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[img_assist|nid=912|title=Freaky Deaky by Clifford Ward ©2006|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=225]Hoffman’s wife, Tookie, died last week. She used to collect loose hair from her brush and comb then burn them in a glass ashtray: this isn’t related to her death, Tookie just had a ritual. She kept the glass ashtray on the porcelain toilet tank under a small Monet.

The bathroom still has a burnt hair stink. Hoffman is touching the ashes; he rubs them between his thumb and forefinger. They feel talcumy.

He once asked his wife why she did it, why she burned her hair. Tookie said she didn’t want people to steal her soul. Indians burned their hair, she said. They didn’t like people snapping their pictures, either. He told her she wasn’t an Indian.

Hoffman is holding a cardboard box filled with Tookie’s things. Her silver brush and comb set. Her plastic shower cap. Her pills and face creams and makeup. It’s her bathroom box. Hoffman also has a bedroom box and a hall closet box.

He killed his wife a week ago Thursday, or it feels like he killed her. They were married only four months. What can you do? He drove his new Jaguar XK into the iron gate of their Bensalem home at 78 m.p.h. They had been drinking martinis with a lemon twist. Tookie broke her neck. Her head plunged forward then snapped backward. Hoffman got a cut on his forehead and a cracked windshield.

Tookie had real looks, black hair, huge brown eyes. A sweetheart, too. He should have seen it coming. She would have been thirty-nine next week, two years younger than him.

What if I make the same promise as Houdini? She had said. When I die, I’ll come back. But instead of Halloween, it’ll be my birthday. She promised this on their honeymoon.

Hoffman first met his bride the night she came to his home with the Vanderlings from Bucks County and the Averys from Connecticut. She was there as a client, one of the hungry babies. This is what Hoffman calls his clients, hungry babies. They have that hungry baby desperation. They salivate to his every word. They hunger for someone or something on the other side to show him-her-it-self.

Clarice Vanderling wanted to know if her departed mother was finally at peace. If so, would she reveal the hiding place of her gold broach with the diamonds? Randolph Vanderling wanted his dead father to give him the okay to buy a new stock. The Averys had similar questions. Estelle Avery’s dead brother hadn’t divulged his Grand Cayman account number. Her husband, Sonny, needed to remind his Aunt Jillian how excluding him from her will was un-Christian and hurtful.

Then Hoffman turned to Tookie. What about you? he said.

I don’t remember my family, Tookie said. I’m not sure who’s dead or alive. I just want to know if there are other things to do after this. It doesn’t have to get better, only different.

On the afternoon of her thirty-ninth birthday, Hoffman goes to his library. It’s mostly brown leather and wood. Books fill the wall shelves. They have a faint mildew odor. Books are also stacked on the oak floor and the coffee table. A dozen track lamps mark the edges of the room in warm yellow light.

Hoffman is now seated at a large round table off to the left, his fingers tapping its green felt top. He is tall and slim and wears a dark suit and tie. Hoffman has the look of a concerned mortician.

His clients are the hungry babies, not him, never him. But tonight he may join the multitude. This thought brings a flush to his neck and cheeks. Wife or no, is he really waiting for a dead person?

Tookie is gone. Tookie is sealed in an 18 gauge A-line steel casket with swing bar hardware and premium white crepe interior. Hoffman paid $1,500.00 extra to have a lighthouse and an ocean airbrushed on the glossy pearl sides and top. Goldstein’s Funeral glued Tookie’s eyes shut and powdered her dead gray skin. Nobody is home. Everything inside the 18 gauge A-line steel casket is going to rot, even her bones. Good-bye and so long, my Tookie. Houdini won’t be stopping in to say hello. Dear Tookie won’t be doing that, either.

This isn’t what the hungry babies want to hear. This isn’t what Hoffman says to them. He didn’t buy his 9,000 square foot home in Bensalem and his Jaguar XK based on the truth as he sees it. His hungry babies aren’t paying top dollar to take a grim peek at Life and Death 101. They want life to have a purpose and suffering to have an end and a reward. Hoffman will always listen to the client’s question to understand how the client wants that question answered.

Is Auntie Polly there with Uncle Joe?

His arm is around her shoulder, Hoffman says. Auntie Polly has her head resting on Joe’s chest. She’s smiling at you and waving, Hoffman says. Can you see her? Close your eyes and see her. They talk about you constantly, did you know that? True as I’m here, Hoffman says. They are impressed with your generosity, your kindness. They like to discuss the sensitive way you treated them during their last days. At the convalescent center. At the hospice. At your house.

What is it like on the other side? Are there trees? Birds? Flowers?

That and more, Hoffman says.

Do they have pets? Dogs? Cats? Fish?

You can bet on it, Hoffman says. Dogs with big watery eyes and cats that curl up on your lap and stay there.

Are there individual homes? Condos? Semi-detached?

More choices than you can imagine, Hoffman says. Something for everyone.

Is there a wooded area with a stream? Uncle Joe loved to fish, they say. Are there bass in the stream? Salmon? Cod? Perch?

Let’s hope you put a fishing rod in Uncle Joe’s casket, Hoffman says.

Everybody laughs. Some of his clients are so relieved they weep.

But what about social activities? Auntie Polly was always a very social person, they say. Are there discussion groups?

Hoffman shuts his eyes.

No groups. No.

They’re dead. Joe and Polly and Tookie, all of them are dead.

His poor Tookie. What is he, a drunken animal? Hoffman’s elbows rest on the large round table. His fingertips press against his forehead. He begins sobbing. Then he uses a white handkerchief to blot the tears from the green felt.

Hoffman should have seen it coming. He is supposed to have a sixth sense about these things. It’s what he does for a living.

Hoffman’s father is a retired orthodontist who lives in West Philadelphia. The grandfather was David Douglas Hoffman. David Douglas was born in Cardiff, Wales.

His parents shipped him off to the mother’s sister in Philadelphia at the age of nine. The mother said her boy’s cradle would rock by itself. She said when David Douglas was four; he accurately predicted the death of a cousin.

The retired orthodontist didn’t understand his father. He can’t understand his son. This doesn’t stop Hoffman from visiting him on Tookie’s birthday.

You’re too thin, the father says. His name is Marv. He is inspecting his son over the rims of his tortoise shell reading glasses. When you’re mother died, may God rest her, I ate like a horse, Marv says. Cherry cheesecake. I ate half a cherry cheesecake a day.

Too much sugar, says Hoffman and makes a face.

What can you do? says the father.

Marv Hoffman has that refugee look. His brown and white striped flannel bathrobe is open at the neck and stops at the knee. It shows a white bony chest and thin white legs. A few long and obstinate strands of graying hair are combed over his freckled head.

Before Hoffman entered the living room, his father was reading the leisure section of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The newspaper is now folded on his lap. Corked-tip cigarette butts fill the ashtray on the end table beside his chair. Along with stale cigarette smoke, the room has a bacon odor, maybe from breakfast, maybe a B.L.T. A brass floor lamp shines its light over the old man’s left shoulder.

I didn’t see it coming, Hoffman says. He slumps onto the beige feather-cushioned sofa across from his father. More stupid tears are coming, he can feel it. Hoffman says, we’d been drinking, Tookie and me. I was tipsy. I admit that, I take full blame. But we’d been tipsy before and nothing happened.

You had bad luck, says his father.

I want to hear her voice one more time, says Hoffman. I sound like my clients. But I want to know everything is all right.

She’s all right, says Marv. She’s dead. You and your grandfather, unbelievable.

What sort of business is dead people? It would be different if you buried them, that’s a nice dollar.

You don’t understand, Hoffman says. You never understood me. You don’t have a clue. For years I’ve wanted to tell my clients how it’s all crap. Everything. Heaven, hell, all of it.

[img_assist|nid=913|title=Yellow ‘Fro Dancer by Clifford Ward.|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=200]People want to feel someone powerful is watching out for their interest, his father says. They want protection. They’d also like to avoid the box.

That’s it, exactly, says Hoffman. But now I don’t know. I don’t want to think that way. About it being crap, I mean.

You don’t want Tookie to just rot in the box, the father says.

"I can’t bear the thought, Hoffman says. “ Especially today. It’s her birthday, for God-sake.

Marv is nodding and smiling and going uh-huh uh-huh under his breath. He drops the folded Inquirer on the pine wood floor. Marv re-crosses his thin white legs, tucking the hem of the brown and white striped bathrobe under his thigh. He lights himself a king-sized Kool. Smoke and the bacon odor mingle. His long fingers angle the cigarette pack and a yellow Bic lighter next to the ashtray.

You’re like me, says his father. He turns his head and exhales a line of smoke near his left shoulder. It becomes luminous gold under the glow of the floor lamp. His father says, The synagogue was for old farts and kids, that’s what I thought. You couldn’t pay me to go to synagogue. Marv stops and looks down at his cigarette. His fingers have a tremor. He says, Then my Ruthie passes. What can I do? I can’t shut her in a box and walk away. Who can do such a thing?

You got that right, says Hoffman.

His father taps the cigarette on the edge of the amber ashtray. I started going to Shul. Friday night services, his father tells Hoffman. I say a few prayers. I say, how you doing, Ruthie? How’s my sweet girl? I’m good. I hope you’re doing good. Marv’s voice becomes tight. He has to wait a second or two. Then he tells his son, I don’t say these things out loud, of course. I say them to myself. To her. Me and her, talking. Like it’s a phone conversation.

That’s a good idea, Hoffman says.

Not that good, his father says.

What can you do?

It’s late afternoon. Hoffman is on his way home. Even with the top down on the XK, he smells like cigarettes. Overhanging trees along the Schuylkill Expressway run shadows across the XK’s silver hood. The river is to his right, the sun low and reflecting an orange light on the water. A shell boat with a single oarsman keeps a smooth and even pace.

He will give Tookie’s clothes to the D.A.V., maybe the Salvation Army. Tookie has expensive taste. Had. She had expensive taste. Prada bags, some nice Versaces, a Rianne De Witte, nothing cheap. Somebody will be happy. Then Hoffman remembers the ashes from Tookie’s hair. The glass ashtray is still on the porcelain toilet tank. What’s he supposed to do? Does he flush her ashes down the toilet? Does he trap her soul if he stores the ashes in a baggie? He wishes he had Tookie’s advice.

He stops the XK for a red light. The car on his left is a maroon Dodge Caravan. The car to the right is a tan station wagon, maybe a Volvo, maybe a Mercury Sable. He isn’t that familiar with these types of cars. A phone has started ringing. Hoffman hears it but can’t grasp its exact direction. It’s a distant, muted ring. He glances at the woman in the Caravan. She’s thin with thick black glasses. She is staring straight ahead. An older man to his right has an unlighted cigar at the corner of his mouth. He is also watching the red light. Hoffman’s right hand sweeps the glove compartment then beneath his seat. What phone keeps ringing? An unexplainable panic is working him. Did he bring his cell phone? He must answer the phone now. Hoffman knows this better than he knows anything else. He must answer it this moment, or it will never ring again. Ron Savage lived in the Chestnut Hill area of Philly and went to Leeds Junior High and Germantown. He has worked for 27 years as a Senior Psychologist at Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia. His work has appeared in numerous journals.

The summer she and I were twelve, Alexandra Metcalf became my best friend only hours after she moved onto our block. I was sitting on my front stoop, hugging my knees, listening to the bees’ late summer panic as my parents carted sod back and forth. They were planting the evergreen that would eventually tower over the house, and surrounding it with chrysanthemums. Alexandra’s blond head bobbed past our honeysuckle hedge and she stopped to wave at me as if she weren’t thinking twice about it.

We swam like minnows in the pool in Alexandra’s back yard every day that first week. On the first day, I learned to dive, crouching low, peering at my reflection peering back at me, then meeting the surface with a bruising splash. There was nothing dainty about my dives. Alexandra’s were practically swan-perfect, her rounder thighs catching the sunlight, shaming me in my own bony frame.

"Let’s play shark," she said one day, a hiss of authority behind her voice that upended my will, a will only practiced on my parents until then. Her china-blue eyes were round with eagerness, her teeth bared. "You be the lady swimming at the beach and I’ll slowly swim near you, kind of tap you like this.” She nudged my leg and I flinched as if a real shark had nosed me. "Then you scream, as loud as you can, and I’ll pop out of the water and catch you and drag you under. Okay?"

"What if you hold me there too long?" I glanced at Mr. and Mrs. Metcalf, poolside, both of them reading magazines. Alexandra’s sister, Michele, who was about to start her sophomore year of high school, was stretched out on a chaise, tanning. Her skin was already brown. I could see the faintest shocking white line gleaming at her hip.

"I wouldn’t dare!" Alexandra screeched, as if offended that I suspected her of this. "C’mon, Carrie, grab the side and just kick your feet a little." She paddled backwards to the middle, her eyes fixed on me, then took a deep, silent breath and went down.

I clung to the side, waiting. It was taking her longer than I expected. Michele turned onto her back. From just below the blue tile lip of the pool, I watched, mesmerized, as she slathered a dollop of sun block onto each of her long legs and began massaging it into one of them in long, deliberate strokes.

"Gotcha!" Alexandra yelled, surfacing next to me. "Didn’t you feel me touching your leg?"

My gut lurched.

“I guess not,” I said. “You really took your time."

“The element of surprise. Daddy says there’s an art to it. Isn’t that right, Daddy?”

"That’s right," Mr. Metcalf said, eyes closed, one arm slung across his forehead.

I played the game again, doing it the way Alexandra wanted to, waiting with my back turned and my attention riveted on her stealthy approach from behind. I was truly terrified, the delight of it squirreling up my chest and into my throat as I sensed her coming nearer. I turned in time to see her head charging forward, leaving a cleft in her wake that, for a split second, made me think she was a real shark. Before she could grab hold of my legs, I scrambled out of the pool. When she burst from the water, bewildered, and saw where I was, she let her arms splash back in and she arched into an effortless backward somersault.

"You’re hopeless," she laughed, coming up for air, spitting water in a neat fountain far ahead of her.

Michele didn’t like to swim. She lay still, glistening as Mrs. Metcalf read her magazine, nodding and clucking under a white straw hat.

“Watch this,” Alexandra whispered.

Like a rotor, she spun herself into a frenzied whirl, arms in the air until she lowered one into the pool and splashed a cascade of water directly on her sister.

Her sister screamed, livid, and grabbed the towel from her chaise.

“You little brat!” Michele shrieked, grabbing a towel and curling into a ball as if traumatized.

Ignoring her daughters, Mrs. Metcalf absently patted the few drops that had landed on her, but Mr. Metcalf strode over to the pool. Clad in a tight piece of spandex, he was a full, slender head taller than my stocky father and seemed to tower over us.

“You know better than that, Alexandra.” His voice was deep and full of quiet condemnation.

“It’s no big deal,” Alexandra said. “You’re in your swimsuits.”

“We don’t play those games in our family,” Mr. Metcalf said. “Do that again, and you’ll go straight to your room.”

When he turned his back on us, Alexandra looked at me. Her mouth was cockeyed, and her eyes rolled toward her father. I jumped back in, and we ducked our heads and blew bubbles to keep from laughing out loud.

When we came up for air, Michele and Mr. Metcalf were walking back into the house, and Mrs. Metcalf had risen from her chaise. She was a tall, broad-shouldered woman who, under her livid rouge and brown eye shadow, was paler than milk, even in the sun.

“Would you minnows like some dinner?” she asked.

Alexandra nodded and looked to me to see if I’d stay.

“I guess I should call home first,” I said.

“Then call,” Alexandra said.

“And just so you know, Carrie, you’re always welcome in our home.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Metcalf,” I said.

Shivering, I got out of the pool and picked up the cordless phone, my movements jerky from the cold stiffening my bones. As I called home, I watched Alexandra doing dolphin dives in the water and knew then, not just from watching her move but from a growing intimate knowledge of my own uncooperative body, that I was Alexandra’s complete physical opposite: my straight brown hair hung just above my shoulders, my teeth jutted from my face. Thankfully, we were both flat-chested.

