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More than 100 words--I tried, y'all

One of my favorite bloggers, Slouching Mom, issued a challenge last week. Write a story in 100 words. I did my best. Really, I did. But I came in somewhere around 260. Yeah. I'll keep trying.

*****

She'd agreed to meet him for coffee. Why? Curiosity, she supposed. Justification: it was like a business lunch. Coffee, for God's sake. What could be more benign?

But once he arrived, she knew it wasn't benign at all.

Outside the lecture hall, he looked different. Smaller. A tiny piece of Kleenex clung to the whiskers on his chin. His lips were dry, his eyes pink and watering.

Still, her heart pummeled her ribcage. Here they were, sipping Americanos together. After all this time.

She tried not to think of his wife. Her grades. Her parents back home. She focused, simply, on his hands wrapped around his mug, on his chapped knuckles. And she swallowed hard, her brain already spinning--like a caterpillar spewing out silk--as she imagined what lay ahead on that gray afternoon.

He talked about the wind, a paper he was publishing, his assistant professor. His tone was more condescending than it had seemed in his office (as he played with a Rubik's cube and, over the top of it, flirted).

Her coffee wasn't even cold yet. But she felt her arms snaking into her jacket, realized she was groping around for her gloves. 

"Stop talking," she said, suddenly powerful, suddenly, she knew, right.

Startled, he looked at her.

She wanted to reach out and pick that stupid bit of tissue from his jaw. Instead, she said, "My roommate's gone for the weekend. Let's go back to campus."

Because campus, it turned out, was only place this would work.

 

A Pleading Green

Okay, you Greener Grass hounders, here's another installment. (You know I secretly like that you hound me, right?) 

If you've never read, but want to, the first part of the story is in my right sidebar under I Like To Write. Just be warned that it's getting long. Entirely too long.

*****

Nurses changed shifts. Dave went home to shower and came back still looking haggard, but clean. Tamara stayed, dozed on a hard plastic chair for a while and once with her upper body draped across Joshua's feet. She drank coffee from a vending machine and ate candy bars and bags of peanuts. She studied herself in the bathroom mirror and thought she looked profoundly wasted--eyes small and glassy, hair all over the place, clothes wrinkled and starting to stink.

Yet she couldn't go change into her own shorts and shirt, clean up or grab a proper meal. She was in a purgatory that, she couldn't help believing, was of her own making. She just had to endure it. Endure Dave's anger and her guilt and Joshua's comatose state. By enduring, she was, in a way, repenting. Which was the only thing she could do for Josh right then.

"Why don't you run home, see the kids," Dave suggested, pulling out a fresh copy of the Sentinel and rubbing his cleanly shaven jaw.

"Who's with them?"

"Megan."

Tamara must've slid him a questioning look, because he said, "Theresa's daughter."

"All this time?"

"She's good with them," Dave said.

Just then they heard a small rustle coming from the bed. Tamara scraped her chair up to Joshua as his head rocked, just slightly, back and forth. His eyelids peeled back and he looked straight ahead with unfocused pupils.

Dave rushed to the bed and grabbed Joshua's limp hand. "Josh, it's dad. We're here. Mom's here," he looked pointedly at Tamara as he said this. "You hit your head, but you're gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay."

He had no way of knowing that, of course. But Tamara kept her mouth shut.

Joshua's eyes drifted from one side of the room to the other, then closed again.

"Shit," Tamara muttered. "Shit. Joshua?"

Nothing.

She ran out into the hallway and grabbed a nurse. The nurse listened to their recount of what had happened and nodded. "Let's hope for more and more of that," she said, but didn't offer further encouragement. She jotted something in Joshua's chart and left them again.

The room was silent. Or as silent as a pediatric ICU can be, with machines humming and people talking quietly in the hall and the far off trill of a phone.

Dave was looking at Tamara with watery eyes, his lids opened so far that the whites were visible around the entire perimeter of his irises. Like small, floating rafts, she thought.

"How could you have left for so long?"

The harsh honesty of the question made her jump. She didn't expect to be asked outright. At least not yet. It was more Dave's style to criticize around the edges of the main issue, to make it clear in small and biting ways how hurt he was.

She came back with, "How could you have forgotten about me? About you and me?" She would've done anything, in that moment, for a drink. Anything except walk out of the hospital while Joshua was in the big, white bed, his body so small and vulnerable surrounded by metal boxes and rubber tubing. "Everything became more important to you than me and us," she added. "Golf. Work. Mail. Everything."

"You do not know that," he said, pointing at her with his first two fingers stuck together. A small oddity of his.

"I felt that," she said, and her voice was hoarse with emotion. She sensed the tendons in her neck straining, the vein along her right temple bulging.

And in that short exchange they had cut the complexities and small disappointments of their relationship down to what it was. Tamara saw it as something palpable, like a small, lumpy sculpture she could hold in her hands. She had no idea, though, if it was malleable, or too set in its shape to morph into anything else.

"Do you feel this?" he asked, his gaze cutting to their son, their oldest child.

She thought of all the times she'd spent with just Joshua, while Dave worked and before Caitlyn and Eli had come along. Just the two of them trying to fill the days. Going to Gymboree and napping together on the futon in his room. 

