So We Can Glow - Stories - Leesa Cross-Smith Page 0,61
wife reaches in and gets one. Tula opens her door and holds her arms out for the baby. She puts him on her lap, gently pets his head. I smile at him, let him grab my fingers.
“What are your names?” I ask.
“He’s Max and I’m Nina,” Coach’s wife says, snapping to normal in the way that only women can when they’re holding up the Earth. Nina says thanks to us and smokes at the front of the car, standing there like a crownless queen in streetlamp light. We watch the boys clean up the yard. They look like animals.
Dandelion Light
Your eyes are two different colors. Heterochromia, you tell me. I tell you I like that word and you ask what other words I like. Cartographer, I say. And I tell you I can draw a map to you. There are a lot of men here and I can drink wine, I say when you ask me what I am talking about, what I am doing. I put my glass on the table and take a pen from my purse, grab a stiff hay-colored cocktail napkin from the top of the stack. I draw a small skull and crossbones, a fat heart, the outline of Kentucky—a crazy jagged, pointed elf’s shoe with no foot. You ask me what it means and I tell you I forgot the X so I draw it. Write YOU ARE HERE underneath. I cross everything out one by one and throw the napkin away after I kiss it and finish the rest of my wine. You are slightly buzzed. I can tell by the way you don’t shake your head when you tell me I am a piece of work. And the c sound in the word piece doesn’t snake out as slick as it should. It sounds like your tongue tripped and stumbled out of a thick, rustling bush at night with its eyes closed, its hands straight out in front of it, feeling for anything.
We’ve met before. No one is surprised when we leave the party together and walk and walk and walk. The neighborhood smells like everyone’s laundry and dinner. I have terrible allergies. I even moved to Arizona to try to fix them, but it didn’t work, I say. Our arms reek of peppery-lemon citronella, stolen sprays from the bottle of DEET-free bug repellent by the back door. This neighborhood is rife with mosquitoes, I warned you. And I know where we are going. I am leading you to wet grasses and backyard clover. We lie watching the evening clouds and listening as if we can hear them click into place, watch the curved world shift from simmering-sunset light to firefly light. Moonlight, starlight when you devour me like I am a sweet, little cake—worship me like I am a cooling token in your hot-hot hand or a prehistoric translucent-winged insect in a perfect square of warm, clear amber. Something you could slip a string through and wear around your neck for good luck. Tonight I am your amulet, the bundle of snapped branches long burned white.
Our first official date isn’t even a date, it’s a science experiment, you say when you’re as sober as a kitten. We fell asleep in the vegetable garden. I don’t know what time it is and I don’t care. I tell you I hate science and shrug when you ask if you can see me again. Smile when I say stay here because you are seeing me now. You are slipping a flower behind my ear when I tell you I’m hungry. We go inside my house, clatter in the kitchen. I pull a white paper box of chicken from the refrigerator. I wilt spinach and green onions in a cast-iron skillet. We sit across from one another, under the gauzy-white low-hanging kitchen table light. We clink and drink unsweetened iced tea with the little lemon bars I made the night before. Baking as therapy, I say. I tell you that a year ago, my husband and I moved back to Kentucky from Arizona and got a divorce and now, he already has a new wife and our twin daughters are with them for the weekend. I tell you my daughters’ hair is like blackbird feathers and I hook my thumbs to make bird wings with my hands. How am I drunk when I only had one glass of wine? I laugh but we both know I am not drunk, I am sad. And tonight those