“Hey, Helen, I’ll make you a deal,” Lon calls. “If you bring me back one of those big, juicy beefsteaks, I might be persuaded to split it with you.”
It’s his tone, teasing and tinged with the memory of a younger man’s mischief, that coaxes my first smile of the day. “Oh, really?” I abandon the small Rutgers tomato I was considering and move farther down the shelf to where the massive beefsteaks lie. “Will I have to do anything R-rated to seal this deal?”
“No,” Lon says, sounding startled.
“Then forget it,” I say, and at his snort of laughter, pick the biggest, ripest tomato we have, hide my trembling hand in my apron, and head slowly up out of the darkness and back into the bright, cozy kitchen.
Chapter 3
Hanna
Seth’s best friend is a junior named Connor, so to get closer to Seth, I said hi to Connor twice today in passing. He looked pleasantly surprised the first time and said hi back the second. This is progress.
Then Connor just happened to be outside my English class when I got out and walked me to my locker. We passed Seth, and I really didn’t like the looks they gave each other, like a thumb’s-up from Seth to Connor that he was walking with me.
This is not good.
Later on I dodged Connor by changing hall routes and ran into Seth in the courtyard by himself. There was no way I could just go up to him so I headed over to my regular spot on the curb and he said, teasing, “What, you don’t want to talk to me?”
So I went over and it turned out he was getting high and offered me weed but I lied and said, No, it gives me hives. (Weed at school. Right. Like my mother wouldn’t rip my head off and take it bowling if I ever got caught getting high at school. Especially a school my father keeps wondering if he can afford to keep me in. No, I’m not losing my chance at Seth just for that.)
Anyhow, Seth said something about Connor, like he was trying to find out if I liked him and I said, “He’s okay,” because I didn’t want to talk about stupid Connor, I wanted to make him like me.
He finished getting high and said, “C’mon, let’s go into the cafeteria, I need something to drink.”
I really didn’t want to lose my chance alone with him but what could I say? So we went, with him being silly and messing my hair up on purpose, and me walking slow to make it last and praying nobody was in the cafeteria, but of course Connor was, along with a bunch of others.
So what did imbecile Seth do?
Brought me right over to Connor and with a big dorky grin said, “Don’t say I never gave you anything.”
And then he went and sat at a different table with stupid senior Nutria Cerelle, who had great blond bed head but also wicked knock-knees and, although nobody seemed to realize it but me, a name that meant a giant swamp-dwelling, orange-toothed rodent.
What a stupid day.
“Gran called earlier,” my mother said when I dragged myself in the back door and dumped my books on the kitchen table. “She said to tell you that she’s pickling the green tomatoes tonight so you should be there by six.”
“Well, I can’t go tonight,” I muttered, peeling off my coat and slinging it across the back of a chair.
“Why not?” my mother said.
“Because I already made plans,” I said, opening the fridge and hanging on the door. “Why don’t we ever have anything good to eat?”
“Eat a banana,” my mother said.
“I hate bananas,” I said, scowling and closing the refrigerator.
“You’d better call Gran and tell her you’re not coming,” my mother said. “Don’t just leave her waiting, Hanna. She counts on you.”
“I know, I won’t,” I said and, grabbing my purse, headed up to my room.
But I did because I knew she would try to talk me into coming, and I didn’t want to go and that made me feel guilty. I mean, I pickled the tomatoes with her every year, and yes, I loved the steamy scent of hot vinegar steeped with fresh dill and pickling spices and how she always sent me home with a giant jar of my own, but I wasn’t really in the mood to pickle anything but myself so I went down to Crystal’s instead.
There was a keg party in the woods behind her house so I drank two beers, and spent the rest of the night flirting with some karate guy I never met before who showed me how to flip people and actually did a move and put me down real gently right in a pile of leaves. Twice. He was cute but his goatee worried me. Plus my parents would probably have heart failure if I ever brought home an eighteen-year-old with two-foot dreads and a giant FUCK tattooed on his biceps.
Yup, not gonna happen.
Well, that’s just great. While I was being tossed around by karate guy, Seth and Nutria the Rodent became a couple.
Sammi and I were standing in the courtyard when the Rodent-mobile pulled in, and Nutria and Seth got out. They held hands and walked over to her friends.
“Stop staring,” Sammi whispered, kicking me in the ankle. “Here comes Connor.”
And of course the first thing out of my mouth was, “I thought Seth didn’t want to go out with anybody because he didn’t want to get hurt again.” And Sammi gave me this Arghhhh look, but too bad. I was so freaked at the sight of the Rodent flicking back her bed hair and Seth smiling down at her that I wanted to throw knives at them.
Connor gave me a funny look. “Yeah, well, I guess he changed his mind.”
Then he said his parents were going away for the weekend and he was having a party and we were invited if we could get a ride there. He lives in the same town as Sammi, which is about six miles from me. Seth lives fourteen miles away. The Rodent lives in Seth’s town. Of course.
I hate my life.
