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It was only [img_assist|nid=10936|title=Contemplating Attachment by Sandi Lovitz|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=366|height=366]after I left India—after I left my mother—that I began to sew.

My mother was a popular tailor in south India.  Wealthy matriarchs commissioned her when they needed a fashionable blouse for their daughters’ bride-viewings.  My mother then sewed their wedding trousseau, and later, their maternity salwar kameez, a loose-flowing tunic and pant set.  She also salvaged remnants and made outfits for the little children and babies.  There were always more women, more weddings, more babies.  She never suffered in her business. 

Her sewing gave us food and shelter; her sewing gave me Bopal. 

I.    Never mistake the power of the thimble.  Even the best seamstress will have cause for one; else she will be pricked by a very large and very unsuspecting needle.

I was nineteen when I came to the United States for school.  When the taxi driver asked me where I wanted to go, I told him I needed a sewing machine.  He drove me to Joann’s.  With traveler’s checks I bought my first sewing machine: a Singer 10 stitch.  It was clean and a very bright white.  Later when I got to the dorm for international students, I unpacked it onto a tiny folding card table in the corner of the room.  My roommate who was also Indian had brought jars of various types of oil from Mumbai: jasmine, coconut, almond, and had set up along the other card table.  She listened to me loudly sew shapes: sequined circles, zig-zaggy squares, polka-dotted rectangles while she layered her hair with oil.

“What are you going to do with those shapes?” she asked.

“Practicing,” I said.  “What are you doing with that oil?”

“My mom has thick hair,” she said.

My mother called every week.  She asked more questions about my machine than me.  She demanded I call her right away when I had picked out a pattern, decided what I was going to make, and figured out when I would complete it. 

***

    In between classes I drove around the city looking for places that reminded me of home.  The deadened shrub in front of the local library looked like the tuft of my father’s hair that my mother kept in a button box after he died.  The convenience store window with the illegible scrawl reminded me of how quickly my mother could sew.  The hospital with the steady stream of traffic felt like our house before a wedding: the half-naked women crowded in our tiny living room, comparing cup sizes and waiting to be measured.

One day I saw an Indian family go into the hospital.  They were unsure of what they were doing there, so I parked and followed them inside.  They made it to the ER waiting room, speaking to each other in a language I didn’t know, but I listened carefully anyway.  After the daughter’s name was called, everyone left, but I stayed.  Several hours later an older white woman came by and asked if I was there to help.  I told her yes; she gave me a schedule, and I started volunteering. 

My job was to help discharged patients leave the hospital.  I started with minor cases: anxiety attacks, falls with no broken bones, overnight monitoring.  After a month they moved me to the major cases: stents, radiation, physical rehabilitation.  I didn’t cry at first.  But after I escorted Rosie, a giggling patient who’d suffered a stroke, into a van, I hid in the storage closet and bawled.   I couldn’t get her face out of my head: one side hung as though someone held an invisible string and was pulling it askew, testing how far it would go.  I thought about my sewing machine. 
My eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw that I was not alone.  A man was also crying, softly, his hands over his face. His nails were chewed down, his knuckles like gaping bandages.

“Why are you crying?” I asked.

“Why are you crying?”

I thought about my favorite stitch on the Singer, the one that looked like the arc of a bat flying home after a long night of hunting.  “I can’t fly away,” I said.

He stopped and took his hands away from his face.  He looked me straight on with bloodshot eyes.  His chin was round, and I wanted to push on it, shape it into something else.

    “What if people are better off dying?” he asked.  His eyelashes dropped with wetness.  I wanted to carry them in my skirt the way women carried mangoes in India, trying to sell them but not really trying to sell them because then there wouldn’t be any left to eat.

    We remained silent until someone called for me over the intercom.  Another patient was going home.

On his way off shift he was sitting outside of the hospital smoking a cigarette, his shirt half-done so that I could see the curly black hair like mattress springs on his chest and the gold cross he wore around his neck.

    “Hey,” he called to me.  “What’s your name?”

    “Rukmani.”

    “I’m Bopal, a third year.  You want to get some dinner?”

We went to a sushi bar, and by the time the rolls and sticks came, the back of my neck was soaked.  He watched me stare at the food.  He shoved the chopsticks aside and nudged a piece toward me. 

“You have carpenter hands,” he said, but I didn’t understand.  I picked up the roll with my fingers and swallowed.  He laughed.  Later in his shiny efficient car we kissed three times: 
one for chemistry, two for compatibility, and three for longevity. 

“We will be together for a long time,” he said after the third kiss. He was my first kiss, my first in bed, my first everything.

That night I got on the computer, and after hours of searching I purchased my very first pattern.  It was an old style of silk robes, long flowing, drape-y things with sashes cinching in the waist and sleeves like wings.  They reminded me of fish that were not of this world.

I called my mother and told her.  I also told her about Bopal. She begged me to get a thimble.

***

[img_assist|nid=10937|title=Isn't it Grand by Suzanne Comer|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=246|height=306]Though conflicted, Bopal continued with medical school and decided upon pediatrics as his specialty because someday he wanted children with me.  He decided when it was time for us to be serious, when it was time to move in together.  He told me I wasn’t capable of making those choices.  “You are always changing your mind, Ruk.  Stick to one point,” Bopal said when we were in a fabric store, and I was cycling silk in and out of our cart, but it was easy to go between, to not fixate on one stance.  He called me peripatetic, his vocabulary extensive and free-flowing, and sometimes morigerous, but he didn’t mean it as an insult.

Bopal was blunt and forward and said I had gone too long without someone heady in my life.  I thought it strange at first, but he liked to use my towel right after I showered, when it was wet and he said he could feel the places where my body had touched it.  But later after I thought about it some I would wait for him to use my towel, and then I would use it again, feeling the places where his body had touched mine.  On the nights he worked and didn’t come home, I slept with his towel, holding it underneath my t-shirt so that it would not dry.  It smelled like the ocean.
He praised my ability with numbers, so the next day I changed my major from cultural studies to accounting.  Sex made him so happy that I’d get on the internet and watch porn to learn.  And I didn’t tell my mother but I converted to Christianity because of his gold cross.  When I touched it, it felt like Bopal, warm and hard at the same time.

To balance his rough demeanor, he bore a sensitivity that was light, but also deep.  He cried during sad movies.  He visited his elderly parents and cleaned their bathroom.  He watched his friends’ kids when they needed a night out.

    In my head I called Bopal narisimha: half-lion, half-man, an avatar of Vishnu.  My mother kept a tapestry of narisimha in the bedroom we’d shared; “the Great Protector,” he kept us safe from the things that my mother and I never talked about. 

    One night coming home very late from a surgical rotation Bopal had been doing at the hospital, a bonus shift he had taken from another resident so that he could celebrate an anniversary, Bopal had fallen asleep.  His car had veered into oncoming traffic and killed two children on their way home from their grandmother’s house.  Bopal was alive on the way to the hospital, but he died of a heart attack before the paramedics could even lift his body out of the van.     

    After I notified his parents about what had happened, I threw out the Singer, which had been giving me bobbin wind-up problems anyway, and purchased a Brother 25 stitch, which came with different feet.  Some of the stitches looked like sutures.  I finished the silk robe I had started and slept in it with a wet towel next to my waist.

II.    Some fabrics require a high tension setting; other fabrics do not and will pucker along the seams if the setting is not adjusted properly.  Ensure that the thread can withstand the tension desired; too much tension may cause cheaply-made threads to break.

My mother called me every day.  Sometimes I answered; sometimes I pretended that I did, and we would have real conversations that had nothing to do with sewing.  She sent me scraps of fabric in the mail: squares of bubbly denim, see-through chiffon, and rough polyester.  When she sent me a plane ticket, I called and told her to stop.  After that she airmailed a pattern that she had penciled.  The parchment paper was dotted with charcoal marks.  I could still picture her favorite pencil sitting behind her ear as though a watchful apprentice. 

Her instructions indicated fleece.  I purchased more than I needed, skipped class for two days to finish.  It was a combination blanket and hood, but it didn’t have any arm holes.  At first I thought I had sewed it wrong, but the instructions were clear.  When I tried it on, my arms were kept snug against my body, but I couldn’t move them.  My head was secure, my torso warm.

I stayed in this blanket for days until the one morning I woke up and did not turn away from the sun.

***

I finished school and took an accounting job at a large commercial bank.  Every morning I got to work early and stood on the sidewalk and watched the flurry of people circle through the revolving glass doors, their bodies pressed against the transparent elevator that crept up the side of the building. 

“I see you here every day,” a man said.  His cologne was loud. “What are you looking at?”

“Life,” I said.  When he didn’t move from my side I turned to look at him.  He was a large man, tall and hefty, with stunning blue eyes and an ethnicity I could not determine.  My eyes moved back to the people coming down the elevator, and it looked like they were falling.  I held my hands up in the air, and he laughed.

His name was Chris, and he’d bring me bagels and muffins and donuts and we’d eat breakfast while watching the working people go to their offices.  On our first official date he took me to an Ethiopian restaurant.  He tore the pieces of flat bread and dipped them in stew for me.  We kissed afterward, in his house.  I lost track of the number of kisses.  I lost track of a lot of things when I was with him.

When I told my mother about Chris, she asked me what I was sewing.  She seemed upset when I told her that I wasn’t working on anything.  She wanted to know the settings on my machine and chastised me because I had put the tension on five without ever starting at three.  “You will break,” she said.  “You will break.”

During a run for fast food, as my car’s engine sat idling, Chris put his head in my lap and proposed.  No ring, but he’d borrowed a crown at the window and placed it on my head. “My kingdom, my lady,” he said. 

Chris and I married within six months.  The wedding was filled with people from his family: those from his father’s American side, and those from his mother’s European side.

My mother could not leave her business to come.  It was wedding season for her too.  “When will you come visit me?” she asked.  “I want to hold you.”
“Soon.”  I wanted to bring her a child to sew for.

At the reception Chris drank too much and whispered in my ear, “It’s like you live to love me.”  He felt up my gown and pressed me against the head table.  I thought I saw my mother in the corner of the hall, holding up my old sewing machine.  I left the reception to call her again, but she did not answer.

A few days later I received a letter from my aunt that my mother had died sometime on my wedding day, around the time Chris was sticking his tongue in my mouth. 

My mother passed from a diabetes-related infection that had begun in her pedal foot.  The doctors had cut away and found a large, brackish growth that smelled like a drowned rat.  There was nothing they could do because she wouldn’t let them.  Contumacious, Bopal would have said had he still been here.

As some sort of consolation, the family sent me a box with all of her old patterns, many of them ones she had drawn up herself.    I closed my eyes and reached in.  I pulled out a mock-up for a little girl’s party dress.  It was new, articulated in her favorite charcoal pencil.  I began sewing.

III.    Pay attention to the needle thickness.  Thicker fabrics like denim, fleece, and suede require thicker needles, but more delicate fabrics like silk, velvet, and chiffon require thinner needles else the stitching will damage the fabric.

“Let’s have a baby,” Chris announced one night five months after our wedding.  “You’re not done with that thing yet?”  He poked at the dress.  I had gone back and forth on different choices for the material and had finally settled on a flattened black denim.  The piping would be white.  Every time I finished stitching two pieces together, I used the seam ripper and started over again.  The edges were becoming ragged.  It was taking too long.

“Rukmani?” My neck hurt from bending over the torn seams.  He took the ripper from me and looked at it.  “It looks like teeth.”

I didn’t ask for it back but held my palm up, hoping he would just drop it in.

“I think the pharmacy is still open; let’s pick up some ovulation kits.”  I was not ovulating.  Bopal used to schedule the cleaning of the bathroom by my period. 

Through the onion-skin walls I could hear the car starting, the engine idling, Chris waiting.  My palm was still up when I stood from the chair.  I used the inside to soothe my face, which was wet and smelled like Bopal’s ocean.

In the drug store, his arm around my waist, Chris whistled while he selected the kits.  I watched him finger them as if they were legs.  He paid the cashier who didn’t have a big enough bag for all of our stuff and stuffed them inside the pockets of his cargo pants.

    At home I took the test.  Chris cursed and said it was defective and insisted I use another stick and another until we’d gone through the entire box.  Until we’d gone through all of them.  So we went back to the drugstore, his arm still around my waist, still whistling.

     One night Bopal and I had gone to see a movie about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.  Throughout the entire film Bopal was stiff, straining against the armrest as though it were paining him. His hand was on my forearm; it grew numb.  After the movie ended, as we walked under the bright lights of the marquee, I tried to jiggle my arm back to life.  When I looked at it, I saw a purplish thumbprint marking the skin. 

    When I showed it to him he said, “Ruk, your arm … vitiated by my lack of emotional control,” and I thought he was quoting from a book or something he had read or even something I had missed from the film.  But they were his words: elegant, formal, but still reeling of feeling.  I told him it was all right, but he didn’t listen and took me dancing at my most favorite club even though he had been scheduled for a five AM shift at the hospital the next morning.

    After twelve boxes of ovulation predictor kits and almost one hundred tests later, my stomach heavy from water, Chris went to bed with his shoes still on.  I stripped, and though I had taken a bath earlier in the day, I felt I needed another one.  When I looked in the mirror I saw finger marks the color of blackened coffee along my waist.  “Vitiated,” I whispered.

IV.    It is best to sew during lunch time when the sun is highest in the sky and the light is most ample.  Using your machine at night or too early in the morning can render you blind.

    Once I got pregnant, Chris asked me to quit my job.  They threw a party for me at work, but Chris said he was too busy to come even though his office was only one floor up from mine.  Afterward, I sorted through the cards and everyone had written the same thing.  We will miss you, which made me think that they didn’t know me at all. I packed up my small box of stuff, tucking away the one photo I had of Chris on my desk.  It was a picture of him before he’d met me, a picture of a time when Bopal was still alive.  In it he is leaning on the hood of a car, cupping a pair of keys. 

***   

During the day I slept; at night I sewed.  The dark scared me—it seemed too large and our house too empty—and Chris would not let me leave the light on, so I moved my sewing machine to the guest room and worked.  The dress was not finished, but it would be soon.

“You ever get scared, Ruk?” Bopal had asked one night when he had insisted on leaving the light on in the bathroom.

“Of dying,” I said.

“I mean things like the dark, tenebrosity.”

“Dying is like being in the dark.”

“Nah,” he’d said.  “Dying is like being in the light.”
   
***

I finished the dress the morning after Sarah was born.  She was too small for it, but her eyes bugged when I showed her the contrast between the piping and the skirt.

Within a few weeks of her birth Chris began complaining.  He wanted more time for us to talk.  He wanted me to try to look decent sometimes instead of the usual salwar over sweatpants that was just easier.  He wanted more sex.

“I feel like we are slipping,” he said. 

I went to the hairdresser and got my hair cut short—got rid of all the thick, black dregs that hung around my face—and when it was styled, the hairdresser clucked, and the old ladies  who were watching Sarah sleeping in her car seat turned to stare at me.  At home I put on a dress from my time with Bopal, a tight black jersey that clung to what he called “my planets.”  “You are spectral,” he’d said with his eyes closed, his face pressed next to mine. 

The dress didn’t cling as tightly as before, but it still looked decent.  While nursing I put on lipstick and blush and tried really hard not to kiss Sarah.
I nursed her three times before Chris came home flushed with heat and triangles of sweat on his chest.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said.  “She still up?” he pointed to Sarah whom I had brought into bed with me.  Her tiny hand grabbed a hold of the jersey material, and she snuggled against it. 

When he finally came to bed he gently removed Sarah from the bed and roughly removed the dress from my body.  He placed his elbows on my breasts while he went inside of me, his bones poking at my nipples.  I tried to turn, but he forced me upright, and when he was done, he went into the den to watch TV.  I sat on the toilet; the urine burned across my stitches.  I cried silently.

In bed I thought about Bopal after the accident.  His smashed forehead, the bulge at the back of his head where his brain had swelled up, his teeth shattered.  I wanted to turn my brain off, but I couldn’t.

V.    Winding the bobbin takes practice.  Ensure that both sides of your bobbin are filled evenly for solid, smooth, and secure stitches.

