“Fingernails” by Dinah Cox

Part of our series of pieces inspired by the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform.

“The bill has come due on the Trump Administration’s hollowing out of our public institutions: the sidelining of experts, the rejection of science, the underinvestment in research, and the gross corruption and abuses of power.”

✶

All the academics had a side hustle these days, and the chemists were the worst. Everything from athletic enhancement to tooth whiteners to craft beer to air fresheners appeared on their personal websites, and no hashtag was a meaningless hashtag—every click would count. Kate found the whole thing unseemly, even as she knew she was hopelessly behind and would never make tenure without some kind of public-facing gimmick. Not that she was a chemist herself or in the sciences at all. She was a historian; the conference on botulism was just an excuse.

“Try the tuna tartare,” said a man who looked like the evil candymaker in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It was lunchtime, between sessions, at the Holiday Inn in Market Town, Oklahoma. It wasn’t a terrible Holiday Inn, but neither could one call it stylish or safe. It was like an old cigarette machine or a coffee-stained tabletop: honorable, storied, still standing after all these years, the former glory of its bar and lounge replaced by chafing dishes and long, institutional tables of various hues of faux wood finish. Kate thought it unwise to try the tuna tartare.

She avoided the stranger’s gaze. Slugworth: that was the candy-making villain’s name. This current guy did not have a monocle, but he did have eyeglasses with too-small lenses and a necktie with polka dots one might describe as not especially tasteful. Definitely not your standard-issue academic, he was more like an elementary school principal dressed up like a shambling superhero for fun-day Friday during Reading Appreciation Week. Probably he would try to guess your birthday or volunteer to drive you to some seedy, local accommodations. She surreptitiously watched as he ate tuna from a toothpick.

He swallowed, turned to her, and spoke. “I know your father,” he said. “He was on my dissertation committee.”

Oh, great: another former student turned dubious scholar. Kate herself was her father’s former student. Everyone was.

“My father’s retired,” she said. She stepped away from him and pretended to drop something in the trashcan. “I can let him know I made your acquaintance.”

“Please do,” the man said. He told her his name, which, it turned out, was Lester. And his last name was Chester. Lester Chest Hair? She thought he must have been lying.

“It’s a stage name,” he said, pointing the name tag dangling from the lanyard around his neck. “I do commercial work.”

She imagined Lester Chester sold leisure suits. Maybe life insurance or water beds. Maybe he pretended to be a crazy man in charge of a large stereo warehouse packed with deep discounts. Whatever it was, it probably paid more than any adjunct teaching he’d managed to scrape up.

“You’re a historian?” he asked her. “I thought botulism was more of a medical agricultural industrial kind of thing.”

“I’m here as an observer,” she said, the truth. “I don’t actually have a paper to present.”

“I’m sure you’ve considered the sociological implications of widespread mistrust of food safety practices among industry professionals as well as the general public.”

“Sure,” she said. “I mean, hasn’t everyone?”

“That’s my bag,” he said. “Fringe groups. Hate crimes. Online awareness.”

“It’s good,” she said. “To be aware of what’s happening online.”

“Right,” he said. “It’s a cesspool out there.”

Lester Chester, it turned out, was not just her father’s former student but also his former and current friend and pickleball partner. She didn’t even know he’d taken up pickleball. Lester Chester told her all the rules and showed her photos from his phone. He followed her to the restroom and waited for her outside. Later, when her own phone rang and showed her husband’s name—Gabriel—on the screen, Lester Chester tried to grab it from her and answer.

She walked quickly into a quiet corner of the hotel lobby, but Lester Chester would not be deterred. “Hello, Gabriel?” Lester shouted into the phone. She realized then he’d been drinking. “Don’t you know how to party, Gabriel?”

“No?” she heard Gabriel’s voice say. He sounded tired, but not worried. “Is Kate there?”