She remembered the excitement of feeding him his first bites of liquified sweet potatoes and the hair-ripping frustration of potty training him. They'd been a team. And she'd often thought, as tedious and isolating as a lot of it was, that she should have stopped with him. Should not have gone on to have more children.

"Of course I do," she said.

He said, "Good. Because I thought maybe you were done feeling."

She had to chew her lip and clamp her hand over her mouth to keep from fighting anymore. It wasn't right. Going at it there in Joshua's room. For all they knew, he could hear.

She sat back down, laid her head on Joshua's mattress and rested that way for a long time. Finally, she sighed, stood and said, "I think I will run home and check on the kids. The car out in the lot?"

He threw the keys hard and they skittered across the white, tile floor.

She scrambled for them and, kissing Joshua's forehead, she left, thinking, please, please, please, please.

Weary of you

She loved her old Scrabble set. The board was sturdy. The trays wooden, like small pews. Whenever she opened the game, she ran her hands through the smooth tiles as certain people might run their hands through money: over and under, around her fingers. Sometimes she scooped up the tiles and let them fall, clicking into a slippery heap.

Now, though, all the tiles were laid out neatly, the board a vast diagram of words. She had only three letters left to play.

"Why do you make that sound?" her husband asked, looking up at her from where he sat on the couch.

"What sound?"

"That high sort of sigh. Like a whinny. Every time you think."

She laid her hand on her flannelly chest. She wore her nightgown even though it was just eight-thirty. She liked to change into it as soon as she got home from work. "Only when I play Scrabble, though, right? I don't do that when I'm thinking about other things." She imagined herself at Davis + Davis, whinnying, as Gordon put it, while she compiled quotes or made copies.

"Mostly during Scrabble. Sometimes when you sleep, too. Or balance the bank account." He thought for a moment, and then added, "When we're, you know...when I'm parking the Porsche in its garage."

She registered annoyance at another of Gordon's weird euphemisms for sex, but said, "Are you serious? Why is this the first I've heard of it?"

He shrugged, mumbled, "Seemed like a small thing. I'm really just curious if you're aware of it, is all," and reached for a handful of cashews from the side table bowl.

She said, "Small?"

"In the big scheme, yes."

She tried to concentrate on her three tiles, but could only hold her breath and try not to emit strange noises.

The faucet dripped. Her grandmother's antique mantel clock ticked. Gordon crunched his cashews.

Then there was the clatter of wooden Scrabble tiles, the soft thud of the board hitting the cushion next to Gordon, the rattle of the pews and heavy, wool-socked footfalls down the hallway. The slam of a door.

Gordon shook his head, wiped salty hands on his pants and stood, letting out a sigh of his own, though this one lower and less earnest than his wife's.

He knocked on the bathroom door. He called her name. He hated when she got like this. Things were humming along just fine. A nice Friday night with a Scrabble game, maybe a large pour of merlot later and the sports section before bed. But now. Now he'd spend his evening trying to appease her. Offering her wine. A foot massage. Specially smoothing out the Op-Ed and Cooking pages for her to peruse while they sat propped against their pillows, twin lamps throwing discs of light across their laps.

And she'd be reticent, reluctant. Making it clear she was doing him a favor by letting him wait on her.

Well, not this time.

He went to the hall closet and grabbed his heavy corduroy shirt, letting the hangers clang so she would know he meant business.

Gordon tramped three blocks to the Hot Spot, a grimy little outfit with a pool table, flashing trivia screens mounted to one end of the bar and rows of gleaming liquor bottles that, he suspected, never sat long enough to accumulate dust.

He drank two glasses of house red: a bitter, young blend of sub par grapes.

When he returned home sometime later, having lost badly at a trivia game to a couple who looked like they'd just ridden in on a truck bed filled with gasoline cans and snarly German Shepherds, he hung up his shirt and went right to the bedroom.

To his relief, she was asleep, whinnying. He turned to go into the bathroom when, in the light of the lamp she'd left on, something shiny caught his eye. He looked back at his wife. He stepped closer. He saw that her slumbering body was surrounded by right side up Scrabble tiles and that, above her head like a parenthesis, was the word, Sex. She'd taken a post-it, too, had drawn on it a long, black exclamation point and stuck it to the sheet to emphasize Sex!

He raked his hands through his hair, paced the creaky floor twice and came back to her. He plucked out the letters he needed and, across his own pillow, spelled, Weary and went to sleep on the couch.

A tragic green

To read the first part of this story, Greener Grass, you'll find it in my right sidebar under I Like To Write.

*****

Dave hadn't offered to pick up Tamara at the airport and she wouldn't have accepted anyway. She took a cab to Children's Hospital.

Once it spit her out on the curb in front of the lit, looming building, she stood there for a long time. The night air wreathing her arms and legs was warm. Every so often she heard the automatic doors behind her zip open and closed, saw adults walking slowly to their cars.

Could she even go in? When were visiting hours? But then, she was the other parent, the mother, after all.

She found a metal, backless bench and sat down. She still clutched the plastic bag full of Cornelia's black clothes. She laid her head on it and closed her eyes. She'd come all this way as fast as she could and now here she was, dawdling.

Okay, she told herself. Grow a spine and get in there. The worst they can do is turn you away until morning.

