The Mug Shot that Broke My Heart

Photo by Eflon/Flickr

By Kase Johnstun

In late January 2016, I walked through customs at John F. Kennedy International Airport after spending nearly a month in Barcelona, Spain. I’d spent my time there at JIWAR, an international artist residency, writing and drinking wine and looking out over Calle Asturies from my thin balcony.

In transit back to Utah, my phone, back on my U.S. cellular plan, dinged with local news notifications that had been blocked while in Spain. I scanned through them with a tiring thumb: car crashes, house fires, burglaries, and Mormon news.

A mug shot stopped my scrolling. My thumb hovered above the screen that showed a photo of someone I once knew well, someone I had once loved. It had been seventeen years since I’d seen her, even a photo of her, but I knew her, the way I know the lines to my favorite childhood movie though I haven’t watched it in decades, belting them out without thought. And I got dizzy. A warmth rushed upward to my head when the flush of adrenaline tapped into my bloodstream.

There was no mention of her name in the notification’s basic font that sat on my screen, only the mug shot and the headline, “Woman facing felony charges for fraudulently filling hundreds of prescriptions.” It was her face, but the bright eyes and smiling dimples and smooth skin that I remembered from our youth—from our early twenties—were gone. A grayness covered the photo, and a sturdiness in her gaze peered off the screen. She was no longer the young woman I loved romantically, but she also wasn’t the woman who I’d hoped had spent seventeen years laughing and smiling and being in love with her husband and not getting arrested on felony drug charges. I had found all these good things in life, and I had wished she had too.

I’d met her during my college years.

We did the same thing, took care of students with disabilities. I was a job coach for students my own age, eighteen- to twenty-two-years-old. She was a group home manager.

I spent my days piling students into a van, singing horrible nineties pop music on the way to our job sites, and working with them to dip chicken in batter or collect recycling for Sister Stephanie or straighten cereal boxes on supermarket shelves.

At the end of the day, I waited with them while their parents or group-home facilitators picked them up at the rim of the school’s roundabout. We waved goodbye like we’d never see each other again. Our hands flailed in the afternoon sun. The next morning, we’d all high five in the parking lot like team members running through a human tunnel. It was a fun ritual.

She would wait outside to take students to their home, to bathe them, and to make them feel a sense of family until they fell asleep at night.

They loved her. They rushed to her, threw their arms around her, many of the young men holding on a little too tight and a little too long. She’d roll her eyes and wiggle out of their grasp and give them a smile. They competed for her attention, as did I. She was pretty, but it was the way she laughed and shouted and lived life so unfiltered that drew me to her.

I’d asked her out a few times before she said yes, and when she finally did, we spent eight months together. For the most part, we laughed when we were together, the world—and the people in it—existed only for our entertainment.

She once told me about her uncle who, when he got hungry while sitting on his lazy boy and watching old episodes of seventies sitcoms, would ring a tiny bell and yell “chili” to his wife, who would then bring him some chili. It was horrible, and we both knew it, a domineering man and a subservient wife fulfilling his gross needs, so whenever we noticed a relationship in public like this, we would ring a fake little bell and yell “chili.” It was a way of saying, in public and right in front of men like this, “Are you seeing the way this asshole treats his wife.”

We laughed a lot.

But she had a sadness to her that hid behind the outwardly funny, boisterous, and giving personality that she wore everyday.

One night, after we had gotten close, after we had gone on a night hike on the trails of the Rocky Mountains, she pulled a photo out of a hiding place in her car. She held the photo close to her chest.

“I have kids, twins,” she said.

There were a few moments before she spoke again.

In those moments, I’d thought about how well she had hidden them from me, how well she had kept them a secret. I wondered where they were when I visited her at parents’ house where she lived. I wondered where they were when I just popped by one afternoon to say hello—had she seen me coming and stuffed them in a closet or a hamper or in the back with the dogs?

I understood keeping them from me, a young man who had sworn up and down that he never wanted to get married or have children.

But then she spoke again.

“They’re three now,” she said.

I remained quiet, still wondering where she had hidden them.

“I gave them up,” she said. “It was the only thing I could do. It was my first time having sex and their dad is not someone I would want to raise them. He didn’t fight the decision.”

She ran her fingers over the photo, letting the tip of her skin rest on the young children’s faces, a photo mailed to her from their adoptive mom.

“I miss them everyday,” she said.

The sadness hung on her for a few more moments before she shoved the photo back in its protective spot in her car.

I reached to give her hug, but she pulled away and made some crack about not being a cry baby or not being so needy or not being pathetic. Just as she put the photo away, she had somehow tucked the sadness away too.

In all my relationships before I got married, there was a moment when I knew that relationship would not survive much longer. With her, it came one Monday night when I visited her at her parent’s home. In Utah, with Mormons, Monday night is family home evening. It’s the night of the week when the family gathers together to pray, to eat dinner, and to invite elders over to lead discussions about their faith.

That night, right after dinner, her father asked us all to join him in the living room. He was a kind man. He asked us all to kneel down to pray. The very blond, pale portrait of Jesus that hangs in every Mormon household hung next to the just-as-common painting of the Mormon Temple. My immature self started to get angry.

At the time, when I had just barely broken the twenty-year mark, I felt offended that this man would ask me to kneel down to pray to the “Heavenly Father” of the LDS faith when he knew I was raised Catholic. Now, having just barely broken the forty-year mark with a family and a home of my own, my perspective has changed.

It was his home. It was Monday night. He had all of his children there. I would not have adjusted my family’s weekly ritual to suit the needs of a kid with a marijuana leaf necklace hanging around his neck and a five-inch long goatee dropping from his chin, the ratty thing crinkling in his fingers while he played with it nervously.

