Robbie Nester

Harvest

in memory of my father, Mish Kellman

Once, the fields and lots of this place
shone with star-bright blossoms,
the sweet air heavy with twilight
heralding the trees’ full load.
Drawn out to the silent
grove, dizzy with perfume,
I’d gaze up into the dark green depths
where secrets swelled. I’d peek
into the petticoats of leaves and reach
a hand to palm the nascent fruit,
mindful of proprietary farmers and their dogs.

In a month, as in a nebula light years away,
galaxies are born in bursts of brightness
no one can see, the perfect planetary globes
of lemons, grapefruits, and oranges would light
our moonless evenings, smooth-skinned and bright—
the Meyer lemon, rounder than the ordinary kind;
squat mandarin; pink grapefruit
blushing in the half light of the leaves
among the twisting rows of guardian eucalyptus.

In a place that’s galaxies apart, with only
one small square of rock-hard dirt,
my father made things grow
beneath a narrow
sky fretted with wires,
wondering all the while
at what he managed to bring forth.

Once transplanted here
where the wide skies stretch
for acres, sown with clouds,
he planted everything: the seeds
of pomegranate, star fruit, hand of Buddha,
red clay beneath his nails, along
the half-moon cuticles. Every week,
he wandered narrow aisles
of nursery and farmer’s market,
holding up each perfect berry,
burying his face in golden
bells of angel’s trumpet, nurturing
each sign of life. But though I tried,
I couldn’t do the same.

Since then, the air has lost its savor.
On nights like these, only
knot-hard stars will ripen
where the trees once stood.
No wonder that I haunt the farmer’s
markets Friday afternoons, taking in
the glistening peppers, pendulous tomatoes
like grandees, pebbled avocados,
that even I, a stranger to the soil,
now long to plant a seed.

Richard Nester

How To Last

There are no poems as good as bones
for lasting underground. That which would live
with dust must be of dust. Words are too big,
too many cracks and seams, too much
contradiction, too much doubleness.

I’m never at a loss for dust.
Lay down a minute and it’s there,
like time, seeping in.

So it is with bones,
their slow-compounding particles,
the invisible mounting the invisible,
until there’s quite a stack.

No poem was ever made that way,
slow-cooked, hard. Bones admit
the winter cold. Poems guess.
Bones know.

My son learns Indians in school—
Juanenos and Gabrielinos—lost tribes
with names their people wouldn’t recognize.
One was found near Carlsbad recently,
his bones I mean, not him, not his poems.
His poems were gone—
bones with wings.

Karen Greenbaum-Maya

Hard-Boiled Egg

I was born with a hard-boiled egg in my mouth. Of course I’d already peeled it, or I’d never have been passed. Stuck in the dark of that red place, listening to muffled booms. No Mozart. Nothing to read. Sooner or later my mother would have crunched and cinched herself to regain flat abs. That would be my second chance. I was born to hit the ground running, tuck and roll, but I was slow, so slow. Like trying to learn to ride my bike, launched down a cement sidewalk. I fell as I waited for magic to strike and keep me traveling. I was born to wait for peaches to fill out, bring the smell of summer. I washed them like a raccoon to get rid of the fuzz, I hid the pits behind the hose. I was born to wait on the ocean floor, squinting up through weight of water, looking for faint dazzle of light, afraid of distant air.

Lucia Galloway

Cochineal

How we set ourselves apart. How we projected, as halo,
blood and fire, the signatures of our humanity. Found a coal
in the mineral-laden earth to make a line
of dyes from hematite, from cinnabar, and color with lean
bright orange our capes and winding cloths. How the ache
in us persisted like a hunger for some choice
not yet presented, for a hue that we could hail
as shout, not merely tolerate as echo.
Here is a chain of story: how we came to cinch
our grandeur, display in triptych and tunic our élan.
How, fortunate, we found the color crimson that had lain
as pigment in tiny parasites that etched a kind of lace
on pads of nopal—that cactus wild and hale
in Mexico, Peru. These insect bodies found their niche
as lading in Spanish ships, traded across an ocean.
How cochineal red became the crepe de Chine
of many merchants’ ventures. As if the ail-
ment of our evanescence would surely heal
if only we had, of red, sufficient cache.

Frankincense

From scraggly trunks of the Boswellia, a resin
flows when those who seek it slash its skin.
It weeps, and tears solidify. Intrepid harvesters risk
danger from the venomous snake
living in those trees that eke
their life from sun and rock but little rain.
How is it that with tears, with snake and knife
we humans trace our shifts and turns? The making of a scar.
Charred Boswellia resin ground to powder, pressed to cakes
of kohl. Cleopatra wore the eyeliner—black ink
to inscribe a chapter in the story of Rome’s imperial arc.
Matthew the gospel writer paints a different scene:
gifts borne from the East by men of rank—
congealed tears as homage to a baby born in an inn.
Aromas balsamic-spicy, lemony, hinting of conifer sink
into the mesh of history. Along the Incense
Road from ancient Ubar, Franks
brought fragrant smoke to Europe’s censer,
salve to souls and bodies weary from the race.

Chalcedony

What other matriarch bears a load
of such extensive progeny? Chance
named her after ancient Chalcedon.
Then, as favored stone for rulers’ seals she took the lead.
Cognomen for the fibrous quartz clan:
agate, carnelian, onyx, chrysoprase, heady
aventurine, green jasper, and heliotrope laced
with red or yellow. This lustrous family clad
Moses’ brother in a breastplate of splendor and ado.
A jeweler’s yen for beads and bezels honed
merchants’ dreams, put caravans on every lane
of trade, while European carvers made from haloed
agate milky cameos. And when the lode
of local rock ran thin, merchants could lade
the holds of ships with agate from Brazil. O halcyon
years of intaglio, of Florentine commesso! Not cloyed,
although a tad complacent, these quartzes dance
through history—a fantasia, un dolce.

Hillary Gravendyk

First Minute, After Days

Quarter-light tips in.

A room shaped like a mismatched trio of brackets.

Each bend or angle bristling with other lights.

Drunken or weary. Lost or left.

