forehead with dry lips. I smelled the sun on his skin, intoxicating. Tears welled in my eyes. This wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d wanted to leave with a notebook full of instructions.
“How is your mother?” he asked.
I couldn’t tell him that along with spring’s arrival, beers had appeared in strange places around the apartment, in the back of the nightstand drawer, behind our collection of canned beans. That she kept them in brown paper bags, drank several each evening standing before our sliding glass window looking out at the parking lot filled with half-broke-down Fifth Avenues and Novas. That her eyes had changed from ambitious to roving. Toward what I still didn’t know.
“Blessed,” I said. He smiled wide and I saw a shine of silver fillings in his molars. The devil came over me and I imagined his silent wife, Derndra, kissing his mouth, reaching her tongue back during her wifely demonstration and touching those hidden gems.
“Don’t overdo it in this heat,” he said, but I was used to the heat by now, the heat that never set on us, that only maintained through the night, beckoning me from sleep, the damp sheet kicked off onto the floor.
ON MY WALK home through the dead fields, I thought of my mother in the hot breeze of afternoon when I was five years old, just before the beginning of that first bad drought. A patch of watermelons had sprouted up in the small square of dirt under the second-story stairs of our apartment and she was on her hands and knees marveling at their strong vines, the big green leaves and the basketball-sized melons. She patted them and laughed. She brought me close so I could see.
“I threw seeds down here forever ago,” she said. “Who knew all this time they were growing right up?”
The melons were bright and healthy. They were beautiful and ripe. How had we not seen them before?
She talked all night about them. The sapphire-earrings boyfriend grew more and more agitated with her adoration of something that wasn’t him. He didn’t like her when she was up. “Acting like you’ve never seen a fuckin’ watermelon before,” he said. He slurped Bud Light all night. My mother was oblivious to his growing anger. I wished she would just shut up. I knew what happened when she kept on pushing his buttons, but she didn’t seem to have that awareness, not then, not ever. She couldn’t believe the watermelons were there and she was taking it as a good sign. She didn’t want us to eat one just yet. She called Grampa Jackie, who had been predicting the coming drought, could taste it in the air and had taken on a low demeanor of dread. She laughed like we’d been struck by great fortune, tried to cheer him. “You always said the land was a gift, Daddy,” she said. “It still is!” She didn’t drink that night and Sapphire Earrings slammed out of the apartment and didn’t return until early morning, when he shoved me out of my mother’s bed and onto the floor and took my place.
When my mother woke up, we raced out to check on the melons, to pet and encourage them, but someone had smashed them all. Ripped them from their vines and thrown them against the sidewalk. Their pink insides reeked a sickening perfume. She let me miss school and we sat on the steps while she drank brandy out of one of my old plastic baby bottles, waiting for the killer to return to the scene.
But the killer was in the apartment. It was clear as day that Sapphire Earrings was responsible, but she didn’t seem to understand that at all.
“I’m sad sometimes,” she’d said to me as the sun had left us.
How I’d wanted to fix it for her. How I wanted the world to be good enough so she wouldn’t have to feel its rough edges. If someone could just see her when she was at her best, the way she was in the morning back then, getting ready for the day, dancing and singing, the soft dander of her cheek. The way her neck looked when she tilted it back in the car and sang “Great American Cowboy” along with the Sons of the San Joaquin. I didn’t know what to say to fix it, to make her eyes go clear, to make her steps sure and straight, her breath her own without the bite of alcohol on it. “I’m hungry,”