Chris had taken Sarah out for his morning run, and I stood near the sewing machine, running my finger down the side and coming back with a line of dust. 

I pulled out my mother’s box of patterns and dug through, not sure what I wanted to make, but needing to make something.  My hand came across an envelope at the bottom—something I had missed when I had first gone through it.  My name was written across the top in my mother’s cursive writing.  Ruk.  Inside was a pattern for a maternity dress.  It wasn’t finished yet; only half of the pieces were sketched.  There were no instructions.  She had started with the bust, which was smocked, and the sleeve ran straight down to the bicep. 

I put the pattern back into the envelope and sealed it tight.  I left it in the box.

I began sewing something free-form.  I had a small amount of emerald organza from the underside of Sarah’s dress, so I traced and cut a bust and small skirt piece and sewed them together.  After I was finished, I blushed.  It was a see-through tankini, but I never swam.

 “People really are just lenocinant animals, Ruk,” Bopal had said one night when at a
restaurant, I’d come upon two people having sex in the ladies bathroom.  The extent of Bopal’s savagery in bed had been me on top with all of my clothes on.

    I posted a photo of the tankini on eBay and within minutes someone had bid on the outfit.  I took out the rest of the organza and made two more outfits, adding white ruffling at the edges, which I then sold for a little bit more. 

    I went to the fabric store and came back with bolts of material.  I sewed for the next month.  I did not tell Chris about the money.

VI.    Every machine is different; read the owner’s manual before attempting to thread your machine.  Older models tend to be more difficult to thread, but have a longer shelf life; newer machines are easier, but require more maintenance.

Chris worked as a loan officer at a large commercial bank.  Over time he moved up in rank.  His job was lucrative with raises every year and bonuses or promotions twice a year.  We were moving to a larger house again—this was our fourth in less than two years.  I had learned not to accumulate much, only what was absolutely necessary. 

We were in the middle of packing, and Chris asked me to get rid of the sewing machine.  He said it was getting old.  “You don’t sew anyway,” he said when I took a protective step toward it.

I went for a walk with Sarah and when I came back I found it in the trash.  The white arm was hanging over the side as though it were desperately trying to climb over the edge and spare its life.  I laughed and touched the spool.

“What’s so funny?” Chris called from the other room.  He was packing our bedroom.

“Trash.”  He didn’t say anything.  I moved the trashcan into the den but didn’t take the machine out.

    While I was emptying the storage closet, I came across a box of old photos.  In it were pictures of me and Bopal early on, when he would take digital shots of me and make prints.  Before giving them to me he’d write obscure words on the back like a game, quizzing me to see if I could make the connection between the word and the photo.

    Jongleur.  A picture of me during karaoke, blazing drunk, mouth open wider than the microphone.  I was probably trying to rap, which Bopal had dared me to do. 

    Sui generis.  I was unaware that he’d taken a photo of me.  I was standing with my back to him, my hair flying this way and that, giving a homeless person a dollar bill.  We’d gone to the symphony that day, and our tickets had cost a fortune. 

    Mephitic.  I was asleep with Bopal’s hand over my mouth.  He always said I had the worst morning breath, made me sleep with fennel seeds in my mouth, though that didn’t help.

“Are you still in love with him?”  Chris was behind me.  He knew a little about Bopal and how he had died, but that was all.

 “Why do you still have them?  Why not throw them away?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can’t compete.”

“You are not.”

“Okay then throw the pictures away.  Right now.  Give them to me, and I’ll do it.” 

Behind me through the window, the sun was going down, and when Chris stretched his hand toward the box of photos, his limb made a shadow against the wall.  It looked like a hook I’d found in an alley in India once.  It was rusty and red, and lay buried underneath the dirt.  I had tripped over it on bare feet while running, and my mother had to use her sewing needles to stitch up the skin because she did not want to pay for a doctor.  The wound had healed, but I still had a scar there that looked a little like the hook that had caused it.

    “I can’t,” I said.

    “What did you say?”

    “I can’t.”

    He moved toward me so quickly that I didn’t have time to defend myself.  He slapped me hard on the face and then walked away, slamming the front door, the noise waking our daughter from her nap.  I went to the mirror and saw that my dark skin had simply absorbed the shock of the slap. 
“Men who hit their wives are execrable.”  Bopal’s words when he’d told me about the abuse his mother had suffered at the hands of her first husband.  Bopal had been the product of her second wedding: a love marriage to a half-Indian, half-white man.  “If she would tell me his name, I’d find him and
…”

    He had never finished these thoughts, but in my head I filled in the blanks for him.  Shoot him.  Cut off his balls.  Sew his penis shut.

    I took my sewing machine out of the trash and packed it in a suitcase of its own.

***
     
    The larger house had more rooms.  I claimed my own near Sarah’s and stayed there with my sewing machine.  Chris left me alone.

When women began calling the house asking for Chris, I made my business official.  I called it Racy Ruk’s (Tasteful Lingerie) and hired a webmaster to design a site.  I applied for a license and paid a marketing consultant to promote the business. Because I filed our taxes, Chris didn’t know how much money I was saving.  Sometimes I even sewed after I tucked Sarah into bed.  The walls were thick, and she couldn’t hear me.

“When will you stop?” I’d asked my mother once.  She was sewing into the night, making last-minute adjustments for a wedding in two days.  I was seven and sleepy, and the machine made a noise like it was unzipping something, which kept me awake.  It was time to get a new machine, and she was simultaneously cursing it and goading it on so that it wouldn’t break in the middle of her projects.

“Amma?”  I came over to her side, and her eyes were scrunched like they hurt.  “When will you stop?” I asked again. 

“Until,” she said.

“Until when?”

“Until I feel safe.”  When she un-scrunched her eyes, tears ran down her face.  I tried to wipe them, but she gently pushed my hands away.  “I shouldn’t sew at night,” she said.  “Ruk, go to bed.”

I fell asleep, and when I woke in the morning, my mother was still sewing.

VII.    The outside of a piece is important, but equally as important is the inside.  The underside of a garment should always have finished seams.  Finished seams look polished and neat, and they prevent unraveling or shredding, which can show through to the front.

One night Bopal had found me surfing lollipop sites like some women surf for shoes.  I would add them to my cart and then close the window down to avoid the temptation of buying any.   I tried to click away, but he had seen.   After that Bopal used to randomly leave lollipops underneath my pillow, calling himself the “fairy popmother” (“I know, the pun isn’t exactly right,” he’d tease). 
The first time he left me a lollipop that was olive green with a bit of red in the middle.  “Like your mother’s sewing machine,” he said.  When we first started dating, he had asked for pictures of my mother, but my mother didn’t allow anyone to take pictures of her.  I had showed him a photo of the machine instead.

The second time he left an even larger lollipop shaped like mouse ears.  In the middle it said, “You’re sweet.”  He nibbled on my ear while I unwrapped it and took a lick. 

“You can eat it all,” he said when I put it away for later.  It was hard to be angry.  But when they kept coming, one every day, I told him to stop.

    “Please, Bopal, I don’t want any more.  If I wanted them, I would buy them myself.”

    “You wouldn’t.”

    “Yes, I would.”

    “Ruk, you’re being neanic.”

    “What does that mean?”

    “You’re being childish.”

    “I’m not.”

    “Tell me really why you want me to stop.  Speak your mind.”

    “I’m afraid.”

    “Of?”

    “Too much happiness.”

    Bopal laughed.  “There’s no such thing.  Happiness is not like energy; it can be created.  It’s limitless.”

    “How do you know?”

    “Because I’ve never had an unhappy day in my life.”

    “But the day I met you.”

    “I wasn’t unhappy, Ruk.  It was an epiphany.”

    I didn’t agree with him.  I also didn’t tell him what I really believed—that happiness was like water.  There was only a certain amount of it to go around, and if you used too much, then there wouldn’t be any left for later, even for your own children.  And that disappointment, hurt, and betrayal were all distractions to happiness, which weren’t always bad because then that meant you didn’t use too much happiness too early on. 

    After our discussion, Bopal stopped putting the lollipops under my pillow every day.  He did randomly, sometimes once a week, sometimes more than that.  But he always remembered, and though I threw them in the trash without him knowing, I had appreciated them. 

***

After five years of Chris’s infidelity, Sarah determined our arrangement wasn’t working and that we should split.

“You don’t love each other anymore.  Divorce.  That’s what Jane’s parents did.”  Jane  was her best friend, classmates in first grade.  Sarah had the keen insight that many children had, yet she had something a little extra—the emotional capability to deal with the ramifications of this insight.  She could handle it. 

 “Dad said that he doesn’t love you anymore.”  She was a transparent little girl, unable to keep secrets, and I was thankful that her life was still simple.

“He did?  When?” 

“I asked him if he loved you still.  He said no.”

“Oh.”   

Various sewing patterns were arranged on the dining room table for Sarah.  She’d asked me to make her a special dress for Jane’s birthday party on Saturday.  I had selected about ten for her to choose from, and now I pulled one of a girl in a red sleeveless chiffon dress with a thin sash and a gauze top and showed it to her.

“No,” she said.  “Jane’s wearing red, so she told me that I can’t.”

“I can make it in any color you want.”

“Mom?”

“What?”

“Don’t you care that Dad doesn’t love you anymore?”

The pain was dull and old, the way an achy bone feels when it’s been overused slightly. We lived like respectful roommates who didn’t know each other very well, sharing in the domestic duties and each spending as much time as we could with Sarah.  When we had occasion to speak, it was most always about Sarah.

“No,” I said.

 “I don’t believe you,” Sarah said. 

“Pick an outfit,” I told her. 

“Be right back,” she said.  She ran down the hall and into my bedroom.  When she came back she was holding up the dress I had made before she was born: the black with white piping.  It would fit her perfectly now.

“I like this one.  Do you?”

I held her on my lap and nodded.  “Perfect.”

After I read her a book and she had fallen asleep, I went online and surfed for lollipops.  I added a few chocolate ones for me, and ones that had frosting for Sarah.  I had a total of ten lollipops in my cart when I made a move to close the window.  I paused.  My heart raced as I dug into my purse for my credit card.  I purchased the pops.  They would be here in a few days.

I sat back in the chair and closed my eyes.  I could feel Bopal’s arms around me.

VIII.    Sewing is always about the end product—the finished result.  It teaches one to think about how minor details will affect the grand outcome, and how subtle changes in pattern shapes and sewing lines can produce varying results.  Sewing requires foresight, not hindsight.
   
When Sarah was thirteen, Chris decided that he was going to teach her how to drive. 

“She’s too young,” I said, but I didn’t do anything. 

    For the entire hour they were gone, I gathered all of the little scraps of fabric that had no place and began piecing them together on my sewing machine.  I didn’t bother changing the thread or adjusting needle thickness; I sewed and sewed and only stopped when the needle broke while I was trying to attach two squares of denim.  The needle was thin—the same type that I had used to sew Sarah’s party dress.  The machine jammed, flashing an error message.  I tried to unscrew the needle to replace it, but the screw would not turn.  Frustrated, I threw my bag of sewer’s tools against the wall and began to cry. 

    I cried so hard that I almost missed hearing the telephone.  It wasn’t until the answering machine picked up that I ran to the phone, breathless.

    “Hello?” I screamed into the phone.

    “Ouch, Mom.  Why are you yelling?”

    “What’s the matter?  Where are you?  Has something happened?”

    “Chill, Mom.  Dad and I are at the Dairy Queen.  I wanted to know if you wanted something.  Dad actually wanted to know.” 

    “No, I don’t want anything.”

    “Are you sure, Mom?  I mean, Dad’s asking.”

    “Yes, I’m sure.”

    Bopal once told me a story about a very particular, very orderly resident who was divorcing his wife over a fork.  I didn’t believe him until he explained that what she’d done was a form of deray, disorder.

    “She’d mix up the utensils, Ruk.  So sometimes there’d be a lone spoon in the forks tray.  Other times a lone knife in the spoons tray.  It was the lone dinner fork in the salad forks tray that did it.” 

    Bopal said that most people were like that.  We all held a world order in our mind, and if something was off in that world order, it could cause us major upset.  He said we often didn’t know what would disrupt it: sometimes something as simple as a fork, other times something as monumental as a death.  And sometimes something as commonplace as a husband thinking of his wife at a Dairy Queen.

    By the time they got home—safely and in one piece—I had replaced the needle and was well on my way to a king-sized quilt.  I hung it up to show Sarah who wrinkled her nose in disfavor.

    “Love you, Mom,” she said, kissing me on both cheeks and heading to her room. 

    After Sarah had gone to sleep, I went into my room and shut the door.  I took out a scrapbook of convincing opinion columns I’d cut from the local paper.  I read them every night before bed; I admired these people’s beliefs, how they could believe in something so strongly.  It was the types of letters Bopal might have written if given the chance. 

    When I finished the last letter—a woman upset that the city council had voted against building a park for disabled children —I closed my eyes and drifted off.  In my dreams I was in the car with Bopal; sometimes I was the only one in the car.    

“Wake up, you’re dreaming.  Wake up.”  I opened my eyes and shrieked. 

    “It’s me, it’s Chris.”

    I rubbed my eyes and looked at him in the dark.  He’d never come into my room before unless he needed to ask me something, and even then, mostly he’d stand outside in the hallway and ask across the threshold.
I turned the light on, so I could see him well where he sat near the window.  It had been a long time since I had really looked at him.  His blue eyes were the color of breast milk, his build fatty.  His hands that had at one point seemed menacing were still menacing but now etched in wrinkles and blue veins. 

    “I can’t do this anymore.”  He grabbed me by the wrists and kissed me. I should have pushed him away.  I should have stopped it.  Deray, deray, deray, deray, a voice droned, but I covered my ears.  I gave in to what he wanted, in the way I had done before. 

    The next morning, he hardly said a word other than to ask me to pick up Sarah after basketball because he was going to have a late night.  His eyes avoided mine.   

    For the next six months I sewed nonstop.  Within weeks I had sewn an entire new wardrobe for Sarah, which made her popular at school.  I dug out the pattern for the maternity dress my mother had started and sewed it, even though I knew that I would have no use for it again.  And when I felt a pain so deep that it was like something was plunging my heart of its blood, I talked to my machine, asking it questions that I would have asked Bopal.
How many stars are in the sky?  Why do newborns need to be held?  What is the purpose of a convict?  That there were so many ambiguous questions like these—limitless unlike happiness—provided me comfort.  And then as quickly as this brume set in, it vanished.
Chris tried to come into my room one other time, but I kept the door locked.  Though he knocked, I held onto my scrapbook, lying naked underneath the spread of the maternity dress, and did not answer.
   
IX.    A weak[img_assist|nid=10938|title=The Judgment of Mr. Carson by Rachel Dougherty|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=383|height=383] machine is better than a weak operator.

“We are all doctors manqué, failing to prolong the inevitable,” Bopal had said to a friend of his who’d killed a patient in surgery.  I remembered thinking it cold, detached: wondering how Bopal could get away with saying things like that and have so many friends by his side.  Hundreds of people had come to his funeral.  But thinking about it now I found it reassuring—a comfort that in whatever we did, we would never be good enough, but that was okay as long as we were self-aware.  Bopal knew this truth, and he was not afraid to live an imperfect life. 

Earlier Chris had taken Sarah out for another driving lesson.  I had seen Sarah drive; she was learning well.  They continued to go for ice cream afterward, though Chris never asked me if I wanted any.  I was close to finishing the quilt, which I worked on in between lingerie for the business.  It was large—bigger than the size of my room—and so colorful.  It had come to symbolize different projects that had been important in my life and was composed of scraps from that time.  I remembered the trips to the fabric store: in college, after Bopal died, when I got married, after my mother passed.  I remembered everything.

I was digging for more scraps in the closet when the phone rang.  I smiled thinking how,  though her father had stopped, Sarah never failed to call and ask me if I wanted any ice cream.  The answer was always no.  I answered, still smiling. 

“Sarah, no ice cream for me, love, I—”

“It’s Chris.”

“Oh.”

    All I heard was “hospital.”  I dropped the phone, couldn’t find my car keys, and ran the entire two miles uphill to the hospital.