She finally stood, her heart dribbling erratically. The doors shushed open for her and the hard, white lights of the hospital made her squint, made her almost throw her arm over her eyes. She went to the information desk and was directed to the second floor, ICU.

ICU was a nurse's station surrounded by glass-walled rooms. It was all metal railings and rubber tubing and leggy carts on wheels--nothing remotely homey about the place. Tamara's stomach pinch inward until she thought she might double over. At the desk, she whispered "Joshua Marks".

The nurse, an overweight woman wearing a light polyester jacket covered in teddy bears, came around and showed her to the corner room.

And there was Dave, sleeping in a plastic chair, his chin resting on his chest. Next to him, hooked up like a car to a diagnostic machine, was Joshua, her baby. The nurse spoke quietly, telling Tamara they were keeping track of his ICP, Intra-cranial pressure, that so far it was elevated, but not so high that they had to drain it. Yet, she said. Yet.

Joshua's hair was plastered back against his skull, his sweet little skull that contained his sweet little brain that was always thinking about numbers, always wanting her to quantify everything. How many grains of sugar are in that teaspoon mom? How many feet between Earth and the sun? How many miles per hour am I walking right now? What about now?

His skin, it seemed to her, was a golden-green. Maybe it was the lights coming from behind a wooden slab on the wall, but he almost appeared to give off a glow. Radioactive, she thought.

Briefly, she wondered who was taking care of Caitlyn and Eli. Craig, she figured. She was sure they were fine, that Dave had arranged somewhere safe for them to be.

She asked the nurse, who still stood there writing in a chart what, exactly, had happened to Joshua.

"Aren't you Mom?" the nurse responded, looking at Tamara with raised brows.

"Yes, but I've been...away."

After a pause that Tamara felt was heavy with disapproval but was probably just the nurse reading up, she said, "Fall from a play structure. Closed head injury."

"What?"

"He was admitted late yesterday morning."

Tamara glanced up at the massive institutional clock above the nurse's station and saw it was a little after four. A weariness hit her that was so profound and deep she didn't know if she could keep standing. The phrase bone-tired passed through her mind.

Can I just...I need to lean." She propped herself against the wall near Dave, who still hadn't stirred.

The nurse left on her squishy soles, her teddy bears retreating.

Tamara cupped both hands over her mouth and nose, staring hard at Joshua and muttering, "Shit, shit, shit."

Dave grunted. His head lolled to the side. His lips smacked, then his eyes opened, small slits inside thick pouches of skin. "Tammy," he said, his voice sounding like he'd swallowed rocks.

As soon as he fully came to, though, stretching and rubbing the back of his neck, anger hardened his features and pulled down the corners of his mouth. "When did you get back?"

She refused to let herself feel affronted. She deserved this. And worse. "Just a little while ago," she said.

"Finally."

"I know."

"So this is what it took. Your child in a coma."

"Dave," she said, doing her best to keep the plaintive note from her voice. "Not now. Okay?" She went to Joshua's bedside and ruffled his bangs lightly with her fingers. Tears stung hot behind her eyeballs. She wanted to press her face to his, but didn't know if she should, if it could hurt him in any way.

"When?" he asked.

Her only desire right then was to look at Joshua, touch Joshua, absorb all this without Dave haranguing her. She knew she had it coming, but it was too much just then. Far too much.

Inhaling a large, serrated breath, she stared at her husband. She knew her eyes were red and floating and that she, herself, looked awful. She said, "Maybe later. Maybe never. Right now we just need to concentrate on Josh."

A cocktail of bitterness, regret and fear passed over his face and was so obvious Tamara considered going to him, offering him a hug. Or something. But she didn't. She stayed at Joshua's side, trying not to ask how this had happened, how he'd hurt himself so badly on Dave's watch, what the hell he'd been letting the kids do. Because blame, right then, wasn't going to help Joshua. Wasn't going to help anybody.

So she stayed quiet and let the damn tears slide down her face like burning trails of black lava.

A slippery green

You can find the first part of this story, Greener Grass, in my right sidebar under I Like To Write.

*****

Tamara gazed across the living room at Paul and Cornelia. They sat on the floor, sharing a beer, both cross- legged, both with daisies where their pupils should've been. Truth be told, it was making Tamara ill.

Cornelia's feathery brown hair kept sticking to her lip gloss and her pale face stared at Paul's more often than not. Tamara still thought there was something disturbingly familiar about her, but she couldn't place what.

Squinting at her, Tamara asked, "Have you ever been in a TV show? Like as an extra or anything?"

Cornelia laughed. Her teeth were white and straight, though too narrow and widely spaced, like a picket fence. "No," she said. "Definitely not."

"Where are you from?"

"The Midwest," Cornelia answered, and she focused on the floorboards.

Flipping his pink dredlocks over his shoulder, Paul said, "That's right! You're both from Milwaukee!"

Through clenched teeth, Cornelia quietly said Paul's name, then smiled up at Tamara. "I haven't been back in a long time," she said.

Tamara looked down at her black skirt and peasant top and a strange sensation, like stepping barefoot into fresh snow, drifted over her. She thought of the woman who'd given her the clothes, who'd given her a wad of cash and told her she understood why Tamara was running. She stared hard at Cornelia's gray eyes. And she knew.

The coincidence was absurd. Too tidy.