In one bracket a chair. Dark monitor.

Disorder on a blacker field.

Someone’s hands bound loosely down.

Skein of plastic braided into the mouth.

One hand charred black and almost

Black, a color like green. Wait—Mine.

Then I was lost in a stranger sound. Quarter-light tips out.

A machine gasps in surprise.

Throat closed by what opens inside it.

Waiting

Spun sky, unhappy stairway. Stark record of summer: bright, harrowing. But it wasn’t the brink. It was an uneven surface, was a jumble of absences. They waited for me in the sycamore shade. Violet current, stuttering eye. Watching me disappear by degrees. You pressed my shoulder, held it to the wheel. And I haven’t even told you what I fear most, what’s buried in the flesh. Selfish desire, I kept you like a secret. Wanted what I could get. We built a boat from all this, set it adrift in the tarpaper night. Mended my skin with barbed-wire. Covered ourselves in refusal. I forced your hand into mine, though I knew you couldn’t go where I had to go.

Myra Dutton

Doomsday

Now children think they have five years to live.
Stacks of worry lines crease their young brows.
They say, “Bees are dying, glaciers are melting,
and islands have been swallowed by the sea.
Every day one hundred species become extinct.
Each day there is increasing war and greed.
We wake to hear––No more Swallowtails.
Butterflies are the first to go.
Our world will never be the same.
The revenge of Gaia is upon us.”
Their young shoulders sag as they walk
past the people they once believed in,
and the children know––No one has the answer.
It seems like two hundred years since I was a child,
trained to hide in case of nuclear attack––to hide
under my desk, under God, in bomb shelters, in basements,
my mouth covered with a hankie, a pan on my head.
All anyone needed was a year’s supply of Campbell’s Soup.
Chicken Noodle and Creamy Tomato would save the world.
It was a well-kept secret that no one had the answer.

It seems like two hundred years since I believed
that humanity was innately good, that it cared
for all countries, all peoples, all beings,
that it cared if waters were pure, the air unpolluted,
and the land lush, green, and toxin-free.
What can I possibly say to the young idealist,
undaunted, who demands integrity from everyone?
Am I to say that times have changed?
… that two hundred years have passed
since I believed in mankind.
Or can I say that I am learning to trust?
… that even from this chaos and disorder,
good will rise, that it always does,
given enough time.

Alaina Bixon

Powder Blue Skirt

Powder blue skirt
loose
willowy
billowing
diaphanous.

Cirrus clouds, stirred.
Blue of late afternoon sky in November
after raking leaves.

Better on a hanger than defined by its wearer
Possible flutterings, delicate lines
Like the branches of those bare autumn trees
A day whose color I never saw again.

Cynthia Anderson

The I-10

Born in 1897, a San Bernardino native son,
my grandfather lived to be 100. Late in life,
when we would take him out for a drive,
he would point to some shopping mall
off the I-10 and say, We used to hunt
rabbits there.

When he retired from title insurance,
he had a farm in Cherry Valley,
fruit trees and eggs. Then, in Yucaipa,
he looked after my grandmother
who hung on 22 years after a crippling
stroke, with a will to live she learned
as an only child in Randsburg,
where her father worked for the mines.

Time and again, I would drive down the coast,
pick up the I-10 in Santa Monica,
take it straight through the polluted heart
of L.A. to the hinterlands, find my way
to the Yucaipa house by memory,
never using a map, never thinking
about how much the freeway
had changed the land in its short life.

My grandfather spent his last days
in a convalescent hospital in Riverside.
He remembered when the palm trees
along on Magnolia Drive were planted,
recalled Sunday drives before the first
world war. He and my grandmother are buried
in Desert Lawn, hardly a resting place,
the I-10 a noisy witness to the end
of their lives and the world they knew.

Cynthia Anderson lives in the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park. Her award-winning poems have appeared in journals such as Askew, Dark Matter, Apercus Quarterly, Whale Road, Knot Magazine, and Origami Poems Project. She is the author of five collections—”In the Mojave,” “Desert Dweller,” “Mythic Rockscapes,” and “Shared Visions I” and “Shared Visions II.” She frequently collaborates with her husband, photographer Bill Dahl. Cynthia co-edited the anthology A Bird Black As the Sun: California Poets on Crows & Ravens.

E.J. Jones

Cheating

It was early Saturday and my son, Wesley was already at the park with his friends. Like everyone around Blythe, he started his October mornings when it was still cool, before the desert heat set in. Tanya, my wife, was in her garden doing the same. The house was all mine. I picked up the paper grinning about having the morning to myself. No honey-do’s, just me and twenty-four hours till the next football game.

Yesterday’s mail was on the counter next to the coffee machine. Under a refinancing mortgage flyer, there was a letter with Georgia on the return address. I didn’t dare touch it, but nudged the flyer away with my coffee cup. I hoped the letter was either a mistake or a bad joke because up until then I was having a good day.

It’s weird how things jump in my head. A bad pass interference call will make me remember I left a fountain pen in my favorite shirt. My home address written in my mother’s hand reminded me I’d hid a bottle of good bourbon in the garage two years ago. It was a gift from my boss, and I could give a million reasons why I’d kept it, but the truth was that Ten High was good liquor. I was taught to never throw things like that away.

Staring at the envelope made me sweat, so I dumped my coffee and poured me some of Tanya’s grapefruit juice. I didn’t want to touch the letter, but poked at it with a spatula like it was something that might bite. After flipping it like a pancake, I saw red lipstick where the ‘V’ sealed it shut. I knew those lips; I’d wiped the same imprint from my forehead and cheek a hundred times as a kid. Momma was big on kisses before school.

The juice didn’t help my sweat or the cotton in my mouth, and I figured I better do something before Tanya came in asking questions. It was dumb, I know, but I went to get the bourbon. Tanya nodded as I walked by. I hadn’t had a drink without her for more than fifteen years.