**

When swimming got old, we did gymnastics on my back lawn. I admired Alexandra’s perfect cartwheels and long-held handstands even as I thudded onto my back, sending the wind gusting up and out of my chest. My mother flitted near the kitchen window, applauding us both, but Alexandra was too busy spinning and springing along the grass to notice.

She’d never taken lessons.

She was a self-taught acrobat, fearless and airborne.

And when she watched me walk, Alexandra couldn’t help but offer instruction.

“You always look like you’re about to bend, Carrie,” she said one afternoon as I sauntered over to a silver maple to investigate a fallen bird’s nest. “My mother says you should straighten up or you’ll get a hunchback by the time you’re thirty.”

“She said that about me?”

“Not you. People.”

Alexandra stood by my side and told me to look straight ahead. I did as she said, and my eyes started aching.

“Good,” she said. “Now tuck in your butt, bring your shoulders back, and push your chest out a little.”

I obeyed, and it felt good for about ten seconds.

“Don’t worry,” Alexandra said as my shoulders started to fall. “You’ll get used to it.”

When she wasn’t looking, I preferred the comfort of slouching.

**

At home, Alexandra was all I could talk about. My new friend had a collection of China dolls, I told my mother as she chopped vegetables in the kitchen. And each doll had a different dress, and each dress was a different color. The dresses were made of real silk, I added when my mother remained unimpressed, and in addition to the China dolls, Alexandra also had a collection of crystal animals from Prague .

“You have your own collection,” my mother said.

“Spoons,” I said. “Stupid spoons.”

“They’re not stupid,” my mother said. “And you’ll appreciate them when you’re older.”

The collection had been mine for as long as I could remember, and for as long as I could remember, my mother had been telling me that I’d appreciate my blossoming set of sterling silver flatware when I was older. At the time, however, I couldn’t imagine sharing my plain yet elegant spoons with Alexandra. Her love for showy things kept me from pulling the heavy wooden case from my mother’s closet and explaining the history behind each piece of sterling it contained. Born out of thin air with a history that had surely started and ended with her parents, Alexandra could only be bored to tears by stories of my grandmother and my Polish great-aunt and great-uncle—now long dead, all contributors to this collection in honor of my birth.

“I want something I can show off now,” I muttered, scorning a legacy I knew was precious. “I’m going to Alexandra’s.”

“No you’re not,” my mother said. She’d finished with the vegetables and had begun splitting chicken legs from thighs. “I need you to help with dinner.”

“Mom.”

The sickening sound of moist bones breaking was enough to make me wish I were a vegetarian just like Alexandra and her big sister, Michele.

“Good God, Carrie, you practically live there,” my mother said. “Why don’t you spend some time with your own family for a change?”

“I wish I had a sister,” I mumbled, though I wanted much more than that.

I wanted to be someone else.

“You can see Alexandra after dinner,” my mother said, turning to face me, one hand on her hip. “Besides, if she really wanted to see you, she’d call or come knocking once in a while, don’t you think?”

I hadn’t thought of that. I took for granted, as I should have, that Alexandra would be around forever.

**

The first time I ate dinner at the Metcalfs’ house I was dazzled and sickened all at once. They drank buttermilk out of wineglasses. I hated milk and one look at the thick yellowish liquid clinging to the inside of the glass closed my gullet. But I always said yes when it was offered because it seemed so elegant and strange. At my house, I avoided milk and drank juice from jelly glasses my mother picked up at yard sales.

It was clear to both of us that we preferred her house with the pool and fewer rules. There was also the occasional chance to spy on Michele who looked at her body in the tall oval-shaped swivel mirror, cupping and holding the plum-like roundness of her breasts. Through the keyhole, we took turns peering in as she scowled at her reflection, reaching languidly for her robe, covering herself. I couldn’t think why she looked so angry, and wished my body would open up like hers, my sharp edges soften into curves. I still marvel that she had no idea her keyhole afforded such a perfect view.

Whenever she came across us while we played dress-up with Wally, their fat orange cat, I stared at her polished toes, afraid I might fasten my gaze on her nipples because they always seemed to poke out past her bra like tiny, fat buttons.

“If that cat has any brains, he’ll run far away from here one day,” Michele said one afternoon. She had come downstairs to flip on the T.V. “The way you dress him up like that, it’s a disgrace to cats everywhere.”

“He’s my cat, so I can do what I want,” Alexandra said. “Right, Carrie?”

I looked up at Michele, and she smirked at the two of us as if she knew something we could never understand. Then she turned off the television, wheeled around and delicately climbed the stairs without waiting for me to prove my loyalty to her sister.

“She’s mental,” Alexandra said, glowering, when Michele was gone. “She dresses Wally up, too, when she’s not busy looking at herself.”

I didn’t know whether or not to believe this, the improbability of a girl like Michele playing dress-up with anything at all except herself. Part of my fascination with Alexandra and her family was with their glamorous boredom. They never seemed to need to be busy; their languor was an activity. The effortless way they moved through their house and around each other, their striking looks, distracted me from Alexandra’s bull’s eye accuracy of reducing me to the smallest version of myself simply by being who she was, someone I loved instantly without wanting to admit soon after that I sometimes hated her.

**

One Sunday afternoon, the last before we returned to school, I was alone at Alexandra’s. She had to leave for a piano lesson and, though I wasn’t asked along when the time arrived for her to go, I was invited to stay in the house.

“You can lie on my bed if you want or read something. I have the whole Bobsy Twins, series,” Alexandra said. “But just be really careful about the shelves,” she warned.

At first, I lay down on her bed, and the whisper of her pink cotton coverlet sent up a perfume I couldn’t place, except that all of her clothes smelled like this bedspread. Mine smelled bleachy and over clean. The door to her room was closed and the house was quiet as I looked around, my head perfectly still on the pink and white gingham sham, its plumpness keeping it that way.

Alexandra’s China dolls filled one tall pink wicker bookshelf, and the tiny crystal animal figurines filled another one. Everything on those shelves was sacred. Even Alexandra refused to touch her treasures. She’d already lost one in a pillow fight, and she was so terrified that another one, which had been knocked askew in the same fight, would fall as well, and she wouldn’t even let her mother right it in case it toppled. So there it stood, teetering on the verge of certain doom.

Alexandra and her mother were taking a long time. I had fallen asleep and, jerking awake ten minutes later as the clock radio blinked the lost minutes back at me, I wondered if they’d forgotten I was still there, waiting. Not that I minded too much. It was enough to lie there and pretend it all belonged to me.

I rolled off the bed and padded over on bare feet to peer at the row of crystal animals lined up at eye level, each one different. A giraffe standing next to a lion that was curled up beside an elephant. All the rest behind them were dogs and cats. The sunlight streaming in through Alexandra’s bedroom window bounced off the giraffe and onto the floor in a colorful pool of light. Slowly, my hand steadier than I knew it could be, I took the luminous giraffe and gingerly held it, arcing it through the shaft of light and down, bewitched by the rainbow spilling across the pine planks under my feet.

Just as I finished counting the colors, I started again, sure there were more than my eye could see, but I’d barely begun my second count when I heard crying. Creeping to the door, I opened it slightly until I realized that the crying was coming from the next room.

“You know better than that, Michele,” a man’s voice said, deep and even. “We don’t cry in this house.”

And then Mr. Metcalf was standing in the hallway, in front of me. His frown reversed almost too fast for me to have seen it and he smiled.

“I had no idea you were here, Carrie. Where’s Alexandra? Did she go off and leave you here to fend for yourself?”

I nodded, mute, my palm suddenly empty. We both looked down and saw the giraffe at my feet, snapped cleanly in two.

“Mrs. Metcalf said I could stay if I wanted,” I managed to say.

“Fair enough. Why don’t you join me downstairs for some milk and cookies?”

“What about Michele?” I asked. “Will she be coming, too?”

His smile vanished. He looked at me as if I’d insulted him.

“No,” he muttered. “She’s not feeling well.”

When he turned to go downstairs, I pocketed the two pieces, then followed.

“Have a seat, m’lady,” he said, gesturing with a flourish to a dining room chair. Then he went into the kitchen and came out with a goblet of buttermilk, which he placed before me, and a plate of cookies that wasn’t sweet enough to smother the taste of the milk that Mr. Metcalf seemed intent to have me drink, one agonizing sip at a time.

He said nothing as he watched me choke it down. With Wally purring on his lap, he began to ask me meaningless questions.

“Carrie, are you happy to be returning to school? It’s not long now.”

I shook my head, my lips pasted together.

“I’ve heard the school here is very big. Very good, but very big. Do you think you and Alexandra will have any classes together?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled, tonguing the cookie into my cheek.

At that moment, Alexandra and her mother breezed in the door, Mrs. Metcalf chirping, “Darlings, we’re home!”

As if wound from behind, I took my empty plate and unfinished milk to the sink and scurried off with Alexandra, the giraffe’s head and body in my shorts pocket.

**

That afternoon, back at my own house helping my mother prepare dinner, I knew I had to tell Alexandra what I’d done. Her father had seen the murdered giraffe.

Gathering my nerve, I went back to their house, the pink and purple creeping into the sky before sunset almost displacing the terror I felt from my scalp down to my feet.

When I knocked on the door, Michele answered.

“How’re you feeling?” I asked, nudging one sandaled foot against the other.

She eyed me for a heartbeat. “Fine,” she said. Her voice fell flat between us. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

I didn’t have an answer.

“I guess you’re looking for Alex,” she said, opening the door wide. “She’s downstairs torturing Wally.”

The one time I’d tried to suggest that Wally might not be having such a great time, Alexandra had said that I was being ridiculous. Cats had no idea whether they were having a good time or not. Besides, Wally was her cat, and I could go home if I didn’t like dressing him up.

Stung by her words but unwilling to be chased away, I stayed on and helped her lace the dresses over his fat, furry stomach and truss the tops of his paws into the tiny booties. This time, however, Alexandra looked up at me, and I thought she understood why I’d come.

I knelt next to her and picked up a piece of doll’s clothing, tracing the eyelet at the hem, embroidered with green petals. Alexandra had a dress just like it in her own size.

“Wally looks nice,” I said. “Like he’s going to a party or something.”

Alexandra was silent.

“Is he?” I said. “Going to a party?”

“Wally doesn’t like parties. We both hate crowds.”

“Then maybe for a walk? Maybe we can take him in the stroller. It’s pretty outside, with the sun about to set.”

I hated how Wally looked, but for the first time, I didn’t want to be in the house any longer than I had to be.

Still not looking at me, Alexandra gathered Wally into her arms and placed him in the stroller, his hind legs poking up, his front paws bound too tightly in ruffled sleeves and slippers for him to fight even if he wanted to.

Once outside, we walked together back toward my house and past it into the park that led toward the school. I started to worry about whether I should bother with any of this—with a confession, with a decision. And I worried, too, that if there was any decision to be made, no matter what I would say, it might not belong to me, that it might be out of my hands altogether.

“So, what’d you do while I was out at piano?” Alexandra asked. “Did you get to read?”

“No,” I said, the fingernails of one hand clamped between my teeth. “I think I fell asleep.”

Alexandra laughed. It was an adult laugh, the kind I’d heard from my mother once or twice, and it made me wonder what kind of emotion could can produce such a mirthless sound.

“I wanted to ask you something,” I said before I really wanted to. I hadn’t planned to ask her anything. But the will I’d abandoned when Alexandra first bobbed into my life was beginning to right itself, stretching, as if roused from sleep.

She stopped the stroller and turned to face me.

I looked at the ground, knowing I had to go forward. “Do your parents—?”

“What? Love us?”

Alexandra spit out the word like a curse, and it dovetailed with all that I knew about her: that she would be a friend I could always count on to put me in a place that would suit our friendship best, even if it hurt her to have me there. It would be a place where I could not hope to be allowed to love my new friend in the way everyone should be loved.

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, ripping off my cuticles and staring back at her.

“Then what did you mean?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

But in a way that terrified me more than what I was sure of, I really did.

I knew exactly what I meant.

 Casey Krivy Hirsch is formerly of Toronto, and living in the Philadelphia suburbs since 1989. She has been a freelance writer for numerous regional newspapers and publications, including Main Line Today and City Paper. Mother of three, she is currently

He told me about his war wounds. I recounted my masturbation injuries. We bonded.

Then came winter.

“See here, Klugstein,” he said. “There’s no need to raise the thermostat above 45. If the pipes won’t freeze, then neither will you.”

Inspired, I replied, “Righty-O!” and reached for the Echinacea.

The New Year brought the worst ice storm on record. The roads were impassable. The supermarkets closed. He ate my cat.

“Sorry about little Priscilla, Klugstein,” he said when I objected, “but this is no time for sentimentality. There’s work to be done.” Undaunted by gale-force winds and temperatures below the freezing point of blood, he climbed onto the roof to remove a fallen tree. I boiled water for herbal tea. He returned shortly with his face encased in ice and poured the kettle over his head.

“Good show, Klugstein! Keep the home fires burning!” he exclaimed while disemboweling my puppy. He grinned sheepishly. “All apologies, old chap, but I’m a bit short of rope, and catgut simply will not do for this job.” He went out again with two hammers in one hand, a saw and a drill in the other, and Bowser’s intestines between his teeth. I boiled more water.

He came back an hour later with an armload of chopped wood, which he put in the fireplace. “Home is where the hearth is,” he chortled, and in one motion struck a match against his mustache and flicked it into the kindling, which ignited immediately. “Who needs natural gas?” he said. “The tree is gone, the roof is patched, and I save a trip to the lumber yard.” He went to the garage to do something complicated to his car.

The next day, while I tried to open a stapler, he used the remains of the fallen tree to build a deck, a dining room table set, and a life-sized replica of Tensing Norgay. He stepped back to admire his handiwork. “Sherpas are a stout-hearted and industrious people,” he said. “A model minority, if ever there were one. Our immigrants would do well to emulate them. Are you Jewish, Klugstein?”

I threw out the stapler and entertained myself with the puppets he had made for me from Priscilla and Bowser.

I knew little of his politics. He loathed all welfare handouts, including Halloween candy, and would toss fake chocolate bars made of scrap wood into Trick-or-Treaters’ bags. Around each splintery Hershey’s simulacrum he wrapped a brief lecture on self-reliance and dental health.

On Mischief Night our mailbox was firebombed.

The next year he placed a trap of his own design in the mailbox, and we awoke to the screams of a nine-year old boy whose arm had been caught and permanently mangled by the device. The parents sued, but expert testimony, that shifted blame to their child-rearing practices, made certain their defeat. In a counter suit he recovered all legal costs plus an undisclosed sum. The Judge sent the boy to a foster home in a remote part of the state.

He was an excellent housekeeper, but not given to socializing, so I was rather surprised when I returned home one evening to discover much of the furniture occupied by cadavers, including two in my bed. “Have you taken up grave robbing?” I joked.

“No indeed, by the time they’re buried they’re no good to anyone.” He explained that he and several like-minded individuals in the medical and funereal professions would seize the deceased at opportune moments and donate them to Third World medical schools and to a few amusement parks in the less developed regions of Canada . “Waste not, want not, ay? Pardon my use of your boudoir, Klugstein, but if we leave them on the floor, they’ll likely be stepped on, and we can’t have that, can we? By-the-by, have you dusted in there recently?”

I tried to emulate him but lacked the will. Though he almost never criticized me, my self-esteem plummeted as I repeatedly failed to live up to his standards. Finally, after seeking solace in a solitary all-night Punch and Judy show that I put on with Bowser and Priscilla, I decided to quit my job and move in with my parents.

I dreaded telling him this, but when I did, all he said was, “Well, at least it’s not the public dole,” and returned to the task at hand, the smelting of three rusting vans from the next-door neighbor’s yard.

My last contact with him was a congratulatory email he sent to me when “The Bowser & Priscilla Show” went into national syndication on PBS, where it replaced “Barney.” I knew we would not cross paths again, for the tracks of our lives were not parallel, but skew.