"Are you...?" Tamara started. "Did your dad used to collect old board games?"

Cornelia's spine snapped straight, as if someone had run a cold length of chain up her back. She stood, the old wood groaning beneath her, and disappeared into the tiny bathroom. She was the daughter. The daughter who'd left and had never returned.

Tamara wanted to follow her, to pound on the door and tell her how much her mother missed her. She wanted to ask how she could've left like that. But then, Tamara wasn't exactly thoughtfulness embodied, was she?

Paul slammed his beer bottle on the floor and said, "What the fuck, Tamara? What's going on?" 

Stunned, Tamara only shrugged, running her blouse's hem (Cornelia's blouse's hem) through her thumb and forefinger.

He jumped up and strode to the bathroom door. He knocked lightly, saying, "Babe? Babe. It's okay. Whatever it is, we'll make it okay."

A sense of loss struck her then. Loss that grabbed her ankles and calves and hips with its frigid hands. She wanted Paul's attention. She wanted Dave's attention. She mourned for the mom she should be and not the slippery, distracted mother she actually was. Maybe The Woman had been that way too, always looking at the next thing coming rather than appreciating each individual moment. Maybe that was why Cornelia left. And maybe Caitlyn, Joshua and Eli would eventually leave Tamara in the same way. God knew she deserved it.

Brad was in the kitchen, clinking around with a bottle opener and beers. When he came out, he set one on the scarred coffee table in front of Tamara. She was about to say no thanks. But instead she gazed at the burnished, brown longneck, imagining how the carbonation would feel slipping down her throat. She eyed the bottle's opening, curved like the head of a penis. She wanted to lick it. She thought if she could, she would be happy.

"That's for you," Brad said, raising his handsome brows and gesturing with his handsome head.

Tamara's eyes ticked back and forth, almost imperceptibly. "I know Cornelia's mother," she whispered.

Brad said, "Huh. Well, isn't Milwaukee a pretty small town?"

Stretching forward from the couch and grabbing the beer, Tamara said, "Not that small." She fondled the glass, pressing it to her cheek. A thousand barbeques and college parties and early dates with Dave and, later, nights alone on the deck whizzed past, as if she were standing on a highway median, her hair blowing back and her eyes closing with each car that blew by.

She noticed that Paul was inside the bathroom with Cornelia now. Probably having sex in the tiny, stand up shower. Or stroking her hair while murmuring comforting words. Or something.

Tamara tipped up the bottle and gulped. It was so good. So good she started to tremble and couldn't stop until the entire sixteen ounces sloshed around in her belly.  Only then did she lay her head back, letting the flat spot on her skull rest against the wall.

She still ached down there from the miscarriage. And she ached up here. And everywhere. She didn't know if it'd ever stop, even with five more beers coursing through her system. Though that fact wouldn't stop her from trying. She'd downed one and nothing had exploded. No AA sponsors had burst through Brad's front door demanding that she give up her two-year sobriety pin.

What could another few hurt? New York, she'd learned, wasn't far enough. She needed to go farther. And the only way to do that, she concluded, was through those bottles of beer in the fridge.

A frantic green

Is anyone still following Greener Grass? Helloooo? It's been a long time since I've posted an installment and I apologize for my distraction. If you've never read this before and would like to, you can find the first part of the story in my right sidebar under I Like To Write.

*****

Dave was worried Megan wouldn't show up the next morning and he'd be forced to work from home with Eli, Joshua and Caitlyn bugging him for glasses of lemonade and snacks and games. But Megan came at her normal time with coloring books and new crayons for the kids.

She set them up at the kitchen table, smiling shyly at Dave, as she always did.

As he backed his car out of the garage, he thought how odd it was, first of all, that he'd made out with a teenager who was his kids' babysitter, that she was acting like it had never transpired, and that this had become their routine. Leaving his children with her while Tamara galavanted around the country (outside of the country?) and he had to keep slogging to work day in and day out.

No one would get it if he took leave because his wife had disappeared. And as much as he hated the pump station, he knew that focusing on it was good for him, kept him from sitting home and dwelling on Tamara's whereabouts.

And, holy hell, Where was she and why hadn't she called in three days and was this going to be his life forever? Counting on a babysitter to raise his kids? If he kept up with this lustful shit, he wouldn't even have her anymore. It couldn't, after all, end well with Megan. Dave knew that.

A couple miles from his office building he had to pull over in a narrow alley behind a dry cleaner and a sandwich shop. He had to pull over because he was shaking and feeling ridiculously sorry for himself. He had to pull over because he feared he might vomit into his lap. 

He leaned his seat back and gulped in giant breaths of gray city air. He eyed the fire escapes and reeking dumpsters but didn't see them.

When he got to work, he tried to slip into his office without rousing anyone's attention. Theresa noticed him, though, and said, "Good morning, boss." He thought she'd spiked her voice with sarcasm, that Megan had told her mom what happened.

He may as well find out what he was dealing with right then, he decided. "Hey, Theresa," he said.

She was unwrapping a Tootsie roll. He saw ebay up on her computer monitor. A pile of untouched folders sat on her desk, files he'd asked her to consolidate.

"How's home?" she asked.

He switched his briefcase from one hand to the other. "A little...unsettled." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Messed up." He hoped Theresa would see the anguish in his eyes and cut him some slack for kissing her daughter.

