Sarah thinks this, but doesn’t say this.

Eat this meal, this savory concoction, chew each piece and enjoy it.  The salmon simmered with coriander, the slow preheat of the oven, the hours spent coaxing each herb in the garden to a height, to a size, to a fullness fit for the minor harvest, all of these things, the money spent on each pan, pot, spatula, the mix of meager sauce over low heat, the pinch of mint, salt, freckles of pepper and paprika. 

At your age, Ginni, you wouldn’t believe the needs we have, and the confluence of events which bring them to our table.

Sarah blinks, she fingers a fork amidst the place setting, austere and deliberate on the distressed wood of the table.  It’s funny what we pay for something new and intentionally well-worn.

Sarah too tells herself to eat slowly.  To chew food, to pause, to taste and swill a wine glass filled with a leggy merlot. 

Milk for you, though, Ginny.  

Ginny sits in her height chair, a blond tuft of hair passes back and forth like a long, weak pendulum, an uncertain feather on a string.  Meanwhile, Sarah can see through the window, the way the day outside gives up, the bloom of colors sinking and ceding to black.

Last night brought the storm which kept them both from sleep, and morning brought the aftermath of limbs on the lawn from the ancient oak towering over the house, and day carried Ginny off to school, and all that time, with her first five years behind her already, it never seemed she’d reach these new days discovering kindergarten and classmates and so much time spent in the absence of her mother.

Sarah cooks through it. She bakes and strains and mixes, with flour dusted over countertops in strange shapes like blossoms of alien flowers.  While she cooks, she remembers the chalk mountains, even in this spate of Northeastern rain, she remembers the desiccated natural monuments bleached to the color of a femur. Plateaus and buttes made of stacks of minerals compressed and waiting out in sun for something else, waiting forever.  Blanched, worn down with wind, cut through many millennia ago with rushing rivers, until the sun had finally made a ghost of it all, a ghost of everything.

You were there once, Ginny.  As was your father, your brother and I.  But I’ll tell you that story when you’re older, when the truth of it has dimmed for me, and my belief in the pure facts of who we once were is escapable.  Your history will be so much better in my telling of it.  I’m tirelessly working and reworking it, so even the less honest ideas will feel real when I give them to you.

Sarah rotates Ginny’s plate placing the salmon closest to her so that it is made unavoidable and will be next in line for the fork, then the teeth, then the tongue.  Ginny moves faster than Sarah with her silverware clinking and drawing food into her mouth with a smaller spoon with minimal pause for a moment to breathe. 

This isn’t something Sarah mistakes for appetite, but rather a chore Ginni needs to complete before she can creak open her evening toy box and spread her toys like body-bagged casualties of a forgotten war in lines and columns as if to assess the wealth of her collection.  A trove of children’s games, stuffed animals, and Tonka trucks of made of plastics in bold colors, toys with trick buttons that trigger voices carrying sentiments as trite as “love”.  A plush frog, when squeezed, spits out a red rope tongue and tells Ginny it loves her.  And why wouldn’t it?

Sarah used the word “love” before, and she will again.

When Sarah’s husband left his family, he did so by staying behind.  Sarah took her 22 year-old son, Kris, and her newborn Ginni and moved east, and that’s how Sarah’s husband left her. 

With the U-Haul half-empty and blazing in the driveway under Albuquerque’s storied summer sun, Sarah’s husband spit words at her like “responsibility” and “incapable” and “unfit”, and over his shoulder Sarah watched as every scrub brush in New Mexico held completely still as if the desert itself was holding its breath.  Shadows that hung on at the base of the cacti and Joshua trees claimed their distorted shapes on the cracked earth and in the dust.  The land, radiant with heat, froze.

 “If you don’t finish your spinach, you can’t open your toy box tonight.”  Sarah says because she knows the power of the toy box, of its contents, the calming categorizing of each toy that Ginny methodically lifts out.

Ginny nods without looking, chews without tasting, swallows without chewing, eats without eating.  The spinach inevitably remains, a picked through pile of swamp green, boiled just shy of emitting a rotting vegetable smell.

Sarah watches Ginny survey the pile of spinach for the least offensive plan of consumption, poking slowly with a fork, trailing strings of it across her plate like wet tinsel. 

Sarah remembered the few times that Kris bothered to try eating between shooting up and sleeping.  He ate only apples on those days.  He crunched down on each one as if testing the will of his own teeth, the strength of his jaw. 

You won’t remember, Ginny, but one day when it matters, I’ll tell you about the sound his mouth made, the bulb of muscle flexing in his cheek, the sometimes spittle of sandy apple flesh we were easy to forgive if he was mid-story and collapsing into the embrace of the heroin in his blood.  But of course, in my recollection, the spittle would only come from an enthusiastic recounting of one of his latest adventures in business or overseas. 

