the stream of needlers flowing in, out, and around Nurse Gaskin.
He turned to look at Tweed.
“Over here,” she said, taking his arm.
Her father’s plot lay close by. The screams, the mob sounds, were scarcely muted.
Above the top of the crypt, an illumined ridge of red papier-mache resolved itself into a slice of scalp, the twist of a ghoulish ear.
Tweed’s gaze caressed the letters cut into her father’s headstone. BORN SINGING, they said. And below that, SINGING STILL.
“He would have sung some interesting things tonight,” said Dex, his voice full and fond.
“Life is short,” said Tweed. “Dad knew that.”
“Should we go? Or do you want to watch her die and hear what Mr. Buttweiler has to say?”
She shook her head. “There’s no need.”
“Okay.”
“But I would like something else.”
When Dex asked what that might be, Tweed knelt to her backpack, which she had set against her father’s gravestone.
I love you, Dad, she thought. She wished he could be there for this.
Unzipping the pack, she reached deep into its cloth wound.
“Ms. Gaskin sure can scream,” Dex said.
It thrilled Tweed, that sound.
The screams felt as if they were coming from Nurse Gaskin’s deepest secret self, as hidden as the murderous part of her, close to the angels, a dark rich soil given voice.
It made sense of the universe.
And it offered a perfect backdrop for Tweed’s revelation.
She withdrew a thermos and a tall tumbler.
When Dex turned back from the scream, he saw what she was doing and broke into tears.
“Oh, Tweed. Really?”
“Yes,” she said.
She rose, uncapped it, poured until the glass swirled brimful of moonlight.
Then she set the thermos on stone, took a long cool swallow, and held the tumbler out to the father-to- be.
Nurse Gaskin’s howls of pain corona’d Dex’s head. He was crying.
How lovely her man was.
They would make a beautiful baby.
Tweed touched his friendship lobe, warmed it in her fingers, and kissed it with sweet ardency.
Then she took Dex’s right hand and fisted it about the tumbler.
“Drink,” she said. “For our love.”
And he did.
His tears subsided. Through what remained of them, he smiled.
Then he raised the glass.
Over wounded-gazelle screams, a benediction from a supportive cosmos, Tweed watched the water glug down his throat, its silver backwash sloshing at his upper lip.
When he had emptied it, he smashed it against her father’s headstone. Lifting her in his arms, Dex gave Tweed the deepest, wettest, sloppiest, most soul-stirring kiss she had ever known.
Life was good indeed.
And it was about to get a whole lot better.