Chris and Sarah had been driving together; he said he was driving.  He wanted to take her to a little café tucked in the mountains.  It was winter, and though it hadn’t snowed recently, the roads were icy and slick.  Around a bend one big deer and two little deer had been standing on the metal grates along the pavement.  Chris swerved, the car spun, and they hit a thick cottonwood tree head on.  The passenger-side airbag went off.  It broke several of Sarah’s ribs, her nose, and gave her a head injury that had her out.  The doctors still couldn’t tell if she’d suffered any trauma to the brain.  The driver-side airbag had also released, but Chris’s face had hit something hard.  His front teeth were shattered.  He held an ice pack to his lips, which were swollen, and when he talked, I couldn’t bear to look at him. 

It’s Bopal.  Bopal Reddy.

It’ll be all right, Miss.

“Stop talking,” I said to Chris, but he kept going on, about how sorry he was, about how they should have stayed on the freeway, but she’d wanted to be a little adventurous, and he couldn’t say no.

“Stop talking!” I screamed. 

I had never yelled at Chris or anyone before.  He went quiet and sat down.  He held the ice pack to his head, and I saw where the blood from his mouth had caked.  He was crying. 

“Father manqué, mother manqué,” I consoled myself.  “Family manqué.”  The vocabulary soothed.

When Sarah finally opened her eyes, the doctors said she would be fine.  She had suffered no injuries to her brain.  Her broken bones would heal over time, but her nose would have a lasting bend to the right. 

“Nothing major, you will always be a very pretty girl,” the doctor said.  Even with the bandages on her nose and her forehead bruised, she was stunning.  A perfect mix of everything and nothing. 

“I’ve decided,” she said, holding my hand with her right and Chris’s with her left, “that  it’s time for you two to get divorced.”  I laughed.

“I’m serious.”

“If you want me to, I will,” I said.

“Mom, stop being so morigerous.” 

She held up a book someone had left on the end table.  A dictionary.  I felt a little flutter inside the way a catheter feels after it has just been inserted.
It was Sarah who finally decided for both of us that it was time.  After her release from the hospital, we filed for divorce.  Chris moved out of the house and with the money I had saved, I paid off the mortgage in full, and Chris signed the deed over to me.  I had more time for my business, and I worked to replenish the money I had used to pay off the house. 

X.    An expert seamstress understands that there are always lessons to learn, new projects to tackle.  If willing, the job is infinite.

I finally finished the patchwork quilt; it was over twenty feet long.  It had to be folded and weighed too much to carry.  At night I wrapped myself in it several times and felt my mother near me.  It was as though her fingerprints were everywhere.  If I fell asleep in the quilt, I didn’t have the terrible nightmares.  Instead my dreams were filled with light and music.  Sometimes Bopal was there, loving me so hard it hurt—like someone was cutting open my body and then placing a warming salve under all of my joints, squeezing until that warmth radiated throughout. 
When my daughter fell in love for the first time, she called me from her dorm room at college and asked what it felt like. 

“Like a blood massage,” I told her.  She laughed.

“That sounds about right, Mom,” she giggled and told me that he was an aerospace engineer, a soft-spoken man from Kansas who packed her lunch and left little notes inside and sometimes index cards with one or two nonsensical words like jiggledy-jamz or potter-putter or whamdom.  “He likes to make up words.”

“Love him, Sarah.  Love him more than you think you are capable of.”

“I want you to meet him.”

“I want to meet him too,” I said. 

After we hung up, I thought about Bopal.  The only remnants I had of him now were photos, memories, and a dictionary filled with rare words—words that he’d used in his regular, colloquial life.  Inside was a random note he had posted on the refrigerator after a rough night at the hospital.  He had come home silent.

There will always be the inevitable.  And there will always be words. 

I was lucky to have loved him so much.  I was lucky that he had loved me as much as he did.

After talking with my daughter, I sat on the porch looking at the moon. I wanted to give away my sewing machine.  It was time.  The business had grown enough that I was ready to hand it over to someone else; I had no need for money any longer. 

My eyes tried to find shapes in the moon’s textured surface, but there was nothing.  Just a buttery-colored circle emanating the light that I imagined my daughter was feeling in another person’s arms. I covered myself in the quilt until I couldn’t move any longer.  I felt safe.

Annam Manthiram is the author of the novel, After the Tsunami (Stephen F.  Austin State University Press, 2011), which was a Finalist in the 2010 SFA Fiction Contest and in the 2012 New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards, and a short story collection (Dysfunction: Stories, Aqueous Books, 2012), which was a Finalist in the 2010 Elixir Press Fiction Contest and in Leapfrog Press’ 2010 Fiction Contest.

There was nothing Tempo hated more than lying to a grown up, but she didn’t want to disappoint Joy, who’d done her a huge favor by even telling her about the babysitting in the first place. Although they’d been friends for forever, Tempo hadn’t been Joy’s best friend forever in years. In fact, it had come as a complete shock when Joy pulled her out of the lunch line earlier that day and told Tempo she’d found her a job babysitting for the Peraltas. Tempo couldn’t help asking why Joy didn’t want the job herself.

Joy’s eyes did a loop-the-loop. Her goody goody sister Denise, who’d sat for the Peraltas before she graduated, had let it slip that Joy had only just finished eighth grade. Not to mention the fact that Joy was, face it, horrible with little kids.

“Mrs. P. and I didn’t really jell,” Joy said. “But she’s bound to like you. You’re such a goody goody, too.”

Maybe compared to Joy, but Tempo wasn’t anywhere in the same universe as Denise-who’d made National Honors Society and led Chesterton’s tennis team to the state finals. Who’d just started college at Princeton. Tempo knew that when it came time to apply for colleges, she’d be dying to get into somewhere like Princeton.

“Anyhow,” Joy said, “can’t you use the money?”

Although Joy didn’t mean it in a mean way, Tempo shut right up after that. Joy went on, saying the Peraltas paid, like, ten bucks an hour, and the kids were easy peasy. The only thing was, Mrs. Peralta was anally retentive, and she wanted babysitters with “a certain level of maturity.” Translation: fourteen-year-olds need not apply.

Joy, however, had it all figured out, and she’d invited Tempo over to her house after school. Now, in her bedroom, which was about a hundred times messier than Tempo remembered it, Joy was making Tempo rehearse everything she was going to say. When they finally called up Mrs. Peralta and right off the bat the lady wanted to know her age, Tempo just replied, “Sixteen, Mrs. Peralta.”

The woman asked whether Tempo had her license yet.

“Almost sixteen,” Tempo said. Already, the whole thing wasn’t sitting well with her.

Mrs. Peralta was quiet, and Tempo would have hung up right then and there, except Joy was sitting up on the bed and making frantic come-on-come-on motions with her hands.

Tell her about the class, Joy whispered. Sell yourself.

Tempo told Mrs. Peralta that over the summer she’d taken the Red Cross babysitting course, which covered safety-related topics and stuff like how to role model and positively influence younger children. She talked about her cousins, who were the exact same ages as Elizabeth and Edwin. She watched her cousins almost every weekend because her aunt and her mom both worked at the mall on Saturdays. Which was ad-libbed, but totally true. Joy smiled and began twirling her way around the clumps of dirty laundry on the floor.

“I see,” Mrs. Peralta said, in a tone Tempo couldn’t quite work out. Sometimes people got judgy about single mothers who had to work on weekends, and so that Mrs. Peralta wouldn’t think she was a charity case (and so Joy wouldn’t think so, either), Tempo said she just wanted to earn some pocket change.

Joy stopped twirling. Pocket money, she said, but Tempo didn’t correct herself.

“I understand,” Mrs. Peralta said, and to Tempo’s relief, she began to ask about grades and favorite subjects. (English, and math was a close second.)

Mrs. Peralta asked whether she had a boyfriend.

“No, ma’am.” Tempo thought about her mother’s boyfriend, Allan. He wore tons of cologne, but he always smelled like he’d just climbed out of a deep fryer. Just thinking about how her mother’s clothes reeked every time she went out made Tempo sick to her stomach.

She went into the final part of her speech, saying how adorable and funny and smart Elizabeth and Edwin must be. She was dying to meet them. Joy flopped back onto the bed, snickering, while Tempo said she loved spending time with kids that age-what with their energy, their innocence.

“Very well,” Mrs. Peralta said. Tempo could almost make out the smile in her voice. “Next Thursday. Quarter to six.”

Tempo thanked her, got off the phone, and grinned at Joy, who bounced off the bed, punched a fist in the air, and shouted, “Score!” Just like the boys she was always hanging around with these days.

 

[img_assist|nid=10579|title=Summer Moment by Merle Spandorfer © 2013|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=500|height=448]
Tempo hadn’t been exaggerating when she told Mrs. Peralta she loved spending time with kids. She had a knack for figuring out children, like factoring and the quadratic formula. Whereas sometimes she couldn’t buy a clue about what the girls in her grade were so fascinated with. She’d almost rather babysit than hang out with her so-called peers.

Still, Thursday afternoon, she wasn’t exactly feeling like the babysitter of the year. It was about a thousand degrees out, and she had to walk all the way down past the high school and up Grandview Ave, where the houses went from big to huge to monstrous. By the time she reached the Peraltas’, she’d gone from semi-sweaty to completely gross. After she rang the doorbell, she wiped her forehead with her wrist and peered at her reflection (yuck) in the little privacy window beside the door.

Mrs. Peralta, dressed in a simple black sheath that probably cost a hundred bucks at Bloomingdale’s, smiled at Tempo, and Tempo shook hands and glanced into the entryway-the foyer-with its marble tile, flowers bursting from vases set in recesses in the wall, a wide staircase that swept up and around and up and around.

“You have a lovely home, Mrs. Peralta.” She tried to make it sound natural.

Mrs. Peralta said, “You look a bit flushed. Ungodly hot for September, isn’t it?” She felt Tempo’s forehead in a motherly kind of way. Her hand was cool and steady.

She let Tempo into the house (the AC was cranked) and called for her children. Two seconds later, the girl appeared. Elizabeth-seven years old, with her hair up in a French braid, a dress that might have matched her mother’s except hers had a bow in the front.

The girl squinted at Tempo and said, “I don’t need a babysitter.”

Tempo’s cousin often used that same line, and so Tempo said she was just there to babysit a little boy. “I think his name’s Edward?”

Elizabeth shook her head. “Edwin. His name is Ed-win.”

Tempo went on, saying she’d feed Edwin lots of junk food and candy and soda-which caused Elizabeth to gasp out loud and her mother to frown. Tempo told them she’d let him play outside, but only up on the roof, and afterward she’d make sure he didn’t take a bath or brush his teeth before she put him to bed, which would probably be sometime after midnight.

The girl was giggling now and telling Tempo that was all wrong wrong wrong. Tempo said shoot, maybe she’d need somebody to keep it all straight for her, and Mrs. Peralta smiled as Elizabeth offered her gracious assistance.

Upstairs, somebody screamed.

They found Edwin in his room, throwing a first-class tantrum, flailing on his little pirate ship bed and howling.

Elizabeth kept asking, “What’s the matter, Eddie? Do you miss Denise?”

Which only made him shriek more, because apparently, ever since Mommy had told him they were having a babysitter tonight, he had indeed been expecting Miss Denise.

Tempo peeked around Mrs. Peralta. “Know something?” she said to Edwin. “Denise was my favorite babysitter, too.”

The boy took his crying down a notch, and Mrs. Peralta turned to Tempo. “Denise Foster was your babysitter?”

Tempo kept talking to Edwin as though they were having a private session. “Did Denise ever play Confectionery with you?”

Edwin shook his head and Tempo, without mentioning Joy, told the Peraltas about the time she’d gone over to the Fosters’ house-she’d been eight then, although now she embellished and told Mrs. Peralta she’d been almost ten. Denise and Tempo had baked cookies and little cakes in Denise’s Easy Bake Oven. They’d decorated the treats with icing and sprinkles and those tiny colored marshmallows that come in Lucky Charms and then arranged everything on doilies and cut glass plates.

“Denise is an absolute goddess,” she said. Edwin nodded solemnly.

In actuality, Tempo did kind of idolize Denise, who was the sort of person who knew exactly what to do in every situation. That afternoon, for instance, by giving it a name like Confectionery, by explaining how aesthetic appeal and presentation were as important as the baking itself, Denise had turned their game of make-believe into a lesson in sophistication.

Edwin was sitting up now, bouncing, saying he wanted to play ‘fectionery. Without missing a beat, his mother said maybe later, and she told the children to go ahead and play now, she’d kiss them when she and Daddy came home that night. She smiled at Tempo, and it was like Mrs. Peralta was beaming all this positive energy into her. If at that moment Tempo had looked in the mirror, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see herself glowing from the inside.

Tempo followed her back downstairs to the kitchen, where Mrs. Peralta went over the children’s schedule for the evening.

“No phone calls out, except in an emergency,” Mrs. Peralta said. “And no friends over. Otherwise, let common sense rule.”

It was a little after six now. She beckoned for her husband, who’d just appeared, and introduced him to Tempo.

Mr. Peralta wound his tie around his neck and said, “Wow, that’s a name.”

Tempo, channeling her mother, said, “It was my dad’s idea.”

“Is your father musical?” Mrs. Peralta asked.

Tempo shook her head. “He was in love with his car.”

“Oh, you poor thing.” The woman looked simultaneously amused and genuinely sympathetic, and Tempo felt another ray of positive energy.

Mr. Peralta cinched his tie and looked Tempo over. “Small for sixteen, isn’t she, Suzie?” His wife frowned and told him not to be crude.

Tempo was blushing, and she almost died when Mr. Peralta winked at her and said, “Small for fourteen, actually.”

Mrs. Peralta slapped him hard with her purse and grabbed his arm. “One more word, and you’ll find yourself without a babysitter or a date tonight.” She tried to smile at Tempo. “I’m sorry. We’re going to leave before you decide we’re completely beneath respectability.” Tempo was still blushing as Mrs. Peralta yanked her husband out of the kitchen.

Yesterday in the hallway, Joy had told Tempo to put some Kleenex or something in her bra before she went to meet the Peraltas. Hilary Kralich and Lacey Davidson were standing right there, laughing their heads off, while Joy said without boobs, Tempo didn’t look anywhere near sixteen.

“Do you even wear a bra yet?” Hilary asked.

Tempo knew Hilary hated her guts, especially after Mrs. Carson had discovered her copying Tempo’s earth science test at the end of last year. (Hilary had also stolen Tempo’s report on President Clinton’s reelection and plagiarized from it, but nobody had found out about that yet.) Still, Joy was the one Tempo was furious with. Even if Joy were only bragging-she’d never had to stuff her bra-it still felt like a betrayal.

Joy must have sensed this, because later she told Tempo she wasn’t trying to put her down.

“But seriously, Temp,” Joy said. “The Peraltas take one look at your chest, and they’re going to think you’re not to be trusted.”

That night, Tempo had tried out Joy’s advice using a pair of socks. It startled her to look in the mirror and see those lumps in the middle of her chest. She felt the way a pregnant woman probably did, or someone with a goiter or a tumor, something that didn’t belong. With that thought, she’d canned the whole idea, although now of course she’d had to listen to Mr. Peralta’s awful comments instead. Plus she was feeling guilty all over again for lying to his wife.

*

Just as Joy had said Denise had said, Elizabeth and Edwin were a total dream. The only snag came before bedtime, when Edwin asked Tempo to take a bath with him. He just wanted her to keep him company, but still, she couldn’t help feeling supremely weird sitting there on the edge of the tub, just looking, or just trying not to look while it stared right back at her. She’d seen pictures before, naturally, but it was different seeing a penis in person. A pecker, Joy would call it. Earlier that week in study hall, Joy and company had passed around a dirty version of the Peter Piper tongue twister.

For their story, the children selected “Little Red Riding Hood,” which they were both evidently familiar with, because when Tempo got to the part where the wolf persuaded the girl to pick flowers for her grandmother, Elizabeth declared, “He’s lying,” and Edwin cried, “Bad wolf! Bad wolf!”