When Sarah finally tells it, Kris will have lived a life that Ginni could learn to love, even emulate.

After turning 18 and finding the needle, Kris lived the rest of his life as a phantom, but that was no fault of Sarah’s.  Hell, it’s what the southwest did to all of them.  Dry heat, scarce rain, drifting sand from the drier wastelands, even now Sarah most readily remembers New Mexico as the places that movies seem so fond to capture when framing desolation and despair.

“You eat your fishy, Ginny.”  Sarah says in a tone, tired and flat from overuse.

“The storm knocked out our eccentricity last night” Ginny says.

Without correcting her or even smiling, Sarah reminds her daughter not to focus on the powered down television but rather the mushy, uneaten spinach. 

Eat this and you will eat the work that I invested in creating it, you will eat the time it took to prepare, you will eat the earth that grew these flavors. And in the act of the eating, there will be no room left for you to dwell on the family you’ll soon forget, and what’s become of those others. 

It’s only ever been us.  You won’t know now about the brother who slinked in and out of the house, lying often on the couch some mornings like a wastrel, who had nowhere else to shower but was still unwilling to do so even in our home.  I’d imagined for at least your first few years that he would protect you as older brothers must.  I’d imagined this of Kris who couldn’t complete the simplest of tasks like leaving a note or locking a door or properly hiding his needles and spoons and lighters and rubber tourniquets.

Ginni, you must get used to me saying that “you were too young to remember, but”, because the day will come when our every conversation, our every recollection will begin like this, and end in a fantasy so much healthier than our shared past. 

To share is a funny thing.  Ginny takes time to come around to sharing, as all kids do, so that makes her normal.  That makes her just another kid with a single mother and no others to call family. 

After her husband had left them (an act he excused with some obtuse accusation which held Sarah responsible for their son’s habit), and after the three that were left had made a home in Pennsylvania, Kris’ drug became indistinguishable from him.  During the months of Kris’ evaporation, Sarah unfolded a terse note tucked inside her lawncare bill: “If you can keep your dogs from digging up the yard, it will be easier to keep the grass growing.”

And they had no dogs. 

What little Sarah was able to abscond with from her marriage, aside, of course, from the junkie son and the newborn, included mismatched utensils, two suitcases with broken zippers, a box of men’s razors, Stetson cologne in a limited edition bottle, two cigarettes and no lighter.  Sarah left with their daughter, with the unfortunate name Gertrude which Sarah had shortened to Ginny as the lesser of two evils.  The name was a concession Sarah had made anticipating the many years of compromises laid out in front of them.  Those imagined years would have been laced with reminders of Sarah’s acquiescence to naming her daughter Gertrude at her husband’s insistence.  “Gertrude” was supposed to have been Sarah’s leverage in the greater disagreements the future years of their marriage would germinate, but with the move, those oncoming years simply dissolved like sugar in warm water.

It was a year into Ginni’s life when Kris first found what he’d lost.  Sarah was changing her daughter, who had been laid out on the table like a squirming project of wet spots, dry cloth, powder, and diapers, and Kris quietly slipped into the room and stepped up behind her, grabbing the back of her neck, rough, like you would a punished puppy, and demanded his “things”.  His fingers wrapped through her hair and pulled tight to her scalp, Sarah gave in to the sudden tug and backed away from the helpless, sprawled Ginny, who was still cooing and trying to find a thumb to suck. 

Kris’ needles, heroin, and spoon, were all wrapped in plastic, and had been buried in the back yard during Ginni’s nap.  Sarah knew what enabling was, and she knew that hiding his “kit” was the opposite of it.  She was saving her son from the drug.  She was a hero, she just knew it.

Upturned soil amidst the overgrown crab grass led Kris to his kit.  Sarah’s digging through errant backpacks left at the stairs and satchels tossed in closets, her digging through old gym shoes and extracting baggies of powders, quickly turned to months of earth turned over, lifted up, filled in.  Ziploc baggies, saran wrap sometimes, to protect what Kris would eventually dig back up and stick in his arm. He’d sink into a couch, leaning precariously over something built to spill like soup or a Coke, fighting gravity in slow motion, and Sarah could never quite get over how much what they called “the nod” looked like an awful lot of work from the outside.

Ginni, you will finish your applesauce, and then to your toys, to your favorite television show with those children overtaken with the glee of their first acting gigs.  Songs, cloying, worming their way into your ears then your dreams.  If this is the worst of it for you, and it will be, then you’ll have been lucky, you’ll have been spared.

