Alpacas

Illustration: Ansellia Kulikku.

After her marriage fell apart, Lee landed back in Passaic. Some might have considered it a defeat to return to their hometown a 23-year-old single mother with an overdrawn bank account, especially when they’d so vocally wanted to leave.

But Lee didn’t feel defeated. She felt, instead, giddy with possibility. After all, she’d changed. Her former high school classmates wouldn’t recognize her, she was sure; she barely recognized herself. No way would she make the same mistakes. No way would she do anything as unglamorous as trawl through the Yellow Pages for a cheap divorce attorney again.

But to leave, Lee would need money, and to get money, she would have to work. Reba Carmichael—who was not Lee’s mother, but may as well have been—put Lee and Paavo up and got Lee an interview at the Pell Candy Factory. Reba worked part-time at the factory outlet and had heard there was an opening.

“It’s steady pay, plus you get to take home defective truffles,” Reba said, though Lee knew this already because Reba kept misshapen chocolates in covered glass dishes on every flat surface of her apartment, and Christmases Lee got a dented sampler of them from Reba and Reba’s husband, Two Crow. Two Crow was his last name. No one called him by his first name because, as Reba put it, “Dennis is boring as sin.”

Lee spent hours picking what to wear for the interview, though the Pell Candy Factory was not at all that kind of place.

“Blue or pink, Paavo?” Lee asked, trying on different blouses borrowed from Reba.

“Green,” said Paavo, a color he loved so much he couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge any other.

“Do yourself a favor and don’t mention Paavo,” Reba said, dropping Lee off. “Nobody wants to hire single mothers.”

“Wasn’t gonna,” Lee said, though she hadn’t thought about it one way or the other.

The man who interviewed Lee was Sam Wendt. She remembered him as the high school mascot, running up and down the sidelines. Lee had once watched the team carry him aloft to a trashcan into which they dumped him head-first to vent their rage after a particularly galling loss.

Wendt had been three years ahead of Lee, and couldn’t have been much older than she was, but he already looked like a grown man, more like a teacher than the student Lee remembered. He wore a silver pin on his shirt that identified him as a Quality Assurance Supervisor.

“Can you read?” Wendt asked. If he remembered her, he didn’t let on.

“Yes,” Lee said, with more enthusiasm than appropriate, delighted by the simplicity and clarity of his question.

“Read that,” Wendt said, pointing to a poster pinned to a bulletin board behind him, of a kitten hanging by its claws off a laundry line.

“‘Hang in there, baby.'”

“That was a