She and Gabriel were married, but only on a technicality. He had needed a green card. She had needed someone to pay half the rent. They married in graduate school—after his student visa ran out—and eventually fell into something resembling love. They both liked interior decorating. Neither liked to cook, but it worked out fine because neither very much liked to eat. They shared closet space companionably. No one save their favorite professor had been the wiser that their marriage had been for any reason but the old-fashioned kind, and, at some point after Gabriel left The Netherlands for good and became an American citizen, they really started to believe it themselves. Now he was in love with the neighbor girl, who was only twenty. They were planning to run away together, but not until after his summer class was over.

Kate grabbed the phone from Lester Chester’s grip. “Gabriel?” she said into the phone. “How is the carpet? Did you rent one of those steam cleaners like I told you to?”

Already Gabriel had hung up. Lester Chester seemed at once smug and deflated, as if he, too, had lost out on discussing important business with Gabriel. For the rest of the afternoon, he kept close to Kate, even stole a stick of chewing gum from the side pocket of her purse. She knew she’d be able to scrape him off eventually but lacked the courage to tell him to buzz off. This was her problem: timidity.

The other problem was a desperate desire for others to imagine her overflowing with even-tempered generosity. She knew she’d never transcend that one.

And the final problem was the worst of all: she had mysterious, inky lettering on each of her index fingers, on the fingernails, in fact, and she didn’t know how or why it had appeared there in the first place. A panicky person would be at the Mayo Clinic by now, but Kate was a careful person; she was placid, like a puddle under a hammock on a still summer day. She did not mind, not really, that on each of her fingernails, printed in pixelated dots almost too small to read, were the words, “good until” followed by today’s date. It didn’t take Lester Chester long to notice.

“You’ve been marked,” he said. “The mark of the beast.” “It’s nothing,” she said. “A fungus.”

“A fungus that knows how to spell? An alien fungus.”

“Okay, maybe it’s not a fungus.”

“You want to go to Walgreens?” he said. “Maybe pick up a milkshake?”

“Sure,” she said, surprising herself. Mostly she just wanted a ride to Walgreens; she’d forgotten to bring along her favorite hand lotion, and her parents’ supply of bottled water was running low. And Lester Chester, in spite of describing himself as “four sheets to the wind,” seemed harmless enough.

They took an Uber and didn’t talk on the way. In Health and Beauty, a woman working there hovered over Kate and asked too many questions, including a rather pointed one about her fingernails. Lester Chester wandered off toward the Photo Center and the Walgreens woman followed Kate across the store to the grocery section. In front of the frozen pizza case, the woman tapped Kate’s shoulder and said, “Those aren’t very nutritious, you know,” after which Kate turned to her and said “thank you.” The moment the words left her mouth, she couldn’t stop herself from smiling with what she was sure was too much tooth, too much gum. Sometimes, Kate wasn’t sure what she believed in, but one principle to which she’d always been committed was respect for the public sphere, the simple idea that it was better, more honorable, to be polite rather than unnecessarily rude to strangers. If an older person or a pregnant person or even just a tired-looking person needed a seat on the bus, Kate was always the first to stand. Lester Chester, it turned out, was an expert on a particular genre of online videos known as “Angry Karen and Wild-Eyed Chad Confront Unwitting Shoppers in Retail Environments.” Why were they so angry?

Lester Chester had several theories, most of which seemed to Kate to justify the offending behavior or at least fail to sufficiently condemn it. In any case, Kate considered herself a walking antidote to twenty-first century American rage; where others were agitated, Kate was calm; where others wanted freedom at the expense of others’ well-being, Kate wanted well-being for all; and where others wanted to tell her all about the nutritional value of a frozen pizza she wasn’t even planning to buy, Kate was interested, measured, magnanimous, and, above all, kind.

“It’s true,” Kate said to the Walgreens woman. “It’s better to make your own pizzas. At home.”

“Can I interest you in some shredded mozzarella?” Walgreens-woman said, pointing to the dairy case. “There’s a low-fat version you might find necessary.”

Necessary? Was this woman remarking on her waistline?

“I’m just passing through,” Kate said. “Really, I just need bottled water.”

“You’ll need some trash bags to go with that.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m afraid I cannot allow you to buy bottled water without also buying trash bags.” This Walgreens woman was unusual, but Kate was confident it wasn’t her fault.

