She felt things more keenly than other people. Whatever it was that buffered other hearts from the slings and arrows of real life was missing in Mimi. Her behavior, which had once been labeled harmlessly eccentric, grew more erratic with the years, and by the time Grandma Fran died, Mimi’s spells of heavy drinking alternated with spells of angry abstinence and the occasional naked sprint up Main Street. The line between normal and abnormal had been blurred out of existence. Mimi careened through life like a runaway train while Cat followed behind, minimizing the damage the best she could. Sometimes Mimi drank. Sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she was lucid and agreeable. Sometimes she shed her past along with her inhibitions and tested the chaos theory of living to its limits. But there was one constant, one North Star that guided everything Mimi did: her belief that one day Mark would come back to her. It never once occurred to Mimi that maybe this time there wouldn’t be a happy ending, that maybe this time the story would end the way all of those old folk songs they had made famous always ended: with the fair maiden pining away for love of the errant knight who would never return.