He returned every cent of my security deposit, with interest.

---

Eric Thurschwell now lives in Wynnewood, PA, but he once shared a house in Langhorne with a handy person. No animals were harmed in the production of this story.

[img_assist|nid=4280|title=Red by Ashraf Osman|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=107]Why did things have to get all retarded when I came out of The Shepard? Why did I have to be the only bull to see those bulls clocking that bull? One stick! Then two! Popping down on Old Man’s dome like me cutting open melons for dessert. Poor homeless fuck. Punk ass with a Kidd jersey’s kicking him under the alley light but it looked like he was just kicking a bunch of tattered rags. Poor emaciated homeless fuck.

I tossed my garbage bag loudly into the dumpster. Gave it a swift boot for a scare. “Hey,” I shouted, my chest puffed all big in case they wanted this shit. “I already called the cops!” That wasn’t true. I hated the fuckin’ Blue and would never call them ever, not since they busted my boy Lou for smoking on the curb in Oak Lane two months back.

Kids took notice and took off, but Kidd Jersey chucked a basketball I didn’t even know he had. Hit Old Man square in his bloody dome. Why aren’t these Kids shooting hoops somewheres instead of stirring the Hill? Why do I gotta go back inside and serve up dessert while they get to chill over at Pastorius and pat Kidd Jersey for bucking Old Man in the dome?

Victorious Kidd Jersey on a park bench, smoking a bowl: All right, we finally beat up the Old Man. “Way to bring him down. Our lives are finally like so complete!”

Poor Old Man, they played knickknack on his dome. Promised myself I’d get a wet rag and go set him straight. But Dickhead Donnie came down in a huff.

“How fucking long does it take to throw out trash, Margaret?”

“I’m sorry, my name is Lee.”

“Excuse me, Leanna, but those fucking people could use some fucking coffee!” Dickhead Donnie’s got a gray Amish beard and nothin’ on top. Yo, J once said it looked like his hair melted, like in Temple of Doom or some shit. Male pattern baldness to the extreme. All he has left is some chin soot.

Dickhead Donnie dumped dollops of cream on some mixed berries. “For everybody else (dollop), this is a fucking job. For me (dollop, dollop), it’s like I’m a culinary Einstein!”

I grabbed a tray with two urns of coffee and a stack of porcelain cups which clanked as I steadied it on my shoulder. “Dickhead Donnie,” I said, leaving out the Dickhead, “when you start splitting atoms instead of artichoke hearts, we’ll fucking talk.”

Right through the double door, smiling. Then I remembered Old Man, streak of blood, broken promise, Super Lee turning all Clark Kent.

J was coming through the other side, and I practically sent his tray of dirty dinner plates airborne.

“Morning Ralph, I said.”

“Morning Sam.”

That’s our Wile E. Coyote thing.

“Yo kid, listen,” I stopped him, “Old Man got bucked in the parking lot by Punks Ass Kids from Pastorius.”

“Damn, really?”

“Yeah, and Dickhead Donnie’s got me serving coffee to these fools.”

Listen. Why were everybody’s eyes on Lee? Why did I have to open my mouth and let out a stench? Why does Groom’s Pops gotta be grinding his teeth over there in the corner? Why couldn’t I be home with J and our favorite Ma watching whatever instead of catering at the Shep?

“Want me to go and help him out?” J’s all concerned, and that’s what I love about him. Had to give him a pat on his free shoulder. Good kid. Loyal as fuck, especially to his Ma. Knows I treat his Ma well too, knows he’s my bull.

Rich Moms turned and raised her coffee cup expectantly, as though I didn’t know where to pour the coffee. Thank you ever so kindly Rich Moms for showing me, I was gonna turn the powdered white creases of your dome into raging rivers of hot coffee. I started pouring—linen napkin on my arm all classy—making sure to give Rich Moms Regular even though she asked for Decaf. She don’t know ‘cause a Bunch of Wasps started chiming their water glasses like a fuckin’ drum line.

Bunch of Wasps: “Speech! Speech!”

Best Man, Thick Boston Accent: “Now, uh…” He’s all red-cheeked and pissed and starts patting his khakis for his notes that he left on the counter in the men’s room that I flushed thinking they were trash. “I’ve known Jason for four years, through most of our time at B.C.”

I’m not even taking orders at the point, just switching back and forth, Regular, Decaf, Regular, Decaf. Yo son, then I got confused ‘cause I was listening to Best Man wax on all eloquently; two Decafs in a row, nobody noticed a change in the flow.

Best Man, TBA: “Anyway, a bunch of us made up a little ditty that best sums up how we feel about this guy right here.” Jason blushed but I’d bet you a nickel it was the Bombay that they had us serve. “It’s pretty easy to follow, so anyone who doesn’t sing will have to do a shot!”

Laughs from Jason’s friends, dirty looks from Jason’s grandparents, coffee from Extra-attentive Lee.

Listen. Best Man jacked himself up on the table, kicking aside dessert plates and half-empty bread baskets that should’ve been removed before but I was outside watching Old Man catch a beat. Yo, work was coming second and I knew it when I saw a couple of rolls bounce on the floor. But I couldn’t help thinking of Old Man. His scruffy bloodstained face, his raggedy coat, his pathetic body trying to prop itself up.

“Jason!” Best Man started droning slowly, then faster and faster: “He’s awesome. He’s studly. He’s the ma-an!”

An immediate crowd pleaser. A new number one on my list of Best Chants I Ever Heard In My Life, replacing the time at the Phillies game with Mary and J last September, when a bunch of true blue fans in front of us starting yelling “ Safety School!” at a herd of Nova freshmen. Listen, them sheep was wearing big royal blue V’s on their tees at a fuckin’ orientation outing and all.

Had to tell J. I dumped my coffee tray on the bar as Groom’s Pops stood to make a speech. Don’t bother Groom’s Pops, nothing’s gonna top Man with two syllables.

Listen, though. In the kitchen, bunch of chefs and waiters were crowded around J, who’s sitting up on the silver counter with his black bowtie undone and the top button of his dress shirt open. Blood’s splattered on his collar like a dessert decorated by Dickhead Donnie. The sinks were filling up fast with suds; a knife was left in the middle of a cake like it was baked that way. Dickhead Donnie dropped the title for a minute and brought J a rag with ice. Fit it on his head like a crooked turban.

“Yo, what happened, J?”

“I was helping the homeless guy,” he winced as a chef blotted the scrape on his chubby cheek, when I got tackled from behind. “They pushed me into the ground. Grabbed my wallet, my tips from tonight, everything.”

Listen. It was enough to shake loose my hair band and make my fro fan out like a black peacock. I was Ragin’ Hulk, Wolfy Berserk, Vigilante Lee.

Donnie went into his office to call the Blue. I grabbed the knife from the cake and shook a glob of chocolate cream to the ground as I headed through the back. Past where Old Man’s dome bled, though there’s just some broken glass and a pile of newspapers now under the light. It was all dark at the Toyota dealership across the street, the red and white flags barely flapping. Yo, even quiet enough on Germantown Ave to hear a car’s tires grind up the cobbles of Chestnut Hill. All the lights were lit-up on Allen Street though. I imagined White People probably watching me from their massive stone homes.

White People, nasally voices: “Oh my gosh, there’s a Black man with a knife walking up to the park. Lock the doors, for Pete’s sake, lock the doors!”

Pitch black at the end of the block, where Pastorius began. Must’ve taken a full minute for my eyes to adjust on the park. But then I saw a flicker across the field, and a couple of red embers floating back and forth like fireflies. Covert Lee ducked behind a nearby Sycamore, thinking out his next move.

Listen, how did my day go from eating Delasandro’s cheesesteaks with Mary and J down on the Art Museum steps to seeing Old Man get bucked, to taking lip from Dickhead Donnie, to Man with two syllables, to J getting bucked when I should’ve been the bull to be bucked, to this vigilante shit? Why’s my ‘stache sweatin’? Why did I once again have to be the only bull to take the only bulls? Why couldn’t I just clean up and go home, but with J’s wallet and our tips?

Punk Ass Kids, in a fair world: “We’re really sorry Lee; we know not what we shit we did. Here, take your wallet back, and take ours too. You can use our parents’ credit cards all you want. They don’t give. And give us a kick in the ass so we learn our lesson.”

“Damn right you’re sorry bitches, but don’t forget Old Man.”

I ran over to the Punk Ass Kids and gave one a Doc Marten to the back. He went down like the shit was a fixed match. The other two jumped backward.

“Whoa, man what the fuck!” I grabbed one around the neck. He smelled like cigarettes and skunk weed. He’s elbowing me in the side and my tux shirt gets all untucked. Kidd Jersey scrambled for the bat.

“Leave it bitch,” I yelled, whipping out the knife from my belt. There isn’t much light on the field, but enough for Kidd Jersey to see me holding it to his bull.

Yo listen, I must’ve looked deranged, in my catering clothes with my hair freaked, holding a knife to Hostage Kid’s throat. Probably the knife that did it; the difference between Good Worker Lee and Vigilante Lee.

“You’re not gonna do nothing, bitch!” Kidd Jersey screamed.

Kicked Kid’s wheezing for air somewhere at my feet, and Hostage Kid’s squirming to make a break. Yo son, Kidd Jersey was right and he knew it, so I squeezed Hostage Kid til he coughed a little. And I cursed.

“You stole my fucking boy’s money, Motherfuck! I want his shit back!” I had to call J my boy, no time to get into the dynamics between Mary and me.

But listen. Blue and red started flashing up Allen, and we all stopped to look, even Kicked Kid, who was faking a lot of the pain ‘cause he was scared of Deranged Lee. Hostage Kid emptied his pockets onto the grass and I let him squirm free. Bulls booked it into the woods toward Millman St., and I grabbed the wads of cash and J’s wallet and split back down the lawn toward Allen.

I could feel my adrenaline pumping the way you feel a glass of ice water. I got back and Donnie’s about to drive off in his van. Didn’t see me stash the knife in my pants though.

“I know you gotta look out for your boy,” he started, back to Dickhead status, but I’m not paying you to go chase after Kids. Do that on your own fuckin’ time. And Lee, don’t forget to lock up.”

No, “Congratulations, Lee?” No, “Way to save the shit, Lee?”

I went back inside and started rearranging the tables and chairs for tomorrow. J mopped the floors quietly.

When we got into the car, I took out the wad of ones and nodded triumphantly to J, who started divvying them up on the dash. Eighty-three each, plus our two hundred flat. Not bad for a night of crime-fighting for Lee, not worth it for J, who’s gonna have to have Mary fussin’ all night.

I started the engine and the lights and radio blared, but then, yo, J hit the dial and nodded out his window.

We both got out of the car, helped Old Man to his feet and walked him up to the back entrance of the Shep, where I slipped a twenty into his tattered overcoat pocket and let him in to lay down on the couch in Dickhead Donnie’s office. Showed him where the fridge was too. Listen. I’d be back in the morning to get him out before Dickhead Donnie showed up. Call time’s always an hour earlier when you gotta set up for a wedding.Zack Pelta-Heller is a non-fiction grad student at The New School. He writes regularly for AlterNet and Zink magazines, and his prose has appeared in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, SuitCase, Slow Trains, and Lilith. Currently, he edits crossword puzzles for a living.

[img_assist|nid=4284|title=The Artist as Vase by Ernest Williamson III © 2006|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=254]

If summer was breaking plates, what then was spring?

A time to keep moving. One deliberately placed foot at a time. A left step followed by a right. Learning what the phrase “going through the motions” means.

Begin with the occasion. A blue linen cloth covers the table. Your mother ironed and starched the embroidered daisies into submission. The candles flicker. Small, pastel, foil-wrapped eggs are scattered artfully amid the individual saltcellars and pepper shakers, the pot of jonquils, the butter sculpted in the shape of a lamb. I can see now that its peppercorn eyes take it all in. An oversized chocolate rabbit flanks the table setting of each grandchild. Even though they are too old for hunts, there is one for eighteen-year-old Phillip, one for thirteen-year-old Emily. The candy figures are hollow—the chocolate, chalky. Later, they will be discarded.

Happy Easter!

Or should I correct myself—the beginning was Good Friday.

Actually, an interesting day to tell me that you were leaving.

And in the time that it took for Jesus to rise, there I was swallowing bites of glazed ham. Helping myself to spring peas and a dollop of mashed new potatoes. All the while waiting for a plank in the wooden floor to open up, vaudeville style, and drop me out of the scene. For a scene it is. And I am the greatest performer of all. Amazingly—showered, styled, coiffed, even articulate. Chit chatting with your parents. Catching up on the latest family news. Helping in the kitchen. Passing plates of hors d’oeuvres. Sipping white wine.

Now keeping myself upright in the Hitchcock chair, I lean against the painted frame for support. No one sees the slightest crack in my smile. No one hears the slightest cry in my voice. I appear fresh, but on the inside the stain spreads.

You said you were unhappy.

Playing over and over in my head like a classic hit gone wrong. You were going through the motions. Needed to do this. Looking for your own place. But, still, somehow, you didn’t want to throw away almost twenty-seven years.

And how was I feeling?

Too shocked and scared and panicked to have made such a decision. That, indeed, you should stay until Phillip graduates, until Emily and I take our trip to Spain and France, until the season passes for you to leave.

And was there even a spring?

For there must have been daffodils poking through the matted winter mulch in the rock garden. Their thrustings like small fingertips reaching for the warmth, the light.

And what about the lavender curling over the rocks, choking every little plant in its way. A shock of purple, a symphony of bees. That must have been later in May.

Spring was a time of pretending. It was a time when my spirit whispered, barely audibly, all will be well, and all will be well, my chant, and all manner of things shall be well against the sound of your voice droning on and on, gaining strength and momentum about your ever-present unhappiness like so many worker bees.

The vernal equinox must be slightly out of kilter.

The sun sets. Each night I listen to the rhythm of your breath as you sleep. Your eyelids flutter as you plan your move, gather your energy, your resolve, while I grow exhausted, deprived of rest but driven, somehow, to stay awake, to worry, to plot out scenarios.

How exhilarating it would have been to take a rain check on Easter. Bag the singsong greetings, discard the bouquet of tulips, throw out the dessert. For the holiday set the precedent when there should have been an announcement: the spring performance is cancelled due to lack of interest.

And because there is no communication between us, has in fact never been, we busy ourselves planning the menu for the graduation party and painting the sun-porch woodwork. I pull the faxes out of the machine, page by page, of the houses on your list. Shake my head and murmur a wistful no. I do not wish to help you look for a new home even though you respect my opinion.

And so the season, like everything else, passes. We sit in the living room, the children wondering what they did wrong now, when you tell them your news. Your desires. Your needs. Your plans sketched out for them. There is silence and then Emily runs out the front door, slams it shut, to find a friend around the corner while Phillip, on his way out the back, tells me through his tears that everything is going to be all right.

So I return to planting my summer hostas in the bed near the kitchen. I see you standing, watching me, through the den window. The light is fiery and illuminates your figure in the late part of the day.

The children will not return for dinner. As it turns out, it is the last supper of sorts but no one realizes this now. You will be gone in the morning before Phillip and Emily even wake up. I ask if you would like to eat in front of the TV. A sitcom will do the talking in our house tonight.

I prod the pasta salad with my fork. Suddenly, the tomatoes, the black olives, the green peppers confuse me. I rest my fork carefully on the ironstone plate.

“This is very good,” you comment. “You’ll have to give me the recipe when I leave.”

My silent rage grows, spreads, but has nowhere to go.  I pick up my plate. When I open the backdoor, the early evening air washes over me. As I throw the plate against the shed, I imagine the pasta salad scattered amid the ivy and pachysandra. It takes several tries to break the heavy plate, but when I succeed, the smooth, glazed shard reveals its chalky inside.

Betsy L. Haase teaches eighth grade Communications. She is a Teacher-Consultant for the National Writing Project and a candidate in the Master of Arts Writing Program at Rowan University.