I knelt, doing my best to be respectful. Her dad reached out for his wife’s hand. They had all closed their eyes. Mine remained open to watch the wave of hand clasping approach me. My girlfriend reached out for mine, gave me a little smile, and grabbed it, rubbing her thumb across the backs of my fingers.

The prayer began, and I watched them, their devoutness in their prayer. All I wanted to do was to break the chain and walk away. The anger and resentment of my twenty years growing up in Mormon Utah as non-LDS growled in my gut, consuming me. And the rubbing of the thumb across the back of my fingers felt like acquiescence. They were kind people. I was immature.

I knew at that moment, however, that we would never last, and six months later, three months after I had tried to break up with her on the rocky Irish shores north of Dublin where she had met me at the end of my long backpacking trip across Europe to celebrate graduating college, and only two months after I had left Utah for Kansas to begin graduate school, we broke up over the phone. It was one of those relationships that took a departure to end it, but once the departure was made, both of us knew it was over.

“I just thought you would convert eventually,” she said to me. I think we both knew that I wouldn’t. It was the kindest break-up I had ever been through, and I believe when she hung up the phone, just like I did, she considered me a friend and wished the best for me.

We had never broken each other’s heart, not romantically. We had moved on, loving the person who gave us something in life, who, like my wife and I talk about over a couple of glasses wine, helped us find each other—to show us what we did and didn’t want in a lover. The heartbreak, for me, finally came when I saw her sadness in her gray and flat eyes in the mug shot on my phone.

Something had gone wrong somewhere along the way for her, and it hurt in the place in my heart reserved for long-ago lovers.

•••

KASE JOHNSTUN lives and writes in Ogden, Utah. He is the author of rereleased Beyond the Grip Craniosynostosis (McFarland & Co). He is the co-editor/author of Utah Reflections: Stories from the Wasatch Front (The History Press). His essay collection Tortillas for Honkies was named a finalist for the 2013 Autumn House press Nonfiction Awards. He is the literary chair for the Ogden City Arts Advisory Committee and hosts a literary podcast called LITerally where he interviews authors about all things publishing and writing.

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The First Time a Man Cheats

By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com
By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By A. Sandosharaj

1. The first time a man cheats on you—to your knowledge—you are old for a young woman: thirty. He is several years younger.

You do not leave him.

But it ends.

Briefly.

Your ego churns—who could she be? After all, your hair is unmatched, your jokes are funny. You’re often the most well read person in a room. What must she be like?

When you find out about the cheating, it’s weeks before September, when things will surely feel new, as they always do in the fall, a lucky byproduct from you never having really left school.

For now it is the driest part of summer, when he is with who you think is a new girlfriend, but is in fact an old girlfriend, but old only in the sense of previous because, at twenty-one, she is ten years your junior. Her age jerks in your throat. What have you accomplished with your ten-year head start?

2. Next you find out she is divine. Wholly, remarkably, indisputably divine. Her every attribute is your opposite: pillow pale to your teddy bear brown, sleek to your curves, commanding to your petite. You’ve piled up toothless degrees, and she? She quit high school.

It is no comfort. She has years—ten!—to return to her education, your only trump, to find Foucault or graphic design, whereas you know, outside of amassing useless suffixes, you’ve so far been a stall. There are no more degrees left.

3. When you finally see him again in September—in the bursting fall of the eastern seaboard—it’s football that brings you together, chatter about sports as talismanic as Christmas time, Christmas, when he will leave you again for her (this will be just before your winter birthday, which always falls near the Super Bowl, when you will not hear from him, not even a happy birthday text).

For now it is September. He has returned from her to you, arrived at his right mind, you hope. There is football every Sunday and classes have started on the campus where you feel a little more than the graduate student you once were. It is, as always, at least a new semester. The university life is still yours, as is he; his treachery was, you are growing more sure, a forgivable lapse.

You are weeks from sneaking into his phone, doubting her absence.

4. That will be December. December, when you meet in a cafe with her (stunningly beautiful) to listen to her (more divine than imagined) conjure a man you do not know: a boyfriend who plots surprise parties and selects lingerie, cooks breakfast and stays in. A boyfriend who chauffeurs. Who cares to argue. Who meets parents. Who adores. Gazing at her lovely face, you realize he has never once, on his ever-present phone, taken your picture.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen him cry,” she starts one story, and you wince, unable to keep listening. Really? That granite cries? Tears?

You are both polite, both victims, both too smart for this shit, and when he arrives, having discovered your meeting, he leaves with her.

But this is all long after September, when the cold stretch of the holiday break advances, when all you can remember is him helping her with her elegant coat.

5. For now it’s September and the prodigal is home. You’re in the pink gloom of five a.m., considering the colorful townhouses across the street as the September sun slips over their scalloped peaks. The wide shutters are lowered like the lids of tipped dolls, peeking. He is drowsily telling a story about his father who has just died after a year of cancer. He stops to play music from his phone. He will sleep for hours more; for you, it’s time to wake up.

The music he plays is, as with everything that is a matter of taste, undeniably good. It sounds like all the best music you’ve ever heard in your life, only… current. You will always admire this. His spare motorcycle, his handsome dog, his custom everything. He doesn’t just wear clothing, you know. He wears everything. Maybe even you.

As you dress for class you wonder, does he, too, feel the fresh start of September? The rising out of summer for new books, new clothes, empty grade sheets? Is it an annual blank slate for him, too? Does he too have this same feeling, you wonder, does he too know its promise? Or does it only belong to children and academics? You want to know.

•••

A.SANDOSHARAJ’s work appears or is forthcoming in cool places like The Rumpus, The Millions, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Southeast Review, Massachusetts Review, Crab Orchard Review, River City, American Literary Review, Subcontinental, Racialicious, Addicted to Race, and Fiction is First. She teaches writing at Howard University in Washington DC.

