Coe Review

ever starving or even that hungry? Darla herself couldn't remember the last
time she was truly, really hungry. It was probably just that people were afraid
of being alone and food was good company, not to mention that the added
weight could sometimes feel like a second body—a second, warm and fat
body snuggled up to you, spooning you as you went about your daily business
to the drycleaners or pet supply or grocery store where, quite apart from your
will, this same said body could lead you to the glass freezer doors where you
found yourself staring in at the rows of ice cream.
She speeds a little. She parks. She is led to a booth and points to a picture
on the menu. She says to the waitress, Number three, then holds up her hand
and gives the peace sign. Two, she says.
The waitress is a bit confused. Number three or number two?
Number three. Two orders of three.
Let me get this straight, the waitress says. You want two number
threes?
That's right, Darla says, and then adds, I'm expecting company, shoving
the laminated and somewhat sticky menu away from her.
Soup or salad?
Soup, Darla says. Clam chowder. For both of us.
The waitress leaves and returns with a basket of warm bread and a slab of
butter on a little plate. She returns again, not a minute later, with two bowls.
Here's your chowder. Pronounces it chowda. Careful, it's hot, she says and
smiles, a wad of gum the color of radioactive grinding in her teeth.
After she steps away again, Darla leans over the bowl nearest her, takes
a deep breath, and picks up a spoon when something jars her concentration.
A man has slipped while hanging Christmas lights and is now hanging from
his gutter in the freezing cold after midnight.
Oh my gosh!
She grabs her jacket and purse, fishtails in the snowy parking lot as she
speeds away. A few minutes later she pulls over to the side of the road in
front of the house. As it turns out, the man hanging from the gutter is just a
stuffed dummy dressed in cowboy boots and blue jeans, a flannel shirt and
leather gloves. She sits in the car for a while until the reality catches up and
begins to chuckle, laughs, roars with laughter, and then—perhaps thinking
of all the dummies she's turned around for in her life—begins to cough. Just
a little cough, a little sniffle, the warm sugary icing of tears streaming down
her cheeks.
The middle finger of the dummy's gloved hand attached to the arm not
reaching for the ladder is pointing up to a white seam in the clouds, a crack
in the sky where a fuzzy moon is trying to get through followed by a sudden
opening full of blazing stars. It's a message perhaps, from the hanging man,
90 How They Came to Call it Love