But her face was it's usual passive self, her mind distracted by online auctions. "Gosh, I'm sorry about that, Dave. Here, I brought this in for you." From under her desk, she pulled a still warm casserole dish. "It's only baked macaroni and cheese. But it'll help you and the kids get through another dinner."

"Wow, Theresa. Thanks."

She waved him away. "Believe me, it's not much."

He took the casserole dish into his office and set it on top of a filing cabinet. He could smell it, the hot, bubbly cheese, and wanted to dig right in. It sure beat the fish sticks and french fries he'd been throwing together.

He sat down, turned on his computer and mentally prepared himself to work on the pump station. All he really wanted to do was park it at home and watch Megan wrangle the kids, to talk Tamara into coming home, to reclaim his old bike, the '88 Harley he'd sold soon after Caitlyn was born, and tear around Wisconsin countryside, smelling the sweet hay and the manure and the tractor-trailer exhaust.

"Ok, dammit, pump station, pump station, pump station," he massaged his temples and thought about how Tamara used to do that for him–rub his head with her fingertips–to ward off impending headaches. When had she stopped? He couldn't remember. But that sweet little habit of hers had tapered to nothing, to critical sidelong glances and snipes about how he picked up non-organic milk from the Pick'n Save.

Just then, his phone line bleated. He waited for Theresa to get it. When she didn't, he glanced at Caller ID and saw that the call came from his home number, and snatched up the receiver.

"Sorry to bug you at work," Megan said. If her voice hinted at the slightest acknowledgment of their kiss or held any glimmer of seduction, he would've sat back in his seat and grinned, ready to flirt, anything to put off the fucking pump station.

But her words came quickly and frantically as she said, "It's Joshua. He fell off the play structure and he's, like, really hurt."

"What do you mean, really hurt? Won't he stop crying?"

"He's not crying," she said. "He won't even wake up."

A confounding green

The first part of this story, Greener Grass, can be found in my right sidebar under I Like To Write.

*****

A child's voice said, "Daddy?"

Dave was lost in Megan's lips, his hands buried in her hair. But Megan vaulted away and yanked her shirt straight.

"Hey, Eli," she said, trying to sound soothing but coming across, instead, as shaky.

Eli looked at her warily. If he were Joshua, he would just ask why she'd been kissing daddy. But Eli only sidled toward the wall, where he clung to a door frame, eyes downcast. He wore cotton dinosaur pajamas with a hole in one knee.

Megan glanced at Dave, her own eyes wide. Then she crouched next to Eli. "Hey, buddy. Can't you sleep?"

He shook his head.

"Did you count the stars on your ceiling like we talked about?"

He nodded.

"Are you scared of something?" She swiped a chunk of smooth, dark hair away from her face.

Dave went to the fridge and grabbed a beer from the case he'd bought on the way home from work. "We talked about this Eli," he said. "You just have to lie there quietly and you'll conk out."

Neither Megan nor Eli responded, so Dave shrugged and sat down at the table.

Eli said, "I'm scared of fires." He still couldn't pronounce his R's, so fires came out as fi-ahs. Dave thought it was the cutest damn thing.

"Let's go tuck you in again," Megan said, standing and taking his hand. Over her shoulder, as she walked away with Eli, she looked at Dave. Her expression was flat. Maybe a little disappointed around the eyes.

When she'd settled everything and Eli was once again in bed, presumably counting the glow-in-the-dark stars Tamara had once-upon-a-time stuck over his bed, she passed back through the dining room where she grabbed her iPod and bag. At the front door, Dave stopped her, knowing he had beer on his breath, knowing he must be coming across as a lecherous old man.

"You okay?" he asked.

A shoulder jerked up and she wound one finger through a belt loop. "Yeah, I guess. Why wouldn't I be?"

"Well, after, you know, what happened."

"What do you mean 'what happened'?"

Dave looked at her quizzically. Was she going to play denial? He raised his eyebrows and pointed to her, then to him and back again. "You know...I kissed you."

"No, you didn't." Her chin ticked upward.

"Ah, Megan. I think I did."

She was looking right at him as she scoffed and said, "In your dreams." She turned and left, her sixteen-year-old ass swaying the tiniest bit, her headphones going over her ears, one hand sliding into her pocket.

What the hell? Dave thought, cocking his head and polishing off the beer. What the freaking hell?

A desirous Green

The first part of this story, Greener Grass, can be found in my right sidebar, under I Like To Write.

*****

The hallway light clicked off and Dave glanced up from his computer.

Megan appeared in the doorway of the den. "I think they're all asleep," she said. "Eli took some extra time. He was worried about a Harvester?"

The movie Cars. He had to remember to hide that damn DVD. "Thanks, Megan," he said. "I really appreciate your staying extra hours today. This pump station..." he let his voice trail. A girl Megan's age didn't want to hear about his boring work. Hell, he couldn't even get his own wife interested in most of it. "Sorry," he said, shaking his head.

"It's okay," she said. "I like your kids. They're sweet."

"No, I mean, I'm sorry about starting in on my job. Like you care, right?" he chuckled.

The sun was low in the sky now, but still bright enough that he hadn't had to turn on lights. An orange glow burned through the den's two west-facing windows (an architectural flaw, in his opinion--why not put one window on the north wall to catch some of the midday rays?).

