Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
eyeliner who had been interviewed on Global News Network, the
one who called herself his girlfriend.
He said, “Ma’am, I have no idea who you are.”
She shrugged and said with a friendly smile, “That’s how time is,
isn’t it, it just goes away before you know it, and in between, people
grow older and some get old. I guess I look like nobody you ever
woulda knowed.” She gave a rueful laugh. “Don’t matter. Like
everybody, I just wanted to say, Glad you’re back.”
He knew that laugh. Sherleen, the woman who introduced him to
sex. At the time, he was sixteen, half the age he was now, and she was
thirty-one, younger than he was now. She had worked at the ranch
where his mother boarded his horse, the gift he received from his
father shortly before he died of emphysema. He was the rich kid,
and she was the gal who described herself as “rich in heart and
heartaches.” She had been his secret haven, somewhere between
comfort and escape. When he was twenty, he left to take a car trip to
the Southwest. He sent her postcards, but she had no way to write
back, and when he returned, he heard she had moved.
He was embarrassed to remember this. “What you been up to,
Sherleen?”
“Kind of the usual,” she said, “which is not a whole lot.” And he
knew it was hard times by the number of times she said “Oh, well”
as she talked about all the “usual” things. He could see it in his mind,
her getting bucked and kicked while breaking in horses, her hooking
up with the seasonal ranch hands, this “bad-ass” and that “mean
sucker,” who kicked the shit out of her after they rode her like a buck­
ing horse in bed. That was back when she could still work. Not any­
more. She had a scrunched-up back, miserable pain eased by bottles
of whatever was cheap. She had come to town when she heard that he
was missing in Burma. For old times’ sake, she had worried a lot.
Sherleen was also the mother of his eleven-year-old son. He im­
mediately recognized that fact when he saw the boy come up to them
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