Mom's cousin Lenna stood out in a crowd

in her younger days, Lenna "the little tart," the sassy one, the Sweet and Sour, with snips and snails and puppy dog tails. "Nappy" was another word for it. DeLorean didn't understand that one until she took up sewing in Home Ec class and, due to a lack of spatial orientation skills, had ruined a velvet dress. She got better at un-sewing than she ever did at sewing. DeLorean did salvage the dress, after ripping it apart and sewing in a newly cut piece with the nap running the right way. She sewed a doll dress out of the ruined piece, not that her mom ever let her hear the end of it, at five dollars a yard for that Christmas-green velvet.

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Nap refers to fabric with a vertical “pile” or any texture that is raised from the fabric surface--velvet, corduroy, faux fur. When you brush the nap in one direction, it will take on a certain sheen. Brush it in the opposite direction, and the sheen will go darker or lighter. This matters if you sew. Laying out a pattern on yards of fabric, you must be sure the nap runs the same way on all parts of the finished garment, or the flipped piece will stand out like the drunken aunt dancing at your wedding.

"You're a nappy one," Mom used to tell her. Well, she stopped sticking out like a sore thumb after pledging her troth to Dwayne.

Troth.

Once upon a time, that nappy little tart DeLorean pledged her troth to that misogynist troll Dwayne.

Troth rhymed with "both," but those pledges of fidelity, loyalty, and respect were all one-sided. The same damn fate had fallen on Lenna and Mom and DeLorean: to be yoked with selfish SOBs.

Now DeLorean faced another nappy little asshat known as Rory. Lenna's youngest.

"You greeted me with a gun," she said. "You wanna call that none of my business, I might call the sheriff."

Rory snorted. "Yeah, that's what Shirley did after I avenged Houdini's tragic demise."

DeLorean marveled once again at the way he'd segue from Lenna's blue-collar dialect to a more erudite kind of urban reject.

"After she set her pit bull on Houdini for the crime of peeing on those Dodge Ram tires," he said, "I watched for a night that truck was in the parking lot at Hardee's. I had a spray of stink juice, the contents of which I will never reveal.,though I wll say this: nothing sticks like egg yolk to a car, and nothing stinks like rotten egg."

DeLorean couldn't help but smile.

"Trouble is, Hardee's had surveillance cameras. It was Dick and Shirley what got me in that Anger Management facility. That which you all refer to as a nut house."

Oh dear. He'd heard. DeLorean had to think fast and hard as to whether or not she had carelessly used the word nut house in proximity with the name Rory, and if any bystanders might be so thoughtless as to go telling him she said that.

She really hated that about drama queens and gossips. If you're someone's friend, you don't go repeating negative shit other people say about you just to sound like you're some kind of ally or confidante. She had zero female friends, in part because she hated gossip.

"Rory. I would have done a lot worse than spray a bottle of stink over Shirley's tires, given what she did to Houdini. I did not come here to judge you or cause you any kind of trouble. I just wanted to visit my mom's cousin, now that Mom is dead. But you won't even tell me where she is. The cemetery, maybe? I never found her in the obits, but it costs money to list those in the newspaper, so, ok."

Rory stood there with his own little mutt as his side, pretty much eye level with DeLorean, and she tried not to remember calling him a little pipsqueak, among other things, back in the day.

"Mom was broken in spirit after what Shirley done," he said, lapsing back into Lenna-speak. "She quit eating three days out of every week, lost a shit load of weight, and wandered into the desert to pray, like John the Baptist, minus the horse-hair shirt. Dad was gone, so she took back her Catholic faith like Linus and his security blanket, if you remember your Charlie Brown."

DeLorean nodded. Who didn't remember Linus and his blanket?

"Once I got out of the program," he made air quotes with his fingers, "I moved back here to keep Maw from martyring herself. She took up yoga, but she didn't give up the starvation diet, which turned out to be some 72-hour fasting fad that's all the rage now. Said to ward off cancer and cure diabetes and then some."

Rory's blue gaze seemed to shift down to DeLorean's stout torso, and that one glance felt like velvet must feel when someone rubs it against the nap.

Fasting. Prayer. Yoga. Goat yoga, no less.

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> The goats add a level of fun and amusement

that other animals can't match, not even the cats of You-Tubes, Rory had told her when she caught him striking those impossible poses on the top of a rock. She had driven him to "counting to ten," and longer, which was a step above what Dwayne said she drove him to, he with the verbal sticks and stones and more recently, the smashed GPS and the bruises that got Sandy the nosy nurse all over her case. Now it was that Rory. That skinny little bearded zealot with his weird dog, and his yoga goats wandering in the sand around them, bleating and doing their darnedest to get her to crack a smile. That Rory, standing there, daring to give her some sort of accusing look. She might just as well get back into that burgundy spray-painted minivan and drive back to Dwayne.

But first, she had to see Lenna.

Or no. First, she had to bust out laughing at those goats.

Day 606: 5 Minute Freewrite: Tuesday - Prompt: nap