Perhaps she’d misread the training manual or sale circular or maybe she merely had a screw loose. Perhaps this hard sell routine was masking some kind of pain.

“I think I’ll just skip the bottled water and the trash bags,” Kate said. “No one needs to use all that plastic, anyway.”

“I do,” the woman said. “I use plastic for pretty much everything.”

“It’s not your fault,” Kate said. “The entire culture was built on fossil fuels.”

“I like fossil fuels,” the woman said.

“Of course you do,” Kate said. “We all rely on them to a certain extent.”

“No,” the woman said. “I like the way they smell.”

Just then, Lester Chester appeared from the processed food aisle. “You know what I like? I like CornNuts and Bugles and cheese that sprays out of a can.”

“Nutter Butters,” said Walgreens-woman. “I’ll bet you’re a freak for a Nutter Butter.” “Do you know me or what?” Lester Chester said. Then, to Kate: “Does she know me or what?”

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “Do the two of you know one another?”

“We do now,” they said simultaneously, and the singsong lilt in their voices was enough to convince Kate that when she and Lester Chester finally left Walgreens, they would be doing so with Walgreens woman in tow.

But that was fine, really fine, Kate told herself, because the woman clearly needed some company, and that oddball, Lester Chester, needed someone other than Kate on whom to lavish his attentions. Maybe the three new adventurers could call another rideshare service and request a convertible, cruise around town and head for the open road. Not that Kate ever did anything like that. But she’d always wanted to do something like that, to run off with strangers and never return. But she knew she needed to check on her parents at home. And her wayward, Peter Pan excuse for a brother was shepherding the neighborhood children into some kind of homegrown theatrical production, a low-budget affair involving the use of chemical solvents that easily had the chance to burn down the garage.

Soon enough, Lester Chester and Walgreens woman forgot about Kate and began a lengthy conversation about people they knew who played the harp. Turned out they both knew two of the same people who played the harp. Together. Like a harp duet.

“Isn’t that wonderful,” Kate said. “You all have friends in common.”

Their conversation went silent when they turned to Kate; clearly she’d interrupted. “I think I’ll call a car,” she said, pulling her phone from her purse. “Lovely to meet you both.”

Now she was alone in the back of some college kid’s Honda Accord. They drove past across town toward Market Town’s lesser fast food drag. Suddenly, she felt an overwhelming and unexpected sadness, like a suffocating blanket. Gabriel’s affair had rattled her to the extent she’d started reading self-help books and exercising two and sometimes three times a day. If theirs had really been a loveless marriage, then none of it mattered, not really; still, she was wounded enough to find herself sobbing at unexpected moments, usually while driving alone or taking a shower. She and Gabriel had lived in Wisconsin for ten years—the trip to Oklahoma was a way to check on her parents on the university’s dime—and somehow, she’d never managed to feel at home in Wisconsin or Oklahoma, the contrast between them enough to make her decide she belonged nowhere at all. And maybe she really did want to know a thing or two about botulism. Maybe something would shake loose about this fingernail fungus; maybe her parents could be convinced to move to assisted living. Always Kate had an agenda, not a nefarious one, but one based on sound principles of enacting decency in a turbulent world.

The driver took the long way back to Kate’s parents’ house in College Gardens.

When Kate was a child, Market Town had been quieter, greener. The entrance to every city park had been marked by a sturdy, wooden, hand-painted sign, like something you might see in a frontier town or ski lodge, something solid, scrappy, and true. Now those signs had been replaced with flimsy acrylic, bright colors already fading in the sun. She remembered goats eating at every culvert and creek side; nowadays, the roar of the riding lawn mower was ubiquitous. Progress, it turned out, looked a lot like a commercial for Home Depot or Lowe’s.

She’d been thinking about Gabriel, about his arrogance, about his stubborn insistence he’d done nothing wrong. She wouldn’t miss him. She would miss him. The neighbor girl had been an idiot, that was all, and after she realized he was nothing like the Dutch fashion designers of her imagination, she would return to her parents, and Gabriel would return to Kate. She indulged in a fantasy of his future remorse and knew at once she was kidding herself; even without the neighbor girl, he was ready to fly the coop, some sob story about how higher education was a pyramid scheme and what he really wanted was to start a company that made high fashion handbags for dogs, something she knew he’d never actually do because doing so would require initiative and Gabriel had none. He was offstage now, waiting in the wings, soon to be dropped forever through the trapdoor.