The bottle was in my tool box, somewhere Wes would never be without me, and somewhere Tanya’d only be if I died. It was a bonus from winning the company football pool, close to six-hundred dollars that went mostly to a BMX bike and pearl earrings. I bought socks and underwear for myself because you can never really have enough. My regional manager, Keith had tossed a lump of rubber-banded twenties on my desk and put the bourbon down next to the money. Enjoy it, you lucky bastard was written on a post-it stuck to the bottle. Keith was a good guy, but he was the dummy that bet Seattle every year. Him giving me the bottle made me realize no one at work really knew me. I thought about giving it away, but only real friends deserve quality and Tanya was my best friend.

I sat on my tool box and rested the bottle horizontal across my knee, whacking it on the ass a few times. I’d never liked the smell of liquor and took a swig without putting it to my nose. The heat in my stomach gave me courage I didn’t really have, and I went back for the letter.

Tanya barely looked up at me on my way back inside, so I hid behind a bush to watch her. Turning over top soil and clearing weeds was what she loved most next to me. She dug into the ground hard, stabbing into it like she’d been wronged. And then real gentle she spread fresh soil around her marigolds like she was putting on a band aid.

Her braided hair was away from her face and wrapped inside my old UC Riverside cap. We always joked that her two years there plus my two made us an educated couple. Standing there with the bottle in my hand was stupid because if Tanya saw me peeking around the bush at her, she’d have known something was wrong, even at a glance. I loved watching her though, especially if she didn’t know I was looking. Whenever she felt she was alone, her beauty was effortless, coincidental. Hell, maybe even accidental. I was never smooth with women, but when I saw her at The Getaway, the campus bar, nursing a Jack and coke with that all alone look, I had to talk to her. We both had a few more drinks, and I asked if we could do it again sometime. She leaned towards me and put her hand over mine, her smooth dark skin covering my pale knuckles. “I don’t think that would be a very good idea.” I couldn’t accept her saying no; I was hooked. Tanya claims she didn’t know it, but I’m sure she did.

It was hard a first: black guys looked at her like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ White girls glaring at me asking, “Why would you even do that?” Not Georgia bad, but it did start fights. We’d worked through a lot.

Seeing Tanya in her garden made me want to get on my knees beside her, bury the letter unopened, spray it with weed killer and wait to see if something beautiful would grow. If I’d had the courage to pick up the letter earlier, I might have done just that. But she’d smell the bourbon now. Her nose was a good as mine. There was a fight coming, but I didn’t want to have it just then.

Our house was a modest three bedroom, most in Blythe are. Wes’ room is closest to the front door, but he’d never seen me take a drink and I aimed for him to never have to. The master bedroom was at the end of the hall, but it seemed a long ways off. The office was in between and the coolest anyway. His and her desks were pushed up against the walls. I sat the bottle on the floor next to mine in case I decided to try and hide it if Tanya came in. When the silver blade slit the crease in the envelope, I saw sweat beads racing down my temple in the reflection.

The letter was only one page. I turned it over and the back was white, blank. If there were words that could make up for sixteen years of silence, I knew damn well they couldn’t fit on a single page. The very first word was, Son, and it was the worst word to start with. I dropped the letter in my lap and took a good swig.

My parents never called me, Son. Hey You, maybe. Boy, I heard several times, but not a word that tied us together as family. Not since I showed up with Tanya and a wedding ring on my finger.

The third line said my father was alive, but doctors couldn’t say for how long. I don’t understand why, but I sympathized, a lot. I knew he was afraid to die. And neither one of us faced our fears very well.

There was a big ink splotch in the L of We Love You. The pen bled ink while they wondered whether love was the right word. Momma wrote it, but I knew my father was looking over her shoulder, dictating. She’d stopped, and then looked at him for approval. Who knows how long before he answered. I took my time, too, had a few drinks before reading on.

If you want to see him, it will have to be soon. The words were supposed to be an invitation. Leaving the front door open was as far as he was willing to go. I wasn’t sure how far I’d go. I put the letter and the bourbon in my lap. Looking at them, I couldn’t tell which was worse.

“Hun?” Tanya’s voice was still outside, but close. “You didn’t turn on the AC.”
One of the things I’d hated most about drinking heavy was that time slipped. Heat had invaded the house, and I was sure it was almost afternoon, but it felt like only minutes had passed. I hadn’t moved except to lift the bottle to my mouth. She was beating the dirt off her sneakers before coming inside, something neither one of us could get Wes to do regularly. I didn’t run, but I wanted to.

“You in there, Babe?”

I took one more good swig and capped the bottle; not much could have made the situation better and nothing could have made it any worse. Tanya stared at me from the doorway, her arms pressed against the arches like she was bracing for an earthquake.

“What happened?”

She was asking whether she should hug or kill me. I blinked and she’d covered the ten feet from the doorway to my side. She snatched the bottle when I didn’t answer.

“My fathers dying,” I said, pointing to the letter. “Wants to see me.”

“We’ll send a card.”

Tanya had a way of closing herself off when things got bad. It was how she coped with her father’s drinking. Everything about her became rigid, stone. Nothing could penetrate and hurt her then. She’s a good cop because of it, but I swear I don’t know her when she gets like that. She knew she was hurting me.

“I’m going.”

“Bye.”

There was no hesitation in her response, just a reaction, concrete bouncing back a rubber ball. She walked out with the bottle, and I heard her pour the rest in the toilet, flushing it twice, and then running water inside and pouring that out. Without the liquor, it was just a bottle. We both knew that.

“He’s my father,” I said when she came back.

“I’m your wife.”

I couldn’t explain what I was feeling. She saw the confusion in my face, sighed and left. I didn’t tell her that I was thinking about taking Wes with me. That was for the best; she’d have handcuffed him to the frame of the house.

Looking out the office window, across Seventh Street to the hard and hilly dirt where Wes practices his bike jumps, I saw the melon fields, honey-dew. I tried to think about something else, but couldn’t get away from the smell of alcohol on my own breath. The tiny skeleton-like trees beyond the melon fields made me think about sitting on my porch in Georgia, listening to my father. Funny how things pop up, huh?