Megan said, quietly, "I care."

With those two words, Dave's entire blood supply sunk to his groin and he felt dizzy. He gripped the edge of his desk. I care. Hadn't that been all he'd ever wanted to hear from Tamara? That she cared? And here he was, getting it from this girl. This girl with amazing breasts and a super flat stomach and a perfect ass. A girl so springy and young he could've bounced flower petals off her.

He pressed his palms to his cheeks, rough from not having shaved in two days, and managed to say, "Your money's on the kitchen counter."

"Thanks, Mr. Marks," she said and turned.

Mr. Marks. Jesus.

Her formal salutation allowed him to focus his eyes again, to let go of the desk, his brain to stabilize.

He still thought he should go out there, draw out the conversation, let the house darken around them as they talked, offer her a beer. Illegal. Illegal. All of what he was thinking was illegal. And wrong. But, fuck, he wanted to do it. He wanted her company a little longer.

He heard a zipper, the chime of her cell phone.

Standing, he went into the hallway, then pivoted and strode back to his desk. Close the door, he told himself. Close the mother-fucking door and sit down at your screen. Your boring, asshole of a screen, and get back to the pump station. Answer some emails. Initiate a game of Mafia Wars if you have to. Just, stay where you are.

Something dropped in the kitchen, clattering to the floor and scuttling across aging ash boards.

That was all Dave needed. He burst from the den and found Megan still in the kitchen, of course, on her hands and knees, peering under the refrigerator.

"I just knocked my iPod under there," she said.

He got down and looked too. He could smell her shampoo again. He cleared his throat hard, willing himself to stay focused.

"Jeez," he said, noting how disgusting and dusty it was under there, feeling faintly embarrassed and annoyed at Tamara. "I don't see it anywhere." He grabbed the broom and reached it along the sides of the hulking fridge. "We're gonna have to move it out," he said.

"Oh," Megan said. "It's okay. I can get it next time I come over." She leaned against the counter, looking a little stricken.

Dave flung out the word, "No!" Then, immediately, followed with, "No worries. It's on these felt pads that make it easy to pull away from the wall."

After a few minutes of tugging and cursing, the felt pads not working as well as the package claimed they would, he had the refrigerator yanked back and a pink iPod in his hand. He blew lint from its screen and said, "I hope it still works."

"It will," Megan said, jamming it into her bag. "It's been through worse."

"Don't you want to...test it or something?" Dave asked.

"Nah, it's fine."

Straightening, he said, "What kinds of songs are you kids listening to these days?" He sounded like he was seventy-two. You kids? Christ.

She shrugged, lowered her eyes, then looked at a Matisse print on the wall. It was Tamara's. Something left over from a house she'd lived in in college. "My favorite playlist right now is, like, Moby and Chemical Brothers and Cibo Matto. But they're totally old school."

Dave laughed and said, "No, old school is Van Halen and ZZ Top. Stuff I used to listen to."

"You don't anymore?"

He grabbed a Sprite out of the cockeyed refrigerator and offered her one which, to his surprise, she accepted. "No, thankfully. On my way to work, it's Talk, mostly. Talk radio. Which is sad. God, you know, I used to be so into music." It was true. Maybe he hadn't had the best taste in the world, but he loved what he loved and he didn't know how that passion had drifted away.

She sat down on a stool, her bag still slung over her shoulder, her body hunched slightly inward. She slurped from her can and quietly belched. She probably thought she was doing a good deed, keeping the lonely, old dude company.

"You don't have to stay," he said. "You can take your Sprite on the road. I mean, you're welcome to stay as long as you want. But don't feel like it's a requirement for employment."

"You want to hear a song?" she asked, retrieving her iPod again and plugging massive black headphones into its jack.

He took them and listened, liking the thumping beat, knowing it was nothing he'd choose on his own, but appreciating her taste nonetheless. "Wow," he said.

"Good, huh? It makes me feel like I can get about a million things done."

It made Dave want to smoke a joint and have sex, but he wouldn't,  of course, say this. As he handed her iPod back, his hand grazed her denim-clad thigh. It was warm and taut and he didn't think he'd meant to do it, but her leg felt outrageously good under the pads of his fingers.

He concentrated on his pop. What spewed from his mouth next both startled him and filled him with a bizarre, misplaced pride. "Do you have a boyfriend, Megan?"

"Uh uh," she said. "For a while I did, but..."

"Didn't work out?"

"No, he...I'm pretty sure he was gay."

Dave guffawed and, in the midst of his laughter, caught the nape of Megan's neck and turned her head so she was forced to look him in the face. "Don't ever settle," he said. "For gay, or anything else. Anything that doesn't feel 100% right and nurturing and sexy and wonderful."

Her brown eyes warmed (liked, he thought, just baked chocolate brownies). She caught her bottom lip between her teeth, and in an instant, Dave was nudging those lips with his own, trying to tease her into relaxing. She made a small mewling sound in the back of her throat and this spurred him. He was on his knees, kissing her gently at first and then, as she relented, going in farther, scratching her face all to shit with his whiskers, he was sure. And he was sorry. But not very.