Ginni would have no memory of Kris with dirt under his nails from digging up the freshly buried drugs , and since the rain was oblivious, it was sometimes mud on his knees and in his hands, and dried in a clump from a straggle of his hair.

Kris left then, after the hassle of digging had worn thin, and he embarked “business trip”, from which he’d never returned.

Sarah has stories for this.  She does.  In them, Kris’ business was an international printing company with minimal employees, exhorbitant expenses, and in this telling, Sarah and Ginni would soon fault his careless girlfriend for taking Kris away from them.  She lured him to California, all the way across the country, so that he could fatally succumb to the twisted metal of an anonymous accident on the California Freeway.  Oh, this was just one the multitude of histories Sarah was compiling for future use with Ginni.  She was creating a new life for them, one that Sarah hoped Ginni could one day take for granted.

Either that or she grow up broken.  Sarah imagined that her sacrifices were heroic.  She was a survivor and would teach Ginni to do the same.  But, of course, this would all have to come after Ginni had cleaned her plate.  It would all have to follow Ginni’s bath and story time and tucking in.  It would have to follow Sarah’s own tending to herself with the needle, tying her arm with the string from Ginni’s 3^rd birthday balloon, taking her own heroin in a commendable and responsible way, only after Ginni had finished fussing and gave herself to sleep.

This gave her things to look forward to, like the next dose that Sarah could take to relax, after putting her daughter safely to rest, and only after dinner.

Sarah thought about Kris and his dirty habit, his indiscretion, how he battled his demons with such frivolity, and she watched Ginni whose head was down and frowning at the final bite of fish.

Eat this, and eat it slowly.  You will never know the amount of work that went into this.

Leather furniture sticks to my skin
like the vinyl in a mustang
out of air conditioning.

The heat and me write to you now,
and only you.

Does that somehow make this special,
make us special?

Shuffling through an old teacher’s poetry
in a new book,
and wondering who we were then,
when the quad lost its leaves
and regrew them,
trees clogged with pollen
seeds dropped forgotten,
the dust of summer
and drifts of snow,
and all through this and back,
the must of winter-worn books.

Now,
for me,
today,
I’m trounced by the
indisposible nature of it all.

A neighbor’s marriage as an act of process,
something to be gotten through with:
a witness, the justice of the peace, and oh yes, not to forget
the husband.

What does it say that I can’t throw away
the simple thank-you note
scrawled for a bottle of
ten dollar wine?

You won’t say, but I know that you know
what it means of me
that I tell you all of this
instead of anyone else.

That you,
of everyone,
have to hear that I can’t put
some professor’s poetry down,

And I dip into email
awaiting word from her,
like that stupid
bobbing bird dips in water
with some dumb
unquenchable thirst.

We have become ineluctable.

I’ve so much to say,
that its dripping from me,
this sweat and grout and sand and unbearable
grit, and
only you know
(because I tell only you)
how the beach gets in everything
you wear and even
after a week back,
you’re still shaking the grains
from a pocket or sock.

So much
to say.

What does it matter,
that I can’t say it all
unless someone is listening?

And what does it say
that you’re what I’ve got?

To hold it in my hand
is to reduce a hand to its component parts.

Feet and people move and murmur,
a track in the ceiling hooks a thin sheet
offering at least the idea of a curtain.

Never easy with words when
I needed them most
“I won’t look while you change.”

Hear her voice, see her eyes
“Please, please don’t see me like this.”
She hadn’t said this, of course,
but it was left in her wake in a whisper.
What is the sound of smoke as it dissipates?

A dead-eye glint,
a half-closed lid,
the glaze of a cataract.
A breast sags from the gown,
its pale moon of flesh
fresh and clean, it seems, from the abbatoir.

In this disgrace of gravity,
not even shame will move her body to curl in on itself,
to tangle a nervous finger in her hair
she once wound then unwound
and then wound
and then not.

They call it “life support”,
as if the machines are a mild supplement
to what her body already wanted.
As if they
hadn’t pumped and sucked,
brutal and with duty.

Screens dilate with images and codes,
numbers fall, others rise,
readouts of red electric lines pulse and trend,
Now the exhale and hush
as small lights blink like eyes
from wide to wider,

How long can it all wait,
me in this space,
she and these machines,
until my new life without her surges forth?

Still,
so still.
I am thinner than this minute,
lessened by the lie of the hours
and days and weeks and years
we each were promised
would come next.

My mantra, my crutch:
still,
patient
and still.

Like dried earth
cracked and cut through
with the black bolt of a scar.
An ancient geometry of clay
turned up at its edges,
in remembrance of floods,
or in threat of the next.