You know that Nigra round over there got a piano in his house? People nowadays rather pay a monkey a quarter what they should pay a real man to do for fifty cents. My father was never happier than when he had someone to blame for something he’d done. He never kept any job very long, and the reason was always the same: Niggers. I loved him, but he was an average man. He couldn’t accept it and spent half his time pretending he was rich, and the other half making damn sure everyone knew he wasn’t as poor as a nigger. It made him drink. And drinking made him mean. I’d never told Tanya, but until high school when I got a job and saw how easy is was to keep it, I blamed them, too.

When I walked into the kitchen, there was an empty Jack Daniels bottle on the counter, probably a gift to Tanya from someone who didn’t know any better. I couldn’t imagine where she’d hid it, but I knew she’d been faithful and hadn’t drunk hers.

“What are you thinking?” Tanya said softly, rolling a baby tomato around the salad in front of her. She didn’t look at me, and I knew that meant she was giving me a chance to apologize for breaking our sacred vow.

“No brain cells left?”

I tried to walk out, but something hit me in my back. Not a big something, but an attention getter. If it wasn’t her wedding ring, it was a hell of a bluff. I stopped dead in my tracks.

“You don’t like it, I know, but I’ve got an obligation to–”

“You made a promise!” she screamed. “And you have an obligation to me, to Wes!”

I couldn’t get past not seeing my father before he died. I saw how much it hurt him when his father passed, saw how hard he drank and how it never helped. I owed him that much.

“I just wanna see him, okay?”

“Not okay. No drinking without one another,” Tanya said. “No Georgia…remember?”

“I know what I said, but try and understand.”

“Every mile of that three-thousand on the way back, I cried, and you promised. You swore.”

My father’d called Tanya things we never repeated. Tanya’d never been to the South, and I’d convinced her it wouldn’t be that bad; she believed me and wasn’t ready for it. The trip back from Georgia was rough. We didn’t really talk until the car overheated near Blythe, eight miles into California. In the seventy-two hours we waited for a new radiator, we went from being a zebra-couple to just Warren and Tanya: steak eaters, iced tea drinkers, good tippers, two polite and quiet people, that’s all. People stopped staring and started waving. The Gas Company and the city police were both hiring. We dropped out after the semester ended and moved. Blythe seemed like a good place, and we both needed someplace good.

I wasn’t sure what else to say, so I told her what I thought was the truth. “He’s still my Daddy. I love him.”

“He’s not worth it!”

For some reason, probably the alcohol, hopefully the alcohol, I turned and looked at her, hard. Everyone in my family knew how to look down at black people. The Hughes glare, my father called it; he said I had it better than most. I leaned my head back, so she had to look up into my nose, gave her an ugly sideways frown. Her eyes grew wide with pain.

“Don’t…look at me like that.”

I was wrong, but I was mad. And drunk. “Look at you how?”

“Like you just noticed what color I am.”

I’d broken through the wall her father and the hoodlums she arrested couldn’t get through. I’d hurt her with her defense up. My backbone went limp and all I saw was the floor. Tanya disappeared. It didn’t matter if I’d looked how she said. I’d hurt her. If I could have, I would have swallowed a match and burned from the inside out. Shame hurts, and I was as ashamed as I’d ever been from what I’d done. But I still wanted to believe that my father felt my kind of shame, not the shame forced onto you by other people, the shame that makes you sorry, makes you change.

Blythe isn’t an easy place to hide. Anybody can be found with a few phone calls and a description of what they drive, so I made the forty mile drive to Parker, Arizona. Keith sent me there two years ago to oversee the construction of a gas line. The crew always talked about a local bar called Bruce’s, and that regulars could bring in their own bottle. It was down the street from Quicker Liquor on the corner of Choctaw and Main. Funny how things come back.

The clerk at Quicker Liquor was a fat bald man, the kind you see buying alcohol, not selling it. I found what I was looking for and put it on the counter.

“Good choice,” he said. He held up the bottle like he was asking for an invite then slipped it into a brown bag. “Occasion?”

“Reunion of sorts.”

“Ahhh, catching up on old times, huh? Good memories, good times.” His voice was scratchy from smoking, but I could tell he loved to talk. I grabbed the bottle and walked out.

Bruce’s wouldn’t let me in with the bottle, but someone at the bar gestured to go around back. Five people, three old couches, one big cactus and a steel barrel bonfire was all it was. But it looked like a place cops tolerated rather than disturbed. I sat down on an empty couch and made the mistake of pulling my expensive bottle from the brown bag. It drew the attention of an old Indian woman, a mustache above her lip and what looked like a five-O’clock shadow.

“White man,” she said, pointing. “Give Crazy Lucy some. You drink on my land, you pay tax!” Drinkers like to talk, but drunks like to be left alone. I was surprised this drunk didn’t know the rules. “All of this,” Lucy said holding her arms up and spinning around, “is mine. Mine!” She held out a Styrofoam cup. I looked at a man and a woman sharing a cigarette for what to do, but they minded their business. After I poured her about three fingers, she gave a toothless grin and danced away. It reminded me of my father’s drunken dance and how at times, he was good.

I don’t remember driving home, but I woke up parked in front of my house. It scared me to think that driving drunk was something I couldn’t unlearn, a stain. The moon’s glow lit a brown-bearded face peeking into my car window.

“You okay?” It was Juan from next door. He had a dog leash in one hand and a cigarillo in the other, an average night for him. “Want me to get Tanya?”

I shook no, and he walked away. The alcohol was wearing off, and my back was killing me. I couldn’t have gone back to sleep in the car, not without another bottle. I had to face Tanya.

The porch light was out, and I got the feeling I wasn’t welcome because at night it always glows. The house was pitch-black, but Tanya wasn’t asleep. She snores something awful, and the only sound was the big oscillating fan rattling the blinds in the living room.

I checked on Wes. He was asleep, but he’d left his TV on again. I’d told him about the electric bill as many times as Tanya’d told him about washing and not just rinsing the dishes, but I smiled turning it off. He was a good kid. I tip-toed in the bedroom.

“If you start drinking heavy, I’ll divorce you. I swear to God!”