My Best Friend’s Girlfriend

missing him
By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

 

By Brooke Ferguson

My best friend Dan has a girlfriend. She’s tall, like me. She wears cowboy boots and has a lot of energy and almost a thousand followers on Twitter. She’s a talented artist, and is launching her own business, and is friendly and pretty. Dan says that he likes her very much, and he seems happier than he has in a long time.

This is great. All I want, I’ve been saying to anyone who would listen for the past two years, is for him to be happy. He’s a great guy and he should find a great girl and be really happy. Great!

Except now I’m miserable.

Two years ago, my best friend was my boyfriend and we were living together in an apartment in San Francisco. We were indeed best friends, and roommates … and it kind of felt like that was the extent of our relationship. We were both pretty depressed and in bad situations at work (that is: we hated our jobs). We stayed in and binged on pizza and TV and movies. We didn’t really have any other friends. Everything was almost a flatline. Dan and I were both so easygoing, so low-energy, that if there was a problem we’d just shrug and go bury ourselves in a book (him) or the internet (me). When I told him I wanted to break up, he kept saying, But we get along so well. I don’t understand. I said that was true, that we were great friends, but there was something else that was supposed to be there. A spark that was lacking. An intensity. Just a little passion. For our own lives—to get out of our awful jobs, to go surfing and hiking and take trips like we always said we wanted to—and for each other. I was sorry, but I was firm. It was over.

The next three months were some of the worst of my life. We were both trying to find a place to live, sleeping in the same bed at night but not touching, except sometimes when I was crying and he would hold my hand. We’d mope around the apartment until one of us said something funny, and we’d laugh until we remembered we were breaking up. Then we’d grow sullen again.

We never really took a break. I knew that I wanted Dan to be in my life forever, but I said it was up to him if he wanted to remain friends. If he needed some time and space away from me, I totally understood. But he didn’t, and we moved right into a close friendship. Even though we were broken up, we were still each other’s “person.” We picked each other up from the airport. He watched my dog while I was out of town. He was the one I texted when something funny happened or I heard a stupid joke about Willie Nelson. We went to movies, took surfing lessons, went camping and hiking. We did all of the things we’d talked about doing when we were dating. And I kept saying, I just want him to be happy! We both got better jobs. He dated a few girls, but those relationships just seemed to make him stressed out. I dated a few guys, but that went nowhere. None of them made me laugh like Dan did. And we went on, going to museums together, going to concerts, eating hot wings… Until she showed up.

At first I was genuinely glad for him. And then I was not. Then I was a wreck.

I was hurt, too. Hurt that he didn’t have as much time for me, hurt that he might enjoy another woman’s company as much or more than mine. All the time that I’d been encouraging him to move on, to let go, I didn’t really understand what that would mean, what it might feel like. It felt like a cannonball to the stomach.

I began to feel jealous. Dan and I would spend a great day together, riding our bikes to the beach and getting lunch, browsing second-hand records, laughing and joking the entire time. And then we’d ride back and he’d break off to bike to her house, to spend the night with her while I went home alone.

Choose me, I began thinking at him when we were together, when he would text me that he couldn’t hang out because they were going to some party or some pop-up fashion show or something else so cool and exclusive it would have never even appeared on my radar. Choose me. Choose me. The thing was, he had chosen me, and I had ended it. Somehow I managed to turn his moving on into a rejection. He was leaving me; he was breaking my heart. Somehow I had to prove I was the better woman; I was the right choice.

Oh, come on, you selfish asshole, leave him alone and let him be happy. You just want what you can’t have, were some of my first thoughts as, I’m sure, they are your first thoughts.

And to that I will say: fair enough. Except. Except.

I’m not completely sure that’s true. It’s never been easy just being Dan’s friend. I still believe breaking up was absolutely the right thing to do. We’ve become more active, much closer, and a lot more honest. When Dan and I were together, I had a lot of secrets. I was alarmingly preoccupied with my previous relationship. I was a raging, obsessive Grizzly on the inside. I was so stuck on how this other guy had wronged me that I couldn’t be present for the guy who was in front of me, who took care of me when I had a scratched cornea—waking up every three hours to give me pain medicine, feeding me pizza, washing my hair while I soaked in the tub and cried. But I was too afraid to tell him about the beast in my head. How would that conversation go? Sorry I’m acting so weird. I’m just completely obsessed with my ex-boyfriend. Well, yeah, maybe something like that. At least then it would have been out in the open, and we could have talked about it and maybe I would have been surprised by the result. But I didn’t give us that chance. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. I was so afraid I would lose the relationship that I didn’t speak up to save it. And then, after a while, I just gave up.

So what? I had my chance. What was I doing during the two years before the great girl (G.G.) entered the picture? Well, I was alone for a long time, trying to figure out what kind of life I wanted. I was dating other people and realizing how rare it was to connect with someone so deeply. I was getting the proper help for all the bullshit that I was carrying around from my other relationship. I was discovering that intensity wasn’t love, and that Dan’s way of showing love was maybe not flashy, but it was heartfelt. Over the past year I would sometimes look at him, and feel both a warmth and a sadness, wondering if things would be different now. Would I still feel that lack of spark, or would I find it now that I could be really, truly honest and vulnerable with him, now that I was no longer keeping a piece of myself tucked away like a demented squirrel with a rotten nut? Now that I could accept him for what he was, instead of critiquing all the ways he wasn’t my psychotic ex?

I didn’t get a chance to find out. He moved pretty quickly from a tumultuous, six-month relationship into one with the G.G. He told me about her right away, and said he wanted me to meet her. All right, I thought, he’s finally found that great girl! And she is great, actually. We’ve met a few times, and she doesn’t mind if Dan and I are friends. (I honestly can’t say I would be cool with my boyfriend being such good friends with his ex, but maybe that’s because I have a treacherous mind, and she’s a G.G.).