Tempo herself felt the wolf was just beastly (she’d always thought the hunter at the end a bit sketchy, too). She kept reading, though, and when everything turned out all right, or at least the girl and the grandmother came out alive, the children actually clapped, said good night to each other, and went to bed, just like that.

“I love you, Miss Tempo,” Edwin said, before she kissed him. It was almost enough to make Tempo want her own baby brother.

In her room, Elizabeth said she didn’t need a goodnight kiss, but she insisted Tempo sit beside her until she fell asleep, which was in about two minutes flat. Tempo felt the positive vibes zapping into her again. She sat for a little while longer watching Elizabeth, taking in the halo of light the bedside lamp put over the little girl’s head.

[img_assist|nid=10665|title=Urban Landscape by Lesley Mitchell © 2013|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=500|height=368]
Back downstairs in the library, Tempo had gotten through about a chapter and a half of her book for Honors English when someone knocked on the front door.

It was a soft tap tap tap, and that was it, as though the person already knew there were children sleeping inside. Tempo thought about the wolf in the fairy tale knocking at the grandmother’s door, which was absolutely ridiculous for sure. She told herself that maybe it was the Peraltas and they’d forgotten their key. Mrs. Peralta had said they’d be back sometime after nine. Which would make them a little early, actually. It took Tempo another minute to work up the nerve to answer the door.

It was only Joy. She giggled and waved while Tempo unlocked the door, and now Tempo discovered it wasn’t only Joy, but Hilary Kralich, too. The girls pushed their way inside.

Tempo shut the door behind them and locked it again. “You guys scared me half to death,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Surprising you,” Joy said.

Hilary grinned and said, “Surprise!”

Tempo told the girls they couldn’t stay because Mrs. Peralta had said no friends over while she was babysitting.

“Oh.” Joy’s smile disappeared. “Fine. Then you’re not our friend.” She waited a second before she smiled again and said, “Just kidding.”

The girls brushed past Tempo and sailed down the hall toward one of the living rooms. Hilary leapt onto the squarish sofa, and Joy collapsed on the daybed, putting her feet up on the cushions and flinging her arm across her forehead like she’d swooned.

Tempo stayed back in the hallway, saying she had tons of homework, including five chapters of Catcher in the Rye. Okay, the reading was optional, and it wasn’t really her kind of book-the narrator had an attitude problem and a tendency to swear. But she wasn’t going to tell them that. She reminded them that she wasn’t allowed to have anyone over.

Hilary snorted. “Lame.”

“You’re going to get me in trouble,” Tempo said. It was ironic because she hadn’t needed to use that tone of voice all evening. “The Peraltas could be home any minute.”

Joy sat up. “When?”

Any minute, Tempo said again, and now thank God the girls were getting up and walking back toward the front of the house. Instead of leaving, however, Joy started up the staircase with Hilary bounding along right after her.

Elizabeth and Edwin were asleep, Tempo protested, and anyway it wasn’t right to go upstairs in somebody’s house unless you were invited. Joy said pshaw, like that was a word she used all the time, and Hilary shook her head and told Joy, “Oh my God, she really is a wet blanket, isn’t she?” She asked Tempo what was she was going to do, tell on them? She threatened to scream-and when Elizabeth and Edwin woke up they would see who would tell on who.

Joy said to Tempo, “I have to show you something up here.”

Tempo followed them upstairs, half afraid of what they would do if she didn’t stay with them and half curious about what there was to see. She paused in the hall between the children’s bedrooms, but Joy and Hilary continued on.

“Wait up,” Tempo whispered.

You could probably have fit Tempo’s whole apartment in the Peraltas’ bedroom suite. She could sense the size of the place even from the doorway, which opened into a sitting room, and beyond that, the main bedroom. Joy and Hilary were banging around in the bathroom.

“I can’t remember,” Joy was telling Hilary, “whether Denise said to look in the master bath or the master bedroom.”

“Denise?” Tempo watched Joy slide open the drawers under the vanity, rummaging through everything. The bathroom gleamed-the faucets, the towel bars, the handle on the toilet-as if all these tiny spotlights were being focused on Tempo.

Hilary opened a cabinet and then slammed it shut again.

“We really shouldn’t be in here,” Tempo said, as Hilary started into the Peraltas’ closet.

Joy went through a set of shelves, a formidable display of shoes, polished and stacked two by two. “She said it wasn’t even really hidden.”

“Denise?” Tempo asked again. And then: “What isn’t hidden?”

Joy ignored her. She and Hilary headed for the bedroom, leaving Tempo to straighten up and turn off the lights in the closet and the bathroom. Tempo was sure Mrs. Peralta would be the type to notice anything out of place. Returning to the sitting room, she thought she heard noises downstairs-footsteps rustling, voices calling her name. She hurried out to the hall. But there was no one.

Back in the bedroom, she told the girls she wanted to go downstairs.

Hilary smiled. “Then go, Lame-o.” Joy, searching through the drawers of the Peraltas’ bureau, didn’t answer.

Tempo stared at the back of Joy’s head. When they were little, they used to try to send each other telepathic messages on the playground, certain they could succeed if they both concentrated hard enough at the same time. Now, however, Joy was on some completely different, completely insane wavelength.

Joy crawled onto the bed and patted down the duvet. She thrust her hands under the pillows, into the pillowcases. Finding nothing, she crawled back down.

Tempo tried to smooth out the comforter. “Please.” Her throat caught on the word. “You’re going to get me in trouble.”

Joy finally looked up. “Jeez, Temp, don’t be a baby.” And then she yanked open the drawer of the nightstand and said, “Here. We. Go.”

It took Tempo a second to identify the contents of the bag Joy was holding up. The substance in the bag.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Why would the Peraltas have that?” According to every health teacher she’d ever had, marijuana was, like, really bad for you. It was toxic. It was illegal.

Joy shrugged. Everybody needed to unwind, she said. Mrs. P. was pretty uptight in case Tempo hadn’t noticed.

Hilary was jumping up and down, clapping her hands. “Maybe they need help.” She snatched the bag from Joy and beamed at Tempo. “You know, getting in the mood.”

“What mood?” Tempo asked, and then she made a face. “Gross.”

Hilary dangled the bag in front of Tempo. “Here’s a question for you, Brainiac. What do you get when you put sex and pot together?”

Tempo pushed the bag away. Joy, all wiser-than-thou, said, “Denise and Trayne would get completely randy whenever they smoked it. One time, I could smell it all the way downstairs, and I went up to Denise’s room to warn her. I saw them on the bed together. He was lying back with his pants off, while she crouched over him with her head down near his stomach. She was sucking at it.”

A wad of horror wormed its way down inside Tempo. “She was sucking at it?”

Joy laughed, and Tempo asked, “What did you do?”

“I cleared my throat and said, ‘How does it taste?’ and Trayne said, ‘Uh, Joy, we could use a little privacy.’ Denise didn’t even look up. Oh my god, it was the funniest thing ever.”

Hilary said, “A sexpot!” She giggled. “Get it?  Sex plus pot equals sexpot!”

Tempo was quiet, her brain spinning with the times Denise had played House and School with Tempo and Joy, the day she’d given Tempo a boxful of Barbies because Joy wasn’t interested in them, the afternoon of Confectionery. The memories whirled and frayed and then fell away, leaving only the picture of a girl and a boy, naked. A girl and a boy naked together-doing drugs and doing each other, as Joy would put it. She would be laughing her head off while they did each other, did that to each other.

Joy took the bag back from Hilary, and Tempo said, “Put it away, Joy. God, I’m all nauseous now. It’s disgusting.”

Hilary sneered. “Disgusting? Mrs. Peralta being a sexpot?”

Joy said, “I don’t blame her. I think Mr. P.’s pretty hot, actually.”

“Just put it away,” Tempo said.

Instead, Joy opened the bag. Tempo almost gagged on the smell. Taking three baggies out of her pocket, Joy said, “Share and share alike.” She pulled a handful of marijuana out and divided it between the baggies. She handed one baggie to Tempo and one to Hilary.

“You’re stealing it?” Tempo asked.

Joy sighed. “It’s just a little bit, Temp. They’ll never ever miss it.”

“Damn straight.” Hilary gave her bag a shake. “This is enough to roll, like, two joints. How about a little more?”

Joy shook her head. “I don’t want to risk it.”

“Risk what? They won’t know who took it.”

Tempo stared at Joy again. Obviously, the Peraltas would know who took it, or at least they would know who they thought had taken it. But why wasn’t Joy saying anything? Why wasn’t she putting the bag away? She wasn’t even looking at Tempo.

“Come on, Joy.” Hilary said. “Let’s just take the whole freaking bag while we can.”

Tempo had trouble getting her voice out. Finally, she said, “I can get more the next time I babysit.”

Joy turned.

“I’ll take a little each time,” Tempo said. “The way Denise did. I can always come back for more.”

“What if the Peraltas don’t like Tempo?” Hilary asked. “What if they don’t have her back?”

“They’ll have me back.” Tempo steadied herself. “Trust me.” She managed to sound serious and at the same time act as though it was no big deal.

Joy nodded. “That’s it, Temp. That’s my girl.” She started to put her arms around Tempo, and for a split second Tempo felt herself about to slap her friend across the face and tell her to go to hell.

But she didn’t.  She went ahead and hugged Joy, as if they were two little girls again, meeting under the monkey bars at recess, and while Joy put the rest of the marijuana back in the nightstand drawer and closed it, Tempo arranged the pillows and finished smoothing out the duvet.

*

The girls had just reached the foyer downstairs when they heard the keys being laid down on a counter, the murmuring in the back of the house. Hilary and Joy slipped out the front door. Tempo closed it behind them and locked it.

She made her way back to the kitchen. Mrs. Peralta asked how everything had gone that evening.

“Everything was fine,” Tempo said.

She wanted to tell Mrs. Peralta the truth about Joy and Hilary and the marijuana. She wanted to tell her about Denise. About herself.

The woman paid her. Tempo put the money in her pocket, slipping the bills behind her plastic baggie. She fingered the baggie for a moment.

Finally, she said to Mrs. Peralta, “I think I forgot something.”

She hurried upstairs and raced back down the hall to the master suite. In the doorway, she paused, feeling as if she really had forgotten something, or lost something. Then she dashed into the bedroom, put her baggie into the drawer with the Peraltas’ stash of weed, and hurried back out.

At the stairs, she met Mr. Peralta.

“Tempo, ma Cherie.”

He came close to her, so close she could smell the wine on his breath, feel the warmth on her forehead. She stood still as his hand brushed the top of her head.

“I hope we see more of you very soon,” he said.

It would still be some years before Tempo would come to understand that she was like a little boy playing with matches when she whispered, “I think you’re pretty hot, Mr. P.”

His hand jerked back, and then froze. It hung in the space between them, as if it were something separate from him. She stared at his hand, and then stared at him staring at it. He wouldn’t look at her.

The hall light came on, and Mrs. Peralta appeared. “Is everything all right?”

Mr. Peralta laughed, a phony kind of laugh. “Tempo was just saying good night to the children,” he said.

After a pause, Tempo nodded. “I promised Elizabeth.”

In her room, Elizabeth was sleeping, her perfect face angled slightly away from the light, just as it was when Tempo had left her. Tempo reached out, as if to pet the girl. She sensed the Peraltas hovering in the hallway behind her.

When Mrs. Peralta called the next day, or over the weekend, or the following week, it wouldn’t matter whether Tempo lied or didn’t. Mrs. Peralta would know. Not everything, but she would know enough to understand Tempo wasn’t such a goody-goody after all. Maybe she would think she wasn’t to be trusted. Maybe she would think she wasn’t mature enough. Maybe she wasn’t, maybe she was.

Tempo turned off the bedside lamp.

Bryan Shawn Wang grew up a few miles from the King of Prussia mall and now lives with his wife and children in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. A former biochemist, he teaches biology and chemistry at local colleges. His fiction has recently appeared, and is forthcoming, in Rathalla Review, The Summerset Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, and Kenyon Review Online.

 

“The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is not a problem of physics, but of ethics. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.”

                                    Albert Einstein

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The tears began to stream down my face as I watched him play and I didn’t even care if the degenerates who were there with me saw it and made fun of me for it later.  There was something so beautiful, so perfect about the performance that it made me not care.  It was Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number 2.  Usually I didn’t go in for Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake and The Nutcracker were too fruity for me.  I was more into the sterner Teutonic fare like Beethoven and Wagner.  But this piece had some bite to it, unlike the Tchaikovsky to which public radio had accustomed me.

The pianist was in a league of his own.  He was a curly-haired, doughy-faced Russian guy in his late twenties-not that much older than me.  More than simply getting the notes right, he played with a flair, a flourish, that was mesmerizing.  I knew nothing about pianists, but I had to think that this guy was among the top five or ten in the world.  I simply could not imagine ten people who could be better at it than him.  Maybe that got to me, too-seeing a true genius at work.  It’s not often one gets an opportunity to do that.  But, then again, perhaps the cause of my tears was that all of the counseling the courts had forced me to undergo had just made me soft.

*

In the 1930s, scientists learned that nuclear reactions could be both initiated and controlled.  It began with a large isotope (a misleading term because it’s actually one of the smallest particles of matter in existence), usually of Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239 because of their ability to produce an excess of neutrons.  Scientists bombarded this isotope with a smaller isotope, typically a neutron.  The collisions then caused the larger isotope to break down into two or more smaller elements.  Using Einstein’s equivalence principle, it was possible to accurately predict how much energy would be produced by this nuclear fission.

*

The story of how I’d gotten to be in that matinee audience at Heinz Hall was a cautionary tale from which it was unlikely anyone would ever learn anything, least of all me.  During what was supposed to be my junior year of college, I’d gotten involved with the “wrong crowd.”  Of course, that’s a relative term, depending solely on one’s perspective.  They were the “wrong” crowd if one desired to accomplish anything of value in life, or to stay out of jail.  They were the right crowd, however, if one’s goal was to obtain narcotics with which to get high.  At the time I met this crowd, that was the driving force in my life-my raison d’être.  It hasn’t escaped me that if an opiate represents one’s reason to, well, ‘être, then one doesn’t have much to live for.  I didn’t.  As far as I’m concerned, in spite of what my judge and counselors have tried to tell me, I still don’t.

I had help getting in with that wrong crowd.  My accomplice’s name was Mia.  Not much of a name for a femme fatale, but she wasn’t much of a femme fatale.  She was thin, short hair, kind of pale.  Put pointy plastic ears on her and she could’ve passed for an elf.  Not a Keebler Elf, more like those mischievous pixies in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Of course, I was no leading man, either: too short and thin through the chest and shoulders.  Mia and I attended the same college and met one night during our junior year at some douchebag frat party.  It was a pretty big university and our majors were in different departments-I was school of science while she was studying art history-so I couldn’t recall ever having seen her before.  I had just enough beer in me that night to approach her when her female friend disappeared momentarily. Walking up to her, I asked: “Can I buy you a beer?”

“They’re free,” she replied.

“All the better.”

She smiled and shook her head: “I don’t drink that swill.  I’m only here because my friend was hoping to see some guy.  More of a hairdo than a guy but, whatever.  He didn’t show so we’re heading to a party thrown by some art students.  Care to tag along?”

A simple truth of human existence is that almost everything bad that happens to us, we cause ourselves.  Sure, Job was God’s punching bag.  But for the rest of us, those whom the Old Testament Jehovah didn’t decide to use as subjects of social experiments, we bring about most of our problems through the choices we make, whether it’s smoking cigarettes, driving too fast, having unsafe sex, or whatever.  There are lots of little steps along the path to our downfall that if we would’ve only pulled back, or veered off in some way, we may have been able to avoid it completely.  Granted, we’re all going to go down in the end.  But plenty of us go out of our way to expedite that process.  I didn’t know it at the time-one rarely does-but this was the first step on the way to my demise, and I leaped on it with both feet.