Tanya’s father was Jack Daniels man before he died. She hated being close to him. Even in the hospital right before the end, she said she could still smell it on him. In the dark, Tanya probably saw her father, not me. Since we’d been together we only drank with one another, and never too much, wine at a friend’s party, a beer a piece watching the Super-bowl. It kept both of us sober. We called it ‘really small group therapy’.

I sat on the bed and used my feet to peel my shoes off, hoping the silence would last. But cheating’s cheating. I didn’t blame her for being mad.

“Say something.”

I was facing the wall, and she came up behind me and hugged me tight. The shame I was carrying was too heavy, and I had to let it go.

“In junior high I was suspended for throwing a rock.”

“What?”

“Her name was Kenya.” Tanya didn’t stop hugging when she heard the name, but I felt her grip loosen. “I didn’t know it was a girl. I just saw black. Daddy’d been saying all week how it wasn’t right…integrating my school…”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Walking home I couldn’t think about anything else but how I’d done wrong. Mama always told me to never hit a girl. But Daddy was so happy. Waited for me on the steps with a bottle in one hand and two small Dixie cups in the other. Held out the bottle to me and said, ‘Well, spank that som’ bitch. You drinking wit’ me or not.’ I hit the bottle; he laughed. I hit it again, and he laughed harder. We sat on paint cans by the garage and got drunk.”

“Warren, I’m not sure this–”

“And then he was good…for a while. Kept a job almost a year. We played catch in front of the house. He kissed Mama before breakfast and after dinner. He told me he loved me all the time. ‘Proud’ he said, ‘damn proud.’ It ain’t right, but a lot of stuff ain’t right.”

Tanya was still hugging, but I could tell she didn’t know what to do. I turned around, looked her in the eye and rubbed her cheek with my hand. “I know I made a promise,” I said. “But I’m making another one right now. Two days and I’m coming back.”

She kissed me soft, and I felt her relax in my arms. “You better.”

“I will, Darling. This city, this house…this is home.”

Valerie Henderson

Fall Back

Moira unrolls a crocheted yellow square and levels it with a steady palm, ridding it of bumps, lint, impurities. She removes the baby from its walker adorned with dangling plastic stars and lays it on its bare back. Moira is in charge of the baby. Though, it isn’t quite a baby. Moira’s sister’s daughter is old enough to piece words together like “fishy” and “good.” It is strong enough to drag a rusted saucepan out of the bottom cupboard. But, since Page still wears diapers, Moira calls her the baby.

It is nap time and though Moira could have the baby sleep in its crib and simply listen to the monitor, she prefers it this way: the baby in sight. Moira leans against the foot of a corduroy recliner and stretches her legs out in front of her like a V. She lifts the magnified mirror to her face and, with metal in hand, she tends to her eyebrows. Her eyebrows do not require much maintenance, minimal weeding below the meager arch. Moira’s brows are strong. Masculine. Dark. And in pictures, they are the first thing to get noticed. They add stability to the rest of her face which is otherwise delicate, breakable like porcelain. She pulls, producing reddened skin that throbs. She holds a single finger to the altered area until the pain is gone. She continues the pattern. Pull and hold.

The baby is restless. It turns and stretches its arms out in stubbornness. When the baby can’t sleep, Moira resorts to Tubs, a wind up pig with a corkscrew tail that marches on demand. The ticking helps the baby, helps Moira. Once when the baby was out with its parents, Moira wound up Tubs and set him atop the island in the kitchen while she sat on a bar stool eating her sister’s leftover meatloaf for dinner. His stomping feet and painted-on smile hadn’t provided company so much as a distraction—nevertheless she had taken her fingers to his knob four times before her plate was empty.

After nap time, it is time to eat. Moira inserts the baby in its highchair. To distract it while she prepares its meal, she jingles a ring of keys in front of it before handing them off altogether. The baby lifts and drops them seemingly fascinated by the clink and in between lifting and dropping it pounds chubby fists against its plastic tray. Moira takes a cup from the pantry and sets it in the microwave which is splattered with sauces and stickiness. It needs to be cleaned. She sets the timer for one minute. One minute should fly by, but it drags. It is the only time of day Moira is aware of seconds passing by as she watches the glowing red numbers descend. 45 seconds left. 30. Then, because she is impatient, when the clock says 1, she opens the microwave so she doesn’t have to hear the beep.

Over a bright orange baby-proof plate, Moira spreads a scoop of tomato paste and fat pasta and last but not least: one meatball. Moira mashes the meat with her fork, breaking it into bites for the baby. For herself, Moira splits an avocado. She recently read in a women’s magazine that an avocado a day proves for a flat stomach because of the good fat. When it comes to the mound of her stomach, she figures the good fat can’t hurt.

The baby digs into the spaghetti. With its first bite, red has already smeared over its paunchy cheeks and chin. Moira likes to have the baby fed and cleaned before its parents get home.

Moira moved in with her sister, Pauline, after Pauline gave birth. Pauline and her husband, Andrew, couldn’t afford daycare and insisted on Moira moving in—an offer she couldn’t refuse. Moira had been living with a woman near Fresno State while she finished up her degree in Biology. But, before graduation, her roommate had announced she was moving in with her longtime boyfriend and after months of struggling to pay the rent by herself and find a new place, Moira opted to move in with Pauline after graduation, until she found a job. But, the job was never found. Never whole-heartedly looked for. Once Moira moved in, she fell into the routine of Pauline, Andrew, the baby. She was comfortable—a bird roosting deep in its suspended nest.

It has just gotten dark outside and the baby’s parents are home. Pauline pushes through the swinging screen door of their one-story bearing paper grocery bags. She peeks over them to find her way. Moira offers her assistance and takes a bag from Pauline, looking inside to find stacks of lemons.

“Why didn’t you just have me pick these up? You didn’t have to stop.”
Pauline removes her sweat jacket and hangs it over a barstool. “A woman from the restaurant brought them from her tree. They were free. We can do something with them.”

Moira nods and begins unloading them into the fridge.

“You know, I’m really starting to like that new cut of yours.” Pauline takes a finger to the hair that hangs just below Moira’s chin. “Maybe I should cut mine.”

