated, she could picture Paula Corradetti, fetal in the dust, her little girl face purple with pain. She could see eight-year-old Tara on the swing set, pumping for zero-gravity thrills. She could see her father, sitting at a picnic table across from a red-haired woman she didn’t know. I’ll be back in half an hour.

Once, when Jackie was at the Foodland with her mother, she saw the red-haired woman in the breakfast cereal aisle. Her mother didn’t seem to know who she was, either. When Jackie made eye contact with the woman, there was something she wanted to say — a question she wanted to ask — but she wasn’t quite sure what it was. She looked away and kept walking behind her mother’s cart.

Tara’s house was in shadow, but Murray seemed to have little difficulty navigating the driveway and propping his bike up against the garage. At the side door, the glow of his phone brightened his features.

“Forget something?”

Murray looked startled as Jackie walked toward him. “Couldn’t find my keys,” he said, making a performance of patting his jacket. “Figured I left them here.”

“Alice couldn’t let you in?”

“Didn’t want to wake her up.”

“Or the kids, I guess.”

“Yeah,” Murray nodded. “Or the kids.”

He took a step toward Tara’s house and stopped. “Oh hey, you know what — ” With a sudden jingle he produced the missing keys. “ — they were inside my zipper pocket the whole time.”

“It’s always the last place you look.”

Murray wheeled his bike backwards down the driveway. He stopped in a pool of light and swung a leg over the saddle. “Good to see you, Jackie.”

“Bye, Murray.”

When he was a couple blocks away, Jackie walked up the driveway and climbed the concrete steps to her friend’s new house. From where she stood, the park across the street looked empty and quiet. Jackie opened the screen door and knocked. It was the kind of knock you make when you know a baby’s sleeping.

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