*

I peered to each side to see if anyone from my group had taken note of my tears.  There were five of us in total, plus one counselor from the halfway house there to chaperone us.  I was situated in the middle.  The two guys to my left, Gerald and LaRon, were sleeping.  Gerald had his head tilted back and a river of drool flowed out of the corner of his mouth; LaRon was snoring-loudly.  To my immediate right, Ty was playing Angry Birds on his iPod Touch.  Beside him I could see that Walter’s attention was completely consumed by his unsuccessful struggle to hold in the farts from the Mexican food we’d had for lunch.  God bless him for trying.  Mike, the counselor, was the only one in our group aside from me paying attention to the concert.

With the exception of Walter, who’d gotten popped for his fifth DUI and was in his mid-forties with a wife and kids at home, the rest of us, including Mike, were all in our twenties.  Aside from Walter, we were all first-time offenders, arrested on drug-related charges.  Since none of us had committed violent crimes, the courts system had sent us to a halfway house rather than jail.  That was a gigantic relief to me because even though I’d done everything I could to kill brain cells I was still quite protective of my rectum.  The program supervisor at the halfway house, a graying former hippy who was clinging to some misguided faith in humanity, had arranged for us to attend this matinee with the hope that the exposure to culture would somehow elevate us.  As I surveyed the sea of white hair in evening gowns, suits and tuxedos filling the ornate concert hall, I thought it much more likely that we would bring the rest of the crowd down, rather than being uplifted ourselves.  It’s not that any of us were evil.  Speaking personally, I wasn’t as good as Jesus, Mother Teresa, or Princess Di, but then again I wasn’t so bad as Hitler, Charles Manson or Walt Disney.  What we were was misguided and weak-losers, if one insists on reducing the subject to binary thinking

*

They used to call it splitting atoms, though that wasn’t really an accurate description of the process.  The enormous amount of energy released during nuclear fission is caused by matter being converted into energy.  If the masses of all the atoms and sub-atomic particles the process begins with are measured against the masses of the subatomic particles that remain after the process is completed, it is apparent that some mass is “missing.”  Depending on if the reactions are controlled, enough energy can be released to either power or destroy an entire city.  While the atomic bomb isn’t grounded upon Einstein’s E = mc², it does cogently illustrate his theorem.  Energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared.  Neutrons colliding with atoms and worlds are destroyed…

*

People say opposites attract.  That is true when it comes to chemistry where protons and electrons exert a pull on one another that holds together the nucleus of an atom.  But when it comes to human chemistry the most elementary intro psych textbook will insist that like attracts like.  That was our problem: at core, we were too similar.  Even though Mia was a right-brain art student, and I was a left-brain physics major, at the core we shared more or less the same strengths and weaknesses.  Not proton and electron, but more like neutron and neutron-two common fissile isotopes thrown together by the life’s nuclear reactor.

It was Mia who first introduced me to weed, then blow, and finally junk.  I bounded over the various gateway drugs like an Olympic hurdler.  We both had holes to fill.  The crater that Mia was trying to seal was the aftermath of something bad that had happened to her as a kid, something that she would never talk about.  Whatever it was, it affected her outlook.  It’s funny because even though her behavior and the things she said would’ve gotten her burned for a witch back in the Pilgrims’ days, she nevertheless shared the Puritans’ outlook on humankind, thinking that everyone was essentially evil at bottom.  Like the Puritans, she believed that evil should be scourged away, only instead of using a hair-shirt and cattail whip, she employed heroin and cocaine.  My situation was different.  Aside from my parents divorcing when I was eleven, I’d had a pretty standard, trauma-free upbringing.  When my father left, my mother placed all her hopes for the future squarely on my shoulders.  It was a heavy burden for a eleven year old to bear-and it hadn’t gotten any lighter by the time I was twenty-one. 

*

I glanced at my program.  The orchestra had progressed into the second movement: the Andante non troppo.  The pianist was really getting into it.  His curls were flapping in the air as he jerked his head about violently with each note.  I was amazed at how high he lifted his hands above the keyboard before bringing them crashing back down again, while always striking the correct notes.  I recalled when I had taken piano lessons as a kid-I was hesitant to remove my fingers from the keys for fear of losing my place.  But this guy was a maestro.  He literally could’ve played with his eyes closed.  I glanced over at Mike to give him an appreciative nod and caught him with his index finger buried to the first knuckle in his right nostril.

*

Nuclear fuel contains millions of times the amount of free energy contained in a similar amount of chemical fuel, like gasoline.  The earliest fission bombs, for instance the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs that were dropped on the Japanese cities Nagasaki and Hiroshima, were thousands of times more explosive than a comparable mass of conventional weapons.  Modern nuclear weapons are hundreds of times more powerful for their weight than these first pure fission atomic bombs.  All of this is brought about by the collision of particles of matter so small that they cannot be seen, even using an electron microscope which is able to produce magnifications of up to about 10,000,000 times. 

 

While he was not directly involved in the Manhattan Project, one year before his death Einstein revealed that he considered the one great mistake he’d made in life to have been signing the letter to F.D.R. recommending that the construction of the atom bomb be undertaken.  The justification was the danger that the Germans would devise one first.  Robert Oppenheimer, the leading physicist in the Manhattan Project, later commented that after seeing the first nuclear bomb tested in New Mexico in 1945 a line had come to him from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”  Neutrons and atoms colliding.  Mere isotopes.  Destroyers of worlds.

*

At first I spent the money my mother sent me to live off of to buy drugs.  But once Mia and I had gotten hooked, the money dried up quickly.  So we dropped out of classes (we’d both stopped going anyway) and used the refunded tuition.  But that didn’t last long.  We started selling stuff: books, televisions, computers, even clothes.  Eventually, we ran out of things to sell and we were left with two choices (technically, I suppose, it was three, but at the time neither of us really considered quitting an option):  we could either steal or turn tricks.  We chose stealing as the lesser of two evils.  Before I’d gotten involved in drugs I wouldn’t have known how to go about becoming a thief.  But one good thing about being in a drug community is that it exposes a person to some pretty unsavory characters.  In retrospect, it’s probably not all that good of a thing after all, but it comes in handy when searching for accomplices.

Garbage was a former biker we’d met at a house where people used.  Neither Mia nor I had any idea what was his real name might have been and we didn’t really care.  Everyone called him Garbage and that was good enough for us because, in the end, it was better not to know too much about people.  Anyway, he looked like a “Garbage”-big and hairy with a complete lack of personal hygiene.  When we encountered him at the flop house, we’d just sold Mia’s easel and the last of her paints and canvases in order to score.  I was in the process of coming up into lucidity enough to talk when I noticed him on the couch beside us.  I had no clue as to how long he’d been there.  From the look of his eyes, I could tell he was in about the same state as me, so I told him we were looking for a way to scare up some cash that didn’t involve any of our orifices.  He said: “You’re in luck.  I have a little ‘business’ and I recently lost my partner.”

“Did he get pinched?” I asked.

“No, no.”

“Dead?”

“No, nothing like that.  I mean I lost him.  I literally lost him.  He got an insurance settlement for fifty large for a slip and fall at WalMart and we cashed the check and drove down to New Orleans.  I lost track of him somewhere in the French Quarter on the third or fourth day.  Had to hitchhike the whole way home alone.”

“Oh.  So you guys did insurance scams?”

“Naw, that was on the up-and-up.  We were into precious metal extraction.”

I stared at him blankly and he added: “We steal copper pipes from abandoned houses.”

*

[img_assist|nid=10576|title=Elephant at Large by Lesley Mitchell © 2013|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=500|height=372]

Mike glared at Ty until he finally stopped playing his game and glanced up.  An annoyed look tightening his face, Mike nodded for Ty to put the iPod away.  Ty clucked his tongue and made a disgusted “Tcch” sound that drew the attention of several of the blue hairs seated nearby.  Jamming the phone into the hip pocket of his jeans, Ty turned to me for moral support in his confrontation.  Seeing my tear-streaked face, his eyes became wide.  I would definitely hear about this later, but I didn’t care.  The orchestra had progressed to the final movement-the Allegro con fuoco, and I was completely enthralled.  I was unsure what was eliciting this visceral reaction from me, and I didn’t care.  When confronted with true beauty, it’s best not to question it too much because the mystery of its existence is half of its allure. 

I made a mental note to find this piece on the ‘net using the computer at the halfway house so that I could download it onto my iPod.  Technically, iPods were contraband in the halfway house, but we all had them and the counselors pretty much all knew it.  The program the court had placed me in had some manual labor for us to perform, and lots of counseling, but those could only fill up so many hours.  The rest of my “rehabilitation” was spent watching Jerry Springer, listening to my housemates argue over video games, and staring at the ceiling reliving over and over again everything that happened.  My parents phoned almost every night-my mother, anyway.  My father had gotten remarried and started another family years ago.  When I first got arrested, I think he decided to place all of his eggs in that basket.  I didn’t take my mother’s calls most of the time.  When I did she always wanted to talk about what I’d do when I got out-going back to school and all.  I played along, but the truth was I didn’t care about the future anymore.

*

When fission occurs with U-235, one neutron is used, but three neutrons are produced.  If these three neutrons encounter other U-235 atoms, other fissions can be initiated, producing yet more neutrons.  In layman’s terms, it is the domino effect in action.  This continuing cascade of nuclear fissions is called a chain reaction.  One becomes three.  Three becomes nine.  Nine becomes eighty-one.  Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds…

*

Mia volunteered to come along and help with the “job.”  She thought it would be an adventure.  Garbage didn’t mind because he said it would be another set of hands; I think he had a thing for her.  Plus he’d already made it clear that he would get two-thirds of the take whether it was just me or both of us, so it wasn’t any money out of his pocket.  He borrowed an old, beat-up van that, from the look of it, had probably been involved in some abductions at some point.  He’d found a house out in the suburbs of Monroeville that he insisted was vacant.  We arrived late on a foggy night, parked the van in the driveway and did a quick reconnaissance of the place.  It was a one-story, ranch-style with a small, neat yard.  Peering through a window, I could see there was a minimal amount of furniture and no clutter just sitting around, as though the owners had already moved out, or were in the process of doing so.

The front and back doors were locked, so we walked around the side and Garbage kicked in a window with one of his enormous, steel-toed biker boots.  Then he told me: “Climb in there and go open the back door for us.”

Observing the pile of broken glass on the floor, and the jagged remaining edges of the window still clinging menacingly to the panes, I stepped back and mumbled: “Why me?”

Garbage looked cross, and snapped, “Because I’m too goddam big and you don’t want your little girlfriend getting cut up on that broken glass.  Do ya, bud?”

I frowned and muttered, “Okay.”  Then I climbed gingerly through the window, avoiding most of the shards of glass scattered across the floor.  I made my way to the back door double-quick because I suddenly had visions in my head of that smelly oaf Garbage ravishing Mia against the aluminum siding.  She’d gotten high before we left, and I didn’t think she was in any condition to fend him off.

When I got to the door, they were waiting.  Garbage smirked, “Good job, bud,” and gave me a patronizing pat on the cheek.  I would’ve liked to have socked him in his ugly mush, but I’d never hit anyone in my life and I didn’t think he was the right person to start with. 

We negotiated a rickety set of narrow wooden steps down to the basement.  It was finished, but most of the furniture had been removed, which was lucky because I was tripping all over myself until we found the light switch.  Garbage located the laundry room and Mia and I followed him in.  Seeing several copper pipes running along the drop ceiling, he exclaimed: “Pay dirt!”

While Mia walked around the little room, humming to herself and picking up and examining the various odds and ends, I asked Garbage, “What now?”

He dropped the Army surplus rucksack filled with tools that he’d carried in with him.   As he bent over to open it, his leather jacket pulled above his waist, revealing the top third of the crack of his hairy ass.  Rifling through the rucksack, he removed a plumber’s wrench which he handed to me.  Nodding at a plastic patio chair in the corner, he said: “Why don’t you climb up on that chair, little fella, and see if you can’t loosen them pipes in the corner.”

“What’re you going to do?”

He answered me by producing a power saw from the canvas bag, plugging it into an outlet on the wall and giving it a test squeeze.  As it buzzed to life, a twinkle of demented glee filled his bloodshot eyes.

*

As the Allegro con fuoco was rising to its final crescendo, the tears continued to stream down my face.  I started thinking about genius.  The Russian pianist was obviously a genius, but his genius lay in interpretation, not creation.  Tchaikovsky, the composer, had created the music.  He’d made something-something sublime-that had never existed before, could not have existed were it not for him.  Even Einstein had never really done that.  Einstein merely commented on things that already existed.  Of course, they were things nobody else would have been able to see.  The rest of us are surrounded by these things-they’re the sheet music of the universe-but we’re completely incapable of reading the notes.  It takes an oddball genius like Einstein to decipher those notes from out of the very ether and play it out for all of humanity.

Einstein had a great love of music, and was a gifted and enthusiastic musician.  I’d read that he’d once asserted: “Life without playing music is inconceivable for me.” His second wife, Elsa, claimed to have fallen in love with him because he’d performed Mozart on the violin so beautifully.  In addition to Mozart, he’d revered Bach, and admired but didn’t love Beethoven.  I’m not sure what his thoughts were on Tchaikovsky, but I have to think that if iPods had existed in his time, Einstein would have had Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number 2 on it. 

Einstein was my hero-the reason I’d pursued physics.  I even had a poster of him hanging on the wall in my old bedroom in my mother’s house.  But that was all gone now.  As a convicted felon, I could never get the clearances necessary to work in nuclear physics.  But maybe, deep down, that’s what I’d wanted all along.  If Einstein was Mozart, then I was Salieri.  Hell, I wasn’t even Salieri; I was the organ-grinder out on the street playing for spare change.  No, I wasn’t even that.  I was the organ-grinder’s monkey, capable of nothing more than capering about drunkenly and holding up a tin cup for alms. 

*

On the development of nuclear technology, Einstein had remarked: “Since I do not foresee that atomic energy is to be a great boon for a long time, I have to say that for the present it is a menace. Perhaps it is well that it should be. It may intimidate the human race into bringing order into its international affairs, which, without the pressure of fear, it would not do.”  You can’t be right all of the time…

*

It had been a few minutes and I was still working on that first pipe joint.  Since I had taken college-prep courses in high school, I’d only had shop in middle school and had been lousy at it then.  I was better with my mind than my hands-at least, I had been.  While I was struggling with the joint, I overheard Garbage finish sawing through his first pipe.  I looked over in time to see the two ends of the pipe separate and one end begin spurting water like a geyser.  “Shit!” Garbage exclaimed, stepping away from the gushing water and switching off the power saw.  “I can’t believe they left the frickin’ water on!”

Mia clapped her hands delightedly.  Kicking off her sandals, she began to dance under the shower of water spewing from the breached pipe, humming the melody to: “Singing in the Rain.” 

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“What do you think, Einstein?” Garbage snapped.  “We find the main water valve and shut it off.”

“Where would that be?” I asked, not budging from my perch on the chair.

“If I knew that, I would’ve already turned it off, genius.” 

That was clearly disingenuous: he was flummoxed.  His partner, the guy who ditched him in the French Quarter, apparently had been the brains of their operation.  Garbage was the muscle-a pack mule capable of grunting out a few words.  He had opposable digits, but aside from allowing him to shoot up, I could see that they provided him not much more benefit than an orangutan wanking himself in the zoo.  I didn’t like hearing Einstein’s name on the lips of that ape, and still stinging from his earlier jibes, I responded without really thinking: “I’m not the savant who cut a water pipe before checking to see if the water was on.  I thought you knew what you were doing.”

Mia seemed completely unaware of our confrontation.  She raised her hands in the air and spun around like she was at a Phish concert.  The water was rushing out at such a rapid rate, and the laundry room was so small and enclosed that the water on the floor had already risen to her ankles.  I could see from the glint in his eyes that Garbage had found a convenient scapegoat for his mistake: “You’ve got a lot to say, don’t you?”

“No,” I tried to backpedal a little, realizing there was no one there to pull that gorilla off of me in case he attacked, “I’m just saying, you know, we need to do something.”

“I am going to do something,” Garbage replied, flicking the power saw back on.  It whirred to life with a menacing whine.  “I’m going to give you a lobotomy from the neck, you intellectual asshole.”