In their teens, Pauline praised Moira for her effortlessly straight hair, expressing her frustration with the inheritance of their father’s unruly locks. Pauline even purchased a chemical relaxer which after processing fully only left her with slightly smoother curls and an itchy scalp. She asked Moira how she had gotten so lucky.

Pauline walks over to the baby. It’s plopped in front of the television with several stuffed creatures available for its entertainment as it watches enthusiastic adults dressed in neon hats singing the ABCs. Pauline joins the baby.

Andrew enters with a loose tie over an untucked white collared shirt. He works as a manager at a car rental office and since he is manager, he has the liberty of synchronizing his schedule with Pauline’s waitressing hours since they only own one car between them. Though Moira often tried to lend them her car, they refused, acknowledging her need to run errands for them during the day, for the baby, and they insisted she have her car at constant availability in case, God forbid, there was a baby emergency.

Andrew’s eyes are red with exhaustion but he offers a warm hello to Moira before joining the rest of his family.

“Andrew, what do you think of Moira’s new cut? I’m thinking of chopping mine off. That way it will be so short, I won’t even be able to put it into this pony tail.”

“I like the pony.” Andrew strokes the tail with a closed fist. “I get to see your face.” He leans across the blanket and gives his wife a kiss.

Moira takes this as her cue. She makes her way to her room in the back of the house to give her sister some time alone with her husband. Moira spends most nights surfing the internet. She starts out responding to emails from old college friends, passively attempting to search for jobs. Recently, she has taken a mild interest in biotechnology. She likes the idea of working with synthetic hormones and livestock. But, after scrolling over job descriptions and demands, she ends up watching video tutorials on how to potty train a baby with chocolate candies or how to organize a baby’s toys to save space. Her bed needs to me made, the lavender sheets balled at the foot of the mattress. They are the same lavender as the walls of her teenage bedroom. Once, when no one was home, Moira broke the household rule and allowed a boy into her bedroom who told her the color reminded him of an Easter egg. He said it must have felt like spring all year long.
Just as she finishes entering the word “baby” into the website’s search engine, there’s a knock at her door. She closes the screen and before she can say “come in”, Pauline’s head has popped through. Pauline scans the room as if to make sure that no one else is there, even though no one else ever is.

Pauline shuts the door behind her. “I need a favor.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Who said anything was wrong?”

“I know you like I know the nutrition facts on a pint of Half Baked,” Moira says. “Something’s off.”

“I’m late.”

Moira smiles. “Really?” Her eyes move to Pauline’s stomach.

“Why are you smiling like it’s a good thing? Is it a good thing?”

“They’d be two years apart, like us!”

“Since when is it like you to instantly find the silver lining?

Moira sighs. “What’s the favor?”

“I need you to pick me up a test tomorrow when you do the marketing.” She hands her a ten. “Put it on a separate receipt.”

“No wonder you reacted to my hairspray yesterday. Your smell is heightened. Just go to the store now. When you thought you might be pregnant with Page, you couldn’t take the test fast enough.”

“There’s no rush,” Pauline says. “I don’t want to tell Andrew until I know for sure. He’s been wanting another one but it’s not the time. We can’t afford it. Besides,” Pauline says, “if I am pregnant again, you’ll never be able to leave.”

Moira thinks about the day that the baby will be ready for Kindergarten and though Moira might still be needed for a couple hours after school, her caretaking responsibilities will change. She will no longer be in charge of the baby morning, noon and night. Instead, her duties will become less interactive and she will still spend her days organizing laundry and mopping up messes but, she will be alone.

“I’m just saying.” Moira says. “It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.”

This is the day Moira has been waiting for. The wooden trunk that used to house fashion magazines and the gel breast inserts she used to hide from her mother, now contains used onesies, stuffed elephants and bears missing eyes and limbs—almost everything yellow, unisex. Still, Moira thinks it will be a boy. That’s usually how things work: couples are blessed with one. Then the other. Every Saturday, when the baby’s parents sleep in, Moira takes the car to yard sales, only stopping when a section of pastels pops out at her, signifying baby gear, baby toys, baby furniture. Moira sifts through the clothes and toys. Is it enough? She knew she would need these one day and she is glad she put them away for safe keeping. Moira not only inherited the love of yard sales from her mother but also the need to hold onto things. When the girls were little, her mother tied each of their first shoes to her rearview mirror. She said it was a daily reminder that, at one point, each of their feet had fit in the palm of her hand. Moira followed suit keeping not only the baby’s first shoe but its first pacifier, old nasal aspirator and hospital identification bracelet.

Moira stacks the toys and clothes back into the trunk, excited Saturday is only two days away. At her computer, she begins a new search: newborns.

***

Moira straps the baby in its car seat. She gives the straps an extra two tugs to make sure the baby is secure. Once she is certain all is safe, Moira gets in the car and drives to the market.

She heads down the produce aisle, list in hand, and wonders what new fruit she can dice up for the baby. Recently, she discovered the baby’s intolerance to apples. She warmed them up with sprinkled cinnamon and though they smelt like fresh apple pie, the baby spit them out, leaving patches of cinnamon on its lower lip before dumping them over its tray. Moira didn’t know a baby could be so hard to please but, now, she is determined to find something to its liking, no matter how long it takes.

Moira makes her way to the meat department. She pulls her cart alongside the counter and waits for service. When it is her turn, Mitchell, the normal weekday butcher, says hello and asks what he can do for her. She points to the un-marinated, boned chicken and asks for three pounds. It is the cheapest and once cooked it will last their family of four a whole week.

Mitchell pulls at the filmy, bluish poultry and rolls it into white paper. He hands her the wrap. “Is that all?”

Mitchell is smiling and waving an enthusiastic, gloved finger up and down at the baby. The baby stretches its arm toward him.

“You know, she’s starting to look more like you every week.”

Moira doesn’t mind when people assume the baby is hers. It makes her feel as though she’s doing something worthwhile. Raising her young. And so, she lets Mitchell and others alike think she has her own family instead of letting them know she is just part of someone else’s.