At her parents’ house, no one asked about Gabriel. The unspoken rule in the Traitor household was that it was better, more courteous, to allow loved ones to solve problems on their own. And because the problems were numerous if not always serious, the house was often silent, drafty, dust-ridden, stagnant like a stone.

At the kitchen table, her brothers—Jamie and Marcus—had a deck of playing cards between them. Over forty and playing Go Fish.

“No, I don’t have any Jacks,” Jamie said. “You asked about Jacks already.”

“Jokers, then,” Marcus said. “You have any Jokers?”

“We’re not playing with Jokers,” Jamie said. “Joker.”

Both brothers had flesh-colored bandages wrapped around their forefingers and thumbs. The day before, Kate had shown them her fingernails as well as asked about theirs, but each, in his own way, had dismissed her: Jamie called her a hysteric and Marcus said he enjoyed a little blemish here and there and was actually glad to have something to shake up his ordinary routine.

Marcus shuffled the cards and began to deal. “Don’t you want something to happen around here, Kate? Don’t you want some action?”

“Yes,” she said. “I mean, no.”

“This barcode thing,” he said, pointing to Jamie’s thumb. “It’s a little like Halloween when we were kids. Dad’s attempt to be scary. Remember?”

“He wasn’t scary,” Kate said. “Not on Halloween, I mean.”

And it was true; her father, while they were growing up, had been as bland as a laid-off librarian. He never even dressed up, never passed out candy, never tossed dry ice into a punchbowl, never even remembered to change the batteries in the flashlight. But she was not surprised to learn he was responsible for these bar codes on everyone’s fingernails, mostly because they’d all been hanging around their parents’ house and their father had too much time on his hands; who else aside from their mother even cared about their fingernails enough to mark them with expiration dates? That their father was weird had long ago been recognized as universal truth; now he was also trying to make some kind of bizarre political point.

Kate considered joining the card game, but Jamie, crossing and uncrossing his legs in a way she was sure he considered judicious, pronounced himself the winner.

She looked up when their father appeared framed by the sliding glass door. He was carrying a fishing rod and wearing a wide-brimmed hat festooned with feathered lures.

Kate had never before seen that hat, and she didn’t know he owned a fishing rod.

Sometimes, he took up new hobbies for no reason, like the time he started stacking rocks in the woods and the time he took a class on sand sculpture. But theirs was a dry existence, the wide plains interrupted by only occasional trickles of potable water. Mostly they’d become accustomed to drought.

“Teach a man to fish,” he said, upon entering. “This man,”—he pointed to his own chest—“will be able to feed himself for weeks.”

Kate looked up. “Where you been, Dad?”

“Sporting goods store,” he said. “There’s a new one. On Perkins Road.”

She wondered if selling a fishing rod to an old man who didn’t know how to fish could be considered elder abuse. She’d heard there were hotlines you could call. But maybe she was meddling. Even thinking about calling an elder abuse hotline was meddling. She didn’t want to meddle. “That’s excellent, Dad,” she said. “Don’t forget to wear sunscreen.”

Kate watched as Marcus dealt another hand. This time, instead of asking one another the standard Go Fish questions, they began to make use of an elaborate set of hand signals, something like American Sign Language, but more rudimentary and, at times, seemingly somewhat lewd. She watched as their bandaged fingers flashed before them in a blur.

“You boys should let Kate play,” their father said, as if they were children again. “She’s only in town for a few days.”

“It’s OK, Dad,” she said. “I need to get back to the conference, anyway.” Her father turned to her. “They give out the awards yet?”