So why am I suddenly not okay with it? I don’t know if it’s because he’s becoming someone else’s person and I’m mourning the relationship that ended two years ago, doing the grieving I didn’t really get to do because we moved so quickly into a friendship. It might be that things are shifting and changing, and that a lot of times that really hurts, even if it’s a good thing. Maybe eventually it will stop hurting, and I can truly feel glad for him without a sting of pain in my heart. I have to accept that we won’t spend Christmas or Thanksgiving together. We won’t go visit his dad in Texas. But that’s what a break-up means, and maybe we’ve just been putting it off. Maybe I feel a sudden, fierce need for him because he’s moved on, and I haven’t yet, and I don’t know what the future holds. I do know what the past holds—someone who believed in me and treated me kindly. And also someone who didn’t have a lot of ambition, who didn’t touch or hug me often or show affection in public. There’s no face on my future. It’s completely unknown. If Dan isn’t my person, then who is?

One night as I was sitting on my floor, crying and listening to Billy Bragg records, I wondered if I my dilemma had ever been represented somewhere. Had I seen this before? Was there something I could look to for guidance, for comfort? I realized that yes, there was something, and it wasn’t very flattering: I was a less charming Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding. All this time I was feeling sorry for myself, but I had not been wronged. If anything, I got what I asked for. And if I took things further, if I started to try and pry them apart, to highlight all the ways I was right for him and she was wrong, I was going to be the villain in the story. It doesn’t feel great to realize you’re the bad guy, even if you aren’t trying to be.

So, what am I going to do? Nothing, really. All this confusion requires no action except that I back off and keep my mouth shut. I will not spill to him about my internal struggle. I will not tell him that when they post Instagram photos of their adventures together I want to punch a wall. I will not say, I think maybe I might want to try again? Because as it stands, he’s unavailable and I am unsure. Even if I were sure, I would have no right to interfere with his new relationship. His happiness is, in fact, very important to me, and so is our friendship. What I am going to do is keep working on myself, and figuring out what I want, and keep moving forward. I will wonder, and be sad, and write about it, and just be his friend. Part of me thinks I’m a terrible person for even having these feelings, but then, they’re just my feelings. If I’ve learned one thing from sitting in a rut, thinking isn’t doing. I can dissect my thoughts to the atomic level and no harm is done. Like I said, there is nothing to be done, unless he becomes single and I am certain I want to risk our friendship for another shot at romance.

Who knows—maybe she really is his person and their relationship will finally close the chapter on whatever it is Dan and I have been doing the past two years. Maybe her arrival will be the best thing that ever happened to our friendship. Maybe I’ll send her flowers.

Maybe not.

•••

BROOKE FERGUSON lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her dog. Her work has appeared in The Hairpin, Index/Fist, and Sparkle & Blink, and she was recently a writer in residence at Starry Night Retreat in New Mexico. She blogs about movies at http://tallbrooke.wordpress.com/

Winter Just Melted

dogprints
By Gina Easley www.ginakelly.com

By Elizabeth Kavitsky

I moved when the birds flew away, when the squirrels had planted their meals in the dirt, and the trees shook off their skins. It was the beginning of my twenty-third winter. I packed unwashed clothes into a suitcase while my parents were at work. Suddenly I lived in Delaware, with my girlfriend Jen and her dog, Tubby.

Tubby did not belong to me at first. He was only my girlfriend’s dog. He was just a shedding thing who interrupted our kisses. I watched her play with him, jumping up and down, both smiling, as the floor squeaked and his mouth gummed her arms and his orange fur fell into the air and her long curls flew around her shoulders. I loved her.

One morning, Jen tried to put drops in Tubby’s ears. She coaxed him sweetly, petting him. His ears went back and his eyes closed in happiness. She grabbed the drops and stepped towards him, still speaking carefully. He saw the bottle and hid behind me. Tubby looked at me, and his eyes, a deep, sad, amber-brown, asked me to protect him. I stood still, not allowing Jen near his quivering body; his trust came so suddenly.

I started to walk him in the morning after she went to work, the ground freezing with winter. We walked across dark asphalt and around traffic, far from the apartment, to find a spot with grass and gnarled plants. Waddling from arthritis, he spent most of his time sniffing the ground, making no noises, except the occasional sneeze. I began to talk to him. Mostly about nothing. Then I spoke about my morning, my worries. I asked him if Jen would be safe and come home to us. I told him that I was scared I would not find a job, or even worse, that I would.

The weather darkened the mornings, and my fingers became red and numb in the chill. I searched out two pairs of gloves and wore both sets at the same time. He watched me as I layered my clothes before we ventured out. If we managed to leave at an early enough hour, I would sing to Tubby, knowing no one else would cross our paths. I couldn’t tell if he noticed my song.

Inside the apartment, I sat on the couch with my computer, my legs folded beneath me. He watched me. I didn’t have food, yet he came near me to be touched. He fell asleep with his head on my slipper. If I got up to wash dishes or to make lunch, his amber eyes watched me go, and his ears stood alert for my return.

One night, the sun was setting early and it was dark at seven. I stared at the ground, as I always did when we walked. The grass crunched under my boots. Suddenly I stopped. There was a form before me—a squirrel, dead in the brown grass. The night made its fur glint black and its eyes glow. Everything turned still. I shivered and pulled Tubby out of its path. He was uninterested. Streets and fences and the grass darkened, the world black except for the eyes of the corpse. I wanted someone to run to. I didn’t want to tell Jen. I wanted to seem strong. I was alone in my fear.

Snow started to fall too often, covering Tubby’s grass. His paws gathered ice when we walked. I wore layers that made me round and genderless. With every footfall, I wondered what would happen if my booted foot stepped on the squirrel, buried under six to eight inches of hardened snow. On the way back, I followed my old frozen footprints because they were safe. Tubby sniffed the fences and made new prints.