I savor the slow pain in my chest,
time lumbers, tumbling over itself, inevitable.
And the breath I have held,
my last drawn from the world
with both of us in it,
must escape.

I am not looking for stinkbugs to crush in my hand or for an ant to smolder and curl under the magnified sun.  Not chasing/racing/escaping anything.  My body moves me through the dream without purpose, the pivots, pistons, coiled springs that maneuver the apparatus of my legs can be traced to same wasteful impulse of a fidget: clicking a pen, smacking your lips, the lazy tapping of any blithe, shifting rhythm.  Most lawns are stiff and brittle without water and I imagine that my path across them is weaving a thread through the patchwork plots of land, brown earth and sun-scarred grass the color of hay, drawn tight like the pink pursed lips of a suture.

I may be an adult, or possibly not.  Passing by houses like refrigerator boxes, cardboard and vacant.  No hinges, circuits, ball-bearings, heating elements, water meters, and no cans of paint thickened with time and exposure.  Every house sits on its own little plot, carefully hollowed out with wells which would have dried to dust had the rains receded, had the water gone scarce, had the wells been dug at all.

The whirring current of electrical outlets, framed by plastic wall plates, and neutered by child-safe plugs have never been measured for usage, nor billed to an occupant.

I am weaving through fences, over sidewalks, between arborvides and kicking up blazing mounds of mulch, blurred and brown.

Without wind, the sky is only the idea of a sky.    Like the outer edge of a snowglobe, a plastic atmosphere hunched over a few crowded objects, all acting as patient standins for the real world. An entire universe the subdued color of an afterthought, any distinct contrast has been drained down to an uncertain grey.  The sky seeps into the earth which swallows the homes which sigh their stale air collapsing as wood creaks bending the nails which quit in relief that the rest would just blanch and dissolve.

They swayed, their mouths gaping like Christmas carolers in suburban neighborhoods friendlier than Teri’s.  Neighborhoods where the inhabitants grew soft around the middle from attending dinners, and where they welcomed newcomers and talked fondly of those who’d moved elsewhere, even keeping in touch, as if the gesture mattered. 

When she wasn’t at work, the past came back fast and unexpected.  Teri remembered stroking the neighbor’s mutt while her father tied strings to its collar in the dark of their backyard.  All summer it had shit relentlessly on their lawn, until, unleashed and feral, it finally dropped a triumphant turd on their porch.  Teri kept quiet when Sammy asked if anyone had seen his dog.  She’d later asked her father if the dog had deserved it, but he didn’t answer. Her father never answered her unless she pressed on, which came with its own set of risks.  At eight years old, she understood that he’d never called the owners to complain about their animal.  He’d much rather exact a punishment and then revel in its secret reward.  Teri remembered digging her fingers through the dog’s coarse coat and pulling them away smelling of mange and musk.  While the aluminum cans were carefully threaded to dog’s collar, it stood unusually still under Teri’s hand, trusting and not at all skittish.  Silent, like her father, she’d never mentioned to Sammy that his pet was probably still trying to outrun the empty cans of creamed corn clattering behind it, as the dog’s own momentum created the cacophony from which it fled.  Teri shook her head to clear the memory.  The past and all of  its sad inhabitants were mere distractions strung out in her wake and which must be cut loose.  

She boiled a shallow pot of water over the burner and tore open the box of macaroni and cheese.  Teri carefully squeezed the foil packet and a waxy yellow lump slumped over the steaming shells.  Through the window over the kitchen sink she marvelled at the land development opportunities going to sod across from her quaint community.   Her “neighborhood” consisted of a lone row of five townhomes huddled close like an uncertain set of quintuplets with just enough courage to cross the street on their own.    She scanned the alien landscape of dirthills punctured by the gnarled bones of trees, unique in their unsightly  knobs and the twist of their diseased bark.

Teri dropped onto the couch and flicked the tv on, crossing her sweatpant legs, waiting for her dinner to cool.  First to Hollywood Squares where Whoopi Goldberg engaged Gilbert Godfrey in an exchange of insults devoid of wit yet uncomfortably barbed.  Next she clicked to the Wheel of Fortune where Vanna posed, resplendant in a white sequined gown, walking back and forth across the screen and turning giant letter-blocks, which brightened at her touch.  No woman is made like that, Teri reminded herself and sucked the cheese from the inside of a shell before crushing it between her teeth.  So many years of fighting for equality in order to be considered at least as effective as the men that ruled the earth.  The same bellicose fools that happily eradicated entire ecosystems just to put up strip malls where their demoralized wives would busy themselves buying the latest fashions, preening subtly for their husbands who would never even notice.  These men who fuck for sport and for no other reason. 

