Michelle

Claudia’s dad gives her a dollar each game she stands on the sidelines of the soccer field. She raises a neon orange flag up each time the ball goes out of bounds, which sounds easy to do to most, but Claudia will tell you differently. She’ll tell you she has to run up and down with them, keep the flag up in the air as long as the ball is out, and sometimes she has to go to her dad and tell him who kicked the ball out of bounds. That’s always hard because Claudia hates playing sides. ###
Today makes the thirtieth game Claudia has helped her father referee, and today marks the day she will earn thirty dollars for her hard work. She put her previously earned dollar bills in her pockets this morning so she could feel what twenty-nine dollars in her pockets felt like. Her pockets bulged, but she didn’t care; she rather liked the lump on either side of her hips. It made her feel more like a woman, like her mother. ###
But when she stands on the sidelines, eying the soccer ball as it goes this way and that, the dollar bills begin to fly out of her pockets. She chases the tumbling bills, and when the ball goes out of bounds, the flag does not go up. Claudia’s father blows his whistle and calls the end of the half. ###
“I need something for my dollar bills,” Claudia says to her father. ###
“Here, take this.” He grabs a big red and white thermos next to an empty lawn chair. It is labeled with a Marlboro logo on the front. It is full of water and ice, and he dumps it out. He shakes it a bit and then hands it to Claudia. ###
“That’ll do,” he says, walking back to the middle of the field. ###
Claudia sits next to the puddle of water and ice, and she slowly puts each dollar bill into the thermos. She closes the lid, traces the Marlboro label on the front with her finger, wondering where she’s seen that word before. Marl-bor-o, she says to herself. And then she remembers: the cardboard packs, no bigger than a deck of cards, next to her mother’s jewelry box; the cartons in the plastic bag that her mother would bring in on grocery day, cartons she isn’t allowed to touch; the small, white, cylindrical sticks, hanging from the corner of her mother’s lips, hanging from her fingertips, just barely hanging on before the ashes come sprinkling down, crumbling to nothing bigger than a thumbnail. Her mother placed the pack in her back pocket the day she stepped into her truck and didn’t return. ###
Claudia takes out one of her dollar bills, rolls it tight, and put it to her lips. She closes her eyes, inhales, feels her lungs fill up with fire, and slowly, slowly exhales. She takes the dollar bill from her mouth and holds it between her index and middle finger, giving it just a tap, tap. ###
She calls to her dad. He jogs over. “Look Dad,” she says. “I’m just like Mom.” ###
“Claudia Jean,” he says. “Don’t ever say that.” ###