Jil. What kind of name is "Jil"? And what the hell happened to her other L? Did she lose it down the drain when she knocked it off the edge of her crisply white sink basin? And if that's the case, doesn't she know that all she needs to do is open the cabinet doors and use a wrench to take off the curved pipe. Most things get caught in the bend of the drain. I would have known that. Then she could have safely reattached the L to the end of her name and gone about her business as usual.

OR MAYBE, she's so scatterbrained that she forgot it at the Greyhound bus station on the way back from her mother's place in Montana that year that her little brother broke his neck in the pickup truck accident. She was worried sick and nearly forgot her very ticket in that dirty, blue-tiled cell and she had simply overlooked replacing the L for so long that she had gotten used to being Jil rather than Jill.

Actually, those silly little letters sometimes just walk away on their own after they wiggle their sly sleek bodies through the bars of their golden cages. Why, just a few months ago, the last half of my last name wondered off while I was at work and now my name is only five letters long where it used to be nine. Occasionally, a coworker will find the missing ones and stick them back onto the five that stayed, but that's rare.

Mostly, I think my runaway letters are partying down in Algodones, Mexico, eating dog tacos and drinking beer so sweet that they're intoxicated within an hour. They probably dance in the streets until dusk to a live band and get their kicks at The Green Door.

Maybe Miss Jil's renegade L got picked up by my band of letters, but probably not because occasionally mine come home and hers doesn't ever seem to. So the lone L is probably wandering lost and crying down America's back country roads and byways desperately seeking its owner and siblings. Or not.

No matter how it happened, the woman is missing a part of her name that protocol dictates be there and it offends my not so delicate sensibilities. She needs to either find the missing L or buy a new one. From there she can probably have a respectable jeweler solder in on good and tight for a reasonable fee, Then there would be no worries that it would ever wander again, no matter how hard it tried.

Matter of fact, was it not I that put your name back together again? Most people used the front half or the back half, but by doing so lost the middle half. I had always thought you were a complete person and I used the whole thing, nothing missing. You once said that people who did that either loved you twice as much or half as much; you didn't know which. I pick both.

But back to Silly Jillybean... I don't like your new girlfriend and when I ask what she's like, don't you ever say she's a lot like me because I'm an original. There's nobody else like me. (Except for maybe my new love who has the common sense to have an extra letter right at the beginning of his first name. Isn't that clever? His is an E.) Anyway, I can't believe you'd date a woman who is dumb enough to permanently lose a letter. How careless! Jil. What kind of name is Jil?

Learn more about this author, Marcia Middleton.
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