He began to slowly approach me, holding the saw up at shoulder level like a handgun.  He’d gotten about halfway across the tiny room when we heard from outside the door: “This is the police!  Whoever is in there, come out right now with your hands where we can see them.”

Garbage froze in his tracks, and spun his head to look over his shoulder in the direction of the voice.  When he did so, Mia, who was still dancing-too high to process what was happening-bounced into Garbage, causing him to drop the saw.  The saw hit the water and made a loud, crackling noise.  Mia’s back was to me, but I don’t think she ever had any idea what hit her.  Her body began convulsing.  The lights had already cut out when I heard her crash to the floor, splashing water into my face.  Garbage’s face I did see.  We locked eyes just before the saw hit the water.  He had a look in his eyes like he’d just stepped in dog crap; I don’t think he fully comprehended what was about to happen because he didn’t seem terrified at all.  Maybe he was a little high, too.  The electrical surge from the saw hitting the water caused a fuse to blow, so I only had to watch a few seconds of it.  Sitting in that plastic chair had protected me.  For once in my life I was grounded.

The cop who’d yelled moments earlier, shouted through the door again. His index finger probably caressing the trigger of his gun, he sounded a little spooked: “What the hell just happened in there?”

I explained.  They shut off the water and the main circuit breaker to the house, just to be safe, before coming to retrieve me.  I wouldn’t get out of that chair, though, until one of the cops had splashed through the water to yank me out of it.  I was in jail when Mia’s family had her funeral back in Johnstown, where she’d grown up.  It was probably just as well that I couldn’t go.  They wouldn’t have wanted me there.  I’m sure they blamed me for her death.  I blamed me and I knew the truth of the situation.  At least, the truth as I saw it.  We were inconsequential.  Isotopes too small to notice.  But when we collided, one split into three and we released enough energy to destroy two worlds.  They were small worlds, to be sure, but they were the only worlds either of them had.

*

The pianist banged out those last triumphant notes and the crowd broke into raucous cheering, shooting to their feet as though pulled up by some cosmic puppeteer.  The tears continued to stream down my face as I followed suit.  Einstein once said: “Solutions are easy.  The real difficulty lies in discovering the problem.”  But how are we supposed to discover the problem when it lies within ourselves-sewn into the fabric of our being at the subatomic level?  Neutrons colliding with atoms until eventually worlds are destroyed.  Whatever problems Mia and Garbage may have suffered from had been solved when that power saw hit the water in which they were standing. 

And me?  My problem was I needed a fix.

 

Stephen Graf is a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He holds a Masters Degrees from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and Trinity College, Dublin, a PhD in British Literature from the University of Newcastle in England, and he currently teaches at Robert Morris University. Among other places, he has been published in: AIM Magazine, Cicada, The Southern Review, The Chrysalis Reader, Fiction, The Minnetonka Review, New Works Review, SNReview, The Willow Review, The Wisconsin Review, and The Black Mountain Review in Ireland. His short story “Hadamard’s Billiards” was awarded an Honorable Mention for the 2012 Pushcart Prize.

[img_assist|nid=10053|title=Two Together #9 by Gillian Bedford © 2013|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=500|height=672]
At the end of each day and, later on, throughout the day, he made lists, hundreds of thousands of lists.  Lists of his failures (short), lists of his successes (longer), lists of other people’s failures and successes, lists of all the people other people had loved, lists of who had believed in god that day, who had forgotten, and who had stopped looking up and started looking ahead.  It didn’t really help him with work but it helped him keep track of Life, which constantly seemed harder to keep track of. 

He was not a watcher, not by any means.  He didn’t waste his time sitting on benches in the park letting his biological clock tick quickly towards sagging age-no, in fact, he liked to think of himself as a rather efficient person.  And efficient people took good notes, about everything, and this he did meticulously.  He was proud to say he had not forgotten a single note he had ever taken-he wasn’t one of those who sat down at dinner and stammered about things they had wanted to say and had wanted to share but couldn’t for the life of them remember.  Absolutely not.  He had lists-and they, as far as they reflected his ability to observe his world, were perfect reflections.  Perfect. 

He didn’t live with anybody yet.  Although only forty-two, he realized the problem of this, as his biological clock had ended up ticking quite quickly even without any bench sitting, but he would solve it soon.  This year, in fact, he had made a list of eligible women and he would begin (after August vacation) to interview them, as it were.  He would never be so blunt, of course; he would be polite, and nice, and equally eligible.  Hopefully he would not have to get to the bottom of that list; if he did and none proved eligible, or the eligible ones proved stubborn (which would imply some sort of ineligibility) he would make another list.  In one year’s time, there would be a wife in his relatively nice middle-sized house.  In two year’s time, hopefully twins.  A child, if he wasn’t that lucky, and he understood that even lists and efficiency couldn’t always hold a candle to luck.

He had eight friends.  Thirty-seven acquaintances.  One hundred and thirteen dependable business acquaintances; two hundred and four possibly dependable business acquaintances.  Ninety-three uncategorized Facebook contacts.  Twelve dependable friendly acquaintances, nineteen possibles, and one true friend.  No parents above ground.  And yes, he most certainly had a list of all his friends, except for the one true friend. 

She was not efficient.  She was untidy, and she had married an untidy man and had untidy children, the kind who smiled and laughed and played splattered with smearings of food and dog spit.  Unconscionable, but they were her children, not his.  She came to his house (he did not go very often to hers) because the multiple untidy persons he met there could easily cause him discomfort.  He usually claimed he could not remember why he and Celia had ever been friends because he knew, now, that he would never be friends with, to be precise, such a slob.  But of course he remembered, and it wasn’t just because Celia reminded him every time she saw him.  It was because, deep down in his secret self, the part that thought when he was almost asleep but still able to think, he went back to that first time and made lists of all the excuses he’d have to make so she wouldn’t know he thought of it.

They had met in high school, freshman year, in the most banal English class where they’d introduced each other to the class and she had looked like a wreck and he’d looked not bad but a little worse than he did now.  She hadn’t learned how to do her hair yet and so it was all in tangles when he’d said hi, my name is irrelevant and I like black things (he’d been just a little bit dark and negative and pessimistic back then).  She’d said hey my name is Celia and I love invisible pink unicorns.  He’d thought she was an idiot but after a few classes she came over and asked him what he believed in.  He said he went to church and believed in nothing.  She kept asking questions: what did he want to be, where had he gone to school before, did he like school, what did he like to study, did he even like to study, had he ever been arrested, did he drink, and he’d said why do you care? And she’d said because you’re the only one here with a quarter of a brain, and he’d said only a quarter? And she’d said she only had one fifth, he should be happy, though she didn’t think he was very happy very often.

They’d been friends because he’d desperately wanted someone to talk to.  He’d wanted someone to ask him questions because he had his own answers from all the years when nobody had asked him anything, and being relatively perfect back then (his perfection had admittedly decreased with age) he wasn’t going to go finding people.  And besides, she’d been interesting.  She was a failed preppy, a tangle of mismatched colors and incomplete hair, and while being neat was just as important back in those dark and pessimistic days as it was now, being neat was only enjoyable when other people weren’t.  And except for Celia, they had all been superlatively neat.

So they’d banded together and annoyed each other to high heaven but had a ball doing so, calling the other every two minutes to complain about the world and its awesomely depressing ways.  And when they went to college they still called, Celia now to ask about what was the excuse God had put in men’s heads instead of brains and he to ask the same of women.  After college came a short lull, and then an invitation to Celia’s wedding, and then she was seeing him again to talk about life, and marital love, and work, and marital fights, and book-clubs, and then the cessation of work for children, and children, and more marital fights, and dogs, and more book-clubs, and marital love, and a new novel on marital love and children and dogs, and four more new novels about marital love and children and dogs, and then books of poetry, gardening, kindergartens, life, philosophy, the world, and did he still think he fit in the world the same way he used to because he sure looked it, plodding and plodding and plodding along.  Well, he’d said, you certainly seem to enjoy my plodding well enough, you’re here more than anywhere else, and she said she’d rather be anywhere else than at his house except he was so darn stubborn.   

But it was in October when, at his still relatively nice middle-sized house (he didn’t yet have enough money for an addition), Celia drove up to his door with the slobbering dog and the two food-covered children and told him she’d lost her house and needed a place to stay.  And he’d looked at the slobbering dog for a very long time and said how, exactly, do you lose a house?  And she said a pile of men whose shirts say bank come in a truck and take it away.  He’d said where’s Owen?  And she said he’s in jail to rot until his toes turn green.  Oh, he’d said.  Well, can I come in?  she’d said.  He opened the door.

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He often wondered afterwards if she’d only turned in her own husband for fraud just so she could put a hurricane in his house called Home Redecorating the Homeless Way (Celia called it her “feminine touch”) but then he thought that was mean because he knew how long Celia was working selling cosmetics to ugly people, the only first job she’d been able to find.  What was all that college for, he’d asked her, and she said I haven’t worked in eight years, do you know what that means?

She put piles of flowers everywhere in his once neat and clean and shiny bathroom and kitchen and bedrooms, and because she didn’t have time to change the flowers the flowers got old and wilty and eventually dead, but the minute he’d throw them out she’d tell him she wanted her children to have flowers around them so they would always know happiness.  He’d wanted to say a lot of things then but she’d also said she never wanted her children to hear bad words so that they’d always have clean mouths, so he’d said nothing out loud.  So she’d put the flowers back, and when they started to wilt he started replacing them himself, trimming them and putting them in the vases with a happy little forbidden word whispered with every bouquet. 

And then the bathroom.  Women were supposed to be clean, men messy, but Celia must have thought the bathroom was a big moon bounce of towels, or something, because that’s what the bathroom became.  Except it was more of a moon slip as the towels and tiles didn’t stick, except when the towels were wet, when it all became a moon jungle, complete with a squelching monsoon floor.  And he’d hear her in there with the children, giving them a bath at ten pm, playing water games and singing water songs. 

And when she was finished and taking the naked children wrapped in towels back to the guest room where they all slept he’d go into the bathroom and not exactly scrub it clean but something very close to that, and all in a huff from cleaning other people’s mess he’d walk to the room to talk to Celia about the Guest Code of Conduct when he’d hear her humming a little song to them in the dark, and then a quiet when are we going to go home?  And an equally quiet I don’t know, and then why are we here? And then a because if you’re lucky you get to have one really good friend, and if you get one there’s a special invisible contract which says you will do anything for each other.  And this is my one friend. 

Well, what could he say after that, he sat down in his nice neat bathroom and when she asked if she could take a shower he just let her and went to his bedroom.  And as he was falling asleep he made a list of all the reasons why he had always liked Celia.  In the morning he cleaned the spilled cereal and walked the utterly stupid dog and didn’t say a word against anybody until he got home and found the children had made a fort in the middle of the living room out of his bed pillows and couch pillows and bed blankets.  It looked like some Mongolian tent, right there in the middle of his living room, and when he lifted the blanket he found the crumbs sprinkled like large dust particles all over his no-longer clean carpet and the dog in the middle of it, smiling as he put blizzards of black hair on the ivory pillows and blankets.  And when Celia came home he shouted anyway, and she shouted back that she didn’t want her children hearing shouting and he said fuck your stupid children-and then Celia cried, and he had to say sorry and wait outside the shut guest room door for three and a half hours until eleven thirty at night, when Celia said she was sorry she was so difficult and he said he was sorry he was so anal and the kids kind of looked at them both from under their blankets and weren’t sure if things were still okay or not.

All of this, of course, put him into an absolute frenzy of list-making.  If there had been many lists before, there were hundreds of neat piles of them now, everywhere.  Sometimes he’d be up late making lists, and then he’d realize there were lists all over the floor, and his floor looked like a mess, it looked like a Celia mess, and he’d jump up and carefully pin and staple and paperclip them together and then organize them into type: lists of Celia’s bad cooking skills, lists of Celia’s bad child-rearing skills, lists of the stupidities of Celia’s children, lists of the stupidities of Celia’s dog (this was the longest by far), lists of the reasons why Celia should go, lists of the reasons why Celia should stay, lists of insults for Celia’s husband (only slightly shorter than those for the dog), lists of reasons why not to kill Celia’s husband, lists of reasons why to kill Celia’s husband. 

And then, after about three months, Celia came home one night and said she would be leaving.  Well where was she going?  A hotel room, she supposed.  And the dog?  It wasn’t that nice a hotel, she said.  Well could she afford it?  No.  Well why was she leaving?  Owen’s coming home, she said, or at least he’s getting out.  How?  His sister finagled it out for him, apparently she’s got money but only for him not for me so he’s out but we’re on our own.  Let him come here, I suppose, it can’t be that much worse, he said.  I’m not going to do that, Celia said, I’m not going to ever bring him here.  He’s no longer my husband, not really.  My friend is no longer his friend.

And she said thank you and thank you and all that thanking business, which made him very uncomfortable because he hated to be thanked for things by Celia since he never really felt he had to give her anything, everything of his was sort of hers by default, and when she was done she said she was going to tell the children and he watched her walk up the stairs.  And then he looked at the slobbering dog and the fort the children had rebuilt in his living room, and they really didn’t seem so bad, and the fort was rather ingenious, and the dog had a friendly feeling and Celia was an idiot but she knew everything about him and she knew everything about everything somehow, and he needed to make a list and so he went upstairs to his bedroom and made a list of all the reasons why Celia should stay forever.  And when he finished he made a list of all the reasons why Celia should leave forever and when he was finished with that he tacked them both up and stood back and looked, and he saw that the list for Celia staying forever was longer than any of the other lists he had made before in his life. 

He looked at it for a while, because this time he knew he was fully awake and not almost asleep.  And then he thought of the interviews, and he opened his sock drawer and took out the neatly rolled list of eligibles, and he looked at it for a moment and looked back at the Celia list.  And then efficiently, carefully, he ripped both lists into a hundred little pieces and threw them in the air, letting them fall from his clothes as he walked to tell the children they could keep his living room as long as there were flowers.

 

Alessandra Davy-Falconi, originally from Boston and Pittsburgh, is currently a student at Bryn Mawr College.  She was a winner of the 2011-2012 Helen Creeley Poetry Contest, read her work at the 12^th Annual Boston National Poetry Month Festival, and has a piece soon to be online in The Hive: Apiary Digital Edition. Her writing is influenced by anything and everything; she writes purely to tell stories in as many ways as possible. 

 

[img_assist|nid=10041|title=12 Years by Lisa Tarkett Reed © 2013|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=400|height=384]

“Butter is too bold,” Caroline announced, tossing the sheet of color samples to the floor. “In fact, this entire strip is too loud.” 

“Why not buy the sofa first and paint the walls after?” Paul suggested.

“I’m waiting to find one I absolutely love-but I can’t live another minute with these tacky white walls.”

Paul wanted to say that dingy beige walls were no less tacky than white ones.  Or that he’d rather have a place to put his ass. There was a time when living without furniture seemed appropriate, if not welcomed, when an extra chair equaled an old fruit crate and his dresser was made of plastic, but now that he was nearing forty, an empty den felt like a regression to his failed twenties. Still, they were in the cautious stage of living together, when she closed the bathroom door to pee, and he waited to trim his nose hair when she wasn’t home. 

Paul handed Caroline the paint samples and kissed her forehead. “You choose the color, and I’ll paint the walls.”

“Don’t be silly, I’m hiring professionals. Instead of wasting those hours on menial labor, you could be learning techniques to improve your efficiency or just relaxing. Do you know how many dentists burn out before their prime? Really, Paul, we met at one of my “Using Your Free Time Effectively” lunch and learns, weren’t you listening?”

“I was too distracted by your legs.”

“People sign up for my lunch and learns to hear what I have to say, not gawk at my legs.”

When he opened his mouth to reply, she yanked down the hem of her skirt and headed for the large bay window.  Paul took a step towards her on the off chance she’d asked for help, but she attacked the task with same precise, quick fashion she did everything.  As she stood on her tip toes and stretched her lean arms to extend a metal tape measure to the top of the window frame, he marveled, yet again, that she was his.    

