“But Gretchen, I am your father!”

The screen door slammed behind her and she walked into the night and the fog in her mother’s coat. Far enough away to watch the house without being seen, she stood in the woods until she saw her dad come out, look around, then open the hood of the car and start messing with something. Nothing complicated, maybe just fixing a bulb in the light her mom had complained was burned out.

She thought about the sound of a screen door slamming. She walked through the woods to her spot by the road where she could stand and watch the cars drive past on the freeway down the slope, only tonight fog was heavy but for one spot; vehicles emerged from fog for a distance equal to the gap between two of those mercury lights along the freeway before vanishing again. She watched them and thought about the sound of a screen door slamming.

There should be a television game show called “Describe that Picture”, she thought. Like “Name that Tune.” Because a thousand words? She could do it in way, way less. “I can paint that picture in two hundred fifty words, Bob,” her opponent would say. “I can do it in seventy-five,” she’d say, to gasps from the studio audience. They’d drag it out over the commercial break, the director or someone making the audience laugh, then the “On Air” sign would light up and she’d win a trip for two to Mazatlan or enough money to enlarge her bedroom.

Her mother smoked Merits and there was a pack in the pocket of the coat and matches so Gretchen lit one up. Her mother was out tonight at dance lessons, because she thought if she could go ballroom dancing with Gretchen’s father, who was an excellent dancer, it would be good for their marriage.

Gretchen prayed to God she’d never be in a relationship.

Wild hops formed a cone fifteen feet tall where they grew up the pole of the streetlight under which a fifteen year old girl stood in her mother’s coat smoking and thinking. Fog congealed around her in tiny droplets, and when she exhaled it came out twice as thick, both smoke and condensing vapor from her lungs, so it carried further and stayed in the air longer, like rays from some TV monster destroying Tokyo.

It should be pointed out that Gretchen wasn’t just any fifteen year old girl, she was also currently embodying the immortal Fortuna, goddess of luck. Leaning to one side, an unbalanced, poorly-loaded delivery truck drove past on the freeway below, emerging into the light and then re-entering the darkness and fog, but in that space of time Gretchen saw the life history of the driver, a twenty year old man named Pete Bedelia who last year had a summer job with a landscaping company, this summer was driving this truck for a drugstore chain. He would never learn how to load a truck right; a pallet of shampoo had tipped over in the back, making the truck lean, as well as a terrible mess inside, which he would discover when he arrived at the warehouse. He would have no summer job at all next year, instead acquiring an eating disorder and starving himself to death before Easter.

Gretchen blew a stream of luck his way as he vanished into the fog. Pete wouldn’t starve to death; he’d enter a therapy program. In two years, he’d find work as a counselor at a camp for kids with similar eating disorders.

The woods were silent but for water dripping here and there from a tree and striking another leaf further below. Forget a picture, Gretchen could map out an entire life in under a hundred words. But the sound of a screen door slamming haunted her. All the things that sound could mean. Anger, escape, release. Love and hate. Melancholy. Words couldn’t begin to describe what that sound did to her every time.

Mom was learning the chachacha. Last week, foxtrot. At home she tried to get her husband to practice with her. Sometimes he did, sometimes she put on the record from the dance school and laid out her things, what Gretchen thought of as the devil’s kidneys, kidney-shaped pieces of paper with numbers on them. Gretchen had thought they’d look like foot prints, but mom said this shape was designed for the sweeping effect, to show the direction your foot took when you stepped off, cause dancing was about moving, not standing in place.

She imagined Satan wincing, taking a break from causing trouble to grab his lower back, nodding when a demon asked him, “that Meyer woman dancing again?”

An old woman in a Chevelle would live to see her grandchildren be born and enter school because Gretchen blew luck on her. She went through nearly half the pack that way. Then it got cold, even in the coat, and she returned home. On the way she washed her mouth out with some Listerine she hid in a hollow apple tree so the smoke wouldn’t stink so bad. Her mother wasn’t home yet, she saw with some relief; this gave her time to clean up a little, because she didn’t want her mother stressed and nothing stressed her mom worse than a dirty house.

She opened the door and went in.

Her father was sitting there watching something on television. “I fixed the headlight,” he said.