•••

One week, the snow stopped falling and everything began to drip. I saw the squirrel, dead and asleep, gnawed and frozen. I made a note of its place in my path—past the first tree but before the bend in the fence. I walked every day with Tubby, avoiding the squirrel, sucking in my breath as we came near it, breathing out hot air when we passed. Tubby walked back to the apartment slowly—he pretended he was old and sick. I knew better. I had seen him run, towards the hidden grass, beyond the buried squirrel, towards the fresh air. He did not notice death. He was never afraid.

Jen left our bed every day at seven a.m. to go to work. It was hard to let her go. I woke up wrapped in our pink sheets, her smell lingering next to me. It escaped as soon as I tried to breathe it in. I fell back into dreams, listening to the sound of hot rain pelting the white tub. She kissed me awake. I felt her breasts against my skin as she bent over, pale and soft and warm and dewed. Her hair flew around her shoulders, and I could smell the sweet shampoo. I pulled her close. One more kiss and she had to leave, to dress herself and drive through the cold to a tall building full of things to do. Some days I cried. I needed her and was left in an empty apartment. I was left to look for jobs online. Left to write. Left to take care of the dog. Some days I begged her to stay home. I knew we needed money, but some days, I did not care.

In my first grown-up winter, I did not think I would get used to solitude. The sounds of the apartment scared me, the banging of the heat adjusting, the ticking slats of the blinds nudging each other, the refrigerator making ice cubes. I tried to fill the place with television sounds, familiar voices booming from another place. I got lost staring at the white popcorn ceiling. I saw lopsided faces and dancing ghosts.

Nine months ago, my life was filled with tons of faces, buzzing, caring, laughing, and yelling. There was always noise. I could hear my college roommates baking bread and stacking dishes. There was always music playing in the apartments next door. I spent my parents’ money on beer and mac and cheese. There were always assignments, parties, meetings—always things to be done and I was happy never to have time to be alone. Time in my own company was spent in the shower or behind my eyelids in a dream.

When classes finished, we waited for the day when we would put on cheap robes and end our college days in front of hundreds of satisfied eyes. I stared out of my bedroom window, watching summer burn the grass, and ran outside in a bathing suit to sit on towels with my friends.

Soon, I would be standing in the snow alone, helping my dog find the grass. When I found my way back to the apartment I shared with Jen, I took off my coat, my hat, my two layers of gloves, my socks, and my boots. I looked at my matted hair and red cheeks in the hall mirror. Tubby sloppily licked the ice off of his paws. I wanted to show Jen my snow-covered boots and my red cheeks. I wanted to hear her praise. She did not come back from work until the sun set.

•••

It kept snowing. The sky was always grey and the ground was always white. I thought the snow looked like freshly grated parmesan cheese. I wondered if I should give a more flattering name to this celestial gift. I eyed the frozen cars and slippery roads from under my blue hood. I felt my skin flush in the nineteen-degree air, through which thirteen-mile-an-hour winds jerked at me and the dog at 8:30 in the morning. I walked home on cheese-covered roads.

Most nights, I sat nuzzling in my girlfriend’s lap, my head resting on her chest. Those types of evenings kept me standing. I longed for days where we sat around in oversized sweatpants and forgot about our empty bank accounts and frozen grass and the car with the broken headlight, and we simply lounged in one another’s warmth, sleeping in our smiles. One Wednesday, she was home from work because of snow. The weekend winked at us. Jen’s phone buzzed, jumping on the wooden end table. She picked it up, and her soft face tightened. Her uncle Brian was in the ICU. He had fallen and hit his head. He was unconscious and not breathing on his own.

Jen comes from a giant family with many uncles. I couldn’t keep their names or stories straight. I thought about my own uncles. I hardly ever saw them. My love for them was through blood. Jen was different; she loved her family, but more importantly, she knew them. She carried great empathy for anyone, a cloak of understanding that she could wrap strangers in, strangers on television or in line at the grocery store or standing near the highway in the cold. She was upset, but in a redundant way, as if these feelings were so familiar they were stale. She was used to pain. “He…” she said, “he has never been the healthiest person.”

I held her hand and kissed her and talked softly as she lied and said she was fine. She swallowed her fear and let it stick to her ribs. The day continued. I was happy to sink back into our relaxation. She liked to take her pants off at the end of the day and walk around in a baggy sweatshirt that barely covered her. She teased me as she walked. Her legs were long and pale and it was hard not to stare. I wanted to drink her and hold her at the same time.

As I walked our dog in the light that bounced off the sleeping snow, I worried about Jen. She silently let the hours pass after the phone call, without mentioning her own fears. I wanted to talk to her more after the walk. When I returned, my cheeks were red, and I smelled of frozen sweat.

As I took off my coat, my phone vibrated and blared my ringtone, a song by Young the Giant. Life’s too short to even care at all… It was my godmother, who only called when there was bad news. Two years prior, the morning that my grandfather died, it was her booming, tearless voice that told me. She spoke purposefully. She spoke as if from a podium. Now she told me my father was taken from work in an ambulance. He was throwing up uncontrollably. He couldn’t walk. He was sweating through his clothes. I felt very far away as I heard her explain: a CAT scan, an EKG, waiting on an MRI. They were admitting him. She would call me when they knew more.

She asked me if I was okay, if Jen was with me. I looked at the yellow walls of the kitchen that were marked and stained. Muddy snow melted from my boots onto the mosaic linoleum. My dad was sick. Tears flung themselves down my face. They felt unusually warm. Jen’s strong hand was on my back.

She pulled me to the sofa in the living room and held me. I did not say anything. I tried not to cry. I hardened. A selfish thought was bobbing among my fears. If Daddy dies, I’ll have to move back home. I hated myself. It was my dad, my dad. He was not supposed to get sick. He was not supposed to die. I looked at Jen, her galaxy eyes bright with sympathy. I told her I was sorry about her uncle.

