*
I take the long way home, anesthetized to the cold, to the fine mist in the air. I go the long way, stopping by the used bookstore on Lincoln to pick up a copy of Anne of Green Gables.
I pay two dollars for the book because there are pages falling out, random, forgotten treasures tucked inside the aging pages: a bookmark with tassels, an old photograph of a little girl in white knee highs beside her grandfather in blue plaid pants. There’s an inscription in the book, and a date: To Mom 1989.
I find my neighbor Graham in the hallway on my way upstairs, about to drop an empty bottle of wine down the garbage chute. “That’s recyclable,” I remind him, hearing a pestering quality to my voice that drives Chris mad.
But Graham just laughs. He’s left his condo door wide-open, a blonde beauty queen on the sofa with a fresh glass of Chablis. We exchange a look, and I force a smile, one that she doesn’t return.
“Caught by the recycle police, again,” he says, withdrawing the bottle from the chute. There are recycle bins by the freight entrance of our building, a long walk for someone who doesn’t think much of the environment. But I do. I stop myself before reminding Graham that it takes some one million years for a glass bottle to decompose.
There’s an overwhelming need to tell someone about my night at Stella’s, knowing that Chris won’t do. Not even Jennifer will do—she is much too logical, too left-brained for this kind of insanity. I need someone who’s ruled by the right brain like me, someone driven by feelings and emotions, by their imagination and beliefs, someone inspired by fantasy.
Someone like Graham.
But from the open condo door, I hear the sound of acoustic guitar on his stereo, the beauty queen beckoning him by name. He tucks the empty wine bottle beneath an arm and tells me he has to go. “Of course,” I say, and watch as he closes the door behind himself and I find myself staring at a square boxwood wreath, listening to a squeal from his date.
Inside my own home, I forget all about my movie and tuck myself into bed with Anne of Green Gables. When Chris finally returns home from his trip, I hide the book quickly underneath the bed, behind a flounced charcoal bed skirt where only cats and dust bunnies dwell, and pretend to be asleep.
He crawls into bed beside me and kisses me long and slow, though his lips are laced with the image of Cassidy Knudsen.
WILLOW
My momma was the most beautiful lady in the world. Long black threads of hair, a thin face with high cheekbones, perfectly arched eyebrows and the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. I love you like a squirrel loves nuts, she’d say to me, or I love you like a mouse loves cheese. We’d spend half a day trying to think of the silliest ones we could: I love you like a fat boy loves cake. And we’d die laughing. It was our thing.
We lived in a rural Nebraska home, in a tiny little unincorporated town just outside of Ogallala. Momma and Daddy, Lily and me. Ogallala came long before Omaha, just like Momma and Daddy came long before Joseph and Miriam. It was another whole world to be exact, another whole me.