She was beautiful, more beautiful and successful than he ever thought capable of attracting, and she knew it.  With a flawless face and a few impeccably tailored suits, she had built a career as a D.C. dental sales rep with a higher paycheck than his, for the time being.  There was an imbalance between them that would steadily shrink over the years, as she aged and he built his practice. He would ask her to marry him when they were on more equal footing, when to be refused by her would leave him shaken, yet able to move on.  In the meantime, they would share a house, beige walls, and, eventually, the sofa of her dreams. Unromantic perhaps, but like everything in his life, he had learned to be more rational with his feelings. 

 

From the endless bland samples with delicious names like popcorn ball and toasted oatmeal, Caroline finally chose winter garden, a greenish beige that resembled the detritus of supple summer leaves.  She had placed the color strip on the table between them during breakfast and lauded the color’s versatility, never asking what he thought of it. As he waited for his eight o’clock patient to arrive, Paul browsed home improvement websites, searching for an alternative: a cadmium red or vermillion or alizarin crimson, a pulsing color to arrest his attention each time he entered the den.  He wanted something that forced him to stop, for just a moment, and feel the blood pounding through his veins.  

Reds always had that effect on him. Of the hundreds of paintings he created in his twenties, only three were stowed in the attic of the new house, and all were predominately red.  The rest, a decade’s work of varying success and palettes, lay rotting in the Henrico County dump beside the double mattress he had shared with his ex-wife Emily.

Emily had favored blues. Ceruleans, sevres, and cobalts featured heavily in her work, at least while they were married.  Though he hadn’t spoken to her in years, he still kept one of her paintings, a portrait of him sitting beside a barred window in their studio, examining the dust floating in the interrupted light.  She had glanced up from her easel one morning and smiled at him until he abandoned his still life to pull her onto the paint-splattered drop cloth beneath their canvases. When they finished, she had asked to paint him, and he had sat with his skin covered only in flecks of oil colors, watching the dust they had disturbed move in and out of the light.

She gave him the painting when they separated, asking him to keep a small part of her and their life together even after he threw his own work in the dumpster behind their apartment.    On the day she moved out, he watched her pull a small canvas from the trash and load it into the tiny U-Haul she had rented for her share of their meager household. It was a nude of her, abstract like all his paintings, yet he doubted any woman could walk by a dumpster display of her naked breasts unmoved, no matter her feelings for the artist or the quality of the rendering.

After she had driven away, he had descended the four flights to the ally and salvaged the remaining three nudes, leaving the rest of his work behind the sagging mattress with all his paints, brushes and canvas.  He never painted again.

The paintings remained sealed with the same bubble wrap and tape he used when moving them to Baltimore for dental school. He had carried them, unopened, to a series of progressively nicer apartments until Caroline helped him heft the four bundles up the stairs to the attic of their new house.  She never asked what lay beneath the nearly opaque layers of plastic, just as he had lifted several heavy boxes of hers to the attic without comment.   As far as she knew, his only artistic skill was matching composite shades to teeth, and he saw no reason to correct her.  Years of coaxing endless dollops of paint to blend and express the world he saw and felt had been reduced to a mere sixteen, premixed shades of beige: the yellowish As, the brilliant Bs, the gray Cs, and the reddish Ds, each with four levels of brightness to represent every tooth in the world.

He once clung to the belief that he could live an artistic life as a dentist. One of his first-year professors in dental school had likened building a posterior restoration to sculpting, saying: “You must replicate the natural shape of the molar using composite and a condenser, just as Michelangelo chiseled perfection from a slab of granite.” Granite.  Not marble. As though Il Divino installed countertops for upper-middle class Florentines.  Had Paul been a true artist, he’d have catapulted from the uncomfortable lecture hall seat, stripped, and tossed his scrubs in the trashcan by the door.  It would have been more dignified to walk across campus in his boxer shorts than remain seated as he did, choosing to embrace the professor’s poorly executed metaphor as confirmation that he was still an artist. His medium had simply changed. 

“Dr. Weston, your eight o’clock has arrived,” his assistant Megan announced from the doorway of his office. Her eyebrows rose slightly at the end, as if to add a silent finally. “He’s complaining of pain on tooth number twelve.”

She handed him the chart and stepped aside so he could walk ahead of her. Such deferential gestures always made him feel slightly uncomfortable, but every dental assistant he ever had behaved the same way. He eventually realized that their training must include a minute understanding of the doctor-assistant power dynamic. 

“Thank you, Megan,” he said. She gave him a perfunctory nod, and he hoped that in her personal life, which he knew nothing about, others stood aside for her.

As they walked to the operatory, Paul flipped through the hastily scribbled medical history and decided Andrew Brookfield may have a slight sense of the inconvenience he might cause by arriving late to his introductory appointment. He glanced up from the chart to see the patient and stopped so suddenly that Megan collided with his back.

“I mixed the color myself,” the young man said in a proud voice. He tucked a strand of electric purple hair behind his ear and stared back at Paul in mock astonishment.

“It’s nice to meet you, Andrew,” Paul said, forcing a smile. “I’m Dr. Weston.”

They shook hands briefly while Megan took her seat on the other side of the reclined dental chair, and Paul couldn’t help thinking that Andrew Brookfield had been handsome before he dyed, pierced, and tattooed himself into something else. Beneath the heavy eye makeup and facial piercings, his face was perfectly symmetrical and his irises were an arresting shade of green, nearly the same as Emily’s. Weeks or months typically went by between Paul’s thoughts of his ex-wife and yet in one morning, he seemed incapable of thinking of anyone else.  

At the realization that he was again staring, Paul fumbled with a pair of the Megan’s small, pink gloves before snapping on a pair of his large, blue ones. “Which tooth is bothering you?” he asked since most patients rarely understood the inside of their own mouths well enough to direct him to the same place as Megan.

Andrew pointed to number twelve with the tip of his tongue and banged a piercing against several non-offending teeth.          Paul wanted to tell the young man it was a wonder he had any teeth left with so much metal assaulting his enamel. Instead he used an explorer to pull at an amalgam filing on twelve and asked “Does this hurt?”

Andrew simply nodded and closed his eyes, retreating into himself from the pain.  Most people let out a little moan or jumped slightly whenever Paul found a trouble spot.  The more dramatic the reaction the more he disliked the patient. It was bad enough knowing he was hurting someone, however temporary, without the accompanying sound effects and flailing.   He decided Andrew Brookfield, despite his lateness and questionable fashion choices, might be a welcomed addition to his clientele.

“Is it a dull, achy pain or a sharp pain?” Paul asked.

“Definitely sharp and only when I chew.”    

“You probably have a slight crack.  I’ll need to replace your old filling with composite, but you could need a crown.”

“Just take the tooth out,” Andrew said, opening his eyes. “I don’t want to have to come back.”  

“That’s really a last resort,” Paul said gently, searching for fear in the usual places:  pursed lips, shifting eyes, a sudden foot jiggle.  He’d come to expect the tell-tell signs of dental fear from a certain percentage of otherwise reasonable patients, grown men and women who sat trembling in the chair as though he were a sadist about to get off on torturing them.  But Andrew’s mouth and feet were relaxed, his eyes focused directly on Paul’s face. “It might only need a new filing,” he added in a more assertive tone.  “Worst case scenario, we do a temporary crown and then a root canal, but either way, we can save this tooth.”

“Just take it out. I don’t want to have to deal with it.”

Paul pretended to read the young man’s chart and breathed deep to stave the anger he felt building.   Everything he had been taught urged him to try a filing, then a temporary crown, then a root canal, if needed, before removing the tooth. But despite Paul’s years of schooling, Andrew Brookfield had the option, however asinine, to do what he wanted with his own mouth, and Paul would comply as long as it wouldn’t lead to a lawsuit.  When he started dental school, Paul thought giving up painting would be his greatest challenge.  He never anticipated the daily torment of convincing complete strangers to let him do what he wanted with their teeth.

“Andrew, you’re only twenty-five.  If I take that tooth out, you’ll have a hole there for the rest of your life. People will see a gap when you smile.”

The young man shrugged.  “I don’t smile often.”

“Andrew, the tooth might only need a little composite to feel and look as good as new. We can even work out a payment plan if you’d like.”

“Take it out,” he said, opening his mouth wide.

Paul nodded and used the seconds it took Megan to ready the instruments to force his breathing to slow.

 

After the extraction, Paul decided red walls might be too drastic of an alternative and googled neutral interior paint.  As he searched for a color that fit Caroline’s couch plan without resembling rotting vegetation, he discovered samples to match every number and letter in his composite shade guide.  He even found an interior paint called Country Dairy identical to A2, the closest shade to Andrew Brookfield’s left premolar.

He turned off the computer screen and decided to continue the search later, forgetting Caroline’s impressive ability to get things done. The winter garden walls that greeted him on his lunch break cast a gloomy pallor throughout the spacious den that no amount of sunlight could brighten. 

“It’s so soothing,” Caroline squealed when she found him staring at the drying paint. “It really makes the whole room feel balanced.”

He examined her perfect face for a moment, hoping for some sign of sarcasm, but finding none, asked cautiously, “You don’t think it’s a little plain?”

“It’s tasteful,” she said, narrowing her indathrone blue eyes.  “I’ve decorated over nine apartments since I moved to Northern Virginia.  Trust me, Paul, I know more about paint than you.”

 

In the weeks that followed, the color of decay slowly permeated the rest of the house:  a lamp in the hallway, a throw pillow on the oversized bed they shared. Decorative ties, Caroline called them, all the color of brittle leaves. By the time Caroline found a bland sofa to complete the house, winter had settled in Northern Virginia, the outdoors muted to the same shade as the den walls. Their bodies drifted slowly to opposite sides of the bed once the novelty of sleeping entwined had worn off, and they settled into a routine that eerily mirrored Caroline’s PowerPoint slide of a sample day in the life a successful person.  

Everything had become so colorless, that Paul found himself hurrying into the operatory when, after several cancellations, Andrew Brookfield finally returned for his follow up appointment.  But the young man had stripped the dye from his hair, leaving it a pale yellow that dulled his impressive eyes to the color of moss. 

“How’s that extraction healing?” Paul asked in an overly chipper voice to hide his disappointment.  

“It’s fine,” the young man said.  He smiled, flashing the gaping hole where number twelve had been. “Actually, I want you to take out the tooth on the other side. I like the gap here,” he said, sticking his tongue between eleven and thirteen. “But I think there should be one on each side.” 

Megan pulled a surgical mask onto her face to hide whatever reaction she was having to Andrew’s request, forcing Paul to realize that his own jaw had gone completely slack. He closed his mouth and sat numbly for a moment before he felt capable of speech.

“I can’t extract a perfectly good tooth, Andrew,” he said finally. “That goes against everything I believe.”

“I want you to take out a tooth, not murder me.  Besides, it’s my mouth, and I want it to be balanced.”

“Fuck balance,” Paul said before he could stop himself.  “Life can’t all be about making everything the same.”

Megan swiveled in her rolling chair and began arranging toothpaste samples on the far end of the operatory.

“Sorry,” Paul added quickly, taking a deep breath.     

“Don’t apologize.” Andrew unclipped the paper bib from around his neck and swung his feet onto the floor.   “That’s the most honest thing you’ve said to me.  I’ll give you some time to think about it and come back later.”

As the young man left the operatory, Paul stared at sterile gloves he had reached for to begin the examination.  He let out a gasp when he realized that instead of the usual blue, they were beige.  Looking around the room, he saw that everything, the instruments, his clothing, even Megan’s anxious face, had faded to various shades of brown.   He blinked a few times and rubbed his eyes roughly with his balled fists.

“Dr. Weston?” Megan asked.

By the time he removed his hands from his eyes, she had crossed the operatory and was

leaning over him. “I need to go home,” he said.  She was apparently too startled by his behavior to remember her training, forcing him to push past her into blanched hallway.

On the short drive home, his eyes flitted to as many things as possible: Storefronts, pedestrians, stop signs, an endless sea of nearly-identical houses, all sepia-tinted.  The homes in his subdivision were so similar without different exterior paints that he had to rely on the street numbers to find his own.  In the kitchen, he opened the fridge to jars and jugs with contents all resembling mayonnaise.  He rifled through the drawers to confirm that every item had faded and accidently raked his thumb across a cheese grater. A small drop of alizarin crimson rose to the surface of his skin.

Relieved to finally see a color other than beige, he began searching for red throughout the kitchen. The panic that had begun when everything faded threatened to overtake him when he realized the red apples on the countertop still appeared a rotten brown to his eyes.   He ran up the two flights of stairs to the attic, shoved aside the boxes where Caroline had buried her own past, and tore the bubble wrap from his paintings. Each vibrant image of Emily’s supple curves ignited the wash-out world. He examined her painting last, and felt his racing heart slow as the sober mood of her work overtook him.

She had captured the moment so differently than he remembered, the blues tones making the arch of his fingers more seeking than analytical, almost nostalgic.   It was as though she had sensed, months before the fighting started, his increasing impatience to feel successful, to move beyond a life of fruit crate furniture and eviction notices, and painted him a prophetic memento of who he had been with her. He laid all four pieces carefully across the attic floor and went back downstairs.

In a drawer of seldom-used cooking gadgets, he found a basting brush similar to a crude hake.  He then pulled each knife from the wooden holder on the countertop and pressed his thumb against the blades before selecting a sharp paring knife.  He carried his tools to the den and, turning his left hand palm-side up down, made a tentative cut between his wrist and elbow. His hands shook slightly when he pressed the basting brush against the small line of blood, but the tightness in his chest began to relax with the first, imperfect stroke on the den wall.  The tremor in his fingers stopped as he made a second arch in one fluid movement.  He paused to examine his work and frowned when he realized the color had tapered near the middle of the stroke. Before making his next mark, he drew the knife directly across a vein near his elbow.  His breathing slowed with each brushstroke, and despite the pain in his arm, he felt elated, calm.  By the time Caroline arrived, he had finished painting and lay exhausted and weak on her beloved sofa.

“He isn’t answering my calls either, Megan,” she said, stepping into the den with her cell phone to her ear.  When she saw him, she backed silently out of the room as though an intruder lurked in the kitchen.  Only from the doorway did she comprehend the scene before her and began shouting orders to Megan.

“What have you done?” she asked, dropping the phone to press her hands against the deepest cuts.

He smiled at her and motioned with his chin to the wall beside the fireplace. 

“You did that?”

He nodded.

“It’s beautiful.”

The indathrone blue returned to her wide eyes as each of the colors in the room emerged, one by one, and blended to the truest black Paul had ever seen.

Before moving to the Philadelphia suburbs, Kathryn Hively Lane earned an MA from Rutgers University and an MFA from George Mason University. She has taught at Rowan University and is currently completing her first novel. Though a native of Virginia, she has settled into life in South Jersey with her husband, daughter, and an amazingly supportive clan of in-laws. This is her first published story.

[img_assist|nid=10046|title=Pineapple Landing by Karoline Wileczek © 2013|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=400|height=610]

The summer my father left us, our front yard was filled with deep, grave-sized pits. There was nothing else to look at, nothing to do but watch those cavities and the flurry of activity around them.  Grandma and I sat in white wicker rockers, watching from her side porch, which looked directly onto my parents’ property. The house my parents had built stood on four acres, a flat stretch of what was once farmland at the edge of a dense forest. 

Mom was getting less waitressing shifts at Longville Tavern and Dad was struggling to sell timeshares. Our kitchen cabinets were lined with cans of corned beef hash and Spam. My little sister and I drew the line when they tried to make us drink powdered milk.

Land was the only valuable thing we had, so my parents called a developer to discuss selling off part of the property. The first step was to see if a second well could be dug. 

The diggers came on the last day of school. They must’ve been opening up holes in front of our house while I stood on the stage with my classmates, accepting my blue and gold sixth grade certificate. When Kristine and I came home that afternoon, there in the middle of our yard were four long, deep pits. The only funeral I’d ever been to was Grandpa’s, but the image of the hole that swallowed his silver casket had been burned into my mind.

The pits had a similar look about them. They were three feet by seven and a good six feet deep. Loose dirt was piled around them. We stared. Someone banged on the picture window in the living room and when we turned, Mom scowled at us. Kristine and I trudged inside.