Chapter 4
Helen
I don’t know if it’s the waning daylight, the inevitable withering of all things green, or the relentless approach of hunting season, but I’ve been getting up early before Lon, tending the woodstove, and brewing strong, sweet cups of apple harvest tea to try and hurry the dawn. I sit by the window and, with Serepta curled up in Hanna’s empty chair, watch the pale sun top the trees, the cardinals and mourning doves picking at the cracked corn sprinkled beneath the feeders, the does and their yearlings drinking from the pond, and beyond that, at the greatest distance, Hanna heading down her driveway to wait for the bus.
“There she goes,” I murmur, and Serepta’s ears twitch but she doesn’t open her eyes, so there are no witnesses to the tears gathered in mine. I wave at Hanna’s back and it’s meant as a greeting but feels like a farewell.
I wish spring was melting into summer now, instead of autumn hardening into winter.
I said that once to Hanna when she was twelve and she took my hand and pulled me up out of my chair, led me outside and around the property, pointing out how pretty the sun was in the clear blue sky, the vibrant scarlet of the sumac, and the fun of kicking up crunchy fallen leaves. We gathered pocketfuls of acorns and, like amateur Johnny Appleseeds, tossed them into the woods, picked catmint bouquets to hang dry in the pantry, and watched a monarch butterfly gliding on the breeze.
“It’s a female,” Hanna said as it swooped low and fluttered around the few remaining goldenrod in flower. “You can tell because she doesn’t have those two dots on the bottom of her wings. I wish we had more for her to eat. It’s such a long migration…” She stopped and looked up at me. “Hey, Gran…do you think she knows she’s not going to make it?”
“I don’t know,” I said after a moment.
Hanna nodded slightly and turned her gaze back to the butterfly still searching the fading goldenrod for nectar. “I think she does,” she said softly. “I think she can feel it, you know? Inside of her, I mean. Like instinct. I think she knows she’s not going to make it all the way to Mexico before winter hits but she’s trying to anyway.”
“Why do you say that?” I said.
“Because it’s fall instead of summer and the air is cool instead of hot, and it takes longer for her to warm up in the morning just so she can fly because
the sun isn’t as strong,” Hanna said. “She has to use more energy to find food, and the days are shorter so she has to find a safe place to roost before dark, which means she can’t cover as many miles in a day as the monarchs who migrate in July and August can.” She glances at me. “You gave me that book on them last Christmas, remember?”
“Yes,” I said and tried to smile but couldn’t.
She looked back at the butterfly. “She’s brave.”
“Valiant,” I murmured and the word was bittersweet.
We watched in silence until the monarch finished feeding, and when she flew off, gliding to conserve energy, I heard Hanna whisper, “Vaya con Dios, little one.” And then to me, “Do you think sending good wishes with butterflies is stupid, Gran?”
“No,” I said, shading my burning eyes and watching until the butterfly was almost out of sight. “I think it’s perfect.”
Dear God, I miss my times with her so much.
The school bus finally crawls to a stop in front of Hanna’s house.
I watch her board, then make my way back to the kitchen to coax a second cup of tea from the leaves in the filter. Open the kitchen curtains and set up the coffeepot so all Lon has to do when he wakes is come down and turn it on.
He surprised me with that small kindness back when we were first married and we’ve been doing it ever since.
Making coffee isn’t a difficult task—not a task at all, really, especially not for a part-time waitress—but this morning I go through the motions hating the way my hands shake, this weakness that comes and goes at will, the muscle cramps, and the way my feet have taken to twitching like those of a cat in the throes of a dream.
If it was earlier in the season, I would have gathered wild skullcap and experimented with brewing a tea, and if money wasn’t so tight, I would do as my natural-healing books suggest and buy blueberries for the antioxidants, pineapple for the enzymes, and cashew butter for the proteins and B vitamins. I would try supplements like glucosamine and chondroitin for my aching joints, grape seed extract to help circulation, and maybe even gingko to strip the fuzziness from my thoughts.
But money is tight, and while we’re not going to starve, for the first time ever I regret giving away all those tomatoes, peppers, and zucchinis this summer instead of making myself can or freeze them. I only preserved half of the crop this year because canning alone wasn’t nearly as fun as canning with Hanna for company, and so now I’m grateful that we still have as much fresh, good food stocked in the pantry as we do.
I’m still not ready for winter; I hate driving to work in the snow, the slick roads and icy steps, hate having to walk the deer path alone in the cold, gray dusk, and the long, bleak days with no company but my own thoughts.
And I worry about the heat.
Lon can’t fell the dead trees or cut, split, and stack wood like he used to, but we need at least five cords to make it through, and I don’t know how we’re going to get them. The house has electric baseboards but the cost of running them has become too high and so the woodstove in the living room will be our only source of warmth.
We could buy a cord or two and maybe barter for the rest, find someone looking to make money selling firewood and offer him our dead trees providing he splits our half of the wood, too. I can probably stack it if I move slowly and don’t push too hard.
Or we could impose on Wes, Hanna’s father, to help, but I hate to do it. He works such long days and what little free time he has left should be spent with his family.
I don’t know.
I can’t find an answer.