Always her father had been a sucker for a two-bit prize. He preferred to win them himself, but anything Kate won came in a close second. There was no way she could win anything at this particular conference, she told him, and Miss Congeniality didn’t count. He assured her she was still a winner in his book, and she stopped herself from giving him a hug. When had she become a hugger? Or someone afraid of being a hugger? The pandemic, even after its ostensible end, had her in a permanent state of hesitation where physical contact was concerned; it was almost as if she herself had lost the ability to exist in three-dimensional space. She had become a head in a box. A voice from the heavens. An email that replicated itself every time you hit delete. This thing with the fingernails was strange, no doubt, but perhaps what was most unfamiliar about it was that it forced her to look away from the computer screen and down toward her fingers tapping on the keyboard in an inky blur. Every morning, typing out urgent emails to the history department staff, she endured a brief moment of free-floating anxiety: her fingers. Stop. Stop typing. Stand and pace the floor.

“Jamie told us about the fingernail thing,” she said to her father, who had abandoned the fishing rod in favor of a jar of salsa from the fridge. She watched as he retrieved a clean spoon from the dishwasher and ate directly from the jar, the door of the fridge still open.

“I think we have some chips,” she said. “If you want.”

“I like pure vegetables,” he said. “It’s like a vegetable shake.”

“Right.”

“That’s gross, Dad,” Marcus said from the table. “V-8 does not have chunks in it, at least.”

“We don’t have any V-8,” their father said. “Did you buy any bottled water?”

Kate realized then she’d departed Walgreens without buying anything at all. This thing with Gabriel had her distracted, scattered. She knew her father would forget about the bottled water in mere minutes, and she could pretend he’d never mentioned it at all.

“This thing with the fingernails, Dad,” she said. “They’re temporary tattoos?”

“Right,” he said. “I actually told you when I was applying it. But you were asleep.”

“You came into my bedroom? While I was sleeping?”

“It was actually while you were on the sofa. And it’s really not your bedroom anymore, dear. It hasn’t been for years.”

The room that had been her bedroom was now a mere guest room housing many dozens of sofas, all of various clashing floral patterns, some folded out into thin, lumpy beds, others missing legs, still others ripped to their foamy cores by now-dead family pets. In that room, there was not a single chair, not a single lamp, not a single rug, only sofas and more sofas, stacks of paper, mouse turds and dust.

Had she been asleep on the newest of the sofas when her father applied the temporary tattoo? It didn’t matter, not really, as long as she could figure out what, exactly, he’d had in mind with this sad little fingernail scheme. Suddenly, she remembered something else from a long-ago Halloween: her father, inspired by a recent trip to the dentist, had bought not candy but whoopee cushions, snakes in a can, yo-yos and waxed lips. And when the neighborhood children complained, he ordered them into the basement, where he forced them to listen to him read aloud from McTeague: A Story of San Francisco. Everyone thought it was weird, but the neighborhood children and teenagers, disinclined to defy him, sat and listened to his monotone voice for two full hours, until almost midnight, when worried parents began to show up on their doorstep.

She turned to her father. “Putting stamps on our fingernails seems creepy, Dad. As if you’re asserting ownership.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “If I’d wanted ownership, I would have included the Traitor family coat of arms.”

“There is no Traitor family coat of arms.”

“I know, but I could have included my name. Property of Hap.”

She remembered, then, that the ink-stains on her brothers’ fingernails had been different from her own. All three had included bar codes, but the tiny lettering underneath displayed only a long series of numerals on the fingernails of her brothers. On hers, though, appeared those fateful words: “good until.”

“You customized these tattoos?”

“You noticed.”

Were it not for his recent decline into something resembling dementia, she might have imagined he was playing favorites again, trying to convince her she had fallen from grace. Always he had bragged on her accomplishments more than he had said anything at all about the boys, but she did not flatter herself when she told people she’d more than earned his everlasting praise. All her life she had done little else but work, and not just to enhance what her father always called “the life of the mind.” She had mastered multiple martial arts. Learned how to change a tire and cut down a tree. Built fences. Sterilized glass bottles at the recycling plant for less than minimum wage. Had there been a merit badge for nose-to-the-grindstone, she would have earned it several times over.