Vanna touched a glowing block and slowly turned it for the contestant who had yelled out to no one that he wanted to buy a vowel.  Even Vanna, flawless, was a slave to their whims. 

Mosey, the Calico cat, scrambled across the carpet when Teri flicked the TV off.   He didn’t miss an opportunity for attention.  She sunk her fingers under the cat’s fur, lamenting how she’d fostered such a helplessly needy pet. 

Teri’s gaze settled on the file across the room.  A pile of papers on the hall table,  innocuous enough, under her clutch of keys on the Subaru fob.  In all else she saw herself as a rational woman, but to this, Gerald Palladine’s life, Teri had become…attached.  She was one bubble among suds, drawn down with the last of the tepid bathwater, lost to the dark of the drain.  She needed  what Dr. Phil described as “closure”, and she would only get that by immersing herself in the case, as professionals described it, “offline.” 

Gerald was a Wednesday walk-in.  He came into her life the very same day that her boyfriend, Kyle, left it.  Pure coincidence.

For Teri, the template of their relationship was familiar.  She and Kyle had reached a silent agreement on their respective roles in her drama.  Both inherently understood the need for weeks of discomfiting calm, docile evenings couch-ridden, turning their brains to paste on whatever reality show they could find among the 200 channels.  In their frequent arguments, it was Teri’s job to raise her voice and flail her arms like a synchronized swimmer in a wave-pool.  She was expected to say things for which she’d apologize for later.  Kyle’s job was to simply fill the shoes of the man opposite her, try to hold his own, look concerned and not distracted, and try not to falter in his calm unwillingness to concede defeat, but most of all, he must not cry.  Teri was clear with each of her lovers over the past few years about the importance of his being able weather her most inclement storms.  None had ever come close, and one, Duane the unflappable actuary, had actually cried in the face of her wrath.  If her partner, her boyfriend, her “other” were to be trusted, respected, then he must be able to handle the overflow of whatever emotion she herself could not fully contain. 

In an average argument, Teri reached for small blunt objects, like a cell phone or a slim paperback to lob.  Larger disagreements called for something with a bit more heft, so in lieu of the flimsy Harvard Law Journal, Teri tossed the hardcover Rabbit Angstrom novels (all 4 in one edition!). And for that day’s argument with Kyle, in which he’d called her a “cold bitch” for her unwavering support of the death penalty, Teri upended her favorite piece of furniture: a table from IKEA the shape and color of a coffee bean.  

Kyle’s mouth moved, but Teri’s father’s voice echoed in the apartment, she felt his bare palm on her cheek again, she felt his spit and smelled the stale whiskey in it as he proclaimed her “Teri, the cold bitch”.  Maybe her mother.  Maybe not.  

Teri growled as her hands found purchase on the underside of the table and she spun it in the air.  A thin leg landed awkward with a dry crack, and the table was laid to waste, a pile of sticks on top of a bean-shaped piece of plywood lacquered thick enough that none of the cheap composite could be seen from the top.  Teri noticed then that the table looked more like a jellybean and was surprised that she’d ever seen it any other way.  The pine legs were so quick to give, the misshapen tin feet, carelessly tacked on.  How many of her boyfriends had sat in this couch and put his gold-toed socks up on that table without asking permission and had noticed what she was noticing now:  that the table was cheap, unstable, worthless and always had been.  What then had they deduced about she and her character from her seeming fondness for this shell, these scrap parts masquerading as the linchpin of an otherwise respectable living-room set?

Teri panned from the mess on the floor to Kyle’s face which was overcast with the fast-moving shadows of possible and appropriate expressions.   From indignant to exhausted to disbelief to a stunned and uncertain anger.  Teri watched Kyle confuse himself, raising an eyebrow, sputtering unintelligible syllables, and ultimately waiting for her lead to obediently follow. 

She asked him, politely, calmly, to leave.  She asked that he never come back for any errant garbage that he may think he’d left here by accident because he most certainly hadn’t, and then she requested that he not call her again under any circumstances.  He did all of these things, and she hated him for it.

Later that day she’d met Gerald.  And in the months since, she had easily immersed herself in the minutae of his case.  Taking fewer and fewer clients, she honed in on whatever tasks required the least amount of interaction with anyone new until she’d awoke one afternoon at her desk behind neatly stacked documents earmarked for clerical attention.  She’d fallen asleep on her pencil and had to rub her cheek red in order to clear the lead smear.  Her phone was on out, the staff had all cleared their jackets from the alcove and set out into the evening traffic.  Gerald Palladine had become her only client. 

Teri pulled her billable hours report from a file.  She’d been busy typing letters, making phone calls, plenty of discovery, and extensive creative outreach.  She’d spent hours and days and weeks entrenched in the creation of cashflow, and all of it was to come from one Gerald Palladine. 