[img_assist|nid=654|title=Creation by Ashraf Osman|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=104]Gittel Goldberg turned her back on her cramped kitchen and gazed out the window over Madison Street. How she longed for a space between the tenements, a glimpse of the ocean—the last thing that had touched the world she had left behind. But no, only an unyielding line of stone and metal stood before her, buildings and fire escapes huddled together beneath a gray sky heavy with rain. She wiped her hands on the dishtowel and untied her apron, all the while staring at the window directly across the way—Frieda Mandelbaum’s place, with its fringe of white curtain blowing to and fro. Looking at it, she remembered the dream of the night before.

There she had been, back on the ship in her narrow berth, Zev curled up beside her, his little head in the crook of her elbow, and the oldest three sleeping just a handbreadth away. The sea had moved beneath her like a wild thing, and the creaking of the ship had frightened her. She had woken up in a sweat to find her husband Gedalya sleeping beside her and had thrown off the feather quilt, still gripped by her terror that she was drowning, drowning in a sea of bodies! But then the moments had passed, and the pounding of her heart had slowed. Familiar shadows had eased her back into sleep. She had been grateful, so grateful, to be far away from the ocean. But other times—how crazy she was!—she longed for the ocean. Always it happened when she was alone in the apartment. Then she would yearn for those waves and all that she had left behind on the other side of their vast stretch, so far away that memory itself seemed to be a dream.

[img_assist|nid=653|title=Peace by Suzanne Comer|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=191]Ah, enough of this! Gittel told herself, folding the dishtowel and apron and placing them by the enamel stove with its sturdy iron burners that defied dreams. Better to think about gefilte fish. And throwing on a shawl, she grabbed a bucket and fled the tenement to breathe in the cold damp smell of March and the pungent presence of the East River. By the time she entered Kimmel’s Fish Shop, there was a bloom on her cheeks, and last night’s dream was forgotten. Ostrov, Poland, it wasn’t, but the smell of the shop—that much was the same.

Mr. Kimmel couldn’t help but notice that Mrs. Goldberg’s dark hair had come loose from her bun, and he stopped arranging the whitefish to admire her. She was a sturdy, compact woman, pleasingly zaftig, with high cheekbones and a proud way of holding her head. She picked out a whitefish. She picked out a carp. Kimmel nodded and reached for his knife. How much gefilte fish had he been responsible for? It was beyond counting. Still, he considered. If all the platters of gefilte fish that had begun in his shop were lined up from his door, they would go from Essex Street to who knows where. Definitely over the Brooklyn Bridge . But Mrs. Goldberg interrupted his thoughts.

"Not so fast! I want to do all the knife work myself. Just like I did back home.”

Kimmel lowered his knife and raised an eyebrow.

"You know how to kill a fish, Mrs. Goldberg?"

"You will excuse me, Mr. Kimmel, but such a question, I am not going to answer."

Hershel Kimmel smiled and shrugged as if to say, you want the guts and mess? Be my guest. And so the fish were unceremoniously dropped into Gittel Goldberg’s bucket—she insisted that he add some water from his sink—and he watched the three of them go out his door, shaking his head. But Gittel, she was happy. She walked home, the fish flipping and flapping in her bucket, splashing water all over. Back in the tenement, she filled her bathtub with water, and she dumped the fish in. So far, so good. She rolled up her sleeves, reached into the bathtub, and grabbed the whitefish. In no time at all, the head and the bones were salted and placed in the icebox. Now it was time for the carp.

"Okay my goldeneh fisheleh," Gittel said to the carp swimming around in the bathtub. Why did she talk to the fish? Who knows? Hours later when she couldn’t sleep, Gittel would wonder if that was the beginning of everything right there. But at the time, she talked to the fish because it looked so pretty, so golden in the bathtub. It darted, it dived, it dashed round and round.

"Maybe you should slow down, Mister Fisheleh. You should be tired already. Watching you, I’m getting dizzy."

But the fish wasn’t tired. It was having a grand time. It zipped around like it was born in a bathtub! All this fish needed was a tuxedo, and it could perform on Second Avenue. Gittel sat back on her heels and sighed. She looked at the knife, the fish skins, the guts and scales. Gefilte fish–it didn’t seem so good anymore. Gittel gave herself a shake and leaned over the bathtub.

"Sing and dance, why don’t you?" she said to the fish. "You do everything else."

And that’s when it happened. That’s when the fish did something Gittel would remember till the end of her days. The carp rose up on its golden tail and turned its silvery black eye upon her. Opening and closing its mouth, it waved its fins and uttered, "No!"

Gittel gripped the edge of the bathtub and sank down upon the floor. Her heart flopped so hard in her chest, she thought God had punished her by turning her heart into a fish. She pressed her forehead against the cool edge of the bathtub; she gasped and prayed. Then she raised her head. There was the carp in the same position, high on its tail, its fins fanning the air. Once more, it opened its mouth.

"Okay! Okay!" Gittel cried. "I won’t! I won’t!"

Now Gittel was a very wise woman. She read the Yiddish papers every day. She had been to the harbor at Le Havre, France. She had traveled across the ocean. She had seen more of the world than she had ever dreamed she would. Plus, she had talked to every woman in her tenement more times than she could count, and she had heard many a strange story. But she had never, never in her life heard anyone say anything about a carp talking. And in English, no less! So she knew this was a sign meant only for her. This was her wonder. Her mystery. Her very own miracle.

Gittel stood up slowly and wiped her hands. When she looked down, the carp was darting and diving around the bathtub. But it was keeping an eye on her, you better believe it. And Gittel looked right back into that silvery black eye, and she was not afraid anymore.

"My fisheleh, my fisheleh," she whispered. "Don’t worry."

So Gittel went back to Mr. Kimmel, who looked up with surprise when he found her once again at his counter.

“Don’t tell me it’s next Shabbes already.”

“I want to buy a basin.”

“This is some new ingredient for gefilte fish?”

“Mr. Kimmel, with four children, I can’t be using my bathtub for fish one day a week.”

"Mrs. Goldberg, let me tell you, I have been in this business a very long time, and I have, if I may say so, many customers who are as particular as yourself. And for them I do all the skinning, the boning, the everything—and I do it for free! So what, I ask you, is the point of throwing your money away on a basin?"

Gittel gave Hershel Kimmel a look. "You will excuse me, Mr. Kimmel, but such a question, I am not going to answer."

So don’t you know, come Shabbes, the golden carp darted and dived in the basin, right there in the corner of the kitchen. The children loved it. Gedalya had second helpings of the gefilte fish. That much was the same.

Shabbes came and went without any further commentary from the fisheleh, but Gittel kept stealing glances at the carp. Its flips and flops caused her heart to do the same, and such gymnastics, Gittel said to herself, she did not need. She went to bed Saturday night grateful that her husband had fallen asleep before her. She needed to think. With Gedalya snoring beside her, Gittel stared into the darkness. She did not like this weight upon her heart, this secret between herself and a fish. She found herself longing for Monday, Monday when her children would be in school and Gedalya would be working down the street at the Schulmanns’. Come Monday, she would do something. Perhaps—yes!—she would give the fish back to Kimmel. At the very thought, her heart stopped aching. Monday night, she would lie beside her sleeping husband, and this torment would be over. But no sooner did Monday night shimmer like a paradise before her than she knew that she could never bring the fish back to Kimmel’s. What would she say to him? She could just picture the look on his face, the eyebrow raised, the questions he would throw at her, and how many questions can a woman refuse to answer? And then, even if he took the fish—and this, she knew, he would never do, but suppose, just for a moment, that Kimmel took back the fish and said nothing—even so—then what? She would be sending Mister Fisheleh straight into the hands of another woman! And such a deed she could not do. She could not live with the thought that another woman, bending over her bathtub before Shabbes, would get the shock of her life. An older woman could die from fright. A pregnant woman—Gittel shuddered. It was out of the question.

But to keep the fish was also out of the question. Already her children were making up names for it. Already Zev was telling stories about it, bringing his friends into the kitchen to watch it. He hung over that basin so much, it made her nervous. One day that smart aleck fish would open its mouth to her youngest son, and then where would she be? No, on Monday when she was alone with the fish, she would explain to it the whole situation.

"Gottenyu, what am I doing?" she groaned, as her husband sighed and flung his arm over her. "Here I am, planning a talk with a fish!"

But plan it she did. She wondered if the fish had any Yiddish. It had spoken in English, yes, but this little talk on Monday she would rather have in Yiddish. Okay, all right, she’d throw in a bit of both. Surely the fish would see that this was a kindness that must be repaid with kindness in return. And with this hope, she rolled towards her husband and gave herself up to sleep.

So everything was planned for Monday. As for Sunday, Gittel planned to lay low. Do some washing, do some cooking, and keep an eye on the fish. The weather was fine, and Gedalya took Avrum, Mendel, and Ruchel to Seward Park. But Zev, he wasn’t feeling right. His cheeks were flushed, and Gittel knew that the child had a fever. On any other day of her life, Gittel would have been thinking only of her youngest child and how she could nurse him back to health. But now she chafed at the thought that he must stay home with her. She wished he were out of the apartment, far away from the carp in its basin. Instead, he sat on one of the kitchen chairs, his feet propped up on another chair, his dark curly head leaning against the wall. Gittel noticed how the damp curls clung to his forehead. She wanted him in bed, but he refused to lie down. The child wanted to be with her. As she ironed Gedalya’s shirts, she bit her lip.

"What is it, Mama? Are you mad at me for being sick?"

"No, no, totteleh. I am distracted, that is all. Mrs. Greenbaum, she told me a foolish story, and I can’t get it out of my head."

"Tell it to me."

Oy oy oy! Why had she said anything about a story? She couldn’t make up a story now without that fish working his way into it!

"Mrs. Greenbaum’s mishegoss—it’s not for children, mein kind. You tell me a story, and I’ll finish the ironing. Then we’ll take a nap, okay?"

The boy studied his mother and nodded. His gaze traveled around the room and settled upon the fish. Gittel winced, but it was too late. He had begun.

"Once there was a fish. It had a golden tail and silver fins and black, black eyes. One day the fish was swimming in the East River, and a man caught it in a net."

"Zeiskayt, you don’t have to tell me a story. I’ll stop right now. Look, I’ve finished the shirt. Let me get you something to eat, and we’ll take a nap."

"No, I’m not hungry! Do your ironing, Mama. I want to tell you a story."

Gittel clenched her teeth as she reached for another shirt. She prayed that the child’s story would end soon. The sooner she could him get out of the kitchen and away from that fish, the better she’d feel.

"So the man put the fish in a bucket, and he brought the fish home. He was going to cook the fish for dinner, but he was so tired that he fell asleep.”

"That’s a very nice story," Gittel said, "and you and I should sleep too! I am tired of ironing, and here you are with a fever. We should lie down already."

"I’m not finished!" Zev flashed back at her. Gittel felt ashamed of herself for interrupting him. The child loved telling stories. How could she deny him this pleasure when he was sick? And yet, she was more and more anxious. It was all she could do to go on ironing. But—she was a mother first and foremost. She smoothed out the next shirt.

"While the man was sleeping, the fish jumped out of the bucket and landed on the man’s pillow," Zev said, his voice dreamy, his eyes fixed on the window overlooking Madison Street. "Then the bed turned into a river, and the man woke up and said to the fish, ‘What is happening?’ And the fish said, ‘I am taking you to my home for a visit, because you were kind to me and didn’t hurt me.’"

Gittel looked over at the basin in the corner. With a tightening of her heart, she saw that the fish was not swimming around in his customary way. He was still, his fins moving gently, the water billowing against the sides of the basin.

"That gonif is listening!" she thought furiously. Her boy was sick, he needed his rest, and that fish, that fish! Gittel unplugged her iron, marched over to her son, and picked him up.

"Put me down, Mama! I want to finish my story!"

"You can finish it in the bedroom!"

"Let me say goodbye to the fish. Then I’ll sleep."

A wave of tenderness swept over Gittel as her son’s head rested against her shoulder. How could she say no to him? Just for a moment they would look at the fish. Then she would carry him into the bedroom and close the door. As soon as her son was well enough to go to school, as soon as she had a morning to herself, she would get rid of that fish! She didn’t know how, but she would! Gittel breathed in the scent of her boy’s sweaty curls and kissed his forehead. Then she walked over to the basin, and mother and son looked down at the fish. Its fins moved so delicately that Gittel wondered if the fish was asleep. The kitchen was silent, and Gittel felt her son’s heart beating against her breast.

And then between one heartbeat and another, the fish rose up on its golden tail and turned its silvery black eye upon them. Beating its fins and opening its shimmering mouth, the fish uttered "Go!"

Gittel gasped, gripped her son in her arms, and ran into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

"Mama! The fish! The fish talked!" Zev struggled out of her arms and pushed against her, trying to open the door, but Gittel leaned against it with all her strength.

"No he didn’t!"

"He did! He did! You heard it too!"

And then both of them were flinging open the door and rushing into the kitchen.

There was the golden carp, swimming around in the basin, doing nothing.

It was all Gittel could do to stop herself from grabbing that fish and throwing it out the window. She staggered over to a kitchen chair and sank down into it. "Mama?"

Maybe the fish could talk, but Gittel could not say a word.

"Mama, I think we should let the fish go. I think he wants to be free. Let’s do it now."

Gittel tried to look like a mother in charge of the situation. She smoothed out her dress and adjusted her hairpins, tucking the wisps into her bun. Maybe if she had worn a shaytl like she was supposed to, none of this would have happened. At the thought, a flush rose to her face, half shame, half rebellion. She had always hated those wigs; she had always told herself that she would never wear one! And here she was in America, the land of the free! But still, there were other women, women right in her building, who wore them every day and passed her on the stairs, looking at her. She turned to her boy, her youngest child, who would be in December six years old. She felt so old and confused, and he—he was so young and sure.

"What should we do, totteleh?"

"We should put the fish in a bucket with some water and take him outside."

"Then what?"

"We should walk to the river and let him go. Come on, Mama."

"You feel well enough?"

"It’s not far. It’s warm out. When I come home, I’ll rest. I promise."

And so together, mother, son, and fish went down Madison Street and turned at Montgomery, headed for the river. It was a mild day, and many mothers and fathers were out with their children. No one gave any thought to the little pair and their bucket. When they got to a certain place along the wharf, Zev squeezed his mother’s hand.

"This looks like a nice place, Mama." They looked down. There was the water glinting beneath them. A moment later, there was the golden carp catching the sunlight, disappearing into the water with a soft splash.

Gittel stared at the spot where the fish had vanished, overcome by a longing that went through her like a knife. How she wished that she too could go back to where she came from, back to how things used to be! Beyond the East River, the Atlantic beckoned, but she knew there was no homeland waiting for her on the other side. She had crossed the ocean, and the landscape of her heart had changed forever. She belonged here now, on these streets by the East River, even if belonging only meant feeling accustomed to the feeling of not belonging.

"He’s going home now, Mama!" Zev said, his little hand pulling her away from her thoughts. "He’s going home to his family."

"Yes, zeiskayt. He’s going home," Gittel murmured. Holding tightly to her son’s hand, Gittel turned away from the river and headed up Montgomery. At least she hadn’t been the only one to hear the fish’s last word. If she had been, she would have worried for the rest of her life that she had taken leave of her senses. But here she was, her familiar self: a little round now, her hair touched with gray, the small square hands, the ring that Gedalya had given her so many years ago. And there was her boy beside her, chattering happily, going on with his story about the fish. By the time she got him back to the apartment, he was so tired that he fell asleep instantly. As she lay beside her child, Gittel felt herself floating between the "Go" and the "No," between the golden carp and the empty basin in the kitchen. Yes, the fish had spoken—and in a language she would never be able to call her own. But the rise and fall of her son’s breathing—that much was the same. Raima Evan grew up in Swarthmore. She attended Radcliffe College and the University of Pennsylvania, where she received an M.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing as well as her Ph.D. in English. She is an assistant dean at Bryn Mawr College and

[img_assist|nid=4282|title=Blue by Ashraf Osman|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=259]As the rain sopped cement becomes an ever darker hue, Jeanette calls to insist that she’ll be over to visit within the hour. Thirty-three years of watching the rain in blissful solitude isn’t a bad run. Besides, I already know that today’s rain isn’t going to be one of those eternal days. The air isn’t right. I’ll check outside anyway, even though the rain wasn’t violent enough. It wasn’t urgent. Rain needs to be urgent; my husband taught me that.