But these temporary tattoos had no discernible meaning, not even a hint of ideology. Her father had always believed in fairness, in giving people a hand up instead of—or maybe in addition to—a handout, in the kind of society where the strong should lift up the weak. If not exactly Bernie Sanders keeping warm with his homespun mittens, he had always been a close approximation, more Okie, less Vermont. More Quaker, less Jew. But the belief in his own goodness—that was the same. Their entire family was a patchwork quilt of underdeveloped mistakes.

Kate knew she wasn’t special, knew she was ordinary, born into relative privilege in a dusty, forgotten college town. When she was a child, her parents had cracked jokes about its tough pretense of sophistication, its vast American potential. “The Paris of the Plains,” they called it, while shopping at Tiger Drug, long shuttered to make way for Walgreens.

Back then, Perkins Road had only two lanes. These days, it was a teeming expanse of Blurpies and Slurpies and Burned Steak Emporia. And the sun was hotter, brighter. It wasn’t Kate’s fault. Maybe it was.

The next day at the Holiday Inn, Kate found herself attending a panel discussion of the ways in which public education took power out of the hands of parents and into the greedy, pernicious grasp of the federal government. What any of that claptrap had to do with botulism she had not the first clue, not until the third panelist spoke at length about Michelle Obama’s lasting legacy of turning school cafeterias into woke centers for world bank indoctrination.

“It’s the saltines,” Lester Chester whispered into her left ear.

“I wish I had a box of raisins,” her father whispered into her right ear.

They had played a round of pickleball that very morning and were so sweaty and red-faced, their simultaneous exhalations attempting a poor imitation of the steam engines of another century.

The woman on the panel rose to speak at the lectern. She had been working from notes while seated at a long table, but the speech was just getting going, increasing in tempo and volume at the same time becoming more technical, her various charts and graphs cycling through at a rapid clip on a large, flat screen behind her. Kate was feeling uneasy.

Foolishly, she had imagined she and Gabriel would have a child someday, in her mind’s eye always a girl, the kind of child who would gladly wear sunbonnets and submit to having her photo taken from the safety of the backyard sandbox. And of course they would send that child to public schools. And of course she would excel. She would have poor friends and rich friends and friends from their own middle-income-bracket. In the cafeteria, she would drink from small cartons of milk, and, in the cheerful library complete with knee-high tables and pint-sized chairs, thumb through biographies of Martin Luther King Jr. and Maria Tallchief and Cesar Chavez and Sally Ride. She had imagined these things so clearly, so frequently, that they seemed almost inevitable, like candlesticks hauled out every Thanksgiving or lyrics from a familiar song. Now, sitting there in the Holiday Inn listening to the paranoid fantasies of a right-wing lunatic, she realized she would remain childless for the rest of her days, and although she was ashamed of her sadness, she began to cry.

“I know,” Lester Chester said, patting her hand. “Government Overreach. It hurts.”

Her father stretched and put his arm around her. “Don’t let it get to you, Katie. Michelle Obama is still a very noble woman.”

“I’m fine,” Kate said in a whisper so as not to disturb the other members of the audience. Kate detested the panelist, despised her every utterance; as a result, it bothered her she could not stop herself from enforcing the pretense this woman deserved polite reception. She should have shouted at this woman, should have punched her, in fact, should have ordered her arrested and cast into the dustbin of history. But interrupt her while she was speaking? Kate wouldn’t think of such an offense.

She fished a tissue from her purse and tried to appear smaller; her father and Lester Chester were drawing attention to themselves, their giggles like schoolboys and their fidgeting like lost old men. A woman in the row ahead of them shifted in her seat so as to cast an annoyed gaze in their direction. Kate shrugged apologetically. Unlike her more sociable and attractive friends, Kate had never waited tables; still, most days she felt as if she spent her every waking moment doing the equivalent of making sure everyone else’s coffee cup was full.

“Botulism,” said the presenter, finally getting to the point. She had both index fingers poised in mid-air. “You might think an absence of canned goods would lead to better outcomes among minors removed from school premises and sent to Emergency Rooms. You would be wrong.”

Was she suggesting Michelle Obama gave schoolchildren botulism? It didn’t make a lot of sense.