I sat lying against her while Mame flashed on the television. I watched Mame over and over when I was a child. I knew Jen was only watching it with me because of my dad, but I took advantage. I watched Lucille Ball dance around and sing, and I breathed easier, and I waited. Mame was broke and trying to play “the moon-lady,” missing her cue and freezing on stage in a frilly white costume, when my phone rang. Life’s too short to even care at all…I’m losing my mind, losing my mind, losing control…

It was my mother this time. Her voice was soft and tired but filled with sympathy. The MRI was clean. My dad had stopped throwing up. They were still keeping him overnight, but they thought he was going to be fine. I breathed and crawled back to Jen. There was no reason for me to cry anymore. A smog of images started to dissipate…of my dead father, frozen like the squirrel, pale and cold beneath his grey mustache, my small arms trying to reach around my mother bent over in despair, searching for a black dress. I looked down at the dingy tan carpet…at the blue recliner with the broken handle…at my bare feet. “You can still be upset,” Jen said, softly, stroking my neck.

•••

The following morning, I stepped out of the lonely bed and walked Tubby before my eyes were completely open. I stumbled along the half-snowed sidewalk, holding the leash with gloved hands and a scowl. I passed children waiting for the sight of their orange bus. Their mothers had bundled them tightly, and they kicked twisted stop signs and teased each other. I passed a woman warming up her car. I passed a man hunched over carrying a yellow plastic grocery bag.

I wondered what people thought when they looked at me. I wondered if they glanced or if they stared. Did they think I was a boy? My coat was zipped up beyond my mouth and my black hat covered my hair and forehead and the tops of my eyebrows. I wandered, formless. Only eyes peeked out of my clothes. I wondered if people were scared. Did they see the fat mess of a crumbling dog who could barely smell the weeds sticking into his nose? Or did they only see a Chow Chow, with its aggressive reputation and fierce disposition?

I moved branches out of my way instead of ducking underneath them. The dog walked me. I stood and stepped with his ignorant permission. I followed his footfalls…one/two…three…four. Slow, arthritic, half mad. I had to keep my voice positive, “Come on, BUD! Good BOY…” I had to stop him from running into the street where cars would run him down without looking back. I watched his back leg shake. And I drowned in guilt. No, we couldn’t go that way. No. Even though you stood old and tired and did not have enough grass I could not let you go where you needed.

I tried to balance this dog on the edge of my finger like a glass figurine. My parents used to hold me up like this. They tried to keep me from looking at the ground where eventually we all crumble into fragments. I could see the ground now. Tubby teetered in my hands and I tried to be sturdy for him.

•••

Some mornings, life was perfect. I was in her arms and we were laughing at nonsense, and we forgot about our empty bank accounts and our brittle loved-ones.

My life was blissful and it also wasn’t, and that was exactly like walking the dog. It was my choice to walk him, though I had no choice at all. I could feel the guilt and anger, or I could breathe in the sweet air of the trees.

When I moved in with Jen, my mother asked to see me at least once a month. She made Jen and me promise to visit on my godmother’s birthday. This was the day before the Super Bowl, only a few days after my father was hospitalized with a fleeting storm of sickness, and my grandmother was just recovering from open-heart surgery. My godmother, Bobby, turned fifty-nine. I watched them all teeter in the air with my new, grown-up, eyes.

We turned into my parents’ twisted driveway. We sat in the car, sweating in our coats, filling out birthday cards and tearing price tags off of a chocolate mousse cupcake. I looked at my parents’ house. I felt older as I said those words. “Parents’ house.” Not my house. No longer my driveway, no longer my broken double door with painted gold handles, no longer my wooden spiral staircase. My parents had slowly stopped asking me to come “home,” but instead to “visit.” Whatever words she used, my mother still cried.

We walked inside and our boots squeaked on the marble floor. We gave presents and smiles and hugs. There was a new clock on the mantel of the living room. It was made of light stained wood. It was too simple—no numbers. Only a pattern of light and dark wooden dots told the time.

We sat on one of the giant corduroy couches, and our first official visit began. I sat next to Jen. Her coat covered her lap, and I leaned against her as we all talked. Bobby leaned back on the blue couch, her short white hair brushed high, her strong legs sheathed in jeans, her feet covered in thick woolen socks. Her eyes were quick behind her round glasses, and I saw as she tried to smile and laugh, even though she dreaded her birthday. We did not talk about it. My mother sat on the other end of the couch, her legs turned underneath her, wearing one of her unremarkable solid colored cotton shirts. My dad twitched in his chair; the springs had sunken in from his presence. He pulled at his grey mustache.

They talked, about the week, about the snow, stories that were mostly forgotten, movies mostly remembered. I listened as if I did not belong there and I did not know them. I drifted out and saw the wrinkles in their faces and their words. They seemed different.  Or maybe I was different. My mother paused halfway through her sentences while we waited in patient politeness. She cocked her head and asked me to repeat my words. Bobby talked deliberately, but became confused with names and stories. My father talked about his health. Bobby teased him, yelling at him from three feet away, “You are getting into the territory of old people! All you are talking about is your health!” My brother was still asleep in his bed, and it was almost two in the afternoon. My father stuttered in his defense.

I was twenty-three. I was living with my girlfriend. I had a credit card in my wallet with my name embossed in silver and could use phrases like “our apartment” and “our car” and “our bills” and “what should I make for dinner?” It happened all at once. I stood up straight, because all sixty-three inches of my bones were suddenly walking around alone. My parents were now made of porcelain and reading numberless clocks, and I belonged to a new family.

Somehow this was true. But it was also true that a few weeks before, I visited an urgent care center to be treated for bronchitis. I filled out the paperwork and signed my name and was just another coughing person. Unremarkable, just as I wished. A faceless voice called me behind tall double doors and I found myself in an expediting room. A man and a woman bounced around. The woman took my blood pressure and my heart pumped while the man asked how many drinks I had a week and if I smoked and what medications I was on.