Parker loved the rain. We got married in the rain. We had our babies in the rain. I buried him in the rain.

It rained for two days solid when Parker went into the ground. As soon as it stopped I went outside. The eternal stillness swallowed me, which I like to think of as Parker’s last gift.

Parker shared the secrets of eternal stillness with me on our honeymoon. That was the first time I experienced it. Only in the fifteen minutes after a drastic rain storm is there even a chance of eternal stillness. When you walk outside and the lines of the trees are so clear, sharp, and vivid that they seem unreal—you’ve found it. The air is heavy yet clear. Nothing moves. The colors of the atmosphere are a mismatch, with every color visible in the grey light. There’s a smell in the air that you recognize reflexively, but that can’t be named. As you stand there nature takes predominance. You can’t ignore it because it’s so vivacious. From an acre away you can see the needles on the pine, the cracks in the bark. You feel yourself moving with the earth, the circular movement of time itself. You feel the lines of your own body sharpen and define. Momentary harmony. Even the grass individualizes itself, each blade separates as the excessive rain settles on its waxy coat. This is eternal stillness. In this moment you can breathe, you’ve joined the universe, and you don’t have to move. It’s not necessary.

That’s what I learned from Parker. Shared with him.

[img_assist|nid=4283|title=Untitled by Nicole Porter|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=113]Now any rainstorm seems like a message from him, even if it’s just one on the Weather Channel. Since he died there’s only been two moments of eternal stillness. Even while he was living we only had twelve together. I’ve put a window seat in so that I can watch the rain in comfort. It’s the best, most ridiculously ornate window seat that’s ever been furnished. It’s like a cotton candy explosion in silk.

In front of my window are my lantanas. The first time I ever saw a lantana was at the annual garden show. The next day Parker came home with twelve flats of those beautiful flowers. Their colorful petal cluster bouquets remind me of our wedding. They were the last thing that Parker planted before he died. When it doesn’t rain I stare at the lantana, and it makes me a little less lonely.

From my perch I watch Jeanette’s red Subaru sputter up the driveway. Today Jeanette’s got a pizza box huddled under her umbrella. Must be a turquoise day. She’ll let herself in, so I take a few moments to stare out at the rain. Shame it’s slowing down.

Jeanette slams everything when she enters—the door, her umbrella, the pizza box. Makes her happy to know that she can still cause a racket. “Lunch!” Jeanette has the voice of a windblown sailor. I can hear her in the kitchen; banging cabinet doors that she knows damn well don’t contain what she’s looking for.

“What kind?” I ask as I lug my bum foot into the kitchen.

“Pepperoni.”

“And?”

“What do you mean ‘And’, you crazy old broad. Pepperoni. You want a gourmet pizza call your goddamn kids.”

“How many times have I got to tell you, onions aren’t gourmet.” I flip open the pizza box, and of course there’s a mix of pepperoni and onion. Jeanette waddles over next to me to stare at the pizza as well. She puts one paper towel in front of me, and another in front of herself. Scrapping the chairs across the faded orange linoleum, we sit and listen to the wooden seats creak beneath us. What happened to the days when we’d glide in and out of these chairs?

Jeanette lifts a slice of pizza out of the box. A greasy umbilical cord of cheese complicates the process. “You seen those ungrateful kids lately?”

I rub my nose. Mention of my children always makes my nose itch. “They called. Wanted to know what my plans were for the holidays.”

“What your plans were? What the hell do they think; that you’re trying to decide between the goddamn Queen of England’s invitation or the goddamn yacht party?”

I blot my pizza with a napkin, and watch the grease soak through the paper into my hand. It’s possible that Jeanette always brings pizza in an attempt to kill me, even though she’s not in the will. “No, they’re trying to decide. Benny and his nit-twit wife want to go to France for a real Christmas at Notre Dame. Precious is afraid to leave her boyfriend for a week, so she thinks she’ll spend it with his family. And don’t you know, his family celebrates Christmas at the Ritz or something like that.”

“We like having you for the holidays anyway. Fuck ‘em.” Jeanette spits out her first bite. Steam billows out of her mouth, and off the slightly chewed piece of pizza. Slurping her water, Jeanette scrunches up her face so that it’s a maze of lines.

“You want me to bring the pie again?” I ask.

“Yeah, Little Jim was requesting it on Sunday. He’s a cute little bugger. Out of nowhere he asked me, ‘will Violet bring me another pumpkin pie all my own?’ That kid’s got a memory like an elephant. Must be hell for his mother, but that’s what they call karma coming back to bite you in the ass.”

Once the pizza cools we eat in silence. Or rather, we don’t speak. These days there’s always some sort of noise accompanying a meal. We’ve accepted it, even though our children haven’t. Today, Jeanette eats her crust. I wonder how long it’ll take her to tell me what’s wrong. That’s the thing about Jeanette; she’s never been good about just coming out with a problem. Even after all these years she has to work up to it. That’s why I call it a turquoise day, getting to the trouble takes as long as it does for one of those pretty blue stones to form.

Jeanette begins folding up her paper towel into a neat, greasy little square. “It’s raining.”

“Sure is.” I listen to the drops pinging off the roof. Out the kitchen window I can see the drops hanging off the laundry line. It’s a murky rain. A chill seeps into the house. Not my favorite kind of rainstorm. It’s more on the line of eternal monotony rather than something sublime. I can hear Parker lecturing me, ‘if it’s been raining for thousands of years, then consider this storm just as miraculous.’ He was always kind of sappy that way. Still, I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s right.

“Parker out there?” Jeanette nods her head, with its beehive of died black hair, at the window. She knows that I believe Parker’s spirit returns with the rain and she doesn’t think I’m crazy for it. That’s friendship.

“I think so. He’s not making himself known.”

“Just like him, the old bastard.”

I don’t know what to say, so I make sure the cardboard lid is tightly pressed closed. One thing about Parker, he was never a bastard. At least not to my knowledge.

The clock ticks away, as it always does when there’s a need for distraction. I take Jeanette’s napkin out of her veiny hands. “What’s eating you?”

“Usual shit.”

“Bull.”

Jeanette looks at me, with those droopy eyes that used to devour everything she came in contact with. She shakes her head. “Just been thinking lately.”

“About things you can’t control?”

“I know. What’s the goddamn point? Sunday Little Jim gave me a mug with World’s Greatest Grandma on it, and all I could think was what the hell am I going to do with this. How many other women got the same goddamn mug? Florence McAdams probably has one, and I’ll be damned if she’s the greatest anything.”

“I don’t have a mug that says that.”

“That’s not really a consolation.”

“No.” I look over at the wall by the stove. There used to be a picture of the kids there, but I took it down last year. Actually, I threw it at Precious when she got mouthy with me. Still haven’t figured out what she did with it. Now there’s a square of unfaded wallpaper in the middle of the wall. It makes the whole kitchen look tacky.

“You want a mug that says Worlds Greatest Grandma?”

“Not really. Even when they were babies, the kids always knew they rated a distant second to Parker.”

“You want to go look for him?” Jeanette scratches her chin where three sharp, thick, white hairs poke out. I kinda like that she got hairy in her old age; it serves her right for all her former pampering.

“Depends if you mean you want me to drop dead right now or just go outside.”

Jeanette stands. “Outside. It’s too goddamn stuffy in your house, and it smells like meatloaf.”

“I don’t even eat meatloaf.”

Jeanette pulls her coat onto her left shoulder before flinging it to the other side. “Then why does your house always smell that way? Get the damn umbrella.”

Outside the rain is slow enough that I don’t need to worry about the blue rinse washing out of my hair. Jeanette throws both of our umbrellas onto the stoop in front of the front door. A few of the surviving remnants from my garden perfume the air. Of course, the pines are particularly fragrant.

Parker would have pulled me into the muddy grass by now, to wait for that moment of eternal stillness. We would have waited until all possible hope was gone, then we would have laid our heads down, so that we could see life from the perspective of ants, with every blade of grass becoming a mountain.

Today smells like dirt.

Jeanette and I walk up the driveway, and circle around her car. There’s not much to look at other than an old beat up aluminum shed that I’ve always hated, and the little cracked stucco house that would shame the kids if they could see it in its current state of disrepair. Personally, I like the weather-beaten look. Although a new coat of paint on the shutters would liven the place up. Maybe I’ll finally go for the purple trim. That’d piss everyone off. Even Parker.

Jeanette heads over to the vegetable garden that’s already in hibernation. She crouches down. I didn’t even know she could still kneel, but that’s what you get for being Catholic your whole life. I join her, and feel the rain seep through my trousers. You’d think I’d feel closer to Parker at this moment, but it’s just the opposite. I want to be in my house, my smelly house.

Pulling at some of the weeds, Jeanette tears the limp green stems apart. Pull, tear. Pull, tear. I’d tell her to stop, but I hate weeding, and it needs to be done. She sneezes and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “Vi, I’m loosing my mind.”

“So?”

“I’m really loosing it. They’re going to pack me off soon.”

“They won’t do that if you don’t tell anyone. Look at me. I’ve been seeing Parker outside this house since the day he died. I’ve obviously lost my mind. Thing is I know who to tell, and who not to. Besides, neither of us ever had much of a mind anyway, least not a great one. Now we get to be as dingy as we want.”

Jeanette’s voice cracks, and as it does so, her body looses its rigidity. She slumps sideways, so that her left leg is in full contact with the wet grass. “I don’t want to lose my mind.”

“Too late for you to start being a conformist.”

“The goddamn doctor said there’s no cure. He said all my fucking eccentricities aren’t eccentricities, and it’s going to get worse. It’s going to get to the point where I don’t know anyone. Might be a good thing, but Vi, I don’t want to forget. Too much has happened just to forget it all.”

“Maybe the doctor’s wrong.” I start pulling at the weeds as well. We put the green scraps in a pile that quickly becomes a mound.

“I told him he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, and he had the nerve to say that kind of language didn’t help anything. Condescending prick. He reminds me of Benny.”

“Sounds like it.” It’s true my son is a condescending prick, and a doctor.

Jeanette yanks up a large weed, that turns out to be a forgotten carrot. She tries to pull the stem off, but it’s stuck on tight. So she traces the carrot through the mud. “There are some things I was planning on telling you, on your deathbed. Now I can’t, because I probably won’t remember any of it.”

“You’ve been planning to have a scene at my deathbed? What if I died suddenly, fell down the stairs or something?”

Jeanette shrugs. “I don’t see that happening. You’re a stubborn ass; you’ll make us all suffer along with you.”

I nod. It’s true I was planning to have an elaborate deathbed scene, just like Parker. Not that his was enjoyable for any of us, but it was memorable. I wouldn’t give up that time with him for anything. The drizzle stops. I look around, there’s nothing extra vivid or alive. It’s a murky post-rain just as I predicted. “Tell me now.”

“Vi, I tried to seduce Parker. I tried for almost forty years. The most I got out of him was a sloppy kiss that had more to do with you than it did me. He was mad at you for something. I don’t remember what. Christ, I used to know. I knew yesterday. You have no idea how much I wanted Parker. I tried everything. Once, I thought about pushing you down the stairs while you were pregnant with Precious, but I decided that Parker would be a miserable widower, and I didn’t want to deal with that.”

A drop of rain, probably from the pine tree, drips onto my head. One large splat of water, nothing else. I wait for another drop. A bird calls out without receiving an answer. “Why’d you tell me that?”

“Thought you should know. It wasn’t fair of me, hiding it from you all these years. I’m a shit, and you need to know that. Because I consider you my best friend, that’s how I describe you to everyone. In my heart I’ve been a complete bitch to you. Vi, I tried everything.”

“You didn’t need to tell me that. I could have died happily never knowing.”

“Vi, you have no idea what I’ve done. I couldn’t help it, Parker was everything to me. Still is. If he had let me, I would’ve taken him from you and the kids, and moved far away. I never would have felt bad about it, not even a little.”

“Well, you’ve cleared your conscious. I guess I’ll have to forgive you. Nothing happened, and besides, I need somewhere to go for the holidays.”

“Thank you, Vi. It’s more than I deserve.”

“Goddamn right it is.” I swish my hand through the pile of weeds we had just created. The wet stems stick to my hand. It’s time to go back inside my smelly house. As I try to get up, I notice that Jeanette remains seated. She leans back with an arch.

Jeanette closes her eyes to sigh before she continues her confessional. “You know, Parker used to tell me about the moment of eternal stillness after a big rainstorm. I was kinda hoping that would happen today. That’s why I’ve been waiting to tell you until it rained. Sometimes he’d take me outside and we’d walk until it was quiet. Then we’d wait. I never saw it, but Parker said it’s the moment when everything is clear and distinctive. Only when the world is sharp, will you know that you belong to the eternal circle. That’s what he said.”

I grab the carrot right out of Jeanette’s hands. She rocks back slightly as I take it from her. Then I beat her over the head with it. That soggy carrot strikes her shoulders, her back, her head until she’s laying in the fetal position next to my dead vegetable garden. With each whack I feel the carrot loosen. I’m not sure if it’s the carrot or my fists hitting her anymore. Only when the carrot brakes off its stem do I stop.

I throw the carrot in her face and stretch my body up so that I’m standing fully above her. “I hope you forget everything except this goddamn carrot.” I try to run back into my house.

I slip as I get to my door and fall on my hands. The stinging travels through my entire body. Instant soreness. I look back; Jeanette hasn’t moved yet. I look up, and the clouds begin parting, revealing a lighter sky. As I pull myself back to standing, I see that my my potted lantana blossoms are filled with water. Each colorful delicate cup has a perfectly round bubble of rain in it. It’s like the rain is being held in a perpetual freeze. That’s when I know that Parker is present—watching me and Jeanette. He’s resting in the lantana, where the rain has frozen in a moment of eternal stillness.

With more strength than I know I have I pick up the planter and carry it to Jeanette’s car. She watches me as I get closer. I put the planter on the top of her trunk. “Now you’ve got him.” Jeanette doesn’t move. Part of me wants to hit her again.

Instead I return to my house. From the front door I watch her slowly stand up, stumble to her car, and place the planter in the passenger seat. After she and Parker drive away, I rummage through my junk drawer, looking for purple paint samples.

 

 Melissa Mowday is a Philadelphia area writer. Her fiction has appeared in the Avenue Literary Journal. She was also commissioned to write the 2005 Hibernia Park Murder Mystery, which is her second play to be performed. Currently, she is completing her

[img_assist|nid=4295|title=”Dravidian’s Cure” by Antonio Puri © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=73]I’m sitting at a small rickety table by the window of this nondescript cafe, its only sign a half-shattered plastic square that reads “Breakfast.” No name, just what it serves. What I serve. Remarkably, Angel manages to keep this place open. I don’t know why he picked this location, this dingy block of downtown Long Beach , so empty of hope the only life on the sidewalks are the alcoholics ditching into the Algiers Bar across the street. I’m on my break, trying to read a moldy paperback copy of The Stranger, drinking coffee I’ve laced with whiskey from the flask I keep in my apron pocket. The awning of the bar reflects the sun in glaring hot swaths across the asphalt. I lift my cup to drink and in she walks, predictable as the heat of the California sun.

I wonder where she’s been today. She looks more alert than usual, though wearing the exact same outfit as she has all month: leopard skin coat, fake-fur collar gray with cigarette ash and dandruff, grimy pink mules. The exposed rough skin of her unshaven ankles makes me sad.