“What happened instead—” and here she changed the projected image from an inscrutable pie chart to a photo of children dressed up for Halloween—a knife-wielding pirate, an unidentifiable action hero, a pair of pint-sized cheerleaders, a vampire with plastic fangs— “What happened instead, is that these children, your children, were exposed to both blood-borne pathogens and sexual predation.”

“Let’s go,” Kate said, quietly at first, and then loudly enough for the woman in front of them to turn and shake her head. “I’m serious, Dad. Let’s get out of here.”

“Do your own research,” the woman at the podium said. “If you don’t believe me.”

During the question-and-answer period, Kate was able to convince her companions to make a tasteful exit. No one would be the wiser, she said, if they expressed their displeasure in anonymous written comments at the lobby’s registration table.

“Displeasure?” Lester Chester said on their way out. “I thought that woman was fire.” “That woman is dangerous,” Kate said.

“That woman,” her father said. “Just happens to be my former student.”

“Funny,” Lester Chester said. “I didn’t recognize her.”

The lobby, alive with buzzy conference-goers and downtrodden custodial staff, provided some air-conditioned relief. Still, Kate was feeling hot, sticky like a child stuck in a sweat-soaked locker room. She wanted out of there. But before she could escape to the parking lot, Gabriel’s name appeared on the screen of her phone.

“It’s the carpet,” he said without waiting for her to say hello. “Nothing I do will make it clean.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “After you move out, I’m going to sell the house.”

“You can’t just sell the house.”

“What do you care?”

“I paid for this house,” he said, something he’d always imagined was true. Just because his salary was larger didn’t mean she’d been dependent on him. And since when did he care about the carpet? She imagined her absence must have inspired him to eat dinner in the living room: doubtless there were additional stains.

“Listen, Gabriel,” she said. “Do you think we would have had children?”

“What?”

“If we’d stayed married. Would we have had children?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably not.”

“Because you don’t want children or because you don’t want to have them with me?”

“Kate, this is ridiculous.”

“Answer the question.”

“You know I hate children,” he said.

“Everyone says that,” she said. “When they’re young.”

She knew—knew like she knew her father was not playing with a full deck, knew like she knew her hometown had gone fascist, knew like she knew the marks on her fingernails were signs of something terrible—that Gabriel would have children someday, and she would not.

“I’ll just leave the carpet, I guess,” he said.

She said, “We’ll talk when I get home.”

“I won’t be here,” he said. “When you get home.” “

Right.”

“How are your folks?”

“The same.”

“Right.”

They exchanged a few additional thoughts about shared homeowners’ issues—the student loan payments, the furnace filters, the grass growing in the gutters—and finally gave into the resigned emptiness of sad goodbyes. Well, Kate was sad; Gabriel sounded fine.

She hung up the phone and looked around the lobby. The conference appeared to be wrapping up, though she could hear active sessions still rumbling down the hall. The lone computer in the “business center” was occupied by a teenaged boy who appeared to be playing video poker, and the woman working at the front desk was watching stock car racing on a television mounted so high on the wall she had to crane her neck to watch it. The woman was grimacing, but not at the race cars; Kate thought the woman seemed speedy and seedy and adventurous, and every time she grabbed her neck and winced, Kate thought of new nicknames for her: Whiplash Sally, Pit Stop Princess, Dusty Rose Runway Runner.

“You at the conference?” the woman said to Kate. “You need a key to the pool?”

“Yes,” Kate said on a whim. “Give it to me.”

She looked around for her father and Lester Chester. More weak punch in plastic cups, more cold taco shells balanced on the edges of paper plates, more tuna tartare slurped from toothpicks: they appeared to be having the times of their lives. Men always loved the company of other men. Gabriel had always liked her father better than he liked her. And Lester Chester would talk to anyone who would listen. Kate took the key from the front desk woman, and then, surprising herself, said, “you want to come with me?”

“To the pool?” the woman said. “Nah, I can’t leave the front desk.”

“Sure you can,” Kate said. “I saw you leave it several times just this morning.”

“You saw that?”

“Everyone saw it.”

“The manager see it?”

“Who’s the manager?”

