Making Dinner

James wasn’t home yet. “I could use some help with dinner,” Jean said, and Lacey dragged herself off the couch and into the kitchen, stationing herself as far down the counter as she could get from her mother. “Steve and Laurie will be here soon, you know,” Jean said. “You might want to change before dinner.”

“I thought you wanted help cooking,” said Lacey. “I’ll make the salad and then go change.” She was suddenly aware of  torn tee shirt, the feeling of her unwashed hair against her scalp. She’d forgotten about their weekend guests. What would they be like, she wondered, as she washed the carrots and cucumber and set to making neat slices. James had told her almost nothing about them. Or, rather, he had told her a thousand stories about their college days, Jimmy and Steve, sneaking into the chem lab late at night for illicit experiments involving cocaine,  campus legends for stealing exams and seducing girls. According to his stories, there was nothing the two of them couldn’t have pulled off together. But now James had a potbelly and thought of college as his glory days. Lacey felt sorry for him. These would not be her glory days, the best times of her life. It wasn’t only that high-school kind of sucked. She was just certain she wouldn’t stop having adventures at 20. She rinsed the lettuce and spun it dry.

James said that Steve was always the babe magnet in school. He’d bring back two girls to their dorm room and if James was lucky, one would end up in his bed. Otherwise, he’d be trying to sleep while Steve had them both, giggling and cooing and moaning. “Did you watch?” Lacey had asked. “Of course,” James told her, “But I pretended not to. My desk kind of blocked my view, so I could only see when the girls were sitting up, riding him.” He’d had a hard-on, telling her about it. Was it even a true story? She put the thought out of her mind and arranged the last of the vegetables in a ring on top of the lettuce. A shower. And something nice to wear at dinner. Who knows what kind of stories James had been telling Steve about her.

Last words

“Are you at least going to let me see my grandchildren?” Jean’s voice teetered on the edge of hysteria. What did she want? Maybe for Lacey to lay down and die? She stared at her mother, unable to imagine any words that might save them.

“Do you think you could keep them safe?” Lacey asked, and turned away as tears began running down Jean’s face. She had to be cruel. She had to use a knife sharp enough to remove this cancerous love. There were boxes to carry.

Earthquake Zone

Spring break, and the hours stretched like days. All her friends were away. Except Andrew, and she didn’t want to see Andrew. She wrote letters to the others, Gretchen and Amanda. They wouldn’t get them until they were home again, but it would be like a gift, she thought, to come home to a stack of hand-addressed envelopes. She decorated each one elaborately, first with stickers and then dense ink drawings, covering and recovering each area until only the small box she’d drawn for the address showed any white paper.

“There’s no way I’m getting out of here in one piece” she wrote Gretchen. It was too late to turn back. The earth had trembled, smoke rose, and she’d run towards the conflagration instead of away. Pull apart the burning rubble to look for survivors, or simply watch it quake and fall, these were her choices now.

Then it was time for dinner.

James and Jean talked about lab equipment and tenure applicants while Lacey daydreamed about drawings, taking automatic bites of pasta and vegetables. Her mother laughed, and Lacey tuned back in. James was funny, sometimes. "What’d I miss?" she asked.

"Oh, it was just a miscommunication James had with the equipment sales-rep," Jean explained. "Half of them don’t have any idea what they’re selling"

James gave her an apologetic smile. "Boring, I know," she read in his eyes. He wishes they could talk about something other than work, Lacey thought. He’d rather be alone with me. She felt a flare of heat in her chest. It was uncanny the way they read each other’s minds.

“Did I smell something chocolate when i came in earlier?” James asked.

"Not chocolate," Lacey answered. "You must have smelled the almonds. I tried to make biscotti, but I’m not sure they came out right." Baking was her other spring-break activity. Precision in measuring, said her cookbooks, was the key to success. She leveled her measures with military discipline. Still, things failed. Fell. Curdled. Burnt. The biscotti were crumbly rather than crisp. "I control my reality," Amanda had told her. All Lacey’s care was not enough. Maybe Amanda’s reality was more tractable.

Jean suggested decaf, to dip the cookies. “It doesn’t matter if they’re crumbly. You’re supposed to dip them anyway,” she said. James declared them delicious and ate three. Lacey nibbled hers, after discovering dunking left an unpleasant sludge in her cup. There was silence. Lacey gave a sigh of relief when Jean went downstairs to work at her desk. James gave her a conspiratorial wink, and she got up to help him clear the dishes.

His hand grasped her wrist as she reached for his plate. Lacey looked up at him, into his brown eyes. "Tiger’s eye" she thought, as he pressed her back into the wall behind her, kissing her intensely, one hand almost painful on her wrist, the other soothing against the back of her neck. His kisses were deliberate, despite the seeming spontaneity ot the maneuver. She was certain he’d planned this moment. In the seconds before she lost herself in sensation, she wished he would come with her, into that chaos of desire.

Flying fast and low

If you catch a glimpse, looking up late at night, you won’t know for sure what you’ve seen. Was that a  distant airplane or a low-flying bird? Or something else entirely, blurred against the sky?

I write into the dark. Sometimes I forget my way back again. This is me unreeling a line as I wander through the chilly air.