Moira looks down and tucks her hair behind her ears. “Let’s hope not.”

“I’m digging the new look. It makes you look more grown up.”

Moira shakes her head. “It’s too short.”

“Well, I like it.”

Moira knows she doesn’t take compliments well and a large part of her feels embarrassed with the attention, as though he is just saying so out of rehearsed kindness and perhaps the compliment is unwarranted.

Moira rounds her cart into the hygiene aisle. To her left are bars of soap and bottles of creams promising to make women smell like rainforests. Moira grabs a compacted stack of generic soap and tosses it into the cart. The baby’s fists cling to the handle from which she steers. She is surprised it hasn’t become fussy. Instead, it seems comforted by the soft loaf of bread Moira has positioned by the baby. To her right, Moira finds vitamins. Vitamins for hair growth. Vitamins for energy. Vitamins for health of heart. Next to the vitamins are feminine wipes and above those, the pregnancy tests. Moira looks for the store brand test. Its box is the only one that isn’t pink and though it is cheapest, it still comes with two tests. Just in case.

According to the name tag, Moira’s cashier’s name is Brenda and she has been serving customers since 1998. Brenda wears a short perm and caked, gummy lashes. The baby has finally become squirmy. It starts to reach for jars of jam on the conveyer belt and when it can’t quite touch them, it cries out in panic. It tries again, still unsuccessful. Moira shushes the baby and strokes its hand as she continues to unload the gallons of milk at the bottom of the basket. The baby is hysterical and Brenda and patrons are starting to stare. Moira reaches for the loaf of bread but the baby clenches it furiously while tears roll down its blushed cheeks. Moira digs through her purse for her keys and shakes them in front of the baby. The baby takes them only to throw them to the ground. Moira drops to her knees to pick them up. Facing the line of customers behind her, Moira makes eye contact with an elderly woman in a jogging suit. Moira says sorry. The woman just stares and smiles a smile of irritation, insincere. Once again, the baby grabs at the conveyer belt, this time succeeding in tilting a glass jar of olives off the counter. It smashes onto the floor. Muddy green washes over the tile. Brenda is on the loudspeaker calling for a cleanup. Moira looks to Brenda and offers another apology. It isn’t the first time she has caused a scene and, by the looks of things, it won’t be her last. While a teenage boy sponges the spill, Moira sets the pregnancy test on the counter with a heavy bar between it and the rest of her groceries. The baby has quieted some and it struggles to catch its breath from crying with occasional hiccups.

Moments like this don’t cause Moira embarrassment. Instead, they make her question her skills as a caretaker. She wonders why she isn’t able to keep the baby content at all times. Once, Pauline told her “Babies will cry. People will stare. It’s all part of the gig.” But Moira refused to pass these situations off as anything other than a testament to her lack of motherly instincts.

After Moira swipes her sister’s bank card for one hundred and twenty nine dollars worth of groceries, the cashier scans the pregnancy test. Brenda looks at the test. Brenda looks at the baby. Brenda smiles a smile the same as the elderly woman’s. “I assume you want a separate bag,” Brenda says.
“Please.”

Instead of handing the test to the bag boy and even though Moira asked for plastic, Brenda slides the test in a small, paper bag, seemingly for confidentiality.

It gets dark and Moira is anxious for Pauline to come home. For now, the test resides in Moira’s sock drawer, still in the paper bag. Moira sits with the baby and Tubs, and, together, they watch the pig perform. When Tubs is done, Moira starts him up again. She is always amazed at how much Tubs, and all of the toys smell like the baby. Powder and milk. She sniffs Tubs slowly before winding him up once more. Moira had never been fond of milk, not the smell, not the texture. But now that the drink is associated with the baby, it is Moira’s favorite scent. Often, when the baby naps, Moira stares at the crusted residue between the corners of its lips. She doesn’t wipe it off but instead lets it linger so that she may take in its smell when it awakes and she is able to hold the baby close.

The baby’s parents are home.

Pauline and Andrew come in laughing. Andrew is telling a story about a client who returned a rental car with a wadded up note left in the cup holder. Apparently, Andrew opened it to find a list of things the girl loved and hated about her boyfriend and to Andrew’s amusement some qualities made both lists. Things like the way he woke her up for sex in the middle of the night and how he insisted on paying for everything.

“What’s the point of the list,” Andrew says. “Why did she need it to know how she felt?”

“Some people need to see things laid out in front of them,” Pauline says.” Without a visual, a person’s emotions can just run around in their head.”

“I’m just saying. I wouldn’t want to read your list.”

“I doubt you’d find anything you didn’t already know.”

The two walk over to Moira and the baby. Pauline gives the baby a quick kiss and asks Moira if her daughter already ate.

“Fish crackers and spaghetti rings.”

Pauline stands and walks to the hallway, motioning with her eyes for Moira to follow.

In Moira’s bedroom, Moira pulls the bag from her sock drawer.

“Good. Was there any change?”

Moira shakes her head. “No time like the present.”

Pauline heads to the bathroom. “Wish me luck.”

But, Moira isn’t sure what luck Pauline is hoping for. Pauline had a habit of requesting luck for unusual things. Like the time their childhood fish died and she lost a round of rock-paper-scissors that determined who would have to flush.

Moira thinks she wants the test to be positive. Raising Pauline’s baby has become a part of her life. The tantrums. The milk. The routine. She doesn’t want it to end. She decides to wait for Pauline in the living room, silently hopeful that a new chapter for Pauline might begin, allowing her to maintain the recent role she’s been entrusted with.

In the living room, Andrew is on the couch with the baby propped up on his knee. He sips root beer. He lifts his foot up and down and the baby bounces, catching air between its diaper and dad, each time giggling wildly at the bumpy ride. Once, she saw Andrew at his nephew’s birthday party, allowing all the kids of appropriate size to play his invention of “climb the man” in which the children could grasp on to his hands and climb up his legs with their feet, starting at his knees, to his stomach until they’d succeed in reaching the top at which point he’d throw them onto his shoulders and announce them as conquerors of the climb.