The woman looked at me, braless under my sweatshirt, my hair short, sitting pale and patient, and asked me to verify my birth date. She apologized, saying she thought I was under eighteen. I was small again. I slumped down into my shoulders. Every day I took care of my family: my dog, my girlfriend. I walked through snow and tried to keep everything from crashing to the ground. But that nurse could not see that.

My mother crossed the living room to hug me. She began to cry. I asked her what was wrong.

“I just am having trouble understanding,” she said behind the giant teardrops.

“Is it Grandma? Daddy?”

She shook her head and poked her small finger into my stomach. I realized she still missed me.  She missed me like a mother who sends her child off to summer camp for the first time. She wanted me home. And I knew she wouldn’t stop crying when I left.

“Me?”

She nodded and cried harder. I held her close and patted her back. I was twenty-three, I was living away from home, but I was also an underweight baby, ignorant, sad, and waiting for the world. I tried to be like the wooden clock on the mantel. I tried to be without numbers.

•••

Two days later, I started early. I ate a breakfast of Special K Fruit and Yogurt cereal. I ate right out of the box, dropping some on my lap, my hand blindly searching for the sweet white bites of sugar. I made a mess, and no one could tell me not to.

I walked the dog before eight and we met no one on the road. Back home, the kitchen was still clean from the night before. I could not stop singing. The walls were thin and the apartment next to us was attached, but I felt alone. I sang “Danny Boy” and Cole Porter’s “So in Love.” I liked to sing songs where I could not quite hit the high notes. I sang in the bathroom to hear the echoes applauding me. I stood on the stairs. I walked slowly, feeling each carpeted step beneath my feet and breathing in my privacy. I peered over the banister, only to see Tubby staring up at me, brown eyes bright, wagging his tail as I sang “Danny Boy.” He could not hear well. He could not walk up the stairs any longer. But he heard my singing and he looked up at me and I swear he smiled. But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying, if I am dead, as dead I well may be, ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying, and kneel and say an “Ave” there for me… I sang as if it was a happy song. I sang as if I was both alone and in company. In each kind of singing, there were sweet notes of contentment.

As the weeks went by, whispers of warm air floated through Delaware. Vultures started to sunbathe in the mornings. The vultures were tall, black, bony women, wrapped in night-colored cloth, peering at me with apathy. I walked by them with Tubby, and they became familiar and comforting. One morning, Tubby and I passed two vultures that were sitting on the edge of a giant blue dumpster. I walked closer and closer, wondering if they would fly away, or if they felt safe in their flock. I soon found myself only three feet from being able to reach out and touch a black wing. I stared. They were beautiful. Their only movement was a slight turn of their heads. They looked near me, never at me. I stood in the world with my dog’s head buried in grass and smiled at the undertakers. Their eyes were deep, their heads only shriveled grey skin, but sleek and strong. “Hello,” I said. I kept walking, turning to look back at them. In that moment, I was nothing to them. I was too alive.

I grew up in my twenty-third winter. I stood alone and sang alone and remembered the true color of grass. Spring came as always. I watched the blades twitch in friendly warm winds. It was both a numberless spring and something new. Shadows melted away as the sun climbed.

•••

ELIZABETH KAVITSKY is a twenty-three-year-old student pursuing her master’s degree in creative writing from Carlow University.

Ghosts at the Table

clock2
By Beth Hannon Fuller www.studiofuller.com

By Kristine Guay

“So what’s new in your life, boys? Is there anything you can share with 
us or that you even want to share?” My partner’s mother breaks a momentary silence at our holiday dinner table while unscrewing the cap off of 
her container of bottled water. I reach across a plate of spinach-pie
 wedges to grab the etched glass wine decanter and fill my glass in front
 of me. My partner Janyce is cutting into a lamb chop, swirling a forkful
 around in the egg-lemon sauce on her plate. Over on the far left, my 
older teen, Connor, is scooping up another spoonful of rosemary potatoes from the
 ceramic bowl and dropping them in a pile on his plate.

“I’m getting my license soon,” says Connor.

“Hey, did I ever tell you what my dad did to me when I got my license?” Janyce’s sister Agni blurts out from the far opposite side of the table. I can see the top of her head from behind the vase of 
orange and pink pastel tulips as she hoists her little black dog up on to 
her lap.

“Ag!” says Janyce, placing her wine glass down and shooting her sister a stare before looking nervously over at me.

“It’s okay,” I say. “Let her tell the story.”

“Well, on the day I passed my test, I asked Dad if I could take the car to drive to Peggy’s house,” she says, looking straight at Janyce as she pauses to shift the dog to her other knee. “And he said to me that I had to wait for him to go with me because I couldn’t drive the car alone for another three months. He said it was because the insurance would take three more months before it would go into effect. Can you believe that?”

“That’s not true, is it?” asks Connor.

“Of course it’s not true!” says Agni as she starts to giggle. “You thought you were being smart, didn’t you, Dad?” She gives a jab to her father who is sitting beside her and looking down at his plate.

“I don’t think he heard you,” says Janyce.

“Oh he heard me. Just look at that smile,” she says.

Janyce’s dad picks his head up and grins. “It worked, didn’t it?”

“It worked until I got my first car myself, and I made a comment about needing to wait a few months for the insurance, and they looked at me like I was crazy,” she says. “The guy said to me, ‘You can drive the car out of here right now.’”

“I don’t get it,” says Connor. “Why would your dad tell you that, then?”

“We were going to try the same thing on you,” says Janyce looking over at me. “But too late now, huh,” she says to him. “Dad just wanted her to keep driving with another person in the car a little longer for the practice.”