There was no explanation elegant enough to validate the excruciating care with which she had treated the case.  Even buried beneath the unctuous facts of this man and his wife’s life together and apart, Teri could make out the almost certain shitstorm gathering on the horizon.  She realized that she couldn’t reasonably bill Gerald for those hours without explanation, and she couldn’t justify to the partners the amount of time spent in the gentle and meticulous gathering of facts.  It was time to cut the client loose.  And so she allowed herself that final, petulant meeting in order to end her obsession with the case, which of course, only deepened.  Then, sent home to spend a week with only her thoughts, she plunged violently into his life.  Unannounced and unwelcome.

Teri panicked and for a moment her finger hung decisively over the “call end” button, however, that moment of hesitation gave her up.

“Teri?  Is that you?”

“Bonnie,” Teri’s voice was firm, “I am so sorry, I had not planned on bothering you again today.  I am working an extremely important case and was hoping to be directed to my voicemail.”

“Of course, Teri, one moment.”  And yet, no familiar electronic bleep announcing her absence.

“Bonnie?  My voicemail?”

“Yes,” Bonnie always sounded uncomfortable, which Teri attributed to Bonnie’s restrictive attire of tight-fitting skirts, low-cut blouses, and high heels.  Or on other days, she assumed it was due to the unwritten directive that Bonnie emit an air of suggestive femininity lest she lose her relevance in the male-dominated firm.  “Um…Ms. Penney?  Are you…”

“Go on.”   Never had Teri considered her own presence as intimidating and therefore the cause of Bonnie’s discomfort. 

“…well, this is the 5th time that you’ve called today…and I thought…”  Bonnie’s voice tried to hide behind itself, her words slipping into the jetstream of her breath, her well-organized thought became the distant shimmer of a contrail under a heavy cover of clouds.  “…well, Mr. MacInerney asked if you’d called today, and how many times…and he asked for me to tell him if you’d called again…but I won’t…unless you want me to, of course, Ms. Penney…because he slammed his door twice today after you called each time, I’m pretty sure….and he said that you are supposed to not call when you are on suspension…er, vacation…I think he’s just concerned since it has really only been less than one full business day since you left…”

“No, you’re right, and thank you, Bonnie.”   Teri said simply to interrupt the blathering, in order to help this woman (who was intent on helping her) save what was left of her dignity.  “No need to bother Peter with my concern for my cases while I’m out.  I’ll have my voicemail one final time today, and thank you again.  I will see you in a week.”

“Thank you, Ms. Penney, have a…very good week.”

Bonnie’s touchtones sending Teri to her voicemailbox were decidedly peppy.  Teri punched in her pin, 09281954, and found her voicemailbox almost as empty as she’d left it only one hour ago.  The lone message lingering in the saved archives of her mailbox had resurfaced as new, demanding a fresh listen before she could receive new messages again. 

“Teri, I know you are a big, important attorney now-a-days, but would it be too much to ask that you return your father’s calls once in awhile?  I mean, I did finance the education that got you your big fancy, schmancy job.  So…Madame President Penney, think you could give me a call today?” 

Teri punched the “3″ button, to ”save in the archives,” before the prompt which would testily remind her that the voicemail itself was over 2 years old. 

Her father had always been an angry man and his voice reminded her of this, more than any of the pictures she’d kept of him.  Teri held the phone tense to her ear though the line had disconnected.  In her mind she saw the face he’d make for all of the photos, his squint as if into a bright sun, his teeth gleaming and large, like his booming voice which unsettled even the senior clerks at the accounting office with its deceptive depth.  Most pictures of him were taken for identification purposes,  driver’s license, his membership card in the PA State Accountant’s guild, any one of the array of annual photo updates of his work proximity card, which placed in chronological order, served as the most reliable documentation of the slow creep of all of that unspent anger into the crevices of his face.   A man not entirely dissimilar to Gerald Palladine.

Her father’s life, as far as she was concerned, served as the only valid subject of observation and insight into the life of her own deceased mother.  The human equivalent of “dark matter”:  invisible except for the force that it exerts on everything else.  Everywhere and nowhere at once, defiantly relegated to a theoretical existence.

What she’d known of her mother was her birthdate and that she’d died of complications during the birth of her only child, her namesake.  Beyond that, Teri had only her father to fill in the details.  She’d asked him simply what kind of woman her mother was, and was met with a churlish response every time.  Had she been made aware of her estranged father’s condition, she would have perhaps been a bit more pointed in her questioning, more fervent. As if in a final act of spite, her father took it upon himself to succumb to his secret cancer, under the care of a hospice  nurse who remembered him distinctly as that “ornery son-of-a-bitch who really had some things on his mind for some woman named Teri.” 

