When I tire of the crying, I let the fury take control, shattering imported Italian crystal goblets against the kitchen wall, and when they’re done, James’s grandmother’s dinnerware. I scream at the top of my lungs, a barbaric sound that certainly doesn’t belong to me.
I sweep the mess before James arrives home, tucking a million pieces of shattered glass in the garbage bin beneath a dead philodendron so he won’t see.
I spend an entire afternoon watching the robins en route to places south, Mississippi and such, for the winter. They arrive one day on our back porch, dozens of them, fat and cold, stocking up on whatever they can find for the journey ahead. It rained that day and the worms were everywhere. I watch them for hours, sad when they leave. It will be months before they return, those red bellies that beckon spring.
Another day the ladybugs arrive. Thousands of them, soaking up the sun on the back door. It’s an Indian summer day, warm, with temperatures in the upper sixties and plentiful sun. The kind of day we long for in the fall, the colors of the trees at their peak. I try to count them all, but they scatter away, and more come, and it’s impossible to keep track. I don’t know how long I watch them. I wonder what the ladybugs will do for the winter. Will they die? And then, days later when a frost covers the earth, I think of those ladybugs and cry.
I think of Mia when she was a child. I think of the things we did. I walk to the playground I used to take Mia to while Grace was in school for the day, and sit on the swings. I rake my hand through the sand in the sandbox and sit on a bench and stare. At the children. At the fortunate mothers who still had theirs to hold.
But mostly I think of the things I didn’t do. I think of the time I stood idly by when James told Mia that a B wasn’t good enough in high school chem, and the time she brought home a breathtaking impressionist painting she’d spent more than a month on at school, he scoffed, “If only you’d spend that kind of time on chemistry, you might have gotten an A.” I think of myself, watching out of the corner of my eye, unable to say a thing. Unable to point out the vacant expression on our daughter’s face because I was afraid he might get mad.
When Mia informed James that she didn’t plan to go to law school, he said she didn’t have a choice. She was seventeen, hormones raging, and she pleaded, “Mom,” desperate, just this one time, for me to step in and intervene. I’d been washing dishes, trying my hardest to evade the conversation. I remember the desperation on Mia’s face, the displeasure on James’s. I chose the lesser of two evils.
“Mia,” I said. I’ll never forget the day. The sound of the telephone ringing in the background, though none of us paid it the time of day. The smell of something I’d burnt in the kitchen, cold spring air wafting in a window I’d opened to get rid of the smell. The sun was staying out later, something we might comment on if we weren’t so preoccupied with upsetting Mia.
“It means so much to him,” I said. “He wants you to be like him.”
She stormed out of the kitchen and, upstairs, she slammed a door.
Mia dreamed of studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. She wanted to be an artist. It was all that had ever mattered to her. But James refused.
Mia started a countdown that very day to her eighteenth birthday, and she started packing a box of things she would take with her when she left.
The ducks and geese fly overhead. Everyone is leaving me.
I wonder if somewhere Mia is looking toward the sky, seeing the same thing.
Colin
Before What we have is time to think. And a lot of it.
That damn cat keeps hanging around now that the girl is sacrificing scraps of her own dinner for it. She found a moth-eaten blanket in the closet and, with an empty box from the back of my truck, created a makeshift bed for the stupid thing. She has it set up in the shed out back. Every day she takes it a few bites of food.
She has a name for the damn thing: Canoe. Not that she bothered to tell me. But I heard her call to it this morning when it wasn’t sleeping in its bed. Now she’s worried.
I sit by the lake and fish. I’ll eat trout every day for the rest of my God-given life if it means I don’t have to eat something that’s been freeze-dried.
Most often I come up with northern pike. Then walleye. Sometimes trout. I can tell from the light spots on the northern, that and the fact that they’re always the first bastards to take the bait. The fish are stocked every year, mostly fry and fingerlings, sometimes yearlings. The smallmouth bass give me the most damn trouble. Until I get them on the ground, I’d bet my life they’re twice the size they turn out to be. Strong bastards.