“Hi, Mom,” I say.

She ignores me and slowly pushes a stiff lock of yellow-streaked white hair from her broad forehead. She makes no eye contact, although I note a distinct lift of her chin. My mother is too good to be seen talking with the hired help. She glides like a queen toward the counter where Angel is wiping down the plastic wood-grain paneling. Her hands hang limp. A black patent leather purse dangles off the tips of her long-fingered left hand.

She clears her throat, a rheumy thirty years of tobacco smoke clogging the pipes. Angel ignores her, and my heart hurts. She’s beautiful. How can he ignore her? But Angel has a business to run, as he explained to me last week, when he dialed 911 to report a vagrant: my mother.

I am worried at how best to proceed because she’s earlier than usual and I am not prepared. Yesterday had been a good day, because I had remembered to lay out two quarters on each table before she got here, so that she could come right in, do her work—which is to steal my tips—then get out before Angel calls the cops. But today everything—the sun, the heat of the whiskey—pushes me to forget just where I am.

I watch her and feel the familiar urge to have a normal conversation, the urge like a gnawing hunger. It must be normal to want that, especially now. I’m getting married this week. It’s normal for a girl to turn to her mom at a time like this. It must be. I think: I’m so glad you came in. I wanted to tell you something. Mike and I are getting married on Wednesday. Do you remember Mike?

Angel is now glaring at my mother although he still hasn’t spoken to her. He hates it when she comes in. Says it ruins business to have crazies wandering around. I tell him it isn’t her fault; she is my mother, what am I supposed to do? We don’t argue about it anymore, though. Angel is only threatening to call the police. He’s the last person to want the cops to come in, check things out, study the fake green cards and expired licenses. Besides, he doesn’t want me to quit, really, because who else would work in this dull, nameless place?

My mother turns on her heel and heads toward the table in the far right corner. I wince. I have not cleared the table, and the last customers had had a three-year-old who, with both hands, smeared pancake syrup all over everything. I’d noticed the hacking cough of the father, the balled up napkins containing God knows what.

I want my mother to sit with me, have a cup of coffee, watch the people slip into the darkness of the Algiers Bar.

Remember Mike? We came to see you at the hospital? Mike paid for the taxi fare. He gave you a carton of Lucky Strikes. You told him you were trying to quit so you were going to flush them down the toilet. He thought that was funny. I was relieved, because he’d paid for them out of his tip money and I thought he’d be mad. And he’s so mean when he’s mad. But instead he said, “Well, hon, do me a favor and flush them one at a time so they last.” You thought that was funny.

Angel jerks his head over at my mom, then looks pointedly up at the clock. My break is over. I get up and dig through my pockets for some tips. I have about three dollars in change. I approach my mother, who has seated herself at the filthy table.

You’re invited. Will you come? Adrian ’s Wedding Chapel. Adrian said we could invite a witness, but if we couldn’t find one, he’d ask his assistant, Hilda. I thought since maybe you were around here, you know, you might stop by. Just a thought. Two o’clock on Wednesday. That’s the day after tomorrow.

My mother lights a Lucky Strike and gazes out over the cafe while I gather the sticky plates and place them on the table next to us. I pull a clean ashtray from my pocket and sit down across from her. Angel slams something and stomps into the kitchen. I can hear him making a ruckus, something that sounds like forks being thrown into a fan.

Her body smells unwashed. Her black shiny purse sits in front of her. I want to open it up, dig through to the bottom for pennies and sen-sen and flecks of tobacco.

“How are you doing, Mom?” I push the quarters in her direction. “I have something to tell you.”

She sighs, plumes of white smoke pouring from her nostrils. She looks down at her hands, the backs of her long beautiful fingers tanned from Thorazine and her wanderings beneath the hot sun. Then she frowns. She picks up the quarters. Her brow twists in confusion, her hand resting on the table, palm up, full of quarters. She looks up at me, perplexed.

“Who the hell are you?”

I fold my hands around hers, curling her fingers around the quarters. Her hands are cool and soft.

Will you come? Maybe you could play for us. There’s an old piano at Adrian ’s. Nothing much. But all the keys work. I checked. You could play anything you wanted. Chopin. You always loved Chopin.

She is still frowning at me and I can’t find any words to speak. I get up and hug her shoulders. Suddenly she pulls me down and we kiss. It is an awkward quick collision of soft smoky lips. We have never done this before, kissed on the mouth, and for a moment I hold my breath, not knowing what to think. Then my mother turns fierce, her eyes blazing blue and sharp. She grabs my collar and whispers loudly, “I’ve got a tip for you. Never fall in love with a woman.” Her eyes fill with tears. “They’ll break your heart.”

I stand up , blushing , and my mother’s face snaps back to its calm disdainful beauty. She stands abruptly, drops the quarters into her purse and marches across the cafe to the front door. She stands there until Angel sighs and opens it for her. I run to the window and watch as long as I can the leopard skin back prowling down the street.

It’s okay. Never mind. It’s no big deal. We don’t love each other very much anyway.

Angel whistles and calls out that it is time for me to get back to work, though there are no customers. The breakfast rush is over. I put my hands into the pockets of my apron, feeling nothing, feeling nothing because I don’t know that I will never see her again.

 

*

 

This piano is old.

“Strange that a piano this old and so, umm, untaken care of, sorry—”

“No, that’s okay.”

“Well,” he crawls out from beneath the legs as if from under a car. His clean blue jeans are worn at the knees, his waist is slender. The piano tuner, Timmy, sits on my carpet, legs crossed Indian style. He rests his hands and polishing cloth in his lap. His hair is black and curly. His long lashes wave up at me. “It’s one of the sweetest pianos I’ve ever heard.” He grins.

I am grateful for this young man, who has come into my home with shiny , elegant tools. I always thought it was just my opinion, just my love for this piano, my mother’s piano, loving it the way we love the first voice we ever hear, how we come to understand that all other voices are mere echoes of that first sweet voice, a voice I have not heard for 15 years.

It is a Winter 1937 cottage grand. A cottage grand looks like a regular spinet, but there’s something different about its internal workings that I never understood. The chain of events that flows through its intricate systems of levers, springs and hammers, through felt and wool and wood, makes it different.

We lift the upper lid , swing the tapered arm down to keep it propped open. I gently pull the hinged lid that covers the keyboard all the way out, exposing its insides. Timmy gets to work. He raps a silver tuning fork against his knee, then sticks it between his teeth. He reaches in and secures a tiny wrench, making minuscule adjustments, seeking 440 vibrations per second.

I ask Timmy what happens to a piano as it ages. He explains that first the leather and felt compact so that the action becomes uneven and less responsive. Rattles and squeaks develop.

“All the action parts become worn out,” he says, tapping middle C. He frowns. “Hmmm. The keys are getting wobbly.” I want to stop his hand from tapping the key, from using up its strength.

“It gets worse,” he continues. “Hard to believe, but the strings may actually break.” He plucks a rusty B-flat string and its dull thud silences us for a moment.

“Some pianos just die.” Timmy leans toward the hammers and sighs. “The big failure is hidden—look, just below the surface of the cap.” He points to the cap, fingers it, and in the rising dust I smell decades of cigarette smoke and my mother’s breath.

When he’s finished tuning, we examine the ornate cabinet. Its color shifts from one side to the other. The side closest to the fireplace is paler than the rest. He rubs his finger into a round cigarette scar; around the water-stains of the alcoholic years I spent trying to rid myself of Mike.

To distract Timmy from the damage I tell him, “I clean the keys with curdled milk.”

He shoots me a glance. “Oh, I think I heard about that. Something about lactic acid?”

He encourages me to reconsider restoration. “I know it’s expensive, but it’s such a lovely instrument. Still. She’s worth it.”

When the piano tuner leaves, I pull out the bench. I’ve draped it with a homely pink rug to cover up how it is cobbled together with too many thin nails since that day ten years ago , when Mike broke it into pieces against the wall then came after me, w hen one post-blackout morning the damage he did to the piano, to me, finally entered my consciousness and I made calls. The police came. I met Margaret, a therapist, in a hospital rehab hallway.

I rub the dampness of last night’s bottle of whiskey off the coffee table. I only had one, just one when I got the letter; when I heard the news, then called Margaret; what should I do?

Thirty or more books of music line the shelf above the piano. I choose Chopin preludes. The prelude is not a piece I’m familiar with, so I proceed slowly, addolorato. But even in this dirge I can hear the water, the life force. The piano tuner told me this piano is now only in tune with itself, accurate pitch no longer possible for its aging body.

My mother had schizophrenia and perfect pitch. She’d call out “G” when the phone rang, “F” at the doorbell. As I clumsily, slowly, begin the prelude’s arpeggio down the keyboard, like so many drops of rain on a lonely night, I try to remember if this piano—her piano—was always weak in its pitch, and if so, was this what drove her mad, knowing the way she did what constituted a perfect sound? I do not know what drove her from me that last day near the Algiers Bar. I do not know what killed her. Tomorrow, because Margaret says I must, I will find out.

 

*

 

When I enter the Medical Records office of Metropolitan State Hospital , a man rises from a desk. The nameplate on the desk reads, Miguel Torres. He is the records clerk who answered the phone when I called weeks before, when Margaret and I decided it was time to know. He waves his hand at a long table. On it is a stack of folders twelve inches high. I stand in the middle of the room, rubbing the backs of my hands. They burn when I am afraid. The smell of dust and mold is familiar and sad.

A woman wearing a white muumuu with pink hibiscus comes into the room. I think she is a patient. She says hello. She stands close to me and then I think she isn’t a patient, because she smells fresh and wears socks and white tennis shoes with her laces tied. She smiles at me and motions to the tower of my mother’s records.

“Go ahead, honey. Tell us which ones you want. We’ll copy them for you.”

Miguel comes back in and hands me a box of paper clips. “Sixteen admissions,” he says. “What do you want?”

Everything, I want to tell him. How can he ask me that? Why can’t I just pick up this stack and walk back to my car and drive away? Miguel leaves the room again and the woman touches my shoulder. “Five cents a sheet.” She shakes her head and sits down at a typewriter table and begins to poke fingers at the keys.

I open the first manila folder. There is a small black and white Polaroid of my mother’s face, an intake photo of a woman in the throes of a nervous breakdown. Her hair hangs longer than I remember it. Her eyes seem sleepy and she is almost smiling, as if she has just had good sex or heard the voice of God.

I did not expect to find my mother, not like this; I have been without her for so long I assumed all traces of her life had disintegrated into dust. I had thought, wrongly, that this hospital had closed, that the tools that shocked my mother, burned her memory down to ash, the so-called machinery of cure, had been bulldozed.

When I received the notice from the hospital that her records were to be purged I called Margaret, whom I had only seen a few times, back when I was disintegrating into alcoholism, before these blank years of sheer coping. Margaret asked, how did she die? I told her I did not know, that she had disappeared one hot day while I was at work.

But here is my mother, stapled to a form. I quietly yank the photo from the page and slip her into my purse. For an hour I turn the pages slowly, finding more photos, delaying the inevitable final pages. Miguel comes back into the room and taps his watch.

“We have to get started copying or we won’t be able to give you anything,” he threatens.

I relinquish my stack to him and he carries it back into the bowels of the archives.

When I rise to leave, my hands not full enough of what I came for, of what I crave, the woman in the muumuu says, “Wait, honey. I’ve got something for you.” She opens a drawer and hands me a piece of paper. On it is a recipe for shrimp mousse. And a recipe for Harvey Wallbangers.

“It’s different now,” she says. “It’s not shameful anymore.” I’m not sure what she’s referring to. I thank her for the recipes and touch her shoulder lightly as she turns back to the typewriter. She bats my fingers away and bends toward her work. I notice, then, the key dangling from her wrist. She’s not a patient. At least, not anymore.

On my way home I stop only once, for bourbon. The red blinking light of a message greets me as I unlock the door to my house. It’s Margaret, asking me to call her. I do.

“Did you get the records?”

“Yes.” I move to the refrigerator and try not to make any noise as I drop ice cubes into a glass. My hand is shaking. “Not all, though.”

“Call me if you want to later, will you?”

I hang up, and my hand stays on the phone for a long time. Chopin is playing in my head and I am riveted to the spot, one hand around a glass of booze, one on the phone. It is my mother’s crazed rendition of the minute waltz, which she played in thirty seconds flat, and I see before me the frenetic dance I would dance behind her as she sat at our piano, the sweet oceanic dread of the waltz making me weep with her.

When the music fades I bring the hospital records to the couch. I hold tight to the glass. Finally, I begin to turn the pages.

There she is again, more photos. They are askew, as if she could not stop moving. In one she looks like a mean parrot; in another her hands blur as she makes the sign of the cross across her polka dot blouse. The blouse is on backwards. In another her eyebrows are lifted into a dramatic “v” as if to plead, “what am I doing here?”

I begin to disbelieve. It is all so unreliable. I remember my mother as young and beautiful, not sick and dying. I thought she was not mad, just agitato and rhapsodic. As I read these records, I see that even the orderlies have written down the wrong year in places , that the nurse mistook her sleeping form for another patient , that a doctor noticed she had some musical ability.

Then I am stopped by one last photo. It is the leopard skin coat. It is the stiff white hair.

The phone rings and its Margaret again.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to talk?”

I shake my head, but she can’t hear that. I want to tell her I am grateful she called but that I have to go now, the news has arrived and my mother is dying. I must attend to her funeral. I hang up, hoping she understands.

I turn to the final page. The handwriting is elegant for a doctor. I wonder briefly if he was an artist, then I read this, how it was lung cancer that killed her. She drowned in ash, and the physician wrote: “all I could do for this patient was give her a cigarette, for which she was obviously grateful.”

Yes, she would have been. What a kind gesture. I wonder if there had been any others since I saw her last.

The phone rings. I set the glass down, push it to the edge of the table. The liquid makes a tinkling sound, and the smell hovers, like smoke.

 Robin Parks’s fiction has appeared in Bellingham Review, Prism International, The Raven Chronicles and other journals, and has won the Raymond Carver Short Story Award. Parks has an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she was the Presidential Fellow in Creative Writing. Originally from Southern California, she lived for many years on a tiny island in the Pacific Northwest, and now calls Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, her home.

My father closes the refrigerator door and takes seven steps, so I know he is halfway through the dining room when he lets out one of those long-winded farts to beat the band. The shuffling sound of socks on tired linoleum tells me he is doing the victory dance he always does when he thinks he has outdone himself.

My friend Debbie mouths, “Yuck, gross.” She knows better than to make a sound.

From the kitchen there is a familiar thwack and dishes rattle. I don’t need to see my mother to know she has slapped the table the way she does when she wants to make her point.

“Jesus Christ, I’m eating here,” she shouts.

“S’cuse,” he says, but he sounds more proud than sorry, which must piss her off more, because she whacks the table again.

For a minute I start humming This old man he played one, he played knick-knack on my thumb, to block out what might come next. They don’t know I’m in the closet so when I hum I do it in my head so only Debbie and me can hear. While I hum I count his footsteps. I’m good at this keeping track while I do something else like hum, so I know he’s going to sit down even before I hear him plop into his chair.

It’s always the same with him, seventeen footsteps to get from his Lazy-Boy to the refrigerator, four from the chair to the TV, five to get to the bottom of the stairs. Even though my mother always nags and calls him unreliable, you can at least guess where you stand with him. Not like her, who might take twenty steps to get from the kitchen to the living room, but sometimes gets there in twelve or fourteen.

My father rattles the handle on the side of his chair and the swish tells me he is back to half-lying-half-sitting while he swears at the idiot ref on TV, which is what he was doing before he got up to get his beer.

With him settled, and my mother still in the kitchen, Debbie and me get back to playing in the closet under the stairway. My father started to build this closet before I was born. Like most things in his life, he never finished it. He broke through the wall and put up some shelves but never hung the door. To spite him for not finishing, my mother hardly puts anything in here, which leaves room to spread out when we play.