Mom rushed into the kitchen in her work uniform, a white collared blouse and a knee-length skirt the color of hot fudge. “Girls, I need you to stay away from those holes.” She maintained a stern expression while looking up at the ceiling, fumbling to fit her turquoise earrings into the tiny holes in her ears.  “They’re coming back to fill them in, but right now they’re too dangerous for you kids to play around, okay?”

 Kristine climbed under the table to retrieve a naked Barbie doll. “Okay, Mommy.”

“Sure,” I said, handing my mother the plastic grocery bag with her dinner in it. It smelled unmistakably of corned beef-salty, oily slop from a can. She refused to eat at the restaurant because she’d “seen too much.”

“Alright, I’ll come in and kiss you when I get home tonight. There’s leftovers in the fridge. And make sure you girls do your homework before you watch TV.”

“School’s over, Mom,” I said.

She laughed and gave me a hug. “That’s right-exciting.  I’ll see you later.  Bye, Krissy Bean!” She waved to my sister, who lay under the table, making Barbie fly over her head.

“Bye-bye!” Kristine called back.

I stuck my certificate on the brown fridge next to the electric bill. Elementary school was over, but I didn’t feel any different. The only thing I was looking forward to was finally working on the tree fort with my dad.  Otherwise, I figured it would be a typical summer: I’d play with Kristine and go to Grandma’s every day, and my parents would keep fighting and trying to make it seem like they weren’t. Nothing would really change until the fall. Or so I thought.

[img_assist|nid=10047|title=Bulbs by Helen Wortham © 2013|desc=|link=node|align=none|width=500|height=375]

 

I found out before anyone else that Dad was leaving. The day after school let out he left a note on Mom’s dresser while she was at work. When she worked Saturday brunches, I often snuck into their bedroom and played with her jewelry-silver bangles, diamond teardrop earrings, a thick yellow-gold bracelet studded with emeralds.  I’d overheard Dad trying to convince her to sell some of these, saying that unlike his father’s land, her jewelry was replaceable. Mom told him she would sooner die than give up her jewelry. Besides, she said, it wouldn’t bring in anywhere near as much money as the land.

 I stood in front of the mirror, three inches taller in my mother’s patent leather heels as I pinned a purple brooch to my T-shirt. A folded sheet of yellow paper tucked under Mom’s hairbrush caught my eye. I picked it up and opened it.

I read my father’s note over and over, until I couldn’t differentiate between yellow paper and blue ink. With unsteady hands, I refolded it and set it back on the dresser. I kicked off Mom’s pumps when I realized that Dad might hear me pacing their bedroom. He was still home, moving things, banging tools around in the garage…packing? I turned off the cartoon my sister was watching, took her by the hand, and went to Grandma’s. If Dad wasn’t going to say goodbye to Mom, then he wasn’t going to say goodbye to us either.

 Grandma’s pale blue eyes seemed to darken when I told her what was happening, but she said nothing. Since I could remember, my grandmother had told me stories from her life: surviving the Great Depression, losing several babies in childbirth, being widowed twice.  She wasn’t someone who reacted to many things.  Still, I’d hoped she would at least go yell at my dad. Instead, she tapped her thick, reptilian fingernails against the armrest of her chair while the two of us sat on the porch and watched my house. Kristine busied herself in the yard, making a fort out of the clothesline and some old paisley sheets.

Dad and I were supposed to start building the tree house any day. We’d been talking about it for years, and finally we made a plan. A month before school let out, we went to a lumberyard and bought cheap boards, full of knots. We picked out my tree, a gnarled oak behind our house with a wide trunk and thick branches. Dad said he guessed it was close to 75 years old. The two of us practiced hammering nails in the garage and he said I was a natural. 

We decided to call my tree house “Annie’s Attic.”  It was going to be the one place that was just for me. “You deserve something of your own,” my father had said.

Now I stared at my tree in the distance, the brown-gray knives of its branches stabbing at the sky, and knew that it would never be anything but a tree. I was no carpenter, despite what Dad had said. The boards would rot in the garage until one day Mom threw them away without realizing what they’d been for.

 My gaze had drifted to my bare feet, brown with dirt and the beginnings of a summer tan. For some reason my feet always darkened first. I was puzzling this over, when I glanced back up at the house. My father was on the front porch. He descended the stairs and took slow, deliberate steps in the direction of the pits. With maybe two acres between us, I couldn’t read his facial expression. He brought his hands together. It looked like they were wrestling each other.  Suddenly they leapt apart and he flung something into one of the pits.

“Lord.” Grandma pulled at a strand of silver hair that had come loose from her bun.

“What was that?” I asked.        

“His ring,” she murmured, her chair creaking back and forth.

“Why would he do that?” I asked.

“I don’t know, Anne.  Why would he want to sell his father’s land?”

After staring down into the pit, unmoving, Dad got into his car. He drove in our direction and slowed when he was almost to Grandma’s.  Had he known the whole time that we were sitting there, watching? He gazed at her, then at me. I didn’t recognize the emotion on his face.  My father was the most self-assured person I knew.  Even when he shattered a plate from Mom’s good china set, he said it was her fault because she hadn’t rinsed off all the soapsuds.

Dad shook his head, accelerated, and sped off down the driveway in a cloud of dust.

“Do you know who she is?” Grandma asked.

I bent down to scratch a bug bite on my heel. “Who who is?”

“Nevermind,” she said, and kept rocking.

 

On Monday, they came to fill in the pits.  There were no machines, just two guys with farmer’s tans and yellow hard hats, who pulled up in a white truck, each carrying shovels. I hadn’t told my mother about the ring and I doubted Grandma had either. Mom hadn’t even said anything about Dad leaving. As far as she knew, I had no idea he’d moved out.

 With every shovelful of dirt, the men buried the ring deeper and deeper.

 “Was Grandpa buried with his wedding ring on?” I asked.

Grandma drummed her fingernails on the armrest of her chair. “Men didn’t wear wedding rings when we were married. That’s new.”

“Do you think it’s bad?”

“No.” Grandma hesitated. “I think it keeps them honest. Or at least it’s supposed to.”

One of the diggers, a man whose pale gut sagged over his belt, used his foot for leverage, so he could force more dirt onto the shovel. To him, digging was just a job. He had no idea what was down there. There was no way for him to know that he was helping to erase our family.

 

We saw them at Happy Harry’s.  Mom had to fill a prescription and she told us if we came along she’d buy us candy.  My sister picked Sweet Tarts and I chose a Snickers. Mom was talking with the pharmacist at the back of the store. Her eyes were all red and veiny and her brown hair was piled up on her head like one of the twiggy birds’ nests from Grandma’s collection. I had never seen her this way.     

Behind me, a woman called out, “Eric, look, they already have a Halloween display.”

At hearing my father’s name, I turned.  She was short, not much taller than me, with waist-length red hair. As far as I could tell, she was younger than my parents but older than our last babysitter, who was about to start college.

“Eric,” the woman said again. “Come here. They’ve got pumpkin decals!”

Eric came around the corner and froze when he saw us.

“Daddy!” Kristine flung herself at our father.

He scooped her up in his arms. The woman with the red hair stared at them, her mouth a little pink Cheerio.

“Hey, Annie,” Dad said, setting my sister down. He waved at me and I frowned.

“Are these…?” the woman started.

“My daughters, Kristine and Anne.”

Kristine tugged on Dad’s hand, bare without the gold band. “Where did you go? Who’s that lady?”

“This is my friend Madelyn.”

I pretended to consult my Garfield watch. “We should go. Mom’s waiting for us.”

“Where is she?” Dad straightened, scanning the store for her face.

I ignored his question and motioned for my sister to follow me.

Do you know who she is? Grandma had asked. One of my classmates, Olivia Johnson’s mom had been caught having an affair with their family doctor, a fact Olivia made sure to broadcast.  Her soon-to-be-stepfather was a rich doctor, she’d informed us.  An affair meant you weren’t a family anymore. It meant your mom or dad loved someone else.

 I dragged Kristine through the store, yanking on her wrist until she cried out. I thought we could hold Mom off until they left, but she was already headed for us. “Hey, girls,” she said in her fake cheerful voice. “Got your candy?”

I tried to think of an item we could look for in a back corner, something to take us far away from Dad and the redhead, but all that came to mind was pantyhose and I knew Mom would just look at me like I’d lost my twelve-year-old mind.

 “We just saw Daddy.” Kristine twirled her Sweet Tarts like a baton.  “He was with this lady named Mandolin, like that thing Uncle Bill plays.”

My mother narrowed her light brown eyes.  “What?”

“Oh, he was just-” I began.

Mom swept past us down the feminine needs aisle, and it looked as though her feet never touched the ground. We followed. I knew I should probably stay behind and shield my little sister, but whatever was about to happen seemed too important to miss.

There was screaming as we approached the registers.  Mom was yanking magnets off of a spinning rack and throwing them at Dad, who stood like a castle gate in front of a cowering Madelyn.  My mother used words that I’d only heard from late night movies and boys on the playground. A bald man in a blue vest appeared and escorted her to the exit. She shook him off, charging ahead of him out the door.

She’d just disappeared from sight when she ran back inside and took my sister and me by the hand, which made my cheeks burn. “This is you taking time to think things over, Eric? You’re a sorry excuse for a man and a father. Come on, girls.”

As she pulled us out the door, I glanced over my shoulder. Dad and Madelyn had their arms wrapped around each other and he was whispering in her ear, the way he did when I had a bad dream. 

 

I went to my tree. Grabbing a low-hanging bough, I pulled myself along the trunk, until I was sitting among the fat center branches. A light breeze, carrying the sweet smell of honeysuckle and mown grass, stirred the leaves overhead. I closed my eyes and imagined being surrounded by the walls of the tree house. If we’d put them up, no one could have seen me sitting there. Without them, I was exposed.  If Mom or Kristine came around the side of the house, they’d spot my yellow tank top and jean shorts outlined against the tree.  My sister would beg to join me, while my mother would demand I get down before I broke my neck.  I wondered if my father even remembered the tree house.

After Dad and I had bought the building supplies, we got milkshakes. He asked me what he should get Mom for her birthday. I sucked too much cold, thick chocolate through my straw and got a brain freeze. If I complained, I knew Dad would just tell me that I should learn a little self control, so I forced a smile and said, “There was this green shirt we saw at JC Penney the other day.  She really liked it.  I could show you if you want.”

 “Listen to you. When did you get to be so grown up?” He ruffled my long, dark hair.  “Let’s go get the shirt on Friday then. Just you and me.”

I took a satisfactory pull on my milkshake.

 

“He wasn’t even wearing his wedding ring.” Mom slammed a pan on the stove and pulled a familiar blue and gold can of Spam from the cabinet.

“Maybe he had a reason,” I said

“Oh, I’m well aware of his reason,” Mom said, jerking metal tab on the can. “I wonder if he sold it. He was always trying to make me pawn my jewelry.”

“He didn’t sell it,” I blurted out.

She dumped pink squares of meat into the pan and as they sizzled, I thought of the egg in those commercials about “Your Brain on Drugs.”

“Don’t be stupid, Annie,” Mom said, more to herself than to me.

“He threw it in the pit,” I mumbled, resting my chin on the kitchen table.

“What?” she lurched in my direction, greasy spatula in hand. She hadn’t spanked me since I was Kristine’s age, but the wild look in her eye and the way she clutched the utensil gave me chills. “What did you say?”

I swallowed and sat up. “I said he threw it in the pit.”

“Your father may be an idiot, but I don’t think he’d be so petty.”

“I saw him do it,” I said.
The spatula clattered to the floor.

 

Grandma and I sat on her porch, cloud watching. Kristine was sprawled across the floorboards between our chairs, her tummy poking out from her pink My Little Pony T-shirt. After spotting no less than twelve clouds shaped like puppies, she’d fallen asleep.

Grandma gestured to a long, bumpy cloud. “A lilac.”

“And the one next to it, a hairbrush,” I said, pointing.

“Even flowers have their vanity,” she said with a chuckle.

A low rumbling sounded from the direction of my house as my mother raised the garage door and stepped out into the sunlight. Her disheveled hair was knotted in a low ponytail. She wore black sweatpants and the green shirt I’d helped Dad pick out for her birthday. It was short-sleeved and ruffled, with buttons down the center. She had been so surprised when he gave it to her.  I’ve never understood why he even bothered.

The shirt and all of its implications might have held my attention longer if it hadn’t been for the shovel slung over my mother’s shoulder.  Her posture erect, she strode toward the pits.

“Did you tell her which one it was?” Grandma asked.

“No. I just said…” I cocked my head.  “How’d you know I told her?”

Grandma’s blue eyes met mine. “Well, it wasn’t me, and I’d wager it wasn’t your father.”

Mom started one pit over from the one that contained the ring. Unlike the men who had filled the pits in, who seemed most interested in scratching themselves, my mother appeared to be stabbing something every time her shovel met the earth. She sifted through each shovelful with her bare hands. Mom had taught me not to stare when we passed a car crash, but now she was the accident, unfolding with terrible slowness, and I couldn’t take my eyes from her.

Her movements grew jerky, almost theatrical. After an hour, she marched to the next pit, dragging the shovel with her.  I hoped to God she would find the ring soon.

Kristine sat up, her pigtails askew.  She followed our gaze. “What’s Mommy doing?”

“Digging,” Grandma murmured.

“But she said those holes were dangerous.”

“They are,” I said.

Mom scoured the second pit, flinging dirt high overhead once she’d combed through it, not bothering with piles anymore. Still, she didn’t come up with the ring. Daylight receded, though it was only mid-afternoon. My mother moved on to the third pit.

Grandma fixed her eyes on the sky, which had turned the color of a grape freeze pop. Lightning slashed the sky like a white hot zipper. I used the trick Dad had taught me and counted the seconds between the lightening and thunder to see how close the storm was. One, one-thousand. Two, one-thousand. Three-Boom!  Thunder rattled the porch. Less than three miles.

“Mommy’s gonna get wet,” Kristine said.

On any other day, Grandma would have herded us inside at the first sign of a dark cloud, but she just sat there, gripping the armrests of her chair, her eyes glued to my mother.        

I chewed my nails.  “Should I go see if she’s okay?”

“She’d likely beat you silly if you did,” Grandma said.

The sky opened up on my mother, the water turning the dirt around her into slick piles of mud. She continued digging. After awhile, the rain came down so hard that we couldn’t see her anymore. It sounded like nails were striking the tin roof over us.

Leaning on her good hip, Grandma pulled herself to her feet. “Let’s go inside.”

Kristine was quick to follow, but I remained, staring into the wall of water, trying to see my mother, to understand what she was thinking.

 

After the rain stopped, I took my sister home. Mom was no longer at the pits.  Her bedroom door was locked when I tried to open it. She mumbled something that sounded like “go away,” and so I did.

Hours passed. Kristine and I played Chutes and Ladders, I made mac and cheese for dinner, and when my sister complained that she was bored, I put on The Little Mermaid for her. I tried Mom’s door again, and this time she said clearly, “I’m fine, Annie. I’ll be fine.”  I mimed the expression I knew she was making on the other side of the wall, the same look of fake optimism that she would need from me in the coming days.

It was dark outside now, cloudless. The stars came out, plugged into the sky like so many little nightlights.  I stood in front of the pits. Who knew where the ring was now that my mother had flung around the dirt that held it hostage. I stuck my hand into a pile of mud, as though I could find it by dumb luck. 

I decided if I ever did find the ring, I wouldn’t tell her.  Just like if she ever found it, she would probably never tell me.  But I knew we’d both continue to search. It would become our ritual: on days when his absence grew a little sharper, one of us would go out there, sometimes with a shovel, usually with just bare hands, and dig.  Neither of us would acknowledge why grass never grew back over the pits, why they were like scabs that wouldn’t heal.

Melanie Unruh received a BA in English and Spanish from Rider University and an MFA in fiction from the University of New Mexico. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Post Road, Echo Ink Review, Pear Noir!, and The Inside Mag. She lives in Albuquerque with her fiancé and their two cats. Currently she is finishing a YA novel set in her hometown, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.