I fix the second, weaker cup of tea and return to my chair by the window.
Serepta opens her limpid green eyes, stretches, yawns, and goes back to sleep.
The strays—I counted five of them out on the porch this morning—are curled up in the homemade cat condos on the back porch. Soon it will be cold enough to turn on the lamps set above their beds, as the clear plastic sheeting protects them from the snow and biting wind but offers no real warmth, and the single-bulb lamps help chase away the chill.
I’m so afraid of the day I can no longer afford to care for these castoffs and orphans and will have to make myself turn away and ignore them milling around out there, cold, skinny, and starving, begging and calling and never understanding why I’m not answering their pleas for help.
Never understanding at all why I am failing them.
Chapter 5
Hanna
Connor is all over me—I swear he memorized my schedule like I memorized Seth’s—so I’m trying to avoid him without being mean, and at the same time, now that I don’t want to see Seth and the Rodent, all I ever do is run into them. There they are kissing, there they are getting high, there they are walking down the hall holding hands.
I give up.
Well, not really.
I just hate seeing her leaning against him with her bed hair swishing all over and her pointy little rodent face right there waiting to be kissed.
I wish I had bed head and a rat face, too.
No, no, no.
They sit at their own table in the cafeteria, chairs facing each other, her legs slid between his…ugh. It’s so bad that I can’t even go in there and eat anymore.
Love, I have decided, is hard.
I slept over Sammi’s last night. Her little brother wouldn’t leave us alone as we were getting dressed for Connor’s party and kept whining, “Where are you going?” but luckily her mother had a date and believed us when we said we were walking down to the diner and maybe the strip mall.
Anyway, we walked to Connor’s since it was only like a mile away.
The love couple wasn’t there, but somehow that made the night even worse because Connor kept cornering me with this hopeful puppy-dog look, which made me feel bad because I just don’t like him back, so right before we left I ended up giving him a mercy kiss in the back hallway for like one minute. Then he tried to ask me something, but I checked my watch and was like, “Where’s Sammi? We’re past curfew!” and ran.
Why do the ones I like never like me? Why do I always get the ones I don’t want?
Seth, you jerk. You give me a giant pain.
Seth came up to me at school while I was heading for the bathroom and with this big cheery grin said, “Hey, I hear you’re going out with Connor.”
And I said, “What? I am not! Who told you that?”
He stopped smiling. “Connor.”
And I said, “Well, he’s wrong.”
Then Seth got this cold look and said, “Well, you better tell him that because he really likes you and he’s telling everybody you two are going out and now he’s going to look like a fool.”
And I was thinking, How is that my fault? I never said I’d go out with him! But I hated the way Seth was looking at me like I was some kind of user, so I just said, “Look, I was with him for one minute at his party but that’s it. No big deal.”
That was the wrong thing to say.
“Maybe not to you but it was to him,” he said snottily.
And I was like, You know what, I don’t need this. But only in my head, of course. So I just gazed at him, dying inside, and he said, “Forget it. I’ll handle it,” and walked away like he couldn’t leave fast enough.
Now they’re both ignoring me, but so what? There are tons of other guys here who flirt, and to tell you the truth, I like that best because it doesn’t mean anything. It’s talk, words, a game, and everyone knows it and no one gets hurt.
Fuck you, Seth. You could have had me but you didn’t want me.
Why didn’t you want me?
“Well, that was fast,” Sammi murmured, nudging me and motioning with her chin to the cafeteria table where Connor and his new girlfriend Teresa sat snuggled together. “How long did it take him to get over you? Three days? A week?”
“Who cares,” I said absently because I had more important things on my mind, like what Seth and the Rodent had been arguing about when I passed them in the
hall this morning. It had looked bad—the Rodent’s face was red and her tone hot and furious, and Seth had a distant look in his eyes like he wasn’t even there—and I was dying to know what was up.
Luckily, I didn’t have long to wait.
Sammi caught up with me between classes and, seizing my arm in a death grip, steered me into a cove between the lockers. “Nutria broke up with Seth because he cheated on her with that girl who broke his heart—”
“Bailey?” I said, wide-eyed.
“Yeah, I guess. Anyhow, he’s going back out with her now—”
The warning bell rang.
“Shit! I’ve got to go. I can’t be late to Brother Gary’s class or he throws a fit. I’ll call you later.” She released me, turned, and took off.
Well.
I stood there staring after her for a moment, then turned and headed to algebra with a giant smile on my face.
Seth had cheated with Bailey, the one girl who was bound to screw him over again, and when she did I was definitely going to be there to catch him.
My father got laid off today. He’s union, and work always slows in the winter, but it’s bad timing this year because of my school tuition and the heating bill and all. He told me if I needed money to buy Christmas presents, I’d better think about earning it, so I applied for a job at a pet store being a Santa’s helper to the pet photographer.
If they hire me, I’ll get an employee discount and can surprise Gran with all kinds of cat stuff for Christmas.
She’s been on my mind a lot lately, mostly at weird times (like in the middle of US history class or English) when I can’t do anything about it.