Before my father got up, we were playing Miss America Pageant, but now Debbie wants to play Indian princess falling in love with the white-man cowboy, which is something we saw on an old movie when we snuck downstairs a few weeks ago after my mother went to bed. We waited until we knew she was asleep; watched her back through the crack of the open bedroom door. She was scrunched all the way on the edge of her side of the bed, even though my father wasn’t in there with her. Him not being there was the reason we crept downstairs in the first place. My mother always turns all the lights out if he’s not home by ten. I don’t want the neighbors to see him stagger either, but I worry he might trip and break his neck on the front steps, so whenever I can, I sneak down and turn the porch light back on.

Like every time we’ve played this new game since that night, Debbie wants to be Laughing Waters. It’s the best Indian princess name and just once I want it to be my name, but Debbie is my best friend, the only one I let inside because most kids would make fun or not know what to say, so I let her have her way so she doesn’t get mad and disappear. I can be Bubbling Brook she says, but that’s too much like Laughing Waters, so I pick Weeping Willow instead.

We don’t have buffalo teeth, or feathers, or stones to make necklaces in the closet, so we wrap winter scarves around our necks and pretend we are weaving baskets near the fire when the handsome cowboys ride up. Hers wears a white hat over his blond hair and looks like Brad Pitt. No matter what we play, my boyfriend always has shamrock green eyes and curly black hair like my father. Sometimes I wonder if my mother ever told my father dreamy things about his eyes. When I get married, I know I will tell my husband what is nice about him.

The cowboys are just getting off their horses to tell us their names when my father pumps the handle on his recliner to get up. There is one step, then a crash like thunder and the sound of breaking glass. In a blink Debbie is gone. No matter how I try, I can’t make her stay when the noise starts.

My mother’s feet thud-thud-thud ten times. Already she is in the living room. The sound coming from her throat reminds me of when the car won’t start.

I peak around the missing doorframe at her back. She steps over my father’s passed out body. Without touching him, she picks up the end table and wipes up a wet mark on the tabletop with the tissue she always keeps in the sleeve of her cardigan. “Would it kill you to use a goddamn coaster,” she says, even though he is passed out. “I can’t have one frigging thing you don’t ruin.”

I am extra careful to slip out of the closet when she isn’t looking so she won’t know where I came from, because I am going to be ten on my next birthday and she says that is too old for playing in a closet. It is never good to do what she thinks you are too old to do. I learned that once and for all when I was brushing Debbie’s hair when we were almost eight. My mother had asked me what I was doing, and when I said can’t you see I am brushing Debbie’s hair she took the hairbrush from me. She said you-are-too-old-for-this-make-believe-nonsense, spanking me with the hairbrush each time she said a word.

Ever since then, I don’t mention Debbie.

The closer I get to where my father sprawls on the floor, the more he looks dead, but I know he isn’t because he is making the fog-horn sounds he makes when he is asleep. My mother bends down to pick up some pieces of the broken vase. She gawks at those two pieces of broken glass like if she stares hard enough she might figure something out. I look closer at a wet spot on the braided rug beside my father’s face to make sure it isn’t blood, but it’s just spit-up dribbling off his chin. My mother finally sees me and as if she can read my mind and knows I want to wipe his mouth and put a pillow under his head. “Don’t touch him,” she says. “Just get the broom.” She sighs so deep she looks like a blow up raft when you pull the plug and the air escapes in a hiss.

I dart to the broom closet and grab the dustpan and broom; afraid if I take too long she’ll pass out too, leaving me alone to clean up their mess.

When I get back, she is still staring at the glass in her hand, making little start and stop sucking sounds, as if even breathing has become too much to handle.

Her head tilts to the left. I lean in a little closer, because her eyes look like what she is about to say is really important.

“I was so happy the night we got engaged and your father gave me that vase filled with violets.” For a second, she sounds like someone else, like someone I want to know better. That happens every now and then, and when it does, it makes me want to tuck in next to her on the couch, and coil my finger in her hair. I take a step toward her, but she pulls back and tosses the broken pieces into the dustpan. Her voice is all-brittle again. “It might as well be broken. It’s been empty for years.”

I sweep up the rest of the vase and put the broom and dustpan away, but when she isn’t looking I hide the broken vase in my closet. I am thinking if I fix it and buy violets; maybe she could be happy like that again.

 

A few hours later my father is still asleep on the living room floor. He is on his back, making huge, gurgling snoring sounds. In the kitchen I eat dinner in silence while my mother goes on about never having one uneventful day, and having to do everygoddamnthing all by herself.

“I’ll help,” I say.

“What can you do?”

I lower my head and separate the tuna from the macaroni and cheese on my plate. When she isn’t looking, I push little flakes of tuna over the rim and cover them with my napkin.

“I can dust and mop after school. I’m almost ten, I’m old enough.”

I know I will miss going next-door to Patty’s everyday to do my homework if my mother agrees. I like next-door Patty with her pink-tinted lips and hair neat in a bun, so unlike my mother, who doesn’t have time for smooth hair or a touch of lipstick. When Patty leans over me to check my homework, she smells like baby-powder and there’s a sparkle in her voice when her husband Eddie comes home and she asks him about his day. She kisses him hello on the lips everyday, and looks happy to see him, not just relief because he didn’t go drinking, but like she is glad just to have him there.

After dinner, I do the dishes so my mother can go out on the front step to smoke with Patty.

Maybe because she lives in the row house next door, and can hear the truth through the too thin walls, or because her Eddie drinks too – whatever the reason – my mother talks to Patty. She is the only exception to my mother’s it’s nobody’s business rule. I have overheard plenty from my closet while they sit on the porch or at our kitchen table pouring out coffee and their troubles.

I rinse out the sponge while my mother carries the coffee pot and two mugs out to the front porch. After she leaves, I cover the rest of the casserole with aluminum foil, and put the dish on the pilot light to stay warm. I scoop up the napkin filled with tuna flakes and push it to the bottom of the trashcan. Why anyone has to ruin good macaroni and cheese with tuna fish is beyond me, but the nights she makes it, it’s easier to get rid of the fish when she isn’t looking than to remind her I don’t like tuna.

Even with the water running I hear my father stir. I turn the water off and carry his warmed plate to the living room. He wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his flannel shirt and settles in his chair. I flatten a section of newspaper so he can use it like a placemat on his lap. His eyes are yellow-green and bloodshot when he winks and asks if I don’t mind getting him a cold one.

“How about it, my pretty baby girl?” he adds. I do mind, but I mind less after he says that, so I go to the kitchen and open his beer with the magnet bottle opener stuck to the freezer door. The opener has a design on it like an American flag. We got it from Avon when Patty was selling it last summer around the fourth of July. We don’t really have money for things like Avon, but we had to buy something, since it was Patty. Lucky for us she stopped selling in August, so we didn’t have to buy anything else.

After I give him his beer my mother is still outside, so Debbie and I are in the closet playing getting ready for Saturday night dates with our boyfriends. Debbie wears a pink sweater-set with jeans, and I wear a turquoise v-neck with a short black skirt. We saw Rachel wear these same outfits on Friends on TV, so we know they are the latest thing. We take turns putting on each other’s makeup before our boyfriends ring the bell to pick us up. Our boyfriends, Matt and Timmy, look the same as the cowboys, but now they wear Gap chinos and pressed shirts, and smell of woodsy cologne. They take us to Appleby’s and tell us we can order anything on the menu. I want spare ribs, but I know Rachel thinks you can’t look ladylike eating spareribs, so me and Deb get the shrimp combo with two kinds of shrimp, like on the commercial. After dinner we go dancing and Timmy holds my hand. While we’re dancing my father gets up and I don’t stop dancing, just count to seventeen, listen to the fridge door open and close, and count seventeen again and he is back in his chair.

He has hardly sat back down when the front door swishes open. My mother comes in and picks something up and slams it down. It is probably his beer. Sometimes talking to Patty calms her down, but not tonight. Tonight she starts right in on him. Already Debbie and Matt and Timmy are gone, and I am sitting in the closet alone, holding my own hand.

“You haven’t had enough?”

“One beer, Alice,” he says.

“One fucking beer, my ass,” she says.

Like usual, instead of answering, my father raises the volume on the television louder, as if by some miracle it will drown her out while she tells him for the millionth time how much she hates her life. She stomps from the living room to the kitchen, opens drawers and bangs them closed saying, I am sick of it, sick of it, sick of it. It might be my only chance, so I run upstairs and make a tent under the covers to read with my flashlight.

“I have had it. I can’t take anymore,” she says. There is a crash and rattle, like a metal tray hitting the wall, and I know she is throwing the kitchen utensils again.

“ Alice.”

“You wouldn’t drink if you loved us.”

I am trying not to listen, but needing to know if he loves us is all that I can hear.

 

When she finally goes to bed, I listen for her sobbing to stop. It seems like hours before I tiptoe to her door to hear the steady breathing that means she is asleep. My father is sitting in the dark when I go downstairs. I pick up the spatula and slotted spoon, the eggbeater and wire whip to clear a path and lead him, half-sleepwalking to their bedroom. My mother doesn’t move when I pull the cover up the best I can from his side to cover her too.

I listen from my room. When he starts to snore, Deb and me will sneak back to the closet with the flashlight. She’ll help me glue the vase back together. We’ll get it fixed, even if it takes all night.Carol Brill is the author of two novels in progress, Ordinary Eggshells and Peace by Piece. Her work has appeared in The Press of Altantic City, NovelAdvice, WriterAdvice and several professional journals. She holds a MFA degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University.

 [img_assist|nid=4293|title=”Paysage de la Drome” by Kathleen Babb © 2005|desc=|link=node|align=right|width=150|height=200]Luz blessed the day her neighbor, Don Chuy rolled-over his milk truck. Nobody would ask for an accident like that, but now, years later, she knew Don Chuy blessed the day too. It was the day he was miraculously spared from the jaws of death, the day the Virgin spoke to him.

The day of the accident that led to the miracle, Don Chuy was at the top of the hill, about to descend, his truck horn bleating, telling the housewives he’d arrived with fresh milk from his ranchito. Suddenly a young mother carrying a baby stepped in front of his old pick-up. He swerved and rolled over, down the hill.

The cans clattered, splashing thin cow’s milk over the discarded Sabritas bags and Cloralex bottles that littered the hillside. They came to rest just before the dirt road below, in a brilliant patch of sun, stacked like silver bullets. Later, Don Chuy remembered nothing about the pickup going roof-wheel-roof-wheel. Luz was outside with her soup pan, waiting to buy milk, when the truck crunched to a stop against the rock on which she sat when she bagged roasted squash seeds.

Luz, who had the only telephone on the hill, rushed inside. She remembered how her youngest son Oscar had talked about a fight at the basketball courts—a guy was cut and somebody’d called 9-1-1 for the emergency. Luz dialed and miraculously, minutes later, an ambulance screeched to a stop at the top of the hill. Two rescuers clambered down with a narrow stretcher and a bag of life-saving equipment, and when they peered into the truck, Don Chuy was not smashed to pieces in the driver’s side where he should have been, but curled up peacefully on the passenger’s side as if he were sleeping off an all-nighter.

Since the day he walked away unscratched from his truck, Don Chuy had been organizing tours to the Guadalupe Basilica in Mexico City . What better way to give thanks than to bring a busload of people to the feet of the Virgin? All the more to adore her.

Don Chuy charged an affordable fare, only 180 pesos round trip, including snacks. Everyone knew he wasn’t profiting. He ladled yogurt from big plastic tubs into cups and passed out bean and potato tacos and fruit.

Luz wanted the Virgin of Guadalupe to save her sons. Well, her daughter too. Jimena’s life was just as much a mess as her brothers, but she had more confidence in women to straighten out their own affairs. Hadn’t Jimena, fed up after years of arguing with her about what to make for dinner, crossed the river in the night and joined her brother in Florida ?

One morning as she was buying milk, Luz told Don Chuy to save her two spaces. If the Virgin of Guadalupe could spare Don Chuy, surely She could spend a little time working the kinks out of her kids’ lives. Luz and her husband Mariano would board at five a.m. , eat some yogurt, take a nap and walk past the scapula and rose-petal rosary-sellers by nine with enough time left in the day to pray for her troublesome sons.

Luz remembered when they were little, sitting on the edge of her bed, Oscar in Jimena’s arms, all five of them, even the baby rapturously watching an India Maria movie. Unlike some of the neighbors, Mariano always had work, building was booming in Mexico City and he joined up with the crews that built schools and hospitals. He came home to San Miguel once a month, pockets filled with cash. He’d bought the first television set in the neighborhood.

Luz liked to turn the dial to movies for the kids—when she was home. After dark, she’d make a pot of hot Café Legal with cinnamon and sugar and give the kids crusty rolls, warm from the night bakery. She remembered a clear moment when she’d looked at those five little faces, dirty from playing outside all day, blowing on their coffee, laughing at la India Maria. They’d been so innocent!

Late in April, Luz and Mariano rose in the dark and boarded Don Chuy’s bus in the pre-dawn gloom. The sun appeared as the bus rumbled past the outskirts of San Miguel. Luz watched the sparse, brown countryside, thinking of Raymundo, her oldest son. Happiest when he was talking the night away with his brothers, his hand wrapped around a liter bottle of beer, he had women all over the place, so that he never had to settle in one spot. If he had a fight with one, he went to stay with the next one. There was Angeles in San Miguel who followed him around like a sad cow and Luz was sure he had one over in Leon too. Couldn’t he just pick one of them, and make a home?

Lately when he’d come to San Miguel on weekends, he’d seemed jumpy, suddenly solicitous, then angry. Bueno, Raymundo had always been an angry kid. Maybe that’s why her husband had spoiled him. Raymundo always got the new shoes, the new pants, the new ball. And she’d allowed it. Maybe it was because she and Mariano knew Raymundo cared more about what others thought of him than the rest of the children. If obliged to wear patched clothing, he skipped school and picked fights with his siblings.

Maybe it was that, as the oldest son, Raymundo had suffered most from their early years of fighting. Luz had only noticed how angry he was when she stopped drinking. He’d been nineteen years old by then, a high school graduate with no direction. Had a baby by a woman he never wanted to see again. Drank all night and slept all day. What could she have said to him about making a future? She had no education and a busload of guilt. What right did she have to tell him how to live his life?

Gazing at a group of skinny rancho horses out the window, Luz remembered coming home late one night from drinking in El Gato Negro with jobless Don Ceferino. She’d walked into the children’s room (Mariano had built an extra room for the kids to sleep in by then) and snapped on the light. There was Raymundo, must have been about eight, sitting in the middle of the bed, his back rigid, his bravado gone.

"What are you doing?" she’d asked.

"Ma, I’m being good," he’d said.

She’d always thought Raymundo, the swaggerer and braggart, could take care of
himself , but she’d been wrong. He was just as needy as the rest.

Then one day he’d up and left, and when he came back, he showed her his law school diploma. Luz had sighed with relief. Now she wouldn’t have to worry. To make sure, she had him draw up the deed (now that he was a lawyer!) to the house in his name. A house, a career and now that he was working with that attorney in Leon , all the fancy clothes he could afford. Still.

Luz’s prayer for Raymundo was that he marry one of his women and have Mariano build a second floor apartment for them on the San Miguel house. Raymundo’s house. She would cook for him, well, for the couple, and her son would see she did care after all.

What Luz wanted next was for Oscar to leave his wife. Or for that big-assed piece of riff-raff who thought she was a princess to leave him. Then maybe her baby Oscar would grow into the fine man she knew he could become.

Oscar had a nice girlfriend before this one. The former girl’s father had a successful tin and iron business. He could have set Oscar up as shop manager, or in exports! She had been a sweet, quiet girl who brought Luz cheese pies. But just as they were talking marriage, Oscar saw Waggle Tail at the basketball courts and he dropped the pie-maker as if he’d been burned. The new one jiggled her ass at Oscar until he couldn’t speak.

