Act As If

In the bottom of Zadie’s purse, as she sits in a lightly upholstered chair at the DMV to get her license reinstated, everyone packed in side by side by side, Zadie number 23 with number 72 currently being served:

1. A half-wrapped mint filched from the bowl on the hostess stand at the Mexican restaurant Phil drove them to last Wednesday, the mints there for the taking, but Zadie with the feeling she was stealing, Zadie always with the feeling of being caught, the unwrapped half tacky to the touch, gathering lint;
2. Lint from wadded up tissues for nagging allergies and occasional (if no longer frequent) crying jags;
3. One useless tampon still in its crinkly wrapper, hearkening a bygone era, testament to Zadie’s wont toward accumulation, everything gathering and taking permanent root;
4. Nicorette gum 15-pack, four pieces left, 11 hollows in the plastic packaging big enough for the tip of her ring finger to fit in and out of, like playing hidden harmonica, good for keeping her hands busy;
5. Red chip that replaced first Zadie’s beginner’s-luck green chip, then later, her claw-her-way-back, mouth-full-of-hot-spit-day-after-day silver chip;
6. Auto insurance card with a quarterly premium that could buy instead a halfway decent used couch off Craigslist, three credits at the nearest community college for training in auto maintenance or graphic design, ten bottles of single barrel straight bourbon;
7. The flip phone she’d replaced her smartphone with, so she’d have one less thing calling out every second of every day for wanting;
8. The signed Certificate of Completion from Tonya, the hippy (as in pear-shaped, not as in pot-smoking) teacher who lectured about response times and legal definition of impaired and classifications of drugs to a roomful of students that should have made Zadie feel camaraderie, though mostly she was distracted by the yellow-haired girl who picked each week at the badly healing tattoo of everyone’s favorite cartoon rabbit on her inner arm;
9. Empty pack of Marlboro Reds, the insides still smelling of free fall and possibility in a way that was supposed to repel Zadie but did not;
10. Bent-to-hell photo of her father (dead) holding Zadie and Phil’s infant son (grown and gone) gazing at each other in a manner which neither gazed at her so far as she could remember;
11. Dumb piece of paper with dumb three-word aphorism written on it that she’d referred to a startling number of times during the days and hours of her mouth full of hot spit and now just had to rub between her thumb and finger to remember its dumbness, its dumbness sometimes helping, so dumb;
12. Key ring with her house key and her car key that she’d kept on this whole time, a carrot or a stick, she was not sure; a taunt of encouragement: Come on, you asshole;
13. Empty Altoids tin, cool in her fist till she warmed it, a feeling of power in warming it. There she was. She was there. Here. Here she was;
14. The number 23 tab she’d pulled from the dispenser after the Uber dropped her in front of the DMV, her thinking without thinking, My lucky number, even if Zadie had never been one to believe in such a thing—too whimsical—though 23 would be from here on out, lucky, even if she did not recognize it as such, a nameless warmth when she spotted 23 on a mile marker or in the license plate ahead of her on the back of a pickup, she misunderstanding luck as random anointment, not of her sweat, her effort, her own hourly, daily making and remaking.