By: Dylan Lenz               

      Arthur Lancaster raised his daughter Colleen alone. His wife Dorthy had died in 1978. Dorthy had cancer. Arthur had loved Dorthy. He missed her.

            Colleen was fourteen when her mother died. It hadn’t been sudden. For the year and a half prior to Dorthy’s death Colleen watched her mother slowly grow more haggard and frail. Colleen had begun to stay away from home more often. At first she would stay at friends houses for dinner and then make her way home, typically the long way. Arthur would ask why she was late but often Colleen would not reply and simply head upstairs for bed. As Dorthy progressively got worse and the doctors sent her home to slowly but surly die over the next four months, Colleen began to find things to do after she left her friends houses.

            Arthur Lancaster had moved to Reardan, WA after the war. He had been hired by the government to oversee the night shift at the Grand Coulee Dam an hour northwest, and moved himself and Dorthy from Ohio in the middle of winter. They bought a small house on small farm and raised cattle and alfalfa. Arthur chose Reardan because it was far enough away from the restless men who worked on the dam that barricaded the Columbia River.

            The town was quaint and experienced typical growth for a farming community near the exit for Lake Roosevelt. By 1978 when Colleen began to stray farther and farther from her dying mother the town was perhaps five hundred people, but in the summer it experienced a surge in visitors making their way to the lake. Around this time Colleen met Frank Booth who was seventeen with a truck, he would take her to the parties that often occurred at vacationers cabins in the summer time. It was at these parties that Colleen would escape home and find her self, or at least get ideas on how she could.

            As Dorothy died Arthur did not ask where Colleen strayed to. In a way he knew what she was doing, he found himself trying to stay longer hours at work, finding extra jobs and other excuses that kept him at the dam late. Many nights he would not know if Colleen was even home, he would simply come to bed and lay next to Dorothy as she slept on the bed they had brought into the living room.

            When Dorothy finally did go it was Colleen who found her.

“Mom?” she asked from the hallway.

There was no answer. Colleen walked next to the bed and looked at her mother. She was not herself any longer. Once her hair had been soft brown and her thin face had been full with colored cheeks. They were hollow now. Her hair was pulled back and looked gray, thought it was still brown. Even before Colleen knew the state of her mother, there was a lifelessness about her.

Colleen reached out her hand and squeezed her mothers. Dorthy had Arhtur or Colleen paint her finger nails, not that she could not. They were still the same hunter green that Colleen had painted a few days earlier.

“Mom?” Colleen asked louder this time shaking her mothers arm. For a moment she stopped and looked at Dorthy. Her chest did not rise or fall, there was something strange about her. Colleen touched her neck. Then stepped abck as her held her chin so she would not cry. She rushed to the phone and tried to recall the number for Arthurs office. There was no answer so she tried again, then again, and again for fifteen minutes and she decided that she would call Frank instead.

His mother answered on first ring. Frank agreed to come over and get her. She did not tell him what had happened.  

Frank picked her up a little while later. They said little and instead drove out to the lake and got drunk on the awful homemade wine Frank’s father made every fall. Later Colleen agreed to let Frank fuck her for the first time. Colleen did not cry.