When that fog finally lifted, she was unsettled to find herself adrift in the Self-Help section of the Wal-Mart of bookstores: Barnes and Noble.  Worse than seeing the other screwballs browsing the aisle (two men draped in black, wearing pentagrams on thick necklaces, bracelets clinking with pewter charms), was the fact that she must now count herself as a member of the that same lost and lonely contingent.  She was a woman who openly mocked those that teared up at Oprah’s “insights” and who only watched Dr. Phil for a laugh at his trainwreck guests.  And here she stood, holding a book that identified itself as “New Age”.  The horrified gasp that escaped left her deflated. 

Teri’s moral compass had failed her.  So many imperceptible shifts in a new direction, one slight measure at a time, very clearly and suddenly announced themselves for the full 180 degrees that they had turned her.  It was nauseating, but she wasn’t a woman who went weak in the knees or hysterical.  No, she isolated problems and systematically neutralized them. 

With the book splayed in her hand and no better solution on tap, she began investigating what the books might prescribe for her situation.  She quickly diagnosed herself with “mild obsessive tendencies”, and was directed to treatment called “creative visualization.”  It was garbage, Teri knew, but desperate times…right?  Even so, she planned her head trip with a healthy dose of skepticism, cadging what she could from an hour or two paging through the Self-Help section.  Following the books’ borrowed guidance, Teri imagined herself sloughing off the essence of her own life as a method to coax the second unnecessary skin free leaving both molts cast off in a complex tangle….which wasn’t supposed to happen.  A full minute spent attempting to separate the skins in her mind left her tired and despondent at the realization that  even the images she’d conjured up for her own therapy had turned on her. 

But the obsession still hid in her shadow like an olive oil stain on already-black fabric.  And Gerald’s scent, a lime-softened spice soured by light sweat, trailed Teri’s own sweet perfume of lilacs leaving a persistant musk aftertaste.  His life, his family, his friends, events and properties must be pieced together to make something other than jumbled nonsense.  The drive to do this had become a consumptive disease, a tenacious cancer, and could only be dealt with by direct intervention, a kind of chemo for the soul.  Something maybe a bit more hands-on than “creative visualization”, and unquestionably more effective.

Up to this point, Gerald’s file had been locked away in the drawer labelled “Document Retention.”  It held an office copy of the bill which she’d mailed simultaneously to him and the collections department.  For an unhappy man already parting with a fair amount of his savings, a bill for a surprisingly argumentative final hour of legal services rendered would, understandably, not be well-received.  Teri told herself to let collections sink their sharp teeth into Gerald’s case and to go about living her life again.  Though she tried, she was unconvinced of even her own conviction to walk away.

She returned to the case more from habit than hope, like the addict on the accidental path back to his dealer.  Over time it was clear that her attention to rebuilding her active caseload was becoming a many-splintered stick rather than the deliberate and exacting tool she’d used to skewer many unsuspecting plaintiffs.  After stapling her household water bill to a client’s confidential affidavit and untintentionally mailing the documents with a stock letter of Season’s Greetings to one of the firms more prominent clients, Teri embarked on a (not entirely self-imposed) weeklong leave of absence during which she was expected to do nothing but get some well-deserved R&R. 

The week had been freshly cordoned off like a crime scene, her calendar had been wiped clean of responsibilities leaving a stark landscape empty except for the inactive body of the Palladine case. 

Her abrupt “vacation” began at the “Document Retention” cabinet where she secured Gerald’s burgeoning file with little expectation of cobbling together enough feasible explanations from it to bring about her recovery.  She slipped it into her otherwise empty brief, and stood tall contrary to instinct under her colleagues’ scrutiny. She waved her goodbyes to even slight acquaintances, though she only saw their small foreheads and busy eyes over the cubicle walls.  Teri headed for the exit dodging the busybodies, menacing in their measured, patient circling .

The techno-bluster behind her usurped every sound but one final clink of weights and that of a man panting with his gut cinched up in a worn, leather weight-belt.  All of this then ceded to her pounding heart.  Teri dug for her keys in a pocket of her winter coat, a stray feather puffed out from the stitching and clung to the invisible hole from which it had escaped.  Her car was one of about 20 which had settled into its space and sat like a frozen steel scab on the macadam.

In the predawn lot, Teri listened to the distant hum of vehicles rushing across the horizon like a single file line of fireflies fighting to get from one empty place to another.  Something about their steady, tireless flight was reliable, and only she was witness to their loneliness.