“Oh! Yeah, well I don’t need any more practice. I’m ready,” he says.

I steal a sideways 
glance at my quiet younger teen, Aidan, to my left. It’s close to seventy-five degrees outside, but
 he wears a blue plaid flannel shirt buttoned up to the top, covering 
his black concert tee-shirt. The gaping metal tunnels in his ears are
 plugged up with a stopper of red, just barely visible from behind his
 shiny black hair. Behind me is only the sideboard table that I’d adorned with 
a rustic candelabra and a plate of shiny yellow packaged marshmallow peeps
 and boxed chocolate bunnies.

“Why do you let him do that to his ears?” whispers my Aunt Gail just over
 my shoulder. Nobody hears her say it but me, and yet I notice how Aidan sits a
 little straighter in his chair.

“Want to try some of the greens?” I ask Connor, motioning toward 
the bowl directly in front of his plate.

“No, thanks, I don’t like steamed daffodils,” he says.

“Those are wilted dandelion greens, wise guy,” I say.

“I’m all good, Mom.”

My partner’s father and sister are talking about something I missed, and Janyce is now leaning
 back in her chair, her plate pushed to the side. I dip my fingers in the
 shallow bowl of mounded mini jellybeans next to
 my flatware. Multicolor glass cordial glasses embellish the top of each
 dessert plate on the green tablecloth and remind me of the spring crocuses
 outside, just now beginning to push their way through the soggy earth.

“Is it okay if I go visit across the street?” asks Connor.

“Yeah, Mom, I’m done too. I want to go skate,” says Aidan.

“Sure, guys, you can go. Thanks for making an appearance,” I say.

I take in a deep breath. We all made it through the rushed first hour of a holiday meal in the new house, with all my new relatives.

As the teens perform their stiff goodbyes and get up from the table, I catch the end of Janyce’s sister’s and
 father’s conversation.

“I used to love YaYa’s shoes—remember those? They were so high and she
 was so short. They had those bows on them,” says Agni.

“Yeah, and she was always mad at us for wearing jeans,” Janyce chimes in. “I remember how she would be dressed and ready for me when I had to drive her to the Greek market. She was in her dress, those shoes with the bows, and she had her bag in her hand. We were only driving across town to buy feta!”

“Well, that’s how it was with the Greek women of that generation. You dressed properly to go out,” says Janyce’s mom.

“Okay, maybe to go out, but remember how mad she got at Dad when he was wearing ripped cutoffs to build the deck?” says Agni.

“That was hysterical,” says Janyce. “Remember that, Dad?” She turns to her father who smiles and looks down at the table while shaking his head from side to side.

I don’t add anything to the conversation; I watch my sons exit the
 room. On their way out, they pass by my long deceased Uncle Ray, who is 
leaning over Janyce’s shoulder to look into the main
 platter of leftovers still on the table. “Lamb and artichokes? Where is the ham and raisin sauce?” he asks, and I
 almost laugh out loud. I watch him in front of the brick fireplace 
tilting his head to listen to the Rembetika music playing from the stereo. He’s wearing a white button-down shirt with his white tee-shirt still visible, black pants, and gleaming polished shoes. Wisps of graying hair drape sideways 
across a partially balding head and half of his bottom lip is curled up in
 a crooked smile. His face droops slightly on one side.

“Who wants coffee and cookies?” asks Janyce. I start gathering and stacking dirty dishes as Janyce’s mom begins unwrapping the pink and green tissue paper from 
the small wrapped Easter package in front of her.

“Oh, aren’t these pretty,” she says.

“Those are from Athans Bakery, Mum,” Agni says. “I got
 you some filled with Nutella and some with mint. Those big ones have 
hazelnuts in them.”

“Oh, I can’t eat hazelnuts. I’ll have to give those to Daddy,” she says.

I
 pass Janyce on her way out of the kitchen as I’m on my way in,
 carrying the dirty dishes. She’s holding a bottle of ouzo in one hand and
 a plate of kourabiedes in the other.

“Kris and I are having some ouzo… Dad, are you having some too?” I hear
 her ask as I return to the entrance of the dining room. I stand
 perfectly still for a minute in the doorway as I watch my own grandmother, who we buried over ten years ago, looking at the pile of chocolates with 
the others. “I can’t eat hazelnuts either,” she says to the table. Then she fades
 away.

“Come sit and have ouzo with me,” says Janyce. She looks at me and
 pats the chair seat beside her.

“The teens were unusually silent, don’t you think?” I ask her as I 
lick white powder from my fingers and take a sip from my cobalt-blue
 cordial glass. Late afternoon sunlight streams through the windows and dances on the 
glassware. Nobody else is talking anymore, and we listen to the soft plucking of the bouzouki 
playing in the background.

“Well, they are getting older,” she says.

I nod in agreement, but to me that’s only part of the reason. It’s really more that the teenagers
 aren’t so comfortable with all the ghosts at the table. It seems that the smaller the holiday gathering, the easier it is 
for the relatives of the past to show up and make a comment or two. I was 
watching the two teens during dinner, anxiously looking at their cell
phones, glancing out in the direction of the backyard while sitting straight in 
their chairs, all sullen and still. They couldn’t quite get comfortable with 
this holiday, the first one with my new relatives in a new
 house.

And yet to me, their fortyish mother, I only wish I could stop time during 
these moments and linger over dinner with my new relatives while all
 the relatives I remember so fondly pass in and out to get a closer 
look. That’s the real reason for the holidays coming around every year. It’s our yearly chance to welcome back all the 
ghosts to the table.

•••

KRIS GUAY lives in Franklin, Massachusetts, with her partner and two teenage boys. She works as a communications manager in higher education. Her work has been published in Moms Who Need Wine and the Middlesex News, and will soon be in Corium Magazine. She writes her own popular blog called “Life with Teenagers” at www.2teen.wordpress.com.