He tried to think of the rainbows and unicorns and prom pictures that probably decorated her room, the stuffed bunny she maybe slept with, the way she hugged her mom goodnight before bed, but he couldn't conjure the teenage fantasy again. She kissed like someone twice her age and Dave was sucked in. Sucked like a flailing cricket down a drainpipe.

A sweltering green

If you'd like to read the beginning of this story, Greener Grass, it can be found in my right sidebar under I Like To Write.

*****

It was one of those Wisconsin summer days when the temperature hovered around ninety and the humidity hit 100 percent.  It was one of those Wisconsin summer days when Craig couldn't motivate himself to sit in front of his sticky keyboard at the kitchen table or prod the kids off the couch. It was one of those days when he wished Jacquelyn would just take some time off, already and stay home with the family.

But she was in St. Louis at a trade show, in an air conditioned convention center wearing her suit and heels. 

And he was trying to entertain the kids and get three posts up by five pm.

He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window toward Angel's house. Her car, oddly, was still parked in the driveway. Her back door was open to the yard, though. If he stared long enough, he figured he might catch her in shorts and flip flops, watering plants or sitting on a lawn chair with her face pointed to the sun.

He found himself thinking about her more, now that Tamara was gone, wondering who she was, really. Imagining her naked. Constructing elaborate fantasies in which they were thrown together somehow (Electrical storm? Flood? Bat loose in her house and an extreme fear of flying rodents? Desperate need for a cup of sugar?)

And he tried to figure out what she saw when she looked at him. If she looked at him. Boring stay-at-home dad with two rug rats and wife who didn't like him enough to hang around? Or, caring man who loved his children and was married to a heartless woman only concerned with her career?

Did she notice his burgeoning belly under his t-shirts? Did she see the retaining wall he'd put out front that spring and recognize how thoughtfully the rocks had been placed? How carefully he'd leveled it all?

Then, there she was, standing in her doorway, holding a bowl and lifting a spoon to her mouth. She wore a flowy white skirt and a bikini top and Craig lost his breath for a moment. Why wasn't she working? Was she home sick? But sick women didn't look like that, like an ad for Special K.

He jumped up and slammed his laptop shut. He shoved his feet into his Tevas and was just about to jog across their yards and talk to her about...something. The heat, or the new traffic circles on the next street over or Tamara, when Jessica wandered into the kitchen asking for a popsicle and a trip to the pool.

"In a while," Craig barked.

"Noooo," she whined. "I'm hot."

"Well, then, get yourself an Otter Pop and we'll go to the pool in a half hour." He could always sit off to the side and work while the kids splashed around.

The Otter Pop suggestion shut her up and she rummaged through the freezer while Craig took off.

Angel, however, had disappeared and shut her door.

"Shit," he said, slowing as he reached the property line. He had nothing important enough to say to knock on her door. Which, somehow, was more intrusive than going up to her while she stood half outside. "Shit."

He spun around, went back in, and ate three grape popsicles while packing up towels, goggles, swimsuits and his computer. Off to the fucking pool, he thought, as he loaded the kids up in the car. The thrilling, fucking pool.

*****

When Jacquelyn called that night, something she didn't do every evening, but just often enough to convey that she sort of cared what the family was up to, the conversation went as smoothly as spreading mortar over glass shards.

Each exchange caught Craig and Jacquelyn on its sharp edges. They had to backtrack, go around it, try an equally unsuccessful path.

Her voice was gravely with exhaustion. Yet, Craig felt no sympathy for her. She was in St. Louis, basically partying it up. He was in Milwaukee, as usual, taking care of their two kids.

"I can't get into this now," she was saying. "I only get five hours sleep tonight and then I have to be up."

"All I'm asking is when your flight comes in on Wednesday," he said.

"Well, but I have to look it up and my Blackberry's not on and I'm freaking tired, Craig. Do you have any idea what my day was like?"

He pictured her in her hotel room, heels off, feet propped on an upholstered chair. Her make up and bra would be gone. Her short, dark hair would be tucked behind her ears and the bags that had started swelling, in the last few years, under her eyes, would be pronounced.

Thinking of her that way, sleepy and vulnerable at the end of the day, should've filled him with some sort of affection. Should've, at least, spurred a sense of compassion. But it didn't. All he felt was annoyance. He wanted to punch her, actually.

"How would I have any idea what your day was like?" he said. "I've been here. In Wisconsin. Trying to keep our kids from getting heat stroke."

"Thank you, Saint Craig," she said.

"You wouldn't even care if we left them with a nanny, I know. But I do. Mack did a dive today. For the first time."

There was a moment of silence, then her voice softened. "They went swimming?"

"Yeah," he said. "And they did great. Both of them."

He could almost see her straightening up, snapping herself out of her mom-interest.

She said, "I'll email you the itinerary tomorrow."  But her words, this time, wavered. 

They weren't glutted with tears. But they hinted at a weeping jag that might be let loose after they hung up, or, more likely, whisked away and replaced with the deep sleep into which Jacquelyn always seemed able to fall.

A light green

The first part of this story, Greener Grass, can be found in my right sidebar under I Like To Write.

*****

Brad, once he got started, was all too happy to divulge the details of his firing. Which had to do with a buggy website and security breaches and a supervisor he didn't get along with personally.

Tamara ate cereal while he talked and, later, lay on the couch half asleep, listening to him tinker with his laptop, verbally planning how he could submerge the whole agency with a few bits of code.