Even now in the early afternoon, she felt the deep-freeze of the morning frost in her smile.

“Tell me more.”  She heard herself say when it was clearly her turn to talk.

“What else is there?”  The man across from her had closed his eyes, and when he did that, relaxed on her office couch, his left eyelid fluttered like a moth caught in a screen door. “We’ve done all the big stuff already.  I mean, she’ll get the fucking house, the fucking dog, the fucking kids, and one big fucking chunk of the bank account.”

“Yes,” Teri found herself engrossed in Gerald’s vented frustrations.  She indulged herself in it, like a glutton finishing the final caramel from a bag big enough for two.  She leaned back in her chair deliberately until its springs squeaked breaking his reverie.  “But what about the cat?” she asked.

He looked at her, incredulous, blinking for dramatic effect.  At 54, he had shed his hair and gracefully declined a toupee, which combined with his wool jacket, gave him the appearance of distracted depth.  Beneath his jacket, he wore an argyle sweater about eight seasons out of style, Teva’s with socks that probably matched in the dim light by which he’d dressed.  “How could I forget the cat?”

Teri didn’t know how he could have forgotten the cat.  She never tired of rereading the familiar list of his concessions in the divorce,  and still she ticked off each piece of his life in accordance with its “fucking” change in ownership to his wife.  Teri knew well enough that these were things for which he couldn’t possibly have cared less, but their recent hostile seizure had changed that.  It’s amazing, the stuff that we want and why we want it.

Teri may have referred to him as “Gerry” in some past appointment, but she regarded her use of the nickname as a regrettable lapse of professionalism during a moment of weakness.  Had he won her over with a crying jag, or was it the feminine slope of his shoulders, or just one unencumbered sob?  Of course not.  He is only one of many who have sat across from her and misinterpreted this forced divestiture of net worth as more than a simple and fair division of the things accumulated and owned.  She would call him Gerald, now.

“Gerald,”  Teri flicked her computer monitor off, resolved to do what’s right. “I have explained to you my deep regret for your loss, and I have welcomed any and every opportunity to consider possible positions which might prove beneficial in the proceedings.”  She saw him lean back and disengage, fixing the collar on his shirt which had gone un-ironed, flattening his Chinos which he just now seemed to realize were also rumpled like an old tissue.  All of these men so lost and barely fit for public without the guiding hands of the women they almost always chose to forsake.  Stiff bouts of boredom and anger were nearly indistinguishable in these men, once the finality of it set in, once the magic of cleaned and ironed clothes gave way to the complex logistics of laundry.   Sweaters to be folded, unfolded and refolded.  Socks in their subtle variations, blue with black stripes, black with brown diamonds, woven cottons and their unequal nylon adversaries.  Stunned to find that almost never is one black sock the same shade as its only apparent match left in the dryer.

“Look, I don’t need to hear this song and dance again, Teri.”  Here comes the agitation of misplaced blame. “If you aren’t willing to do your job and help me keep what is mine, then I’ve no problem taking my money to another attorney.”

“Well what’s left of it.” 

“Excuse me?”  He asked.  More rewarding than his tone was the red rash of rage flushing up his neck threatening to turn his head into an old, mottled turnip.

“Gerald,”  She used the tone she’d expect of elementary school teachers surrounded by children doomed to never mature.  “I am simply taking the liberty to remind you that by the time you arrive in your next attorney’s office, you’ll do so with far less money than you had when you came to me three months ago.”

“You can expect a letter from my new attorney.”

“Right.  Well, your next attorney would be well-advised to watch the word count on those letters if he charges by the hour.” Teri switched her computer monitor back on and busied herself with nothing while her pulse quickened with the thrill of confrontation. 

Gerald harrumphed as he’d likely seen Jack Lemmon do in any number of overrated comedies, and in disgust he stood tall, turned on a heel and grumbled out of the office.   

Teri’s hands went clammy, as if again the hot gym had belched her out into the night.  She wondered if she’d ever shake the feeling of falling out head first into that parking lot and its silent, stillborn air.

It’s easy to overlook

the worst of our winter

when you are not in it.

The serrated winds

catch the last of the leaves

shaking them together like dice

tossed out onto the street.

For those who stay behind:

summer’s slender fingers of humidity

spread

and recede

and are gone,

a faint afterglow. 

then a wistful memory

of the smell of our herb garden in the air

cedes to the pumpkin rotted

on the lawn revealing

the ground with its dormant grass

matted like unkempt hair,

lawn the color of straw

under an exhausted,

pale sky,

a wan

smile of sunshine as an interlude,

between the roiled layers of clouds,

too many thick sheets rumpled

on an unmade bed and the cold

pillow beside mine that may

never have been warm.