“I don’t want any of those.” I went to close the cabinet and she put up a hand. “Wait. Let me see nutmeg.”
She turned the box over in her hands, squinting at the model on the front. “No, this isn’t gonna work. Too brown. I’ll have to pick some up.”
There was a braided basket on the floor. I’d seen it hundreds of times in my life; it was the one my mother always put her rolls and cornbread muffins in with a folded hand towel. She dumped all the pieces she’d picked up from the bin into the basket. Everything mingled together in the bottom: bits of skin and gristle. I hoped she’d throw the basket out after she was done.
“Gonna work on this from home.” She scrubbed a hand along her head, dislodging the bit of toilet paper and unsticking the tender scab that had formed. Blood dripped from the wound, a bright lick that streaked down the back of her neck. “Could you drive Bastien home? Milo’s working late again.”
It would have been easy to pick up a tissue from the box along the sink, but I didn’t. I just let the blood seep down the back of my mother’s skull. Let her walk away, the drip migrating in a zigzag pattern that eventually reached the collar of her shirt. I could hear her out front, talking to a customer. The workstations were a mess—bins and cabinets thrown wide, little snips of hair crowding the sink drain. My father would never have stood for it. But again, my father wasn’t alive. He no longer had a say.
ARDEA ALBA—GREAT WHITE HERON
In the time it took me to scale the ladder, Milo had climbed onto the roof of the tree house. He was twelve and I was thirteen, but already his body was the length of someone much older, his limbs pulled out thin and awkward, like melting taffy. Milo was tall, but he wasn’t big, and he wasn’t coordinated. No sports and no friends, other than me. We spent nearly all our time together. The two of us and Brynn, my brother and me trailing after her like a couple of lovesick puppies.
Could you just wait?
I could, he said. But I won’t.
We’d found the tree house in the backyard of the foreclosed home, three down from ours and directly next to the graveyard. When we looked through the cutouts in the wooden walls, we could see a sliver of water out in the distance. I called it lakefront property, even though the actual view was mostly worn-down headstones that popped up like jagged teeth.
I’m not going up there, I said. I’ll never get back down.
I don’t give a shit what you do. Just gimme my stuff.
Our mother had enrolled us in summer camp, which was actually just afternoons down at the Y making crafts with other kids who definitely didn’t want to be there. We were too old for daycare and too young to stay home by ourselves. Kids with money went to sleepaway camps or Bible ministry youth retreats, but not us. Our father had given us time off from working at the shop. He’d said that was vacation enough, or would we rather come by and scoop remnants from the mounts he was fleshing?
I handed Milo his jar, stretching up on tiptoe to reach his dangling hand. At the Y that day, we’d learned how to make butter from a girl only three years older than me. She’d had her long red hair in a side ponytail with one of those looped elastic bands with clear blue bobbles on the ends. Milo said they looked like balls, that she’d had blue balls in her hair, and Brynn couldn’t stop laughing. Suddenly she thought Milo was hilarious and wanted him with us all the time. It made me hate my brother, who lapped up the attention and only became more annoying because of it.
I’m not giving you this bread, I told him, shoving the bag down between my feet. There’s not enough.
I’m not gonna eat butter without bread. That’s gross.
We shook our jars. It would take at least thirty minutes to get the lump going in the buttermilk. We’d filled up all our ingredients in the sweltering kitchen and then taken them with us, leaving our mother to hammer out the fleshy pink breasts for the night’s chicken Parmesan.
We spent late afternoons at the tree house once the people living in the foreclosed home moved out. They’d been there for under a year. The man was younger than our father, thin in the arms and waist and wide in the hips. He’d built the tree house with a couple of friends in a single day—all of them shirtless and sweaty, drinking beer in the afternoon heat. Milo and I spied on them from the cemetery, crouched behind the plots of Davidsons and Meekins. Our knees bore witness, collecting deep grooves as we crouched for hours in the unforgiving earth. He’d called for beer and more beer so many times that Milo and I joked it must be his wife’s name. We weren’t sure why they’d built the tree house. They didn’t have any kids.
This is taking too long. Milo’s jar was fuzzy with bubbles from all the shaking, but I couldn’t see any butter forming yet. Mine didn’t look much different.
Don’t be a little bitch. Keep going.
Brynn was coming over soon. She had to watch her baby brother for an hour while her mother ran errands. Gideon wasn’t what I’d call cute. He was pale with buggy, vacant blue eyes. Brynn always talked about wanting babies, but I didn’t think they were anything great. Don’t you ever think about getting married? she asked me, draping the end of a bedsheet over her head to look like a veil. Your brother will probably be a good husband. He’s kind of getting cuter. To get her to stop talking about Milo, I gave her the end of my blue raspberry Ring Pop. I never thought about getting married, but I did sometimes wish Brynn and I could just live together when we got older.
Hey lookit. Milo slapped the wall next to my face.
What? I was getting closer to done; I could feel it. Something hard was lumping against the glass with every flick of my wrist, a kind of thump that made me think of the gel-capped vitamin E pills my mother took for her hair and nails.
There’s something poking up behind the memorial bench.
Leaning forward over the wooden railing, I felt it give a little under my weight and quickly settled back. There was something waving beneath the bench.
It’s a bird.
It’s a plane, said Milo, shaking his jar.
Don’t be a dumbass. It’s an egret. Maybe an anhinga?
Can’t be, too far from the water. Looks like a piece of trash.
I’m gonna throw it some bread.
His long arm swung down, snatching at the plastic bag that held the tail end of a loaf. No, don’t! We don’t have that much left.
Calm down. I opened the bag and balled up a white hunk from the heel. I’ll just use a little.
My aim was pretty good. It curved down in the hot gust of breeze, flipping, and landed five feet from the bench. The bread lay hidden in the straggling weeds, unnoticed by the bird.
Gimme some. I handed up a hunk, larger than mine. His aim wasn’t great. The bread ball landed next to some overgrown headstones where we couldn’t even read the etchings; something like Adler or Addison. It didn’t matter that he’d missed, though. The bird had flopped its body behind the bench until I could see only the tip of its pale wing poking through the slats.
Instead of wasting more bread, I dropped the bag and gave my jar to Milo. Keep shaking.
Hopping the fence from the neighbor’s yard, I crossed through the clumps of weedy patches, clouds of gnats rising up from the puddles that would never drain during the summer. Mud sucked at my sneakers, which had started as white off-brand Keds but were ending summer the color of dirt, the bumpers black from Brynn writing the names of all the boys she’d loved during the school year. My shoes had said Brian and Rickie and David and then Brian again; Brian who sat in front of me in math, Brian with the floppy dark hair that fell over one eye, Brian who always smelled like lunch meat if he’d been playing basketball.