"Don't do it," she mumbled. "Just take the high road. You'll find something else in no time."

"Ha!" Brad said. "In this economy? Ha!"

Tamara thought about Dave and his always unfailing optimism that he'd be able to support himself and the family, whatever catastrophes the world presented him with. If he had to, he said, he'd go back to being a pastry chef for a few months.

Which was why, she supposed, he was cool with buying boats and motorcycles and expensive tennis shoes without consulting her.

She remembered one especially maddening episode when they'd lain in bed, Tamara lamenting how hard it was not earning money, not contributing, not bolstering her identity in that way.

"It's okay," Dave had said. "We'll get by."

"But the heater needs to be fixed and we're late on Caitlyn's preschool tuition and you just bought that leather jacket."

His voice shot into the darkness, "If you're so worried, get a damn job."

"And pay for full time care for three children? There's no job I could get that would be worth it."

"You did pretty well selling ads."

She rolled over onto her side, facing away from him. "I can't go back."

"Why not?"

Because, she'd thought. Because. I cannot imagine cowtowing to clients all day long the way I cowtow to you and the kids. I cannot take on more bosses. I cannot trade my soul like that again.

"It was okay when I was younger," she said and sighed. "It was okay when I didn't know better. But, holy shit, Dave, I can't convince companies to spend tons of money on four-color spreads while the kids are in daycare."

"But you don't seem all that happy staying home with them," he said. And his voice was accusatory.

"Well, I mean, there are good days and bad. But, I think I hide it well, enough." She meant her resentfulness. Her misery.

Dave said, "Not from me you don't."

The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. Over the baby monitor that sat on her night stand, Tamara heard Eli moan in his sleep. "Maybe I'll go buy myself a four-hundred-dollar leather jacket. Maybe that will help."

He rose halfway, pounded his pillows into new shapes and flopped back down onto them. His teeth were clenched as he said, "I work my fucking ass off. I deserve to treat myself once in a while."

"Right," she said. "You deserve your treats."

She waited until he'd fallen asleep, then got up, padded into the kitchen and made herself a vodka tonic. She took it to the deck, where she sat in the dark, her knees tucked under her chin, her nightgown grazing her ankles, and sipped.

Brad said, "I could fuck them over so hard." He laughed gleefully, following some path through his laptop that could lead to the fucking over.

"Don't," Tamara mumbled. "Keep your bridges intact. I'm serious."

His head snapped up from his computer. He pushed his glasses back on his head and looked at her. Looked, sort of, into her. "You're shitting me, right?"

She blinked at him.

"Where are your bridges, Miss Milwaukee? They look awfully singed and rickety to me."

"They are."

Slowly, he closed his computer. "What are you doing here, anyway?"

She tried to sit, but felt a sharp pain in her abdomen and lowered herself back down. "I wish I knew," she said. "Looking for my other life?"

*****

Paul never came in that night.

Tamara barely slept, could only doze. And in the twenty minute snatches of sleep she did get, she dreamed--crazy tableaus where she had orange, clownish hair and wore sequined one-piece leotards and patent leather platform boots and carried a boom box around on her shoulder listening to Chairlift. She had no children, no husband. She lived in a studio apartment with two transvestites and watched them shooting heroin.

She woke up panting, sweating so much she changed clothes twice.

And the next morning, she had to do laundry in the dank basement of Brad's building, plucking quarters from a roll she got at the smoke shop a few doors down.

When Paul and Cornelia finally did arrive, late in the afternoon, their faces were flushed, moony. 

Tamara had a hard time looking at them head on. She glanced at Paul, then down into her lap, then sidelong at Cornelia. Then at Brad. Who was fidgety himself.

Well, here I am, she thought. Here I fucking am. This is what I'm choosing to do with my freedom. What a damn fine idea this was.

She'd been in New York almost a week. The time had come to move forward or go home.

But her feet and her ass and her head felt like they'd been tarred to Brad's sofa and the thought of potty training and baking cupcakes and arguing with Dave about money still made her retch. Worse was her family's smug assumption that she'd always be there to do those things. 

Six days wasn't enough time. It was a blip. If she went back now, they'd soon forget this little trip had ever happened and she'd be right back in her kitchen. Right back in their small bathroom. Right back in bed next to Dave, who she wasn't even sure she liked anymore.

She might have been interrupting a conversation. She would've known for sure if she hadn't been so lost in her thoughts. But she looked right into Cornelia's scrubbed, dewy face anyway and asked, "Is there someplace around here that offers free classes?"

"Like what?" Cornelia asked. "Business courses? Spanish?" her voice was sumptuous and low, fringed, ever-so-slightly, in sarcasm. No wonder Paul couldn't resist her.

"No," Tamara said. The three of them had opened beers and she could smell the hoppy miasma floating just above her head. She closed her eyes, wishing you could block out aromas like you could sights or sounds. "I don't know. Pottery or painting or creative writing."

Brad said, "How about HTML?"

She only shook her head at him.

Cornelia thought for a minute, then said, "There are places. Let me see what I can find out and get back to you."

And, for the first time in a while, Tamara felt a lightness in her chest, across the tops of her shoulders. 

A lightness that, if she wasn't careful, could carry her away.