Black and Orange by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

fine. After Teresa went to sleep the previous night, he tossed and turned a little. She went right to sleep, probably since her demons had poured out and the burden of containing them had left. Martin, on the other hand, had to fight the urge to wake her up every minute and throttle some sense into her about this Flagstaff visit.
    This morning he woke and felt no better. He pulled out a medical book to delve into the mysteries of the lungs’ pleural cavity. He’d been reading these same two books for a few months now, but Teresa couldn’t have named them if you asked her. She rarely gave notice of his books; she read magazines and romance novels and he read an occasional DC comic book chased by surgical manuals and acupressure guides. The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy and Cancer Treatment: Complimentary and Alternative Medicine , a nice mingling of Western and Eastern. If he actually got Teresa to a hospital, no glassy-eyed doctor was letting his Teresa die, not out of indifference. Not on Martin’s watch.
    After they haggled with the tire shop to take a bad check, they got back on the road. His stomach was past the point of needy, angry, snarling, twisting ache. Now the organ was cold-silent like an ocean mine ready to detonate. He released his eyes from the road for a minute. Teresa sat beside him with little indication of the same painful hunger, even if the truth surfaced in her fading skin and crabby circles around her eyes.
    “We could try that credit card again.”
    Her women’s magazine had her fixated. She swept a page to the side and smoothed it down. “The canceled one?”
    “I thought that identity was still clean.”
    “The card-holder is in collections. We broke our ties with that one back in Duluth, remember?”
    “Are you positive the card no longer works?” he asked.
    “You’d have to swipe all four pieces.”
    “You cut it up? Do you still have the pieces?”
    “Hold down your desperation, kid. Do you really want the law on us again?”
    “Do you really want me to answer a rhetorical question?” asked Martin, almost to himself.
    Teresa took out a fresh box of cloves from her shirt pocket.
    He persisted. “We don’t even have money for another tank of gas—this is cutting it close.”
    She shook free a black stick and regarded it with dreary impatience. The expression made her look well beyond fifty.
    Martin laughed in dismissal. “We’re losing our touch. We should have talked Señor Swindle into a better deal—no way was that tire eighty bucks. It hardly looks better than the one that blew out.”
    “He took the check, you could give him that. We’re lucky they had a tire for this hunk of crap.”
    “This hunk of burning nostalgia, is what you mean.”
    “You’re going to miss the exit.”
    She was right. Martin cranked the steering wheel right and cut off a fluorescent-lime jeep, which promptly barked with its horn. The van hitched at the sudden redirection and Martin prayed the new tire would prove worthy, just like this detour.
    ~ * ~
    A few years ago they’d gotten adventurous and drove through Teresa’s parents’ neighborhood in Flagstaff . It wasn’t the first time they had made a drive-by visit and Martin figured it was enough for Teresa to see whether her father’s Cadillac was still parked sideways in the driveway or that her mother’s rose bushes remained trimmed. He’d spent enough time with Teresa to realize that visits here were never easy for her; even though she could stare something daunting directly in the eye on Halloween, Martin often sensed the silent aftershocks of her missed youth after their trips to their neighborhood. She’d wanted to knock on their door for some time now.
    This time, as Martin wheeled the van around every suburban turn, the weight of that last visit must have stymied her courage. Teresa looked absolutely pale with the prospect of meeting her parents again. Martin couldn’t imagine their roles reversed. He was scared to