Moira pours a glass of red wine and starts flipping through a family magazine. She looks at the pictures of Halloween costumes and flower arrangements and avoids the articles. She is distracted, constantly looking up at Andrew and the baby and relishing in their interaction. She sees the baby turn toward its father and while Andrew continues bouncing and the baby continues chuckling, it now wants something more. It sits both arms strained toward Andrew, reaching, longing. It wants to be held. It wants contact. Andrew holds the baby and swings it back and forth, now loving and tender, offering a comfort that only the baby’s actual parent can provide. And in this moment, Moira sees what exemplifies everything she’s missing.

Even though Moira wasn’t ready to raise a child when she found out she was pregnant, she was willing to give it a shot. But, when Moira told her boyfriend, Gary, he claimed their relationship wasn’t ready for such a big step. He said whatever she decided, he’d be on board but once he referred to it as a big step with weariness, she made up her mind. They’d been together two years, since her freshmen year in college. She’d loved him and had often assumed that one day they’d start a family and perhaps it would just be accomplished sooner. Still, she could never push his reaction out of her head and she knew she couldn’t live with herself knowing a man had stayed with her solely because of a child. She cared too much to have him live like that, unwilling and bound. She’d wanted him to stay for her.

The operation was quick and the pain was tolerable as promised, a sterile, apathetic procedure. She preferred it that way. To not have her actual self associated with the act, just her body. Afterwards, Gary had taken her for coffee and a two egg breakfast, eating and conversing as though nothing had happened. At first, Moira was game. She laughed at appropriate moments and tried to look at him the same, tried to look at her own self the same. But, eventually, her resentment for their decision took a toll on their relationship, as resentment often does, and the two parted ways.

Moira feels lucky to still have a baby in her life. Though it is not hers, she learns a great deal about motherhood and feels as though caring and raising Pauline’s baby, in a sense, makes up for her loss. But, when she sees this: the baby reaching out for its kin, needing, she is faced with the reality that she could not provide that for her own, that the baby is not hers, and that she will be lucky if she gets a second chance.

Moira sees Andrew holding the baby close but he gets up and distances the baby from himself, the baby’s legs dangling.

“Yup. She’s wet. We’ve got a wet diaper.”

Moira stands up ready to help. She holds out her hands.

“I’ve got it. Pauline must be taking a shower.”

And just as he walks to the hallway, towards the bedroom, Pauline marches down the hall, with the same collected image. Moira can’t read her. Pauline takes the baby from Andrew and rushes to change it into a fresh diaper.

Andrew turns back to Moira. “See? Even when I try and help, she’s on it.”

When Pauline comes out with the baby, she sits next to Andrew on the couch, positioning the baby between them. She licks her thumb and takes it to the baby’s blanched forehead to wipe a smudge. As Moira watches her sister and waits for some kind of clue, it appears as though she has been forgotten about for the moment. The baby has Pauline’s full attention. After Moira waits long enough, Andrew goes to the kitchen and while his back is turned, Pauline makes eye contact with Moira and shakes her head no—not with disappointment but with a shrug insinuating it isn’t the right time. That is life. Moira is surprised she doesn’t feel disappointed. She feels numb.

Andrew removes a jug of maple pecan ice cream from the freezer. He scoops a few mounds into a glass bowl with a chipped rim. He pops a jar of kosher pickles and positions them atop the dessert. He carries the dish over to Pauline.

Pauline adopted the craving of ice-cream and pickles during her pregnancy. After the birth, her palette hadn’t changed and maple pecan and kosher slices were still her snack of preference, which Andrew supplied her with on a regular basis, happily.

She thanks him and lets herself fall into the couch. Andrew turns on the television and hands her the remote.

“Watch your shows.”

Again, Pauline thanks him and navigates through her list of recorded episodes of reality shows about housewives. Andrew is again springing the baby, switching his gaze from the baby to the television. He looks content.

Moira often observes that Pauline and Andrew rarely take advantage of their Friday nights off by dressing up and embracing the town, whether it is due to their lack of money or their homebody nature. In Moira and Pauline’s adolescence, Moira had a date planned with different boys nearly every Friday night—she had her choice. And Pauline was left home to concentrate on homework or help their mother bake. Moira wondered how she handled it, the staying in, the loneliness, but now it doesn’t matter because in moments like this, Moira realizes Pauline and Andrew’s little efforts of consideration toward one another make for a moving, genuine love that causes Moira to yearn.

Moira pours herself another glass of wine and takes it up to her room.

She sits at her computer and opens her browser. While waiting for it to load, she looks at a picture frame decorated with seashells. Inside is a picture of her and the baby at the beach. They are huddled together under an umbrella, both wearing hats to further shield themselves from the sun. Moira examines their features. They baby’s eyes are almond shaped and its nose is rounded at the tip, begging to be pinched. She and the baby look nothing alike. Though they are cheek to cheek in the photo and her adoration and connection to the baby is clear, it is not the same as that of a mother and daughter. The baby is not Moira’s. And, one day, if Moira is lucky, she figures she will have her own house, her own hallway with her own decorative picture frames exposing moments shared between her and a child of her own. Moira will not go to tomorrow’s yard sale. The items she’s collected will remain in the trunk until she has a real need for them, her own need for them. And, for right now, they are enough. When the girls were in middle school, their mother dragged them to yard sales, encouraging them to consider what others no longer wanted. Normally, they found practical things like a digital alarm clock for their room or resistance bands for exercise, but at one in particular, they found a magic 8 ball. Moira reaches into her desk drawer and takes out the black ball. It is scratched and Moira is unsure if it even works anymore. She’s been unable to throw away the very article that both she and her sister obsessed over and cherished. Many nights, they sat Indian style across from one another gazing into the 8 ball, taking turns asking a well thought out question before dramatically shaking it and awaiting their fortune. Would Pauline marry a millionaire? Would Moira hit her longed for growth spurt? Try again later. Yes! Outlook Not Good. Moira rubs the ball against her chair, ridding it of dust. And with no particular question in mind, she shakes it and waits for the blurriness to focus into results.