The woman turned from the television and nodded toward a greasy-haired man who paid them no mind; he appeared to be restocking the ancient pamphlets in the even-more ancient brochure stand: come to the Tall Grass Prairie, get lost at Turner Falls, count your blessings (and lose weight!) at Oral Roberts University.

Kate shook her head and nodded toward the entrance to the indoor pool. Come away with me, she tried to say with her eyes. Come to the chlorinated splendor.

The woman gave a sideways glance at greasy-manager-man, grabbed a brass key hanging from a hook on the wall, and made a break for it. And when she did, Kate noticed this woman, like all the Traitors, had not just one or two, but four bar codes on each of her index fingers and thumbs. And when they entered the stuffy warmth of the indoor pool area, everyone there— children, their safety-minded parents, a drunk lifeguard, various vendors hawking hand sanitizer and crafty koozies and can openers advertised as “botulism-free,” had the smeared barcodes on their fingernails as well.

“It’s my father,” Kate said to her new friend. “It’s spreading.”

“Your dad Hap Traitor?”

“The one and only.”

“He was my professor once,” she said. “For about a day.”

“Long enough,” Kate said.

“Yeah,” the woman said. “He was boring. I mean, sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Kate said.

Among the swimmers and parents and vendors was Lester Chester’s friend, the hard-selling Walgreens woman, folded into a lawn chair with a terrarium in her lap, watching with rapt attention what appeared to be a music video on her phone. She, too, had the bar codes, though Kate didn’t remember her having them the day before. She looked up at Kate and waved.

Kate began to raise her hand to wave in return, but realized soon enough Walgreens woman was not waving at her but at Front Desk Woman.

“Oh no, it’s her,” Front Desk Woman whispered to Kate. “Let’s leave.”

“It’s all right,” Kate said. “She’s my friend.”

If either of these women ever were in trouble, would Kate have the guts to help them? If they were pregnant and anxious and tired after long, thankless days spent working at Holiday Inn and Walgreens, would Kate give up her own seat so that they could sit down? She felt confident she would.

“If it isn’t you!” Walgreens woman said to Kate. She slapped her phone down on a rickety table. “What a co-inky-dink.”

Kate said, “Lester’s back in the lobby. I can find him if you want.”

“Saw him earlier,” Walgreens woman said. She pointed to the terrarium in her lap. “You want to meet Larry?”

“I want Larry,” Front Desk woman said. “I want to take him home.”

“Sure,” Walgreens woman said. “You can have him.”

Kate watched as Walgreens woman, taking the glass box gingerly between both hands, struggled with some effort to her feet. Kate peered through the mossy foliage and glistening pebbles but could spot nothing alive. Still, Front Desk Woman seemed delighted.

“He’s so cute,” Front Desk Woman said, now in a baby voice. “I love you, Larry.”

Earthworm? Iguana? Snail? Kate was too embarrassed to ask.

Kate watched as Walgreens woman, bar codes visible, palmed the terrarium and handed it to Front Desk woman, whose own bar codes appeared of a slightly different hue. Her father had tattooed them in their sleep, which meant he’d been in both their houses or they’d been in his. Kate was unnerved, but oddly thrilled: that she was witnessing this moment of tenderness between these women, that Front Desk woman now would have a pet to watch over her during late night shifts, that all the men were off eating or talking or cleaning carpet while making their own sorry excuses for conversation. Suddenly, she wanted Larry for herself.

“He is really cute,” she said, seeing nothing but air.

“He’s a killer,” Walgreens woman said. “I mean, if ever anybody needs a real killer, we got one right here.”

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Dinah Cox is the author of three books of short stories, Remarkable, published as winner of the fourth annual BOA Short Fiction Prize from BOA Editions, The Canary Keeper (PANK Books), the prize-winning, newly-released The Paper Anniversary (Elixir). She lives and works in her hometown of Stillwater, Oklahoma.

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Veronica Winters is a Russian-American artist and teacher. She is the author of The Colored Pencil Manual and How to Color Like an Artist (Dover). Her art and writing have been published in numerous magazines and books, including Strokes of Genius, Leisure Painter, Colored Pencil Magazine, American Art Collector and International Artist Magazine. She works in her studio in Naples, Florida.