Waggle Tail thought she had that kind of power over everyone, thought she could be served her food and get up from the table without even carrying her plate to the sink, not to mention wash it. Soon as he got her pregnant, Oscar brought Waggle Tail to Luz’s house to live. Luz didn’t protest; it was her duty to take the girl in. Now Luz just wanted a little cooperation, a little housecleaning help, a little respect! Leaving the house to board the bus that morning, Luz had to step over a stinky diaper on the step. The girl left her musty underwear in a wet pile on the shower floor!

Somebody told Oscar once his wife should be a model and that was all he could see. But green eyes and a pretty face didn’t make a girl useful and Waggle Tail was about the most useless twenty-year-old Luz had ever seen in her life. The worst part was she didn’t want to learn to wash her clothes or cook. God knows Luz had tried to teach her. Waggle Tail let her dirty clothes pile up higher every day, then, instead of washing them, bought new clothes for ten pesos a piece at the Tuesday Market. She thought a container of gelatin was a fitting lunch for a child almost a year old!

If Waggle Tail left her son, she would leave Luz’s house. And then maybe Oscar wouldn’t stay out all night long, getting into fights. Although who could blame him? With the crib squished next to Oscar’s bed now, one couldn’t take more than a step without hitting furniture or dirty clothes. And Waggle Tail couldn’t get the baby to sleep until midnight , so the room was nothing but a four hour high-decibel cry-fest. There was one way to keep your man at home, but with the baby awake half the night, Luz was sure Waggle Tail wasn’t tending to her man’s needs. And if she did give Oscar any, she made him work for it first, sending him out into the street to bring her back hamburgers from El Ranon’s stand.

Maybe she’d get fat.

By nine in the morning, the sun was higher and the bus was slowly stopping in the Basilica’s parking lot. Luz sighed as she picked up her purse. The destruction of a marriage. Was that something to pray for?

The new Basilica gleamed in the sunlight, its side construction soaring like beams of light from the Virgin’s fingertips, not Guadalupe, but another Maria, mother of God, which Luz saw once on a holy card. The old Basilica, built some four hundred years ago, was to the right, roped off in parts, tilting forward, sinking into the soft centuries-old soil.

Mariano, her husband of thirty-three years, pushed his thick hair under his cap and tucked his t-shirt further into his sweatpants as they approach the new cathedral. At his side, Luz walked with slow steps. She wanted to pray for new knees, but only after she’d ticked off everyone else on her list. Plus she thought bad knees were her penance, and maybe she was still supposed to be repenting.

Inside, there was a mix of reverence and festival. Children played in the aisles; mothers with shawls over their heads distractedly tried to hand them sandwiches. Whole families were camped in the pews in front of the tilma, Juan Diego’s cape that still bore the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Luz gazed at the tilma in awe. Four centuries after Juan Diego carried roses wrapped in the cape to the bishop, to prove he’d seen the beautiful lady who claimed to be the mother of God, it still looked vibrant, undiminished. Luz read in a church bulletin once how the tilma had been examined and tested and scientists still couldn’t explain how the colors of the Virgin’s face and her mantle hadn’t faded in four hundred years.

Luz and Mariano slipped into a rear pew. A lady shuffled past in the aisle on her knees, a small girl, about six years of age, holding her by the elbow. Luz watched the woman’s slow progress toward the tilma with some envy. She should have crawled to the Virgin herself years ago, then maybe she’d have been spared arthritic knees , but of course by the time she’d made her first pilgrimage and promised to stop drinking, smoking and leaving her kids, her knees had already started to go.

When she was young, it hadn’t been hard to be good! At sixteen, she’d been pregnant with Jimena, happy with her man. She didn’t drink at all. Mariano was a serious boy, a worker. He’d built them a room on the little parcel of land her father gave them, a room with rounded windows, a modern touch he’d picked up listening to the stories of laborers who’d begun to work in the big building boom in Mexico City . He built a sturdy washbasin for their clothes and an alcove for a stove. He was going to buy her a stove! But before he could, he told her there was no work in San Miguel; he had to go to the city. Luz was left behind.

When he came home for the first time, after a month, Luz’s belly was rounder and he had to beg her to make him a meal. For four whole hours she refused so he could see how unfair it was that she was pregnant and alone. Couldn’t he have found something to build in San Miguel?

"Go to your mother’s house until you have the baby," Mariano said.

"Never," Luz said. She hated her sister’s boyfriend, who had moved in with her mother. He didn’t work and he went through the pockets of everybody’s clothing.

Luz thought she had Mariano convinced to stay when he rubbed her feet that night, then she rubbed his back, but then, at five in the morning, she heard him shuffling around their new room. Luz pretended to stay asleep; her husband touched her shoulder and was out the door, headed for the bus station in the moonlight, his new transistor radio tucked under his arm.

With Mariano working in Mexico D.F., Luz couldn’t help but be distracted by Nacho when he delivered iron doors to the house in which she worked and Don Cipriano selling tomatoes from the back of his truck. In the cavernous Basilica, she shook her head. Old names to her now. That was something to be thankful for.

Luz had only visited the Basilica once before, twelve years earlier. That was when she’d made her first pledge to the Virgin, the day after Cheme, her second boy, only seventeen, disappeared in the night. Luz threw her bottle of Presidente brandy into the creek when the sun rose that day and watched it sink through tear-filled eyes. She asked the Virgin to keep Cheme safe. Then she took a bus to the Basilica to send her prayers for his safety straight to La Guadalupe’s ears. For five months she was too grieved to miss her smokes, drinks and male callers. Then Cheme phoned San Miguel’s public telephone station from the United States , asking they play his message on the radio. Miraculously, while Luz was washing dishes she heard it. Cheme had tried to cross six times before he made it. He’d already been in and out of trouble (Luz interpreted this to mean jail) but he had a job and a place to stay and she wasn’t to worry. In gratitude, she stopped going out for good, made a truce with Mariano. Now it was twelve years since she’d had a drink, smoked a cigarette or entertained a boyfriend. Twelve years since Mariano came home, taking smaller jobs in San Miguel and eating regular meals in Luz’s kitchen.

During that time, Luz thought several times about getting it all out on the table, saying to Mariano, "Look, I’ve had boyfriends. You’ve had girlfriends. It’s all in the past.” But what if Mariano, instead of agreeing, turned accusing? What if he refused to acknowledge his part, and then constantly reminded her of her failings? Would he feel he had to go out and beat up Nacho and Don Cipriano? What if he left her? She used to think it was what she wanted , but faced with it, she’d felt a little sick in her stomach. They’d had five kids together and Mariano was a good provider. She didn’t say anything. And as the tantrums of their earlier years diminished, the silence about the lives they led when they were apart from each other grew bigger, until now it felt impossible to talk about.

Luz was on her knees, even though it hurt, thinking of Cheme in Florida . Owned his own trailer home now, had lived with the same woman for eight years, installed sprinkler systems, had people working for him . He called sometimes, sent checks, seemed to have forgiven all those years when he didn’t come first, when none of her kids did.

Not that Cheme was suddenly a saint. Jimena, up in Florida with Cheme now, was the one who kept Luz informed that he still liked to get drunk, smashed up his trucks. Luz’s prayer for her son was that he’d give up the bottle and work on his sperm count. Twenty-nine years old and still no children. She couldn’t understand it.

With Jimena in Florida bossing Cheme around, Luz worried a little less. Jimena didn’t set by drinking, which was what had started the real trouble between mother and daughter. Her daughter blamed the bottle for the time Luz left the children in her care. Jimena had been twelve, Luz gone without a note, their father working a construction job in the city. Jimena in the kitchen cursing Don Cipriano, imagining how, while they were in school, Luz had gathered her dancing skirt, her make-up, her vinyl purse. Imagining the old man (he was thirty and not even good-looking!) waiting with his bottle of brandy in his vegetable truck at the top of the hill.

As the oldest, Jimena had taken over, passing out bowls of beans to her four little brothers sitting on the steps, silent and scared, yelling at them extra gruff to get into bed so her voice wouldn’t shake. By the fifth day, she was cutting nopales from the cactuses in the countryside to feed the boys. So relieved on the eighth day that her mother came home, she returned to school and studied extra hard. In class, she twisted her hair so tight it fell out of her head in clumps.

When Jimena finished high school, she stayed in the house, and with nothing else to do, argued with her mother over money and food. Luz left fifty pesos when she went to work, and told Jimena to make breaded beefsteaks. Jimena made a pot of beans, bought two kilos of tortillas instead of one and gave most of the food away to a half a dozen young gay men she’d befriended, who, rejected by their parents, lived in a cheap house together nearby.

"It is not my duty to feed the neighborhood," Luz yelled at Jimena, when she came home from work to only a scraping of beans and an almost emptied bowl of salsa.

"You don’t care about anyone but yourself!" Jimena shouted back.

Luz had pledged to change quietly. After Cheme left, she came home regularly, didn’t spend afternoons in the bars any more, and made chilaquiles on Sundays while they watched All-Star Wrestling. She did care. But Jimena seemed stuck on the old Luz, which annoyed Luz as much as the missing food. She’d point out in an icy tone that the chicken soup had not been prepared as she’d instructed, and that if tuna fish and mayonnaise on crackers was the only meal Jimena could manage to put together, why was Luz leaving her so much money and where was the change?

Jimena was twenty-six when she took the bus to meet the coyote Cheme sent for her. She’d been arguing over the slightest possible thing with her mother for months, walking around the house muttering, "I can’t wait. I just can’t wait."

Luz couldn’t wait for her to leave either, if that was how she was going to behave. Then the day came. Jimena stood by the door, backpack over her shoulder, bus ticket to the border in hand. Luz was looking for an opening to say the tender words she’d rehearsed, but before she could, Jimena turned to her.

"You—left—us!" Jimena said. "How could you have done that?"

Luz had only bowed her head, her body shaking with sobs.

That had been three years ago. Luz was afraid she’d never hear from Jimena again , but after two months, she’d received a letter. Luz’s body rippled with fear as she held it in her hand. Would it be filled with more accusations? Would Jimena, with thousands of kilometers between them, finally say everything she’d always wanted to tell her mother? And wasn’t it time?

Luz steeled herself. But the letter contained photos of Jimena with a skinny boy. " Florida Beach " was scrawled on the back of the first one. "Pick-up Truck" was written in English on the back of another: Jimena leaning against a truck with a Florida plate, a bandana around her head. In a photo received this year, she was in front of a trailer home with the same skinny boy. The beanpole looked nice enough. Will he build you a house, give you a baby, buy you a stove? Luz would like to ask. One of Cheme’s lawn care guys, was all Jimena would say about him.

Luz had a vague idea that other people were capable of things she was unable to do. She’d worked in gringo houses, rich ladies’ houses, washing their clothes, cooking their meals – she’d seen people embrace, say words she was fairly sure had to do with how they felt about one another. She just didn’t know how to do it herself. As a seven-year old child, Luz had announced to her own mother she wasn’t going to school any more. Her mother, without turning from the tortillas she was putting on the fire, shrugged. After that, her father had taken Luz to the river where he collected sand to sell to the homebuilders, who mixed it with cement. Sometimes he made four trips a day, first with their burro, and later with a rattlely second-hand truck he managed to buy. Luz played at the river until the trip home, singing to herself, speaking to nobody. Maybe if she’d had playmates, she’d have learned to say things like, "You make me mad," or, "Let’s be friends."

Gabriel, Luz’s second to youngest son was the love child, always touching people, making them squirm. "Pa," Gabriel greeted Mariano, squeezing his father’s broad shoulder. Sometimes his hand lingered on Luz’s back as they spoke. Luz used to show affection by barking, "Go wash your hands!" before she gave her kids their soup , but Gabriel had his daughters on his shoulders, crawling into his lap. They kissed each other right in front of everybody. He talked to his dogs like they were people! Gabriel wanted to tell people what to do with their lives. He wanted people to talk. That’s what his problem was. Must be from being married to the American.

But sometimes Luz thought Gabriel had the right idea. "If only I had been able to look at her. If only I’d said I was sorry," Luz now told the Virgin of Guadalupe.

When she felt Mariano patting her back, Luz lifted her bowed head and realized there were tears on her cheek. At the front of the church, the Virgin smiled kindly. There! Didn’t She lift her eyes for a second? Mariano said that he’d been watching the progress of the lady on her knees. He hadn’t noticed. But Luz was sure. The Virgin of Guadalupe had smiled. People around her were busy with their rosaries; nobody else seemed to have observed it either. It was a message just for her. La Morenita had smiled on her, the former sinner, Luz Martinez . What could it mean?

Perhaps it meant Raymundo would come home to live soon. Or that Waggle Tail would leave her son. Did La Guadalupe wink? Heh, heh, sister, your house will be in peace pretty soon. The American Wife couldn’t believe Oscar didn’t give his mother a single peso for phone, cable TV, food. Food!

"Two grown people still expecting Mommy to cook for them!" the American Wife fumed. "Kick them out of the house. That’s the only way they’ll grow up!"

If it was possible anyone was bossier than Jimena, it was the American Wife. El Bolillo, Mariano called her, “White Bread” not without affection. Luz wished she had her nerve. Married to her, Gabriel was the one she worried about least. Her American parents had sent money; they’d started a hair salon, built a house, put her two beautiful light-skinned granddaughters in good schools. But toss Oscar, Waggle Tail and the baby onto the street, three people who could barely take care of themselves? She just didn’t have the heart. And suddenly her thinking was clear.

Job or no job (sometimes he worked as a waiter, then always got into a fight and got fired) , Oscar and his family would go on living in her house, until they didn’t any more, if that time ever came.

Who else, after all, would see that Oscar’s son ate chicken soup and rice, and mashed frijoles and potatoes? Maybe the Virgin’s wink meant that Luz would help Raymundo give up some of his anger. Or that Waggle Tail’s selfishness and sloth were not going to affect her like before, that she, Luz would glide through her own house with an inner knowledge that she was doing the best she could.

Luz was blindsided by a new thought. Perhaps Jimena was at peace.

Luz was sure the Virgencita was putting these thoughts in her head and that they amounted to something like forgiveness. And that was it! That was what she had come to pray for after all.

Mariano’s hand was at her elbow, helping her rise. She lifted a finger, one more moment. Luz felt at one with the thousands of prayers being uttered at that moment all around her. The lady on her knees had almost reached the altar. Luz wondered what promise she was fulfilling, if Our Lady of Guadalupe had saved a sick daughter, or seen a son safely across the border. The senora stood, making the sign of the cross. Luz stood too; vaguely aware her knees were not vibrating with pain. She lifted her face in gratitude and a warm feeling flowed through her, as if the beams of light that surrounded La Guadalupe’s cape were lifting her.

With this warm feeling came the knowledge that her hostility toward Waggle Tail, whose name was Frida, was actually shame for her own selfish life. "For the past twelve years, you’ve been nothing but giving," was the thought La Guadalupe was giving her now. And Luz knew that the forgiveness she sought was inside her and the deal she had to make was with herself.

Don Chuy’s eyes were rimmed in red as he cheerfully waved Luz, Mariano and their neighbors back onto his bus. Today’s driving would add up to eight or nine hours for him. She patted Don Chuy’s arm as she shuffled past, eyeing the empty yogurt buckets, but there were two plastic bags filled with what smelled deliciously like tacos behind the driver’s seat.

Sweet, absolving Don Chuy! Luz wondered for how many years he would go on living out his promise to the Virgin. She remembered standing stunned the morning his truck crashed into the rock in front of her house, soup pan hanging uselessly from her hand, watching the sun bounce off the milk cans, not knowing the miracle of his survival was also unfolding for her. Susan McKinney de Ortega, born in Philadelphia, is a former television news reporter and daughter of a St. Joseph’s University coach. Her stories have been published in Salonmagazine, The San Miguel Writer, Literary Bulls and and in Mexico : A Love Story by Seal Press (Spring, 2006) . She lives in San Miguel de Allende in the Mexican central highlands with her husband and their two bilingual daughters.